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Public sex and Fashola’s confirmation of Buhari’s failure

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Written By Tunde Odesola

What has President Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani cattle owner, got to do with Bugatti Veyron – that beautiful and world renowned superfast automobile? Only the auto-spelling device of my good, old laptop can tell. The other day, I was distilling my thoughts on Nigeria, and had attempted to type the President’s name on my laptop, but Bugatti came up as a suggestion when I typed the first two letters of the President’s name. B-u-g-a-t-t-i, the word popped up, instead of B-u-h-a-r-i. I paused and pondered: Buhari/Bugatti. Word and opposite!? Or, is this an oxymoron? Uhmm! I wondered. By the way, oxymoron is a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction e.g. ‘little giant’, ‘excellent mess’; ‘deafening silence’.

The vehicle of life runs on the fuel called oxymoron aka contradiction. Indeed, life’s littlest things teach the greatest lessons. Awakening Man’s consciousness to this fact, the great King David of Israel preaches, “Go to the ant, you sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise…” Verily, I say, as tiny as the ant is, its life offers great lessons in industry, discipline, unity, selflessness, courage, determination and power – all rare virtues in the 923, 768 square kilometers of land called Nigeria, where the shine of the day wastes into the darkness of the night, both oscillating round the equator on opposite limbs.

I came across the word oxymoron for the first time in the 80s as a literature student. Then, the beauty of the written word held much allure to me than the abstractive sciences with their unending and confounding formulas, theories and laws. In those not-too-far-gone years, sanity was walking on its feet in Nigeria, it hadn’t yet developed wings. In those years, there was no Yahoo, let alone Yahoo Plus; no sagging, let alone kidnapping; no religious bombing, let alone Boko Haram, no dullard presidency nor obscene legislature or very corrupt judiciary. The late 70s and early 80s was a period when reading was an adhesive that bound youth friendship. This was before sanity flew through the window and condoms, axes, bullets, guns, Tramadol, heroin and cocaine strolled into schoolbags.

The word oxymoron has its root in the Greek etymological translation of the 17th Century,oxumoron, and it means “pointedly foolish”, with ‘oxus’ meaning sharp, pointed, and ‘moros’ meaning foolish. Despite police rebuttal, I had thought the 2018 Most Moronic Statement Award would go to Nigeria Police Force when its Head, Public Complaints, Rapid Response Unit, Abayomi Shogunle, tweeted last week that having “sex in a car (parked) in a public place is not a crime in Nigeria.” Was I shocked? I know that located in the absurdity that uttered that profanity resides an answer to the kill-and-go monster which, the Nigerian police have turned into.

The statement mirrors Nigeria’s ancient plague of putting square pegs in round public offices. It also reveals why restructuring remains critical to the purgation of the air of infallibility in public office holders, who like President Olusegun Obasanjo, belched that he shouldn’t have been at the Ikeja military cantonment, where hundreds of lives were snuffed out by rickety bombs in 2002.

In his characteristic all-knowing element, Obasanjo felt he was doing Nigerians a favor by being present at Nigeria’s hour of need. But as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, President Goodluck Jonathan didn’t abandon the Chibok girls when news came that the schoolgirls were being carted away by Boko Haram; he stood up, debunked the news, reassured Nigerians and their parents that the girls were safe, and went back to sleep. It’s the same air of arrogance and disconnection that propels President Muhammadu Buhari’s parachute abroad, from where he talks down on Nigerians. In the history of political leadership, I doubt if there’s a leader as distant, as absent and as deaf to the wish of a people, who seek their president to speak to them. Great leaders utilize every opportunity to address their people, to connect and disseminate their administrations’ policies, but Buhari is an Eskimo that gets sick at the sight of snow. He’s a general without a gun. He passed through school with no certificate to show for it. Buhari’s silence is loud; there goes another oxymoron. Yet he wants a second term from the same people he feels are too stupid and lowly to worth his address.

With several days to the 2019 presidential election, it appears Buhari’s greatest headache is how to avoid the impending presidential debate. But if the Mallam of Daura can neither communicate his administration’s policies by directly speaking to Nigerians nor reassure and speak to their fears while participating in the scheduled 2019 debates, then the time to return home to Daura is next May.

Still talking about oxymoron; it’s unbelievable that the president’s wife, Aisha, has personally addressed Nigerians more times than her husband, yet she isn’t on a joint ticket. God bless her, courageous woman. When she said few days ago that two unbeknownst men have seized the steering wheel from her husband, and made him a passenger, she didn’t mention names.

However, sitting atop the ministries of power, works and housing portrays Babatunde Fashola, a former governor of Lagos State, a powerful man. But I don’t think he’s one of the two who disrobed Buhari and exposed Nigerians to impotent nakedness. I know Fashola is a gentleman though many in the nation’s political circle say he’s arrogant, ungrateful, snobbish and power-drunk.

In Lagos, his achievements as governor litter the landscape. In Abuja, his failure roars in lightning thunders, attracting torrential curses and abuses from disgruntled Nigerians, who pay exorbitant bills for darkness. Nigerians who live in squalid crevices and those who suffer daily on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, among thousands of other deathtraps called roads across the country, say oxymoronic stuffs about Fashola, alleging that he came into prominence and walked on the path to his destiny because he stood on the shoulders of a giant. They quote the popular Igbo proverb Chinua Achebe made popular: “Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.” They say it’s wrong and wicked for Fashola to say the Federal Government shouldn’t be held responsible for the impregnable pall of darkness perpetually eclipsing light in the country. That people entrusted with power should act and talk responsibly. They wonder why Fashola uttered these ignoble words: “There are problems, without a doubt, and we must deal with them. But let me remind you, all of the assets that the Ministry of Power used to control were sold by the last administration before I came. And so if you don’t have power, it is not the government’s problem. Let us be honest.

He went on, “The people who are operating the power sector, generation and distribution are now privately owned companies. I am here because I am concerned. If your telephone is not working, it is not the minister of telecommunication that you go to. Let us be very clear.”

Fashola’s Freudian slip explains why Buhari maintains an aloof arrogance of silence when Nigerians cry out in suffering. This is why the government looks on when foreign telecommunication firms rip off Nigerians daily, and foreign oil multinationals freely pollute southern communities, just as foreign nationals maltreat Nigerians in their very own country while the political elite add insult to injury by treating the masses worse than a piece of maggot-infested rag. Fashola’s statement is akin to the statement of that arrogant and sycophantic king, who told the Igbo to go and jump into the Lagos lagoon.

If Buhari had lived up to his electoral promise of providing Nigerians with electricity, Fashola won’t need to enter into 2019 election panic mood and mouth that infamous drivel which would win the Wickedest Statement of 2018 Award.

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