Azazi, PDP and national security

Azazi

Truth, a proverb says, is like a calabash submerged in water; no matter how long it takes it will certainly come to the surface. What is however interesting about the truth regarding the pervasive insecurity in Nigeria today is that having been submerged in the alarming ambition of some powerful few set to destroy the country, it has constantly, paradoxically, slipped out of their own mouths in what you might see as the Freudian slip.

All that I have come to know, which have influenced my contention that the PDP-based Jonathan regime is responsible for unleashing the incredible wrath called Boko Haram on the masses of Nigeria, are statements that have escaped out of the lips of the protagonists of the government, including Jonathan himself. It is from Jonathan himself that I heard that some members of Boko Haram, those who act from behind the scene, are in his government. And some days ago, the president at the scene of the bombing of ThisDay newspaper said something to the effect that Nigerians should learn to bear the spate of bombings because it is also happening in other countries. Perhaps in his mind he was thinking of Syria. We may, if we listen to Jonathan, cease to worry for now until Nigeria degenerates to something worse than Syria. Maybe, Iraq.

Andrew Owoye Azazi, the man saddled with advising Jonathan on security issues at such a perilous time, is a man I personally see as quite incompetent, who happens to be operating in that capacity only because Jonathan likes him. I have had to listen to what he had to say about the increasing insecurity. At some point, he told Nigerians, and I wondered if he really meant it, that the entire mechanisms and apparatuses of security possessed by the government were inadequate to combat terrorism. For him, as for other security chiefs in the Jonathan regime, terrorism was a new kind of crime that Nigeria was not prepared for. Azazi had suggested then, in Op-Ed published in The Washington Times, that the government of the US should urgently wade in to help Nigeria.

After his recent utterance in Asaba during the South-South Economic Summit to the effect that PDP was responsible for the Boko Haram scourge, it occurred to me that the man was acting like every big officers in the Jonathan regime who, through their Freudian slips, have continued to throw more light on the cause of the mass murder of innocent people going on now. He simply hit the nail on the head, perhaps without meaning to. It is ironic because he shot himself in the ass.

If Azazi indicts PDP, he also indicts himself. He is working for a PDP government, and all the while he has known that PDP has systematically sunk the country into the abyss of rot, into the cauldron of insecurity, and yet he feeds fat from the tax-payers’ money that the PDP-led government places on his hands. What a conscienceless man!

The most touching tragedy of Nigeria is not that from time to time those at the helms of affairs confess to us how easily they are driving all of us to destruction; it is that after telling us how unspeakably irresponsible they are, they stay put as leaders and movers of events. That is why Azazi, in spite of his Freudian slip which implies that he himself, hired by the PDP-led government, is responsible for the bombings, is still happily occupying his position as the national security adviser. Should he not leave, having told the world that PDP, the mother of the government in which he serves, is responsible for mass murder through the creation of Boko Haram?

PDP has continued to grow in size and in tactics since 1999 as the great monster-party peopled by those who put their interest over and above the interest of all of us as a nation. It is, in the least, shocking that PDP, with all its claim of having the best political minds, is simply staring on, while a country it rules experiences the daily murders of defenceless people.

Numerically and strategically, PDP’s strength is located in northern Nigeria. But the vast north today faces increasing assaults and the PDP is content with dishing out jejune statements through its highly corrupt top officers and political office holders whose only knowledge of election process is how to be “consensused” into power.

It does appear clear that Nigeria may never know peace again until PDP is out of power. This assumption is a logical and pragmatic one. If since 1999 PDP has been in power and Nigeria has dwindled to this pitiable state of insecurity, plus the inconceivable rot endemic in all strata (oil sector, education, stock exchange, privatisation, power sector), then ordinary people in Nigeria must begin to think of a practical means to show PDP the way out. Certainly, Nigeria is greater PDP.

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