By Farooq Kperogi
I just got a chance to watch the video of Rotimi Amaechi’s declaration of interest to be Nigeria’s president. It was an unfunny clown show that dramatizes the descent of Nigeria’s presidential politics into the theater of the absurd.
He started his clown show by jogging—along with a bunch of hungry, slavish flunkies—ostensibly to demonstrate his physical fitness. But he ended with a speech that demonstrated his intellectual unfitness.
He gave a dizzyingly vacuous speech (whose title he couldn’t even remember!) that was punctuated by preplanned cheers and songs from a paid crowd of groveling toadies.
This feather-brained, leaky-mouthed buffoon who should have resigned or be fired in the aftermath of the horrendous Kaduna train mishap— the consequences of which are still reverberating as I write this— wants to clown his way to the presidency because there’s not the littlest whit of integrity or accountability left in government in Nigeria.
While the nation was mourning the tragedy of the terrorist attack on the Kaduna-bound train, Amaechi didn’t show any empathy or compassion.
The blabbermouth was only worried that the scam he wanted to perpetrate in the name of providing security for trains was thwarted by his fellow thugs in government.
Several train passengers are still held in captivity by terrorists. Instead of using this moment to be responsible for once in his life, he chose to put together a frenetic, disorganized, comic show that he called a declaration to run for president.
Nigeria is facing enormous existential crises on multiple fronts that will only get worse in the coming months and years if we don’t get a smart, sober, decisive, broadminded leader.
Yet it is humorless, inarticulate clowns, of whom Amaechi is the latest, or opportunistic, emotionally unintelligent religious bigots like Osinbajo, that are indicating interest to lead the nation from the major political parties.
Ideas-driven, non-traditional presidential aspirants like Kingsley Moghalu, Omoyele Sowore, Peter Obi, and even Dele Momodu who don’t have stolen money to throw around to rouse mercenary mobs of supporters are sadly on the margins.
Maybe it’s true, after all, that people deserve the leaders they have.
Farooq Kperogi is a professor of journalism and emerging media at Kennesaw State University, Georgia, USA.
