By Charles Ogbu
Mr President, Sir,
This open letter is necessitated by issues of urgent national
importance not unconnected with your 3 minute recorded broadcast to
Nigerians this morning where you stated that Nigeria’s unity is settled
and not negotiable.
Mr President, Sir, I wasn’t exactly born with a talent for political
correctness so I like to assume your permission to pay you the courtesy
of being blunt.
First, I want to register my displeasure that you, a mere servant and
employee of the Nigerian people, could derisively address your employers
and the same people paying your salaries even when you are hardly at
work, as “my dear citizens” instead of “my fellow citizens”.
That derisive opening line in your speech lend more credence to an
already established fact which is that you are an arrogant victim of
messiah complex who sees his people, not as his employers whose wishes
he must harken to, but as lesser mortals and slaves who are his to do as
he pleases. Even Emperor Nero didn’t address Romans in that
condescending manner.
Mr president sir, we are not your citizens. We are not even just your
fellow citizens! We are your employers! We are your boss! We pay your
bill. We feed you, Mr president. Talk to us with some respect!
Mr president, when you told us how you discussed with Ojukwu in 2003 and
agreed that Nigeria’s unity is non negotiable, what exactly did you
think the reference to the late Biafra strong man would achieve?
Did you think that line would magically address all the
institutionalized grave injustices in the system which you’ve made worse
with your open display of tribal bigotry, vindictiveness, raw hatred
for people from a particular section of the country and criminal
disregard for the same constitution you swore to protect??
That you believe the unity of over 180 million people is something you, a
Fulani man and Ojukwu, an Igbo man, can sit in your small sitting room
somewhere in your small village of Daura and conclusively discuss, says a
whole lot about how much value you attach to the so called unity.
As a free citizen of a free world and one of those paying your salaries,
I find that statement criminally offensive and hopelessly
disappointing. But even more disappointing is the fact that even after
spending billions of our tax money and over 100 days treating an
undisclosed ailment abroad, you seem not to have learnt anything from
your numerous administrative blunders and trailer load of
un-presidential utterances, actions and inactions which in most part,
are responsible for the mess we are in today.
Mr President sir, let me remind you that you, it was, not Nnamdi Kanu,
who resuscitated and fuelled the current Biafra agitation. Even the
activities of the Niger Delta militants were all birthed by your
tact-less, bigoted, vindictive and mostly common-sensically bankrupt
utterances and actions.
And to prove that you are an unteachable ethnic jingoist with an
iniquitious sense of national unity and an atrocitious sense of
governance, all through your 3 minute address,
You didn’t tell your employers the kind of ailment that kept you away
from your duty post for over 100 days and gulped billions of tax payers’
money.
You didn’t announce measures to resuscitate the economy which your
criminal ineptitude and analogue economic plans largely played a part in
destroying.
You didn’t mention measures you plan on taking towards addressing the
grievances of the secessionist groups even when you admitted some of
their grievances are genuine.
You didn’t make any assurances towards calming freyed nerves considering the mood of the country.
You didn’t categorically condemn the series of terror your fulani
brethren are visiting on Nigerians. Instead, you played it down as mere
herdsmen/farmers clashes.
You didn’t even categorically condemn your siblings (Arewa Youths) for
publicly threatening genocide on Igbos living in the North come October
1st, 2017.
You did none of the above.
Instead, You spent almost 50% of your broadcast threatening social media
users and aggrieved citizens who are only asking you to treat them as
equal stake-holders in the Nigeria project or allow them quit this
oppressive union. The other 50% was wasted on tales about your meeting
with Ojukwu where the duo of you supposedly decided on behalf of over
180 million of us that the unity of Nigeria is non negotiable.
In a nutshell, you spent over 100 days abroad on medical tourism on tax
payers’ money against your campaign promises only to come back with
nothing but a trailer-load of insult, derision and threats for the same
citizens who paid and are still paying all your hospital bill and
salaries even when you were hardly doing any job??
Quite frankly, Mr President, that speech would easily pass off as one hell of comedy except it was a tragedy.
You’ve simply proven that you are a man far detached from reality. It
would seem you are still stuck in 1985. Indeed, a leopard never changes
its skin.
Now, my dear president, as one of your employers, Iet me gift you with some piece of advise:
First, Nigeria is not a nation unless we’ve all decided to adopt a very
confused and lopsided understanding of the term, “nation”. More
importantly, our unity as a people is a farce. It doesn’t exist. You
cannot discuss the negotiability or non-negotiability of a unity that
only exist in your imagination.
How can there be unity when you, Mr President, went to a foreign land
and publicly promised to discriminate against those who didn’t vote you
with your infamous 97%_5% speech?
Where is the unity when you were busy gifting boko haram terrorists and
the marauding herdsmen with a juicy amnesty package and military
protection respectively at the exact time you were, and still are,
visiting the unarmed Biafra agitators with festival of bullets?
Most importantly, Mr President, mentioning “unity” and “non-negotiable”
in the same sentence betrays a very poor appreciation of the queen’s
language. If it’s unity, then the powers that bind the parties together
must have been birthed through negotiations. In which case, any talk
about the non-negotiability of such unity becomes the height of
conscientious idiocy bothering on the fringes of lunacy. If it’s unity
that was a product of force, then it’s no unity at all.
Mr President sir, the clause “our unity is non-negotiable” is an Oxymoronic expression.
You cannot threaten people of diverse cultural, religious and language background into nationhood!!!!
Unity cannot be forced!
On your threats to agitators, Mr President, you proved you lack basic
understanding of what the issues are. It is not just the southeast that
is aggrieved, both the south south, south west and even the North, your
own region, are all aggrieved as examplified by the October 1st quit
notice and threat of genocide against Igbos living in the North. Every
section of the country is aggrieved. Rather than proving you are too
bloodthirsty for dialogue, initiate a workable time-bound plan towards
restructuring this country in such a way to enthrone justice, fairness,
equity and merit.
Restructure this British contraption now! Or, Watch the whole country
collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The
fastest way of escalating an agitation is by trying to suppress it
rather than addressing the issues that birthed it.
Mr President, sir, I am not unaware of the fact that in the coming days,
we are going to be witnessing more killing of the unarmed pro-Biafra
agitators and series of arrests, abduction and incarceration targeted at
social media users and your political opponents but I have a message
for you, sir, just as we survived your brutality between 31 December
1983 to 27th August 1985, We Will Survive You!
This, too, shall pass!
I wish you exactly what you wish Nigerians.
Love from
Charles Ogbu.
