EXCUSE ME: Fellow Nigerians...

Recently I have been engaging myself mentally with poli-historical exercises, out of boredom. I look hard at my experience as a Nigerian and begin to question or wonder at some historical occurrences in this our beloved country. Some of my musings are centred round recent events, while others take me down memory lane - especially those I heard as a kid or read in old newspapers.

One of such interesting thoughts that crept into my mind recently was the attempted "repatriational" smuggling of Umaru Dikko from UK to Nigeria during the Buhari and Idiagbon regime. And I couldn't stop wondering how the man felt when he was grabbed, bundled into a car like a village goat meant for Uromi market, sedated so he could sleep like a newly bathed baby and crated like a tokunbo Camry. Umaru Dikko's attempted crating deserves a Hollywood script, and it occurred when crooks knew how to hunt down people they thought to be felons. I also wondered if Dikko gets cold chills anytime he sees a crate now. Were there any lessons learnt from that near death experience (anything could have happened in transit).

Usually the excesses of our current crop of politicians make those of the Second Republic's look like a Ludo game compared to chess. And this line of thought brought me to a mental calculation of how much of the 500 million dollars loan Nigeria is about to take from the World Bank will end up in our politicians' pockets. And how does an oil producing country like Nigeria become Chinua Achebe's Unoka of this world? Why should the World Bank even entertain any of Nigeria's application for loans - don't they read the news to see where our oil money ends up? Better still have they not been following news from Nigeria's financial sector to know how our "fellow country men and women" treat borrowed money? Doesn't the World Bank know that it will take only a few young men from the Abuja political circle to fish out 500million dollars from their overhead water tanks?

And talking of money stored in overhead water tanks, our politicians have never relented in sucking our country's oil money dry like sweet orange - and borrow some more to satisfy their kleptomaniac urge. While Shehu Shagari's men were pillaging our oil money and hiding it in overhead tanks, his thieving administration decided it was better for the rest of the nation to tighten their belts and adopt austerity measures.

Like the cyclical nature of most things, we are back to that era again where foreign loans are taken to cater to the needs of the ruling class while other fellow Nigerians are thrown into abject poverty.

As my mind wandered from austerity measures to how the military lied themselves into power by promising to end them only to throw us into a worse debilitative state with Ibrahim Babangida's Structural Adjustment Programme, I decided to linger longer with coup speeches, those broadcasts that never failed to pollute our morning air. The military left me with a phobia because any time I hear "Fellow Nigerians" on radio or see it on paper now, I know someone is about to feed us some really fat lies.

I find coups and their accompanying speeches fascinating, not that I support them but any situation that balances a man's life on the tip of needle is an interesting phenomenon. And my fascination has often times led me to textual analysis of coup speeches and they are a literary delight. While Lt.

Col. B. Dimka's failed coup speech was 169 words and straight to the point, Major Orkar's was 1,669 words of PhD thesis. I am not a military historian, but I believe these are the two extremes in Nigeria's coup history.

Other than the buttered lies, all coup speeches have common elements; they all contain salutations, accusations, allegations, declarations, aberrations, solutions, supplications, eliminations and the successful ones end up having corruption.

Like I confessed in the beginning, my boredom makes me think weird thoughts these days. Now I am wondering who gets the assignment of writing those coup speeches? Are there coup ghost-writers and what is their share in the national elephant when it is felled? How hard is it really to write that first paragraph to make it bang! Despite his haste Dimka was the only one that had the courtesy to greet his fellow Nigerians properly before unleashing the devil, ""Good morning fellow Nigerians, This is Lt. Col. B. Dimka of the Nigerian Army calling." Others just go for the usual - Fellow Nigerians, Fellow Nigerian citizens or Fellow countrymen and women. Boring.

As these various opening salutations of coup plotters go back and forth in my head, I am now wondering what the opening lines (or lies) would be for our president as he announces the successful coup of borrowing $500 million dollars that will sink all "Fellow Nigerians, countrymen and women" into deeper pot holes and dusk to dawn curfews. And would the need arise in the future to successfully crate a felon politician back from exile to answer to what he did with his share of the borrowed money?