Full of bile, anger, pettiness and outright mischief, it is difficult to
discern the mission of this opposition. It has become difficult for the
current opposition to articulate reasonable challenges to the present
government’s policies without sounding base, childish and purposeless.
Where you expect healthy flipsides to government policies and actions,
what you get is poorly articulated, dense and vacuous drivels, reeking
with false facts, ill-mannered invectives, foul language and insults and
nothing more.
It is easy to understand why the opposition is so disheveled and
tattered. Made of members and supporters of b party used power
principally as a tool for self aggrandizement and free loading, it is
easy to understand why, as an opposition in an era where such uncensored
liberty with the treasury is illegitimate, the country’s opposition and
has resorted to vending bitterness and acrimony as opposition politics.
It is easy then to understand why the opposition has resorted to free
bandying of fake news, Fabrications and silly stories as opposition
politics when what is required of it is to robustly challenge the
government with factual presentation; the fact that Lai Mohammed
deployed as the spokesperson of the opposition to lead a fruitful revolt
and overthrow to a clueless and ultra corrupt ruling party in 2015
thereby making him an envied scourge fir the parody that today passes as
opposition in Nigeria as well as its rattled supporters.
Again, with its history of salubrious feeding on the common wealth, the
present opposition is lazy and bereft of the rigour required of real and
competent opposition. In such state, bandying wild, specious and
outlandish allegations it cannot give flesh to becomes its favorite
pastime. Talking carelessly at the drop of a pin becomes strategy hence
the opposition revel in ventilating fake news and ridiculously petty
fabrications to please the equally bitter and dense rabble it has as its
supporters is the opposition’s chief article of trade.
The low value of the present opposition is that it churns out very
meaningless statements by the minute even as the ruling party and
government take not even a scant glance at them, talk not of dignifying
them with a response! In anger, its bleeding cahoots, still hurting
terribly from the loss of the freebies and pilfered rations that used to
oil their sordid efforts before they were turned into unprepared
opposition in 2015, forge and vend fake, puerile and detestably false
news like diarrhead patients and they little care that their cheap wares
annoy rather than tickle the populace.
Recently, the opposition exhumed and circulated an article the Media
Adviser to the President, Femi Adesina wrote in 2008 as a Columnist,
where he disagreed with then President Yar:adua’s appointment of the
newly appointed Chief of Staff to the President, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari
as his peace envoy in the Niger Delta. Adesina’s ground for disagreeing
with Gambari’s appointment was because Gambari had a favourable opinion
that supported Abacha government’s role in the trial and execution of
Ken Saro Wiwa.
As a reverred Columnist and indeed the Editor-in-chief of Sun
newspapers then, Adesina was known not to hide his thoughts and feelings
on any issue and one such issue was that he didn’t fancy Gambari as a
peace envoy to the Niger Delta, as proposed by Yar’adua based on where
he stood on the Ogoni crisis. As a Columnist, he had his say but the
Yar’adua government had its way and Gambari’s appointment stood.
Now, Gambari has been appointed Chief of Staff to the same President
Adesina is spokesman to, so what the heck is in his 2008 article on
Gambari’s appointment that so tickled the malevolence of the puerile
opposition that they exhumed and circulated it widely? What purpose do
they wish to achieve by that very childish act? To provoke a war between
Chief of Staff and Media Adviser? To instigate a fight in Buhari’s
government? How asininely petty! How speciously childish!
Honestly, it beggars the mind that we have an opposition that rarely
understands its mission and has turned habitual scarecrows and
tittle-tattlers when it is supposed to offer alternatives to issues. We
have an opposition that is so seeped in childish irrelevance and which
embarrassingly ridicules itself with its preoccupation with inanities
that rarely rewards its sense of pettiness.
Okay, the opposition exhumes and shares an innocuous article by Femi
Adesina opposing the appointment of Gambari to a particular role in
2015? So what next? Gambari will start fighting with Adesina based on
that and they will salivate and ululate in sadistic joy that they have
set Buhari’s government on fire? Poor childish folks they are. They have
done worse in the past in their efforts to sow discord in Buhari’s
government and still ended with unhealing wounds. How do they, in their
small minds, think a Gambari will get incited by such very professional
opinion by a Columnist doing what he had to do 12 years ago? So
disgustingly small minded!
One of the poignant features of the dysfunctional opposition we have in
Nigeria today is that it is inflicted with bare reasoning. That is why
the opposition is fixated on cooking conspiracy theories on the Buhari
regime which have all fallen flat. The appointment of Gambari himself
was the last of such failures as the opposition and their cohorts were
hauling different conspiracy theories of who would get picked as
Buhari’s COS and forged dozens of names but never saw Gambari. In fact,
the appointment of Gambari made arrant nonsense of their baloney of a
cabal that held Buhari hostage and from which they already annointed a
COS for him before Gambari came in and reduced their ignorant guesses to
dust.
The opposition has exhumed and marketed Adesina’s 2008 article against
Gambari’s appointment as peace envoy to Niger Delta and so what? Gambari
will never ever fight Adesina for that professional opinion. There will
be no fight in Buhari’s government because of that. They will end in
bitter pains because Buhari’s government is not ruled by the kind of
puerility that encased their plot. The government will not be distracted
by that very childish and silly antic. There will be no letting on the
same scorched earth policies that had turned the opposition into an
irrational mob. The PDP and its cohorts will still be as far from power
as they were in 2015. I am sure that Buhari, Adesina and Gambari will
laugh over the hare-brained antics of the opposition in hauling out this
article.
But all said, Nigeria deserves a better opposition than this conclave of
bitter, irrational, childish scoundrels and humongous jesters fired by
acute bitterness than even the desire to raise their game beyond the
ridiculous prattle we have seen in the past five years. An opposition
that sees its acts from the gutter level of fabricating fake news,
speaking irrationally, petty mischief, bitter recriminations, childish
thumping all over the space is a sad rebuke to any nation that is
unfortunate to be saddled with such an egregious burden.
Peter Claver Oparah
Ikeja, Lagos.
E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com