Our Circus Enters Senate

If the president looks within our governance cycles, he will see why some Nigerians are unruly
By the turn of the day, the circus would have run its course. We all would have been very well entertained and life, as they say, would go on in eternal motion but achieving not much movement. We like entertain­ment and that seems to be reason we were once described as the happiest people on mother earth, and later, as the most Champagne-consuming people. In all, we love entertainment. And in the frenzy of it, we lose focus on seriousness. Once in a while, we pretend to be serious but end up the same way we started.
As I watched the senate ‘screen’ nominee “noisemakers”, my thoughts fell back on the circus, the puppets and the puppet masters. I see our “ministers”, some with impec­cable qualifications and records of delivery appearing, one after another, to gladly, and without recourse to the bastardization of their image and quality, accept the tag “noisemaker”. Most of the names on the 36-man list do not qualify as noisemakers. They do not deserve, nor desire, that char­acterization. But they have been so characterized and it has stuck as no one had made any effort to disabuse minds that they are not indeed noise- makers as the president had present­ed them in Paris recently.
But again, give it to the president. He is a master of tact. As a soldier, he understands tactical humiliation of the other. By tactically branding those men and women as noisemakers, and later on October 1, tell the world that Nigerians (me, you, him), including those he nominated to lead with him, are “unruly”, he tactically subjects them to some form of mental and physical instrumentation. Once cleared and assigned to offices, they become instruments of noisemaking for his administration. Real faith will be on the civil servants, who as en­gine room of government, are also, the basic foundational problem of good governance delivery.

For the full story, check The Union newspaper.