Desperation now walks tall on our streets. It boasts with audacity and grandstands with shamelessness.
Desperation is the desire to reach where your mind takes you, even if your legs refuse to move. It travels in the mind more than in the physical. It is a thought gone wild. Sometimes, it is a desire untamed.
Everybody is desperate for something. Politicians are desperate for power. Boko Haram is desperate to kill and marry young women. The Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) is desperate for a foreign coach.
In the United State (U.S.), Republicans have desperately taken over the Senate and now parade a controlling share in the House of Representatives. For Hillary Clinton, her desperation for the Presidency in 2016 is in jeopardy.
President Barack Obama of the U.S. may even face impeachment threat. It doesn’t matter whether he has done anything worthy of impeachment. What matters is the desperate need to prove that where he stays is called White House; not Black Hut.
In Nigeria, senators facing failure to win nomination for re-election are threatening impeachment of President Goodluck Jonathan. When I read about this in the papers last week, I started searching the books for what constitutes impeachable offences.
But I have since been told that by doing so, I’m trying to overstretch reasonability. Desperation does not reason. As the Machiavellian believers would say, it is the end that justifies the means.
A few days ago, lawmakers went home for a four-yearly ritual; to test their popularity and acceptance by their constituents. What escaped their minds was that state governors are now their constituents.
The speculation is that Jonathan has handed over political powers to the state governors to decide who should seek public office. That’s laughable because since the emergence of democratic governance in Nigeria, that has been the tradition.
It is definitely not clear how we arrived here. State governors are no longer subject to the parties they belong. Instead, political parties joyfully do the dictates of state governors. Parties are no longer supreme; state governors are.
It has become the issue of the tail wagging the dog. A dog has a tail; and the tail controls the dog. The parties that produced the governors are now subservient to those governors.
At the state level, the governors decide who should eat twice a day. They decide which streets should be tarred based on who resides there.
Being a member of the ruling party no longer attract favours. Party loyalty does not count any longer. Loyalty to the state governors, their spouses and family members are determining factors.
State governors hardly understand why anyone should nurture a political ambition without first seeking and obtaining clearance from His Excellency.
Oh! You want to stand an election against a sitting state governor? That’s suicidal. Don’t try it. It’s like standing in the path of a moving train.
It doesn’t matter that you’re a sitting lawmaker. The mere fact that your governor is interested in the office you occupy implies that you should simply resign and quietly walk away.
So, I understand the frustrations of the rejected lawmakers. I understand their anguish. I also understand why they are putting the blame on the president. Somebody must always be blamed for the misfortune of others.
The belief here is that the president, as the commander-in-chief, should just command these over-bearing state governors or call them to order, so that the race to the Senate would be free and fair.
Truth, however, is that it is easier for Jonathan to command the Generals and their troops than for him to “command” the state governors.
The reason is simple: the political system in Nigeria has vested too much power on the state governors. They have been translated into tin gods; beyond the control of the party and the president.
They have the powers to choose delegates to the national conventions of the different political parties. They have the powers to decide who the delegates should vote for. They have the powers to determine, during the general elections, which party the people of the state should cast their votes for. They can even lead the state out of the party that elected them into office.
So, if you were a president seeking a re-election, what would you do when, by the time you pick the nomination form, you would have been so thoroughly blackmailed into submission that you can hardly execute even the best intentions?
But I don’t think the frustration of losing a re-election should make the lawmakers consider impeachment against the president or shut down government. Taking desperation to that limit will be extra unreasonable.
Yes, Alexander Suvorov once said that there is nobody more terrible than the desperate; because, in the words of Dean Ellis, when you’re in desperation, you’re going to try anything. Still, I believe that desperation should have a limit.
So, when someone does not get nominated for a re-election, then the president should be impeached? Or the nation should be shut down? Haba lawmakers!
Despite the frustrations and the injustice, the lawmakers must also recall how they got to the National Assembly in their first term. Someone must have been unjustly sacrificed for them to have that chance.
Like they say, what goes around comes around. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. It’s their turn to taste the bitter pills of politics.
