Chief Mark Odu
BY M A C ODU
I have followed Professor Wole Soyinka with keen interest since we met at Maximum Security Prison in Kirikiri at Nigeria’s Sunset in 1968. He had been detained by the military who did not appreciate his nationalistic concerns for his home country. I revere him for his capacity to rise above discomfiture of detention to craft one of his memorable works on the floor above mine at the detention facility, The Man Died. I had gone on a mission to destroy Jebba Bridge as Captain of Suicide Squad of Biafra and failed. I was arrested and detained.
I had read Kongi’s Harvest, which was one of his best plays in foresighted depiction of Nigerian Condition. He was certainly like his contemporary and perhaps equal, Professor Chinualumogu Achebe, a visionary of The Nigerian Condition following with all wits at his disposal the trends of society with sharp predictions of its outcome. Alas, both of them left the turf of their birth when they were needed in situ to drive processes of change.
I read Professor Soyinka’s work above in The (Nigerian) Guardian of Sunday February 8, 2015 and made effort to follow his argument for change in Nigerian leadership with the upcoming elections now pushed forward on account of security concerns inter alia. He found a crying need for change of leadership from President Goodluck Jonathan on premises that corruption had risen to unbearable levels that should necessitate a change of direction in favour of General Muhammadu Buhari in spite of his fears that the general could be a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. I was impressed with his development of the logic for his position save for its lack of data which I debit to his distance from home and reliance on opinions of nationalists familiar with General Buhari. I have similar friends. He based his argument on the blameworthiness of President Jonathan for ills of corruption that had done immense harm to our development trajectory and which had to be checked by change of leadership.
He did not allocate any credit for institutions that had independent life which Jonathan had put in place. He did not give any credit for achievements of Jonathan in respecting norms of democracy. No credit was allocated to gains in power, infrastructure and agriculture with appropriate technocrats in charge. He did not see that General Olusegun Obasanjo’s regime hit an abyss of corruption although he nailed him as a failure. He failed to lend appropriate weight to the fact that the civil service with all its distortion through history was inherited by Jonathan without significant changes to dramatis personae. It has been so since the military dispensed with the revered service that ended with Chief Philip Asiodu, and Mr. Allison Ayida era under Murtala Mohammed undue radicalism. The public service has since been occupied by predators whose objectives have become acquisition of wealth with civil power. Policies that do not accommodate the interests of civil servants are sent crashing no matter how beneficial to the Nigerian state. It would take substantially longer for well thought out policies and programmes of a president to materialise under this condition with moderate persuasion from the president. I agree that the president has been slow. But he has been subject of typhoons from competing forces for the national till.
Jonathan may have eleven jets. His surrogates have their own comforts in a lax regime to build in theirs. I do not see Jonathan sitting in two jets at any one trip. Our “technocrats” in his service must be to blame for evident profligacy. We know of one of his aides who would not even be at her duty post since she was mightily favoured. The oversight crew at the National Assembly looks the other way since they flip over to award themselves emoluments and trimmings that compete favourably with the earnings of president of the world’s largest economy.
Jonathan as a minority commenced his transformation agenda that has shown positive gains in development yields; and had dared the recent restructuring of the Nigerian sociopolitical system with The National Conference. It has not been completed. I firmly believe that on it would rest the chance of survival of Nigeria as a nation state if we could create opportunities for self determination of at least zones of the country through True Federalism. A situation where parts are held down by ineptitudes in other parts under quota sharing is the real tragedy we have suffered in our path to national progress. No group under Natural Law should be prevented from charting own course for development and pursuing that course the best way the group thinks appropriate without slowing others down. This to my mind is critical for survival of the Nigerian nation state. Our legislators are comfortable with their plans to move up the ladder of power under prevailing conditions since their eyes are trained permanently on national resources and how they may deep their fingers in there for satisfying their vain imaginings of comfort and relevance. I strongly feel that Jonathan should be left to drive his restructuring agenda to conclusion.
General Buhari is anachronistic. He is in my age group. He is out of date. He cannot fit in with reigning age of technocrats. He is too rigid for this time of leadership with sound reasoning. He may be a stickler for discipline but he has to have resilience to quickly learn Hi-tech demands of contemporary world civilization. He is not so healthy. He has rigid principles of keeping his distance from half of humanity. He may be a pure spirit who has come this time to cleanse the world of corruption. But he has to set his foot on common earth we all thread. He may be a great man but three different electoral epochs have rejected him. He and his contemporaries placed a glass ceiling over their immediate relations and did not succeed remarkably in bringing them to an awareness of the indispensability of Western Education. His people are in worsening levels of deprivation in spite of long years of control of the national till by their own. Perhaps Boko Haram war is best treated with Federalism.
Professor Wole Soyinka, I revere you no less in spite of this variation in stance. I strongly believe Jonathan should be re-elected. With these I urge you to reconsider your stand as a Minstrel of no mean stature and function.
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