LET THE PEOPLE PROTEST

For clarity sake, those who condemn the attack on Ekweremadu are not wrong. Those who call the attack a necessary ingredient upon which democracy thrives on are equally not wrong.

What is wrong is imposing that which you think is right on another person. We all have our different views on national development, ala a fraudulent one as currently being practiced in Nigeria.

Those who attacked Ekweremadu hinged their grievances on the insecurity currently bedeviling Nigeria and nothing else. If you are not Igbo, get an Igbo to interpret that video for you. What you should not tell people is how they should react when pushed to the wall. Igbo people place much respect on lives with the adage that says Ndu bụ Aku. One life lost touches, everyone.

That the Yoruba, Hausa and Ijaw people are not attacking their political leaders over the decay in the national polity should not make the Igbo blind towards the malfeasance of their representatives. Mind you, they did not attack Tinubu or Rotimi Amaechi but Ike Ekweremadu.

While the National Assembly has a budget of over 100 billion, the Nigerian Police with about 300k officers does not have a budget of up to 30 billion. Yet the Ekweremadu and his friends at the Senate will take delivery of hundreds of vehicles that cost 50 million each. This is at a time that over 20 million Nigerians are out of jobs. He has been taking these cars since 1999. What changed? The biggest structure put up by the Senator in his constituency is some church he built in his village.

A few weeks ago, the Senator representing me at the Senate, Chukwuka Utazi was in the news for cornering his constituency projects but was forced to release them after ICPC got involved in the matter. If you lead the Senators representing Enugu at the Upper Chambers by hand to point to their constituency projects, you will shockingly not find anything but these things are budgeted for year in, year out.

The biggest challenge to a Nigerian politician is when you bar him from visiting all those western countries that they go to relax after treating you like condemned animals in Nigeria. Let him stay in Nigeria with his children and enjoy the dividends of democracy he has been giving you. They know that they are not doing anything. We know that they are only pretending to be working.

I don’t see Trump coming to Nigeria to relax. I have never heard that Americans are queueing up at the Nigerian embassy in the US to come and live in Nigeria. But Nigerians are lining up everywhere and getting deported from Ghana.

The European countries that we run to for safety and from which we tell people how to react when faced with hardship as perpetrated by bad politics do not sit at home to watch their politicians misbehave. In Hong Kong, it is ongoing. The yellow vest protests in France forced Macron to make some concessions.

You do not tell people how to protest.

In There Was A Country, The legendary Chinua Achebe said that he rejected the national awards conferred on him by the Obasanjo government as a protest for what was going on in his home state of Anambra.

When Jonathan wanted to confer the same award on him, he rejected it saying that some of the issues he pointed out in his initial rejection letter had not been addressed.

Let the people protest.