By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
It takes pathetic lunacy to aspire to practice Onemanocracy, that is: Government Of One Man, By One Man And For One Man.
I guess we need to travel far out of this country to get a grip on the lunatic subject of hanging on to power via Onemanocracy.
So let’s take a trip to a very strange country, a way-out country faraway from Nigeria.
You see, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired about writing only on Nigeria.
Now I am here undertaking a foreign trip to a land of magic not unlike Macondo, the setting of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
This country I’m going to dwell on shall remain nameless.
The country is ruled by a ghastly and ghostly figure with no credible bona-fides known as President One Man (POM).
A broom for him!
POM is the owner, discoverer and executor of the unforgettable form of government known as Onemanocracy, to wit, government of one man by one man and for one man.
As the definition of the government goes, only one man knows everything in government; only one man matters in the act of governance, and that very man is no other than POM.
The government of POM only functions through the process of “Money-Miss-Road.”
It is incumbent on all and sundry to bow to the bribery of POM to have a clue of the policy direction of the administration.
Whenever anybody frowns at POM – and this is very often – it means that POM has discovered yet another corrupt man in the country.
Through the consistent and very severe frowning at the policies of POM, it has thus been discovered that the entire country is in fact a concentration camp of very corrupt characters unfit to form any form of opposition whatsoever except as coffins and caskets!
His major “otimkpu,” alias praise-singer, croons thusly: “Borrowing money is our religion!”
As an indefatigable fighter against all opposition, POM can be likened to Don Quixote, the title character of Cervantes’ great novel, who blasts away at imaginary windmills.
Like Don Quixote, POM is intent on putting on the front burner the diabolical gale of one-party rule by all means necessary.
The one difference for now is that POM is in Government House while Don Quixote ended up in a lunatic asylum.
The lunacy end can wait for now.
POM stresses that he has no apologies at all for being biased in favour of his tribesmen of lickspittle core supporters.
He boasts of the prebendal logic that more must definitely be given to those who are of his ethnic lot and pretender mullah affiliation.
There is no competence anywhere else beyond the forged or rumoured or foisted homestead of POM.
It needs to be revealed here that POM got fiendishly angry when one journalist gave him a copy of the Gettysburg Address delivered by America’s then President Abraham Lincoln on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, thusly: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Words like “liberty,” “freedom” and “people” gave POM a huge migraine.
He actually fell down – as he always falls.
He posted a lunatic ambassador to a civilized country, and the loony was summarily sent back to POM.
His Man Friday boasts of being armed to shoot TV journalists!
Abraham Lincoln can jolly well die with his so-called “government of the people” while POM rides on with the very effective “government of one man” supported by lunatics of power mongering.
The effectiveness of government by one man is such that POM cannot be held to ransom by organized labour.
The provincial worshippers of POM know that POM can do no wrong, and the culture is to go flat on one’s stomach at the sight of POM.
Even if the economy is sinking into a hole, all it takes for the world to know that POM is in his elements is for him to holler his eternal singsong: “It is my turn, stupid!”
Factories can close shop while workers are laid off in droves, yet the mantra remains: “I am enlarging taxation!”
Who on Allah’s earth doesn’t know that raising taxation to hang on to power forever is more important than governance?
As a distinct dimension of Onemanocracy, POM ardently believes that only himself is fit to stand in a one-man election.
He is not unlike the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm that became well-nigh indistinguishable from oppressive man at the end of the novel.
I had a glimpse of a photograph taken of POM in the company of his excited tribesmen of pigs before I returned from the strange country back to Nigeria.
The picture of the man and the pigs bore this caption: “Fourth from right is our beloved President One Man (POM).”
It takes the lunacy of hanging on to power called Onemanocracy to make pigs indistinguishable from man.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is the author of God of Poetry.
