–Blank NEWS Online (NIGERIA) –By Austen AKHAGBEME:
One of the major challenges of the Nigerian state, especially in a supposedly majoritarian rule such as ours, is the gross insensitivity of our elites to the real issue plaguing the nation.
The mismanagement of our robust diversity by these self-same elites and the many wars for supremacy amongst themselves have brought the nation to its knees over time. Yet even in the face of insecurity and existential threat, the Nigerian elite still carries on with insane politics of rotational presidency and its accompanying tributaries of distractions, hate, tribalism, unhealthy geopolitical alignments and realignments et cetera.
While the power elites in the north are quietly rooting for power retention, their southern counterparts are fighting for power rotation; all amid a damning and seemingly insurmountable security challenge hovering over the nation. How did we get here?
It is gradually becoming more obvious by the day who our collective enemy is in this country. Our enemies are those who do not care about our future but their ambition; those who do not care about our stomachs but about lining up their pockets to the brim with our collective patrimony to secure their future and that of their loved ones.
Why would anyone be discussing the politics of rotational or no rotational presidency in a nation where people do not sleep with their two eyes closed? Why would any sane person be more interested in governing a nation than keeping her citizens safe and secure?
Who will help us tell these desperate politicians that Nigeria is not just an empty geographical space but a real people bamboozled daily by international and local market forces, threatened by daredevil kidnappers and killer herdsmen, incessantly being attacked by terrorists and expressly being rejected by the leviathan itself?
How has the Presidency benefitted the average man in the streets of northern Nigeria in these many years of northern occupation of the highest seat in the land? How has a Southern presidency impacted the Niger Delta East-West Road, the several Eastern villages cut off from civilization by gully erosion or added a 4th or 5th mainland bridge to alleviate the traffic situation in Nigeria’s commercial capital of Lagos?
So, let the noise coming from the coalition forces fighting for the retention of power in the North and their Southern counterparts be ignored while we focus our attention on the serious insecurity challenges that are snowballing into ethnic agitations and also the dwindling purchasing power of the average Nigerian.
- Austen AKHAGBEME is a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online
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