Dear Baba Kadiri,
I should hope that Cornelius Ignoramus is not trying to be profound or abstruse again or going in search of any holy grail, fishing in the muddy waters of the Naija political bureau...
I read with some trepidation Anthony Chidi Opara's premonition, his doomsday prophecy : "Democracy may die today in Nigeria!" followed by Professor Adeshina Afolayan's philosophically practical rejoinder ; "Was democracy ever born in Nigeria in the first place? There is no death for something that didn't even taste life.", and you Baba Kadiri retroactively confirming by post mortem, although you don't give an exact date when you authoritatively declare:
"Democracy died the day those who were elected on the platform of a political party crossed to another party and retained seats which the electorates granted to the party from which they defected" ( And the rest , as they say, is history)
There have been other improbable and absurd propositions such as the regressus ad infinitum that proposes "God is dead" or postulates "The end of history", neither postulate needing a poetic license to escape verification since these statements can be falsified by the converse God is not dead, history does not end , just as some of the onward Christian soldiers conclude their forward-looking prayers with "World without end, Amen". The latter is not on a different plain of reality from/ than Auden's "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone". In Ahoada in Nigeria I often listened to Peter Tosh's Mystic Man but winced every time it got to "The day the dollar die" just thinking of the US and the World economy and that our ass would be all grass if that were to happen and so I hope and pray that we will never see such a day...
We cannot afford to be too dogmatic or too literalist when speaking about the birth or even the putative death of democracy( crazy-demo) in Nigeria, even if there are many of the erudite thinking along the same line in relation to the past. So, I was and am pleasantly surprised, by the prologue to Simon Schama's
The American Future: A History From The Founding Fathers To Barack Obama
which begins with these disputable words :
"I can tell you exactly, give or take a minute or two, when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there : 7:15 p.m. Central Time, 3 January 2008, Precinct 53, Theodore Roosevelt High. I know this as I was regularly checking my watch, and bedsides you couldn't miss the schoolroom clock, its old white face the object of teenage hatred and longing. I suppose a visitor from another world - London , say – might have thought there was not all that much going on in the west Des Moines that evening..."
By the way Baba Kadiri you are once again in my good books, with your helping hand outstretched, confirming that irrespective of tribe, "a friend in need is a friend indeed." And so let us all wish this : Long live democracy! ( Crazy demo)
With so much talk about death and dying we could listen here :
Rabbi Friedman - The Soul and the Afterlife: Where Do We Go From Here?
On Wednesday, 8 August 2018 13:32:24 UTC+2, ogunlakaiye wrote:
Thank you Chidi Anthony Opara, the problem is that there has never been democracy in Nigeria since English was imposed on Nigerians as the language of governance and over ninety per cent of Nigerians are denied the opportunity of learning and understanding English language. However, Aminu Tambuwal's political harlotry in 2014 was Constitutionally challenged in the Court but the corrupt Nigerian judiciary failed to adjudicate on the case and allowed it to die after the lifespan of the House on which Tambuwal presided had expired.
S. Kadiri
Från: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com > för Chidi Anthony Opara, FIIM <chidi...@gmail.com>
Skickat: den 8 augusti 2018 08:20
Till: USA Africa Dialogue Series
Ämne: SV: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Today's QuoteWell, Salimonu Kadiri, I think that we should go a little bit backwards and start from the day Speaker Tambuwal left PDP(the platform on which he became member of Parliament and speaker) and joined APC and still retained his positions.
CAO.
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