GovFashola 72 years Buhari Not Too Old To Rule Nigeria: Age is More Than Just a Number, While Jimi Agbaje at 57 Is Too Old To Rule Lagos!!!
GovFashola 72 years Buhari Not Too Old To Rule Nigeria: Age is More Than Just a Number, While Jimi Agbaje at 57 Is Too Old To Rule Lagos!!!
The most
amazing thing happened yesterday. Amazing, because in a rare Freudian
slip, the Governor of Lagos state, Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola
revealed 
what he really thought about old people in governance. Splashed
on the Front Page of The Tribune on Thursday the 15th of January, 2015
was the headline ‘Agbaje too Old to Rule Lagos’.
Speaking at
the Sky Power Play Ground venue of the Lagos West senatorial campaign of
the APC governorship candidate, Mr Akinwumi Ambode, Governor Fashola
went on to say “today, at 52, I am counting the number of black hair on
my head. Akinwunmi Ambode is the man that can do it. If you put an old
man there, he cannot do it. If you call him in the night, he may not
pick your calls,”
Governor Fashola is a man of reason, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria at
that. Being a man of logic, will the learned Governor agree with me that
if Jimi Agbaje at 57 is too old to rule a state within the federation,
then it stands to reason that an even older Muhammadu Buhari at 72 is
then too old to rule a bigger territory than Lagos, in this case the
Federal Republic of Nigeria!
What makes
Governor Fashola’s inadvertent truth more embarrassing is that this is
the very man who, with his party, mocked President Goodluck Jonathan for
saying that General Muhammadu Buhari who could not carry out his vision
for Nigeria during his days as a military dictator in the mid ‘80s when
he was at the prime of his life, may find it impossible to do so now
when he may be too old to remember his phone number!
The APC
unleashed its propaganda machinery to take on President Jonathan for his
factual comments and described it as petty for want of something
accurate to use in rebutting the President’s truthful words. I wonder
what the APC would have said about their own comments on Agbaje if it
had been said by somebody from the
PDP. Double standards would be the
undoing of the APC!
Whether it
was fate or whether it was coincidence, I do not know, but President
Jonathan’s words came to pass the very next day after he spoke as
General Muhammadu Buhari forgot the name of his own running mate as he
was campaigning in Owerri. The General called Professor Yemi Osinbajo,
Professor Yemi OsinBade!
So, with
this Freudian slip from Fashola, we now know that the leaders of the All
Progressive Congress, APC, know what the rest of us already know, but
because of their desperation for power, they are not willing to tell the
public the truth. Alas, they do not know that no matter how far and
fast falsehood has travelled, it will eventually be overtaken by truth,
whether or not it comes willingly or by reason of a Freudian slip.
The youths of Nigeria will do well to consider this slip from Fashola.
I remember
travelling to my home town with my dad as a child and seeing written on
luxurious buses we would pass on the way the following inscription ‘The
Young Shall Grow’. I vividly recall asking my dad what it meant and he
told me that that meant that young people like me would grow up and
replace old people in all spheres of leadership. I asked my dad if that
meant I would become his dad. Of course he laughed at my childish
reasoning, but when he came to visit me in England while I worked there,
I remember catering to him, and looking after his needs and my mind
went back to that day when I asked my childish question. It almost
looked as if our roles had been reversed. It was at that point in time
that the real meaning of that saying inscribed on the luxurious bus of
my childhood hit home to me.
The young
shall grow and this is a fact of life. Nations only grow when old men
plant trees whose shades they know they will never enjoy.
If youths
were leaders of tomorrow in 1983 after General Muhammadu Buhari seized
power from the democratically elected government of Shehu Shagari, if
youths were still leaders of tomorrow when General Abacha invited
General Buhari to head the Petroleum Trust Fund in 1995, if youths were
the leaders of tomorrow in 2003 when General Buhari first contested for
the Presidency, is it not safe to say that that tomorrow has come in
2015 when according to Governor Fashola, a 57 year old Jimi Agbaje is
too old to govern Lagos?
Governor
Fashola is not the first APC Chief to bare his mind about the
unsuitability of General Buhari for Nigeria’s leadership due to his age.
In fact, other APC chiefs have been more forthright in their
denunciation of Buhari’s continued quest for leadership.
In September
of 2010, Malam Nasir El-rufai, the current APC Gubernatorial candidate
for Kaduna state in an interview in the The Sun Newspapers said “Obama
is 48 and Cameron is 43 for God’s sake. So, why are we recycling leaders
that ruled this country very well or very badly 25 years ago? I was 25
year old when Buhari and Babangida were Heads of State and I am now 50
and they still want to be Head of State. I don’t understand that at all
and I call on the young people of Nigeria to take their future into
their hands and ensure that in the next election, they vote for a new
generation of leaders. I think that we will not make progress until we
break the link from the past and just move on. 70 per cent of Nigerians
are below the age of 40. Many of these young people, the next
generation, as they are called, are on internet services such as
Facebook and twitter, using Blackberry and if you ask any of these
people running for Presidency, they will think that Blackberry is a
fruit…….. People like General Babangida and General Buhari should just
disappear. They should give way to a new set of people with new ideas”
Even the
very military government that Buhari headed in 1983 pegged the
retirement age of civil servants at 65 years old. Why did they do that?
Buhari’s government did that because in their own wisdom, a man of 65
years old should not be in service but should give way for younger
elements to contribute their quota.
If Nigerian
youths want that inscription on the side of the luxurious bus of my
childhood to come to pass, I urge them to vote for President Goodluck
Jonathan in the forthcoming elections because President Jonathan has
shown that he is a champion of the youths. He appointed my friend, Dr.
Nurudeen Mohammed as Nigeria’s minister of state for Foreign Affairs
when he was just 33 years of age. Under President Jonathan’s guidance,
Niger State has a People Democratic Party, PDP Gubernatorial candidate,
Umar Nasko, who is a youthful 40 years of age. In addition, President
Jonathan has a host of aides who are in their 20s (yes!), 30s and early
40s.
Right now, I
challenge youths to scrutinize the APC, and see if they are well
represented within the hierarchy of the party and within its
functionaries. A very good place to start will be the age of the
National Youth Leader of that party. While Malam Ibrahim Dasuki Jalo,
the APC’s National Youth Leader is a disputed 42 years old, the National
Youth Leader of the PDP, Abdullahi Mai Basira is just 31 years old.
Doesn’t that say it all?
If you watch
the Presidential Campaign rallies of the two major parties, you will
notice that General Buhari does not really have much confidence in the
youths if you take into cognizance the people surrounding him on the
podium.
Moreover,
his message to Nigerians is ‘have confidence in me’. In contrast,
President Jonathan surrounds himself on the podium with people who
represent every strata of society and his message to Nigerians is ‘have
confidence in yourselves’! There is a huge difference between these two
approaches.
In
conclusion, I must say that if Governor Fashola’s Freudian slip has
proved anything, what it has proved is that in 201, age is not just a
number!
Reno Omokri is Special Assistant to President Jonathan on New Media.GovFashola 72 years Buhari Not Too Old To Rule Nigeria: Age is More Than Just a Number, While Jimi Agbaje at 57 Is Too Old To Rule Lagos!!!
Comments