No value at home, no worth abroad

When it comes to fighting, nations go to war for the rights of their citizens; sorry I meant real nations, not Naija. How many Naija died or were wounded in the first and recent xenophobic attacks in South Africa? Sorry, our legislooting arm got into a war over who should go to Pretoria. Who doesn’t like foreign allowance in an era of free fall Naira? After all, the trip is a coffee break and an opportunity to shop till they drop with diplomats at their beck and call every step. Anything for the estacode, nothing for the citizen.

Countries do stuff for their citizens, from the ridiculous to the sublime. North Korea, a rogue nation with a rogue leader who wants to wipe off anything and anyone that challenges ‘the leader’, Kim Jong-un. He was reported to have executed his own uncle for sleeping on duty, a hobby that thrives among all arms of the Naija establishment. Then for whatever reason seven weeks ago when his half brother Kim Jong-Nam showed up at a Malaysian airport looking like a confused tourist, one lady walked up to him and gassed him to death. 

Unlike some parts of Naija where autopsies are a religious anathema, Malaysians believe in scientifically unraveling the cause of death. The North Koreans have no such interest, they wanted his body back. A diplomatic face-off led to Kim padlocking the Malaysian Embassy in Pyongyang and holding its staff hostage. After a few huff and puff between both nations, Kim released a few women and children, but held nine other diplomats hostage. Did you ask about diplomatic immunity? In North Korea there is no immunity for anything that questions the leader. Last Thursday, the Malaysians released the corpse of the leader’s half brother, and the hostages were allowed to go home free without sarin gas poisoning and I hope Malaysia remembers to thank megalomaniac Kim for his unusual generosity. 

You could laugh at the way Kim Jong-un does business, but at least any North Korean in the leader’s good books is sure of his leader’s backing, even if it meant fast tracking Armageddon. That’s the beauty of your nation having your back. Nations go to great lengths to defend their national interest. Of course Naija is not a nation; it is a wish with a national flag, an anthem and the appurtenances of nationhood but remains a wish. 

The only time Naija talks as a nation is at the football field. Even then, it bickers more about the ethno-religious composition of the team than its capacity to win laurels. To beat the ethnic police, a.k.a the federal character principle; a gifted player may need to marry names. When you hear Celestine Babayaro, there’s a fusion somewhere – for one, Celestine is not a common name even for the Christians in northern Naija any more than an Ibo man named Babayaro. As far as this example goes, any semblance to a real person, dead or alive is a pure coincidence.

Hankering between the executive and the legislature is an organic fertilizer that grows the tree of democracy in other lands. Imagine what America would be if the legislature had dropped the Obamacare at the Donald’s say-so- some poor Americans would have been flocking to India to exchange their nationality for health tourism. If there had been no challenge to executive orders, America would be off-limits to a quarter of the world’s nationalities. 

Naija executhief, legislathief and judisharing hanker over different issues. The executhief with its own grasscutters and powerful snake farmers with houses in Dubai scapegoat the few members of the judisharing with bloated accounts. It hankers powerful legislooters who stole their states blind and have conferred on themselves legislative-gang-immunity. Trump promised to repeal Obamacare and Sai Baba promised to fight corruption; both men must attempt to fulfill their promises. In Naija the attempt to fulfill promise has led to the resuscitation of the – you Tarka me, I Daboe you between the executhief and the legislathief. 

The legislathief is unhappy that its leaders were being probed. They want to eat their loot in peace. They loathe the idea that the executhief has the liver to bring their perceived persecutor-in-chief Ibrahim Magu, twice before them for approval and twice they said a resounding no. When the Customs enacted an edict to probe smuggled cars, the legislathief feared losing their exotic cars or paying for its smuggling, they summoned the Customs boss to appear in uniform. When he refused to show, they passed a worthless resolution banning him from public office. When the executive brought the names of 37 resident electoral commissioners they promised not to screen them except their perceived persecutor-in-chief is sacked! Our bloated adult delinquents need pacifiers!  

We need executive-legislative bickering but it must be about the waning value of the Naira, about ending insurgency and feeding the three or four million displaced persons, about fixing the collapsed educational system and bringing to book those who squandered over $20 billion on electricity and brought us into darkness. It should be about job creation, roads and rural infrastructure rehabilitation.

It should be about the rights of the Naija to go to India and be respected, not hunted and beaten like an outlaw. It should be about the UK enticing the best of us – doctors, lawyers, nurses, and engineers but deporting the poor, the wretched and even the jailbirds. These are things worth hankering the executhief about. Anything else is pure BS.