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The Unsportsmanlike Losers
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Northern Nigeria needs time to grow and understand the rules of constitutional democracy. The wrongly pampered addiction to violence will be outgrown but the process may be bloody and the result uncertain. Thank goodness they helped us create Niger Delta militancy to set southerners against southerners when a southerner was President. Now MEND is watching and this potent weapon that they placed in our hands had been criminal and haunting us in the south much to the delight of the Northern mafia.

 

On April 09th 2011, Nigerians fired the first warning shots. They fired it with the force of the ballot papers in the privacy of the polling booths. They sent a message and there was no mistaking it. They were going to be taken for a ride no more.
 

They elected the legislative arm of the Federal Government and hid unmistakable messages behind their choice. They told the nation that the space for geographical or ethnic divisiveness was to be counted out of our political reality. Objective observation could not help but look beyond the invisible victors that were not expressed in the shape of political parties. Objective observation in scientific sophistication does not see a PDP. It does not see an ACN nor does it see any CPC. Objective observation was duty-bound to see the geographical spread of the votes, with which the dominant group was elevated into the legislative houses.

Votes from the Northern region even in the home base of a prominent presidential candidate sent the clearest signal that ethnic divide or religious leaning was to be given no space in the determination of the country’s destiny. From the East and from the West, there was a clear signal of things to come in popular choice and the course to sail through in the few years ahead.

Observers came from far and wide. Organized indigenous groups formed a pressure group to exert the maximum possible pressure on potential cheaters and celebrated fraudsters. Observer groups came from home. They also came from abroad. When in 2007, these two groups were united in condemnation of that flawed process, there was no room for doubts in the country at large. There was consensus. On April 09th 2011, these two groups converged once again in an opinion regarding the same process in a different setting. The opinion was reversed. The polls of April 09th 2011 were imperfect but largely free and fair.

The agents of discord saw these signs. In fact everyone saw it. There were 7 days of grace to return to the drawing board for those who sought to turn the table. They had options to align and re-align. They had the choice to build alliances and correct obvious mistakes to dislodge their rival counterparts.

Then news started making the round. Pressure was suddenly brought to bear on common voters who suddenly found themselves abused, derided, chastised, insulted and threatened in the most despicable manner. Their sole offence was nothing but following the dictates of their mind in choosing their political candidates. It was all happening in Northern Nigeria. A door-to-door threat campaign was reportedly launched warning voters that they would be committing a crime against Islam if they voted for the non-Muslim candidate in the presidential election on April 16th 2011.

Two days to the election on Thursday April 14th, a prominent Northern candidate theatrically broke into tears before the cameras of waiting journalists in a contrived show-weeping for the malaise of the fatherland. It did not seem to matter that he had lived with all these malaise through several decades “suffering and smiling”. Desperation could not be better defined in the choice of “anything goes” in the quest for political power by all means.

It was an advancement of the same old message. The message of desperation that reached a peak in the run-up to the final demise of former President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua! The message of desperation that sought to herald the open desire for the seizure of power by hook or by crook! Before the watchful eyes of the constitutionally elected Vice (and by legal implication: Acting) President, some Northern mafia simply ordered a regiment of soldiers into the street to collect the vegetating remains of a dying President to intimidate the Vice President. The Vice President came close to being arrested as a prelude to the declaration of a coup d’etat.

The consequences were unforeseeable. The international community would not play along. Then we did not know these backgrounders.

This desperation again in fighting tooth and nail to force power into the hands of this hitherto faceless Northern mafia – not the North as such – finally uncovered the face of the mafia men. Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, Atiku Abubakar, Adamu Ciroma, Aliyu Gusau all turned out to be the leading faces of the Northern mafia who were hitherto not known as such.

Following the inefficacy of the door-to-door voters’ intimidation, Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and Atiku Abubakar with the blessing of Adamu Ciroma suddenly became mediators in a bid to force the fusion of two opposition parties to build a formidable front against their own party. What mattered was a Northern candidate that will bring power back to the mafia.

A series of mafia-style bombings and violence did not escape the vigilant eyes of political observers. These Northern men would always feign a distant posture of course, knowing nothing of the authors of the heinous crime. It was always from sources unknown.

All efforts having failed, the weeping scenario had to be tried but the underlying message had long been echoed way in advance of any presidential election. They said making peaceful change impossible renders violent change inevitable. This message was condemned by all reasonable Nigerians but defended by the owners of power and Nigeria from the Northern mafia brotherhood.

Now April 16th has come and gone. The observers from home and abroad have sent yet again the same message as 7 days ago. There is consensus on imperfection but freeness and fairness constituted the satisfaction and joy of the Observers.

Then the desperation again! Fighting in Bauchi, fighting in Kaduna, fighting in Kano, fighting in Gombe, in Yobe, in Niger etc. In summary, there is fighting in the North and in the North alone. There is vandalism and a mob gone wild, rampaging free in hooliganic and thuggish tribal madness fueled by religious manipulation (Though Buhari’s convoy was said to be attacked, as he condemns attack on churches; saying problem not ethnic or religious) and the misunderstanding of having a monopoly to violence. They are seeing the inevitable. The unjust, unfair and imperialism-rooted Northern oppression of Nigeria is saying its last prayers and breathing its last breath. The message in the refusal of the Northern mafia to accept the victory of the incumbent President because he is not of Northern extraction is simple.

Northern Nigeria needs time to grow and understand the rules of constitutional democracy. The wrongly pampered addiction to violence will be outgrown but the process may be bloody and the result uncertain. Thank goodness they helped us create Niger Delta militancy to set Southerners against Southerners when a Southerner was President. Now MEND is watching and this potent weapon that they placed in our hands had been criminal and haunting us in the South much to the delight of the Northern mafia.

Today, a Press Release to media establishments – also to us at the NigerianNews – signed by MEND militants has declared nothing but the intent to wade in if the incorrigible power-voracious Northerners want to have us fight fire with fire.

The lesson is simple. The ultimate goal may be a Nigeria without the North if they do not know where and when to stop and take a back seat until its time for them to take their turn again. As it stands with the present attitude however, Goodluck Jonathan will be the celebrated dunce and intellectual midget of the century if he allows power to return to the North come 2015. The present attitude displayed by the Northern mafia does not portend patriotic intentions. It nurtures the selfish goal of regional aggrandizement and cultic perpetuation. The mafia is set to die and Nigeria will be free until losers understand the element of the sporting spirit in a political process!

 

 

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