I love Dora Akunyili, yet I cannot marry her.  It stops at merely admiring her for her courage, for excelling where most people would fail.  She is an accomplished professor and a renowned public administrator.  For all that she remains an upcoming sometime naïve politician. Yes, she sometimes appears to love the company of the rich to the detriment of working hard to serve a legacy of her own.  I love her for being able to speak her mind freely.  No sooner one expresses that love would one begin to see that third world knack for penchant for being inconsistent and empty adulation of entrenched interests in the country.

I would highlight Akunyili’s other inconsistencies shortly, but let us quickly point it out that she has done a less than credible job on the Umar Abdul Mutallab terrorism shame lately. Akunyili wanted to enchant us into believing that Baby Mutallab’s misguided enlistment into Al – Qaeda could not be blamed on Papa Mutallab because he is a good man who had first reported his son’s strange behavior and unbecoming convictions on the war against the “evil west” to relevant authorities.

According to Professor Akunyili, the fact that Alhaji Mutallab reported Umar to US embassy official should serve as enough reason for us and the rest of the civilized world not to name the accomplished rich arrogant condescending father for the sins of his misguided and spoilt child.

I deliberately called the elder Mr. Mutallab arrogant and proud because he has seen reason to be humble and apologize to Nigerians, Nigeria and the entire world on the unwarranted inconvenience brought on all of us by a member of the house for which is the father.

Instead of defending Nigeria as a land of peace and accomplished people, Akunyili is wasting her time and time payer’s money trying to fool us that Mutallab’s father is innocent of his child’s conduct. I, personally, reject this attempt to be played and manipulated for a sucker. Yes that is what Prof. Akunyili is trying to do. She is plainly wrong in trying to hypnotize and bewitch us into thinking that accomplished banker, Mutallab, is not culpable for his child’s failed attempt at killing about three hundred people about that North West Airline flight to Detroit, Michigan.

Umar Farouk is just twenty three years old. What was he like growing up? Was his father always there? What kind of rhetoric and preaching did he learn? What were the bases of his anger? Who was the object of his anger?

Did our Minister of Information and Communication ask for an opportunity for Nigerian interrogators   to have access to this young man, to ask these pertinent questions before deciding to become Mutallab’s advocate? Mrs. Akunyili has a way of personalizing things that affect us as a nation. And this is not right.

For example, what prompted Mutallab to relinquish his appointment at First Bank of Nigeria? How did he become, sometime last year, the first chairman of Nigeria’s First Islamic Bank? I am interested in knowing how much he has given over the years to the case of Islam and what brand of Islam? How much of his acceptance to lead the Islamic Bank could have been a direct motivation by rabid extremism? I need to know, because I am an aggrieved Nigerian by reason of what shame his son, an important member of his family has brought on all of us.  I travel regularly as a journalist and I am not happy that I have to be humiliated as a law abiding individual.

Prof. Akunyili’s concern is usually different from that of ordinary Nigerians. She is often obsessed with saving her job through the grace of the cabal. She is a lesson in desperation. If we must come out tops in this battle of ideals, our core decency as a peace loving people and baseless paranoia of the west to denigrate us all, black people, we must operate in truth and shun shameful propaganda.

For all I care, the fact that papa Mutallab could live the security of First Bank Chairmanship hints on something, and important nexus in the making of what they don’t want to acknowledge: extremism. They better start talking.  The average northern Nigerian Muslim elite blames America for breeding terrorism.  I don’t know exactly what they mean. How can someone else’s attitude form the basis for criminality? For Mutallab to engage in criminal and murderous conduct, it means the seed must be ingrained somewhere in his gene.  So Akunyili should find a better explanation.

 

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