[pull_quote_center]”Rivers under Wike, models a people determined to defy the stranglehold of predatory political fundamentalist and unleash their best potential in spite of suffusing suffocating savagery.”[/pull_quote_center]
[dropcap]N[/dropcap]igeria is a funny place. In this piece you’d permit me please, to be brutally frank. I really am in no mood to massage egos, perhaps because I am also recuperating from the debilitating effects of constantly purifying horrendous volumes of gaseous mental influences. This is the only country I know where citizens make important life decisions without critical thinking.
Take for instance, the important duty of deciding who is qualified to be elected as president of the country, or the decision of what is to be done in the event or on discovering that a president, or any elected politician at all, was not duly elected by legitimate votes cast or even that he or she probably lied on oath about his or her qualifications. The ennobling norm is to be numb in today’s Nigeria.
It can be taken for granted that Nigerians, at least the mass of overwhelming collective, are likely to adjust like water wherever it finds itself than like dams to damn the militating madness in the polity and mitigate its marauding influence. This has been the norm. Whether it ends or continues will depend on the quality and character of leadership the country elects for itself. As it is said, rightly or wrongly but aptly, a people deserve the leadership they get.
The case is not so hopeless for the generality of the Nigerian polity. There are pockets of inspirational nationalist models that dot the oozing plane of complicit docility. These models serve as lifelines that have prevented a complete collapse of the structure, given the fractured substructural frameworks that have been at the core of Nigeria’s ever emerging but illusive greatness. Ekiti under Fayose is a shining example of a conscientized population.
Rivers under Wike, models a people determined to defy the stranglehold of predatory political fundamentalist and unleash their best potential in spite of suffusing suffocating savagery.
What has not be thrown at Rivers? What has not been done to bring her to her very knees? From military invasions to political persecutions, the state has had a bitter taste of the pill of vengeful governance from a classless and mindless pack of opportunists congregating as Progressives. Even the economic fortune of the state has not been spared. To ensure the state is completely grounded, campaigns of calumny against the good people of the state were made the mainstay of many a tabloid, harping on violence and insecurity, majority of which, as expected, were instigated, promoted and broadcast by the very marauders themselves.
Then the cliché ‘Rivers of blood’ was birthed by the very sons of the land, breastfed as pitiable sucklings to national renown by the very land they, like Brutus to Caesar and Judas to Jesus, betray and stab so bitterly; so unconscionably, yet so defiantly. Wickedly, so. Men who should rather be grateful and remain humble for having their kernels cracked on their behalf by the benevolent spirits of our land. But rage and hate drive them down their coarse course. An end that mote be.
What has become of Rivers and her people?
They refuse to give up on themselves or surrender their fate to fundamentalist savages. They fight hard and against perpetual servitude to foreign overlords. Although the battle is not over, the verdict is out. Rivers is not a bride, bought and milked by every opportunist but the husbandman who pricks the very core and sustains the whole. Rivers is strong. Rivers is resolute. Rivers is determined. The people are loving, vivacious and hospitable. The air is fresh, seas; refreshing although tainted by sebaceous shore, the crest of crude and criminal national conspiracies.
The verdict is out. At the peak of overwhelming assaults on her consciousness, rather than wane under the weight of the crass lawlessness, like the phoenix, she regenerates. Rivers is truly amazing and defies logic.
The verdict is out. Rivers is better than imagined.
The verdict is out and in credit to truth, one man’s leadership (and commitment to the wellbeing of Rivers people) is at the center of its reNEWal. This is not just an ode to Chief Nyesom Ezenwo Wike, CON, Governor of Rivers State, but to all Rivers people and friends of the state from across the breadth of Nigeria and abroad, who continue to support and strengthen him as he contains the ‘raggamuffins’ for our own sake. We pray him race in Nigeria’s own interest.
Now that the verdict is out on Rivers, and shows clearly that the media blitz and all sorts of concocted wickedness against an innocent people will not suffice to justify a clear lack of preparedness to effectively administer governance or excuse the obvious non-performance by the present national handlers, one is hoping they’d be humble enough to apologise to and consult their winning victims on the leeway out of the doldrums for the sake of Nigerians themselves.
One is also hoping, that the mass of overwhelming collective of Nigerians, too, would find some lessons from the case of Rivers to take their destinies in their very hands than constantly relapsing to fate in faith that a political messiah would make all things good. No thinking is dumber than that. The ball has always been in the court of the majority and time is ticking fast.
Oraye St. Franklyn is a barrister-at-law. He is senior special assistant to Governor Nyesom Wike on Social Media. He is a strategic communicator and good governance advocate, writes from Port Harcourt, Rivers State. He tweets from @RealOraye. He is also on Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
