Recently, I read with utter dismay how the two major ethnic groups in Benue State were exposing their inefficiency in the public space. Unsurprisingly, pockets of associations within them joined the frenzy, and I asked; in whose interest were they exacerbating the issue? Is it for political, economic or tribal reasons?
Well, I guess it’s for tribal reason. And if it’s for tribal reason, here is my response:
The element of tribalism has been the greatest manipulated political tools that have left Benue State gasping for breath over the years. It’s used to sow seeds of discords among the citizens to manipulate and cage them into perpetual submissions to their political slave masters.
Every Benue politician uses this element well to promote his selfish agenda and keep the state divided along uncountable lines. This same tool has affected the loudness of the voices that should have trumpeted justice. This tool is used to “off the mic of justice” thereby allowing evil to reign.
Instead of the people of the Benue valley to unite against external aggression and work on safeguarding their ancestral heritage, they are busy fighting among themselves because food is served.
Ideally, political parties are prerequisites for modern elections and are established to create a competitive ideology, which is vital for democracy and development. However, the role of partisan politics is not fully understood in Benue State. Hence, partisan politics frustrates development and growth in the state.
After its creation in 1976, Benue State has continued to revolve around the circle of backwardness, and this is chiefly because of tribal politics. Worse still, is the involvement of the youths in this show of shame. Most times I don’t blame them, and this is simply because most of them are intellectually lazy.
If they are not intellectually lazy, I challenge them to go back to history. Because, history in my view, must be a sacrilege against the veneration of power. It must feature those who resisted the narratives peddled by power centers, into its records. This is where Zinn and Chomsky earned my respect.
This is because history for a long time, has been a crime against memory. It has been a cudgel used by imperialists to whitewash their atrocities and bludgeon our consideration, into accepting and normalizing their racism. It has been used to create narratives canonizing the genocides, upon which their empires were built. It has been a utensil in the toolbox of culture warriors and political ideologues, retailing punches and counterpunches, on facts and fictions of history.
History should chronicle the infidelities of human frailty, the nobility of human achievements, the savageries of our bigotries, and the splendor of our attempts at civilization. This is where I agree with Voltaire, who saw history as “the study of all the world´s crimes”.
This is because history is also about the infidelities of emperors and the treacheries of empires. It is also the imperial debaucheries of establishments, the orgies and simonies of popes, bishops, and cardinals, the erectile dysfunctions and sexual predations of kings and nobles, the sexual insecurity of princes, the masturbation of conquerors, the menstrual tension of Queens, and the constipation of royal mistresses. And above all, the sexual politics surrounding every court. Since it has been out of such dark humus that some of history´s revolutions were sired.
It’s worthy of note that, the masses in Benue State today are pleading with politicians in the State and their gang of thieves, in silent groans and quiet supplications, to get their feet off their collective necks as a state.
But that ancient arrogance, akin to the idolatrous posture of Gaius Julius Caesar has been bellowing: “it is our turn”. This, they do with all the arrogance that primitive thievery, given wings by impunity could ever convoke.
Prideful arrogance has no historical memory. That is why it almost always forgets that such may become a signal, required by the elements to rise and decapitate politicians in Benue State and their iniquitous ambitions.
Politicians in republics of impunity are sometimes populated by men of ambition prone to violence. But not all the time. The common man can sometimes come to judgment in those provinces of impunity.
The masses sometimes play host to men and women of integrity, who know that a State without justice is nothing but a band of robbers as St. Augustine would have it.
It’s my earnest hope and desire that as night falls on this embrace, graduating into a full-blown republic of impunity; that there would arise a crop of revolutionaries from the Benue valley, whose truth and sense of justice, would be the levee that will break the tsunami of the righteous anger of a betrayed and battered people.
Comrade Godwim Anyebe is a Journalist, Human Rights Activist and a Public Affairs Commentator
