Clowns, jesters, time wasters at a conference!

Indulgees are probably having the laugh of their lives right now. Since we started gathering here on Sunday, they’ve been trying all sorts of tricks to table a motion for a rib cracker! The target for this move for a rib cracker is no other than the assemblage of men and women (not wise men and women, mind you) that is receiving hefty taxpayers’ money to discuss our country. The target is actually to discuss how to move Nigeria forward, but it would seem to me that everything that has been going down at the conference has little to do with forward; you’d be right to say you are angry seeing them make more backward passes even when they know that the match is being lost!

When you are a genuine, selfless citizen who truly, truly wants the best for this country (as against those blood-sucking individuals who do not give a hoot what happens to Nigeria), you would be sorely pained to see this geriatric-filled conference make no attempt to advance the word called progress. Here’s what I think that is being missed. A conference is convened and named a National Conference – you’d think that everybody who goes there should have at least a pint of nationalistic blood flowing in their veins so that any time they find that their discussion is being tempered by their own individual proclivity, they would be reined in by this nationalistic fervour inside them. Not so this lot! It’s all right to say that our diversity, which we have not been able to put to good use and which tends to divide us more than it binds us, needs deep discussion and reflection to try to see how to make good use of it. It is, however, shameful to note that the people who have found themselves at this conference appear to think of it as just “another day at the office”. But it is not! And they have wasted much time making hash work of this opportunity.

A national conference is a serious business. It ought to hold the nation spellbound! It ought to be drawing attention on a daily basis from Nigerians because of the profound outcomes that would be coming out of the place. Alas, this is not the case unfortunately! We haven’t seen weighty and profound statements issue forth from the conference. A large number of Nigerians do not believe in what is coming out of the conference and, in fact, they see the gathering as a group of jesters clowning about and just wasting their time on behalf of this government and on behalf of themselves! Reasonable and well-meaning citizens, when given this kind of opportunity under the current set-up, would have been able to galvanise huge attention to the work that they are doing.

Here you are, handpicked to attempt to change the course of public discourse in your country. You are doing this even when a government is still in power, with a national assembly that is supposed to be responsible for making laws still in that particular line of business. It doesn’t really matter who set up the National Conference and who appointed you to go forth and make a difference; the point is that the level of discussions at this conference ought to have been raised to such a height that it would have commanded attention of Nigerians and the world – to make it clear that something profound is about to happen with a conference like this. Instead of this happening, there are many Nigerians who, when they do not tune off anytime news about the conference comes on, give themselves a good rib cracker with some of the nonsense that is coming out. Such nonsense as creating 18 or 19 additional states so that some of them can have an opportunity to become ministers or ministers of state; or is it really the case that they have forgotten that the constitution states that every state must produce a minister for the Federal Republic of Nigeria?

And so, they are messing about and making us laugh our hearts out about creating more states (it is even possible some of them think that Nigeria should have as many states as the United States; and so you are likely to hear such warped thinking as: “In the US they have 50 states, why can’t we do the same?”). It is that bad, fellow indulgees. It is! I have tried to argue in the past that Nigerian politicians wasted a golden opportunity upon our return to civilian rule in 1999. When you have come out of the crisis the way we came out in 1999, the first thing great political statesmen do is to ask soul-searching questions. The members of the National Assembly should have demonstrated wisdom by making a law that would allow government to function and suspended the military-created constitution for a comprehensive review. We should have had wise men and women use expressions like “NEVER AGAIN SHALL the citizens of this great country be subjected to A, B, C…” But we are a nation of short memories. Once our so-called statesmen find themselves at a flowing tap where famine exists, they lose their senses and start working to prevent their fellow citizens from getting to the tap!

If the National Conference hadn’t had more people who are very comfortable with backward movement, they would have known that President Goodluck Jonathan dropped in their hands a rare opportunity to make the difference that Nigeria and Nigerians have been clamouring for all these decades. How interesting it would have been to have profound pronouncements coming from the conference and have Nigerian citizens paying more attention and believing the conference more than they would listen to the National Assembly or even the federal and state governments! Well, that’s what you get when geriatrics are made to bring about change to a country with a largely younger population that has moved on. Now you can see why indulgees did not succeed in making us do a rib cracker on this matter; because it is serious!

PHILLIP ISAKPA