Reacting to Mr. President’s Facebook Address by Okee Igboegbunam

Dear Nigerians and many of YOU who care about Nigeria as a paradox of modern history. A country with daunting human as well as material resources Nigeria is yet so prone to useless using and manipulative meanderings.

I do write this quick note in reaction to our President's latest Facebook Address. I must say that I am impressed by his avowed resilience to pursue development instead of retribution. But so were our past administrations. None had told us it was pursuing danger instead of safety or retrogression in place of development. In all, they all seemed to mean well. Only the trailing penumbra of sickening schemes proved their original intents. But are we not tired? WE MUST BE TIRING! However I urge support to the leaders once more, to help them see hope where we have reasons to see it exist and is achievable. We need not despair, WE MUST OWN OUR NOW by seeking to live the genuine dynamics of our diversities.

We have one and it is NIGERIA!

See my note to the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

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Mr. President Sir,

What just happened in the eve of our YEAR OF HOPE is unimaginable for an African giant with all her educated and enlightened people! It is a sad story to see that equal strides in the spheres of competitive development are not requited with solemn commitment for peaceful co-existence. Nigerians expect STABILITY AND PEACE IN POLITICS AND RELIGION, not death, threat and hate. 

Your above budget highlights indicates a paradigm shift. It indicates a new resolve to re-master government spending by allocating resources to the creative aspect of our national planning.

Let us put hindsight to play on the reckless attitudes of the various government agencies, where these funds are going to be purveyed. I hope and believe your new-look namely, that government wants the funds to rivet the aims that purposed the funding. There is therefore the need also to have in place a technical monitoring unit that can be accessed by the public for graphical information on project works and timeliness of operation. The need has arisen is spite of the over site function of the National Assembly. I am saying this because I observed from the past year that appropriation that was done including the re-building of my community Town Hall with large sums of money ear-marked (ref FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF NIGERIA 2009 Budget No 0220000 MINISTRY OF YOUTH DEVELOPMENT see entry No

022000020120000 "YOUTH DEVELOPMENT CENTRE, TOWN HALL UMUNYA OYI LGA." The amount allocated is 30,000,000!). To this moment Your Excellency, nothing is seen, or known to have been done at the site of the Community Hall. Should that be so?! The same story can be said of such others candidated in that appropriation.  The Planning, Research and Statistics Departments or Research and Development Units of pertaining agencies/depts, as case may be need just form this PUBLIC FORUMS -no duplications. We need to know the beetles that bit off our yams.

This has become necessary in view of the negative and non productiveness of government probes long after the bad deeds are done.

Your Excellency Sir, probe by in our past administrative panels is trail. Trail by its definition says that we'll be behind chasing -more often chasing shadows. Trail happens when the happen has happened and the probationers are therefore behind and not in front.

If it will be possible, especially in the area of CONTRACT AWARDS, let us have media assessment briefing by the executing arms before CERTIFICATES are paid. I have advocated for a published benchmark to help percent approximation of scales of work. These will create a public reassurance and make for genuine scientific appreciation of performance of the agencies. Nigeria has lagged behind in the areas of infrastructural provision that many people will want to know the culprits behind the business-as-usual parlance. We also want to know the non-tax-payers corporate contractors!

Permit me a point of the sorrowful October First, Christmas and New Year bombings. I hold it that Nigerians believe leadership to be a kind of trusteeship and that our leaders (especially those angling now to lead) ought to show capacity for living above parochial frustrations. What I see is that many of these leaders are still steel-ready to steal the national treasury bare and bait the grassroots with crumbs of their plundering. Our Election years prove this. Now many hirelings are coming out masquerading as this and that, bombing, kidnapping and molesting innocent people.

All these are political desperations because the Nigerian religious sects have been living with non members of their sects even as Sharia was introduced, heightened and down-played in various northern states about five years ago.

For the recent claimants, how many Sharia do they want? The state of Zamfara that started it and the governor that spearheaded it (Ahmed Sanni Yerima now a Senator) once came campaigning for presidency round Nigeria, bagging different chieftaincy titles among non Muslims. He wore Igbo and Yoruba dresses, addressed the people using universal language of secularism to the chagrin of those who believed he was leading them to Mecca or Medina. In the end, he made his money and ensconced himself into the upper legislative chamber where I am yet to hear something of him by way of germane sponsoring of bills to ease the squalor of his people!

Mr. President, you know it better than anybody that Nigeria have experimented her volatility based on the polico-religious dimensions with June 12!

The world witnessed it: Vatican, Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia, England and Washington all bore witness to the truth that a seemingly religiously polarized Nigeria voted for two Muslims, using not religion or denominational slings, but proofs of personal integrity, broad mindedness, diligence and ability to be devoid of certain characteristic clefts.

Religion ought not to be any stumbling issue in Nigeria after June 12. It is only stumbling on abuse! The gains of that simulation ought to cheer us if not for political hamstrings, those who wear blue streaks to scream that Nigeria will go to rocks and ruins except they are up at the hem. We are not deceived: After June 12, any politician who thinks he/she can use religion or religious fanaticism to cause problem is hitting on the stone.

However, for anybody to appeal to a remnant, hitherto inert pocket of fundamentalists and use them to ferment sectarian violence smacks irresolvable frustration. They should take it that even if we wanted to vote for them, we now know better!

Nigerians have seen war before. They know what it is like. For those born after the war, AL JAZEERA, BBC and CNN now afford good opportunity to witness how insensate, stupid and how war can ill-at-speed take a people some hard centuries backward. There is Afghanistan, there is Iraq. We have Congo DR, Burundi, Liberia and Rwanda while Cote d’Ivoire is mincing to start.

Greater Nigerians should know better than the selfish political class. After Biafra, Nigerian soldiers have been to peace-keeping missions in places where people killed themselves fighting over the greed of few.  I myself have searched history to see a single war won on the terms of its proposition, not one could I see. Historians go to the places, and report the same old ruse and news. In Iraq Shites are still fighting with their brother sects in spite of the common slogan, "God is the greatest!" Palestine is not so different. They share Jerusalem yet fight over it, why; so one will own it as the starting point of its generational (faith) blessings. Not that East or West Jerusalem (or the entirety of it) has more gold than the Qinling fold belt of China or the Archaean Witwatersrand Basin of S/Africa; Not that Jerusalem has any sustaining economic power greater than the  oil reserves of the Arabian Peninsular! No, it is just that their fathers told them stories. It is just that they are still pursuing the ideal instead of following the real. Can Nigerians see this and repent of idiocy?!

But the worse wars are those campaigned under the banner of religion, race or creed. These are the most stupid of wars. See it? How can man ever justify his wanting to push his fellow men off because of GOD, the all powerful and most beneficent? Do we not see that as soon as the pushing is done and we settle to the ‘spoils,’ other divisive issues will rear to tear or creep in to gore more divisions? The Balkans afford good example.

Is there just one nation that can claim strict homogeneity of religion, color, class and party interest? SO WHY THE FUSS?! Two quick précis will guarantee better appreciation of retarded nature of religious uprisings:

AMERICA:

The civil war of the United States ended in 1865. Four years of the bloodiest and deadliest warfare our country has ever know. The American Civil War pitted brother against brother and father against son. A war based upon fundamental differences between the Union and the Confederacy.


The civil war ended 142 years ago, and yet today, there are still people who, in their mind, continue to fight the civil war because of their fundamental belief in the different values of human life based upon the color of a persons skin.


Despite these differences, the United States lives in relative peace, blacks as neighbors to whites as neighbors to browns as neighbors to yellows.

IRAQ:

Today, Iraq faces a similar situation with the differences represented in the different sects of Islam that represent the majority of the Iraqi population. The Shi'a sect in the East, which is the most populous, the Sunni sect in the West, the Kurds in the North and a spattering of other sects spread throughout the country.

Because of these differences, the future of Iraq depends upon the answer to one fundamental question, "Can Iraq overcome feuding between sects to create a united country?".

The answer to this question is an emphatic, "YES!"

The population of Iraq is tired of fighting. They are tired of watching their people die in useless conflict. They fought against Iran for over ten years, and then watched as even more died in 72-hours of fighting in the culmination of the Kuwaiti occupation. They stood by silently as Hussein killed over 1.5 million people in the time since his defeat by the allied coalition.

For once, the Shi'a, the Sunni, and the Kurd are all standing united against a common foe, and that foe is radical Islamic terror. As they beat back the terrorists, they are finding that they have more in common than not, and are simply wanting to lead their lives in peace.

In the case of America, the people are making do with their natural differences and are plotting to enhance capacity building with laced advantages in terms both absolute and comparative, to the different color heritages. The color-tied values are diminishing.

Not so with Iraq. The Iraqi population seems ONLY tired of and may probably resume fighting any other time they find strength to continue. Except they continue to resonate reality and learn to understand the checkered dynamism of socio-cultural diversity instead of pursuing the ideal of religious calling. Unless they discover their commonality outside religion and take it that the points of growth rest with outwitting the fundamentalists who are selfishly extremists, they will not lead their lives in peace.

Why do we fight?

1. We fight to separate one tribe, tongue and religion from another, ONLY to come to New York and drink tea together.

2. We fight to separate believers of one faith from the others ONLY to pay course fees to the professors of such faith and institutions teaching its tenets so we can learn and employ as means to furthering dialogue

3. We accuse people of being infidels yet we interact with them and buy catchments of arms from them to fight or defend our whims.

4. We sneer at people derogatorily as ‘uncultured’ when the facts show that our deep pockets earn its fatness from them.

Though religion be a motive force I t think that John Ruskin was right in his Time and Tide when he said: “A knave's religion is always the rottenest thing about him.”