Columnist: Correct Me If I Am Right By Rudolf Okonkwo
“We need to change our attitude on how we report things about our country and we should emulate the foreign reporters who never report negative things about their countries." David Mark, Nigeria's Senate President, complaining about social media being used to insult Nigerian leaders in a speech to reporters covering the Nigerian Senate.
I’m going to use some bad words in this column. If you cannot stomach them, please stop reading.
Right now.
Thank you.
I do not waste my thoughts on some Nigerian politicians. Despite their antics and cries for attention, I dismiss this bunch of political actors. Some are so rotten that I consider them irredeemable. Some are so insignificant in the overall reformation scheme that I feel they will wither away as soon as the cord of corruption is cut off. Some are nothing but stagnant balls of smoke made of sheer ignorance. Mr. David Mark was one of them. But he shouldn’t be.
On a second thought, David Mark is much more than all of the above. He is not just irredeemable. He is also contaminating. He is not just insignificant. His dirty fingers are scratching the canvas of Nigeria. He is not just a stagnant smoke of ignorance on Nigeria’s sky. He is also in motion.
In short, David Mark is a lucky bastard. And nothing is scarier than a government of lucky bastards in the life of a nation.
Mr. Mark went in front of reporters that cover the senate, men and women that he has pocketed, to complain that the social media is used by faceless people to insult Nigerian leaders like him. He grumbled that these disgruntled operators of social media have no way of retracting their stories. His solution: that the government should control social media to stop its users from insulting leaders like him.
What the likes of David Mark do not know is that social media does not operate in a vacuum. It needs content to exist. And social media content is provided by people like David Mark.
For those who need more details, this is the essential biography of David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark. Born on April 18, 1948, in Otukpo, he joined the Nigerian army and became prominent as a Major when he was named Secretary of the Abandoned Property Implementation Commission after the Biafra-Nigeria Civil War. In the 1980s, he reemerged as one of the so-called Babangida boys. He became the military governor of Niger state from 1984- 1986. When Babangida took over as Nigeria’s military dictator, he brought Mark close as his Minister of Communication. He played a prominent role in the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. He headed the gang that threatened to kill M.K.O. Abiola if the military had dared to hand power over to him. He fell out with Gen. Sani Abacha who retired him from the army and he went on exile. At the beginning of this current democratic dispensation in 1999, he became a senator representing Benue South senatorial zone. He supported Obasanjo’s effort to amend the Nigerian constitution to serve a third term. For that effort he collected the lion share of the billions that Obasanjo’s supporters used to bribe senators. He became the Senate president in 2007 as a reward for his loyalty to the PDP.
David Mark is a shameless hypocrite who has absolute disdain for Nigeria. That such an uninspiring character is angling for the presidency of Nigeria is a testament to the hopelessness of the Nigerian project. Put aside his pedigree, Nigeria’s number three man is as shallow as they come. Otherwise he would have heard that it was Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post newspaper that singlehandedly exposed President Richard Nixon as a crook and forced him to resign.
David Mark is old enough to know that “the only countries where newspapers are full of good news are those countries where the prisons are full of good people.” If David Mark is just ignorant, I won’t be scared. I will simply hope that soon, like other ignoramuses like him ruining Nigeria, he will die off with his stupidity and leave Nigeria to its fate. But David Mark is much more than ignorant. He is deliberately manipulative and mischievous. And that is dangerous.
David Mark is a lucky bastard. The best way to properly insult him is to ignore him. That is what I will go back to doing now that I have let out steam.
Long but interesting piece, for full details http://saharareporters.com/column/how-properly-insult-david-mark-rudolf-ogoo-okonkwo
Omo, fear dey catch me sef as i dey copy and paste this gist so
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