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"Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear."
---Ralph Waldo Emerson.
 BB
let me commence this letter with an enlightenment dint-dose of
metaphorical philosophia in man's mystical chemistry of existence and
essence. Call this what you will, but be sprightly wheeled away from the
weedily way-laying notion that it should boast its broad base in
biology or theology. All doctrines and theories are its offspring; it
requires no myths to be meaningful, no culture is needed for its
instructive accuracy. Yet, all myths and cultures, from it have drawn
their etymologies, scopes and functions. All books and schools, all
skills and fields, with it they boast affiliations, and to it they owe
their relevances. Stones and bones, sticks and spears, swords and guns,
temples and caves, churches and mosques, all in its protection early
minds had toiled. For it, ages were graded; powers were garnered, given
and questioned. And that its beautiful substance might be our rules,
laws and knowledge were made; and that their purposes may rob off well
on the central man, policing professions and insightful institutions
were created to identify its banes as taboos, crimes or illegalities.
This, in my unique and most intellectually and spiritually consoling
description I call Samaformism. And, Babangida, for this decent
doctrine-ideology via which Humanity Day was annually begun for man on
the 17th of March, 2007, for which healthcare and educational facilities
are being explored to be freely used by all, for which movement ought
to be restrictless or common joy ought to be shared by all, all lives,
including mine and yours, have been evolved and empowered to be.
As a growing child in the eighties, let me tell you how hero-crazy,
heroism-addicted I was on a piece of Nigerian earth. Admiring our
excellent actors and actresses from their guissepuous representation of
warriors or warlords in inspiring epic movies, their causes and courage
pillared in my soul, the sole-strength of hope in wholesome degrees and
pedigrees that marked me out as a move maker among my precocious peers.
No evening passed me by without gathering my little friends, all gladly
clad in our different wears but common mood, poetically inspired for
battles our different parents always prevented or incessantly ended with
strokes of their curious canes.
Oh remind me dear Lord, how many times mother's hands had been filled
with blood because the sharp objects I, like a true warrior fortified
against defeat, had hidden in the jungles of my small-sized shirts and
shorts to house my passion in the childish illusion of heroism and
victory mien of a mere child. And though I would feel bad that these
blades and sharpened spears cut mother as she constantly washed for me,
my sincere remorse never prevented me from converting more garbs into
war rags, and from smuggling more 'weapons' into their corners, which
always cut mother more. I loved knights and warriors, courage and
freedom, their impacts and stories, a great deal!
In later years, this fraternity with nobility and freedom, courage and
heroism snowballed from movie characters to real life's constitutionally
constituted and professionally coordinated soldiers who vigilantly and
valiantly man the security of man in this region. Your picture was
frequently among those which filled my heart with hope, and I loved you
as my first known image of national spartanism.
I would go to school, relaying some cock and bull stories about your
physical and moral strengths. I told my more-trusting than gullible
classmates how fine and dutiful you were, IBB; I said to them you could
provide for Nigerians and fight any nation or international organization
to a stand still, which oppressively attempted to engage the idea of
ideal Nigeria with your mortal kicks and punches, guns and bombs. I
unwittingly exaggerated our resources and argued the Nigerian soldier
was invincible. These were my immature, yet true perception of all
notable figures that I first knew in our nation's annals.
A fine story farmer that I was, my young friends believed these rare and
virtuous plants were true and possible with the over-bloated
agriculture in you. I never meant to lie; I completely believed you
possessed all these and more. They were the expectations and hopes from
the wholesome soul of a trusting child that most children are.
Then suddenly, a revolutionary realization of my misleading perception
of your personality (like my maturely altered convictions of those movie
stars of earlier years) in pharmacological scientia of cathartic
psychological drugs, exposing some critical truth that my innocent
infancy had mis-worshipped as noble feat, mutated my funny folly to
phenomenal perspicacity that efficiently perceives and detects every
smoke-screening moral and spiritual camouflages.
First I observed only the fine fools around our home and school, whose
best judgment maggots of carcass might be too intelligent to trust,
praised your deeds. I suspected your disguised insincerity through the
published symbols of your fans' naked dauncehood. Second, I noticed some
disciplined teachers and exemplary elders in cross-fire arguments
against your worthlessness. I was gradually becoming convinced of your
standard moral sub-standardness through the consistent verdicts of
dignified Nigerians who were never identifiable with ethical
kwashiorkor, or direct dishonour. Third I saw your vivid pictures as a
cun instructor, fraud elaborator and the nation's historic inspiration
of euphemistic corruption; I saw the flakily faked moral mien that
masqueraded a mind that was motivated for courage-dismembered
Mephistopheles, a heart acting for the upkeep of hell's large flame, and
a soul sold out in unprofitable mortgage of the lachrymal anguish of
broken Nigerians.
What class of an evil genius are you, IBB? Mortals who know not are
innocent, but are inferior to the holders of things they don't. Those
who know and still reign below the charms of the hope of what they know
ought to be scolded at a rate untold. Noble and disciplined action, call
it righteousness if you choose, is the only acceptable proof of
whatever we believe and know. The man or woman is depraved and base,
whom knowledgeable awareness befriends but elects to reign in the
kingdom of the optional vanities of all that ignorance and sabotage
provide. Besides, by burying evil actions unacted, no man ever ruined
his own future. And, to learn before, or in anticipation of life's
challenges is the best timing of knowledge. Those who learn in the face
of challenges learn truly but at the expense of deadly personal
sacrifices; those who learn after it already lose the fruits of the
challenges their feeble power fall for. But no matter when we learn, and
irrespective of the consequences of this season, we must learn still,
and apply this learning to the noblest calling of knowledge-the
well-being of the traumatized world.
You it was who banked on the indisciplined-tolerance of Nigerians of the
time to overthrow the Buhari/Idiagbon's malediction-importing
administration. Throughout your reign, governance dividends were lean,
and as if for famine you forcefully lorded it over our sovereignty and
explored our territories, you replaced several mighty errors with more
pronounced epochal, epochal frauds. Several citizens were severely
sacrificed to sustain the unpopular rituals of your demonic morals. Your
countlessly eclipsed crimes and terror-reforms Babangidaized Abacha who
willfully Abachanized Nigerians!
Through the gentle strokes of weakening hunger and spirit-diminishing
hopelessness, thousands abandoned the Nigerian space for the grave,
insanity, crimes or foreign places. I was nine in 1985, but my
unnarrowable brain can never net-off the oven-effects of your maniacal
policy via Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), the landmark
insincerity of your empty, supercilious unification projects, the
implied indoctrination of theft and massive institutionalization of
corruption, the depraved legalization of vandalization, the heroic
looting of our integrity, resources and promises, and the robustly
insane annulment of the freest and fairest election in all of our
tortuous history.
IBB, you are a meretriciously imperious man. You told Nigerians you were
stepping aside in the heat of the 1993 June twelve election crises as
if you were so certain of coming back to power. Do you think of the
possibility of Nigerians cornering you cheap wit, or of death, or even
of the God you confess faith in at all?
All of the public interviews you had granted have been displays of your
ignorance and arrogance. You would not apologize for the wrong done;
contrary to what you said when you came to power as a youth, that power
belongs to the young, you later held that Nigerian youths are foolish
and irrelevant to the leadership of their fatherland. At what age did
Gowon, Obasanjo, and you rule Nigeria? And I challenge you to prove to
the world, how exactly you are better than the worst of the Nigerian
youths. The leader who squanders chances of general survival at the
ritual point of expedience and realism is worse than the supremely
supine youth whom socio-economic despondency precludes from living an
ethically excellent existence.
You are a fool of the first order. You are a betrayer per excellence.
You must have been struck with a psychotic inanity of the most
aggravated species! You are a hollow billow of nature's empty negations.
You are the wreckless exception to heaven's outstanding beauty. Your
spiritual worth dangles between zero and one percent on the Spiritometre
of out joint essence. Taken out of your stolen material wealth, your
head and heart, plus all other organs you boast as a human beast, serve
no purpose attributed to an average mortal of logic. You are a waste to
your kinsmen and race, and a major inspirer of hate in a convalescing
age of joint aids and love. Being the leading logic of the devil, your
essence is the fashionable immortalization of Nigeria and all that is
good on the planet of man. Let it be recorded in the books of
beauty-conscious historians that unless you change by revealing the
sleazes and evils you had fostered in Nigeria and apologize for them, I
who blunderously loved you as a child, now wholeheartedly detest you as
an adult.
Why not? You were given the chance by fate to fan flat the lethiferous
hurdles on the survival path of your people. It was a rare privilege
that Nigerians heartily welcomed you in 1985 despite your coming to our
revered throne through a process frowned against by our civilization and
moral taste. You, along with Olusegun Obasanjo, Sani Abacha, Mohamadu
Buhari, Abubakar Rimi, Earnest Shonekan, OluFalae, Arthur Nzeribe,
Maurice Iwu, Bode George, Tafa Balogun, etc. etc., are the worst
maledictional anathema in the long annals of Nigeria.
Your dignity-absent scholars have said that they defend you "…for the
good reason a sane man would defend late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief
Anthony Enhahoro, and late Chief Ajibola Ige-whose infamous war doctrine
of hunger and starvation are instruments of war" was well-articulated
to General Yakubu Gowon during his prosecution of the civil war and
which drove a million of Igbo children to their untimely grave. He
understands the politics of Nigeria of yesterday, today, and probably
tomorrow, and he would probably play very crucial roles in determining
the political course of the country."
I have no doubt in my mind as well that the civil war was Nigeria's most
horrible dance in naked moral and ideological cluelessness before the
world (if this was what patriotically pains your accolades); and all
those who have supported it with their planned theatre of mindless
executions-Gowon, Awolowo, Obasanjo, Ojukwu, Enhahoro, etc. etc.,--no
matter how unimpeachable they seem to us, shall have the columns of
their guilts in our history. But note that a withdrawal of support for
that war is not an express approval of secession. The Nigerian union is
not a burdensome political phenomenon to be endured or preserved at all
cost; it is a cherished redemption-temple to the construction of which
every citizen submits a plan. However guilty these Nigerians are for the
roles they played in the civil war, none of them, I boldly assert, was
as meteor-devoid as you, who destroying the most beautiful electoral
resolve of one of the most diverse nations of the world, insist they are
foolish enough to deserve a worse political nightmare in your proposed
accursed return. Neither Gowon nor Ojukwu ever insinuated a return to
any of Nigeria's political thrones after the civil war.
Contrary to what your spiritually waned apostles of political come back
say of you that, "So I say to detractors: hate him, dislike him, abuse
him, disabuse him; one thing that is prevalent about him is his
propensity to disarm your aggression with his gap-toothed smile and
humility. This is unprecedented in a former president. The man is not an
actor but a soldier's soldier", you are a man of fake frankness who
neither says what he feels nor feel what he says. Your gap-toothed smile
is a mere expression of some tragodia in unparalleled sadism. You are a
deeply committed adherent of active arrogance showcased in passive
form. You feign humility to disguise your cruelty and spit fire to
appear courageous to the easily scared.
You represent for all the taught military theories and tactics in our
strong army, a soldier of cowards. For, who but a cowardly soldier,
neglecting the honour of ideal strength, wins by means of deception and
lie, complicity and duplicity? The Athenians and the Spartans announced
before they attacked any of their enemies, winning still; the English
found it unethical to attack the defenceless. But all of your battles,
because you have read the unpalatable likes of Greenian and
Machiavellian theories of survival by deceits, you had waged through the
weapons of pretences and empty smiles.
Your drafted-for-shame loyalists also cited some newspapers and Nigerian
personalities as supporting and praising your all. The press praise
(August 29th, 1985-The New Nigerian; August 30th, 1985-Daily Times and
National Concord) was intellectually based on ill-judgment, blunderously
based on trust. These newspapers and journalists, in their
shallowness-blessed assessment, thought you were a rational man who had
come to fill their nation's air with the perfume of freedom after their
draconian, dictatorial handling by the duo of Buhari and Idiagbon. They
believed you were in power to serve as the corner-stone of needed
structures that would usher in the triumph of civilized human liberation
over undemocratic democracy and iron and blood policies of the military
adventurers before you.
Professor Wole Soyinka was quoted among those prominent Nigerians who
believe in you: "I like Babanginda's personality, sense of honour and
the sincerity in his ambition. He is a sincere leader with commendable
listening capacity." I strongly suspect that these words are not Wole
Soyinka's; they ought not to be. And if they are, they must have been
created when the charm of your spiritual deceit had a strong hold on the
loving laureate. My suspicion of that Soyinka might have sympathy for
your fairly fastidious folly in 2004 occasioned my Letter to Professor
Wole Soyinka published on Nigeriaworld.com that time. In any case,
beauty, truth and justice are the reasons celebrities and personalities
enjoy the respect of the masses; no Nigerian shall leave undishonoured
by Nigerians, who offers any known form of intellectual, spiritual or
political assistance that fosters the confident enthronement of any
popularly despised corruption mogul, nation divider, or morality
resenter as leaders in Nigeria.
While Wole Soyinka is yet to make a categorical disavowal of his support
for the you we all know and see, Abubakar Umar(Ex Governor of Kaduna
State) cannot be held down by "IBB had 99 percent of followersip in the
military; he was the kind of General whom I could follow into battle
blid-folded." This gallant soldier followed you when he thought you were
worthy, and honourably withdrew his loyalty when he discovered you were
evil. He did not only kick against your annulment of the June 12
election results, he was countlessly seen at critical scenes, fighting
against your cohorts' social sins. This man of the people was not just
mad at Shonekan, he dared the acrimonious Abacha in all that daring
portends. To your disappointment I know, Abubakar Umar has been a
regular fire-spiting commentator in the affairs of Nigeria since your
historic derailment.
I laughed as I read from your plaudit publishers that you cried for
having to cancel the June 12 election. You? Cry? Interesting1! For how
long? And if your tears meant that you were to potentially regret that
annulment, why, why did you go ahead to still annul? Just why did you
not de-Rubicon that tear-inviting decision, even after execution? Or was
it too late? Okay. And why not apologize to Nigerians, explaining the
surrounding circumstances that warranted the inevitable annulment?
Why your "And even now, we make no apologies for the decision…"? IBB,
you are a self-assuring fool that covets the impossible mask of a
genius!
The youths whom you so eloquently debased and calumniated have resolved
to abort, not just your atrocious political goals, but also your
relevance in their nation's history, no matter how hard you try to
inflate your place. Your uttered insult in the following words, "Young
generation can't rule Nigeria because we have seen signs that they are
not capable of leading this country and so we feel we should help them.
May be they are not given the proper education. That is why" exposes to
your political failure as well. "Your failure as son is my fault as a
father", the far-sighted Roman Emperor tells Commodus, his son in a well
scripted and professionally directed and acted epic movie titled
Gladiator. The Nigerian youths would have been thoroughly educated if
you had not replaced basic facilities of learning with the Advanced Fee
Fraud (419)! There would have been more sages among them if you had not
wielded our political power for the astronomical enrichment of yourself
and your criminal cabal. Learning more from their deeds than from their
speeches, a nation's youths are always a reflection of what their
leaders are. These youths too-and this is why the ones in your Fans
Clubs now pretend to believing in you-see and like the idea of a
50-room, hilltop palatial mansion. They love to ride on the best fleet
of cars and jets, they want to steal (like you and Obasanjo) with pious
impunity, they love immunity against pretty justice. The leaders so far,
part of which you are, have historically left them with no nobler
choices! You who were freely fed, clothed, housed and instructed with
Nigerian resources and will had the stinking gut to blockade their
survival that you might dance on their mass grave of failure? Does this
make sense to your so-called genius? Even despite these, few Nigerian
youths manage enough to intellectually develop themselves to see the
level of rots your moral aridity, hundreds of baboonish men and women in
your unenviable category, had designed as legacies.
I can see you have begun the shameless, crazy course of spending the
stolen wealth and the vampirous will on your clearly hated candidacy:
you have created groups on facebook, twitter, tagged, and yahoo
websites; you are taking the advantages of their diplomatic insincerity
and the moral and material poverty of unconscientous countries,
columnists, and youths to make the world feel that Nigerians believe in
you. You are forging alliances with nephews and cousins of the devil who
prefer to sacrifice their future to satisfy their present. The
political future that you and other myopic and ungodly few had
lubricated with the grease of greed and deceits now rolls for your
unprincipled patronage, and you have no internal strength with which to
resist the perniciously saturating temptations. You now wish to resume
your demented duties of properly plundering and further vandalizing
Nigeria!
Even in their graves, MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Gani Fawehinmi, Fela
Anikulapo, Dele Giwa, Pa Alfred Rewane, Ken Saro-Wiwa, etc., detest your
return; Okey Ndibe, Omoyele Sowore and Malcolm Fabiyi campaign that you
may fail; Bamidele Aturu, Tunde Bakare and Balarebe Musa believe you
are a fool; Abubakar Umar, Kennedy Emetulu and Akin Iwilade see you as
an object of farce. Have you read "I am not quite sure that Nigerians
can stop him from exposing himself to ridicule. He has been lucky that
he is not in jail now. His coming out to contest will provide an
opportunity for Nigerians to deal with him squarely…" from Femi Falana?
Now listen to me: from Kano to Maiduguri, Zaria to Calabar, Kano to
Ile-Ife, Port-Harcourt to Sokoto, Ibadan to Bauchi, Ikire to Jega, Nnewi
to Benin, in all nooks and cranies of our tiny largeness, Nigerians
abhor the idea of your return as their president. And I would not need
to inform you of this if the electoral process is sane enough to
relinquish the last say to us electorate. The man whom the foolish and
the undisciplined respect, he is not great; the mortal whose life and
logic appeal to the simplicity of the common and the complexity of the
highly placed, he is our hero. Your name and deeds are ruinous relics of
the devil's hold, be told. You are a genius of some special folly
incomprehensible to all that is beautiful in our world. Genius makes
proud when it is useful; the enigmatism advertises itself, which is
committed to the demystification of a nation's befuddling troubles. IBB,
you are an unspecial specialty of all negative varieties, a farcical
human spirituality, and a one-man battalion buffoon and a bestial bully!
In any promising war of words, conjunctions first betray the ambition of
rhetoric. But with the lasting loyalty of verbs and adverbs,
adjectives, nouns and pronouns, the joint tears and disapproval of
Nigerians against your return to Aso Rock will fly these curses to the
abode of absolute fructification in case you refuse to give it up in all
that giving it up implies to logical reasoning: IBB, may your life's
joy jilt your end with no remorse! May your best qualities cater to the
needs of your disgraceful exit! May all columnists, sociologists and
historians hit you harder than Samuel Doe, Idi Amin, and Adolf Hitler!
May the invisible drums of innocent Nigerians' blood you have needlessly
spilled fill your spiritual well at the detriment of the required water
of spiritual comfort! May your dishonest mien turn a toxically
mesmerizing mess that maims your greatest aims! May your glory nauseate
at the arrival of the seat you so shamelessly hope to occupy! May the
bone and muscles of millions whom you have mercilessly murdered with
your military tactics and political evils pile up into unbreakable
pillars that barricade your stolen honour at the most critical moments
of your soaring! May your soldierly courage be at the mercy of the most
cowardly cowards! May you and your cash-won supporters die in stinking
gutters! May all of your spiritual, intellectual and political
strategists and accolades (within and outside Nigeria) have their bread
of honour maximally buttered by indignity! May any politician-believer
in Babangidaism and Obasanjoism (here or in any part of the globe)
perish in fatal losses! May your evil ploys against them never diminish
the elegant spirits of all Samaformistic anatagonists! May all your
exhibited metaphysical immunity and psychological pretence against
Nigerians' collective protests, tears and curses sponsor your tragic
death! May Aso Rock be eternally disquieted until Nigerians, and not any
unpopular, immoral clique, decide through the power of the ballot,
those brave and moral leaders that rule Nigeria! And unless justice and
universal harmony that enhance survival and dignity of all earthlings
are not the essence of Samaformists and prophets, these trailer of
curses shall locate and determine your tear-filled existence for as long
as you breathe God's air, within the furious flash of our planet's
numerous eyes!
---- A Nigerian living in Nigeria, Mankind Olawale Oyewumi is a
philosopher, teacher, writer, humanist, activist and Samaformist. The
acclaimed writer of SONGS OF THE LAW and IMMORTAL INSTRUCTIONS, LETTER
TO IBRAHIM BADAMOSI BABANGIDA was first published in 2010 and was
included in the creatively written chapters of A GIFT TO NIGERIA AT
FIFTY edited by him. Here is the link to the whole book:
This piece was published today in commemoration of the June 12, 1993 Presidential Election won by MKO Abiola.
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situation in Nigeria today is worse than it was when Goodluck Jonathan
came into the picture, but the only pictures and images we have been
seeing since Jonathan came are those of hunger, unemployment,
kidnapping, horrific road accidents, ill-equipped hospitals, horrific
roads, grand-standing and looting. Looting has been the champion of all
of these images combined. It is the pillar of the transformation
agenda of today's Aso Rock and the plank upon which Jonathan has built
his kingdom. It is the sum total of this that has made an erudite
scholar and nationalist Professor Tamunoemi Sokari David-West to insist
that a hundred Jonathan cannot be compared to one Buhari. Professor
David-West will be 77 come August 26, 2013 and he has seen it all. He
served as Petroleum minister with integrity and honour; straightforward
in his dealings, and he brought order, stability and transparency to the
Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), the same national oil
corporation whose accounts are today in disarray, in the red, held in
secret and held unaccountable to the Nigerian people by Jonathan and his
Bayelsa rough-riders who are looting the nation, men and women who
think they have the right to loot the nation with the excuse that at
least the oil is theirs. These are merely a few people who delude
themselves and are using their sickening "transformation agenda," which
is clearly pseudonym for looting and corruption, to do as they please
and to mismanage the nation and steal her funds. Since corruption is
very much alive and well - in fact well positioned in Aso Rock and
occupying the throne of state - in the land, there is absolutely no hope
for change in the lives of the people.