Isa Ali Pantami – The pantomime within and my people of Habib

If you were a fan of the dissolved News of the world you would understand what I am trying to do with this title. They were very creative with their headlines that dragged you the reader to the story. So, forgive me for trying to do same with this heading.

Anyways, don’t let me bore you with the details of this issue. It is all over and except you have been under a rock or are into sports betting you would have been assaulted with the nuances of the issue. So, I will not repeat it here.

My plan was to ignore it and just move on with the lethargy that I have built around myself in a powerful bid to seek protection. This our country daily assaults your sensibilities with the madness that is leadership. So, if you put your mind, you will be assaulted and denigrated. You just develop thick skin and move on.

When this Patami thing hit, just like the Judge who went to fight in the market, I ignored and moved on. What else is new, I told myself. But this morning on the Habib Bank Alumni forum, I was inadvertently dragged into a debate on the matter.

The Habib Bank alumni whats app group is a group of those of us who passed through that hallowed institution. But it has been about twenty years down the road and we have all grown older, imbibed different outlook towards life and have been affected and infected by whatever it is that is running round the country.

Debates there can be sometimes harried and passionate. It is largely a conservative platform, so I choose my words and remain mostly silent.

Read also: Before they ‘deport’ Atiku to Cameroun!

But on this matter, the argument on the other side was generally- he has apologized, we should move on. He who has not sinned before should cast the first stone and basically, we are just looking for a bad name to give a dog to hang it.

Let me say that this was not the position of majority of the group or at least I will say that most people were silent and I would just say that this position was that of the three people talking and my own position was just mine. So, this is in no way the position of the group that has some of the most respected and accomplished Nigerians.

Anyways, these their arguments threw me into thinking. What were the national security implication of one who held such thoughts even in his newly born years viz a viz the position he is holding today and the level of insecurity in the country?

What is going on with this man, hasn’t it thrown up the emptiness that is screening of public officers before they take office? The bow and go syndrome, is it not beginning to bite us now? Would an officer with such a past be given any position in any reasonable government, no matter how much he apologized?

For me, the Minister of Communications who overseas the new economy in the digital age is a very strategic position. The position must be held by someone who is balanced and not with this kind of thinking, no matter how early in his life he had those thoughts.

The digitization of society is powerfully running at top speed, that it is more than ever before shaping lives, security and what else as we move. It’s like having someone like that running DSS. How will that augur for national security even if he stood naked by the river to apologies?

These things are not just like cheating on your wife and saying sorry. At the least, he should be debriefed. Simple! His decisions since becoming Minister of Communications should be revisited to see if there have been any colouring in them.

His relationships, his linkages everything should be cross checked and re- crosschecked and if he gets a clean bill of health then he can continue.

Just saying sorry is definitely not enough and pointing fingers to Edgar to say have you not sinned before, those not count because I am not the Minister of Communications.

Simple.

Author: Joseph Edgar…

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Articles published in our Graffiti section are strictly the opinion of the writers and do not represent the views of Ripples Nigeria or its editorial stand.

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