President Buhari on the 11th of October, 2022, gave “honourary awards” to an unspecified number of citizens. I call it unspecified because till date nobody can give accurate figure of how many they are. Immediately the first list came out, which stood at about 427, the government came out to discard the first figure as fake. The eventual figures that were released have not been harmonised till date. The only thing that is certain in President Buhari’s regime is uncertainty. When Senator Adamu was initially unveiled as the official choice of President Buhari for the Chairmanship of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Presidency immediately denied involvement. When they noticed that the candidacy of Adamu will collapse if they didn’t come out open in their support of him, they came out openly at the last moment to accept that Buhari is behind the candidature of Senator Adamu. He won.
Thinking they can continue to move in that trajectory, when it was the time for the choice of a presidential candidate, Senator Adamu, borrowing a leaf on how he was enthroned, publicly declared, during the presidential primary election of APC, that Senator Ahmed Lawan, the Senate President, is the consensus candidate backed by the Villa. As usual, the Villa denied, but unlike the previous election into the National chairmanship position which they came out to eventually support, when they saw the level of resistance against their choice, which was meant to elongate the tenure of a sitting Northern Muslim for sixteen years, they held unto their denial and left both Senator Adamu and Senator Lawan in the cold to lick their wounds which are increasingly becoming cancerous. Lawan was kicked out from the senatorial race by the court as an usurper, while the relationship between Adamu and Tinubu, the eventual presidential candidate of APC, has been anything but cozy. Obviously, this regime has shown that it is incapable of being trusted. Men of honor keep to their words.
Let us face it, the two major political parties have failed. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) built the foundation of this failure and the All Progressives Congress (APC) is building a skyscraper of failure on top of the foundation. Between the two major political parties, since 1999, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been on strike for about 71 months, which is a cumulative period of about 5 years. The latest being an eight month avoidable strike under the leadership of APC, with all the University students condemned to a life of perpetual idleness, which has made them the devil’s workshop of yahoo yahoo dealings, occultic influence, banditry and armed robbery. These flurry of strikes stem from a botched agreement entered between ASUU and the incompetent PDP led government in 2009 and inherited by a more incompetent APC government in 2015 with no solution in sight till date except for a subdued wry notice of the fatigued and battered ASUU of the possibility of an imminent end to the strike. We pray fervently that before the publication of this article that the strike would have been called off in the interest of the innocent students of Nigeria whose only offence is that they were born in a country with lack of good leaders.
The security situation is even worse, being the primary purpose of government. PDP allowed Boko Haram to take over the North East and foisted their flags on about 17 Local Government Areas in Borno State, while APC allowed bandits, terrorists, kidnappers, insurgents, militants, separatists and unknown gunmen take over the whole country and are stealing oil, massacring people in mosques, churches, markets and indeed everywhere. Jail breaks are frequent and the President can no longer even protect himself as his convoy comes under attack. Bandits collect taxes from the citizens even from the President’s State. They not only collect taxes, they, according to Gov Masari, now openly collect the wives and daughters of their fellow men for their sexual satisfaction. These men voluntarily submit their wives and daughters to them in order to save their lives. In APC’s government, almost every Governor is crying out loud for self-defence.
In economy, the two major political parties are disasters. Nigeria has been a mono-economy based on Oil and both PDP and APC governments have done nothing to change the situation. We are still importing refined petroleum products from 1999 till date. Naira has depreciated to N735.00 to $1. This failure is replicated in all the sectors of the Nigerian economy and has not attracted any solution from both parties with the resultant effect that we don’t have power, energy, fuel, security, stability etcetera. Nigeria is today facing an existential threat as the present government has borrowed itself out of existence as all its revenue cannot even service its debts. The two major political parties are even in disarray as the desperation, greed, selfishness and pride of both presidential candidates have caused intractable disunity amongst their members. It is under this sorry state of the nation that President Buhari considered it necessary to give honorary awards to some “distinguished” Nigerians, most of them politicians and civil servants who have been at the corridors of power since 1999, who, incontrovertibly, contributed to the sorry state we have today.
Let us admit that there are some citizens of Nigeria who have distinguished themselves admirably in their chosen career and are eminently qualified for the honours. An award is a recognition of excellence and a reward for superlative performance. It serves as a motivation for the entire citizenry to attain such level of excellence. But can a government truly give what it doesn’t have? Can a government that is bereft of honour in all ramifications truly give honours to its citizens? Chinua Achebe, the author of the evergreen novel titled Things Fall Apart”, aptly summarised it when he declared that, “the truest test of integrity is in its blunt refusal to be compromised”. He made this timeless declaration when he rejected national honours in 2004 and 2011 to protest the poor performance of the Peoples Democratic Party governments under President Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan respectively. Their performances led him to relocate abroad almost permanently to receive special medical care for his special medical condition which he sustained after a near death auto-crash-experience caused by the prevalent bad roads in the country. Nigeria lacked infrastructure in almost all spheres of the economy during those regimes. He was a true Nigerian who recognised that integrity demands that it is not enough to be qualified to be given an award, it is important that the government dishing out such award must be qualified to give the awards. You cannot put a new wine in an old wine bottle, it will burst.
If a true Nigerian rejected awards in protest of bad governance during the PDP incompetent regimes, much more are Nigerians of honour and integrity expected to reject utopic honours under the worse performed APC. It is disappointing that even some harshest critics of President Buhari still unashamedly bowed down to collect honours from him. Every Nigerian understands that our problem is leadership. Nigeria is blessed abundantly with human and material resources but bad leadership has denied the people the ability to enjoy these resources. The leaders steal our oil and money and convert them for personal use. They have turned us to paupers in a land where our God meant to make us Princes. They deserve the prison not the honours but we have a government that is decorating them with honours not the prison. Are you then surprised why this government has failed woefully?
Have you asked yourself why this regime, since inception has not organised any centralised honours for Nigerians. What it was doing before was spontaneous recognition of excellence where it was merited like the indelible achievements of great athletes. Have you noticed that all those achievements in sports and entertainment were gotten outside the influence of the government? How come the government turned and organised the largest assemblage of awardees at the lowest ebb of its performance. The reason is simple, having lost all sorts of credibility, this government that has no budget for capital expenditure, is now using its money to fund awards to Nigerians to use such Nigerians to shore up its almost dead credibility. It is unfortunate that in the life of those individuals, whenever their life history is read, the name of this government that gave them the award will follow them to the grave. The blood of those innocent Nigerians killed in terrorism and banditry will now be in their hands as they shake the hand of the Commander-in-Chief who has failed to protect them.
The first recorded time in the world where dishonourable men were referred to as “honourable men” was in the days of Julius Caesar, where they killed Caesar, because of jealousy and wanted to camouflage that they killed him for the good of Rome because Caesar was ambitious. In order to be allowed to deliver a speech at the funeral of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Caesar’s friend and an orator, referred to them as honorable men. The honourable men gave Mark Anthony a condition that he must tell the crowd of mourners that it was under their authority that he was allowed to bury Caesar. He agreed and came to the crowd and made the famous burial speech that turned the tide against the conspirators. The greatest argument by Mark Anthony to convince the crowd that Caesar was not ambitious was that Caesar was offered a crown that will prepare him to be King of Rome three times but he rejected the crown three times. This destroyed the argument of the conspirators that he was ambitious and enraged the crowd against them and they took an instant decision to wipe out all the conspirators to revenge his death. Caesar, out of honour, rejected the crown three times because he sensed that Romans did not want to be ruled by Kings again and when it came to the right time, the people fought to defend his name. Chinua Achebe rejected the honours twice to protest poor government. Nigerian corrupt politicians could not even reject an honour once in solidarity with the Nigerian people in what they are suffering at the hands of this failed government. They are simply ambitious failed leaders and politicians without substance. The only choice Nigerians have now is to vote out all these leaders in 2023 the way Romans wiped out all the conspirators and denied them the opportunity of destroying Rome, and vote in leaders who will be responsive to their needs. Whoever received any award from Buhari is indeed an “honourable person”.