Accidental Politician In The Gamut Of Geopolitical Accidents Of Nigeria
By Taiye Olaniyi
A common dictionary definition of accident refers to it as “unexpected events, typically sudden in nature and associated with injury, loss, or harm.”
Further to this, “Accidents are a common feature of the human experience and result in injury or permanent disability to large numbers of people worldwide every year.
Many accidents also involve damage to or loss of property.
The Yoruba so fear and detest accidents so much as “Agbako”, a disastrous phenomenon and pray against it so fervently that a disaster of any kind no matter how minimal should never come their way.
We pray that one should not be out on a day that the journey of life or on the road thirsts for the human blood.
Building on this impression, many of our motor parks are daily being populated by beggars and prayer warriors petitioning the God of their religious persuasions to help protect the lives of travellers from road accidents, kidnappers, marauders, cattle rearers, bandits including political savages engaged in thuggery of all sorts on the road.
But looking at the geopolitics of the world and the religious fundamentalism infiltrating almost every sphere of humankind today, numerous politicians are no doubt the main and harbingers of disasters of all kinds in every geographic space of the world.
This aspersion as an assertion becomes more glaring because of their selfish and fiendish interests against the required selfless service especially of public interest in public service.
I remembered as if it were yesterday that many of us university students before graduating in our final year as far back in 1980, were interviewed in our various universities and polytechnic institutions.
Once and if one was successful to have passed with at least second class lower and equally passed the recruitment interviews right there in our various universities and polytechnics one simply got employed into the Federal Public Service by policy criteria of that time.
One needed not and couldn’t possibly have known who was coming to interview where and never by any sort of intervention by any kind of accidental politicians could one have been employed then into public service.
The public service of today is so accidentally charged and crushed by the varying population of politicians and politically inclined public servants in the politicized public service of Nigeria.
Why do I bother about this unhealthy scenario of highlighting everything politicians and everything politics in the Nigerian public service of today?
This interest arose from basically two or three paradigms;
(1) Monday the 16th February, 2025 marked exactly 10 years of one of my Facebook posts and the pictures of the autographed copy of Mallam El- Rufai’s, book that was entitled “Accidental Public Servant”.
This aforesaid book was bought and autographed for me and others at the Booksellers Bookshop Garki, Abuja.
The impression that I had on that day and till date was and still is that could a Nigerian Minister who must have been a member of one political party(s) or another or junketing as usual from one night caucus meeting(s) of parties and later was made a minister truly serve as a public servant in Nigeria?
This is because relentless and true “Service” like Mohammed Ali once intoned “Is the only space for occupying Gods territory” the Mother Earth.
Public servants are by all and every public service dictate must be apolitical nor be visibly open to belong to any political party not minding that the constitution grants him or her the rights to vote for any politician of his or her choice and a party of choice during the election(s).
But realizing that the moment politics of geopolitical and geo religious doctrines infiltrated and thus influence policy decisions and dictates in the Nigerian public service, every decision goes along with political accidents and current disunity in the nation’s public service.
This is to such an extent that anyone has the right to refer to himself or herself as an accidental public servant as El -Rufai entitled his book which unfortunately till date I have not found the time to read but I still own as a cherished personal copy.
(2) As a proud civil servant then in the employ of the Federal Ministry of Communication in the defunct Department of Posts and Telecommunications, P& T Bauchi and the Nigerian Postal Service, NIPOST (1981-85) and (1985-2016) respectively, the then not much politicized public service is now a total ghost of its pride and relics of past glory as a Postal Industry amongst the comity of Nations.
To one’s dismay, not less than 75% of the trained staff of the Nigerian Post from where I retired as a Postman, would be retiring and retired this year without iota of fears as to what the future portends.
Average retirees in Nigeria of today directly or indirectly belong to the family and of the Union of the Abandoned and Helpless Senior Citizens of Nigeria unlike their counterparts in politics with many affluence to placate as their past paticipla and present continuous.
We, and those retiring soon all indeed as once public servants that had served, would have served the Nigeria Nation selflessly but surely would have nothing else to remember than their future deprivations as once in public service and as abandoned human properties in a nation now dominated by accidental or/ and only money spinning politicians and allied in public space.
(3) Whereas Nigeria was once described by Dr. Kenneth U. Idiodi as, “A Nation where the best is difficult to attain but the worst never happens”, the spate of corruption, the irreligious manifestations in religious and traditional fundamentalism that are predicated on accidental politicians causing mayhem everywhere in Nigeria are daily getting Nigerians whittling from existence from previous Divine plans for us all.
I wish that average Nigerian politicians would be conscientious and bold enough to publicise their days and duration of their periods in public service from the local, state and federal levels what level of human capital developments of Nigerians they have raised from economic morass against many Nigerians in our geographic spaces that have met their untimely deaths.
Those that are daily dying due to ill health, poverty, religious and political infernos, herders and farmers’ conflicts and clashes.
The Nation today needs an unbiased update on where, how, what, when, who and why do we greatly have records of cases of crimes, deprivations, miseries, calamities and woes that daily perforate and accident the much publicised “Renewed Hope”.
We no doubt need to be mindful of the need to be more scientific minded than populating the public service mostly with the unemployed on political campaign grounds which may not assuage the public service from current normal disengagement of trained and competent hands due to the spelt out public service retirement criteria
Be that as it may, it is equally of great disservice to leave the public service in the hands of young politicians and political minded recruits with no iota of interest in patriotic services but strictly penchants for “Dividends of democracy” as we call the fallouts from political patronage.
Not minding that labor unions now incessantly gun for strikes at the spur of the moments they find rightly or wrongly to do so, of what use would they be in the nearest future when Artificial Intelligence and robotic fallen angels would have captured almost every inch of public service space both in public and private companies?
Would it still be business as usual and “Solidarity Forever’s Syndrome when and where the IT world of Artificial intelligence and robotic mini humans work more at home and deliver quickly jobs in sophisticated manners than the nonsensical human populated public service spaces with politics infested humans?
As it is often asked , “Today is yesterday’s tomorrow are you moving forward in thoughts and conducts?
Like those heroes of the past who in the depths of their rooms daily burnt their candle lights in order to find solutions to Nigerians innumerable problems, one, along people of like minds daily gets bolded by Jimmy Cliff’s admonition as encapsulated in his song, Fight on Brave Warriors.
According to the excerpt of the aforementioned lyrics by Jimmy Cliff I humbly submit thus:
Fight on, brave warrior
Until they open up the door for you
Fight on, brave warrior
‘Cause if they don’t
We’re going to bust it through, If they come physically, We’re going to take them psychologically
If they come psychologically
We’re going to take them on mentally
If they come mentally
Wе’re going to take them on spiritually
Fight on, brave warrior
Until they open up the door for you
Fight on, brave warrior
‘Cause if they don’t
We’re going to bust it through.
On this note I wish our beloved fellow Nigerians be apolitical or in the phylum of accidental politicians in public service spaces, a movement from the darkness of the mundane world to the glowing world of Light, Life and Love from our One and only God. (vitalnewsngr.com)
*Taiye Olaniyi is a Lagos based journalist and Public Commentator*
