Conspiracy theories’ new definitions
It is sometime in 2006, the Wizard of Ota has just seen the worst handwriting on the wall – there will be no tenure elongation aka Third Term. So, he returns to the northern mafia to give him a successor. They present him a long list. He calls for background check including health status. He […]
It is sometime in 2006, the Wizard of Ota has just seen the worst handwriting on the wall – there will be no tenure elongation aka Third Term. So, he returns to the northern mafia to give him a successor. They present him a long list. He calls for background check including health status. He picks the one most unlikely to last but calls that candidate to crosscheck and conscious that even medical certificates can be procured at Oluwole. He calls the anointed in waiting and asks him to pick a running-mate. The first choice had stealing’ (do not use the ‘C’ word) hanging on his neck. Last minute, the candidate picks Ebele, aka reverse Midas.
The Wizard knows the likely scenario, but he has satisfied the mafia and so returns to his convent watchtower. Angry at the choice, the northern Mafiosi makes an ingenious back-up plan. Now custodians of Professor Oyewole’s crystal ball with which he predicted that a certain Shamgar the son of Anat would succeed the Wizard in 1979, they raised and armed an insurgency to make the seat too hot for anyone not ‘born to rule’. To ensure that it can withstand even the strength of a chest thumbing army that decimated Charles Taylor and routed Foday Sankoh, they test run the insurgency under their own son.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Conspiracy Theory I. If you subscribe to this, you are likely to sleep through our national morass without valium. However if you wonder how an insurgency could turn against itself, please call your psychiatrist, you are not a fully converted conspiracy theorist.
Once the northern son dies in office, the insurgency is activated full throttle – bombs exploding everywhere – start with churches after all this is supposed to be first, a religious war to annihilate the Christians. But then for decoy, bomb out mosques, target liberal Imams, then bow up markets, bus stations- name it!
If the nation rallies, redraw the plan for maximum international attention. What about slaughtering male school children? Now, that should make headlines. But wait children do not go to school in the heartland of almajirai, so change tactics, tell the world that over 200 female kids have been kidnapped from their schools while writing WAEC. We all know that northerners don’t like books, in fact, that is why the home-grown insurgency is Boko Haram – literally – book is sin! So, who will believe that shebang?
Next act, use social to publicise your self-inflicted wound. See how an underrated people can prevent a PhD president from enjoying his regional mandate? Play their card, strategically leak a Chibok visit. If they buy it, they would prepare to kill him there, but fly the President to Paris instead. Deny the report and ridicule the media, then allude to it later, a presidential visit has never been known to stop halt insurgency. In fact, it could have exacerbated disintegration. Imagine if the president, like the GOC had been attacked, it would have started World War III.
As the Wizard of Ota told hecklers at the scene of the Ikeja Cantonment disaster – I don’t have to be here. Presidents are not obliged to go to war zones, except there is guarantee that the visit would resolve outstanding issues, 20,000 starving soldiers can do the trick if they get the marching orders and the required morale booster.
At any rate, aren’t governors supposed to be the CSO of their states, even in a state of emergency? If 200 girls were missing under a state of emergency, blame the governor. He must have hidden them to embarrass the president. Mama Peace reminds us how nobody asked Yardy to #BringBackOurSoldiers killed in Naija-Delta? Nobody said #StopTheKilling when the Ife were fighting the Modakeke or vice versa. When 20 bodies floated on the Ezu River; when the Aguleri were slaughtering the Umuleri, no president was called to visit? When baby factories were being unfurled from Owerri to Okitipupa, nobody invented a hashtag to stop the practice.
Conspiracy theorists have the cure-all panacea and it works better than Ovularia’s archetypal Panadol – obliterate Lugard’s contraption totally. That way, those who have lost out at becoming presidents can be president of a country of four villages, then their wives can become perm secs and their sons – governors. Leave the haramists to their schemes. In the meantime, let the stealing continue. Theft is not a crime here, if you doubt me, don’t just take the president’s distinction for it, listen to the new Ekpo Nta of ICPC who at a 2012 workshop in Katsina, identified corruption as the cause of Naija’s poverty. Over the weekend, he told engineers he has found Michael West. Difference between stealing and corruption is – corruption is a punishable crime, but stealing is a way of life.