M. O. ENE
Last Friday, 7.7.23, the 40th day of Governor Peter Mbah’s makeover of image-battered Enugu State, I backed off from forums and daily commentaries or analyses. I was impressed by Mbah’s courage and commitment to confronting the deadly joke of a lone wolf issuing sit-at-home orders from faraway Finland. This is leadership 101.
The 24-month shame has shifted. The wheel of governance is back in steady hands. Trust is creeping back. We wait and watch the new dawn blossom in the first 100 days with a complete cutting off of a course, if not a cause, that has become a career to misguided miscreants and a curse to Igbo society.
Over the weekend, hiding from scorching heat and missing Old Man Winter, I read serious strings of sentences that stimulate the soul. The soul servings by Oseloka H. Obaze (OHO) inspired. They brought back flashes of famous scripts from the three-time SSG of Anambra State, the best governor Anambra failed to get, and a deputy DG of Peter Obi’s consequential presidential campaign that still stuns political pundits.
“Emperor,” as we call the UN distinguished diplomat, writes, publishes, and lectures. I re-read his published take on the Abuja presentation of Dr. Moses Paul’s book, “The Nigerian Dream.” I watched the Ted-x talk on YouTube (Njenje TV): “We the People.”
Chinua Achebe’s mantra of leadership being Nigeria’s problem endures, but I believe that “Ihe na-eme anyị si anyị n’aka”: We are our own greatest enemies. From where do our leaders emerge, and who empowers them? We the people!
Obaze wrote that “we need an ethical and purposeful leader, who is development-oriented, can think disruptively and has a transformative mindset.” It does not take an oracle to see these qualities served in the two Peters of our era: Mbah and Obi. Yet, it takes “we the people” to support and sustain the policies.
We must not run away from politics; it won’t let us. When we stay away, we get bad leaders who ruin our society. We live the consequences. We suffer from their character deficiencies and lack of compassion, their clear cowardice, and their general incompetence. We must seek solutions, the way forward.
I reluctantly read Obaze’s latest piece, “The Yoke Upon the Judiciary,” published yesterday by Global Upfront Newspapers. The Nigerian judiciary is known for strange pronouncements on partisan political cases, from 1979 arithmetical abracadabra, the fourth-to-first Supreme Court governor, and the latest Bulkachuwanized seats of ex-Senate President Lawan Ahmed and now-Senate President Godswill Akpabio. Whether the highest court will uphold or revoke INEC’s awful presidential results floats in the air. I can only be pleasantly surprised.
Good that I read the piece. Obaze nailed what I have been preaching: “true nation-building devoid of past excuses and recriminations.” I was boldly blunt and Southeast specific: Forget Biafra as-was; let’s build an Igbo-cultured nation in Nigeria. #Aladimma. Let Arewa, Bornu, Middle Belt, Midwest & Niger Delta, Oduduwa copy. The goal is a functional federation.
Obaze provided some elements to be incorporated in a new Nigeria: “long-missing core values… genuine self-rule; creating effective and strong governing institutions; cultural match and legitimization of our diversity; and orchestrating equitable and sustainable strategic development… ‘consumption to production’….”
“Cultural match” is key. It is a foremost factor necessary for nations to integrate into a functional federation of nations. We cannot transform Nigeria’s contrasting cultures with a magic wand. Our diversity, albeit a strength, is currently convulsed at another crossroads. Dysfunctional components do not make a healthy whole. Our diversity should be taken slightly apart and made stronger for socioeconomic sustainability in unity. A new Nigeria is possible, but it must run on stronger socioeconomic spare parts; the original parts are dated and dilapidated. Without the wellness of parts, national politics is prone to ferocious forces of division along faulty frontiers.
This is where we lost the GPS signal and continued the half-century of postwar wandering in the wilderness of Nigerian nightmare. For the last 24 years, Quixotic quests for secessions across Nigeria have yielded deaths, destruction, radical rudeness, and retrogression. From Ijaw militants in the Niger-Delta, Igbo neo-Biafrans, Fulani terrorists in the Middle Belt to Bornu Boko Haram, Arewa bandits, and down southwest to Oduduwa irredentists, it has been a zero-sum game. Nothing is gained.
On the other hand, the Obidient Movement has piggybacked on the ashes of #EndSARS and in less than 12 months changed the narrative to reveal that Nigeria as-is is unsustainable: A new and better Nigeria is possible.
Whatever the outcome of February 25, 2023, we can take the momentum to another level, starting with the Southeast as a showcase. That is the Aladimma Agenda: It has been on the table since December 7, 1997. Someday soon, someone somewhere will wonder why we left it for so long, why we wallowed in empty ethnic enmities and failed to show Nigerian nations the way forward; why we tolerated a breakdown and not tailor a buildup of relationships.
The words of Oseloka Obaze re-energize to re-evangelize. We the people can rebuild Nigeria by laying an exemplary foundation in the Southeast. This is a surefire street to gaining the latent respect of many Nigerian nations who, in certain terms and in the stillness of souls, yearn for such a leadership.
We must stop looking for solutions outside ourselves in our cultural-matching nation. No one is coming to save us. We do not all have to be governors, LGA chairs, commissioners, or special advisers to contribute immensely to nation-building. In everything, everywhen and everywhere, we must be flexible enough to learn, unlearn, and relearn, knowing that what happened has happened and that we can use today’s gift of life and yesterday’s experiences to shape tomorrow’s opportunities of massive magnitude.
Hard work. Honesty. Humanity. Humility. Everything else is embellishment.
#moe
Monday Memo, 7.10.23
aladimma.net 