By: Rowland Udoh
One of the topical issues President Muhammadu Buhari found time to address soon upon his arrival from his private visit to the United Kingdom is the raging matter of disengagement of some of the aides/appointees of the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo. PMB is reported to have said that owing to the creation of a new ministry comprising some of the units previously under the Office of the Vice President, it became imperative that such persons in the affected units be moved to the new ministry.
That is good talk and understandable from a man whose vocabulary does not allow him to play with words, but the Nigerian people are not marines. Marines are special forces military personnel in the US Army who take instructions from their superiors and no questions asked.
We dare here to ask, “if it was that simple and straight forward, why didn’t Garba Shehu, the traditional palace court announcer issue a statement, no matter how terse, to diffuse the tension that the controversy was generating?”
The Ohaneze and a section of the Afenifere issued statements with different slants. Ohaneze thought in their wisdom and mindset which is culturally intuitive, that the VP should resign, probably in a manner that would have been reminiscent of the exit of Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, the then Chief of General Staff, in the wake of the admission of Nigeria into the Organization of Islamic Countries, OIC. A section of the Afenifere asking Osinbajo to stay put and go no way, may have been informed by the acrimony in the ailing days of the Yar’Adua/Goodluck Presidency as well as the cultural disposition of siddon look, apologies to the late Chief Bola’s idea of blessed memory.
You may like to reason with the saying, “Good things come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” This writer believes that the President’s explanation is an afterthought following extensive and profound imagination by his spin doctors, so it was only safe that he had to deliver the message, no need for hirelings.
It could be argued that if transparency and accountability have been genuinely entrenched in our governance process, this distraction was totally avoidable. The Vice President would have explained this off without second guessing. All the paper over the cracks cannot produce what a mortar would do in a cracked wall.
Let the slogan of “Change begins with me” start from the very top so we can all in peace and love get to the “Next Level.”
