Nigeria Content Online

On Awolowo Road in S.W. Ikoyi, just around the corner from my house, a clown is directing the traffic.

Considering how
busy the road is, what with petrol stations, banks, shops, travel
agents and so on, he’s not doing a bad job either.

If not for him, one
might be tempted to conclude that the affairs of the nation are being
run by clowns. But that would be unfair to clowns. And we aren’t really
laughing either. I mean, because I worked from home on that day, I was
lucky to avoid the mayhem and chaos that President Goodluck Jonathan
caused in Lagos last week when he came to launch the hard copy of his
dialogues with his Facebook ‘friends’.

The Third Mainland
Bridge, critical artery of the city, was shut down for hours, but his
cheerleaders and apologists have been defending that monumentally
selfish act. Nor is it the first time Jonathan has shut Lagos down
because he is disturbing – sorry – gracing us with his presence, he’s
been here before with similarly disruptive results.

His Facebook
friends should tell him that Lagos is not a civil service town, and
people there have to work for their money: no work means no results,
and no results means no income. That applies almost as much to salaried
employees in private companies which have to deliver on the bottom line
as it does to the majority who are self-employed.

Even in Abuja,
where some peoples’ ‘job’ consists of dancing attendance on some
government person with an inflated sense of their own importance or
taking a daylong nap in government offices, there is still a large
majority that has to get to the office and do their work.

To be fair to
Jonathan though, even the most popular national leaders in these days
of crazed lone killers might hesitate to disdain the advice of security
agencies as, some 500 odd years ago in another country, a ruler –
Elizabeth I of England – disdained the advice of her own security
advisers not to venture among her rough and ready soldiers at Tilbury
with the famous words: “Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved
myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and security
in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects.” Well, despite that
bit of bravado, Elizabeth I did face an assassination attempt, and she
didn’t find it funny either. So even without former vice-president,
Atiku Abubakar’s observation (or warning?) that “Those who make
peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable” precautions
are only prudent for rulers who don’t merit loyal hearts or goodwill.
Still, one can only shudder at the level of incompetence that is unable
to provide security without such chaos and the cocoon of complacency
with which our president must have surrounded himself to let it happen
a second time within such a few short months.

As for Atiku –
although pro-Jonathan apparatchiks are up in arms demanding that he be
arrested for causing disaffection (and he, Atiku, is just dying to be
arrested so that he can acquire some official oppression and possibly
even a bit of prison ‘cred’ for something other than the whiff of
corruption that continues to dog him) – he isn’t really saying anything
new.

Former Chief
Justice Fatai-Williams quoted the same words of U.S. president John
Fitzgerald Kennedy in his lead judgment in the challenge brought by
then Senator Abraham Adesanya over the appointment of the head of the
2nd Republic’s election management body. Of course, lazy as we Naijas
are about these matters, the word ‘change’ has been substituted for
‘revolution’.

But before you get
to violent revolution, surely you must pass the peaceful change
impossibility test. Nigeria, preparing for elections, can hardly be
said to have reached that stage yet.

Even the ruling
Peoples Democratic Party, for all its reputation as a ‘nest of killers’
cannot be said to have made peaceful change impossible, despite the
unsporting pinpricks to which Atiku has been subjected since he emerged
as the consensus candidate among four northern aspirants within the PDP
(revisiting his re-admission to the PDP, removal of a favourable
opinion poll from the PDP website etc.). So, as ‘Baba’ himself might
say, everybody should calm down.

Nobody is revolutionising anything.

And as I would add,
especially not in the PDP! Outside that hothouse, whose leaders (to
adopt the words of British Liberal Democrats talking unguardedly but
truthfully about their Conservative counterparts) don’t seem to know
how ordinary people live, what with their four-hour shutdowns and $40
million transfers, civil society gathered to celebrate the living proof
that peaceful change remains possible in Nigeria with a reception for
Kayode and Bisi Fayemi, marking the former’s accession to the
governorship of Ekiti State.

It’s true that the
gubernatorial party had to arrive late due to Arik Air’s “operational
reasons”. Arik probably has serious people in charge of operations.
Maybe they ought to try something different.

Like sending in the clowns.