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The holy book
enjoins the faithful not to build their spiritual house by the seaside
lest it be washed away by strong tides, neither in the open fields lest
it be blown away by strong winds, nor among thorns and weeds lest it be
choked to death by worldly concerns, but on the rock where it can
withstand inclement weather. The moral of the message is that life is a
continuum; that your earthly mission prepares you for the life after
and that what you sow you reap.

One man who seems
to have taken the lesson literally is the gap-toothed general. Away
from the vulnerable fields of Obalende, and the threatening waves of
the Bar Beach, our man moved to Abuja and built himself a House on the
Rock.

As the landlord, he
knew all the nooks and crannies of the place but when with one
misunderstood stroke of the pen he cancelled a freely conducted
election in 1993 and all hell was let loose, he patriotically stepped
aside. Sixteen years, five administrations and several distortions
after, he is poised to return to his house to restore its original
master plan.

In doing so he is
following the path of history. Two of his predecessors also toed that
path; one tragically, the other successfully: Jack, the innocent
general, who wined and wedded while the country fought itself, tried to
retrieve what he left behind sixteen years after being shooed out of
office, while the Ota chicken farmer recaptured the crown he
voluntarily relinquished 20 years earlier. As the original landlord,
the gap-toothed general should know how to navigate his way faster to
the house he built.

It is a welcome
development. After witnessing the hell raising and bullying style of
the chicken farmer, the sedentary and sleep-inducing way of the ailing
president, the tenderfoot steps of the acting one, every patriot should
know that what is needed is the experienced, serenading surefootedness
of the one who built the House on the Rock. Who could have forgotten
how he unchained the mouths of a voluble people long caged by the
stern, thin and vengeful general; or how he set free the two
journalists jailed under Decree No 4, thereby running an open
government, the envy of black Africa?

Let no one raise
the spectre of later proscriptions of opposition publications, or the
jailing of many journalists without trial.

All was done for
the orderly development of the country, and no more than child’s play
compared to the antics of his successor, the dark-goggled one, who
holds the dubious honour of having locked up more journalists and
banned more publications in our history.

Let no one mention
that he tried to sap life out of our people with his Structural
Adjustment Programme. Who does not know that it was a visionary
programme, poorly copied by the chicken farmer with his endless
increase of fuel prices in the name of deregulation? Only the patent
owner can apply it again with debilitating effectiveness to modern
times.

Let no one whisper
the enthronement of the ‘settlement’ culture. It is another indication
of how the media often fail to close up on the big picture by focusing
on long shots. Who has forgotten that he jailed a former oil minister
for drinking tea and receiving a gold wristwatch in his patriotic war
against corruption? Who does not know that he prevented a population
explosion in the cells by simply collecting proceeds of multimillion
Naira graft and warning the culprits to go away and sin no more, while
jailing only petty thieves? If the media were even-handed, they would
have harped on the spiritual basis for the general’s action to the rich
that ‘to err is human, to forgive is divine’.

The one that galls
most is the endless reference to the June 12 election. Since everyone
agrees that the general conducted the freest and fairest election in
Nigerian history, why do they deny him the right to also annul it?
After all, as military president, he did not pretend to be an elected
one. Besides, it is only a mad man who will not avoid a moving train
hurtling in his direction in the shape of the dark goggled one. In line
with our people’s saying that ‘he who runs away lives to fight another
day’, he stepped aside for a new experiment when the people were
shouting ‘crucify him’.

To underscore the
saying that ‘you don’t appreciate what you have until you lose it’,
hasn’t the country been the loser for the early departure of the
gap-toothed one? At a time when brother African presidents such as
Mobutu Sese Seko, Omar Bongo, and Gnassingbe Eyadema were laying good
examples for longevity in office for the likes of Hosni Mubarak and
Robert Mugabe, the general was harried out of office. Witness the peace
reigning in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the blooming democracy in
Zimbabwe and Egypt, and the ease with which the younger Eyadema
inherited power, and every patriot will root for the return of the
builder of the House on the Rock!