THE POLITICAL TSUNAMI THAT'S ABOUT TO HIT NIGERIA
The Nigeria plundering class is in denial and playing the fool. Standing directly in the path of a fast-approaching political tsunami that’s about to sweep them away into obscurity, they go on pretending as if they don’t know what’s coming. Like ostriches, they have their heads buried in the sand paying scant attention to the warning signals flashing bright red right in their faces.
Sun Tzu, the Chinese general, military strategist, writer, and philosopher who lived in the Eastern Zhou period of ancient China, must have had the Nigeria ruling cabal in mind when he spoke about the ways in which mighty armies lose the war to ill-equipped and ragtag platoons.
In the Art of War, an influential work on military strategy which he is credited to have authored, Sun Tzu wrote: “These are the six ways of courting defeat – neglect to estimate the enemy’s strength; want of authority; defective training; unjustifiable anger; nonobservance of discipline; failure to use picked men...”
The powers that be in Nigeria are guilty of committing every single one of these strategic errors and much more.
By underestimating the level of discontent of Nigeria’s aggrieved youths, the Nigeria ruling elites show they aren’t as smart as people thought they were. In their calloused minds, all they see is an uncoordinated group of disgruntled jobless youths yelling and screaming at the top of their voices on their twitter handles and Facebook pages. These powerful men, along with the beneficiaries of their years of plunder, think they are dealing with little children with tantrums ignorantly caught up in youthful exuberance and sheepishly roped into a poorly planned project. They sincerely believe that with time, the youths’ anger will burn out and their frustrations quickly dissipate. As the thinking of the ruling class goes, if past experience is anything to go by, the hooplas will soon fizzle away, everything will return to normal, and it’ll be business as usual.
Predictably, they look up in the sky but cannot see the ominously dark cloud gathering. Blinded by their hubris, they fail to appreciate the force of the political headwind that’s growing in strength by the minute. They believe so much in their huge numbers and put so much faith in their vaunted structure that they don’t give much of a thought to the fact that what was a mere tropical storm of yesterday has now grown in force into a category 3 hurricane today. Unable to discern the signs, they erroneously pay no heed to the powerful wind that's blowing thinking it’ll soon die down.
Again, writing in the Art of War, Sun Tzu said, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
The Nigeria plundering class overestimate their strength and trivialize their foes. They dismiss the intentions of the discontented Nigerians to be rid of their yoke. Foolishly, they continue to underrate the determination of irate youths to take their country and chart a new course for their future. To their own undoing, they forget that a hungry youth is an angry youth, and an angry youth is a pretty dangerous adversary.
It’s for these reasons the ruling class will be drowned in the category 5 hurricane that is coming. By failing to estimate the enemy’s strength, they’ll all be swept away in the tsunami about to make landfall in Nigeria. The coming elections will be a teaching moment for Nigeria’s preternaturally corrupt ruining crass. They are in for the shock of their lives in the 2023 presidential elections as they get consumed in the flames of the votes of Nigeria’s angry youths.
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