PA has made a bold case for the voters to cast their ballot with care in the February 2015 elections. Does anyone know why Buhari will not be beholden to the so-called northern elders? The northern elders know he has little choice but to be which is why the APC's fight is their (elders') fight.
oa
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2014 7:00 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Pius Adesanmi - Goodluck to Northern elders!
"The surest way to get Goodluck Jonathan re-elected is for anybody to bark orders at Nigerians under the banner of "northern elders". For me, Goodluck Jonathan is a complete failure, a tragic nightmare that Nigeria will hopefully start to recover from when we send him back to Otuoke in 2015. That decision, however, collectively belongs to the Nigerian people. Goodluck Jonathan is not going to be fired on the say-so of some arrogant and self-serving northern elders. In fact, the unwelcome voice of these so-called northern elders could make folks who are unsympathetic to Jonathan cast protest votes for him.
I have said it before and it bears repeating: those who deployed nearly forty years of visionlessness and unsurpassable greed to bring Nigeria to her current comatose condition should not be talking when we are talking Nigeria. If they must talk, they must come to national conversations with the humility of wet chicks, mindful of the fact that their colossal failure in decades of stranglehold on the centre is the reason why we are an embarrassment to Africa and the black world today. Besides, if all you've got to show for your decades of chokehold on power at the centre are Ibrahim Babangida's hilltop mansion in Minna, Ali Modu Sheriff's private jets in Maiduguri, and avoidable cases of polio all over the place, it is the height of schizophrenia for you to jump up, beat your chest, and scream that power must return to you. The cheek of it!"
"So, if you push Goodluck Jonathan out in 2015 because you successfully made Nigeria ungovernable, you are just going to move into Aso Rock and resume feeding that villa from the creeks and we all live happily ever after? The militants in the creeks are just going to let that happen? Let me remind you that the enemies you are making today with your irredeemable arrogance have their own ways of making Nigeria ungovernable if and when your own time comes in 2015. Unlike you, they don't have to bomb their own people to make a political point. Dokubo Asari and Government Tompolo have a more effective way of bringing you to your knees in a mono-revenue national economy. If you are already dreaming of new and renewed oil blocs, if you are already salivating over gas licences, and sundry allocations after 2015, a rude awakening awaits you.
To make matters worse for you, you never thought that the day would come in Nigeria when the master-servant paradigm would be severely undermined and rendered untenable. You focused your greed entirely on that one feeding bottle in the creeks. You impoverished the North and pauperized Nigeria. You come from a region that could supply the whole of Africa and a significant part of the rest of the world with tomato, onions, cattle, etc. This region by now should be boasting of mega-agro and agro-allied industries developed around tomato and onions. There are orange billionaires in Florida. They grow only oranges. There are potato billionaires in Canada. There are lettuce billionaires. In British Columbia where I did my Ph.D, there are salmon billionaires. Where are the North's tomato billionaires?
Where are the North's onion billionaires? No, not one. All your billionaires are rent collectors from oil and other offshoots of oil. Instead of thinking hard and critically about these issues, Usman Bugaje is still talking rubbish about how the oil belongs to all of us. Shame on greedy elders who cannot think of their people and for their people.
Here is an advice: if you do get back your Aso Rock in 2015, you better start thinking of how to feed that Villa with the proceeds of tomato and onions. It is doable if only you have vision and you apply yourselves to a mega agro-industrial revolution for the region. There are provinces in Canada that live only on the mega production of lettuce, cabbage, and cucumber. They don't rely on Ottawa for anything. And the strategic advantage is yours. Oil is finite. Humanity is accelerating toward other sources of energy. A post-oil world is in the horizon and when that posit-oil moment arrives, we shall be able to tell Dokubo Asari and Tompolo: e nor finish? However, there will not be any talk of a post-tomato or post-onion human civilization any time soon.
If you, northern elders, fail to see these things; if your greed and ambition do not go beyond the envisioning of an Aso Rock that you are going to regain in 2015 and feed with the same old feeding bottle from Dokubo Asari's backyard, Goodluck to you!"
- Pius Adesanmi
http://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/160063-goodluck-northern-elders-pius-adesanmi.html
- Ikhide
Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com
Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide
Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide
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