Nigeria Content Online

The
last time Imo State’s Governor Ikedi Ohakim caused a stir in Lagos it
was with the way his convoy brutalised a female driver: until last
Thursday, that is, when, on a courtesy visit to his Lagos State
counterpart, Babatunde Fashola, he declared that the menace of
kidnapping in the East should be blamed on the stock market collapse in
Lagos. He said:

“You may have
noticed the state of kidnapping in the southeast. One of the things I
need to tell you is that people came from Lagos to tell us in the east,
they called it Road Show, asking our people to buy shares in banks…
Our people sold their wares, some sold their warehouses and we were
captured by volcanic market …Unfortunately, the market crashed and
young boys got frustrated. We are trying to see how we can restore
them. Our people have lost too much money in most of these banks
stationed in Lagos.” Brilliant stuff, you’d agree. Misbehaving bankers
in the west leading to misbehaving youth in the east. I was still
relishing Mr. Ohakim’s Nobel-quality submission when something, or
rather somebody, caused me to lose my temper.

That person (going
by the name “Akika”), made a comment on the story, on the NEXT website.
Akika said: “Our problem as Igbo is due to the brainless worms that
lead us more than Federal Government’s marginalisation.” This got me
mad. Why would Akika be insinuating that the Igbo hold the monopoly on
questionable leadership in Nigeria, I wondered. I immediately realised
that Nigeria has subtly moved from a “my Mercedes is bigger than yours”
age to a “my governor is more inept / corrupt / greedy / stupid than
yours” age. We have found yet another intriguing avenue for our innate
competitiveness: which explains what Akika was trying to do.

Thankfully I was
not alone in my displeasure. As though to convince Akika that he didn’t
know what he was saying, Oyo State’s Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala called
a press conference in Ibadan the same day that Ohakim was revealing his
groundbreaking socioeconomic discovery in Lagos. Amongst other things,
Akala, in response to allegations by a former Oyo governor, Lam
Adesina, that Akala was seeking to assassinate him, said:

“What would I kill
Lam for? Of what use would killing him be for me? He can’t stand on my
way… The man is over 70 years. He smokes pipe and he is dying by
installment. Why would I accelerate his imminent death?” Now tell me,
is Akala an Igbo governor? The sameness of their actions and utterances
thus pushes me to imagine that when our governors gather for their
forum; beyond reminding themselves of how powerful they are, and beyond
plotting new ways of showing Nigerians how powerful they are, they also
find the time for special ‘self-development’/‘gubernatorial-conduct’
classes.

The next time you
hear of a Governors Forum meeting, maybe you shouldn’t make the mistake
of imagining that it is ALL about politics. Indeed it is mostly about
politics: self-preservation, self-interest. Take this as evidence: In
the dying days of the Yar’Adua administration, they spent all their
time preventing Vice President Jonathan from taking over power. In
these early days of the Jonathan administration they are spending all
their time telling President Jonathan that nobody is worthy of taking
power from him.

But these
governors are also smart enough to know that ‘self-development’ is as
important as self-preservation. Recall how they all made plans to be
Harvard alumni in 2009. Since that didn’t work out I imagine they found
ways of incorporating special tutorials into their intrigue-fuelled
forum sessions.

What this means is
that apart from plotting which one of them will take over from
President Jonathan in 2015 or 2019, they also spend time attending
special classes on topics ranging from “How to ‘DEAL WITH’ the media”
and “Foreign Banking for Beginners” to “British Virgin Islands or The
Isle of Man: How to Select a Tax Haven?”; “Talking before Thinking”;
and “How to Bargain with Award Peddlers”. And courtesy of former
governor Donald Duke, we now know that, “How to Rig Elections” is also
on the curriculum.

With the recent
statements of Ohakim and Akala you can clearly see the A-students in
the “Talking before Thinking” class. Ohakim also seems to be excelling
in the Personal Branding Class (see ‘Clean and Green’).

It is however the
“Social Networking for Governors” class I’m most interested in. Rumour
has it that no one in the class understood the difference between
Twitter and Facebook until the instructor explained it thus: “Twitter
is like the Ecological Fund; little room for ‘free styling’. Facebook
on the other hand is like a Security Vote. You can do a lot more with
it…”

PS. Governor Fashola of Lagos is a consistent F-student in the
“Talking before Thinking” class. If you know of any other governors
failing courses, please let me know.