Adegboruwa’s vision of hell By Idoko Ainoko

Legal practitioner, Ebun-Olu Adegboruwa on Friday May 5, 2017 issued a statement titled ‘Let us paralyze the system’ in which he ominously called for a shutdown of all sectors in Nigeria as a blackmail tool to force President Muhammadu Buhari to resign. The statement is a monument to a man who, having a psychotropic vision of hell, somehow managed the lucidity to invite other citizens to partake in his desired orgiastic anarchy.

Adegboruwa wanted all sectors of the country, without exception, shutdown. His end game is best assumed from his statement: “Let the National Assembly be shut down.

Let all the courts be closed down. Let all the banks be locked up. Let all offices be closed, especially public offices. Let all schools, markets, hospitals and all such institutions, be shut down completely. Let them be TOTAL PARALYSIS.

“Let all official activities be suspended, until such a time that the President agrees to resign, and until the President disengages himself and his cabal from governance, in order to allow our nation Nigeria, move forward” he charged.

The only problem is that Adegboruwa was barking up the wrong tree. He sees a cabal where Nigerians, who are awake and fully conscious of their environment, see appointees that have continue to carry out their assignments even though their boss, President Buhari, has to observe rest periods because of his ill health.

Fortunately, Adegboruwa, even in a likely state of impaired reasoning, was able to reference a bit of history, which, sadly, totally made mincemeat of his claim that he was speaking against a cabal. For him, the lesson of history was that “We have travelled this route before and we are not prepared to go through the (Late Umaru) Yar’adua experience again.”

Comically, it is Adegboruwa and his likes, for whom he is likely a proxy or mouthpiece, that are taking us through the Yar’Adua era. When the late president was gravely ill, there was such hullabaloo about a cabal hijacking the government and that its members prevented the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan from functioning in acting capacity. The many exploits attributed to the cabal at the time were stuff that will leave Hollywood and Nollywood with materials to work with for decades. The only problem? Yar’Adua died and till date no one was able to convincingly present members of the cabal to Nigerians. Neither has anyone been indicted for the crimes the cabal allegedly committed. It turned out the cabal was the figment of the mutated imaginations of those that made some Nigerians believe that story.

The current scenario is different. When President Buhari recovers, we are going to search with floodlights for Adegboruwa’s cabal and never locate it because like the fabled unicorn it does not exist. We are going to discover that the real cabal that is bent on short changing Nigerians is the very one on whose behalf Adegboruwa is speaking. Like those who alleged a cabal to shove their way into relevance and later juicy government appointments in the day of the Yar’Adua saga, carrion birds are again perching to see what they can peck out of the current situation. They wait in vain.

A clear indication to this mindset is the insensitivity in including hospitals on the list of places that must be shut down for Adegboruwa’s cabal to have its way. For his crowd, the only thing that matters is to use ill health as the justification for calling a citizen uprising against President Buhari. It does not matter that closure of hospitals will cause avoidable deaths and untold suffering. He feels nothing for awaiting trial inmates whose stay behind bars can be prolonged by as many as six months if the courts shut down as being canvassed. Even children, who in their tender age have no business being deployed as fodder, are not spared in the bid to ground Nigeria as their schools are listed among institutions that must be forced to close.

Even when locked in an echo chamber that allows Adegboruwa and those who commissioned him to hear only themselves in an inescapable timeloop, there should be the slightest allowance that allows issues to be occasionally seen through the prism of reason. This would have allowed him to weigh the other updates about President Buhari and not just be locked into the falsehood originated by his cohorts. But this would be asking too much from a man whose sole claim to relevance is representing violent militant leaders and treasury looters. A death wish for President Buhari from such an entity would thus be in order since it will allow him and his associates run riot and thump their noses at citizens.

The responsibility falls on Nigerians to see beyond the message and deconstruct the messenger, who in this case happens to be Adegboruwa. His vision has nothing to do with a Nigeria running optimally but one taken over by chaos instigated by him, which is the only time lackeys, like vultures and other carrion eaters are able to feed fat. He is not alone as others have attempted the same gimmick before him, only that they had the decency to be subtle in asking Mr President to embark on a medical leave.

Those of us who are patriotic citizens will therefore not heed Adegboruwa’s call. We will rather be asking him to strongly consider the detox that will diminish the vision of hell he is having concerning the country.

****Ainoko, PhD writes from Bayero University, Kano and can be reached at [email protected]