President Buhari, barbarians are at the gate

Nigeria our beloved country is currently hurtling irredeemably towards the precipice. Predators of all kinds are tearing mercilessly at its vital organs aiming to decapitate and ultimately bring it down.

The local predators have rendered vast swathes of the country insecure, killing at will, kidnapping almost effortlessly anyone they wished from the high and low for huge ransom payments. Groups of individuals with a view to achieving one pecuniary thing or the other are raising the ante calling and acting to mindlessly tear up the country’s fabric in a process whose fulfilment they will not be spared its disastrous consequences.

Watching all these with their eagle eye vision, the foreign predators from a vantage helicopter position are seeking pressure points and creating more with a view to weakening them further in order to cash in. They see and smell blood and salivate at the prospect of a feast of rich pickings from the expected dismemberment at last of a Nigeria that has defied all their prognosis and clandestine attempts to bring it down. 

If governments at federal and state levels are aware of these existential threats to our collective well-being, their attitude and reactions have been pitifully pathetic. At the federal level where the main responsibility for protecting the integrity of the nation rests, a combination of lethargy, hubris, cluelessness, condescending indifference, incompetence and contempt has been the unfortunate template of reaction at the rearing head of insecurity and threats to the nation. Indeed the administration seems more interested at self-preservation and protection of the privileges and convenience of the luxuries of office for its few beneficiaries than in doing more to preserve the collective whole of Nigerians from current uncertainties and the looming dangers ahead.

At the state levels where governors are virtual dictators and emperors, in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, it is more of absentee governance and jostling for the next level of political office in the next circle of elections than anything else.

The same attitude is observed at the National Assembly which is ironically the bastion of people power. Indeed to judge from how the National and State assemblies conduct themselves on issues that pertains to the well-being of Nigerians, one gets the unmistakeable impression that the people are farthest from their minds or consideration.

Governance at all levels and across the country has now become a matter of symbolic ostentation, vacuous flamboyance and dubious entitlement by a self-absorbed elite bent on perpetuating themselves by all means necessary even at the expense of the nation which they swore to serve, protect and preserve. 

Majority of Nigerians do not see or feel government in the benign way it should, impacting positively on their lives. To them governance is about corruption, failed promises, taxes, levies, price increases, poor or non-existent services, lack of protection and security of lives, arbitrariness, inconvenience by reckless convoys and blockage of public roads, excessively loud sirens and all the negative things that make their lives a daily fare of frustration, despair and hopelessness. In the midst of all this, many Nigerians seeing government as distant and irrelevant to their lives try to find ways to cope with and create the opportunities and happiness they desire for themselves by dint of their own initiatives and hard work. And in this, they have come to develop and maintain a silent but deeply rooted contempt for the men of power seeing them as scum and never do wells with forked tongues.

Others however are not willing to take their alienation with such stoic equanimity. A growing number from among the neglected class of Nigerians are resorting to self-help measures striking devastatingly at the nation through such acts like banditry, kidnapping, cultism, insurgency, terrorism and other acts of social dislocation and willing to go to all lengths to perpetuate it as a way of life in their own justification.

Government at all levels in the country should be wary at the ever widening gap of perception between it and the governed. Today outside of Aso Villa and the National Assembly at the Federal level and the Government Houses and state assemblies, effective government and governance hardly exists. It is into that widening gulf that non state actors are brazenly muscling in on endangering our collective existence. 

And watching this mix of corruption, incompetence and indifference on the part of government in the face of violence, insurgency and general insecurity perpetrated by non-state actors all with a potential to engulf us all, are foreign predators silently and ominously massing at our gates rubbing their palms gleefully, drooling and ready to pounce to make hay as they had done in countries that showed the similar lack of indiscretion, introspection and enlightened self-interest to protect their collective national interest in the past.

To put it in proper perspective and bring it real home, the recent EndSARS protests and the subsequent tendentious reporting of it by the Cable News Network (CNN) as well as the busy body action of the United Kingdom parliament in debating the matter should be considered in this regard. They are not actions that occurred on the spur of the moment or out of some noble, humanitarian considerations for the plight of alienated Nigerians as claimed. They are actions intended to achieve through the sleight of hand the long held agenda of dismemberment of Nigeria which have been attempted severally without success. These are actions that are uncannily reminiscent of the series of choreographed events by the same institutions that set the stage for the eventual intervention and destruction of Iraq, Libya, Syria and others. By the reckoning of the foreign predators Nigeria is next in the line of dominoes to fall and at no time is this agenda ripe than now.

In this regard the barbarians now poised at our gates have Nigeria all mapped out. They are not just studying current developments in our country keenly; they are clandestinely helping to create the favourable situations that will enable them control the popular narrative conducive to their eventual intervention either directly or through proxies. 

Having test run this agenda with EndSARS, their next major target in the timeline is the 2023 elections and the road leading to it. Between now and then, series of actions will take place to cast uncertainty on the elections which may likely not hold or will be controversial if it comes to hold at all. 

Our political elite absorbed now at jostling for the next circle of elections in 2023 would do well for themselves as well as the country to consider this. If a group of young men could successfully hold the country to a stand still for over one week with EndSARS, and insurgents and terrorists could successfully carryout the threat of preventing people from accessing their farms, then one can be sure that these same groups may well be capable of disrupting the 2023 elections acting wittingly or otherwise on the clandestine orchestrations of foreign interests bent on dismembering Nigeria to our collective regret. 

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