By Sola Ebiseni
MAN is not only a political animal, he is indeed distinguished from and claims superiority over other animals by his ability to create society as a platform to organise his kind for the domestication of other beings for his own welfare and social perpetuation.
Every human epoch has its own associated political structure and sentiments. When the social structure is cracking and the polity is at the risk of being rendered asunder such that no one is ultimately the beneficial owner, the political class puts on its thinking cap in search of a political solution.
Politics reigns supreme over the economy as the determinant of who gets what, how, where and when. It is through politics that infrastructural edifices are built; it also takes political disagreements, and war if not well managed, to pull such magnificent structures down.
Politics is at the root of Nigeria’s myriads of problems, the solutions which must be unmistakably political. The declaration of the search for a political solution by the Federal Government must be sincere, total and realistic.
Admittedly, Buhari is not the sole creator of the nation’s woes, yet so enmeshed therein, even if as one of those ill-informed soldiers of juvenile dispositions who engaged in the earliest coup and counter-coups of crude tribal dimensions, he plunged the nation into avoidable but debilitating civil war and continues to hold the nation’s politics by the jugular.
Only few men in history are blessed with such divine privileges of leading their country both as a beneficiary of high treason and being elected for the maximum period allowed by the Constitution. Others, particularly in Africa, only transmute from Head of State by coup and transmute to civilian president through sham elections organised by themselves.
He self-educated himself, became a lawyer and U.S. Congressman from Illinois. In 1849, he returned to his law practice but became vexed by the opening of additional lands to slavery. So, he re-entered politics in 1854 and ran for President in 1860, sweeping the North in victory.
Pro-slavery elements in the South equated his success in the North with the North’s rejection of their right to practice slavery, and southern states began seceding from the Union.
Lincoln identified his twin priority of ending slavery as a crime against humanity and the emancipation of the Black people on one hand and the preservation of the American Union on the other. He achieved both by mobilising the entire nation behind his vision, forming alliances across party lines with animosity towards none.
The economy responded rather positively and the entire world was the better for it. He was White yet sided with the oppressed Blacks, dealing a fatal blow on the iniquitous slavery based economy of the Whites. He did not seek for them more slavery lands but rather closed the routes through which many have died as articles of trade.
Though he died on April 4,1865 from an assassin’s bullets, yet he accomplished his vision and mission in only four years and is forever remembered as perhaps the greatest President of the United States of America.
No elected President of Nigeria enjoyed the level of Buhari’s goodwill at the inception. He had virtually all the nation’s human resources at his call to make his administration the best Nigerians ever had, including a very cerebral deputy who, as Attorney General of Lagos State, used the instrumentality of the judicial process to fight for a true federal Nigeria with the concomitant devolution of powers to the states; he has men who have served the country in different capacities and whose experiences were available for him.
He jettisoned these resources and placed the destiny of Nigeria in the hands of his few boys led by Abubakar Malami, whose only political exposure was being the Legal Adviser of Buhari’s CPC. The political vacuum created was capitalised upon by individuals using him as a cover to execute their personal agenda. He refused to engage the nation and communicated nothing but sectional and parochial messages that threatened and still threaten to tear the nation apart.
The President’s party men, who understand the imperative of politics at the time of Chief John Oyegun, one time Governor of Edo State, as chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, set up the Mallam El-Rufai Committee on True Federalism when President Buhari was on medical vacation overseas.
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