By Tony Ademiluyi
Plateau State used to be a haven of peace in the days of yore. With its cold weather, it was a natural tourist attraction for foreigners, as it reminded them of Europe and North America. The former British Prime Minister, John Major, once lived there while he was a banker with the then Barclays Bank, now Union Bank.
It was as cosmopolitan as Lagos, as all tribes of Nigeria converged there. Some big names came out of its capital, Jos. The defunct P Square grew up there; former Chelsea footballer and ex-Super Eagles player John Mikel Obi grew up there; and popular Northern musician Zaaki Adzee also grew up there as well.
Since 2001, however, the state has known no peace. The settler/indigene clash has left hundreds of thousands murdered, with millions internally displaced. The crisis has defied all solutions, and it keeps getting worse by the day.
The latest killings were on Palm Sunday this year—barely a week to Easter Sunday. Thousands were slaughtered like chickens in broad daylight, and there is a viral video of a woman who was publicly holding her dead son and mourning him as she was inconsolable.
President Tinubu visited Plateau State to ‘commiserate’ with the victims. However, he didn’t go past the airport and boldly told the mourners that there was no light and he had a flight to catch to Lagos in ten minutes. How callous!
If he knew that he couldn’t be humble to visit the mourners, then why bother coming to Plateau State in the first place? It was a mockery of the collective intelligence of the good people of Plateau State for him to have expected them to come to meet him at the airport. What happened to empathy and love for the people, especially given his position as the nation’s President?
When 9/11 happened in the United States, the then-President George Bush Jr. left everything that he was doing and headed to the World Trade Center in New York to show solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack. This was what triggered the eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden, who took responsibility for the attack under his successor Barack Obama.
In the West, leaders even cancel important foreign trips to commiserate with their people. Here, our ‘leaders’ treat our people with utter disdain. Wasn’t Tinubu elected to serve Nigerians? So why on earth can’t he show solidarity with the people that he was elected to serve and lead?
It is a recurrent pattern for Tinubu to snub victims of violent attacks in Nigeria. When these conflicts happen, we just get a watery press release from the media team but no official address from him. Why is Tinubu so insensitive to the plight of the vulnerable Nigerians? It really beats my imagination and that of many decent Nigerians!
It is tragic that Tinubu, who made a global name as a pro-democracy activist and was forced into exile in the UK in 1994 during the General Sani Abacha years, has now made a volte-face by becoming a civilian dictator whose feelings toward his people are akin to how the late defunct Soviet Union dictator Josef Stalin plucked the feathers of a chicken, watched it scream, then gave it some corn to eat.
Eric Blair a.k.a. George Orwell wrote the evergreen classic ‘Animal Farm,’ which greatly lampooned the Soviet Union. History repeats itself because man, in his usual frailty, learns the stories but never the salient lessons.
Did Orwell have Tinubu in mind when he wrote Animal Farm? Your guess is as good as mine.
Tony Ademiluyi is a Lagos-based journalist and writer.
