The agenda

Today, my article is given to Aba Saheed to ram in his usual satiric strings for a music meant for the initiated. It is a song in the realm of parables, but not like the parable dished out on Mount Kur Attin, otherwise known as Sermon on the Mountain. This is about The Agenda; the hidden agenda that is now gradually coming into the open to the bafflement of Nigerians. But who tells you there was an agenda?

You think we would take all this trouble without an agenda we were nursing? Perhaps there was no individual agenda but just keying into global agenda or our own national agenda. It is difficult to say or differentiate. What is true, however, is that there would always be an agenda. Everybody has an agenda. Everybody has a plan for himself or for his life, like when you are entering into a marriage. You know what you want out of the marriage. You know why you are getting married, and why you are getting married to a particular man or woman.

You know why you chose a girl who is the only child of rich parents or a man who is the last child in a family of seven where the preceding four siblings are doctors ‘who have arrived.’ There is always a hidden agenda even if it is not made public or known to the other party.

In Nigeria, there are always ‘no go areas.’ And this is built into a well designed well-choreographed political web. You are not supposed to speak or write about religion, especially two foreign religions that have no bearing on our culture and tradition. You cannot talk about these foreign religions which have become the two major planks of political struggle, and veritable lucrative industries for their champions and promoters.

Religion is the food of the poor and ignorant. It is the opium of the timid and of lazy minds. If you want to control or enslave a people’s mind and brain, stuff their mouths with religious bone like you do dogs.

We must use religion to capture and control those who have resisted organised conquest. Now we must deploy religion the way it has never been used before. We must send people into the field and arm them to the teeth. Our armed religious emissaries must invade villages and towns in the night and cause mayhem and maximum horrific damage. They must instil serious fear and fright. Drive the owners away from their land or subjugate them and occupy their territory.

Naturally, they would cry and make a lot of noise as their forbears did. We know them to be noise makers. They grumble and complain and throw tantrums. That is all they are good for. But we are not bothered. They are used to complain on television networks, or pour out their hearts in big English on the pages of newspapers. That is all they are good at. Threats upon threats without action.  That is their stock in trade.

This is the first phase of our subjugation and re-colonisation project.

Another ‘no go area’ is a bastardised word called Unity. No one is allowed to toy with that word. “The unity of Nigeria is not negotiable”, is like a jagged record. And according to queries posed by Professor Kole Omotoso, ‘Unity for whom?’ Unity cannot be in abstract. But in Nigeria it is a word used to commit all sorts of crimes including oppression, repression and dispossession. It is a word that has forcefully bundled nationalities together in an unnegotiated marriage of [in] convenience.

I don’t know of any country in the world where victors share the spoils of war with their victims. Victims should know that they themselves are parts and parcel of the spoils of war. It is, therefore, silly idle talk to expect that offices and positions will be shared equally or equitably. When masters take the thighs of the animal, the conquered should be lucky and grateful if they are given the entrails.

But that is even a small fraction of the grand agenda. We can still give them big empty positions. They will still be our messengers. However long the beard of the labourer is, he is still a paid servant to his employer. It is important they realise that we are the owner of the horse. We have got the horse. We can ride it the way we like.

They speak of the police they can control. Do they not know that the police are a veritable instrument of control? To allow for regional or provincial or village police is to weaken the power at the centre. Unitary political structure is the best system of mass control in a multi-racial or multi-national society.

People think we are as foolish as they are. All these political neophytes, they want us to commit class suicide by allowing them to have peace so that they regroup and plan our ouster. It is part of political master stroke to ensure that there is no peace in the land. We may allow only the peace of the graveyard.

Nothing guarantees servitude better than poverty. It is our desire to keep everybody poor, hungry and unsettled. If there is mass poverty people will be so engrossed with self-survival that they would not even have time to organise any class action. Poverty reduces people to lowest self-esteem. People will begin to doubt their self-worth and eventually lose faith in themselves or in their ability to do anything worthwhile.

As I write this I remember a guy in my class four in the secondary school. Our German Physics teacher had asked the class to define Gravity. He called on one bearded 22-year-old XYZ and asked “what is gravity?” The young old man answered with full confidence: “Gravity is gravity!” I submit therefore that The Agenda is the Agenda!

• The pen is the tongue of the hand, the silent utterer of words for the eyes…
– Henry Beecher