Today is June 12th, our nation’s
Democracy Day and I have some home truths to tell.
The struggle for June 12th was
indeed a noble, worthy, cataclysmic and monumental one. It was also something
of a nightmare which littered our fields with many corpses and soaked the very
foundation of our nation with blood, sweat and tears.
I can confirm that because I was
deeply involved in it and for many years I, along with many others, fought for
it’s actualisation.
Many were martyred, many were
jailed, many were tortured and many were compelled to flee into exile.
Great essayists, keen minds and
profound writers and thinkers like Professor Adebayo Williams, Professor Wole
Soyinka, Mr. Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, Justice Adewale Thompson and the great Chinwezu
kept us going, fuelled our courage, stirred our passion, inspired our spirits
and ignited souls with their powerful essays which we read eagerly and
voraciously wherever we found ourselves in the world.
This was an intellectual,
spiritual, physical, emotional and psychological conflict and struggle and we
threw everything that we had into it.
Chief MKO Abiola was our hero and
leader. He was the symbol and rallying point of the struggle and both he and
his wife Kudirat sacrificed their lives for it.
I commend the Buhari
administration for naming June 12th as our nation’s Democracy Day and I believe
that Abiola deserves it. Yet this noble gesture, as commendable as it is, may
well be too little and too late.
I say this because the Nigeria of
today is the Nigeria of Buhari and not the Nigeria of Abiola. And this presents
us with a very different set of challenges which have resulted in a far greater
existential threat to our country than the annulment of Abiola’s June 12th
presidential mandate and his subsequent murder ever did.
Consider the following. In
Buhari’s Nigeria the President is from the core Muslim north. The Senate
President is from the core Muslim north. The Chief Justice of the Federation is
from the core Muslim north.
Again in Buhari’s Nigeria every
single security, intelligence, investigative, military and para-military agency
in the country except for the Navy is headed by a northern Muslim.
This begs the question: do the
southerners and indeed the Christians have any place or any meaningful stake in
Buhari’s Nigeria?
Yet it does not stop there. In
Buhari’s Nigeria the core north says “no” when we say stop the genocide. They
say “no” when we say restructure. They say “no” when we say establish a
federation. They say “no” when we say establish a confederation. They say “no”
when we say stop the hegemony.
They say “no” when we say Nigeria
is a secular state. They say “no” when we say stop the Fulanisation. They say
“no” when we say stop the Islamisation. They say “no” when we say Nigeria
belongs to us all.
They say “no” when we say the
northern minorities can lead the nation. They say “no” when we say there are
many in the south that can govern the country.
They say “no” when we say Nigeria
is not an appendage of Saudi Arabia. They say “no” when we say we are equal
regardless of tribe or faith.
They say “no” when we say free
Leah Sharibu. They say “no” when we say we are not their slaves. They say “no”
when we say we demand a referendum.
They say “no” when we say we want
to leave the marriage and break the union. They say “no” when we say stop
playing this dangerous music. They say “no” when we say stop indulging in this
dance of death.
They say “no” to everything and
to everyone that seeks to resolve our differences in a reasonable and peaceful
manner.
And so it has been for the last
59 long and turbulent years of our existence as an independent state and
sovereign nation.
Little did we know that in 1960
we had merely replaced our external British colonial masters with a new set of
internal ones.
We locked ourselves into a
strange and deceitful web and became enmeshed and entangled in a complex
catalogue of self-induced and self-inflicted woes.
Today we are a people under
occupation and our land has been desecrated by the precence of hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of extremly violent, dangerous, well-armed,
blood-lusting, blood-crazed and blood-frenzied terrorists and killer herdsmen
who are just waiting for the signal from their masters before they unleash
unimaginable horror, terror and hell on our people.
Must we wait until we are
slaughtered like flies and buried in mass graves, like the Biafrans, the
Bosnians, the Tutsis, the Jews, the Congolese, the Armenians, the Red Indians
of North America, the Aborigines of Australia, the Incas and Aztecs of South
America, the Ouigas of Mynmar, the Yazidis of Syria and Iraq and countless
others, before our eyes open and we demand to leave this tinderbox?
Can anyone blame Prince Adekunle
Odunmorayo when he said, “The demand for restructuring is cowardly, useless and
unachievable. Damn any restructuring. We want out of this charade. We want a
new nation: we want Oduduwa”.
The Prince, who is my kinsman and
a proud son of Ile-Ife, has spoken the minds of millions.
Yet it does not stop there.
Permit me to add the words of one of the greatest, most moderate, most
conservative and most respected leaders of our nation who fought to keep
Nigeria together during the civil war, who has dedicated his entire life to
that cause and who has had the privilage of leading the country on at least two
separate occassions.
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