Behold, A Rat! Or Can’t You Smell It?

The latest in today on the shameful concert a-stage in Abuja is from the Arewa Consultative Forum. The ACF would want the clause in the “Constitution” on incapacitation of the President to be respected. It wants Mr. Goodluck Jonathan to be allowed to assume the mantle of power as president given Mr. Musa Yar’Adua’s continuing health-related incapacitation and abdication. I don’t know about you, but even though I’m not a rat, I do smell rat here. It doesn’t take a genius talk less a class in introductory political science for anyone to discern that the same line-up of individuals who hold the realization of genuine democratic transformation in Nigeria hostage are scrambling again to abort the current opportunity to achieve that necessary condition for Nigeria’s progress and development. They all know that the game they play so well is up again. They are ever busy now scrambling to salvage the rump yet another time. Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo’s shameless “God punish me” response to a question in Abuja the other day, and the excursion to Abuja by the so-called Elders last week, are all indicators of the same desperation to abort by the line-up. People of goodwill must not allow them to succeed this time.

That Yar’Adua has been badly compromised on health grounds to hold up the trough that these characters feed off to the detriment of the peoples of Nigeria and their over all destinies is not lost on them. That, has been evident from the time it has taken them to scramble up counting from the day he went out on a stretcher in the middle of the night more than two months ago to Saudi Arabia. Did it slip their minds that the relevant clause that should apply in this case in the “Constitution” they produced in 1999 and brandished in our name must be triggered into effect? They have been busy tinkering to see how much time they can buy to sustain the status quo. The tide has turned on them, and they know it too. That’s why they have signaled their readiness now to move to their next act of holding true democratic transformation in Nigeria hostage. We must stop them this time.

This Decay Can Inflict Poetic Justice, Alhaji (Dr.) Mutallab

The New York Times described him as “a prominent Nigerian banker and former government official”. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula boastfully called his son; their “Nigerian brother” who successfully outwitted airport security systems even though his determined efforts to wreck the havoc he was deployed for was marred by a ‘technical fault’.
Since Christmas Day when fate foiled 23-year old Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s attempt to bring down a jetliner over Detroit one has watched in dismay as his father, Alhaji (Dr.) Umaru AbdulMutallab and the rest of his family embarked on a subtle PR ploy to cast themselves as unfortunate victims of their son’s indiscretion. Some, particularly in the popular press seem to have bought into their ploy: In a side bar, The New York Times proclaimed: “Parents of Suspect Offer Help”. From his London base, one Eddie Iroh in comments made in Nigeria’s Next newspaper was quick to praise Mutallab, the father for alerting Nigerian authorities and the US Embassy in Nigeria that his son had gone AWOL. My reading and assessment of Alhaji (Dr.) Mutallab’s alert is that he simply dialed 911 to for help that could bring his son back to him. The family statement confirmed as much: “We were hopeful that they would find and return him home”, it reads in part. The US Embassy cared less and rightly so, to use their system to help a man who pays neither tax nor tight to sustain it to look for his son and bring him home. That US authorities simply inserted the lad’s name into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, the extensive collection of data on more than 500,000 people, instead of the “far smaller no-fly list, which has only 4,000 names, or the so-called selectee list of 14,000 names of people who are subjected to more thorough searches at checkpoints” underscores the validity of my assessment even further. As for the Nigerian authorities, it’s premature at this point to even bother to infer why they wouldn’t bate an eyelid in response to Mutallab’s distress call. That fact will unfold clearly a little later in this piece.