Cowards in Power 

By 

Wada Nas  

wada@gamji.com

http://www.gamji.com/wada.htm

 

Professor Jerry Gana, the Information and National Orientation Minister, is, by all standard, an erudite scholar, a high grade politician and a thorough going gentleman. With special capacity for sustained longevity in power, he remains today one Nigerian and perhaps the only one, so far, who has been in the corridors of power, in political capacity, since 1985 when he started as MAMSER Director-General, a position that groomed him in the art of intricate  propaganda. His first stint as a minister was when General Sani Abacha appointed him to the information portfolio where, admittedly, he made his mark.

This, and his MAMSER position, made him the General Gobbels of our time. Enhanced more by his present position, he has indeed proved a better propaganda guru than General Gobbels, the Nazi minister famous for treating truth on its head and capable of making the pliable believe lies to be true. This was his specialty.

Such was General Gobbels and no less has our heal one been.  Since assuming his current portfolio, he has been unearthing one sabotage or other virtually everyday. Nothing displeasing to the authority that was not interpreted  as sabotage. Even when he is the author of some twisting events, sabotage was it.

At a point last year, his office failed to inform former heads-of-state of their invitation to participate in anniversary celebrations. Most [former leaders of Nigeria] received their invitation letters two weeks after. With the capacity for discovering saboteurs, he branded the former leaders as much, when he knew that the fault was from his office. And like Gobbels he got Nigerians to believe him, enjoying the action and without quorums to the accuracy of his sermons.

Pipeline and NEPA wire vandalization, which have been since IBB, have suddenly become actions vitiated by saboteurs who have some dirty past and now out of power wanting to sabotage the laudable efforts of the “dynamic and well meaning” Obasanjo administration. We all know the direction of his poisonous arrow and this cannot be list on anybody.

Nigerian media operators collected the free views of the Nigerian people on “Two years of the Obasanjo administration,” and their verdict was failure. Even publications friendly to the regime released the verdict as pronounced.

Incapable of disproving, with facts, what the people said and are still saying, our Gobbels descended heavily with a huge club on the heads of all print media describing them as blackmailers. And these include those papers and magmas that have been helping him expose “plots against Obasanjo”, which has been their philosophical doctrine since May 29, 1999. There was never a month that passed by without one of them discovering one plot or the other against Obasanjo. Yet, inspite of their tremendous assistance to the propaganda minister, in his saboteurs detection project, he fiercely humped them as the newbreed blackmailers of the same administration they have been supporting with such zealous ethnic slant and committed demagoguery.

Not done with, he recently took on the so-called Abacha governors saying that their plot to destabilize the government has been exposed. He went further to unkindly lump them all as public looters who ought to be ashamed to show their faces in public let alone form a political association. It was such a bad language he used so unrefined, ungentlemanly, and unministerial.  

Under the Abacha regime, Jerry Gana was minister incharge of information. He was in a position then to have exposed the lootings of the governors and their godfather. He never did so. One thing we remember clearly was how one of his aides demanded and received “dash from foreign editors unknown to him that there was a secret camera around. Until the editors exposed it Gana said nothing and not quite sure what to do to the aide. There was no sabotage their to a government that made him a sabotage dictating Gobbels.

The propaganda minister has accused them [the Abacha governors], collectively of looting public treasury. The presumption here is that he has the evidence and so if this is the case, the right thing for him to do is to rush to justice Akimbo to present the truth and if he fails, he should be prosecuted for hoarding information, known to him, about corruption which is an offence under the anti-corruption law. If he can’t report the evidence then he should shut up. 

But what makes Abacha governors looters and not Abacha ministers? Only the propaganda guru could tell the nation. The truth of the matter is that with tremendous failure as the only evidence of democracy dividends, this administration is afraid even of its own shadow and so with numerous political associations poised to get registered as political parties, the government is jittery and afraid of the future of the party that brought it to power, which is fast crumbling. They are afraid of new associations and if they have their ways, would not have any association registered as political party because PDP would be massively deserted by the small circle of the remnants of its followers. There people are cowards in government who cannot withstand proper democratic challenges, because of their poor performance and dictatorial inclinations. In history, poor performing governments have always blamed their failures on others in order to divert attention from the truth. Jerry Gana, as a professor, knows this much.

But there have always been dangers in such unholy approach  to governance. As Nelson Ottah tells as in his book, "Rebels Against Rebels", the courage of sabotage started the fall of Biafra and the daughtering of the innocent. Every one was a saboteur except sycophants and good men want into their shells.

Saboteurs are the creation of little dictators and so we much be careful in the way Professor Gana has been dictating them. There were media reports that the saboteurs of the Abacha boys were invited to Aso Rock, but not IBB boys. Cowards. Discriminatory. Are we being told that only Abacha Governors could be saboteurs?

It is indeed a pity that discrimination has become the hallmark of their administration. Take the constant harassment of one Alhaji Badeggi for allegedly campaigning for IBB. That SSS people told him that it was not time to start campaigning  if a ban has been placed on political campaigns. But the pain is that this is being one to him as the administration has set up Obasanjo Solidarity Forum and Obasanjo-Atiku success movement. The SSS people are telling Nigerians of what they could be when 2003 comes on stream. Their bias is already clear and must be told so.

But they are not to blame. They are mere errand boys. The fear of IBB is the first wisdom, and the fear of the Abacha boys is the second. These people are but pretenders of democracy. Already they have been up and down telling the House not to make it possible for INEC to register more political parties because they know that in a free democratic contest they would be roundly put in their proper places come 2003. Because they lack true democratic tendencies they have proved incapable of tolerating internal democratic dissent and so found solace in so-called discipline to each well meaning pillars from the party, unknown of the harm they are doing to themselves.

In order to divert attention from the current malady of failure, Jerry Gana finds it easy to blame the Abacha the butt of even inconsequential fellows who have never done what Abacha did to this country. But Nigerians are not fools. General Gobbels couldn’t deceive the whole world. Not even his German brothers. So, Nigerians cannot be deceived by the ratings of “sabotage, blackmail and destabilization” to divest public attention for the deepening political and socio-economic AIDS which official failure has inflicted on them.

Let Gobbels Gana tell us how the messianic saints and angels in this administration got the money with which they build mighty houses and several estates plus huge flatlands. Let him ask them to tell Nigerians their salaries when in service such that they can now say I got this and that before I came into government”. How did they get the “these and those" before coming into government when all Nigerians know that immediately after retirement or better still while still in service, their riches were showing. Who is the Nigerian angel? None. Who is the Nigerian saint? Still to arrive this world. Who are Nigerian sinners? All over the place including every where. And who are Nigerian lookers? Lots of them in power today including those handling massive and wild allegations against others. This is the truth that must be told.

Professor Gana and his co travelers cannot stop the march towards the liberalization of the political climate by way of forming new political parties. He must be aware that even his boss, inspite of himself, openly admitted that PDP is not a political party but an association for the pecks of office. Of what value then is such a party to Nigerians? If anybody thinks that because he is now in power and so can freely intimidate other citizens, he is wasting his time. Failure has never intimidated anybody finally, it is not enough to shout “Abacha” always, without showing the people what you have achieved more than him. When a minister blackmails, we can fore see the danger ahead.

It amounts to moral bankruptcy for Professor Jerry Gana who served under Abacha to start hawking insults on the persons of those who served along with him ungluing out governors as greater lookers and not ministers whose budgets were bigger than budgets of some states. In trying to please his present masters he must not indulge in getting himself plashed with some dirt. If anybody is to insult Abacha, certainly Professor Gana should not be the man and if he is one, then we don’t know what to call him.


You can read more about my views at from my webpage http://www.gamji.com/wada.htm