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By Mideno Bayagbon
Finally, IPOB proscription, and/or tag as a terrorist organisation, had its day in court. And our absurd dance of incompetence, in going about doing the right thing, the wrong way, got a legal coating.
But It took all of one week, many unbelievable verbal gymnastics and diarrhoea of the mouth, for the legal steps as prescribed in our statute books to be followed.
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It took the hue and cries of lawyers and reasonable Nigerians (and not the bunch of “Buhari government haters and saboteurs”, Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, reached into the deep recesses of Nigerians’ government’s peculiar wisdom, to pronounce), for the government to be forced to do what they have done, legally.
It also took the whimsical courage of fellows like the still troubled President of the Senate, Bukola Saraki, to get first, the military to recant, and to force out a story and pictures of President Muhammadu Buhari signing the proscription order, and designation of IPOB as a terrorist organisation.
This, presumably, on the advise of the Attorney General as the law prescribed, and the rubber stamping of same by a competent court, to bring our governmental incompetence and its various disorganised arms, to toe the legal route.
One is forced to wonder: must we always muddle things up first? Must we always attempt to rough ride, and ram things down Nigerians throat, the wrong way, before government sees the wisdom to do the right things, right?
Most discerning Nigerians knew that Nnamdi Kanu’s cup was filled to over flowing; that it was a matter of time before a brake was applied to his stupid attempt to railroad the nation into another round of blood letting.
All, including almost all Igbo elites, are agreed that he had crossed the red line with his incendiary speeches and his advertised setting up of a secret service formation. All knew he had left the substance of the agitation to toe the path of self aggrandizement. Who does that and expect a competent federal government would sit aloof and allow anarchy walk in and wreak preventable havoc?
No one expect, even a slow acting, Baba Go Slow government like Buhari’s, to sit idly, while a ragtag bunch of ill motivated clowns, even if fighting for a just cause, burn down police stations, set up road blocks, fan the embers of war.
Even if Mazi Kanu didn’t know, the rest of us knew something serious was afoot when the military started moving men and equipment to the South East in what they were to later codename: Operation Python Dance.
When the embers got ignited with the IPOB members raising accusation that the military had attacked and killed 29 of their members, the lie was easily put to the propaganda, in that testing of the waters. The rest as they say, is now history.
Mazi Kanu scampers into hiding, some 59 of his men are arrested on various charges of arson, disorderly conduct likely to cause a breach of public peace, and the python naked dance takes on a heightened hue.
From the shock and cry over the mud soaked cruelty melted to the mouthy, and as it turned out lilly livered bunch of Mazi Nnamdi Kanu disciples, the triumphal military, forgetting that their authoritarian rule ended almost nineteen years ago, constituted itself into a kangaroo court, came out blazing in righteous anger and decreed Kanu’s ragtag ego trippers a terrorist organisation.
In quick cahoot, afraid that the Nnamdi Kanu induced military python dance might sweep some of them off their olympian governorship mansions, afraid that the Buhari government can easily come up with a state of emergency declaration, Southeast governors hastily proscribed IPOB.
This seeming desperate thought of saving their pompous backsides with a proscription of the Indigenous People of Biafra group reverbrated across the nation. Shocked Nigerians could only, with mouth agape, ask “like really?” Proscribe an indigenous group you never registered in the first place?
Of course, questions as to whether the South Eastern governors had such powers were not out of place. Lay and learned Nigerians jumped into the public arena asking that what must be done, if it must be done, must be done rightly; legally.
Well, if military pythons could dance, and decree and the cult like lilliputian Nnamdi Kanu would scamper into a silenced hideout, why can’t their supreme excellencies, also show the Abuja recuperating emperor that they deserve to be left perching on their Dunloped throned?
Truth is, something urgent needed to be done to quell the rising emotions, douse the palpable tension, which Kanu’s misadventure had foisted on the country.
But as Chimamada Adiche, the storyteller, noted elsewhere, incompetence dressed in finery and verbose political gibberish, as strategy, is still, well, incompetence.
And as my old mass communication professor at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Professor Sylvanus Ekwelie would also have put it, the authorities displayed voluminous incompetence, now righted by the presidential proclamation backed by the judicial pronouncement.
Nevertheless, in the throes of the pyrrhic victory dance by the authorities, the hope is that the baby will not be thrown away with the muddy bath water.
The genuine agitations of the people of the South East for a fairer treatment in the Nigerian state must not be snubbed and consigned to the rubbish dump. Genuine attempts must be instigated by the federal and state governments to give all Nigerians a better deal than what currently obtains. Lets not by our gross incompetence open the doors for more Kanus to spring up across the country.