by Collins Uma

The PDP, through the non-existent Wendell Simlin and its spokesperson, Olisa Metuh, started this mudslinging. We have a choice to join them in that gutter or not. Nyako chose to join them. We will not infringe upon his rights to association, with pigs.

On a good day, Admiral Murtala Nyako should be standing in front of a judge right now explaining exactly what he meant by that libelous memo of his. But we never have good days in Nigeria, all because of a little something called ‘immunity clause’ which shields men like Nyako from prosecution, no matter how much damage they do to society by their actions, inactions and senseless vituperations.

I stopped taking Admiral Nyako serious when, after he was ‘helped’ by the PDP to become governor of Adamawa state in 2007, he couldn’t summon the courage to look his four wives in the face and, like every self-respecting state governor in Nigeria, appoint one of them as First Lady, the unconstitutionality of that office notwithstanding. What Mr Nyako did was to make them all ‘First Ladies’. Yes, all four of them. All with the usual retinue of aides and aides’ aides and official cars and offices and foreign trips and all other perks and abuses of privilege, all funded from the state’s lean purse, which itself depends on a meagre federal allocation. Let’s not talk about Adamawa state’s internally generated revenue. It is laughable. Yet, Baba Mai Mangoro, as he likes to be called, thought that the proliferation of profligacy represented by having four ‘First Ladies’ was what his state needed. Justice Binta Nyako was put in charge of ‘Abuja Affairs’ (whatever that meant), Dr Halima Nyako was in charge of the health sector (no, she was not Commissioner of Health or Special Adviser on Health or Senior Special Assistant on Health or Special Assistant on Health. There were people occupying these offices already). Hajiya Asma’u Nyako was told to oversee the ‘Home front’ while Hajiya Zainab Nyako handled ‘Political Affairs And Mobilisation’. Only someone with Nyako’s genius could come up with something like this.

According to The Guardian’s September 17, 2007 editorial “When Hajiya Turai Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s First Lady, invited other governor’s wives to a meeting in Aso Villa, Justice Binta, another Nyako wife, showed up at the door beating Hajiya Zainab to it. A furious Zainab was politely but firmly sent away on the ground that there was no room for two Nyako wives at the Villa.” The editorial went ahead to talk about “security implications when four power-hungry women are clustered at the seat of power, plotting and planning. In an attempt to undo each other, they might in fact undo their husband”.

But Murtala Nyako seems oblivious to this.

When, in October 2012, Boko Haram struck at Federal Polytechnic, Mubi, Adamawa state, killing 40 students, Nyako was still a member of the PDP and he didn’t think the attack was President Jonathan or federal government-sponsored. Ditto the other attacks while he was still a ‘Jonathanian’. This unfortunate memo is therefore not about Northern Nigeria as he would want Northerners to believe. It is about him and his new clique’s quest to take power from President Jonathan by every means conceivable. Addressing South Easterners and saying “one is quite sure that if you had condemned the cold-blooded murder of political and military leaders of Northern and Western Nigerian origins in the night of 15 January, 1966 by your sons it would not have led to the subsequent massacre of the innocent and the Nigerian Civil War” was simply an indication that the anti-Igbo pogrom of 1966 in which at least 30,000 Nigerians of South-East origin lost their lives in Northern Nigeria, which led to the Civil War where up to a million others died, is justified in Nyako’s mind. And people like him are ready to take the rest of us down that road again just because of 2015 politics.

It is tragic enough that the PDP has people like Olisa Metuh and Doyin Okupe who have refused to use their God-given intelligence and now talk like they have had their heads reconstructed in the similitude of donuts. This makes us look at the APC with hopes of salvation. It is therefore very disappointing to see that the messiah we are looking up to is in greater need of salvation itself. The real tragedy, however, is that other expectedly sensible members of the APC have not come out to dissociate themselves from the evil opinions expressed by Mr Nyako.

There is no gainsaying that Jonathan’s perceived weakness in the face of the Boko Haram and other insurgents’ onslaught has unwittingly encouraged and emboldened the terrorists and their sponsors. Denying the existence of Boko Haram and claiming that the terrorists are nothing but paid killer squads from the Nigerian Army who are being used by President Jonathan to decimate Northern Nigeria, however, as Nyako has done, is a terribly dangerous level of mischief. It is as murderous as it is suicidal because it gives the terror groups and their sponsors free rein to operate, knowing that some stupid political game has ensured that someone somewhere is taking the fall for their operations.

The PDP, through the non-existent Wendell Simlin and its spokesperson, Olisa Metuh, started this mudslinging. We have a choice to join them in that gutter or not. Nyako chose to join them. We will not infringe upon his rights to association, with pigs. He chose to respond to the “typical bulls__t from the federal administration” with his own typical bulls__t. We will ignore him. General Muhammadu Buhari’s comments after the Nyanya bomb blast has shown us a higher ground, a better way to go. We will take it. Buhari’s comments and opinion exude ultimate class, compared to Nyako’s crass.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.