OPINION+ CARDINAL OKOGIE SPOKE THE TRUTH ON JONATHAN By Wumi Akintide How I wish most of our Nigerian men of God are like Cardinal Okogie! That man is retired as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Lagos but he is far from tired. He is as tough as a nail and he does not suffer fools gladly unlike many of his peers whose policy is “see no evil and hear no evil” All they want to do is be on the right side of the power brokers of the Nigerian state while totally closing their eyes on their iniquities and shortcomings. BY WUMI AKINTIDESEP 30, 2014 How I wish most of our Nigerian men of God are like Cardinal Okogie! That man is retired as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Lagos but he is far from tired. He is as tough as a nail and he does not suffer fools gladly unlike many of his peers whose policy is “see no evil and hear no evil” All they want to do is be on the right side of the power brokers of the Nigerian state while totally closing their eyes on their iniquities and shortcomings. I call most of them collaborators and enablers of evil masquerading as men of God.Dr. Wumi AkintideDr. Wumi Akintide I said it before and I would repeat with emphasis what Cardinal Okogie is right to say that President Jonathan does not deserve to be re-elected in 2015. He is damn lucky to have been hand-picked by Obasanjo to run on the same ticket with Umaru Yar Adua. His place in history would have been better secured and preserved had he taken a script from Lyndon B. Johnson when he said he would not accept if nominated and would not serve if elected. If he had come to the presidency with that mindset, he would have been less handicapped to clean up Nigeria and not become part of the problem. I belong to the Redeem Christian Church of God in New York. Many of us in that Church take every word coming out of the mouth of Daddy G.O as a pronouncement from God. I believe that if Pastor Adeboye had told Mr. President he could never be a transformational President for as long as he continues to fuel corruption in Nigeria the man would have made some adjustments going forward. How do I know that? I know it because the man believes Adeboye is as powerful and as close to God like many of us think he is. I personally agonize over the fact that President Jonathan, a frequent visitor to the City of Faith and the Holy Ghost Redemption Camp could, in the fullness of time taint the man of God’s credibility thru his association with the powerful cleric. Cardinal Okogie and I have a meeting of minds on the President. Our opinions of the President are based on the President’s score card. Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Later Rains Church once expressed the same views based on some of the activities of the President. Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie who does not speak in tongues like some of his colleagues pretty much drew the same conclusion this week when he told his interviewer that the President does not deserve to be re-elected. He did not say that God told him so as Bishop Olabayo of Taborah or some of his colleagues speaking in tongues would have said. I have never heard Pope Francis or any Pope before him speak in tongue while delivering a homily. I believe some of our evangelical pastors and preachers do it just to create an aura of mystique and power. I have gone to do some research on what they speak out of curiosity. None of the tongues they speak correspond to any language spoken in any part of the world as they claim. It is neither Latin nor Greek .It is neither Hebrew nor Arabic nor Swahili. What they speak is neither French nor Dutch or German and if you insist they write it down, none of them can do it or repeat it in the same sequence. Many of them would have published books in tongues if that were possible. It is just a creation of their imagination to dazzle their audience. It can be learnt, rehearsed and dramatized just like some damn good Nigerian Nollywood actors like Pastor Ajidara and Pastor Dele Odule have done with precision and accuracy. I don’t care about how fluently Pastor Oritsejeafor is speaks in tongue, he is one of big enablers of corruption in Nigeria and he is a disgrace to Christianity. He has been using his platform and bully pulpit as President of the Christian Association of Nigeria to collude with President Jonathan to make a mockery of President Jonathan’s war against Corruption in Nigeria. Any pastor who will do what Pastor Ositsejeafor has done can hardly be a man of God as far as I am concerned. In more civilized country, President Jonathan would have stepped down even without being told by anybody. Scottish Leader Mr. Salmond lost his “yes” vote in the recently concluded Scottish Referendum 45% to 55%. The next day, he announced his resignation as first Minister and leader of the separatist movement in Scotland. There is no such thing in Nigeria. If Boko Haram succeeded in capturing half of the whole country today, President Jonathan would tell you the year 2015 is a year of Destiny for him and his party. The PDP has outlived their usefulness. It is time for the opposition to step up to the plate. It does not have to be Buhari per se but he is about the most credible candidate to wrestle Corruption to the ground if Nigeria is a serious country. I cannot see Atiku Abubakar performing any better than Obasanjo or Jonathan. Atiku is a former Director of the oldest Laboratory of Corruption in Nigeria. That the man keeps doing a hop, step and jump from the SDP to PDP and from PDP to ACN and then again from ACN back to the PDP and now to ACN makes him a rolling stone in my book who will cross carpet to the PDP again tomorrow if he does not win. The ACN can forget 2015, if they ever run a Muslim/Muslim ticket or nominate a candidate like Atiku. In Buhari you have a rock-solid candidate who can be trusted to pursue corrupt Nigerians to the gates of hell. Many of them even in his party are going to gang up against and stop him. What goes around comes around. I am glad a northern leader now finds himself in the same shoes with Awolowo, the best President Nigeria never had who would have laid a solid foundation for Nigeria with his leadership and vision but the Hausa/Fulani and the igbos would not let him. Buhari can now feel the pains Awolowo has had to endure. If he loses again to Jonathan as predictable, he would probably end up in frustration like Awo. That has always been the predicament of Nigeria. Nigeria as a rule, is always putting the cart before the horse and repeating the same mistake time and again but expecting a different result. The country is definitely insane. The country always settles for the weakest link in our chain of power forgetting that a chain is as strong as its weakest link. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Tafawa Balewa were all in line to become the first Prime Minister of Nigeria at a point in our history. Who got the nod? It was Tafawa Balewa the least educated of the three founding fathers. Brigadier Ogundipe should have succeeded Aguiyi Ironsi. Guess who got the nod again. It was Yakubu Gowon, a very junior officer with no experience. After Murtala Mohammed was assassinated, the northerners were going to find another less experienced officer, Shehu Yar Adua to succeed Murtala because the Fulanis thought they were born to rule. It took quite some arm-twisting to get the northern power brokers to agree to let Obasanjo take over with Yar Adua as his junior, more powerful northerner as number 2. In 1979 3 candidates were in line again to take over from Olusegun Obasanjo. Guess who got the nod again? It was Shehu Shagari whose highest ambition was to be a Senator. He was catapulted to presidency while Azikiwe and Awolowo were by-passed in the name of compromise. There were far better candidates that Obasanjo could have handed over to in 2003 after losing to Oluyemi Falae in the whole of the Southwest while beating him flat in the rest of the country. I can tell you that Olu Falae was far smarter than Obasanjo in education and intellectual power. Obasanjo would not even come out to debate Falae because he knew he would have been crushed. Banbangida should normally have handed over to M.K.O Abiola, the actual winner of the June 12 election. Since Babangida could not impose Alhaji Tofa, the weaker candidate, he chose to annul the election adjudged to be the best in the history of Nigeria. Abdulsalam Abubakar could not find a more qualified soldier or civilian to hand over to in 1999, so he chose to hand over to Obasanjo one more time too many. In 2007, Obasanjo chose to hand over to a terminally-ill Musa Yar Adua who died in office thereby creating a chance for Goodluck Jonathan with little or no experience at all to, all of a sudden, become President by default. Yakubu Gowon became Head of State, as I said before, at age 32 and he reigned for 9 years before it occurred to him to return back to school to acquire more education and a Ph.D.It has now become the standard practice for most of our top Generals and military officers to return to the University to catch up on their education. The policy may have somehow hastened the falling standard of education in most of our Universities as lecturers and professors who have to teach those Generals and Admirals have to bend over backward to please some of their high visibility students. They sometimes have to lower the educational standard to accommodate them in the hope of receiving some gratification from those Generals after they graduate and go back to their duty posts in the top echelon of the Military or the Public Service as the case may be. My good friend, late Rear Admiral Okhai Mike Akhigbe was one of such high flying officers to take advantage of that practice to study Marine Law before retirement from the Navy. There were hundreds like him in the Army, Navy and Air Force who took the same route. When the northerners used to dominate the Military the Public Service and the ruling class in Nigeria, Nigerians used to complain about northern domination. Today we have the first minority President from the South/South zone of Nigeria. If you go to Aso Rock today, you will see clear evidence the Ijaws have taken over Nigeria. You can tell from their bowler hats and their barbariga-looking dresses. President Jonathan would appear to identify more with the Igbos by offering them very lucrative positions in his Government. Many Igbos support him today because they think he has been good to them. Jonathan has offered them most of the more lucrative Ministries like Petroleum, Finance and Foreign Affairs. He promoted Ihejerika an Igbo General as Head of the Nigerian Army. That was something that has eluded the Igbos since the Biafra War. I am not criticizing the President for favoring his own people or showing some favoritism to many Igbos in his cabinet after all the man’s middle name is “Azikiwe”. I will probably do the same if I found myself in his shoes. All I am saying is that the President must be careful not to overdo it to a point that it would becomes a problem in a federal system where he needs to maintain some delicate balance and sensitivity in the allocation of big jobs. I guessed the President wisely exercised that discretion when he chose to praise or eulogize the black scorpion as a national hero when he died about 2 weeks ago at the age of 78 despite the objections of a few Igbo men and women in his cabinet. It was the right thing to do and I urge the President to go a step further to have Adekunle’s benefits paid to his survivors. To be a truly transformational President, Mr. Jonathan has to prove to us he has what it takes to do that. That is what I am talking about. The new Nigeria we are all praying for cannot occur until we have a President who is willing to take the bull by the horn and to do a few things differently. Something is happening right now in Taraba State that the President as leader of the PDP ought to pay some attention to. Substantive governor Danbaba Suntai who survived a plane crash in Nigeria and was rushed overseas for medical treatment has since returned to the country. He was finally discharged home and a cabal in his state government is now putting pressure on his acting Governor to hand-over back to him even though they knew the man has not fully recovered to be able to effectively discharge his job as Governor.They just wanted him to resume duties as Governor regardless of his state of health. Rather than relying on the opinions of the doctors that treated him abroad,Taraba state wanted to set up a new medical panel to determine if the Governor is well enough to resume work. The way the case is being handled leaves much to be desired. Here was a Governor still suffering from early Dementia, a fall out from his plane crash. He does not remember things and he frequently suffers from serious memory lapses and disorientation. How could such a man resume his routine duties as Governor? But the PDP wants him back on that seat in at the Government House by force and by fire. That is only possible in a corrupt country like Nigeria. They are going to make the man sign his own death warrant for all we know. President Jonathan should stop the conspiracy before it becomes another major embarrassment for his Government and party. I would like to end end this article with the last suggestion I believed would have helped to end the general distrust between the three dominant tribes in Nigeria, If not the rest of Nigeria. Nigerians learning the three major languages of Hausa Yoruba and Igbo from the Secondary School would have gone a long way to help unite the country. . More than 40 years ago Radio Nigeria used to air a program known as “WA-SO-BIA” crafted from three words in Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo which means the same thing in the 3 languages. “Wa” in Yoruba language simply means “come here” “So” in Hausa means the same thing. “Bia” in Igbo also means precisely the same thing. The program was aired to emphasize the importance of crafting an educational policy at the federal level that should have mandated the need for all of our Secondary Schools and tertiary institutions to include Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo in their curriculum like is done in Canada where Canadian citizens who want to join the federal public service in Canada must pass a competency test in both French and English language to apply. That is something a good President should have done a long time ago. The move should have gone a long way to foster a better understanding between the three dominant tribes of Nigeria. Jonathan cannot be a transformational president if he cannot leave a legacy of that magnitude. If all he can talk about is that he has built a second Niger Bridge and built a few Federal roads and rail road while the nation’s security is as compromised as it is today, and while Corruption has totally ruined the country, I believe the President is no better than some of the nation’s good Governors like Raji Fashola, Oshiomhole, Olusegun Mimiko, Rauf Aregbesola, Amosun, Governor Akpabio and Governor Kwankwanso of Kano to mention a few. A real transformational President would be able to point to great accomplishments like Obafemi Awolowo has done in the old Western Region. If President Jonathan can pave the way for a hoodlum like Ayo Fayose to be the flag bearer of his party at Ekiti and Iyiola Omisore at Osun, he has dented his own image as President. I believe the man should just focus on conducting a free and fair election in 2015 that can be his lasting legacy. The President will have more credibility if he is not a candidate in that election. The best thing he has done as President is finding Professor Jega who has improved on the conduct of free and fair elections in Nigeria by some of the steps he has taken so far. The President must ensure that Jega does not tarnish his good image by going ahead with his creation of 3000 additional polling stations in the North for the reasons he has stated. It was a step in the wrong direction for Professor Jega and his comrades at INEC. Need I say more? I rest my case. WUMI AKINTIDE ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- +The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial policy of Community Of Interest Nigeria ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 02:44:24 +0000
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