December 16, 2001
"...Time alone, oh! Time will tell. Think you're in heaven but you're living in hell" - Bob Marley
Nigeria’s Minister of State for Defence (Navy) Mrs. Dupe Adelaja is stupid! No wait; she is not just stupid; she is insane!! She is stupidly insane! She is insanely stupid!
The question of the place of Ndigbo in Nigeria is one of the most provocative subjects in our nation’s contemporary discourse. It is and has always been a charged and passionate topic. And much as official Nigeria would wish the plight of Ndigbo a fate of perpetual non-issue, the problem refuses to just die or fade away.
How could it not fester when each time a federal government takes one forward step toward healing, it soon reverses itself with two backward steps that deepen and exacerbate the problem? The much-applauded executive pardon, which Obasanjo granted citizens who had fought on the Biafran side during the Civil War, is turning out in typical Nigerian fashion to be all hot air. At least this can be the only logical deduction from the recent comments attributed to Minister Adelaja.
Patriotic Nigerians are incensed by this Minister’s cold, callous and disquieting characterization of pardoned "ex-Biafran soldiers" are "traitors" undeserving of any pension from the Federal Government. At a recent ministerial briefing, this divisive, silly Minister showed utter un-patriotism and tactlessness when she stated that having fought on the side of Biafra, these reprieved ex-soldiers should be "content to engage in buying and selling".
Adding insult to injury, this buffoonish uncivil servant further ranted: "it is a bad stigma that you are a traitor, that you left your country to fight on the other side". Comparing the Obasanjo administration to its roguish predecessors, this fool still further said, "this government has a large heart, after so many years all the other governments didn't pardon them, and now after pardoning them now, we are talking about pension".
Still talking her head off, Mrs. Adelaja said of these ex-soldiers, "yes, you can be doing your buying and selling, but I suppose that as individuals we have aspirations, we have focus, and we have vision". And then with the affected air of a favourite female Minister with better than privileged access to her Chief Executive, she concluded that the ex-soldiers’ pardon was only meant to help them realize those aspirations.
Good grief! Affront unimaginable and condemnable! In a country where nothing shocks anybody anymore, Adelaja’s comments still represent the crudest, most shocking form of unrefined mentality! How do you mean "aspirations", Mrs Adelaja? Aspirations to simple buying and selling opportunities in one’s own fatherland? Aspirations to the daily grind of denied existence? Or aspirations to a federally enforced sense of diminished citizenship? What gall this Minister of Idiocy has! And what stigma was she talking about?
This puny-minded Minister considers executive pardon to mean the washing off of stigma associated with fighting on the wrong side! Silly! Those ex-soldiers are nothing but heroes to the Igbo nation and are appropriately appreciated as such by Ndigbo! One doesn’t get stigmatized for putting up vigorous defence against one’s annihilation. One doesn’t get stigmatized for standing up against the orchestrated massacre of one’s kind. One simply doesn’t!
On the contrary, stigmatized is the entity, which tried but failed to wipe out an entire nation.
Stigmatized is a national government, which committed genocide against the most productive and contributory part of its population.
Stigmatized is a government, which informs its half-measures with the inaction of its discredited predecessors.
Stigmatized is a federal Minister incognizant that a Yoruba leadership that suffered from a dementia of parochialism contributed largely to preserving the current abnormality called Nigeria.
Stigmatized is a federal Minister too senseless to understand that her President’s small measures of rapprochement towards the Igbos need to be expanded and the pace speeded up to bridge the divide between the East and the West.
Stigmatized is a federal Minister who does not understand the historically ironic import of a Yoruba President supervising the final termination of the Civil War through genuine programmes that reconcile the entire country.
Stigmatized is an insular-minded federal official who blinds her intellect to similar Third World cases in which expansive-hearted regimes, in precedence-setting reconciliation programmes, reabsorbed former enemies into their regular Forces, thus winning peace and stability for their peoples.
Stigmatized is a Minister in a buffeted administration who wittingly feeds destabilization efforts against her own government.
Stigmatized is a national defence-concerned functionary, who fails abjectly to appreciate that potentially disintegrative explosion inevitably results from unresolved plights of citizens.
And stigmatized is a shameless, myopic Minister in a supposed 21st century government who still thinks in 18th century retrogressive context of conquest and subjugation.
This thoughtless Minister should be taught there cannot be any halfway houses to reconciliation. You either get reconciled or you don’t! There are also nothing like half-executive pardons. One is either pardoned or one is not! Which begs the question whether Adelaja is utterly ignorant or dangerously reckless.
For a supposed healing presidency, Adelaja’s despicable show of insensitivity and her amoral display of poor judgement are a political capital crime which deserves the sharp stiletto of the presidential boot. Is this not a sad, deplorable case of serving one’s country too badly? Well-meaning citizens are deeply offended by this latest proof of the lack of will of the Obasanjo government to serve and heal Nigeria.
Minister Adelaja clearly spoke with the cruel, pitiless flippancy of a desensitized whore. And unfeeling whores are not what our country needs today to heal the suppurating sores in her diverse body politic! Her wild, irresponsible comments stoke the raw lesions from the Civil War. As such, the President should give this Minister her walking papers!
It is incommodious that a Minister of our government does not even understand her English language properly. Isn’t she a slave of mischaracterization to refer to these soldiers as "ex-Biafran soldiers"? These veterans are now more appropriately "former Nigerian soldiers". They are no less former Nigerian soldiers than those who’d fought them on the federal side.
The rightness of this characterization flows from the presidential pardon Obasanjo awarded them which effectively wiped any and all burden from participation in the Civil War on the side of the Eastern Region. And by this executive exoneration, they become no less eligible for service pension than their counterparts from the other side. The grant of pardon presupposed that lack of it had denied them of rights and privileges to which they have been entitled.
This foolish Minister should, therefore, be sent back to school and to her old English teacher to relearn her lexicon. She should be re-taught that pardon in its simplest form means the forgiveness of a past wrong. She should learn that pardon implies a full restoration to status as it was before the offence or error was committed.
In a larger political context, executive pardon or clemency, which is what these so-called ex-Biafran soldiers received from President Obasanjo, guarantees them all their rights and privileges as former members of Nigeria’s Armed Forces. This further guarantees them all the benefits of service to Nigeria while in the Armed Forces up to, at least, the point of their forced separation from service. The award of pardon imbues these former soldiers with the privilege to pension. Nothing less than this full restoration to privileges will suffice, if the presidential pardon is to retain its integrity.
As irrationally irresponsible as may be Minister Adelaja’s public affront on these ex-soldiers and indeed on the entire Ndigbo, it points up the serious lack of substance to many pronouncements of the Obasanjo government on many a national problem. It smacks of total lack of faith in one’s own integrity to bestow a citizen with presidential pardon and still publicly characterize him a stigmatized traitor.
Where is the good faith of the government in professing a desire to heal the country? Obasanjo’s exercise in token half-measures is doing great disservice to our people. Half measures oftentimes become more injurious than no measures at all. Half-measures usually aggravate conditions they seek to resolve. They don’t cement goodwill. And they do not build a nation!
President Obasanjo should seize the moment and utilize the opportunity presented by this imprudence of his Minister to end the still raging Civil War that we all falsely claimed to have terminated in 1970. Ohaneze Ndigbo presented to the President through his Oputa Commission, a Position Paper on our plight as a people. The President should constitute this Paper into a working guide in a sincere quest to resolve Nigeria’s Igbo problem.
And he must act promptly by first sacking this disgrace to our country named Dupe Adelaja!
Guides
Ditch Bitchy Minister Dupe Adelaja!