What sticks to this policeman is worse than shame; it is infamy. Such a public servant deserves to be publicly pilloried, tried and meted a punishment that is appropriate to treasonable acts, if only to serve as a deterrent to others in positions of responsibility under the law. To demand less is to reduce ourselves below the status free citizens of a free nation.
It means we endorse violence against our representatives, that we are content to submit ourselves to the jackboots of naked force. It is to annunciate the era of the brute, as the current fundamental modality of governance.
For this latest outrage, one in an escalating series of impunity, the buck stops yet again at the presidency, and that incumbent, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, continues to surprise us in ways that very few could have conjectured.
Peaking at his own personalised example where he set the law of simple arithmetic on its head — I refer to the split in the Governors’ Forum, and his ‘formal’ recognition of the minority will in a straightforward, peer election — democracy has been rendered meaningless where it should be most fervently exemplified.
Nothing is more unworthy of leadership than to degrade a system by which one attains fulfilment, and this is what the nation has witnessed time and time again in various parts of the nation, the recent affront against the legislative chamber being only the most blatant and unconscionable.
We know, of course, that this is not the first of its kind in the nation’s history, but precedents are not binding. Each leader selects his or her own model for emulation or avoidance, and that choice is certain indication of the true nature of such a leader, and a clue to the kind of conduct that a people can expect of him.
It is a warning. His choices for the occupancy of crucial public positions — such as the protective arm of the nation — constitutes an even more immediate and constant public alert. The signals are ominous — for and beyond 2015.
These, to state the obvious, are not ordinary times. The menace of Boko Haram hangs over the corporate entity called a nation and over every individual, citizen or mere bird of passage.
The cliché ‘heating up the polity’ may grate the eardrums with its banality but I think that we have a right to demand of a leader not to stoke up the furnace in which events have cast its citizens.
Every day records a new violation of our humanity. The atrocious targeting of the great mosque of Kano has rendered any lingering doubt of impending national imposition an invitation for collective suicide, preferably through piecemeal dismemberment.
The theories of cause and effect can wait, or continue — it does not matter — the omniscient in such matters continue to pontificate, some of them blithely forgetting that they indeed contributed to policies that landed us in this brutal cleft.
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