Opinion: Saraki: Kawu Modibbo's fantasy. By Abdulkadir Bolakale
PUBLIC commentators are remarkably good listeners, great learners and very humble species. Usually driven by objectivity and never assuming to know everything, the public commentator will never dabble into a matter where he or she is bereft of the basic facts.
Instructively, anytime there is a strong reason to doubt, their unmistakable traits of humility and readiness to learn come into play. Invariably, this helps in asking the right questions and treating the information so obtained, sacredly. Obviously, it is this very part that separates a thorough-bred journalist from a mercenary, paid to rein-in someone, good or bad.
Graciously, the media anywhere in the world knows its own, including when an opinion is aimed at defacing the facts of a matter. While many, out of personal choice and conviction, will not compromise their integrity for filthy lucre, it is not in doubt that a few public commentators have achieved legendary status doing such dirty jobs. After reading Isaq Kawu Modibbo's opinion of Thursday March 6, 2014, in the Vanguard newspaper, last week, I can only but sympathise with him. The opinion showed how lowly in reasoning and the extent hate, especially for the Sarakis and the administration of Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed in Kwara, has driven him to the cliff of insanity.
More than anything else, it exposed his mental state and the havocs the gourmand spirit has done to his sense of objectivity. For, anyone who has followed Kwara politics right from the days of the late Dr. Olusola Saraki, the Waziri of Ilorin, whose openness and generosity earned him tremendous goodwill and support, to today, would easily notice Modibbo's hideous hypocrisy and economy of facts and figures. Curiously, despite the fact that even the blind can easily decipher that Modibbo shoulders the discomfort of a jaundiced mind, he still expects people to trust and believe him to know what he is saying.
Ordinarily, one would have ignored him knowing that such lies hardly stand the test of time, but for the danger of misleading unsuspecting persons. This explains why I have found this exercise necessary as well as expedient, particularly in the face of his sheer delusion and reckless audacity to dress falsehood in a saintly garb.
Really, it cuts like a knife that Modibbo could queue behind men who are short of their bests; men who have rabid taste for greed and treachery, but contempt for people-focused policies and accountability, to attack the person of Dr Bukola Saraki, who as governor of Kwara State, single-handedly opened up and built the solid foundation that has engendered development in the state at all levels, today. Though Modibbo's behaviour is remotely an affliction of those on a vengeance mission, one would have expected him to dignify his medium and the characters he is defending by separating facts from fiction, as well as do well to balance his arguments with facts that are verifiable.
Indeed, that Modibbo did not see anything wrong with a band of politicians, a government and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, that have combined to maroon the nation in poverty and hopelessness, wanting to continue ruling the nation shows his pitiable poor reading of the mood in Nigeria.
In the last four years, the image of Nigeria has been on a free fall, following the lack of willpower to address head-on, the growing corrupt practices of government officials, accounting for the bestial treatment of Nigerians abroad and discontent in the land.
It is even worse to think that President Goodluck Jonathan, who surrounded himself with oldies, tired and over-recycled men and women, who are part of the morass the nation has been battling with, and who, after three years in office, is yet to have a clue where he is taking the country to, holds a passionate attraction to Modibbo. This, perhaps, is why I took pity on Modibbo after reading his article.
For, if the PDP leadership in Abuja, yes, Abuja, since PDP is dead in Kwara, had the ability to make things happen or were convinced that they posed any threat to the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Kwara State, the party would not need a rally where the President, the Senate President and all hangers-on, would abandon urgent matters of national interest, including but not limited to the growing unemployment, massacre of innocent Nigerians by Boko Haram, and corruption, among others, looking it directly in the face, to be in Kwara. It all attests to the reason things are bizarrely bad at the federal level.
Kwarans are peace-loving people and will not welcome the rascality of imposition common in PDP. Regrettably, Modibbo lacked a good sense of history to know how the average Kwarans and by extension, Nigerians behave, to delude himself into interpreting the presence of those who came to have a glimpse of the President to mean endorsement.
Curiously, he forgot, too, that no one would have resisted the band of cultural dancers that came in tow with the President and the Senate President, more so, when there were lots of pecks and monetary kickbacks for the over-hyped crowd most of whom were rented.
Probably, Modibbo was too blinded to forget that history has never recorded one case where the house owner left home because a stranger arrived through the back door. As always the case, it is the stranger who would try everything within his or her powers to win the friendship of the house owner, which was what the PDP did by bringing in leaders that are so disconnected from the people, to, for once, make them feel loved.
Yet no one is fooled, not even by the perfectly rehearsed and well-practiced legendary deceit craft put up by the PDP in the said rally. Not when it is still too fresh the hurried manner these individuals discarded with a bill and moves aimed at introducing a monthly stipend for the unemployed youths across the country.
Really, for those who know the PDP and its anti-people policies, that rally could be likened to a passenger arriving at the departure hall of an airport after the aircraft is airborne. The PDP delegation to Kwara State arrived too late, for, already Kwara people have made their choices.
Not from the likes of Muhammed Dele Belgore who, nudged on by unbridled governorship ambition, abandoned ship to the PDP, or Senator Gbemisola Saraki, who would not care about what happens to the man, her own father of blessed memory, who gave her a political lifeline without having to put up a fight, or Bilikisu Gambari, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq or the late former Governor Lawal's son, Abdulhakeem, all desperately seeking rehabilitation. Understandably, the PDP having the stomach for gangsterism, lawlessness and imposition, it was no surprise it opened its doors for these poor fellows, who would rather make war than wait patiently for their time.
Talk is cheap. Efficiency is not in words, but in action. Not in billboards but in how it directly affects the people.
Mr. ABDLKADIR BOLAKALE, a public analyst, wrote from Ilorin, Kwara State.
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