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The whole of last week one was on a journey through some parts of our country. Believe me it was an excellent and rewarding experience. I saw new things I never knew existed in our richly endowed country. The country is blessed but deeply abused by the people led, of course, by a blind and confused leadership class.
We are getting to the breaking point and when someone of my pedigree says this it means things are really getting out of control. We will examine the fears in detail some other time. The point I desire to bring out is that so many things happen in our country almost on a minute to minute basis, which could escape attention if one’s attention is arrested by other activities. While I engaged in the adventure I mentioned in the earlier paragraph, I didn’t know President Bola Tinubu’s presidential election campaign council had moved into action. I knew they went to Edo State where they got the endorsement of the highly revered Oba of Benin. After that outing not much was heard again from the team until last Thursday when they visited Katsina State and had gone to pay courtesy to the Emir of Katsina, who not only berated the visitors but almost sent them packing out of the palace. This reckless action inspired today’s choice.
Let me address the immediate development before bringing to the fore the wider implications for our national development. The king lowered standards. It is not right to publicly embarrass any visitor. Culturally and otherwise it is not right. One of the low points of Donald Trump, President of the United States, has to do with his poor, belittling antics towards some foreign leaders who visited his country. Keeping the cameras in the open, having the press present and talking down on a visiting Head of State isn’t acceptable behavior. Culturally too it is not acceptable to demean or even kill a visitor. But this is what the Emir of Katsina did.
He said the President didn’t need to visit because insecurity and hunger was plaguing his people. Good points to be angry about but not enough grounds to take up the president frontally and to virtually bring him into public opprobrium. This is not only a breach of protocol, it is about breaking ranks and clear affront on the standing of the President as leader of the country.
Does the Emir have the freedom to expression? Yes he has but if all persons placed in highly responsible positions all over the country were to open their mouths to voice resentment over the many secrets they know then we will wake up to discover that we have no more country we could call ours. It will be about fire everywhere. While freedom to publicly express opinions is great and a constitutionally guaranteed right, the exercise of this right for those entrusted with certain public positions is circumscribed, or still restricted by constraints thrown up by the requirements of social responsibility.
The health of the country supersedes any portion of constitutional provisions or even the Constitution in entirety. You must first have a country before you can begin to find the laws to bind political, economic and social relations and individual benefits which most know as rights. What leaders do or say determine the extent of health a country can have. This is why discretion is a virtue in the management of public good and development. Not everything is said and those who lead are advised to refrain from becoming emergency change agents and revolutionaries, they should be liberal conservatives, aiming for change in a manner society isn’t destabilized.
The actions of the Emir of Katsina is indicative enough that he doesn’t know some of the points marshalled earlier on. So on this occasion that should have been deployed to further the bonds of unity and cohesion among Nigerians he chose to act in a very misdirected manner.
He pandered to the growing but very wrong attitude of a section of northern political players to always denigrate any southern president in power. The evidence is there. Olusegun Obasanjo was thoroughly denigrated by a section of very exposed northerners who said he couldn’t do a second term because he signed an agreement with them to have only a term of four years as Nigerian elected president. Atiku Abukakar, a northern political player and the country’s onetime vice president now seeking to be president for the seventh time led the onslaught. Obasanjo saw hell.
Then came President Goodluck Jonathan, another president of Southern Nigeria extraction. He was so pilloried that people were never sure he was a citizen. Getting to be the president from the vice president position even when it was clear the president was no more was messy. Northern aides gave him the treatment they would give to a scoundrel. If truth be told President Jonathan was virtually harassed out of power and forgot the reason for overstaying in power or zoning.
President Bola Tinubu has not made half of the mistakes committed by late President Muhammadu Buhari yet under Buhari none of the leaders felt very bold to confront him. Far majority of them went into their shells. Under Tinubu, nearly all of them have become emergency social advocates, so visionary and patriotic they must intervene before the country, already ruined, goes down finally.
Nothing defines hypocrisy better than this. Hypocrisy for those who don’t know is prescribing a standard for others which you don’t subscribe to yourself. The Emir of Katsina has chosen to lead the northern sentiments and possible assault against Tinubu and his government. Nothing wrong with taking the snake by the head but the hidden truth is the tail can be as potent as the head. Southerners may look divided and to some extent naive but they are not politically stupid. The Yoruba are not. The Yoruba remain one of the most politically very sophisticated people this country has; they have the ability to confront any race and to ruin what they don’t like without shooting a bullet. This is who they are.Again the Yoruba hold the pillars to the continuous existence of what we know as Nigeria today. Under the right atmosphere both the Igbo and the core North would have left the union. Yoruba indecision has kept the country as one. In this, President Tinubu is the last link. His alliance with the North has done the North plenty of good. If they abuse it, the consequences would be too great to imagine.This is no defense of President Bola Tinubu. After all, I have never met him, but the truth is about national survival and sustainable development. Running down one race so that one would be seen to be thriving is a dangerous game we ought to discredit and do away with immediately. We may not like Tinubu as President. This should not cloud our sense that he is today the elected president of Nigeria. He deserves maximum respect and courtesy. He is not alone, he too comes from a race and a zone. This knowledge is crucial for the emergence of the new Nigeria, which we earnestly crave to see emerge very quickly. Truly, pandering to base sentiments like the Katsina Emir did recently and going ahead to market it in the open places would do us far greater damage. I hope it doesn’t happen a second time.
