[OPINION] Abaribe As A Yahoo Yahoo Politician

Jones Fcc Onwuasonya:

Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe may not be very different from the 419 kingpin or yahoo yahoo criminal who thrive on exploiting people’s fantasies and emotions, especially, the romance scammers.

To appreciate my drift better, you may need to understand how these romance scammers operate. They sneak into dating sites, scour randomly for the lonely and most vulnerable, sometimes, widows, divorcees, single mothers, who may be older than their own mothers.

Then, they begin to send them beautiful messages of love, telling them, how they are also lonely and looking for a partner. After a while, the faked friendship graduate into romance, and the innocent but naive white woman or gay man begin to believe them, and they start exchanging video messages.

In the old days when we use to go to cyber cafés before we could do anything on the internet, I used to come across many of them, especially, during “all-night browsing”. Sometimes you would see some of them come to the cafés with a knife or some sharp objects.

They actually cut themselves sometimes, as way of showing how true their love is to the white mugu. They take up false lives, live as they believe the white mugu would admire. Sometimes, they would be lucky, and within days of trying, they get their first wires of dollars or some other foreign currencies.

The ‘lucky’ ones meet some women or even girls to whom some substantial wealth had been bequeathed or some older women who have some good money saved up from many years of working. The end game is; strip them naked of that wealth, break their hearts and flaunt the ill-gotten wealth among your fellows here.

Enyinnaya Abaribe is a smart politician of the Machiavellian stock and possibly a good student of the Joseph Stalin theory of subjugation of the masses. Like Adolf Hitler, Enyinnaya Abaribe perfects his skills in demagoguery and mass appeal, and does little to use his governmental powers to alleviate the sufferings of the masses.

The Abia former Deputy-Governor and three times Senator understands that the only way he could sustain his power of exploiting the frustrations of the masses is by doing very little to lift these masses out of poverty or providing the required infrastructure to ease their sufferings. He understands that as many people as are able to escape the vicious net of poverty and dejection, would have escaped his well-plotted net of mass hysteria.

Senator Orji Uzor Kalu who was his boss when both held sway in Abia Government House had challenged Abaribe to showcase his people oriented achievements in his many years in the Senate. Some people even argued that OUK who is barely two years in the Senate (six months of which were spent in Kuje prison) has outperformed Enyinnaya Abaribe who has been in the Senate since 2007. The Abia South Senator ducked that challenge and rather continued on his publicity seeking rambles about Igbo marginalization and advocacy for the IPOB and Nnamdi Kanu.

There is actually no difference between a politician who exploits the ignorance, frustration and dissatisfaction of his people for political advantage with the internet scammer or another form of conman who exploits the greed, vulnerability, emotions and expectations of some individuals to their personal financial gains. This is because while the fraudster invests his time in exploiting the naivety of a few wealthy people in order to rip them off of their hard-earned investments, this politician spends most of his time tricking the people into ignoring his apparent failures in his current mandate and looking to perpetuate himself in office, for his own selfish gains, and nothing for the masses.

As an elected Senator, Enyinnaya is not ignorant of the enormous powers available to him on the floor of the Senate to bring forward his arguments for referendum to be inserted in our Constitution or for the President to be censured for his obviously aberrant presidency. Enyinnaya does MOST of his talking to the glitz of camera lenses and before journalists, and these are deliberately aimed at improving his ratings for the next election rather than advance the cause of his constituents or the Igbos, whom he postures as a defender of their interests. He is rather interested in going along the trend.

Abaribe doesn’t forget that one of his responsibilities as a political leader is to lead the people aright and not to flow along with them, even if they were heading to the lagoon. But as a selfish political leader who is only interested in his political survival, he wouldn’t mind urging the people along their mass suicidal, if he convinced that such is the feeling of the majority.

So, whether he wears a DOT nation t-shirt or he is crooning some populist tunes in support of IPOB agitation or on the rare occasion when he feels it convenient to take his critical, some would say cynical, opinions on President Buhari to the floor of the Senate, Abaribe might not be more than a shrewd, manipulative survivalist with his eyes set on the next election.

He is obviously not the statesman or even the responsible, responsive or compassionate leader looking out for the oppressed or even his long-suffering constituents. In the final analysis, we will find that Abaribe ranks in the top clique of those who have made Nigeria the mess it is today.