By Dele Sobowale

“Nigeria is not my country; I am not coming back to Nigeria”.
Lamide, 5 years old, two days after arriving in London on her first visit to the U.K.

On Saturday, April 23, 2011, I was having a rare afternoon siesta and the phone kept ringing. Each time I turned to
look at the set, it was from an unfamiliar caller. I ignored it four times. But, on the fifth occasion, I decided to
answer. The caller’s persistence has worn me down. It was an old colleague, former university mate in the US; old
Kings College boy, the second best school in Lagos in our days. He probably missed attending the best by whiskers;
the best, of course, was Igbobi College. All old KC boys, eat your hearts out – including Bashorun Jaiye Randle.

Lamide, bless her, is my friend’s grand-daughter who had just given Nigeria the “red card”. She had gone on summer
holidays with her grandmother and is(?) expected back in Nigeria. The question mark on “is” has become necessary
because we might have the first five year-old Nigerian seeking residency and social asylum on humanitarian grounds
in the UK!! Would David Cameron have the heart to turn her away if she asks not to return to a place where power
supply is epileptic; potable water is unavailable to 75% of the people; death traps serve for roads; 80% of
secondary school leavers fail the passing out exam and life expectancy is a mere 51 years? Would he? Would you, if
you were David Cameron? I certainly would not, if I were David Cameron?

Now Jonathan and the rest of our leaders have their work cut out for them. Clearly, the country is in trouble if
“the difference is clear” (as the Seven-Up advert used to say) to even 5 year olds. The most urgent question is,
“how do we get the Lamides of Nigeria to again be proud of their country the way we were in the 1950s and 1960s?

P.S. To the friend who woke me up, I say thank you. It was impossible for me to sleep after that blow to our
collective pride as citizens of Nigeria. I immediately grabbed my laptop and wrote this piece. It has to be a
classic! God bless Lamide, everybody’s granddaughter now. I don’t even have the heart to ask her to reconsider her
decision. She will be back all right, because she has no choice over the matter. But her heart will be somewhere
else; not here. That is the tragedy! It reminds me of the title song of the great classic film Wizard of Oz.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There’s a land
That I have heard of once
In a long long time

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams
That you care to dream
Really do come true

When, for God sake, will kids visiting Nigeria from another country, decide not to return to their country? Will our
children for ever look yearningly over the “the rainbow” for another land where the dreams of childhood become the realities of adulthood? When???

HABITS OF IRONY: NORTH AND SOUTH — 1
“0809-476-6464
Mass unemployment, serious infrastructural decay, diesel & kerosene now beyond the purchasing ability of Nigerians.
How about cement? Prices jump up 80% in the last year. Bad roads all over, yet the PDP had over 1m votes in states in Southeast. SHAME”.

Also in my beloved Lagos and all of the Southwest except Osun and that is doubly shameful. Years ago someone wondered why all the economic principles which work elsewhere in the world fail in Nigeria. My answer then, and now, remains the same. “Economic principles start out by assuming that the people involved are, or will be rational”. The laws of economics break down when applied to a nation of morons.

Similarly, democracy operates with some principles, even though not explicitly stated as in economics, that people, when allowed to freely vote will use that power sensibly.

I was amazed by the number of people, from the SW, SE and SS, most of them highly educated, who told me “I voted for Jonathan, not PDP”. Nothing more fatuous could have come out of mouths usually dripping with commonsense. To start with, the Supreme Court had pronounced, in the case of Amaechi versus Omehia of Rivers state, that the electorate in an election gives the mandate to the party not the individual.

Yet, here we had, eleven years into the new millennium, the most educated people in Nigeria deciding our collective fates in the most illogical manner possible.
At any rate, the sender of the text message was unnecessarily harsh on the Southeast. In fact, our brothers and sisters in the SE behaved in predictable ways. The SE has never wanted to operate outside the “main stream”.

They will not sacrifice their access to appointments and contracts for principles. It is the Southwest which had previously fought for positions –even if it means being in opposition. What the SW did with its votes in the presidential elections was to leave its supporters and admirers in confusion. The ACN should have called out the votes for Ribadu as vigorously as they did for all the other candidates. One of those to whom I spoke is a columnist and a die-hard supporter of the ACN.

He too, had given me the “I voted for Jonathan” bit. Then I asked him if he stood by all the articles he had written criticizing the Federal government on power, roads, infrastructure etc. Of course he did. Then I asked, “Who represents the Federal government today, is it not Jonathan?”

Readers can imagine the man’s anguish when he finally saw his error. As I told him, what he and millions like him did was akin to giving the first prize for CHASTITY to the Chief Executive Officer of a brothel simply because he is a “nice fellow”. Truth is, really nice fellows should not be found mingling with shady characters. As the saying goes, “Show me your friends and I will tell you who you are”. Until Jonathan distances himself from the likes of OBJ, Anenih, Prof. Gana, AGIP, etc, he remains suspect in my books.

When, all the transient noise about post-election violence would have passed into history, posterity will have a puzzle to unravel, namely, how was it, in 2011, that the almajiris and talakawas of the North voted for an end to all the calamities listed above, as well as others the sender left out, while voters in the “Centre of Excellence” endorsed those who brought the disasters about. Surely a visitor from space, if asked to point to those who have demonstrated intelligence will not hesitate to point north. They have said no to woeful governance; the South has embraced it. It is as simple as that.