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By
Olusola Adegbite,Esq.
Dear Sir,
I congratulate you on your safe return back to the country.I must also salute your election of wisdom in your recognition of the fact that your unending leave, had once again began to trigger the nation’s delicate fault lines along perilous lines. I do hope that your return signifies that you are now in sound health, both of the mind and the body. Certainly, we cannot but wish you many beautiful years of beneficial health ahead.
So far, the reason for your abrupt reason has not been made public, we hope it has nothing to do with the rumoured 2019 Kite. If it were to be, it would be most disheartening and a major low. Mr.President, the report is that you are slated to give a National broadcast, that is commendable, but beyond the familiar pedestrian lines of our usual broadcast, it is my considered opinion that your return this time should present you a major opportunity, an historic one I would say, to speak life into your Presidency.
In the course of your absence, many legitimate questions of national concern were raised concerning your state of health and further capacity for the huge demands of the Office of the President, and for very familiar reasons, these questions were consistently met with belligerent rhetorics from your overzealous subordinates. Honour therefore beckons on you to sincerely address those questions, that have become the moral albatross of your government. Importantly Sir, it has become critical at this juncture that you, in sublime retrospection decide on the future of this great country and interrogate the question of if that future clashes with your future.Sir, as against the deafening rhapsody of the market around you, there is a substantial section of the Nigerian public that have no business with praise-singing but deserve a laconic, detailed and non partisan report of the current situation.
As you would agree with me Sir, our nation has consistently shown poor leadership credentials by official reluctance to make public, information that ought be public, with the result that governments over the years have become the butt of jokes both in domestic and international circles, with the Presidency becoming no more than a Centre for folktales production and fables engineering. Despite, the high expectation, your government has not been different in this regard and it is a shame.
In today’s world, the lifespan of Official deceit has been rendered thin by the staggering power in the hands of the 21st Century media. It would therefore be the greatest mistake of your Presidency, if you continue to submit to the shenanigans of the desperate political vultures around you, by continuing with the hide and seek game around your state of health. Sir, as you will agree with me, Nigeria is too great a nation to be subjected to auto-pilot leadership, whether from the confines of Aso-rock or from London. It never worked before, it certainly will not work now. I consider it the highest demostration of integrity that you personally inform the People you governed of the basic facts, except if it is otherwise.
Well, as an unknown citizen I am not certain you will regard my admonition, nonetheless i still consider it useful to commend you to the words of one of America’s greatest Presidents of modern times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who said, ‘The Presidency is not merely an administrative office…It is preeminently a place of moral leaderdship’. I pray you have the courage to address those things that can be changed; I pray you muster the equanimity to accept those things that can not be changed; and I pray you have the wisdom to know the difference.
Olusola Adegbite, Esq is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He is currently away at Benjamin N.Cardozo School of Law, New York, United States.
