There are in Nigeria men and women who have walked with the country on some of its bumpiest roads, offering shoulders to lean on, helping hands with the banana peels that line the country`s road and raising a rebuke each time the enemies of the country sung a bit too loudly.
These men and women who have witnessed it all, embracing Nigerias nakedness, numbness and nausea in its most difficult moments have a right to be heard first and the right to first refusal to speak in Nigerias commentariat of nationhood.
These men and women, silent witnesses to the unfolding of the Nigerian drama and melodrama in the theatre of national trauma and tragedy have today earned themselves the right to hold the hands of an ailing country as it gasps for air on its sick bed. This right inheres in these men not by appointment but as one of the blessings of a bond forged in the fire of adversity.
Such men also deserve the right to be consulted first on issues that strike at the heart of Nigeria. Because they know too much to know not to leave Nigeria in knots, there is a level to the conversation on Nigeria where they live and to which the lounge of lizards which litter the corridors of power cannot ascend to no matter how skilled they are as climbers or how well they try.
The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, is one of the men who has seen Nigeria in her pangs as well as in pulchritude. Between 1999 and 2001 he served as a member of the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission of Nigeria set up the government of Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo and also known as the Oputa panel. In 2005, he served as the Secretary of the National Political Reform Conference (2005) and from 2005 onwards as the chairman of the Ogoni-Shell Reconciliation. Between 2007 and 2009 he worked in the committee for electoral reform set up by the Nigerian government.
The celebrated priest is one of the most authentic voices on the Nigerian predicament. To hear him speak is to hear an authentic account of that which ails the Giant of Africa, warts and all. Whenever he speaks about Nigeria, it is from a place of reason and reflection, with the coruscating clarity of his words always giving him away as both an intellectual and moral giant.
In 2015, frothing at the mouth from sixteen years of misrule by the People`s Democratic Party and its congregation of crocodiles, Nigerians stood at the ballot box to rescue the country from the ruthless colony of weasels that had taken over the corridors of power. In historic votes which stunned hubris and hoisted Nigeria onto the hills of history, the Peoples Democratic Party was resoundingly rejected at the polls as for the first time in the history of the country, Nigerians shunned the advances of an incumbent president to pitch their tents with an opposition candidate. That opposition candidate was Mr. Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress.
His forceful promises had easily bought over a tired country whose citizens were horrified by the degree of nonchalance with which their mandate was being treated in the corridors of power. Nigerian minds were made up when President Muhammadu Buhari pledged to make fighting corruption, Nigeria`s cankerworm of great notoriety, one of the planks of his administration.
However, it is written in the stars of the affairs of men that sometimes reality can differ so much from reason as to attract rueful recriminations. This has been the story of Nigerians with a presidency and a president that have since cascaded into a choir choir of charlatans and clowns whose pugnacity makes its members so pointless and its every sound so jarring.
Rev Matthew Hassan Kukah has a gift of measuring time and words, and whenever he chooses, or is led to choose, the clergyman picks his spot perfectly, and unerringly spears a reactionary presidency into stunned reaction.
This stunned reaction such as the one that has followed Rev. Kukah`s Easter Sunday message of April 23,2022, has always come from either Mr. Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser, Media and Publicity to the President or from Mr. Garba Shehu the Senior Special Assistant Media and Publicity to the President.
In a do-nothing administration, the positions of Messrs. Adesina and Mr. Shehu, two of Nigeria`s most reputable journalists, are not exactly enviable as they have all but shed whatever little credibility, they had in seven years of defending an indefensible administration.
If Nigeria is where it is today, it is because many of those who should speak up have instead chosen to recoil into the shell of silence. The more crooked have made themselves into emergency defenders of a government that appears irredeemably lost with the passing of each day. These people take up the cudgels against whoever raises concerns about the direction the country is heading and are quick to take potshots at whoever it is that draws their ire.
How Nigerians wish that the presidential spokesmen usually so eager to defend the indefensible will take Bishop Kukah up on his offer of a debate so that one of Nigeria`s foremost orators will use the opportunity to cut them and their bedecked illusions to ribbons.
May that day speedily come when only reason and reflection will rule the roost in Nigeria.
Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com.
