Recently, Prince Tony Momoh cane out boldly to state that he has offered
himself for stoning should President Muhammadu Buhari not perform at the
end of his present four-years tenure. That may seem a dangerous gamble:
staking with one’s own life over an issue that presently draws
contestation between the supporters of the President and those who are yet
to live down the fact that President Buhari comprehensively defeated their
political tendency last year. It may seem that Prince Momoh threw an
audacious challenge, wagering with his life on such issue as presidential
performance in a country that is bristling to the seams with an array of
former presidents and governments that disappointed and fluffed the
people’s expectations since independence.
But looked from another angle, Prince Momoh is only demonstrating the
factuality of the position of those that promoted the ascension of this
president and had thus believed in his capacity to overwhelm where others
have failed. Prince Momoh was being candid. Tony Momoh is not one
unknown, anonymous quantity or a moral cretin hiding behind very nebulous
interests to pursue base political interests as most of the hideous
fellows now wailing heedlessly over everything are. He is a former
Minister, an erudite lawyer and veteran journalist. He showed he is a man
with worth who believes in what he says. He is not a chance-taker like the
hordes of inconsolable Wailers that had been naive to write the final
report card of a candidate on a four year-course just at the beginning or
at the middle of his first year.
One would have expected those that have been straining themselves and
crying themselves hoarse since Buhari came to cleanse the sordid Augean
stable last May, to take Prince Momoh’s bet and wager with their own lives
and offer themselves to be stoned should Buhari perform at the end of his
four years mandate. That is an even way of walking their vow that the
president will fail than the silly prank of mounting a coarse and
disoriented wailing business and ranting on just everything under planet
earth since Buhari came to power. One would have expected them to be men
enough to stake their lives on what they have been noisily heckling us to
buy. I had expected the wailing Wailers and their hideous patrons to come
out from their closets and take up Prince Momoh’s bet and put their lives
on the line if they really believe that Buhari has failed even before he
started cleaning a sixteen years’ gargantuan rot they deliberately did on
this country.
If they so believe their cacophonic and often unreasonable clattering on
just anything under the sun since Buhari came, let them stake with their
lives on the issue of Buhari’s performance and at the end of the four
years, let Nigerians decide whom to stone based on their opinions of
Buhari’s performance. If they are so sure of their disjointed position
that a man that met a treasury they raided to the bones, an economy that
was in tatters, a state of rabid corruption, a chaotic governance that
rather exacerbated the crisis of statehood, an acute unemployment
situation, a country almost divided into two by uncurbed sectarian siege,
a horrible state of insecurity, an infrastructural base that was decrepit
and who has started by plugging every rat hole and gathering what was left
of their sordid feast, redirecting the moral tempo of governance and is
about to unleash a maximum rehabilitation of the nation’s run-down
infrastructure despite the very harsh economic conditions he met, will
fail after four years, they should not be afraid to offer themselves for
stoning if their mischievous doomsday prophesies fail, as Prince Tony
Momoh has done on the other side of the aisle.
So can the wailing Wailers still their chaotic and silly cry and be man
enough to bet with their lives on what they believe and have trenchantly
laboured to let other Nigerians buy; to wit, that President Buhari will
not perform as Nigeria’s president? Can those that have become permanently
heart-broken that the regime of filth and pervasive stealing was ended
with Buhari’s present scorched-earth umbrage against roaches and
plunderers, quit their unreasonable wailings and wager with their lives,
as Tony Momoh has done and countless others who supported and still
support the present Buhari regime are ready to do? Can those that are
engaged in the naive pastime of twisting everything, fabricating silly
lies, forging infantile propaganda, cooking and inventing innuendoes,
misinformation and fables to promote their nauseous political interests
quit such idioces and take up the bet from Prince Momoh if they are so
sure of what they are venally trumping at every street corner today? Can
the scare-mongers who are indulged in building a fearful scenario of mass
extermination in the present effort to cage corruption, offer themselves
for stoning if their dreadful apocalyptic fore-warnings fail to happen and
Buhari succeeds in pulling a crestfallen nation up on its legs after his
four years at the helms? What can prevent those who are today swearing and
prattling that Buhari will fail from staking their lives for such
‘accurate’ reading of our president?
We are not deceived. We elected President Buhari to end the venal reign of
vampires that ensured that a rich country like ours was hobbled in 16
better-forgotten years of unbridled freeloading where nothing but raw
stealing and outright prebendalism reigned. He is doing that and issuing
forth very high hopes for the rebirth of a country where corruption has so
mutilated the ways of lives of overwhelmed citizens. He is plugging all
the ancient fonts of looting, securing the yam barns and calling the
rodents, the shameless yam eaters and lascivious devourers that ate away
our yesterday and today to account. Because corruption has so perverted
the psyche of the people and its sordid value chain grown so deeply
engraved in the people’s lives and their twisted ways of doing things,
those that deliberately cultivated this negative value chain are now
mounting a high-octane scare-mongering that the anti corruption antidotes
are killing the people and that Buhari will fail in the task of rescuing
an abused nation from their atrocious acts. Those that ran the country
down and who, by the way, swore that Buhari will never be president, are
now changing tactics, sponsoring all manners of desperate lies and
propaganda to distract and stop Buhari’s efforts to secure the country and
her treasuries for all Nigerians. They are the same characters now staging
a naked dance on how Buhari will fail, or has already failed, in their
queer yardstick of governance which is all about plundering and purloining
for their ilk while Nigerians die from preventable want. That is exactly
what is going on today and the idea is to at worst, detract and distract
the present government from tackling the single most important affliction
that has hobbled Nigeria and has grown their filthy ilk. That silly
wailing clap trap was what Prince Momoh was responding to when he wagered
with his life. It is naturally expected that the Wailers would have walked
their own talk by equally wagering with their own lives but so far, they
have not done so.
Among the vendors of this filthy scare-mongering are dubious fugitives
running, with their loots, from the reach of the present anti-corruption
klieglight. Those that have rushed to hide their stolen loot in septic
tanks, pit latrines and manholes have relocated to the market square,
recruiting the impressionable poor victims of their maniacal corrupt acts
to stage a mock show of being killed by hunger because they fear being
called to return what they stole. They are mounting a high-pitched battle
on the props of bread and butter. They just initiate the battle cry and
their beneficiaries and enablers who constitute the full pro-corruption
choir takes over and today, we are having a deliberate and nebulous
cacophony of voices trained against the present effort of the Buhari
regime against the vermin of corruption. Yea, having failed to sway the
regime with their jaded efforts to blackmail the fight against corruption,
they have resorted, like satan, to a bread and butter war in their
desperate battle to recruit the victims of their carnivorous acts as
misguided fronts men in their war to stop the anti-corruption inquest.
These are the stomach infrastructure politicians who believe that the
commonwealth is there for stealing and having stolen enough, they merely
waylay hapless citizens on their way to voting centers with cups of rice,
pieces of cheap Ankara and few Naira notes and have their ways to more
looting through added tenures. What they are yet to fathom is how they
still failed woefully during the last election when they upped the price
for their victims to raw dollars and yet failed the way they did in the
2015 general election. This topic is for another day.
They say we are all dying of hunger because Buhari felt we must stop
corruption. They say that because they are called to return what they
stole, Nigerians are about to be wiped out by hunger and want. Because
the anti-corruption beams are fast closing in on them, they paint a
picture of Armageddon that befalls all Nigerians should Buhari insist on
bringing roaches like them to account. They failed to tell their victims
that they wrote our death sentence when they emptied the country’s
treasury and ensured that our coffers were left bare when we were having
an oil boom just the other day. They failed to tell Nigerians that they
deliberately scripted all the tales of woes they are trading with today
when they wickedly stole the food for the common man at a time they were
supposed to save for the rainy day. They failed to tell those they are
enticing today through a senseless bread and butter campaign that they
callously wasted their future when they were robbing the Nigerian nation
silly as their years of debauchery lasted.
Yes, to get the soul of their famished victims, and those of their
beneficiaries who have resorted to relentless wailing since the present
regime happened, and those whose minds have been deliberately defaced by
the type of corruption that reigned here before Buhari cane, it must be
turned to a bread war; after all a hungry man only hears the language of
bread. That was why the devil employed bread to tempt Jesus Christ after
fasting for forty days. Like the devil, they are tempting Nigerians with
bread. Like the rebellious Israelites did to Moses, they are trying to
turn Nigerians to rebel against Buhari for fighting corruption by asking
him to rain manna from heaven. They believe Nigerians are the rabble, the
Israeli rabble on its way out of Egypt who can easily be swayed back to
dehumanizing slavery in Egypt with the politics of bread. They feel
Nigerians are the soulless Roman mob who don’t ask questions but who can
easily be swayed by the dubious antics of their persecutors at the mention
and whiff of bread!
Now, they feel they have done enough to turn the Nigerian masses who
freely and without let, asked for the change we have today to rebel
against Buhari and his government, just for doing what the people wanted
and setting the tone for the recovery of a country long devoured by
termites. But then, one imagines, having done so well to turn the people
against Buhari and the change he is effecting on Nigeria’s serially abused
space, as they feel they have done, why won’t these Wailers and their
patrons come out of their thick closets and offer themselves to be stoned
should Buhari perform at the end of his tenure? If they believe, deep in
their hearts, that Buhari will fail (or has already failed) as they
clatter about, let them offer themselves to be stoned as Prince Momoh did
on the other side of the argument. If they truly believe that what Buhari
is doing today is not going to pull the country out of the woods where
they crashed it into, let them boldly come out and wager with their lives.
If they believe that the country will do better with encouraging the kind
of plundering they wrought here for 16 years, let them bet with their
lives as Prince Momoh has done. Are they holding back just because they
know they are dubious and are merely trading on a political quicksand when
they shout in mindless cacophony that Buhari will fail? Are they not
betting with their lives because they know they are merely distraught
losers who are not so sure of the cheeky gamble they are doing at present?
Are they not betting with their lives because they have not mobilized
enough faith even in themselves to take their position notches further?
For a group that betrays no shame judging nine months of Buhari against
their own 16 years of unrestrained waste laying, is there some home truth
they are desperately shielding themselves from when they refuse to bet
with their lives on a contention they noisily bandy about?
But I know that the wailing Wailers now frantically recruiting Nigerians
to get to their sides are operating on a deliberate fault line. They know
quite well that theirs is a dubious effort to preserve a lost paradise
even for a moment of Pyrrhic victory. They know very well that they are
cheeky, that they are mischievous and that they are dubious. They fear
Nigerians know the reasons behind their present aberrant behavior and are
therefore cognizant that wagering with their lives on Buhari’s performance
is a highly risky venture. They know theirs don’t go deeper than the
dubious hysteria they are raising at present and that it is so powerless
to deter Buhari and his government from their set goals of ending the era
of unbridled corruption and employing whatever Nigeria has towards
betterring the lives of famished Nigerians. They know theirs don’t run
deep and that Buhari will succeed in taking Nigeria out of the woods the
Wailers ran it into so they won’t risk betting with their lives. They know
deep within them, even as they will admit it only as a last act, that
Buhari has set up a very redoubtable foundation for success in his first
ten months and will certainly succeed in his very arduous task. They know
that the combination of prudence, aversion to corruption, careful
planning, discipline, passion and commitment which Buhari has shown in his
first ten months in power are sure roads to resounding success. They know
that having not succeeded thus far in distracting his commitment, they are
in for a bloody nose in the months ahead as President Buhari’s government
gears to start the implementation of its first budget, with salutary
provisions dedicated, for the first time in our nation’s history, to the
neglected interests of the common man.
So let the Wailers come forward to bet with their lives if they believe
President Buhari will not perform. Prince Tony Momoh has betted to be
stoned should President Buhari not perform. I am joining him to also offer
myself to be stoned should our President not perform in line with the
demands of the millions that voted for him to replace a regime that reaped
bounteously from a providential oil boom but which presided over the
bankrupting of the country through uncensored looting and shameless
stealing. If the Wailers are as serious as their wailing portray them, let
them offer themselves to be stoned if President Buhari performs. Let them
not fear to put their lives where their selfish interests direct their
mouths. Let them come boldly and offer to be stoned if their nemesis
performs. As for how performance would be judged by 2019, we shall leave
that to Nigerians to decide in the 2019 elections. I am throwing a
further bet that by March 2019 when another presidential election will
hold, Nigerians, including some of those mischievously wailing over their
overturned soup pot of corruption and stealing at present will persuade
President Buhari to continue for another term. This will not be because he
has attended to their notorious instincts of purloining but because
Nigerians will know the huge advantages of taming corruption and using
whatever resources we have to attend to the good of the general populace
and not the selfish thieving interests of just a few selfish free loaders.
Peter Claver Oparah
Ikeja, Lagos.
Email: peterclaver2000@yahoo.