Nura Jibo

By Nura Jibo MRICS

His Excellency, the former governor of Jigawa State, wrote:

“The APC-controlled government of Jigawa State has WON all the Chairmanship seats of the 27 Local Governments and the 283 Councilorship seats in the YET to be conducted local government elections throughout the State. The reason being no opposition Party is able to pay the FIVE MILLION NAIRA for the Chairmanship and TWO MILLION NAIRA for the Councilorship nomination forms from the State electoral commission! While other States are engaged in protests over hunger and poverty, congratulations to Jigawa for being the most prosperous State in Nigeria. “

I responded to him below. Enjoy!

“Your Excellency,

Courtesies and good morning, sir.

With due respect, this was what your president and you did as his governor(s). Indeed, you did similar political maneuvering during your stewardship as Jigawa State Governor and got much of it! However, one thing that you politicians so often forget or hardly understand is that life is just like a piano! It keeps on repeating itself! I am happy you mentioned hunger and poverty in this short satirical write-up. 

Lest you forget, you were quoted several times on social media and in the national dailies asserting that the Talaka that your type impoverished cannot do anything to effect any meaningful change or something like it! You were quoted in the Leadership Stable Newspaper by Wole Olaoye in an article that he dubbed “Too Poor to Revolt,” saying: 

“Nigeria is too weak to break. Who will break it? The ordinary person in Jigawa, the ordinary person in Sokoto, or the ordinary person in Bayelsa? Is it the Igbo vulcanizer, the Yoruba woman selling kerosene by the roadside, or the Okada man in Delta? They don’t have the capacity to unite because they are burdened by poverty. We have taken away from them their dignity, their self-esteem, their pride, and their self-worth so that they cannot even organize.” Wole went ahead to quote you, affirming the fact that “Up there, we (the elite) unite… We will never allow Nigeria to break because once it breaks, we will lose. But the common man loses nothing. What is he losing? He is already in hell; he cannot lose anything more than this hell.”

Unfortunately, all these statements that you made were full of a dearth of political history and knowledge of the political changes that happened in certain parts of the world. Your Excellency, let me take you back to memory lane and inform you so that you see the reasons for the superficial statements that you made in the Leadership and so that you may give thanks to Jibo one day for telling it exactly how it is!

Excellency, you should be aware that the recent Zanga Zanga that started in Nigeria is just a precursor to what you hypothesized above, and want to make those with little or no knowledge of how politics and politicians use words to manipulate or intimidate the hapless and vulnerable by eating therefrom. Your Excellency, what you and all the Northern Governors failed to understand is this:

The resilience in Talaka that you spent so long a time defining and controversially defending under the tutelage, or better put, an appendage of Malam Aminu Kano’s school of thought, is only workable and thrives on individual mental toughness, which is not sufficient! Whenever you talk of hunger and poverty plus starvation in Talaka, there are other sides of it that local champion politicians, especially the northern ones, don’t know or deliberately ignore. 

The hunger and poverty-driven Zanga Zanga that you see is what I prefer to call organizational resilience and sustainability. Indeed, that form of deliberate Talaka’s subjection to poverty and hunger that you mentioned suggests that those highly pauperized Nigerians that your type thinks have dribbled and can charge them and score points any day are no longer susceptible to individual resilience and adaptability, sir! They are now resorting quickly to community resilience support systems essential for successfully navigating unpredictable circumstances. 

I don’t have the time, sir. Still, I could have opened up this political history debate by making you think profoundly about those statements you made, which, by and large, are nothing but one of those political mistakes that most African political leaders are good at. They no longer see the dangerous paths they have led their people down until they are consumed by it.

In any case, I wish you all the best in reviving the political atmosphere in Nigeria.

Sincerely,

Jibo.