Monday 14 January 2013

Asari Dokubo And Orji Kalu’s Week Of Dry Jokes–By Chinedu Ekeke


By Chinedu Ekeke


EkekeCC
Just like every other Nigerian week, last week was interesting. Two news items made the headlines. In those headlines, two people – whose voices should not be heard in any sane society – spoke. But as you would expect, they both spoke nonsense.
The first was the former governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu. The next was Mujahid Asari Dokubo, the billionaire kidnapper from the Ijaw nation. They both talked, but they made no sense.
Let me begin with Asari. Most people who have read me in the past know that I don’t consider him serious enough to devote my writing time to what he says or doesn’t say. I have always argued that he doesn’t deserve such dignity.
However, there have been a few times I considered his statements either too outrageous to be ignored or too much of a joke to be taken seriously. His recent interview with National Mirror fits into the latter.
During the interview, he was asked if people wouldn’t say he is picking on the president for personal reasons. And the creek lord thundered; “ So if a man takes food from my mouth, I should support him? What are you saying now? So…that Jonathan should eat in the Villa and fill with excesses and I should not eat; and I should support him? I no shame for that one. If e no give me wetin be my own, I go fight am. Period! There is no two ways about it.”
And then he added, “Do you want me to die with my 18 children in hunger? No way!”
Now that is the man who wants to save the Niger-Delta and liberate his people from oppression? Here’s the man who said he was born into this world to fight for the freedom of “his people”.
You see, I understand the sad tale that Nigeria has become. The atrocities of our past leaders – conversion of public assets to private wealth – aren’t lost on me. The creation of the Danjumas, Ubas and the Alakijas by Abacha, Obasanjo and Babangida respectively underscores how much of a joke we have become as a country. Yet the likes of Asari Dokubo lend such jokes a tone that is one part humorous and seven parts crazy!
Oh, so suddenly, the liberator of the people is after his stomach and those of his eighteen children? What happens to the altruism he had always dangled before those who took him seriously?
This week marks one year of #OccupyNigeria, during which Nigerians of all socio-political class and leanings took to the streets. It was a week of rage, and a halt to deceit. In the heat of that, I saw Asari Dokubo issue threats to Nigerians on how we must ensure that nothing happens to “their son” the president or Nigeria will become history. As he thundered, his minions who surrounded him watched in infantile admiration.
Asari’s interest was to protect the Niger-Delta project, to ensure their son Mr Jonathan wasn’t intimidated out of Aso Rock because he’s from an ethnic minority. It didn’t matter that the president’s policy was anti-people, and that it was designed to shield his friends from prosecution: the real job that was needed from any serious government.
For one whose worldview takes preference for competence over race or tribe, I find a lot of things odious about Asari’s stands on national issues, yet his recent outburst on why he wants to “fight” President Jonathan is the most outrageous.
Asari Dokubo was reported by National Mirror to have been handling a contract for Jonathan’s regime to secure oil pipelines in the Niger-Delta. His ‘belly-first’ life orientation made it impossible for him to do the job well. The federal government got unhappy with him and then refused to renew the contract. Which supports his anger “…if a man takes food from my mouth, I should support him?”. It should also send a message to us that the President considered not renewing Asari’s contract for the reason of non-performance. For a president like Jonathan whose taste for performance in any job borders on the awful, Asari’s non-execution of the jobs he was commissioned to do must have been truly repugnant to even bad conscience. It must have been the worst case the president is witnessing all his life.
“Liberation of my people”, “My people”, “Ijaw Nation” and other variants of the phrase have become a thriving industry for the Asaris of Nigeria. They have become overnight millionaires from Yar’Adua’s amnesty, and Jonathan’s money-for-problem model of governance. In the name of “their people”, they have kidnapped citizens and foreigners, maimed innocent employees of oil companies and still got rewarded with special budgetary allocations for appeasement. Asari’s recent fury isn’t about the sublimity of his struggle, it’s about the rumblings of his stomach, the bowel of a glutton. His stomach dictates the stand he takes on national issues. When full, he swings to the source of the fullness with bundles of praise, and when empty, he rails on those who didn’t pander to his gluttony.
Enters Orji Uzor Kalu, the one who wants an Igbo man to become the next president of Nigeria. For me, this should be good news, but his reason makes it otherwise. Speaking at a dinner with the Nigerian community in Belgium at Speidemberger Hotel Resort, Brussels, Kalu said Igbo Presidency will end Nigeria’s economic woes. “Igbos are the salt of the nation”, he told his audience. “Anywhere you don’t see Ndigbo, the economy is incomplete”. Then he added; “The Igbos will provide qualitative and dynamic leadership” that will turn around the economy.
Being Igbo myself, the excitement of hearing that I am “the salt of the nation” is unquantifiable, except that I also come from Abia, a state where Mr Kalu – the salt-in-chief himself– ruled for eight straight years without any sign of economic progress for the citizens. He left Abia one of the most indebted states in Nigeria, and one of the most undeveloped. A thriving commercial center in the state, Aba town, could not develop beyond what it was when Kalu met it. The roads he constructed in his first term in the town, and for which he earned himself then President Obasanjo’s lavishing praise and a top spot in the media, all spoiled before the end of that term, right in his eyes, yet in the years that followed, after he won a reelection, he didn’t fix them. The first was that the roads were of very poor quality, the second was that their costs were extremely exorbitant.
Given the creative drive of the average Igbo as he tries to sell, one expected that Orji Kalu would have made an industrial centre of a sort out of Aba, the state’s commercial town. That did not happen.
But that wasn’t Kalu’s most grievous offence against the state and its people. Kalu – oh, I forgot her rampaging mother too –personally handed the state over to one Theodore Orji, his then Chief Of Staffwho was facing grave charges of corruption and conspiracy. From behind kirikiri bars, Theodore was declared the new state governor. Theodore Orji knows neither how to keep the state where he found it nor how to take it a step beyond there. It has been six years of groaning under mounting poverty for the state citizens. All thanks to Orji Uzor Kalu.
Kalu’s very woeful performance in office as governor wasn’t just the only reason his argument should be discarded and thrown into the trash, his co-travellers also make his premise of tackling economic woes untenable. While Kalu was in Abia doing harm to the unfortunate state, his Imo State counterpart, Achike Udenwa, went bragging to Imo citizens that he (former governor Ikenwa) brought Mr Biggs to Owerri, and that that was a proof of the level of development he had brought to the state. While that was happening, the governor of Enugu state, Chimaroke Nnamani was into full timemedia hype, Enugu Is Working, yet Enugu didn’t work. Ditto for Sam Egwu and his Ebonyi state. There was nothing spectacular about these men while they ruled as state governors. So where is the Igbo-man-has-the-economic-magic argument of Kalu coming from?
It is not that other geopolitical zones fared better, anyway. The same sickness that held the Igbo governors down struck their counterparts elsewhere. It was Nigeria’s grab-and-go disease. Yet Orji’s argument is laughable. There is no proof that an Igbo man, just any Igbo man or woman, will fix Nigeria’s economic rot. But there is a proof that anybody, from any part of the country, who has a track record of personal integrity, character and performance in public office, can fix Nigeria’s many challenges. I have nothing against any Igbo person being Nigeria’s next president, so long as the person is capable of seeing that the Orji Kalus start sending messages to Nigerians from the discomfort of their prison cells for the economic carnage they wrecked on the states they ruled. In that case, get me Oby Ezekwesili, after all, she is of Igbo extraction too. Or isn’t she? Even if she doesn’t send them to jail, I am certain she will ensure no state in Nigeria produces the Orjis, Iboris, Igbinedions, Akalas and Dariyes again.
Now let the campaign for an Igbo president begin.
Kindly follow the writer on Twitter as @Nedunaija

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