Northern elders for sale

They have no word for Asari Dokubo who threatens to levy war on the rest of the country if his tribe’s man, President Goodluck Jonathan, is not re-elected in 2015. Never mind that Jonathan hasn’t even declared the ambition yet. This collection of people calling themselves the Northern Elders Council (NEC) are unmindful of what […]

They have no word for Asari Dokubo who threatens to levy war on the rest of the country if his tribe’s man, President Goodluck Jonathan, is not re-elected in 2015. Never mind that Jonathan hasn’t even declared the ambition yet. This collection of people calling themselves the Northern Elders Council (NEC) are unmindful of what is happening in Port Harcourt where Governor Rotimi Amaechi and his supporters are being hounded on account of their political beliefs. These elders don’t give a damn about “the high corruption” being encouraged by a presidential “body language”. They are oblivious to the missing $10.8b or $12b or $20b that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has failed to account for. I have no hesitation believing the Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, when he said that $20b has been “arrested” from the treasury. Conversely, I don’t believe this government.
These elders are impervious to the well known commitment of President Jonathan to serve only one term. Even if there is no written agreement to prove that Jonathan promised to serve only one term, there is the record of his spoken word in Addis Ababa and Ankara where he excluded himself from the 2015 presidential election. This Elders Council doesn’t think it matters how many times a “Nigerian” president kneels down or moves from one church to another upstaging the pastors and delivering a tirade in long lasting monologues against other citizens. Who is it that actually behaves like he owns Nigeria: is it those who say live up to your word and go in 2015, or the one who promised to the whole world that he would serve only one term but is now preparing to renege as a proof of lack of honour and morality in national politics?
It is a measure of the political tolerance in the North that these old people could hold themselves up as elders of our increasingly impoverished masses. The fact is that the people of the North are angry with the provincial ambience of the Jonathan government. Whereas some northern elders are sitting down in Kaduna to principally champion Jonathan Presidency, the poor people from that section of the country are increasingly being profiled in mostly the southern part of the country as Boko Haram adherents. Last month, 32 persons of Northern origin were arrested and detained in inhumane conditions because they were suspected to belong to the Boko Haram sect.
The Northern Elders Council is nothing but a grouping of old men rooting for Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Fortunately, they lack organic connection, and are out of touch, with the thinking of the people of the North. They are paper politicians who haven’t the most tenuous connection to the northern voter. They are joined together by the love of lucre in the most trying moments of our own section of the country. Their arrow heads had been around and were probably relevant during the Shagari years, but not anymore. God knows, they have no following whatsoever in the North. They are on their own. They cannot deliver any votes. Occasional press statements affirming support for the current ruling cabal may fetch the much needed filthy hand outs but certainly not the desperately needed votes. They just want to gravitate towards today’s rulers and take their turns, much like pigs at the trough. And although they may serve as conduits to distribute stolen money as bribes at election time, there is no guarantee that the northern masses are up for sale like these self-declared elders. Just because you have grown grey hair and fortnightly trim your beard doesn’t make you anybody’s elder. These dangerous elders, whose wisdom diminishes with old age, are the North’s fifth columnists hoping to usher in the enemy so he could deliver the deadly blow.
But if the North rejected Jonathan in 2011, it has even greater reason to do so in 2015. The claim that the federal government has created one million, six hundred thousand jobs has not been borne out by facts on the ground. The misery index in the North has gone past the amber light. This level of insecurity in the North is unknown and unheard of. There can be no security under a government that actively promotes social injustice. The North is bent and twisted with the active encouragement by this government. Yet, you have a group of elders who are out of their mind taking money from the government to form a council to “deliver the North” to Jonathan. I fear for this brand of elders playing with fire. Instead of them to go and play with their great grandchildren, they continue to dance at the tip of the stage long after the drummer is gone. Don’t they fear a damaging fall? Don’t they fear a confrontation with the mass of hungry, poor, unemployed youths whose fortunes have further dwindled in the last few years?
The philosophy of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) approximates to the aspirations of the masses of the North. The NEF in particular is sufficiently angry but focused enough, like the common people of the North, to pursue that course that seeks to restore our cohesion, dignity and solidarity. We certainly reject a paid elders’ council that seeks to deliver us to a rapacious and villainous cabal that has put us at the receiving end in the last five years.