Mmek-Abasi Akpabio
I just saw the picture and also read the report of one of the outgoing Governors taking his hand-picked would-be successor to present to the President in the Aso Rock Villa and I immediately exclaimed, there we go again! This is their (departing Governors’) season. Their season of impositions.
Their season of closet endorsements where they and their biological families very privately annoint their most fawning and servile surrogates afterwhich they tuck them into their trouser pockets for very surprising unveilings to their voiceless and hapless citizens. And from there, they ram them down their citizens’ throats in often sham elections.
Of course, as the Governors are doing this, everything remains sweet, blissful, private and calm as they extract their mostly ungodly terms from the lucky ‘annointed’. The honeymoon lasts until when the beneficiary is eventually thrusted into the crucible of State power and he buckles under the weight of competing expectations and fails to live up to the demands of the annointor. At this point, the falcon begins to fail to hear the falconer and all hell is let loose.
Then the falconer himself who would have been out of power begins to learn how to adjust to the new reality of being snubbed and humiliated, and pronto, the banging impact unnerves him to the point of bringing out the beast in him that he begins to bark, shout, groan and disturb the peace of the entire community.
This is their season. Please Mr President, we know you are the Grandmaster of that business, ask these outgoing Governors who are lining the Villa corridor waiting to take their turns to introduce their political love partners to you whether they have looked and chosen well.
Please ask them if they won’t return after the first 90 days or a little longer after May 29, 2027 to cry to you to sack their today’s political lovey-dovey through a state of emergency, or guarantee security arrangements for them in their states to enable them carry out impeachment against their today’s partners in crime who would have gone astray against them even though such still have the best of relationships with their people.
Mr President, please ask them oo. This is their season. Please let them swear to you that as they are now gleefully endorsing and thumping their chests about their political genius to the total exclusion of their own people, that is how they will nurse their pains very privately when their choices go wrong and turn awry.
Today’s very private joyful choice is their personal exclusive achievement and gain. Please Mr President, tell them if the rhythm of the music and the journey change on the way, let them have the mental grit and the philosophical calmness to keep their pains private. Let them not ever turn their personal disappointments and hurts into a communal trauma. Please President Tinubu, this is their season. Kindly tell them to select well. The country has already suffered enough. Let the people never ever be subjected to any further pain for these outgoing Governors’ failure to learn from a very ongoing bitter lessons of our country’s reality, namely, that that enterprise hardly works. In Nigeria, the failure rate since 1999 has been phenomenal. But, do we ever learn from history? We hardly, even a currently unfolding history that is before us. To these annoiting Governors, I say well done! See you on the other side of 2027.
