By Jimanze Ego-Alowes
TUE, DECEMBER 18 2018-theG&BJournal-Marshall McLuhan was a great Canadian media scholar. He left us with many insights. Perhaps the most storied is this: ”The Medium is the Message.”
Strictly, the Canadian was speaking of the interaction of the medias with their payloads or contents. However, of such great quotes one could broaden them to serve his own other purposes and still get things right, perfectly. For instance, we may take it that [understanding] the message, any message, is in our first apprehending the larger story, the framework, the unstated assumptions or mediums. Lawyers sometimes call such as those ”reading the small prints.”
Luckily, our lead subject today is a lawyer. Lately, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, three ministers in one and his stock of grey hairs, are in the news again. Nearly everybody was scandalized when the minister literally unhinged himself with wondrous claims. He was quoted as having applauded and gloried in his own government’s irresponsibility. It was in the matter of citizens not being served the electricity that they pay for. For Fashola, that Nigerians are reeling in darkness is a problem Nigerians have with themselves and their municipal power corporations. In other words, the government of which Fashola is a lynchpin is an uninterested, not even an observer, third party.
That much was Fashola’s open message, the noise if you liked. But within the small prints is the coded message, the real signals, Fashola is canvassing. However, to understand what Fashola is really about, we have to ask what his unstated assumptions are. And to get this we have to translate Fashola and what he says to Fashola and what he is hinting at, what he really means.
Now, the details. Fashola’s framework is that he is working on being granted ”the right of first refusal” on the race of Nigerian presidency come 2023. More on this latter. However as we write, the president, Muhammadu Buhari, has confessed as follows. According to Daily Trust: President Muhammadu Buhari has assured his teeming supporters that if he wins reelection in 2019, hard work and loyalty would be rewarded accordingly. https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/buhari-to-supporters-hard-work-will-be-rewarded-this-time.html
In plain language this means that all the presidential hit men, enforcers, lickspittles, viziers and dukes and lieutenants, who were left in the cold in the first run of Buhari’s presidency will in his putative 2019-2023 reign be brought closer to the burning hearths and steaming banquets.
That is to say, Buhari in the sly, admits that he failed them the last time. But the matter is not ended there. The way it is put suggests it was a consciously, if not strategically taken decision. The president needed to have these minions and service personnel on the leash, as pets, to serve his purpose. It might be well here, to recall the words of Senator Oluremi Tinubu on this matter. Speaking of PMB and inner caucus treatment of her husband she mourned: they used and dumped my husband [read and others] with the dustmen.
Whatever it be, discerning observers will notice that though these men were used and dumped they were so incapacitated they could not walk. In other words, they had no independence, they were dependent pets. That is to say in supporting their potentate, they first gave up or were latter forced to give up their force de frappe – their independent powers. Actually, this is the way the mafia runs shop. Point is you can’t quit on the mafia boss once on his employ. But the mafia lord can dismiss, even maim or waste you if it pays his fancy. You are his complete chattel. Perhaps politics ala APC is a plagiarized Mafioso kingdom.
Also important is the small print that as a politician, Fashola is really in one business. And that business is the very profitable business of accumulating and keeping powers. And Fashola confesses to this. Taken together, a Fashola who campaigns for more power, while dismissing a nation’s history of darkness as none of his business is plain speaking. All I want he thus says is more powers and more and more irresponsibility. And he is quite remorseless, if not ruthless canvassing such.
Luckily, the weather is in high noon for him. Fashola is young despite his shock of grey hairs. And as he appears on TV shows as a guest, Fashola takes himself to be something of a logician, even a genius. In his mien and sometimes his popup disdain for his interviewers and audiences, he gives the impression he is a messiah waiting to happen. He might as well be. It is just that so far there are no signs or wonders he is. This is especially so since his stint as minister it has been one long list of excuses and abandoned responsibility after another. Anyway that is another matter altogether.
To repeat, the confession of president Buhari is that, we have used you in the past unrewarded, but tomorrow belongs to you. And the matter gets interesting here. For a politician as Fashola with the ambition of Caesar, the important point is not local or spot victories. The important thing is in crossing the ”Rubicon”, in universal powers. And crossing that Rubicon for him is in who succeeds Buhari come 2023, if Buhari makes the cut. In summary to understand the apparently innocent foot in the mouth faux pas of Fashola, one must so do through his ambition to be Caesar. That is the small print, the frame story.
At this point, it might serve well to recall that this same Fashola was out at Ibadan just lately. And he brought his audience some ”good news.” It was the good news of the run of the presidency being the turn of his south westerners come 2023, that is given Buahri’s projected win.
Now as innocent as that Ibadan declaration sounds, it comes with coded signals. The gist is this. In politics speechmaking follows power not vice versa. That is, persons are authorized to speak only after decisions have been taken. You don’t speak and then it happens.
In other words Fashola wouldn’t have risked mouthing such a nationally contentious claim, if he was not directed and or authorized to. It is thus safe to say that Fashola was not speaking his mind. He is a minion and can have no such mind in this matter. At best, a Fashola, a gelded political bull, is his master’s voice. All he can have are wishes, he cannot be allowed a mind of his own. Given this, it is certain that his masters have assured him that it is the turn of the southwest. And for the southwest, Fashola believes he is head and shoulder above any other competitors. But he has one, one big one in Tinubu. In other words, the cold war, the ”irreconcilable differences” between party leader Tinubu and Fashola is nothing personal. It is a power game. The two are in the race to the bottom to win out the APC nomination come 2023. As for Tinubu’s ambition, his frenemy Bukola Saraki has let us in into the secret. And this is besides other collaborative pieces of evidences.
In other words Fashola and Tinubu are in a fight, an undeclared fight, for who succeeds the president come 2023. But that fight is against a background of a conspiracy. And it is a conspiracy of the exclusion of none-southwest and none-northerner others, that is the southeast and the south-south.
So for Fashola and his ilk, the Buhari-Osinbajo regime is as it should be. It is a return to the grand vision of instigating and winning the Nigerian civil war. And that is to seize the country as a booty by the Group of 2, the far right wings of the Southwest and the North. For this G2 Nigeria is a tributary to be passed around the north and the southwest. This template was first ”authored and finished” by General Yakubu Gowon and his deputy Chief Obafemi Awolowo. And since these duo, the G2 regime has run its fare, plus or minus. However, it is on record that the Buhari-Osinbajo regime is the most virulent, most revanchist strain of G2ism. And Fashola glories in it, and wants to appropriate its illicit political gains to the exclusion of all others. For him as for other G2ers Nigeria is a crime scene, an exclusive crime turf, and to be blessed is to join in the heist.
But the conspiracy of exclusion is a conspiracy of hate. So in hating the others, even if only politically, you run a government under self-siege. By others-exclusion you become too self conscious even for your own good. And in the ensuing haze, you begin to personalize the security complex.
And to have personalized the security shield is a signal that an elected leader has turned into monarchy. A monarchy, for whatever it is, is in the personalization of all powers, especially security powers. And personalization is anti-modernity. And in a modern nation or its public sectors being personalized, things get shoddy, done unprofessionally. And nothing again can be professionalized, not logic, not security. This is because one qualifies to be hired only because of his bloodlines or personal allegiances to the helmsman. One qualifies never because of his competences. Even if you were competent it was never needed. All that was required was your slavish devotion to the leader.
So all logic must be deployed to prove the elected helmsman, who is now king and monarch, is beyond good and evil. He lives outside of history and can’t be arraigned before any courts or logic. And the helmsman’s minions chosen on bloodlines, strain themselves beyond reason to prove their leader is beyond responsibility. After all he is a king. So all Fashola is saying is: Buhari is your king and messiah. As a monarch Buhari can come to no wrong and has no responsibilities. A monarch only has supreme powers without control, without responsibilities.
It is only that Fashola pitches his own case. He reminds you he is Buhari’s dauphin, the man who shall be president, after Buhari. This is Nigeria a province a chattel of the G2 players. Ahiazuwa.
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