A PhD took us all to hell. He however didn’t bring us back as the popular
saying would have expected. Instead he left us there. But this is no issue
to those that are eternally bereft of vision. They seek to dwell in a
whitewashed sepulcher instead of appreciating the inner beauty of a chamber
lined with marble.
Common sense would have dictated that we collectively tackle the rot and
infestation left behind by certificated leaders but these lucifer worthy
entities would rather make issues of the certificate of President Muhammadu
Buhari. Apparently not satisfied with the rot they bequeathed him they will
rather prefer that he is unable to focus by dragging out that which has
been thrashed out adequately with the pretext that they had only approached
the scale of justice to adjudicate in their bellyaching.
They had failed before in the past because President Buhari’s tutelage in
the United States where he got today’s equivalent of a Masters wouldn’t
have been possible without the basic certificate that they had made an
issue out of. Men of impeccable characters had severally attested to the
existence of this document that some have now erroneously canonized as the
manual for turning a country that has been pillaged by leaders past around.
Had he not been so qualified would the various statutory bodies have
cleared him to run for the elections at a time when all these organization
operated as proxies of the then sitting government?
The issue here is not some piece of paper, by now discoloured with age,
same as which countless of today’s accusers cannot provide their own copies
to save themselves from fates worse than death. The issue is that there
exists a rank of people who think and know that President Buhari has set in
motion the anti-corruption fight, an avenging angel that has ensured that
none of their lazy yet to be born or existing but damaged offspring would
benefit from the commonwealth that was looted without thoughts for the
impact on the wider population of citizens who are too conscientious to
appropriate even the lowest denomination they find on the wayside on their
daily commute to backbreaking jobs.
Yet, no one from among these masses of Nigerians, further impoverished by
the kleptomaniac disposition of certificate doubters, is making any racket
on this matter. If anyone of such means make any issue of a certificate
whose circumstances have been duly explained by Mr President, it must be
that he or she is a victim of monetized dissent.
The slaves making this fresh round of distracting demand do so because once
an entity is keyed on autopilot it tends to exhaust their energy until they
eventually crash en-mass for no other reason than that they have no purpose
to further fulfill in the absence of needless bellyaching.
The only value to their allegation, if it ever had any, was that its seed
was first planted on a parched soil of bitter politics to stop President
Buhari whose eventual victory was known to everyone the moment the All
Progressives Congress, APC handed him the presidential ticket.
The indifference from Mr President’s side is profoundly golden. In addition
to making a mess of themselves with the suit in court they had also sought
to gain traction from it by alleging that having an X number of Senior
Advocates of Nigeria (SANs) on the defence team is an admission of guilt.
They failed in the very simple task of recall for they would have seen that
a closer description of what they are insinuating was committed by someone
who was trying to stampede a judge from the court by showing up with 99
plus SANs.
Like US President Barrack Obama like President Muhammadu Buhari. From
before he clinched the Democrat nomination till date, a tribe of guys who
have lost it there have sustained their birther conspiracy in the mirage of
a hope that the US number one citizen can be flummoxed or forced out of
office on that account. What a lot of them will one day realize is that
they water over eight years of their sorry lives while Obama improved the
fortunes of the US in that span of time. Some of them even went off grid –
living wild in wilderness – until he completes his tenure.
The moronic equivalent in Nigeria would end up worse. Mr President would
complete his tenure without these hapless fellows making any constructive
input to the debates leading to the formulation and implementation of far
reaching policies because they are doubters of his certificate. And it
would not be their first productive shot at compromising systems and
processes. Nigerians would recall that these were the same people that
actively politicized the military by bringing serving officers into
partisan politics to the extent that some of them became the mouthpiece for
certificate deniers.
The remnant of this pointless charge would be led in the blogosphere and
idle street corners by persons who, though possess conveyor belt
certification but are nonetheless deficient in capacity to independently
analyse issues and arrive at constructive conclusions, are in the need of
the kind of quality education that accompanied certificates as at the time
President Buhari got his. The conversation would thus be reduced into a
trolling circuit without any redeeming feature to make it relevant to our
national priorities.
The rest of us must therefore prove we are better educated than the
certificate doubters by techs rolling the agenda for public discourse back
to germane issues. How do we make those who bought the electricity
distribution companies to stop their extortionist regime; how do we make
sure the oil industry cabal do not find a new way to steal the country
blind; how do we take out Naira back from currency speculators; how do we
ensure that the goats that ate our yams do not define the perception of the
anti-corruption fight; how do we prevent new goats from eating recovered
yams; how do we expand the markets for the goods and services that will
bloom from government’s commitment to diversify the economy; how do we
provide more palliatives pending when the hard work of now begin to yield
results?
These are the issues that should dominate public discourse and not a matter
that had been laid to rest pre-election. We are the ones to press the reset
button and we should do so now by teaching the degrees, masters and
doctorate degree holding illiterates among us how to think.
Agbese is National Coordinator, Stand Up Nigeria and contributed this piece
from the United Kingdom.