Thieves can only rule a nation of idiots. This is a very hard talk. But it is a sublime truth. Edmund Burke, the ancient philosophical celebrity, was on record as saying that the only requirement for evil to triumph in any circumstance, is for good men to do nothing. Good men graduate into idiocy, when they succumb to timidity or blackmail, which emasculates them into acquiescence, while their common will is raped and plundered, by heartless buccaneers. Their foolery is consolidated when they are weak-kneed in proffering stubborn response to the rise and germination of misrule.
Among idiots, greed and mercenary considerations blinds the resolve. Greed converts reason to jelly; and their poverty dehumanizes them into making themselves dogs for the sake of bones. It is based on this that one would not stick his head out to challenge anyone, who makes bold to say that Nigeria has a large collection of emasculated idiots in her population. If the obverse obtains, why is Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, not yet cooling his feet at a maximum security facility? Why is Babangida still a celebrity and midget conquistador enjoying some baronial privileges? Why was Chris Uba crowned a trustee of the ruling party in Nigeria, and the party still retains relevance in the political equations of the country?
Scandalous abominations like IBB are symptoms of a failed nation. The factors and elements that conspired to place them at the pedestals of opportunities to plot against the country, and succeed; can only be found in a State that has lost the ontological reasons for its existence. The Nigerian state is a contraption constructed for the greatest inconvenience of its people. The eternal bickering among the ethnic nationalities, who are simply strange bedfellows; actively, but politely nursing mutual platonic hatred of each other, waters the ground for the germination of morally defunct individuals and their apparatchiks; who hijack the State, and deploy it to the service of their demeaned concept of avarice and self-worship. IBB remains a sad reminder of the trouble with Nigeria as Achebe eloquently visualized it.
Just like the evolution of every social cancer, the abomination of military desolations in Nigeria, originated from the decayed humus of a State that possessed only magnitude without direction. While the politicians were busy outdoing themselves in bread and butter politics of the first and second republics respectively; abandoning the ship of state to the capricious whims of rogues; military opportunists were gathering their aces. As politicians became petty; law and order became politicized. Nigerians became victims of a lecherous elitist class of rent-seekers, who control the politic and the economy. The economy in their hands vacillated dangerous between anaemia and coma, thanks to their enthusiastic patronage of kleptomania.
As political decency and due process took flight from our land, the stage was set for uncertainties. A whole range of armed characters seized the opportunity to shoot and slaughter their way into the new non-political order, which politicians’ pyramids of stupidities released as an avalanche that would swallow accountability and good sense. Among these military thugs were a fox and a buffoon. They both succeeded in running Nigeria for sometime. In-between them, Nigeria was ran aground in the sandbanks of official corruption, poverty and underdevelopment. One stole enough to construct a fifty-room fortress in Minna, to wall off all askance directed at his audacious criminality. The other stole enough, but died atop imported women of easy virtue. Both of them never wanted to leave power. They wanted to die there. One was forced to step aside and bid his time for re-emergence. The other not only wanted to die in office, he schemed to perpetuate himself there. And he actually died in office; maybe at a corner couch, while perspiring atop women imported for his pleasure at our expense.
This most unworthy of leaders left his inglorious paws on our firmament. He hated Nigeria so much that he passed a vote of no confidence on made-in-Nigeria harlots; preferring to patronize imported prostitutes.
Many ancient moons ago, St. Augustine of Africa wrote: "What is a state without justice but a band of robbers!" One may not be wrong to conjecture that Augustine may have taken a prophetical peep into Africa’s tomorrow, and saw Nigeria; a kingdom of wasted opportunities. From Independence till today, Nigeria has been hijacked by a coalition of gangsters. This is an alliance of thieves, who are hell bent on embezzling Nigeria out of existence. Although this has been the case, no other era witnessed the kind of executive banditry, inaugurated and actively promoted by Ibrahim Babangida.
Ibrahim Babangida is a feudal-minded soldier, who genuflects subserviently only at the altars of his avarice and fears. He single-handedly created a cult of rent-seekers, whose atrocious greed, consolidated indolence and baronial privileges affronts every ethical tradition. These men were too compromised by their avarice to think development. Selfishness is the summary of tunnel vision. It can never reason outside the dark grottos of its malodorous ego. So these selfish men never considered Nigeria and her development in their equation. All they considered was their profit and pockets. Every social good could be sacrificed to attain this narrow and highly polarized vision of reality entertained by these leeches, hatched and nourished by IBB’s own selfish agenda.
IBB wears this attitude fearlessly because those we empowered to call such crooks to book are crooks in his league. Some of them he created from virtual nothingness, and gave them some corrupt relevance, in his economy of Machiavellian mediocrity. Some of them pre-dated him in their congenital sycophancy. Babangida ran a government modelled after the oldest recipe of treachery known to crime.
Among criminals, greed is the lowest common factor. And to keep a vice-like grip on a community of crooks, all one needs is the Machiavellian blueprint, in its rawest form. Some people and organizations have succeeded in downloading Machiavelli’s theoretics into political praxis. But IBB remains one of its crudest apostles. To this end, Babangida succeeded in siring a sect of trans-ethnic thieves across Nigeria, that have continued to wield unmerited pockets of influence, predicated on the power of stolen wealth; shorn off the Nigerian people, at IBB’s discretionary silence and mutually beneficial corruption.
Some of the clusters of untruths he masterfully releases to the reading public through his paid image launderers are that Obasanjo’s failures are provenance that he is a credible alternative. But stripping down these layers of accreted falsehoods, one sees a man, who knows, and is increasingly being unsettled that Nigerians are now asking questions, without fear or favour. He is afraid of confronting his day of reckoning to the Nigerian people. He is kicking, clawing and deploying every possible weapon in his arsenal of cant to escape justice, which is slowly but steadily approaching his robber-baronial firmament.
Babangida wants to rule us and bring us felicity. That is what he believes. I resist the temptation to speculate on his intentions. I only critique his history. But I would not say he is lying, because the actualization of his intention lies in a future that is a festival of uncertainties. And pontificating ex cathedra on the future would be symptomatic of capital ignorance.
IBB mixes unscrupulous cunning with a decisive brutality. In him is a crosspollination of horrific treachery and glamorous deceptiveness. Babangida is a connoisseur of conspiracy, score-settling and blackmail. Many of those called IBB boys are those he corrupted and eternally blackmails to tow the lines he lays out for them like some Pavlovian canines.
Patriotic shame burns me up, whenever I am faced by the fact that Nigeria once had an IBB and an Abacha as leaders. It is really an indictment on our collective honour. Nigerians slumbered in timidity. We sacrificed vigilance, which is the price of liberty to our postural apathy, when men like IBB rode roughshod over our dreams and bestrode our land.
But my greatest fear is that we seemed to have learnt nothing from history. That is why we are making an extra effort to repeat it, a la Santayana. We seemed to be amply endowed with some historical amnesia that wipes our memories blank of the atrocities splashed across it by those who stole our trust and raped our resolve. The intention of campaigning, let alone wanting to rule Nigeria again is one of the greatest insults on our collective sense of honour. IBB saw Nigeria a nation caught in turbulence; instead of helping her out of her predicament, took advantage of her and raped her for his own illicit and lewd pleasures.
Ibrahim Babangida is today a rich man. He should tell Nigerians how he came about his wealth. He should tell us the inheritance bequeathed to him that yielded that kind of stupendous wealth. Or he should tell us the software he discovered or contrivance he invented that blessed him with that kind of holding and wealth. By the last count Ibrahim Babangida retired as a military officer and a head of State of Nigeria. Calculating his salary for 25 years supposing he has been a general for 25 years, which is a factual impossibility; will not approximate to making him a millionaire. Adding that to his salary as Head of State and deducting expenses, one then sees that there is no way he could ever finance a mansion with the state of the art security gadgets on his earnings. So, who financed his becoming a millionaire? Did he win a lottery? The answer is no! This man became rich by stealing Nigerian people’s money. Every other explanation is factually deficient. I hope his cheerleaders would take not.
Babangida should be man enough to answer to the accusations laid against him by facts on the ground. Any attempt to divert attention from the abomination of desolations this man heaped on our land, is an invitation to future disaster. His cheerleaders should be made to realise that in the temple of truth, sycophants are pedestrians before facts. IBB should keep on deluding himself. Nigerians are angry with him and his likes. The floodgates would be breached one day. And not all his stolen wealth would be able to save him from the avalanche of torrential anger and frustrations. The day is around the corner.
•Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh resides in Frankfurt
