Tambuwal: The education of a young and emerging statesman

The Turf Game (Jimanze Ego-Alowes, alowesjimanze@yahoo.com) 08033009539
Thursday, September 29, 2011

I had written this piece some while ago and was plotting to mail it to the new speaker before I remembered what my guru, Sri Gupta, once told me. Jimanz as he fondly called me, avoid the rich and the powerful and never let them infest you with their greatness. In this great world the rich and the powerful are an infestation and the cause of much misfortune for the poor and the many. The furtherer away one is from the powerful and the rich the safer and more prosperous one is. This is the secret upon which the American civilization is built. That all men are created equal and that truly there are no kings, or in more modern speak, there are no human deities. That is, that power and or wealth is never its own sanctification. Ahiazuwa. So dear reader this is addressed especially to you and the speaker is absentmindedly being copied. Please read on:

I have always admired Aminu Waziri Tambuwal as my idea of a politician for the future. Of course like many Nigerians I never heard of him till he triumphantly emerged as the Speaker of the House of Representatives and against the will of Jonathan. But when he speaks I get a feeling we have in our hands a politician. That is a man who doesn’t delude himself he is a messiah and or the good and excellent son of a corrupt and whorish mother. This alas is the family affliction of many a Nigerian leader.

He seems to my reading of his body and other languages given to a solid and bankable desire to carry the house along. And this house is Nigeria. And I am and guess the many are well pleased with him. Recently he was quoted thus: This is the time that we need to understand that our federation is indeed the only federation we have, as there is no country in Africa with the infrastructure and capacity to accommodate refugees from Nigeria arising from crisis. I urge all Nigerians to understand the various peculiarities of their neighbours with a view to respecting their diversities because we cannot be the same.

Continuing he asserted; God created Nigeria and endowed it with various peoples, tendencies, inclinations, tribes as well as beliefs so that all may live together and work towards the development of the country. 07-07-11 ThisDay. But there is one slight error of perception and or representation that we all need to comment on now and save a potential and emerging statesman from a little error with potential for big and possible terrible consequences.

Let us speak plainly. Number one, no god brought and or created us together to live as one country and or with one another. His statement with all due respect is false; that is it is a lie. Fact is that the British brought us together as one nation. May be to hit the home-run it couldn’t have been God, any god who conscripted or herded Generals Emeka Ojukwu and Jack Gowon, with a Chief Awolowo thrown in, to endure in one space called Nigeria. Perhaps, and to put it more graphically, it is the British and not god who brought IBB, OBJ and this correspondent together to endure as one country. God wouldn’t have done that. God doesn’t play dice with men but the British do. It is not god’s choice. God would not have chosen to bring men with ambitions for a 200 year war and dominance of me an Igbo na Oru and a man of peace to booth, as I desire to be, [though capable to war and defend my nation and the people who are my own people], against any 200 year war generals, together.

But that is the small bit. The danger in such a lie as this is that it could be terrible in its evolutionary manifestations. Perhaps and without intending it, the tale that god brought us together, is fascism built and or attempting to be built on faith and not even brains. The only thing near to it is the Jones town tragedy in America where men were told the same god ordered for their mass suicide. Even built on brains, which we by the way don’t have, fascism doesn’t quite work. Germany and Russia of the socialist type, all despite their abundance of geniuses came to catastrophic grief. It is the harmless lie that it is god’s purpose and or history’s mandate that one is living and or fulfilling, that gave rise to Hitler murdering six million Jews in good and even elevated conscience. And locally a Gowon emulating Hitler and egged on by Awolowo and company, murdered in cold blood via starvation one million Igbo na Oru and Murtala Mohammed buried whole communities alive. Their delusion? That a god brought us together and it is therefore their human duty to keep together by murder and or what so ever means, all what their god, cobbled together. Ahiazuwa.

Of course to those who just murdered the NYSC kids and about 800 more, their deeds are based on their assumption that god has chosen to bring us and keep us together. And this gives them the messianic conscience they are at god’s work. All and anything done for the sake of national unity is therefore in obeisance to a god and thus beyond good and evil.

If barbarians knew there is a price tag to all things I can assure we will be civilized enough to know that a country cannot and should not survive unceasing blood sacrifices. A nation is not an abattoir and God is not a butcher. One more drop and we should go our separate ways. It is this historical understanding that will ironically help save, perfect and preserve our union and not the lies that god abandoned his tight business schedule to carpenter us together. This is not just political but religious heresy and I can confirm may lead a man to hell and more importantly ruin his stay on earth. And dear speaker we still want you around here on earth and or when it happens then we all should be meeting in paradise if there be one.

And before this slips us, there is nothing disgraceful in our lowly beginnings. Israelis are and started as slaves in Egypt and never quite knew a country till about 1948. Modern India was founded and secured by British pirates and even the US was also like us a colony. And as wholly Christian as they were in their foundational days, Americans never told themselves a lie about their founding. They only stated they are and choose to be one nation under god. And now as new knowledge comes, even that god-worn thesis has been given up in America. Our advice and contribution to your further education as a young and emerging statesman is that you never tell a lie no matter how little and or seemingly harmless today. It is little lies like this that comes with mighty and pernicious consequences. Our own example are yet not over with us. And it all started harmlessly with a fairly and mentally unhinged Nzeogwu thinking himself a messiah which is in anteriority a lie and couldn’t even have been true.

Of course his singular madness and action led to the rest. And that includes the fact that at last count no less than five heads of state were even worse, mentally unhinged, also counting themselves for messiahs. Remain thus a politician and canvass for nothing else than that which is truth. Never build a state on and or with fiction and or lies. Hitler tried…and the rest is an industrial nightmare too chilly to recall.

Oftentimes men have wondered and asked, but why do we tell and retell these atrocities? Today I will give the answer. It is because we are still barbarians, running a country with a flood of human blood rather than brains. And tragically we are waiting for god and or godot to redeem us. And it is the worst tragedy to befall a nation. That is to tell lies as a replacement for historical truth and or prefer silence over reporting mass murder. We must civilize ourselves continuously and this with the truth ceaselessly told and retold. We will forgive but we will forever remember and that is the hallmark of our human and historical civilization. Anyway it’s never tiring to tell and retell the truth.

And by the way poets have been doing nothing else since Homer. Just one truth and you make a thousand home runs on it and neither Homer nor Achebe will censure you. It thus will never be number enough to remind ourselves that Hitler killed six million innocent Jews and or that Gowon and Awo starved one miillion innocent Igbo to death. And that a band of the unhinged, led by Nzeogwu and company murdered the men of timbre of other nationalities. The truth, especially if it is big, we can never tell and retell enough. And truths don’t come in sizes. There are no small truths dear Mr. Speaker.

To close, we humbly counsel all bleeding hearts and do-gooders, all nationalistic philosophers and philosopher nationalists as follows: to take out time and inquire how harmless-concepts developers, specialness and or historical inevitability claimants, like Hirata Atsutane of Japan, who merely claimed Japan was a land of the gods and their Nazi counterparts, like Professor Karl Haushofer, who helped invent the science of geopolitics led directly to the ruin of Germany and Japan. And of course that came with dire consequences for the rest of the world. It is enough that we come to early knowledge of the wholly human origin of all that is human and to resolve all disputations with recourse to none other than human reason and human compassion.

My dear and beloved Speaker, youthful brethren and compatriot, please worship your Allah in the closets of your private beliefs and leave him out of the state, its formation and or running. There is no history of peoples or imperiums anywhere, were the mania for god and or his equivalent didn’t ruin a state. Tambuwal Ronu!

via Daily Sun