–Blank NEWS Online (NIGERIA) –By: Austen Akhagbeme:
There’s no denying the fact that a larger part of Nigeria’s many knotty problems is the elites’ hegemonic tussle and fragmentation. The fight for relevance and inclusion is usually fierce and thrives on subterfuge and blackmail. What with the recent “Ibadan speech” of the legendary Soldier and multi-billionaire Army General and civil war veteran, Gen T Y Danjuma, which turned out to be a slip!
He was alleged to have berated the yoruba nation for her new found taciturnity as opposed to the era that produced vibrant social engineers and critics like, Wole Soyinka, Tai Solarin, Baba Omojola, Gani Fawehinmi, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Olu Onagoruwa, Olusegun Maiyegun to mention but a few.
The most controversial was when he offered to be silent than to spill his cocooned knowledge of the underbelly of evil, bedeviling our nation in recent times. This has elicited unpleasant and unprecedented responses accross the board.
To some, Danjuma is too deep a part of the problem than to become a part of the solution. These owes largely to his role as a prominent progeny of the abnormal military phenomenon and its retrogressive contributions to the political development of our country, Nigeria.
Those who have been referred to as the vindictive and “unrepentant tribalists” bemoaningly reminded us about his infamous civil war exploits as he fought along side the same ethnic Hausa-Fulani (who are ravaging his ethnic Jukun land with impunity today) against the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria. They felt he deserved what he gets.
Above all, those of us who took it from the prism of a ravaging age long war of hegemony and domination by the cyclical Nigerian elites, saw T Y Danjuma’s outburst and premonitions as a fall out of a lost ‘feudal battle’ between a domineering fragment of the elites and her victims.
Each political dispensation in Nigeria, throws up its own fragment of Elites. While some are largely recycled, others are stooges of the old scions who are too physically weak to participate yet too wise to be represented by proxy in the scheme of things.
They are one solid indivisible pack when the going is good: they keep mum and mute when there’s food in their mouth. But they suddenly turn villains, outspoken, revolutionary and patriotic when the music turns into a war song. This is why, like TY Danjuma just did, they threatened to spill the beans to curry Favour from the emasculated citizenry while securing a basis for a possible negotiation from the predatory fragment of the ruling elite.
In Africa, Elders do not say what they are not ready to unveil: they either keep mum till the grave or spill it and be damned. We must all beg the ebullient soldier to say what he could have love to say. Perhaps, he might just say something a little more different from what we know. He was too involved to tell us a lie. TY, please speak out.
*Austen Akhagbeme is Columnist with Blank NEWS Online
