Ethics in the political arena, is an imperative mix for every qualitative leadership both politically and otherwise. Doubtlessly, the state of things in Nigeria has turned turpsy turvey. It’s so sad, that in an era of betrayals, nothing positive seems to be coming the way of millions of Nigerians. Our political leadership is misty with discouragements, fraud, sufferings, undemocratic inanities, hunger and official immorality and gobbledygook. Our politicians bamboozle the already pauperized and groaning masses with all sorts of immoral acts. Why don’t we have security, yet non-performing security chiefs are having their chock-a-block days? Why are our days full of insecurity, ethnicity, nepotism and absolute religious favoritism?Things have unethically reached to an irretrievable crescendo, and because of such, our youths went on rampage. Nigeria presently is characterized by brutality and hopelessness. Can it boast of any positivity in all perspectives? Millions of Nigerians are extremely hungry and jobless. Every available sensitive job is given to a particular region and religion? The federal government’s concern is to inflict pains and woes on the poor masses? Instead of giving food and security to Nigerians, poor Nigerians file out in their millions looking for NIN registration, while those who have registered and have NIN have their numbers callously barred.If not petrol hikes, their electricity tariffs are hiked. Bishop Kuka, an outspoken cleric was right to have seen a snag with our irresponsible elitist political players. He has seen our elite driving a hopeless vehicle loaded with tyranny, monopolists, greedy and selfish politicians. And in the midst of these, the inability of the Church, full of elites, to come out and speak out against our political intellectuals who are supposed to be self-mortifying and self- sacrificing, is also aiding such elitist unethicality in governance.And his invitation to the Igbo elite to ally with other regional intellectual, to fight for justice and equity, is commendable. The Igbo need equity and the 2023 presidential tickets, which is their turn, has the Church spoken. And these are symbols of justice and equity. The amalgamation of both the clerical and political elite should be a reality to speak out for rotational equity and respect. This is a wholesome task for both classified elite, if they could live beyond selfhood and parochial trifling. Unless our intellectuals in and outside political arena, realize the essence of education, and employ it politically, our country would not be better.
By all standards, well-educated political elite should live above electoral corruption, violence and immorality, in order to solve our socio-political yarn. If philosophically-minded elite with disproportionate hearts of equity and respect for justice and fairness emerge, Nigeria will become better. Philosopher kings are needed to disapprove of selfishness and greed, religious bigotry. He quotes Sirach 2419-22, ‘’come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my fruit-to obey me is to be safe from disgrace, those who work in wisdom will not go astray, to encourage the Igbo’’. The lack of wisdom of our political elite is our bane, and the practice of wisdom would bring us victory. Hence, our elite need to hearken to prophet Isaiah 1:17, ‘’wash yourselves clean. Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes. Cease doing evil and learn to do good. Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, and defend the widow’’. Political evil has turned into political goodness for some. They are incapable of learning good. When you advise them, they take your good advice to be heartless and crazy for national development. We need to right the wrongs of the past and work for restoration. We must work for justice and secure the lives of Nigerians, which has been reduced to vacuity? The Christendom too, that re-enacts the Lord’s Supper everyday has even fallen into a world of insensitivity, neglecting the poor among them, thereby making the Lord’s Supper at Corinth, a charade. Is it not wrong to have privatized our spirit and knowledge? How many times has the Church as the Master, been in the side of the poor and suffering Nigerians? Has the Church ever been the voice of Nigerians in distress? While our political leaders become richer, our pensioners, workers, youths and old citizens go to sleep on empty stomachs. While we have natural oil and gas, we go to even some neighboring African countries to refine them. Instead of calling us together to enjoy our public treasury, just few from the three tiers congregate to absolute wickedness and criminality, frittering it away into their private pockets. Our different legislators only make useless laws to oil their whims and caprices. Their sittings are designed to maximize their octopod allowances in the name of deliberations. Are their ill-gotten gifts to God not repugnant to him? They use public funds to create estates, which of course, belong to them and their likes. Their worship of God is only lip service. They build houses on sand and let them out to the poor who will die when they collapse. What a fall, the Lord has said? Public officers do not work for the common good but for their selfish fiefdom and cronies. That the country is rocked by general insecurity and anarchy is never their concern. They do not want to restructure our constitution, lest they lose their monopolistic entitlements. They know that when our Constitution is well redesigned or crafted willy-nilly, it should provide grounds for our ethical- political responsibility, but they don’t want it. If our constitution is proper and consensually crafted, our relationships with God and with one another will surely be affable and dependable; our ethics in general, morality and relationships with each region and religion will inseparably grow the way we are supposed to relate with God privately and politically. Bishop Kukah re-echoes leadership with responsibility.
We need leadership with responsibility that will provide us with security, justice and equity and democracy dividends. He is calling our elite in all corners of governance and followership to be proactively and responsibly involved in shaping a livable Nigerian climate. Too much blood has been spilled by through insecurity, yet our security echelon is ornamented with vain and crazy encomiums. Our youths have been recklessly abandoned by the government, while thugs and election riggers are rewarded with works and contracts. We don’t have good roads, because our leaders hurtfully fly above the skies and clouds. We don’t have pipe borne water, credible hospitals, power supply and qualitative educational system, yet our irresponsible leaders enjoy even swimming pools and steady supply of these elements. They enjoy steady light from powered electricity, and either well equipped clinics or they fly away to foreign hospitals. While they neglect our schools, their kids and wards are paid with our public funds in the best of foreign universities, while lecturers’ strikes keep poor students languid and bland in their homes for years. While civil servants do the actual work, politicians eat the money and pensioners die while hungrily queuing for pittance in different banks. Is ethical responsibility to continue punishing poor Nigerians with hiked tariffs and endless queues for the registration of the NIN, while politicians have designated homes for such? We have done the so-called BVN and SIM Card registrations, yet not satisfied in inflicting pains and hardship, the federal government has come with the NIN registrations. While trying to register, there are no social distancing and face masking by many. Designated places are not helping matters. They are extorted. The sun is too hard on them, yet politicians sit comfortably in their air-conditioned chambers or houses, sipping and eating what God knows. Oh poor man, you are doomed forever. If you are a Muslim North for example, you have an Abraham as a father in all perspectives. Our political leaders have mastered rigging of elections in unimaginable manners and that’s the major unscrupulous source of our perennial problems. Their corruption status can never be found even in the pit of hell. Therefore, I am in solidarity with and in support of Bishop Kukah. We need more prophets like him than ever before. We need to collectively stand up against our waffled politicians. How can the Church must not keep tight-lipped while they garrote and elf our political hemisphere into the arroyo of ethnic and religious bog. Why must the whole Body of Christ keep quiet while the Igbo are being ostracized from their rightful position and role in making Nigeria work again? The Church must not keep mum while her youths are massacred by security operatives. Don’t we have freedoms of Association, Assembly and protest? Must we go to sleep while Fulani herdsmen invade people’s homes and farmland? Why must the blood of the innocent be wasted on daily basis through insecurity, while the federal government makes appointments into the security apparatuses based on ethnic and religious bias. Where is Leah Sharibu after hostage and so many others?
REV FR OFFOR EVARISTUS (Ph.D)