Averted Kebbi Attack on the President: The Need for an Urgent Recalibration of the Current Systemic Approach to Governance by the President.

Photo credit: Daily post

By Ogiri John Ogiri

He has lived In Kebbi for the most part of his life. In 2015, he probably voted for change. Four years later,the hitherto hope for change he was given during the previous campaign dimmed with unapologetic recklessness. He did not see much of the changes in the life of his people. He was told that PDP was responsible for the failure. Blame became a game. Irresponsibility became the norm until the end of the ruling party's first term in office in 2019.

Another election year soon came. He was convinced to give his vote to the president again in 2019. He probably accepted and voted for the ruling party. Barely a year down the line, in his face, the worst is still being exacerbated. Insurgency and raw terrorism competed for dominance in his region. Killings have not stopped; hunger for food and water has not been quenched;unemployment has not been tackled; poverty has degenerated to squalor despite all the promises of the ruling party. Daily,people die;orphans lament and widows wail as the land is grazed into baldness by accidental political opportunists wearing borrowed cloaks of integrity and waving reconstructed togas of piety but armed with the instrument of propaganda which they usually deploy with an untamed dexterity to keep curious people in perpetual deception.

He probably felt short-changed. He was disappointed and dissatisfied. He felt deceived after all the votes his state gave the president. He probably heard of the president's visit. He decided to go. Comfortably installed at a vantage position, he waited for the right opportunity and charged at the president perhaps to attack him;to express his dissatisfaction and disappointment with the current state of affairs in his country. He was contained. Reports have it that he was shot in the leg. Nigerians became interested. Uneasy calm gripped the president's media image handlers. They had to say something. Expectedly, Femi Adesina rose to the occasion. Instead of admitting their failure, he issued a statement, not to admit but to deflect public attention from the main issue. He told us that the young man in question only came to have a handshake with the president. He had trivialized the the underlying factor that motivated the young man to attack the president. My question; do you shoot at a harmless man who comes to give you a handshake?

There are more than meet the eyes. The case of the young man in question only represents those of so many young people in the north and in Nigeria as a whole who are no longer comfortable with the often excused failure of the president. Nigerians want concrete results.

The federal government should therefore immediately address or begin to address the socio-economic and political conditions that gave unhindered impetus to the kind of attacks that was averted in Kebbi. It has now become obvious that propaganda alone has failed and so can no longer sustain this government in power. A stitch in time still saves nine.

©Ogiri John Ogiri.