Cowardice, when rightly understood begins with selfishness and often ends with shame. Cowardice is not something noblemen should be found exhibiting because while trying to flee from one’s fear, it has been discovered that they eventually run into it.
Ever since he lost in the primaries of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Vice President of Nigeria, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo has since chosen the path of silence and lack of interest in political discussions. While this has been described by some of his sympathisers as political correctness and sophistry, what he has actually done is to prove to Nigerians that he never deserved the number two position that he currently occupies in the first place.
The magnitude of Osinbajo’s silence in the public arena is extremely startling. He is neither being talked about anymore, by the press nor by other members of Nigerian society; not only in the political sphere but also in administrative realm. He has maximally been silenced and he agrees to fondle the grisly trophy without an iota of grieve or an array of fiendish moves. He is simply just blank.
Read Also: $418m Paris Club Refund: Malami Pursuing Selfish Agenda -Govs
What Osinbajo has so far displayed to Nigerians albeit unwittingly is that he doesn’t care about the future of Nigeria – the same country he collaborated with his inept boss to misgovern. Osinbajo has refused to join his party’s campaign, hiding under the guise of focusing on governance, and has also refused to resign from his position as Vice-President.
If Osinbajo believes that his party has not done well to be re-elected, then why did he seek their mandate in the first place? If he believes his party has done well but is presenting a horrible candidate to Nigerians in the person of his erstwhile boss, Bola Tinubu, then why will he sit back and watch the same Tinubu go on to become President without voicing out his concern?
The truth is that it wouldn’t have mattered if Osinbajo was just an ordinary party man in the All Progressives Congress (APC), however, he is not. He is the second-highest-ranking member of the party and a sitting Vice-President. Aloofness is the most foolish path to take.
It could be argued that the Vice-President perhaps, did not contemplate a situation where he would be thrown into a wrestling ring with his former boss, the man who launched him into the public limelight. By his earlier calculations, he probably thought that their ‘fight’ would not have to involve body contact but the scenarios that played out during the party’s primaries appeared to have gone beyond that. This is possibly the reason why Osinbajo has chosen to ‘stay away’. What he probably does not know is that sitting on the fence is cowardly.
What Osinbajo has perhaps failed to come to realise is that he owes Nigerians a lot of apologies and staying aloof while the country heads for the precipice will only compound it. When he declared his intention to run for President in May this year, he has probably forgotten that his declaration speech failed to mention a single achievement that he and his boss achieved in seven years. Yes, not one single achievement was mentioned in the speech because there is no achievement to brandish. The big question he has failed to answer is; how can a man who superintend over a country’s economic affairs for seven years not have a single measurable achievement to show for it? Besides the economy, Osinbajo lectured in UNILAG and was a member of ASUU yet his primary constituency, went on strike for many months yet not even a word was heard from him.
Osinbajo should be apologising to Nigerians for the failure of the current administration. Nigerians are worse off in 2022 compared to 2015 when Buhari and Osinbajo assumed office. The Buhari-Osinbajo administration abysmally failed on all socio-economic parameters, measures, and indices. The lives of Nigerians have sadly not remained the same since then.
Ahead of next year’s elections, Osinbajo must be looking for ways to make amends for his misdeeds rather than sitting on the fence and acting like all is well. All is surely not well with Nigeria and this is a fact. Osinbajo must come to realise that oratory prowess is often cheap, and incompetence is benumbing. He must understand that choosing silence will not erase his name from the list of people who destroyed Nigeria and set her on the path to retrogression.
