Your Excellency, it is with every sense of love and patriotism that I have decided to write you again despite the frustration of knowing that you may not hearken to my sincere advice to you, as I have written to plead with you on several occasions, but my entreaties have been to no avail.
I pray this letter meets you well in the beautiful city of London where I expect you to be resting and relaxing by now whilst waiting to undergo your mandatory physical check-up.
Sir, though this piece amounts to unsolicited advice from a self-appointed Special Adviser, I wish to reassure you that you should stop banking on professional politicians who are merely using you to feather their own nests.
I demand and require no gratification whatsoever other than to put it permanently and indelibly on record that someone told you the truth while the unrepentant liars took over your space and led you astray.
Before I go on, please, permit me, Sir, to take you down memory lane, from the First Republic to the present. Practically all our leaders failed, or fell, usually not because of only what they did wrong but ostensibly because of what they did not do right. Let me also establish one fact.
Most of our leaders have been catapulted to power, not by their superlative might, but by divine intervention. One day, I will chronicle how providence has been responsible for the exalted position all our leaders found themselves.
Sadly, practically almost all of them forgot how they reached their lofty heights and sought to personally perpetuate themselves in power, but the celestial manner of their enthronement also saw to their humiliating, sometimes tragic, downfall.
Consequently, virtually all, except may be General Abdulsalami Abubakar, were disgraced, removed or retired ignominiously or controversially.
President Obasanjo who was easily the most efficient, efficacious and effervescent leader, after the brilliant and youthful General Yakubu Gowon, ended his tenure in 2007 with the reverberating hoopla surrounding his third term bid. Whether he was interested in it, or his acolytes forced him into it, all his good works would always attract that cloudy addendum.
It is noteworthy, for emphasis, that no leader in Nigerian history has ever succeeded in enslaving Nigerians. We can stretch this further, by stating categorically, that no leader in the world has ever achieved absolute authority permanently. Indeed, that is a preserve meant only for God. If only humans reminded themselves constantly of this fact and their mortality!
This is the reason I wish to appeal to you once again to resist the temptation of wanting to take Nigeria back to those days of oppression and suppression. In case you need to be reminded of how much God loves you, I shall gladly oblige. When your military regime was toppled in 1985, your enemies danced on the streets.
You were compared to the worst dictators on earth and many would have thought it was finished and over for you. But the ways of the Almighty are not the ways of man. 30 years later, the same Nigerians who rejoiced over the collapse of your military junta, in their collective wisdom or stupidity or amnesia, gave you a resounding victory at the polls against a powerful government and incumbent President.
This was after you had tried for a record third time and had virtually given up any chance or hope of winning a Presidential election again.
You had actually wept for Nigeria and yourself on that third inauspicious occasion. This time around, in 2015, everything seemed stacked against you, including old age and diminishing health. Yet Nigerians at home and abroad placed their abundant faith in you. What you have done with their faith since then is debatable.
What more could anyone ever ask for again in this life? Credit for that victory must go to everyone, including saints and sinners, in case such nomenclatures exist on planet earth.
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