What Nigeria needs is more scholarship and less leadership

#TeamKreativeMindz
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When Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu cried out, we were not fooled even as we were full of pity for him. In a not too surprising confession on the 18-07-14 Vanguard, he pleaded that the fate of being in opposition is difficult to bear. In his words: I must tell you, I have always believed that we should not have a one-party system in the country and that is why I never changed and it is very difficult to be in the opposition particularly if you have risen to a certain level. It is extremely diffi­cult, particularly if you are in the opposi­tion in your state and at the federal level.
The question is how is it that our best brains not excluding our intellectuals in government don’t understand the nature of the state they inhabit. Or is it that they never inquired about the space, the geography that circumscribes them; or are too lazy to so do?
It is this cognitive black-hole more than anything else that explains our failures in development and governance. When a man lives and is a total stranger to his environment and thus to himself, how can he develop his environment, his country or himself? It’s not an Onu mystique. We are all in the same sin and shame.
The facts are as follow. In a long proces­sion of state redevelopers and rebuilders, aka coup makers or inheritors, from Gen­eral Jack Gowon to Abubarka, the Nigeria state has been dutifully constructed to exist without opposition. Nigeria was built to ex­ist, strictly as a one-party state, whether in the form of the stolen mandate by the mili­tary or whichever party happens into power and office as inheritor of the militaristic construction. That is to say in the Nigerian State House there are not many mansions there, and there is specifically none for opposition.
The only way opposition can exist in the Nigerian state as constructed by these Gen­erals is as an insurgency. Perhaps it won’t be out of place to suggest that factions of APC and Boko Haram acting in concert know this, and are enacting it.
Put in more ordinary terms: the money and powers to make and unmake the president of Nigeria has exclusively been put in the grip and control of the extant federal government. This reality or facts on the ground, as the Israelis would say, is a deliberate, repeat deliberate state and power ploy of military dictators to safeguard their stolen powers, and to favor their home con­stituencies. That is that Nigeria as a unitary state is purpose built.
Now the ancillary points are these. You don’t construct a unitary state and ask that it be run as a multi-party democracy. To have a multiparty democracy presumes that the state is to be constructed at its molecular levels, to fit that idea and ideal.
A multiparty democracy presumes for instance an absence of the dominance of the central or any constituent state in the ordinary and active lives of citizenry. A multiparty democracy presumes too, a plurality of wealth and sources of wealth and other powers, including cultural, media and educational powers or assets. And this plurality must be so constructed or disturbed that no one power, not even the central power, is overwhelming. In other words, in a multiparty democracy, Abuja becomes a Washington and not a Mecca as she currently is.
That is if as Onu dreams we should not have a one party system, then he and his APC should first demand multiparty de­mocracy be built it into the state, from her very molecular formulations. To build a one party state and will to run it as a multiparty democracy is insanity of the designers and practitioners. The nation is lucky these men, the Onus have not gone moony yet. Or have they not gone?
The fraud that is Nigeria is that those who fabricated and forged the Nigerian state and constitution knew all what they were up to. It is to their interest that people like Dr. Onu are in the profitable business counterfeiting opposition. They are sanctifying the fraud that is a forged constitution. Perhaps that explains why APC opted out of the consti­tutional conference. They want the fraud, the deceit to go on.
In the end the implication of what Onu and the forgers of the constitution are dramatising is the farce that you can create a horse and give it the head of an eagle say. Perhaps it is another way of saying that the myth and illusion of a centaur actually lives in Nigeria.
Even this little opposition we now have is gifted them by the sagacity and mag­nanimity of a Jonathan, who confesses he has not used 1/10 of the powers architected into the Nigerian presidency. It is obvious the APC wouldn’t have existed at all in the OBJ reign. So it is an error to build on the magnanimity of a Jonathan. The state must be reconstructed or we perish. Already Lagos state is going broke financing the takeover of Abuja. And Ekiti, Adamawa are ‘fallen’ in the course of the paucities of their hege-monies.
Yes these things are not perhaps as clear as the full moon on a village night. But it is only in our understanding them that we will be saved. One may therefore say with a minimum of error that what Nigeria needs is more scholarship and less leadership. We need for instance to understand that you don’t build a unitary state and want a multi­party democracy. That is our real opposition is to precipitate things and next call for the redevelopment of the Nigerian state, into be multiparty democracy. And this cannot be achieved by our thrashing around like chopped worms, we are doing opposition.