Mark, the law giver
David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark, GCON, retired brigadier-general of the Nigerian Army, Senate President (2007-2015) and arch-conspirator against MKO Abiola’s June 12 mandate – is he the Rip Van Winkle of
- By Hardball
David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark, GCON, retired brigadier-general of the Nigerian Army, Senate President (2007-2015) and arch-conspirator against MKO Abiola’s June 12 mandate – is he the Rip Van Winkle of our generation?
Hardly! Remember Rip Van Winkle, the fictive guy that slept for 20 years, only to wake up and find everyone and everything around him changed? Naah! David Mark’s bluster at his ADC’s legal logjam and INEC’s decision on the court order over it, harbours far deeper delusions!
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Indeed, the former political soldier, from his railings, clearly saw himself as something far more final in history: Nigeria’s current equivalent of the Law Giver of Ancient Athens: the likes of Draco the Severe, Solon the Wise and Pericles the Liberal.
Forget the appellation that goes with each: Mark suffers the arch-delusion he is some lawgiver whose bluster crushes everyone: the courts and their injunctions; INEC, the electoral umpires; the other ADC faction that went to court to stake a claim to the troubled party’s leadership!
Call it the remnant but untamed martial strain in the old soldier!
His threats are formidable to the hopelessly partisan. But to the deep and well informed, they are absolutely comical! Despite the court’s “status quo ante-bellum” ruling, Mark swore, his faction’s national convention, fixed for April 14, would go on as planned. For daring not to interpret the Appeal Court’s ruling in his factional ADC’s favour, he declared INEC hopelessly partisan.
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A baleful Mark barked: the INEC chair must be sacked. INEC itself must be dissolved, because its decision on the matter is “unlawful”. Because of INEC’s position, Nigeria’s democracy is endangered! What a comical relay of hyperboles! Mark and his ADC faction just declared their democratic right to insane anger, so the entire polity must shiver! What conceit!
You can trust Peter Obi to expose his trademark full emptiness of traducing others. He had written on his X page: “What an irony that the acclaimed defenders of democracy and human rights who claimed to have fought for democracy during the era of Gen. Sani Abacha now find themselves worse than the man they opposed.”
Again, to be sure: that was a silly, flippant hyperbole, only a dissembling mind like Obi’s could muster. Abacha was the hated post-IBB butcher, who slaughtered too many but got his desert in a shameful death. Linking Abacha to democracy is ode to the aridity of Obi’s mind!
Still, Mark and Obi are crass opportunists. They worked against the NADECO democratic alliance, yet reaped immense benefits from democracy’s return in 1999. They can’t appreciate ethos they never had.
The about-to-jump Bala Mohammed, governor of Bauchi State, must be fixing his nervous gaze on this duo, blowing their tops! With ADC’s self-destruct manouevres, will Mohammed still jump there from his equally troubled PDP? Will ADC crash itself as a legal platform for 2027?
