-Blank NEWS Online (NIGERIA) –By Austen AKHAGBEME:

THE rise of discontent and dissatisfaction as a result of crass carelessness, clumsiness and cluelessness on the part of our leaders to finding a solution to our Security challenges is taking a deeper step towards the precipice.

Age long ethnic thoughts and ideas, hitherto jettisoned (both real and imagined, genuine or selfish) are being dusted and projected with a reckless abandon. Everyone wants to take a supposed favorable chunk of the embattled territory, of what seems to appeal to their sense of ethnic nationalism and nationhood, where peace, justice and security can be guaranteed.

There’s no denying the fact that Nigeria has become an unanswered puzzle, riddled with knotty contradictions that often helps to confuse the more, her self imposed confusion.

These tensions, coupled with forlorn hope for a possible solution in a shortest possible time has given rise to bottled anger, ethnic distrust and mutual suspicion which culminates into separatism and emancipation cry that we hear today.

The inalienable right to self determination is flagrantly being brandished on our faces at the slightest provocation by ethnocentric jingoists and ethnic ” freedom fighters”. How did we get here?

The political elites, who plays on our gullible intelligence, using religion and ethnicism as canon folders, are unperturbed as they go about their evil permutations and politicking for power in preparation for 2023.

Is there anything they know that the agitators for secession do not understand? Why are the political elites so comfortable with their business in the face of mounted ethnic determinism and discontent all over the Nigerian political space?

As someone rightly said, could these politicians know and have come to realise that Separatists agitation in Nigeria are more often than not, hollow, noisy and just like the tale told by an idiot, full of fury but no substance? If not, why would they be too sure that the enclave they so much desire to govern will still be there and intact against the morbid desires of the daredevil separatists and their collaborators?

These two sets of Nigerians have no doubt, put the rest of us in a not too admirably ambivalent position; those who wants to go their separate ways and those who wants to maintain the status quo so as to cleverly negotiate their turn for Presidency in the next elections, that is.

It is time to stop the anger and give peace a chance to a much more mutually beneficial alternative like true federalism as we were promised from the beginning. Those who promised us true federalism must be bold enough to own up to their inefficiency and make amends swiftly and quickly to stem the tide and the drift to lawlessness and anarchy.

• Austen AKHAGBEME is a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online