Tunde Asaju

By Tunde Asaju

When it comes to fighting, nations go to war for the rights of their citizens; sorry I meant real nations, not Naija. How many Naija died or were wounded in the first and latest xenophobic attacks in South Africa? No numbers. But, our legislooting arm got into a war over who should go to Pretoria on a fact-finding mission?! Who doesn’t like foreign allowance in an era of free fall Naira? A fact-finding mission is a coffee-break trip from the challenges of Naija; an opportunity for the favoured to travel, shop till they drop with diplomats at their beck and call every step of the way. Anything for the estacode even fisticuffs is worth the trouble – nothing for the citizen.

Real countries do stuff for their citizens, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Take North Korea, a rogue nation with a rogue leader Kim Jong-On who wants to wipe off anything and anyone that challenges ‘the leader’. He was reported to have executed his own uncle for sleeping on duty, a hobby that thrives among all arms of the Naija and the African establishment. Then for whatever reason; seven weeks ago when his half brother Kim Jong-Nam showed up at a Malaysian airport looking like a confused tourist, a lady walked up to him and gassed him to death.

Unlike some parts of Naija where autopsies are a religious anathema, Malaysians believe in scientifically unraveling the cause of death. The North Koreans have no such interest; they simply wanted the body of their son back and would do the unconventional to get there. The ensuing diplomatic face-off led to Kim padlocking the Malaysian Embassy in Pyongyang and holding its staff hostage. After huffing and puffing between both nations, Kim released a few women and children in the pack, but held nine diplomats hostage until his demands were met. Did you ask about diplomatic immunity? In North Korea there is no immunity for anything that questions the leader.

Last Thursday, the Malaysians released the lifeless corpse of the leader’s half brother, and the North Koreans allowed their prized hostages to go free without poisoning them with sarin or other death-delaying agent. Let’s hope Malaysia remembers to thank the megalomaniac Kim for his unusual generosity.

You could laugh at the way Kim Jong-on does business, but at least any North Korean in the leader’s good books anywhere in the world is sure of his leader’s backing, even if it meant fast tracking Armageddon for a country with possible nuclear war-heads. It’s the beauty or notoriety of your nation having your back. Nations go to great lengths to defend their national interest. Of course Naija is not a nation writ large – one with a national flag, an anthem and all the appurtenances of nationhood; but a wish it remains for nearly 60 years. Come 2020, we would spend more celebrating our wish than we do saving its million children dying of hunger and starvation or its pregnant women dying at childbirth. The wish is usually more important than the people.

The only time Naija talks as a nation is at the football field. Even then, it bickers more about the ethno-religious composition of the team than its capacity to win laurels. To beat the ethnic police, a.k.a the federal character principle; a gifted player may need to marry names. When you hear Celestine Babayaro, there’s been a fusion somewhere. Celestine is not a common name even among the Christians in Kaduna any more than an Ibo man named Babayaro. As far as this example goes, any semblance to any real person, dead or alive is a pure coincidence.

Hankering between the executive and the legislature is an organic fertilizer that grows the tree of democracy in other lands. Imagine what America would be if the legislature had dropped the Obamacare at the Donald’s say-so– some poor Americans would have been flocking to India to exchange their nationality for health tourism. If there had been no challenge to executive orders, America would be off-limits to a quarter of the world’s nationalities.

Naija’s executhief, legislathief and judisharing hanker over different issues. The executhief with its own grasscutters and powerful snake farmers with houses in Dubai scapegoat the few members of the judisharing with bloated accounts. It hankers powerful legislooters who stole their states blind and have conferred on themselves legislative-gang-immunity. Trump promised to repeal Obamacare and Sai Baba promised to fight corruption; both men must attempt to fulfill their promises. In Naija the attempt to fulfill promise has led to the resuscitation of the – you Tarka me, I Daboe you face-off between the executhief and the legislathief.

The legislathief is unhappy that its leaders were being probed. They want to eat their loot in peace. They loathe the idea that the executhief has the liver to bring their perceived persecutor-in-chief Ibrahim Magu, as Chairman-nominee of the EFCC twice to them for approval and twice they have responded with a resounding no. When the Customs enacted an edict to probe smuggled cars and recover unpaid duties, the legislathief feared losing their status, spoken daily on our pot-holed roads with their exotic cars or in their garage. Of course, some of them are also expert smugglers and so they summoned the Customs boss, Hameed Ali a retired Colonel to appear before them – in uniform. When Ali refused to show, they passed a toothless resolution banning him from public office and the war is heating up. Lately the executive brought the names of 37 resident electoral commissioners for screening, of course our bloated, adult delinquent sinnators refused to screen them. They want Magu removed from EFCC before they could screen electoral commissioners – somebody give these crooks pacifiers!

Naija sure needs executive-legislative bickering so how about bickering over the waning value of the Naira, ending insurgency and feeding the three or four million displaced persons, fixing the collapsed educational system and bringing to book those who squandered over $20 billion on electricity and brought us total darkness. It should be about job creation, roads and rural infrastructure rehabilitation – those exotic cars can’t survive on potholes.

How about bringing someone to book for all the crimes committed against the Naija citizens from South Africa to India. How about a public hearing on the circumstances leading to the wanton targeting of Naija citizens in India? It’s gotten so bad that a Kenyan lady was allegedly beating to an inch of her life because Indians suspected her to be a Naija. How about a legislature re-examining the lopsided law they signed which enables the UK to retain the best among us – journalists, doctors, lawyers, nurses, and engineers but deporting the poor, the wretched and even the jailbirds. These are things worth hankering the executhief about. Hankering about making the Naija retain his human value at home and abroad is a worthy thing to bicker about – anything else is pure bullshit really.

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