Of Adesina, Gambari And Nigeria’s Puerile Opposition

PETER CLAVER OPARAH

Try as much as you can, you won’t place a finger on what the aim of the strange opposition that emerged in Nigeria in 2015 takes as its purpose. Full of bile, anger, pettiness and outright mischief, it is difficult to discern the mission of this opposition. It has become difficult for the current opposition to articulate reasonable challenges to the present government’s policies without sounding base, childish and purposeless. Where you expect healthy flipsides to government policies and actions, what you get is poorly articulated, dense and vacuous drivels, reeking with false facts, ill-mannered invectives, foul language and insults and nothing more.

 It is easy to understand why the opposition is so disheveled and tattered. Made of members and supporters of b party used power principally as a tool for self aggrandizement and free loading, it is easy to understand why, as an opposition in an era where such uncensored liberty with the treasury is illegitimate, the country’s opposition and has resorted to vending bitterness and acrimony as opposition politics. It is easy then to understand why the opposition has resorted to free bandying of fake news, Fabrications and silly stories as opposition politics when what is required of it is to robustly challenge the government with factual presentation; the fact that Lai Mohammed deployed as the spokesperson of the opposition to lead a fruitful revolt and overthrow to a clueless and ultra corrupt ruling party in 2015 thereby making him an envied scourge fir the parody that today passes as opposition in Nigeria as well as its rattled supporters. 

Again, with its history of salubrious feeding on the common wealth, the present opposition is lazy and bereft of the rigour required of real and competent opposition. In such state, bandying wild, specious and outlandish allegations it cannot give flesh to becomes its favorite pastime. Talking carelessly at the drop of a pin becomes strategy hence the opposition revel in ventilating fake news and ridiculously petty fabrications to please the equally bitter and dense rabble it has as its supporters is the opposition’s chief article of trade. 

The low value of the present opposition is that it churns out very meaningless statements by the minute even as the  ruling party and government take not even a scant glance at them, talk not of dignifying them with a response! In anger, its bleeding cahoots, still hurting terribly from the loss of the freebies and pilfered rations that used to oil their sordid efforts before they were turned into unprepared opposition in 2015, forge and vend fake, puerile and detestably false news like diarrhead patients and they little care that their cheap wares annoy rather than tickle the populace. 

Recently, the opposition exhumed and circulated an article the Media Adviser to the President, Femi Adesina wrote in 2008 as a Columnist, where he disagreed with then President Yar:adua’s appointment of the newly appointed Chief of Staff to the President, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari as his peace envoy in the Niger Delta. Adesina’s ground for disagreeing with Gambari’s appointment was because Gambari had a favourable opinion that supported Abacha government’s role in the trial and execution of Ken Saro Wiwa. 

As a reverred Columnist and indeed the   Editor-in-chief of Sun newspapers then, Adesina was known not to hide his thoughts and feelings on any issue and one such issue was that he didn’t fancy Gambari as a peace envoy to the Niger Delta, as proposed by Yar’adua based on where he stood on the Ogoni crisis. As a Columnist, he had his say but the Yar’adua government had its way and Gambari’s appointment stood. 

Now, Gambari has been appointed Chief of Staff to the same President Adesina is spokesman to, so what the heck is in his 2008 article on Gambari’s appointment that so tickled the malevolence of the puerile opposition that they exhumed and circulated it widely? What purpose do they wish to achieve by that very childish act? To provoke a war between Chief of Staff and Media Adviser? To instigate a fight in Buhari’s government? How asininely petty! How speciously childish! 

Honestly, it beggars the mind that we have an opposition that rarely understands its mission and has turned habitual scarecrows and tittle-tattlers when it is supposed to offer alternatives to issues. We have an opposition that is so seeped in childish irrelevance and which embarrassingly ridicules itself with its preoccupation with inanities that rarely rewards its sense of pettiness. 

Okay, the opposition exhumes and shares an innocuous article by Femi Adesina opposing the appointment of Gambari to a particular role in 2015? So what next? Gambari will start fighting with Adesina based on that and they will salivate and ululate in sadistic joy that they have set Buhari’s government on fire? Poor childish folks they are. They have done worse in the past in their efforts to sow discord in Buhari’s government and still ended with unhealing wounds. How do they, in their small minds, think a Gambari will get incited by such very professional opinion by a Columnist doing what he had to do 12 years ago? So disgustingly small minded! 

One of the poignant features of the dysfunctional opposition we have in Nigeria today is that it is inflicted with bare reasoning. That is why the opposition is fixated on cooking conspiracy theories on the Buhari regime which have all fallen flat. The appointment of Gambari himself was the last of such failures as the opposition and their cohorts were hauling different conspiracy theories of who would get picked as Buhari’s COS and forged dozens of names but never saw Gambari. In fact, the appointment of Gambari made arrant nonsense of their baloney of a cabal that held Buhari hostage and from which they already annointed a COS for him before Gambari came in and reduced their ignorant guesses to dust. 

The opposition has exhumed and marketed Adesina’s 2008 article against Gambari’s appointment as peace envoy to Niger Delta and so what? Gambari will never ever fight Adesina for that professional opinion. There will be no fight in Buhari’s government because of that. They will end in bitter pains because Buhari’s government is not ruled by the kind of puerility that encased their plot. The government will not be distracted by that very childish and silly antic. There will be no letting on the same scorched earth policies that had turned the opposition into an irrational mob. The PDP and its cohorts will still be as far from power as they were in 2015. I am sure that Buhari, Adesina and Gambari will laugh over the hare-brained antics of the opposition in hauling out this article. But all said, Nigeria deserves a better opposition than this conclave of bitter, irrational, childish scoundrels and humongous jesters fired by acute bitterness than even the desire to raise their game beyond the ridiculous prattle we have seen in the past five years. An opposition that sees its acts from the gutter level of fabricating fake news, speaking irrationally, petty mischief, bitter recriminations, childish thumping all over the space is a sad rebuke to any nation that is unfortunate to be  saddled with such an egregious burden.   

Peter Claver Oparah writes from Ikeja, Lagos. Email: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com