President Bola Ahmed Tinubu
It is a crime to keep silent in the face of injustice. Nigeria has been turned into a citadel of injustice. We hear the lamentations of the hapless victims of this injustice every day. We watch Nigeria, our beloved country, going down the dangerous political cliff because of and to satisfy the ambition of one man who epitomizes the injustice in the land.
The state of our nation today demands that nobody who cares for a better Nigeria, particularly for the good of our younger generation and is in the position to denounce the injustice in the land, has any right to keep silent now as we await the decision of the election tribunal.
Keeping silent now does not mean being unbiased. There is no middle point between truth and falsehood, good and evil, justice and injustice. Associating with the one means dissociating with the other and vice-visa! Continue Reading…
Keeping silent in the face of injustice means taking sides with the purveyors of the injustice! As a Catholic priest, I cannot keep silent in the face of the looming disaster that is building up as a result of injustice.
On June 19, 2003, the Vanguard newspaper published Chinedum Nwajuba’s article titled, The ABC of Vooddo Politics. In that article, the author said:
“The tragedy of our contemporary society is the eclipse of the Church and of course our universities. The Church for morals and the universities for knowledge! No society rises above her universities. As for the Church, these days, even Bishops have joined solidarity visits to Aso Rock as in the Abacha era. Voodoosim is becoming all embracing.”
What I want to say here is not something new. Rather, I want to recall the caution I gave in one of my books, After the Madness Called Election 2003, in August 2003.
But before I reproduce that caution, I wish to say that if the Church had all along been living under some disabling eclipse as stated by Nwajuba and so failed to live up to the degree of the moral integrity expected of her in the midst of Nigeria’s political conundrum, the savagery that ruled the nation in the name of elections 2023 jolted the Church from her slumber, granted that she has been sleeping while the Nigerian boat kept sinking.
As for our universities, when we hear of some university professors being the regular architects of election rigging in the country, it suffices to say that there is no future for our children if, for any reason under the sun, Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s electoral coup is allowed by the judiciary to stand.
The judiciary remains our last hope. And that is why all eyes are on the judiciary.
Hereunder is what I said in 2003 would happen in this country if we continue to allow greedy, selfish, unpatriotic and evil politicians to bulldoze their way to the topmost ladder of the nation’s leadership through election rigging. I said the following as a remark in substantiation of the above statement of Chinedum Nwajuba:
“What is at stake is the fact that we, the common Nigerians, are being tutored by our leaders to believe that democracy has neither principles nor rules and regulations to guide its practice. The danger is that we are being made to believe that we are not worth a dime in our leaders’ scale of value. Continue Reading…
“The tragedy of it all is that our leaders, after introducing lawlessness as a political dogma which every one of us who wishes to live in Nigeria has to embrace, turned round to cast aspersions on those who are victims of their excesses.
“Lastly, what has endangered the survival of this and other democracies in Nigeria is the wrongful belief that people who are elected by no one can be enthroned without qualms once they have been able to conquer and silence us through the illegal deployment of the army and the police to compel us to submission.
“The boiling issue is that the president and his men have introduced a very treacherous dimension into election rigging. They have turned political elections into a full-blown war against the people who do not agree with them. And in this war, all you need in order to conquer are instruments of terror.
“You need guns, the army and the police. If the number of the army and the policemen you need is inadequate, you can create your own army and the police simply by placing order for more military and police uniforms.
“When those uniforms arrive, you put them on a good number of political hoodlums, give them very dangerous guns, and let them loose on the people in the name of peacekeepers. They will do a clean job of putting terrorism in the place of the people’s power. And then, at the end, you will emerge a landslide winner.
“As far as this new trend in elections is concerned, the president and his men have made it clear to us that working hard as a leader, keeping electoral promises to the people, performing well in office, building up goodwill among the people and so forth are no longer good enough to make the people elect you again.
“Instead of wasting your time trying to work hard, keep electoral promises, perform well in office and build goodwill among the people, all you need is to seize the party structure by appointing those who will do your bidding from the cradle to the top, from the wards to the national level.
“Having accomplished this feat, the next important thing to do is to ensure that you keep whatever money that comes in terms of statutory allocation, do not pay workers’ salaries until elections and the merriments that go with landslide victories are over.
“While workers starve to death, dish out this money in hundreds of thousands to those who will protect your political interest come rain come shine.
“At stake are the pervasion of justice and the subversion of the people’s will. And if there is any Nigerian who does not yet understand that the only solution to violent protests and possible disintegration of the country is the practice of good governance and the enthronement of justice, that person must be naïve.
“No amount of intimidation will stop people from protesting as long as some few people in this country continue to run a country of about 200 million people as if they are running their personal estate.”
Once more, I said all of the above in August 2003, that is, 20 years ago.
Today, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his political cohorts have perfected all that is awful, brutal and morally reprehensible in the game of politics and reduced Nigeria to the butt of all the jokes.
All eyes are on the judiciary!
If the judges fail to pronounce a just judgement, Nigerians, particularly our youths, are prepared to resist that because if it is allowed to stand it will be the end of democracy and the beginning of absolute totalitarianism in Nigeria. It will also likely be the beginning of the end of Nigeria as a geographical and political entity.
This is the singular opportunity that the members of the Presidential Election Tribunal have to lift the Nigerian judiciary from the mud of corruption and infamy and in the process print their names in gold. The whole world is watching with flooded interest. Continue Reading…
Rev. Fr. John Odey
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