On The ‘Crises’ In Rivers State!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

I just undertook a tour of some parts of Rivers State. It was amazing to discover that anyone in Rivers State who does not care to read today’s newspapers may not even be aware that the state he lives in is the same one being widely reported as presently "engulfed in great, boundless crises capable of derailing the nation's democracy."

 

Rivers State Governor Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi

The people I saw in Rivers State were too busy undertaking their normal daily engagements, struggling to put food on their tables (like other Nigerians elsewhere) to bother about the loads of inane, self-serving exchanges by grossly over-fed, light-minded and ultra-selfish delinquents that dominate the pages of the newspapers daily.

Forget the rented crowds! If you ask me: the "war" in Rivers State exists only in the minds of (and among) these misguided combatants fighting to out-smart each other in the endless desperation to corner Nigerian resources to themselves and impoverish the masses the more – the same masses they claim to be fighting for.

You also have another bunch of unpatriotic characters stoking the fire from a safe distance with the sole intention of exploiting it to further some base political and even economic expediencies. 

Nigeria: In Search Of Darkness

The real tragedy, however, are the small fries in this clearly avoidable fray who are too intoxicated by the unprecedented spotlight they have suddenly been thrown into to pause awhile and ask themselves the very simple, elementary question: Why have they suddenly become everybody’s darling at this point in time? And whose selfish interests   are being served by this desperation to turn them into emergency heroes?

Is it not possible that soon, very soon, all the sweet lullaby in the media would just peter out and they would wake up from this “midsummer night dream,” after they had burnt out their relevance (or is it nuisance value), to discover that they had all the while been mere dispensable tools in the hands of some big players – and nothing more!  By then, cold, crude reality would stare them in the face, as daylight intrudes to halt what has all along while been a most pleasant and unimaginably beautiful treatment in a majestic dreamland.

Time has come for sane minds in this country to firmly ask these fellows to immediately excuse the good people of Rivers State (and, indeed, the rest of the Nigerian masses) from these self-serving crises they created to gratify their selfish ambitions. They should confine their elite squabbles to their privileged circle  and leave the Nigerian people to go on with their herculean task of maintaining an impoverished existence in a richly endowed country like Nigeria – perennially run down by the continued triumph of the organized banditry that pass for governance in Nigeria... 

 Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan

…And what, for instance, is even the meaning of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) over which we have been unduly distracted these past few days, and from which this revolting crises pretends to stem from? Is it NOT an overly useless ‘Boys Company’ under which Nigeria’s mostly profligate  governors hide to perpetually gallivant in Abuja at our expense? And what is there in it for the ordinary Nigerian out there cracking his brain to figure out where the next meal would come from?

Well, if this whole noise eventually helps to kill and bury that unprofitable body, Nigerians would at least derive some relieve from the fact that one huge drainpipe has been successfully destroyed. What a country!