By Akinleye Segun –
One of Nigeria’s most talented young actress and comedy sensation, Emmanuella Samuel, landed herself a role to feature in a Disney Hollywood movie. Her announcement via her official Instagram page has elicited a lot of congratulatory messages from her numerous fans who have followed her progress all along, likewise the opportunists who have decided to jump in on her success, thereby bringing to fore once again, the hypocrisy of our nation.
The Senate president, Bukola Saraki, was the chief culprit. His congratulatory message to Emmanuella and a subsequent invitation for her to visit the Senate has not gone down well with most Nigerians. The backlash wasn’t as a result of any crime committed by Saraki other than the fact that Nigerians saw in its full regalia, the falseness that has engulfed the nation.
Ordinarily, one might be quick to dismiss the invite as a harmless gesture from the number three citizen in the country to a girl who has distinguished herself among her peers, with her chosen career. But scratching beneath the surface, one begins to wonder why Emmanuella suddenly caught the eye of Mr Saraki to warrant an invitation to the hallowed chambers, after all, she won the Best New Comedienne and Princess of Comedy awards at the Afro-Australia Music and Movie Awards in Australia.
Success, they say, has many fathers and in the Nigerian milieu, failure sometimes too is never an orphan, especially when the failure and its countless fathers titivate in white flowing Agbada and know how to smile for the camera. Hypocrisy in this regard is the continual visits and consultations on the ill-advised second-term agenda of Mr President, Muhammadu Buhari.
At a point when Buhari’s major concern should be the state of the nation – the endless and needless bloodshed by the rampaging killer herdsmen, the lingering fuel scarcity, the many corruption allegations trailing his cabinet members, the recent abduction by Boko Haram in Yobe State which still has 46 school girls missing, the latest corruption perception index by Transparency International which has confirmed what we know all along – that the anti-corruption crusade by this administration is a farce and the general plight of Nigerians – the number one citizen has decided to turn the other cheek to the travails of the nation and concentrate on smoothening his path to a four more years in office, thus his mandate to the leader of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Bola Tinubu, to reconcile aggrieved party members. In all of these, it is pathetic to find that instead of his allies and party members to call him to order, they are singing his praises.
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Speaking of reconciliation, the president has probably forgotten that not only party members are aggrieved. Majority of his vocal supporters Pre-2105 are also disenchanted with him. There is need to reach out to those 7.9 million Nigerians who, according to statistics provided by the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, have lost their jobs in the space of 21 months. There is also need to reconcile those who have buried loved ones, through the machete of the marauding herdsmen of from the bullet of the unknown gunmen.
The bootlickers who have made the villa their home and are ready to rubbish their own mothers and deny their fathers just to be on the good books of Buhari, are not doing him any favour. Who remembers Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) and their support for the former president, Goodluck Jonathan? During election periods, people will surely come looking for what to feed on. Nigerians are tired of the habitual debtor, Kogi state governor, Yahaya Bello, Zamfara state governor, Abubakar Yari, the clownish Minister of Communications, Bayo Shittu and their spoilt-child-like attitude all in a bid to curry favour from Aso rock.
In the first instance, with his past dismal records in public service, Buhari had no business getting close to the seat of power again. He was branded, repackaged and presented as the Messiah to lead the sons and daughters of Isreal out of the wilderness and into the “Promised Land”. He was presented as the better side of the coin, albeit a counterfeit one.
These and their ilk are the sycophants who walk tall in our midst and are doing the best they can to sell him a second time. In the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
You and I owe it to our generations unborn to resist them through the ballot box. Nigerians can no longer afford another four years of this present administration.
Meanwhile, Emmanuella should bask in the euphoria of her hard work. This is just the beginning for her. The world awaits her on the global stage and her true fans, not the hypocrites that abound in the corridors of power, send their congratulations.
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