Nigeria: Can a President Dissolve the People?

16 January 2012
opinion

"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing." Those were the famous words of Mother Teresa, the Albanian born Indian Missionary and Founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979.

I remember those words as I watch the greatest squandering of national support by a popularly elected president in two weeks of ill-digested strategic manoeuvres. Away from all the shrill posturing and counter-allegations I want to be counted among those who honestly counselled caution. When you are at a precipice you stop running; when you find that you are in a hole you stop digging. If the erstwhile demigods of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and even Cote D'Ivoire had tarried awhile to remember this commonsensical truism perhaps the recent history of their countries and their own personal fates could have been different.

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