The character of the progressives

Even with all the escorts, their convoys have to tear through rush hour traffic jams like area boys, siren blaring like celebrated corpses on the last ride to the cemetery. You know them by their empty titles – dishonourable honourables; distinguishingly extinguished; state execu-thieves! Even when they are tired, they dare not retire, they must […]

Even with all the escorts, their convoys have to tear through rush hour traffic jams like area boys, siren blaring like celebrated corpses on the last ride to the cemetery. You know them by their empty titles – dishonourable honourables; distinguishingly extinguished; state execu-thieves! Even when they are tired, they dare not retire, they must recycle themselves until they become organic manure. The mandate they stole is their key to unquestioned access to the common wealth.
In Arewaland, we have a name for them; we call them dagutu something akin to butterflies masquerading as birds. They think that the ‘honour’ bestowed on them is earned; unwary that the people treat them with the disdain they treat mad men where two roads meet. But with the bulbous ego of the agama lizard, they sit at high tables grinning from ear to ear as their egos are massaged.
Today, they are called progressives, an adjectival misnomer. They neither know progress nor understand its path. They are never tired of buying empty titles from dead institutions just to fill the emptiness upstairs.
The dagutu does not understand that true power is service and so uses it as a foot mat. The dagutu is a man who does not understand honour. When a governor has a social media police, haunting and hounding his social media critics, he has trampled on authority. A governor who queues behind the unwashed masses during elections returns to trample upon them after being declared winner!
A governor of this ilk recently descended from the highest place of honour to the gutters when he stopped his convoy to ‘arrest’ a street hawker. He went a step further into the slime and grime by telling the woman who confessed to being a widow to ‘go and die’! This progressive governor stood by officiating at the humiliation of a woman even though he is a widower and father of a young bride. As the poor woman grovelled under his feet begging for mercy, he turned his cowardly back against her as her means of livelihood is seized. If he saw an armed robber, he would run faster than he did years back at the Delta explosion. There is no manliness in humiliating a widow! Only the lowest of the low do it. To be counted among them is to lose the moral right to be respected in society. It is to put a big question mark on what it takes to be a man and on sanity.
Progressive governors do not build houses; they demolish historical buildings to get the allocation to build their own houses or give land to their supporters. Progressive governors of our day and age have nothing to show as dividends of democracy. They do not create jobs but outlaw trades that existed before they were born. They do not build, they burn. These governors claimed to have degrees from foreign institutions, but in the words of Professor Adeniyi, they may have passed through the walls of these institutions, the institutions did not pass through them.
From London through Paris, Moscow through New York, petty trading is recognized. In most cities of Europe, communes have alternate market days as a means of encouraging people to bond and small businesses to grow. Even parking for residents is temporarily suspended until the markets close. This way both culture and commerce thrive. The goons that ruin our nation have a different notion. They must run the small-scale business aground so as to pave way for the big time lobbyists who exist only to hit and run. Small-scale businesses are the engine of growth and its proprietors have seen children through first and second degrees without help from governments. Why elected officials see them as nuisance still beats imagination.
The constitution guaran-tees right to life, legitimate businesses fulfil that right. To destroy them is to pave way for social dislocation and insecurity. With characters like these calling the shots as governors little wonder nothing has changed. Little wonder what dominates political discourse are none issues and inanity. If these are the progressives, long live the conservatives! Oshiomhole and his gang need to enrol in the school of governance. What more, public office seekers need psychiatric evaluation, what we see from federal to the local level shows that there are mad men in exalted positions.