Tony
Esijolomi Afejuku, activist, academic and public commentator, is a professor of
English Literature who also was renown as a former leader of the Academic Staff
Union of Universities, ASUU, University of Benin, Benin City.
Prof.
Ajejuku in this interview spoke on several national issues including
expectations from the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, among other burning national
issues. Excerpts: WHAT is your assessment of the present situation in the
country given your past assertions against former President Jonathan?
Please let us not talk about former President
Jonathan.
Let us
leave him where he is now. We are lucky that he was forced to give up power at
the time he was forced out. I won’t say more than this.
Regarding our current political landscape, the
corruption of the pre-Buhari ascendancy is still very much around; the plague
cannot be wished away just because Buhari has been fumigating everywhere that
his anti-corruption nostrils direct him to. Let’s keep this topic in abeyance.
Nigeria
was dying, very slowly and in great agony before Buhari entered the chambers of
his presidential destiny.
He entered the chambers with some necessarily
tainted persons who were needed (and are still needed) to serve his purpose
until they themselves are shut and shot out of reckoning.
Study a little the mentality of Buhari’s
kitchen cabinet, and you will observe that the immediately striking thing is
their negative attitude about the preceding regime that tends to blind them to
constructive suggestion. Because Dr. Jonathan was perceived as an Ijaw
president, President Buhari is being brain-washed to function as a Northern
sectional president who must deny presidential assets and fairness to some
sections of our country.
They don’t seem to understand that their
empire will soon become simply stagnant, that it will soon cease to develop and
fall to pieces. President Buhari So you are saying President Buhari hasn’t the
capacity to take Nigeria to the promised-land even though you are on record as
one of his pre-election backers? This regime, this order, has broken our faith
and emotions.
This
regime has broken our morale. The luck it has so far is that the preceding
order is still being blamed for our current woes, but it is clear to many of us
in my circle that this regime has no promised-land to take our country to.
Buhari
and his team are marked characteristically by the emotional shallowness of
people who live in a world of thoughts and ideas and have small contact with
physical reality. What is your comment on the economic situation in the land?
Let me say this: many egg-heads who are part
of the new order are imposing their constipated view of economics on Nigeria.
They are over-learned and under-learned men, in babaringa and agbada,
black-suits and different hats, who describe and everyone describes, as
“intellectuals,” who monopolize our economic lives.
They have commercialized everything selfishly
and crippled our economic morale. There is no middle class in our country any
more. And hunger and patriotism are fighting against looters and kidnappers of
our patrimony, against the advanced new capitalism threatening to wipe out our
masses and people. The question you pose is complicated.
May
the constipated economic view of Buharism not become a cancerous one, a
cancerous economic policy nursing unimaginable inflation and polluted deflation
Our existing economic rights and privileges may
soon cease to exist. The change that we want (or wanted) will soon cease to be
for us all and those who promoted it.
In fact, Buhari’s change is now changeless
change. The polity is disastrously polluted by corruption and more corruption
and more corruption. The more Buhari tries, the more we inhale the aroma of
corruption.
What
is your comment on the struggle for the siting of the Nigerian Maritime
University between the Itsekiri and the Ijaw?
With
due respect, I don’t wish to comment on this because as an Itsekiri man I must
be a party to the tug-of-war with regard to Ijaw and Itsekiri positions on the
matter. You may accuse me of this or that as Itsekiri. Black market judgment If
I sound pro-Itsekiri people including you will say “What else do you expect? If
I sound anti-Itsekiri people, especially Ijaws will say “You see, even Tony
Afejuku has taken our side.”
This
being said let me state this: The original conceivers of the idea of the
university wanted it to be sited in Koko, headquarters of the present Warri
North Local Government Area. I don’t wish to supply further details.
Secondly,
I have read the various press statements by the Ijaw and the Itsekiri on the
matter. That a whole nation could sit down and canvass privately and publicly
that a court judgment they lost to their Itsekiri brothers and neighbors was
“black market judgment” speaks volumes. Unless the Ijaw win in or outside the
courts, there must be war.
Head
or tail, they must not be losers. This is not how to live in a civilized
society. They don’t seem to know the difference between destructive violence
and innovating violence. Let me say nothing further given my introductory
remarks here. But know this: the blood of their ancestors and forebears still
run in the Itsekiri of now.
They will always turn any disadvantage into an
advantage whatever the gang-up against them.
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