Photo credit: BBC
I’m most concerned about how Nigerians lost the second republic to General Buhari!
While his becoming a ‘democratically imposed’ president has shown he never had any good plan for Nigeria, it wouldn’t be fair to him to put all the blames on Buhari.
In the first instance, we were in a learning period, at the end of which the sleeping giant would have had to wake up to its responsibilities.
We could easily say that was a golden moment for Nigerian politics. Never mind the fact that the late Umaru Dikko rightly predicted that Nigerians were yet to be eating from the dust bins.
Rightly, because it is only lucky Nigerians who are lucky to eat from the dust bins these days.
Others are simply hungry!
But then, we are the cause of our collective misfortune. There is hardly any cheating in a photograph, it’s the way you pose that you will appear.
At least, I can remember three political parties formed by Gani Fawehinmi, Fela Kuti and Tunji Braithwaite all of blessed memory.
Why did their parties not sell with us? They were not ready to distribute momey.
The first two were constantly arrested and brutalized by the police and the military, what did we do?
Ayodele Awojobi once bestrode the Nigerian space like a colossus. At a time, he spent much more time in the courtrooms than at the University of Lagos where he was a professor.
He must have died of frustration.
Hassan Sunmomu was the chairman of Nigerian Labour Congress, a very honest man who would not suffer fools gladly. What became of him?
Segun Okeowo was at a time the president of the National Union of Nigerian Students. He took students’ unionism to a higher pedestal. He was rusticated. If not for some positive forces he wouldn’t have been reinstated.
Academics like Segun Osoba, Bala Usman and Ola Oni were constantly forced into perpetual games of hide and seek with security agents because they believed Nigeria could be better ruled.
Even the politicians of those days were so much in a higher class than those we have today. Awo, Zik, Shagari etc left their footsteps on the sand of history.
But you know what?
Did we listen to our prophets?
Did we?
Let’s stop being like the proverbial dog that’s destined to be lost…
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