WINDOW DRESSING AT THE EAGLE SQUARE. BY TOLA ADENIYI

The much awaited and severely hyped conclusion of the gambling exercise of the *Abracadabra Patented Crooks* took place last Tuesday June 7, 2022 at the lavishly decorated Lotto Pavilion otherwise called the Eagle Square Abuja. The Gambling, a bazaar of some sort, was watched live throughout the world courtesy Channels and TVC networks and viewers, including this writer, were glued to their seats for close to 12 hour-duration of the theatrical performance.

A similar exercise by the *Provocative Devils Pandemic* had taken place a week earlier at the Moshood Abiola International Stadium Abuja. Some other organizations like Labour, *PRP* and *NNPP* jostling for the driver’s seat to continue the despoliation of Nigeria also had their shows dubbed Primaries. But the *APC* left nobody in doubt that they were the real dollar-guzzling organization in the land. The phantasmagoria of the décor of their pavilion did justice to the over 2.5 billion naira crookedly taken collectively from the willing gamblers as password to qualify for participation in the national Lottery.

Each gambler was called upon to say a word or two on why they were in the race and what, if any, they had in their manifestos for the people. While two minutes was allocated to each contestant, some spoke for a whopping 30 minutes and to show the unevenness of the organizers’ preferences, speaker after speaker were allowed to have their way and exhaust their duration.

It became entertaining and laughable when some aspirants for the Lottery ticket started abandoning their vows by declaring their withdrawal from the race. Some participants who obviously could not boast of a single delegate evoked laughter when they announced they were calling on their ‘delegates’ to give their votes to other aspirants!

The Gambling exercise exposed the underbelly of a cursed country called Nigeria. Observers were stunned by the quality of the people who were gathered to select someone who would bear their flag as a Presidential hopeful in the national elections slated for early next year. With verifiable evidences of loads of money in different currency denominations collected by these ‘delegates’ as purchase price, it was apparent that their choice, if that is the appropriate word, would only emerge from, not their heart or brain, but their stomachs.

And of course, the fate of each gambler, like in all Lotto, was expected to be decided by the fatness or otherwise of their wallets, carrier-bags or vaults.

It is quite worrisome that Nigerians are being made, through media hype and manipulation, to believe that Elections via gambling on a high scale should be their priority at this point in time. Even the blind, the deaf and the dumb know that Nigeria is on the boil. The recklessness with which the fortunes and misfortunes of the country had/have been toyed with by the so-called politicians who came to office through bribery, election-rigging, thuggery and large-scale fraud in the last 21 years cries to high heavens.

The argument that the reason elections are being held or about to beheld, was to have new people to solve the multi-facetted challenges confronting the country does not hold water in view of the unassailable fact that it is the same people, being paraded, that have been creating and recreating the same problems over and over again. A look at the principal characters in the two leading political associations in Nigeria confirms this ugly fact: all the principal officers of the ruling *APC* from their chairman Adamu to the lowest member of the governing council were leaders in the *PDP* which *APC* overthrew in 2015! All the principal officers in the current Opposition *PDP* including their chairman Ayu were until recently, leading members of the *APC*! It is weird. The two frontline political associations are two sides of the same counterfeit coin.

When these political jobbers mount the rostrum and insult Nigerians with vain, vague and valueless promises of what they would do like creating jobs, establishing state police, re-jiggling security architecture, one wonders if they were not the same people in power the last 21 years in their revolving/rotating chairs.

Truth must be told that neither the characters in the *APC* nor those in the *PDP* can address, let alone solve the choking nastiness of insecurity; homegrown and imported, in Nigeria. Is it the people who boastfully say that a section of the people of the country have an inalienable right to carry dangerous weapons including AK-47, to terrorize, maim, plunder, rape, kill and destroy other people’s means of livelihood that will stop terror in the land? Was there any of the characters gathered at the MKO Stadium or the Eagle Square who ever raised a voice to condemn these atrocities including mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing?

If they failed to merely condemn the rude large-scale importation of truckloads of terrorists emptied on other people’s territories all in the bogus name of One Nigeria, how would they ever root-out bloody madness from the land?

Is it the people who planned to pollute the polity with a thoughtless Population Census exercise at the time programmed for elections that would bring fresh air to the country? Is it the people who gleefully announced that very soon if some scruffy Afghanistans descend from the skies and land at Jalingo in Taraba and spend 5 years thereat they automatically become not only citizens of Nigeria but indigenes of Taraba that will bring salvation to the land? Is it people who have no tolerance, no regard, no respect for other people’s religion or faith that will be entrusted with peace and harmonious relationship in the land? These are some of the burning issues and credible threats to the continued and corporate existence of Nigeria which none of the characters gathered in Abuja venues of muscle flexing has ever addressed or queried.

Is it the people who have slavishly and shamelessly lost their balls, deliberately castrated themselves and turned themselves to political eunuchs that will miraculously resurrect their manhood?

What Nigerians should be doing beyond the ludicrous Gambling Entertainment Shows at the Eagle Square and MKO Abiola Stadium is to immediately courageously look the horrendous threats to corporate existence in the face and embark on the process of separating corn from chaff and resolve, once and for all, the nagging danger of forcing Israel and Iran to live together in the same country.

Those who are preaching against the natural flow of rivers will sooner than later realize that nothing destroys a people faster than a volcanic clash of cultures and civilizations. Nigeria has been ‘lucky’ so far in that only a few million lives have been consumed by Lugard’s selfish and provocative misadventure. But the country has overstretched her luck, and now seriously unlucky, to have got herself entrapped by her politicians in the quagmire of bloodletting, perilous corruption, unprecedented insecurity, seeming helplessness and hopelessness and economic strangulation.

Nigeria is at war. Nigerian leaders, not political merchants, should stop the remote and immediate causes of the war.

The Time bomb is ticking, tragic-comic drama is not the solution.

Copyright:

Tola Adeniyi, 06.2022