For Nigeria’s leaders with dead conscience

One of the greatest afflictions that can befall any nation is the enthronement of wicked leaders. With a conscience seared with a hot iron, they have no empathy for anyone; their business is always their selfish self. They call white black and black white. They rape a woman and sentence her husband to death by hanging before the hot sun. They condone bloodlust and wreck homes. They serve widows for breakfast and the poor for lunch. Their dinner is a festival of betrayed bones. They corner the commonwealth, de-mother the fatherless, rob the unborn of their future, and make life pure misery for the people on whose behalf they claimed a throne. Conscience-dead leaders aren’t just bad for their people, they are bad for themselves. They write their biography in bloodguilt. By the agony of their people you shall know them.

Says the management specialist Harvey Schachter of Battersea,  Ontario: “Leaders with integrity walk the talk. They are consistent, honest, moral and trustworthy. Their deeds match their words. Leaders without integrity can’t be trusted – by their colleagues, their bosses or the public – and inevitably that will lead to problems.” How precise. Our so-called leaders are busy traversing the nooks and crannies of the global capital of poverty seeking for the people yet another round of misery. They can’t be trusted.  Of these pestilential leaders, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar must take the golden crown. Stung by the threat of lost Sokoto 2023 presidential votes, he disowned a just, upright and timely statement crafted by his media handlers in reaction to the brutal murder last week of the Shehu Shagari College of Education student, Deborah Yakubu, by a murderous mob in Sokoto, saying it did not have his imprimatur. Media handlers craft statements on behalf of their leaders anywhere in the world; all they are required to do is to give them update. There is no leader that can personally react to every incident in his own words, but Atiku pretended not to know. He would not condemn murder because of the presidential crown that he has  sought since the 1992 primaries of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Jos, Plateau State. For leaders with a conscience, blood is thicker than water and no ambition is worth the blood of anyone. For Atiku, votes are thicker than blood. It has been his lot for 30 years to have an ambition and for others to take the crown. Atiku said no word against zoning because it favoured him in 2019, but now that it is the turn of the South, he does. What a fraud!

Enter Godwin Emefiele, the governor of money who has for the last seven years superintended the robbery of the Nigerian masses by the country’s Money Deposit Banks. Time was when you could withdraw your money from any ATM without charge. Emefiele changed all of that, causing the DMBs to fleece Nigerians with maniacal consistency. Asked by State House reporters to confirm whether President Muhammadu Buhari had indeed asked him to resign following the purchase of the APC presidential nomination and expression of interest forms in his name, Emefiele took refuge in pun: “There is no news now, but there will be news. You heard me, I said there is no news but there will be news.” Then, he was told that Nigerians were anxious about his position. Listen to the words he spoke to his own hurt: “Let them have heart attack. It’s good to have heart attack. I am having a lot of fun.”

As CBN Governor, Emefiele is in charge of money belonging to Nigerians, but he would not mind if they perished, never mind that he would then have no money to spend. The conceptual category that Emefiele contemned, “Nigerians”, includes people old enough to be his grandfather, but the dispenser of our dollars to political buccaneers couldn’t care a hoot. It includes the Obi of Onitsha, Ooni of Ife, Sultan of Sokoto and the Emir of Kano, just as it includes the millions of long-suffering, hard-working market (wo)men that dot our landscape. It includes the soccer stars that Emefiele enjoys watching and who have made money without putting Nigerians in monetary policy prisons. It includes his own parents. But our money god who was only asked to be a money governor is power-drunk and has burnt his conscience in the lake of fire. He is a politician in suits and as the Ghanaian writer Israelmore Ayivor says of people like him: “You don’t necessarily need atomic bombs to destroy a nation. Politicians who value their pockets more than the life of citizens always do that everyday.” Emefiele is up there in the clouds in his Imperial Monetary Majesty, forgetting, as they say, that “if while climbing a tree you insist on going beyond the top, the earth will be waiting for you.” He is a Lala-gone-up: his destiny is the bare earth. Ears that pay no heed to warnings accompany the head when it is chopped off.

And now we are on Tambuwal Lane. The governor of Sokoto State is not just a lawyer but a former Number Four man aspiring to be Number One. A young girl was stoned to death and burnt to smithereens right up his alley but Mr. Tambuwal would not do justice. His government charged bloodthirsty killers to court but omitted any mention of murder. I join other compatriots in asking for the charges against the accused to be dropped. The case has been clearly made that justice will not be done in Tambuwal’s Sokoto. King Solomon wrote: “A man that doeth violence to the blood of any person shall flee to the pit; let no man stay him.” Anyone who condones or seeks to water down a murder charge is a murderer. His household will end up in ruins. I remember the words of an Ondo State singer: “Asebi yo, o ni mo se gbe, asebi ma yo, we se gbe o.” Gloss: “The evil doer rejoices, says he’s gotten away with his crime. Evil doer, don’t rejoice; you haven’t.”

Let those who shed innocent blood and those who condone bloodshed using fancy words know assuredly that the seed they have sown will mature. It may take ages but it will mature. Their land will know no peace and they will go to their graves in bitter tears. Their wives will become other people’s property and their children the avenger’s prey. They will labour for the wind and sow for nothingness.

Deborah Yakubu’s parents sowed but did not reap the reward of their labour; her father watched her die, immolated by a mob ruled by its muscles rather than its brains. The killers rejoiced. They do not know that at the end of their days, they will not even have the luxury of a burial.

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