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Many
forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and
woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been
said by Winston Churchill, that democracy is the worst form of government
except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Ioseb Jughashvili was NEVER in the Imperial Russian military. As a matter of
fact he dodged serving the Tsar’s armies during the Great War against the German
invader. His role during the Russian Revolution, Russian Civil War, and
Polish-Soviet War was as a Bolshevik political commissar, not as a soldier.
However, that lack of soldiering did not prevent him as Joseph Stalin from
being the cruellest dictator of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, he
gradually removed ALL opposition to his rule in what became known at the Great
Purge of the Soviet Communist party. And it was at that point that Soviet
Russia finally slid into a full blown dictatorship.

You see, the most successful societies of the last two thousand years have been
almost without doubt Imperial Rome, Great Britain and the United States. All
three of them have had one thing in common, a vibrant opposition. The Roman
emperors, far reaching though their powers may have been, had the Senate as a
weight to check their excesses. Britain was set on its way to becoming a global
superpower after the nobles curtailed King John’s power by forcing him to sign
the Magna Carta. Some may even argue that Oliver Cromwell’s attempts to kill
off opposition during his reign, and the subsequent frowning on opposition with
the return of the monarchy actually sparked off the migrations, which lead to
English domination of what became the United States. We all know about the
constant rancour in the US Congress.

The underlying point here is the importance of a vibrant opposition.

Tolu Ogunlesi, a writer at NEXT has received many thinly veiled threats ever
since his article appeared on Wednesday criticising the rather silly statements
made by our president last Saturday. On my Facebook page, I also criticised
those statements, and I have had a lot of vitriol (and Bible verses) flung in
my direction. It all reminds me of a statement once credited to the current Osun
State governor, Oyinlola, when on receiving new decampees to the PDP he
enjoined other people to “stop playing politics of opposition and join the
winning party”.

There are two points that can be brought out here; Nigerians generally do not
know how to take criticism. Nigerians generally do not have ideals. All of this
is displayed in our political class.

On the first point, I called for the president to resign on a radio show on
Wednesday morning. Before getting to the office, people had already called my
boss to ask if that was NEXT’s official position on this matter. No it is not.
It is MY opinion, and I am entitled to it.

For the sake of clarity, the only printable word I can think of to describe
President Jonathan’s conduct since the October 1 affair is goof. And ‘goof’ is
the only word I can think of to describe a lot of things that he has done since
just about the time he became substantive president. I believe, and strongly
too, that the President, Federal Republic of Nigeria ought to be a strong
character who knows his left from his right. Sadly the man currently occupying
the office is neither, and it has shone through in a lot of his decisions. If
he were stronger, a lot of the flux around Abuja would not be happening.

Again, no matter how you cut it, the president is the Commander-in-Chief of our
security forces. A failure of our security personnel is a failure of the
president, and the buck stops at his desk. If he cannot call them to heel, then
he is not fit for the purpose, and he should leave the stage.

What
we had on Saturday was one of the most embarrassing incidents ever, where the
President publicly exonerated the ONLY group to have claimed responsibility for
Friday’s atrocity BEFORE the security agencies had settled down to begin investigating
anything. That action alone prejudiced the investigation before it started
because the security agencies would not want to contradict their boss.

Then
the subsequent actions of those agencies do smell of a political witch hunt
against the campaign of Ibrahim Babangida. One must wonder at the sudden
efficiency of our security agencies in catching people with text messages when
Aba is full of kidnappers and has been full of them for going on two years, yet
there has not been one prosecution, not to talk of conviction.

The point must be made here that as far as I am concerned, IBB has no business
being our president or in government ever again, and if Nigeria were a normal
country where there was justice, he probably not be in the position he is
now. But as things stand, IBB has NEVER
seen the inside of any Nigerian court much less been convicted, so in reality,
and according to the Nigerian Constitution he has EVERY right to run for
office. It then becomes the duty of Nigerians to go out on election day and
vote against him. This attempt to use underhand tactics to get him out of the
presidential race is unseemly, and is a method that could be used in future to
shackle the opposition.

You see, in any normal environment there are two extreme ends of the political
spectrum, the extreme conservative end, which is also known as the far right,
and the extreme liberal end also known as the far left. Typically, people on
the far right see any form of change as a bad thing and are opposed to it, while
people on the far left tend to always want to change things. But then those are
stereotypes. In reality, there is no human being who is entirely conservative,
neither is there anyone who is entirely liberal. What you have are people who
are more conservative than liberal, or more liberal than conservative. With
that in mind, it only makes sense that at any point in time, not everyone will
agree on the same points and we will have opposition. Opposition IS ESSENTIAL
to the survival of democracy.

Unfortunately in our country, what we have is a culture of the big man always
being right. Hence someone like Uche Chukwumerije can yo-yo between three or
four parties in less than a year and see nothing wrong with it. People who have
possibly killed other people on behalf of the PDP in my home state (Edo) have
all swung over to the AC simply because the current governor is from that
party, and trust me, if he is kicked out in the next elections, all of these
people would sashay back to the PDP like it’s nothing new, while those who say
things as they are suddenly become enemies.