Mallam Aliyu perhaps shocked
by Dokubo's robust defense reached for the insanity theory arguing
while seeking adjournment that Dokubo should be taken to a
psychiatric hospital for mental examination. But Dokubo is not mad,
he's as articulate as ever, in painful command of his mortal being
but not his immediate environment. If someone should visit the
psychiatric hospital then it should rather be Mallam Aliyu who is
defending an unjust system he does not have control over. Nor know
certain secrets about. He's acting (like the SSS) like a demented
errand boy doing every bidding of his master to please him.
Although the case has been
adjourned till December 8 for hearing my major concern here is the
glaring injustice at the root of this whole Niger Delta episode.
When the late evil tyrant
General Sani Abacha was in power President Obasanjo was at the
receiving end of Abacha's obnoxious madness. He was thrown into
detention in different locations across the country having been
accused and found guilty by a kangaroo military tribunal of
involvement in a phantom coup plot. We all knew then that Obasanjo
was innocent and the international community said so with one loud
voice. OBJ perhaps would have died like Musa Yar'Adua in Abacha's
gulag but for a certain divine miracle, the intervention of the
supernatural force in the natural affairs of men, which saw the
apple-eating end of Abacha, a good riddance to bad rubbish!
Today Obasanjo is the sole
Administrator of Nigeria as it were and it seems he has forgotten so
soon the book he wrote in prison entitled "This Animal Called Man"
in sharp reference to the hell he went through when Abacha was busy
in his demonic chambers undoing Nigeria. There is no crude oil
deposits in Obasanjo's homeland of Abeokuta or Ota. Neither do they
exist in Abacha's Kano or Babangida's Minna. God chose Niger Delta
regions to deposit the natural resources for the betterment of the
people. Alas the people there ro richly endowed by providence are at
the mercy of a crooked unjust system that seek control of their
lives and resources in the spirit of 'one nation, one people, one
destiny'.
Ken Saro-Wiwa and his eight
other Ogoni militant colleagues were hanged by Abacha while fighting
the just cause of equitable distribution of their black gold
resources way back in 1995. And Obasanjo has continued to unleash
terror on these lands for daring to challenge the status quo that
favours those amongst us elsewhere who do not know the real colour
of crude oil or the geography of Niger Delta where the production
flows. In the sad memory of those Ogoni 9 I enjoin the Ogonis in
particular and the Niger Delta people in general to keep up the
struggle until victory is achieved. Demanding for a fair equitable
share of the so-called national cake is a must and not a privilege.
It is right and your right!
Dr Okigbo in his gulf war
oil windfall report lamented how Babangida (then as a despot)
frivolously spent billions of dollars on nothing tangible. If the
evil genuis had used a quarter of that whooping 12 billion dollars
on developing the Niger Delta then perhaps by now the living
conditions of the people and their polluted devastated cities,
towns, villages, valleys and creeks would have been a different
story today. But IBB thought otherwise at the criminal expense and
peril of the sources of the wealth! Today the Niger Delta conundrum
persists even more vigorously violently with citizens rightfully
fighting for their rights for self-determination and equitable
distribution of their God-given natural resources.
To Dokubo Asari therefore I
say take heart, accept my heart-felt compassion. You will not die
but live long enough to tell the story as Obasanjo did! The
radicalism and inner workings of the man in you in the face of
adversity is what I admire most in you. Our country could be likened
to the late P.W Botha's apartheid South Africa of yore but the
striking difference is that our tormentors share the same
pigmentation with us! Yes they are fellow Nigerians but they live in
another world within Nigeria, a world where truth and justice do not
exist, a world where mischief and mendacity are kings and queens.
I grieve for you, Nigeria,
my dear country! I grieve for your federal system of government that
smacks of a mocking charade, a study in political fraud that is
obviously moribund. I grieve for your wasted years of disappointing
pursuit of destined greatness. I grieve for that historic colonial
day in 1914 when Lugard single-handedly decreed you into miserable
nationhood.
