ALARM!!! The President is Missing!!!

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria

Our president is missing. Call out the search party. Release the hunting dogs and give them his shoes to pick his scent. Yes indeed, for the President now has shoes, and the President has gone missing.

It is several days now since the police, ostensibly acting on the orders of their Inspector General, laid ambush to legislators who were convening to deliberate on the security situation in the North East at the request of the President. It is several days since those who we pay to protect us fired tear-gas canisters at legislators within the legislative complex; several days since some men in uniform raised their weapons against one of the icons of our democracy.

The Presidency has made some noises – Doyin Okupe has released his usual hee-haws. But nothing public has come from the President. And the President is the most visible physical icon of our democracy. And our democracy was very publicly assaulted by a public institution that we call the Police (Force).

It was the President’s letter that triggered the attempt by legislators to hold a plenary. In other words, the plenary was going to hold at the President’s invitation. And those he invited to hold a deliberation on the state of emergency in the North East were waylaid by uniformed men, whose duties include protecting our democracy.

I do not subscribe to the opinion that the President sent the police on that dishonorable mission that made our honorable legislators scale their own gates in less than honorable ways. But I am amazed that there is, up to this time, no public condemnation from the President. Knowing the President to be an honorable man, a man who believes that his ambition is not worth the blood of any Nigerian, a man under whose presidency no one will have to be exiled for stating his opinion no matter how freely, … knowing all this, the only conclusion I can draw from his silence is that the President is not aware that such a calamitous event happened. To conclude otherwise would mean I question my President's claim to honor. And I very certainly do not. I am sure he is not aware of those unfortunate scenes whose attendant shame we had to endure.

With all the advances we have got in Information and Communications Technology, by means of which we know that there are protests happening in Ferguson, United States of America, over the non-indictment of a white police officer who shot an 18-year-old black kid; by means of which we watch the astronauts on the International Space Station as they use an espresso machine for the first time in the history of human space exploration; by means of which we see the little nothings that happen from Russia to Rwanda; … yes, with that kind of ICT, the only way the President of Nigeria does not know that his legislators came under Nigerian police attack is if he is missing, held somewhere incommunicado against his will, or is in another universe, taken by aliens to a planet billions of light years away from ours.

Because I am unwilling to believe in aliens even if they exist, because I cannot believe that someone can hold our president incommunicado against his will, I can only conclude that our president has gone missing.

And he needs to be found.

Like yesterday.

Where is that search party?

Bring back our president!