Plateau Killings: Lalong, Jang at Meeting Point
BY CHAMBERLAIN ODEY, JOS – Political approximations and semblances appear to be giving way to moments of sobriety and punctiliousness. Politics thus must go akimbo for the real Plateau project to thrive and reach towards effervescence.
Critically and unmistakably, for the greater good of the state and to drive and steer the times away from bad mood and blood-soaked, issues-infested melancholy, it is time for Governor Simon Lalong and his predeccessor in office, Jonah Jang to meet, compare notes, and share ideas on managing a crisis-menaced Plateau.
Before now, Lalong and his foot soldiers on the power bed took the emotions of electioneering beyond regulation time and even outside the boxing ring.
Though the situation bears a sharp biblical acuity that David fought the war while Solomon enjoyed the peace, vacuum mongers and profiteer speculators around Lalong swindled history quickly, and went ahead to impress on the world that the new administration was able to restore peace in the state more easily and earlier than it assembled a lacklustre cabinet that took about six months to come on.
No sooner than this claim became sing-song and ding-dong at every whimsical government function, Lalong himself became a prostrate general and sweet game in the nest of his ambitious and self-serving aides, whose poor grasp of the workings of government has helped immensely to keep the administration’s focus disconcerted and dizzying. With an inchoate media machinery that is proudly thieving and remorselessly under-performing and unproductive, Lalong has been all but a sick governor in a happy mood, but constantly in want and in search of himself like a victim of wrong diagnosis.
In the recent resurgence of skirmish and ethnic founded nocturnal cannibalism in the State, these systemic stagnations and amateur in Lalong’s government came afore quintessentially and with uncommon abandon. Following the scamper and stampede in parts of Jos on September 7, the well-advised decision to fall back on the martial despair option of curfew suffered administrative set back when the confusion and power thirst in government consigned the authorisation of the circumstantial legislation to a non-career officer who is not even a member of the state cabinet. This confusion subsisted and persisted up till the rather unnecessary application of the curfew gasp as antidote to a clear case of stranger aggression and external invasion of Irigwe Chiefdom in Bassa Local Government Area.
Erudite columnist an analyst, Jonathan Ishaku has aptly and refreshingly described the curfew over part of Bassa as a “reflex action “. You may not agree with that; but given what evinced in the curfew area while the curfew was on, it appears that Lalong stretched the commendations and success of the exercise in Jos to hyperbolic proportion, and lapsed into such hysteria that saw him confusing rural terrorism in Bassa with urban violence in Jos. And for his lack of gauge of its relevance and workability in the former situation, he has since refused to heed grievous and grieving outcry and vacate the order. The result we are getting is the same as when the prognosis is constantly unambiguous, but the diagnosis is constantly ambiguous, or varying in infinite proportion. The same systemic malfunctions underpin the governor’s slow and sluggish resolve to visit the troubled area today.
Two fighting, one isn’t fair. To address the emerging ugly trends effectively, a hapless Lalong must fall back and fetch from the observatory and silos of experience. This is not about politics but about putting Plateau and the Plateau Project over and above parochial and primordial considerations and partisan sentiments. The political era of Jang as governor is different from that of Lalong. The duo have their commonalities and commonplace – all the same: the same enemy, the same motive, the same tactics, and the same collaborators, in the same Nigeria where the more you see, the less you understand.
