POLITICAL WITCHCRAFT: WHEN WILL THE MADNESS END? The Frankensteins monsters of politics have, once again, been summoned to punitive action and unleashed with a familiarly vengeful appetite, and the newest victim of their vexation is rendered bruised, battered and bloodied, in a manner of speaking. Like many - such as Chibuike Amaechi - who have sampled the vomit-inducing taste of Aso Rocks raw and reactive repertoire, Murtala Nyako is the latest unwilling guest at the devils table. Typically, the experience is both grotesque and excruciating for him. Nyakos evidently dishonest impeachment from office as governor of Adamawa State smells of the noxious odour of poison gas fouling the air in a familiar emission of dense vapor. You can almost puncture the facade of genuine intent just by pondering it. Anyone with half a brain should be dubious about it. It is by no means surprising, however, that, with the craftiness of an artful dodger, Aso Rock successfully recruited the complicit help of Adamawas legislature to achieve its diabolical purpose. The pervasive and endemic individual and collective irresponsibility that defines politics offers a ready reservoir of undignified characters willing to be used for dishonest pursuit at the splash of cash. Whole state assemblies are, like toddlers hoodwinked by the lure of the prospect of candy and goody-goody, easily malleable to malevolent inducement by a presidency willing to squander the public treasury on trivialities and nonsense. It is nonsense to impeach a governor whose real offense - far from a righteous indignation over the wholesale embezzlement of public treasuries that is the common denominator of leadership in Nigeria - is his decampment from the PDP to the equally undignified All Progressives Alliance. Now, with sanctimonious expediency, Aso Rock is drumming the drums of treason to sound the death knell for Nyako, whose other offense was his refusal to cooperate in the matter of Aso Rock vs Boko Haram. He is, thus, the sacrificial lamb for the current federal governments failure to defeat one of its recalcitrant nemeses. But the convenient invocation of treason is ludicrous because merely disagreeing with the president, or refusing to be enslaved to his imperious dictates, is a human rights question, not a felonious one. Unless he has become a deity unto himself, the president is by no means entitled to unquestioning loyalty or leadership would be predicated on the arbitrary convenience of an uncontrollable potentate. We are, therefore, witnessing the gradual but steady transformation of the presidency, and the transfiguration of a president, into an instrument of convenient indulgence. In this day and age of political witchcraft, the nocturnal wings of Goodluck Jonathan never stop flapping. Vengeance is natural and native to him, and vindictive politics is his favorite sport. His capacity to requite offences against him is limitless, ruthless and remorseless. That scorching ability to bite back and rip off a wad of flesh from those audacious enough to cross him - and cross his party, the People’s Democratic Party - is supplemented and energized by the imperious presidential authority he wields today. Jonathan understands presidential power with a distorted interpretation of its benefits both to himself and to the publics good. In his screwed mindset, anything he chooses to do with the power in his hands - such as driving descent into oblivion - is necessary, and necessarily, for the publics good. So, with the equally malicious and intemperately malevolent PDP in devious alliance, Jonathan uses his privilege of power with the cold-heartedness of a clandestine serpent. And he uses it with unprecedented expertise, against which even Ibrahim Babangida, perversely famed for his surreptitious political manipulations, could not have competed. Because of Jonathans masterly combination of political witchcraft and the PDPs gluttonous appetite for endless, unchallenged dominance in politics, politics has acquired the theatrical infamy of comic relief. The dignity of politics is being surreptitiously and systematically squashed under the punitively vindictive breath of an arrogant presidency with no modicum of self-restraint or self-control. Its a strain of madness that asks even its own question: when will this madness end?
Posted on: Wed, 16 Jul 2014 11:47:05 +0000
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