WHAT A PRESIDENT By Jesutega Onokpasa

With a president clearly more concerned for his cousins in Maradi than for his compatriots from Makurdi and, a Commander-in-Chief more invested in the worldview of the elders of the Sahel than in the welfare of his electors from Sapele, we have been invited and, by no less an authority than our Presidency, itself, to finally turn our backs on an already woefully failed and entirely floundered Nigerian project.

Face it or not, the Giant of Africa has become a shame to the Mother Continent and an embarrassment to black people everywhere. Our country, once the Great Black Hope, is the poverty capital of the world, whose President remains invalided to a Stone Age approach to animal farming. Now, thanks to the comedy of errors of a government of progressives who are religiously contemptuous of progress, Nigeria has all but decomposed into an animal farm where less than two million Fulani herdsmen and their foreign collaborators, are more equal than 200 million authentic indigenes, undisputed aborigines and bonafide citizens.

Our President, while he was yet the toast of Obama and Cameron, and Welby and Amanpour, and CNN and, all the other stomach-churning hypocrites now conveniently silent, clearly too embarrassed to confront the inconvenient truth of the colosal mistake they made in Buhari, had warned us that if we do not destroy corruption, corruption will destroy Nigeria. Yet while under His Excellency’s smell-no-evil-from-my-kinsmen nose, Godswill Akpabio leverages his closeness to those that matter at the Villa to keep NDDC firmly in his and, their pockets, as corruption, with all its diabolical implications, has never been more rife in the land!

While the clinically unhinged Nnamdi Kanu and his degenerate minions paint the Southeast red in the blood of our cops and litter the streets of Igboland with the corpses of their own people, our President denies promises from his own mouth; refutes undertakings of his party; belittles efforts on the part of his staunchest supporters; and, tells the rest of us to go to hell and burn to ashes.

While Gani Adams believes the time for restructuring has passed and, even as Sunday Igboho and his rabble claim center stage in Oduduwa’s legacy, our President grants the rarest of interviews at which he pedestrianises responses to questions of existential implication while addressing the most populous of the black nations as one would instruct a kindergarten class.

Bola Tinubu, political entrepreneur emeritus of Lagos, had tagged President Goodluck Jonathan “clueless” and, in unmistakable hate speech, as just another “drunken Ijaw fisheman”, hence fought tooth and nail to rid us of him for the second coming of the messianic Muhammadu Buhari. Now Tinubu wants us to make him the best President Nigeria will ever have as his reward for giving us the worst President Nigeria has ever had! Only in Nigeria!

June 12 was only a few days ago and was marked, once more in Abuja, with even more insult and further injury to our collective psyche by those who strove hardest to truncate it. MKO Abiola once opined on the impossibility of barbing someone’s hair in their absence. In the Republic of The Evil Forest it would seem all too easy for your children’s very heads to be entirely cut off even before they are born!

I never thought the day would come when even someone as committedly unimaginative as Olusegun Obasanjo would acknowledge that Nigeria’s unity is not by force. But then, I also never thought the day would dawn when, at my age, I would consider permanently relocating abroad before those whose loyalties clearly lie across the border would had entirely destroyed my country.

Onokpasa, a lawyer, wrote from Warri.