LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT

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LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT –7

Written by Duncan Friday, 23 July 2010

Forward Marching to the Past!

Your Excellency Sir,
Please, pardon my waywardness today, but the fact is that I never liked awards. Whether they be that in professional callings or those in the literary world; they never appeal to me. I think of them all as worldly things coveted by men with a surplus in worldly and arrogant covetousness.

But when it comes to the case of awards in Nigeria, I think, like every other thing Nigerian (I almost say Naija; that demeaning word that has now, but wrongly, gained notoriety in national propriety nomenclature – originally, the word was used to signify everything that is horrible and despicable about Nigeria and the Nigerian, but now elevated to levels of piety) that they are the veritable instruments of canonizing public-place rascality. (Don’t expect me to take the Nigerian one in this life. And I should wake up and protest for a few minutes and then go back to my grave should I be given one post humously.)

In fact, awards in Nigeria, particularly the national honours one that were handed out to ‘deserving people’ yesterday, can aptly be described as the country’s own Halloween, with the night they are given the date of the nation’s ‘National Halloween Festival’.
For those who might not be acquainted with the real origin of the Halloween feast, I recount for them: it stems from a pagan attempt to ‘holify’ atheism by declaring that on one night in a year, saints and sinners can commune, holus bolus; as members of one large family when nothing any of them does is taken against him or her forever – one night when no sins committed can be written against one.

Anyone with any scant capacity to view issues and situations without bias will easily see the night of our national awards as the only time that nationalists, nocturnalists, saboteurs, sovereignists, treasury rats and treasury dogs of the country can come together and break bread and clink glass without anyone holding misgivings. And together with the Pharaonic plaques that they get and the Pharisaic oratory that goes with the night, those nights justify their place in the Beelzebubean club that contains the likes of Sodom and Gomorrah – little wonder somebody like Chinua Achebe would have misgivings about joining a club whose membership includes the likes of Sani Abacha, Tafa Balogun.

This is just one of the grouses I have against this award; here is another. When I checked through my data bank the last time, I found that in the period of a dozen years of the award, 1959 Nigerians, 33 foreigners and two dropped but unnamed people had been beneficiaries. So, I see the way this has been going on as making that, by the end of another dozen years, every car-owner in this country may have become a member of this horour – sorry; no pun intended – honour club.

And yet another grouse, and this is where the first issue of the day makes its entry: this club of awardees have now constituted themselves into a further club of awardees, which I think go by the title of Association of Past National Awards Recipients. With this club forming a club, it is only to be assumed – if we know the Nigerian mentality and psyche well – that soon they will be on to you as pressure group, one way or the other, in the same manner a certain inglorious club has been doing in the past few weeks; the club of the ‘Association of Former Sports Administrators.

This latter club – who in reality should have hidden their faces behind the four walls of their houses till their dying day for the things they did to our sports in the past 40 years – have now taken it upon themselves to be an unsolicited arm of your campaign to begin serving your natural term as the leader of the 2011 presidential mandate.
Now this is where and how all the angers of poor people, like myself, coalesce against rulers.

Here we are fighting for a just country and trying to create the milieu that could turn a rag-tag conglomerate community of tribal enclaves like ours into a genuine nation in the near future, and some sets continually swear to the path of undermining it surreptitiously. What irks the most is the fact that this is happening after we had seen this our mission as something that is achievable as a result of the glimmer of light appearing through you, inside a long hole of darkness – your mode of arrival on the top scene is unique because it comes, for the first time in the history of this country, not from the normal feudal or corrupted route of the past, but by what can be called infinite providence.

Thus, instead of our set; the poor Nigerians set who had no means of commuting with you, to be the ones impressing most on you through this kind of medium, on what the commoners expect of you, these sets of clubs who are only but a few percentage of the population, are now creating designer methods to have your ear – nay, corner it and hold it hostage.

I started this letter telling you what I, as a kind of mouthpiece for our downtrodden set, think of the award because we; in our totality, did not expect that within your first year as the substantive president, you would be giving out these things. If the plan had been there since the time of your predecessor, we had thought you would have postponed giving it in order for us to face the more daunting task of building this nation, which only few had made any recognisable and sizeable efforts at doing in the past.

Now that you have helped to increase the size, and therefore the powers of this club, do you still think you stand a chance of rejecting their opinion on what they think the velocity of movement towards our nirvana, and the speed and course of building the future of this country should be, if their own thinking does not tally with ours? Remember Sir that bourgeoisie thinking anywhere and anytime in the world has never tallied with that of the proletariat.

So, in this, suppose ‘the club’ says the latest item on the sporting agenda be made to have his wish – Dr. Amos Adamu becoming the Senior Special Adviser to you on sports – against the collective wish of the majority of people on Planet Sports, will you be able to refuse this?

We must not forget this is not wishful thinking; Dr. Adamu is one of the most connected individuals in this country, and one who has not been renowned for having his wishes not becoming horses for his riding pleasure.

Sir, I am not doing a take on Adamu today. I might do it on Monday. Actually, I had thought at the beginning of the week that today’s was going to be my last letter to you. This being so Sunday night when a text came into my phone telling me Adamu was to be appointed to that post. That very moment, I had believed the worst for sport had happened and that despite our efforts to point you to the right direction for our future, that the powerful hawks of the sector had finally hijacked you. Meaning there was no longer any use trying to tell you what positions, path or trajectory was the correct one to lead us to the ‘Promised Land’. It was later that I was fully briefed that the plan to have Adamu in that position had only just begun its gesticulation period that I had sighed in relief.

Still, Sir, our heart is in our hands the way things seem to be developing along the same trajectory that issues did during the period of our past leaders. It is like we are seeing the ominous sign that we are about to begin a period of forward marching to the past.

We do sincerely hope that this is not going to be so and that you will take time to listen to us about what is right for us before you even welcome this self-servers who will use your natural and God-given right to 2011 ambition as the cantilever to elevate themselves onto your sight in order to present their false font which they would make out is the correct template to cure all sporting ills. And we all know through history that leaders are never immune to this kind of people’s machinations.
Coming soon sir is what we have to do to make the Super Eagles world-beaters again.

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