Reading through a press statement purportedly written and signed by one Mr Tunde Aina, the National president, Kogi United forum, on the death of the late Abubakar Audu, gives one great concern about the irredeemable state of minds of some Nigerians.
With due respect and compassion, some criminally minded individuals need to be housed or SMI[ed] (Serious Mental Illness) in a penitentiary institution. These people are suffering from acute and distorted political recidivism. They are perpetually doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Why? Because they continually fail to learn from those mistakes, mistakes dotted with either commission or schizophrenic intentions. Either way, these people need serious sustained attention. Unfortunately, they don’t know they have problems, they are everywhere.
In their communique, they came up with unsubstantiated facts that Senator Ahmed Tinubu was responsible for the death of Abubakar Audu, the presumed-winner of the just concluded gubernatorial elections in Kogi State. They spread lies without preliminary autopsy reports of the cause of late Abubakar Audu’s death. Is that not sickening? Those behind the press release should be arrested and prosecuted for malicious allegation against Senator Ahmed Tinubu.
There is a limit to freedom of speech. Character assassination of other person in a modern and participatory democracy is a serious defamatory lawsuit against the manufacturers. The uninformed individuals in both APC and PDP parties grotesquely denigrate the dead and unashamedly disrespect the living. The greatest undoing to ourselves is to pretend we do not have problems. Nigerian problems are multifarious. We can pretentiously pray in the Mosques and Churches to eternity, if we don’t change our current collective values, the rat race is unending and it’s a belated journey to perfidy or a trip on a famished road to nowhere.
In civilized countries, the spirit of sportsmanship is the watchword in politics. When you wake up in the morning after a morning prayers to read divisive messages and unsubstantiated reports about an individual, just because you don’t like his personality or share his/her political opinions. It is unethical and antithesis to rational mind. It is also a damning evidence that Nigeria seems to be suffering from generic sins. President Jonathan, their political demigod, at the tail end of his troubled administration wrote his name in the positive chapter of our democratic history, but his fanatical followers, the collective children of anger seem not to have come to term or reality that their country is in a new dawn.
These people are known for fabricating rumors and lies to score political gains. In the process, they are ignorantly sentencing themselves and Nigeria back to primitive ages. They are non-correctable disfigurement of characters who are still thwarting the efforts to see a prosperous Nigeria. How do these people sleep at night? They’ve excommunicated decorum from their values. They seem corded or overtaken by darkness and benighted in the medieval periods. Every student of history knows that evils have not triumphed over good anywhere.
All attempts to surreptitiously subterfuge the new normal of governance in Nigeria should be vehemently resisted by well-meaning Nigerians. We should continue to speak out against the psychology of these warped individuals amongst us; who are bent on to punctuate our collective journey to prosperous nation. Change is not easy. If we fail to counter these unpatriotic citizens whenever they come up with premeditated lethal lies, then, the man in us will continue to die in the face winnable tyranny.
