8th November, 2010
Even if it was intended as a comic relief, it still was a depressant that left a sour taste in the mouth. IBB for Presidency? Its far-reaching consequences are fearsome and despicable. His bid is a fury of choking smoke, full of disaster, signifying evil!
IBB carries a grotesque baggage and is yet to untwine himself from that albatross. As an incubus, he left far too many questions unanswered in his earlier misadventure as a military president.
In no particular order, they are: the muzzling of press; the yet unknown whereabouts of Glory Okon; the murder of Dele Giwa; the Ejigbo plane crash in which a whole generation of military officers, mainly of Southern origin, was wiped out; the entrenchment of corruption (settlement) as a way of civic life; the embezzlement of the Gulf War windfall of $12.4 billion; the destruction of the national economy and civil society, especially the middle class; the enshacklement and wanton breach of human rights; the disdain for, and deprecation of, the judiciary; the de facto abrogation of Nigeria as a sovereign state via the annulment of June 12.
But is IBB so remorseless, shameless? Or, are Nigerians seduced with an ensnaring ambrosia to wallow in paranoid amnesia? Have we forgotten so soon that today’s crises of succession and zoning are the direct outcome of IBB’s perfidy of annulling June 12? Have we resolved the nagging enigma that a man who won a free and fair election was rewarded, first with incarceration, then the murder of his wife, before finally being released as a corpse from unlawful detention?
IBB, like Gen. Abacha, his crony and cohort, is an Iscariot rather than a mascot of national renaissance. The current zoning impasse is the same June 12 in slimmers and IBB is the major domo of that catastrophe.
There has been an overdose of compromises––zoning in varying ramifications––to the North that by now, one thinks, the North should feel suffused and saturated with it. The North ought to be remorseful of the grief that these compromises to it have wrought on this country. Again, we give a surmise of some of these zonings in favour of the North. In no particular order, they are: the inconvenient, perhaps reluctant,  marriage of the South to the North so that the resources of the former could be deployed to defray the deficits and administrative costs of running the latter; the precondition that “we rule the rest or we pull outâ€; the delay and deferment by seven years of our flag independence because “the mistake of 1914 has come to lightâ€; the counter-coup of 29 July 1966; Lt. Col. Yakubu Gowon’s admonition to his fellow Northern military mutineers in October 1966 that “…God in His power has entrusted the responsibility of this great country of ours, Nigeria, into the hands of yet another Northernerâ€; the defeat of Biafra. In real terms, it amounted to self-defeat for the South. It was this self-defeat that enabled and emboldened IBB to treasonably annul a free and fair presidential poll, won in 1993 by a southerner, on the predatory pretext and fear of power shift to the South; the political carving up of the country into insolvent States and Local Government Areas, with a preponderance of them in the North and the consequent illogic of illegal transfer of southern resources thereto; the sleight of hand of unitarism, disguised as federalism
A middle course for the apostles, apostates and iconoclasts of zoning is to re-configure Nigeria. It is only such a therapy that can cure the terminal ailment of failed state, staring us now in the face. To insist on the mess of zoning in a porridge of banalities, inanities, orgies of grandeur and aggrandisement is taking our luck too far and tasking the patience of true patriots.
The truth is that the North has always been defiant and adamant while the South is compliant and pliant. We have nearly dissipated, or at least taken for granted, our goodwill and goodluck. As a result, we have been rotating in the widening gyre of zoning. Push has come to shove, and the servitors can no longer hear the taskmasters. Methinks, we are now all at our own political Ground Zero and must discuss and dissect our common interest and stakes without fear or favour.
Consequently, it is now imperative to defang Nigeria’s imperial presidency so that the quest for it would not always degenerate into a “do-or-die†affair. This can be achieved through substantial devolution of powers to the residual components of the country as was the case when the impossible amalgam, called Nigeria, was first fructified in 1960 as a sovereign state. Nigerian unity cannot, and must not, mean uniformity of her peoples. Neither must unitarism be substituted any further for fiscal federalism as is currently the case. Just as zoning has only yielded coercion, corruption, indolence and mediocrity, rotation has only delivered retrogression. For all of 50 years, the categorical pair of zoning and rotation has only rewarded us with political pestilence and unmitigated failures. In my opinion, and thus far, there seem to be three political scenarios, discernible in colonially-carved nation-states of Africa such as Somalia, the Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, DCR
The circus show of zoning and weird dance of rotation will not cease unless and until we, on our volition, choose the path of reason. It would be tragic, and most regrettable, if the circumstances of our sorry existence, as in misery and acute deprivation, compel it. To stop the drift, Nigeria should urgently be re-configured on the basis of fiscal federalism and the six geo-political zones as the federating units. Since 1999, we’ve had eight unbroken years of military misrule, sartorially disguised as civil dictatorship, and more than three years of civil rule, anchored on a stumbling presidency. Eleven years in all, hooded in the cloak of democracy, have yielded only despair and ineptitude as our national score card. The time to act is now to salvage our country and save ourselves the imprecations of succeeding generations.
•Egbuns Kemakola wrote this piece from Port Harcourt.
