T H E L A S T K I N G T H E L A S T K I N G The Last King- A Gripping Account Of How The Messiah Became The Ultimate Undertaker. Published 2017. Dodoh Okafor. Published by: Edge 360 Media Consult. +2347038184024; +2347033289677 Mail: [email protected] www.edgem360.com Designed by: Sam Afolabi. First Published 2017. ISBN: 978 978 956 T H E L A S T K I N G TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgement........................................................2 Dedication......................................................................3 For the Records..............................................................4 Headlining President Muhammadu Buhari's Failures...........................................................................9 He Indeed Changed Nigeria!.....................................18 And Things Fell Apart.................................................22 Buyers' Remorse..........................................................32 The Rich Also Cry........................................................36 The Mess Began Way Too Early.................................43 The Co-ordinator of National Affairs Drama...........50 The Collapse.................................................................54 Virtually Empty Treasury..........................................57 Inter-Ethnic Tensions Escalate...................................62 i T H E L A S T K I N G A Presidency Underpinned By the Doctrine of Inequality.....................................................................73 The Worst Christmas for Igbos in Ages.....................77 Mass Graves for the Shiites........................................81 Mazi Nnamdi Kanu Became A Voice for the Ostracised 5%...............................................................88 Enter Ayo Fayose.........................................................97 Femi Fani-Kayode Will Not Relent..........................115 The Social Media Army.............................................122 Junaid Mohammed Remains the Ultimate Gadfly.........................................................................132 The Yorubas Express Preference for a Restructured Nigeria or an Oduduwa Republic…........................140 The Workers Revolt at Eagle Square........................148 Middle Belt Leaders Reject Nigeria.........................150 ii T H E L A S T K I N G ACKNOWLEDGEMENT would like to specially thank my best friend Olisa Aduaka for his brilliance in editing and making vital Icorrections to the manuscript. I am also indebted to all the authors and media houses- online and conventional- whose reports were cited in this work. Most sincere gratitude to my artist Paul for the wonderful cover design. I am equally grateful to Sampson for his help in the typesetting and book design. I am particularly thankful to a dear Friend, Gbenga for his enormous encouragement. Special thanks to my wife Rita for her wonderful support and great understanding while I worked and reworked the manuscript. Her assistance also proved immense. Everyone mentioned here and those who offered varied assistance but for different reasons chose to remain anonymous are very highly appreciated. I did not forget you- only respecting your wishes. You have all contributed in no small measure in telling the story of our age. You shall be fairly remembered by those coming after us. My debt of thanks to all of you is inexhaustible. Dodoh. iii T H E L A S T K I N G DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this book to the following persons: - Emesiriuwaonu: Sir Joe represents the millions of Nigerian pensioners who for years have been denied their gratuities, are made to suffer, beg and undergo humiliation to get their deserved pensions. Men and women who toiled day and night, spent the energy of their youth- their best years in sacrifice for an ungrateful nation. May his labour and that of those he represents never be in vain. - Ngozi: Ngo stands in for the millions of Nigerian workers who have not received a dime as salary in the last 18 months or more. Such a pity these mothers with kids to train in schools, house rent and other bills to pay, sick, aged dependants to cater for, varied community and society commitments to meet are ruled by sadists who glory at the pain and misery they inflict on their subjects. May the pains and anguish inflicted on these mothers be multiplied iv T H E L A S T K I N G over a million times and returned to the families and all generations of the men and women who are denying our mothers their legitimate entitlements. Ise! - Bom Bom: Bom Bom comes in to represent the millions of youth who are slaving at jobs that give neither satisfaction nor peace of mind. These young men have been betrayed by a society they had high hopes for in their childhood days. The society and her misbegotten leaders have since forced them into ventures they certainly would have renounced only a few years ago. They risk their lives just to be able to feed and stay alive till the next day. Eternal damnation shall be the lot of the leaders who have so stifled the economic space- making our youth slaves and vagabonds in their fatherland. To these three people and the millions they stand in for, I can only offer encouragement. Their pains and agonies are not unnoticed. Men of good conscience know they do not deserve what they are passing through, it is known that they deserve better deals in life. I invite the intervention of Heaven to lighten the heavy burden placed on your shoulders by the con artists and serial liars who now rule your land. v T H E L A S T K I N G FOR THE RECORDS History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce- Karl Marx. We live in a society where social amnesia rules. Someone once told Nigerians that Gen Sani Abacha “never stole” and he was believed. We have read commentaries praising the “wisdom” and “vision” of the first republic politicians. Almost every past leader has been the subject of a book wherein his real and imagined virtues were praised to the high heavens. The misdeeds of so many rulers have been forgotten just months after leaving office. It is little wonder you find these discredited rulers who should forever hide their faces in shame come around to pontificate and take the moral high ground on virtually every issue in the public space. It has been established that one of the biggest motivations for abuse of public trust is the belief that such misdeeds would be forgotten in no time. Collective amnesia can thus be said to be a key enabler of the general deterioration we see all over Nigeria today. It is sad to observe that public intellectuals and historians who vi T H E L A S T K I N G should know better have constituted themselves into agents of public deception. Reputable journalists, university professors and civil rights leaders write all manner of books lionizing known scoundrels in and out of public offices. It is a shame that this culture of grand deceit has continued unchallenged through the years. The height of it all was in 2015 when a collection of “progressive politicians,” civil rights activists, senior journalists, university lecturers, leaders of socio- political groups, ethnic pathfinders and opinion moulders of various callings and persuasions bandied together to tragically re-write history. A silent minority watched in shame as everything we knew and had read were turned on its head. People were compelled to believe that darkness could bring light or that something could be made to stand on nothing. It was about the greatest farce ever witnessed in the political history of Africa. How on earth were millions of Nigerians made to believe that a man that torpedoed democracy in 1983 could be a champion of democratic ideals in 2015? Who made us believe the fib that a man under who ballooned the national debt to a point of unsustainability in the mid-80s, oversaw the collapse of the naira as a currency of exchange, initiated the diabolical barter trade policy amongst other suggestions of economic charlatanism would in the vii T H E L A S T K I N G second decade of the new millennium enable the resurgence of the economy of Nigeria? Who charmed us into believing that an economic manager that could not ensure the steady flow of goods and services in our markets but rather forced Nigerians into queuing for long hours to purchase such commodities as bread, milk, soap and other items of everyday usage would 30 years later lead us into economic prosperity? How did a man under whose watch billions of naira that accrued to ministry of petroleum and the Petroleum Trust Fund in 1978 and 1995 could not be accounted for assume the tag of an anti-corruption leader? Which dark spiritualists cast the spell that led millions to believe the street gossip that one of the wealthiest generals who plundered the nation's wealth in around 40 years of military dictatorship would make an honest civilian leader? How did we all forget the antecedents of a man who openly vowed to wreck our secular constitution in favour of the Sharia system? Everything was in the open and yet, we chose not to see it. We ignored the voice of reason that warned against gambling with our future, we allowed the pettiness of politicians to undo all the efforts at undoing the misdeeds of the past. We found ourselves embracing the destroyers we had denounced in the past. Historians would in the future try to unravel the general motivation for the catastrophic electoral viii T H E L A S T K I N G choice Nigerians made in 2015. How did Nigerians of this generation allow themselves to be misled by ill- motivated politicians, paid social media errand boys, ethnic irredentists masked as patriots, charlatans dressed in the garb of public commentators and agents of dark spirits? It would be hard to but they would try. Perhaps they will succeed, perhaps they will not. Before tomorrow's charlatans rise to tell the future generations how wonderful things were in President Buhari's time as civilian president, it would be right to lay the issues bare- to give a personal account of the social, economic and political tragedies that became daily occurrences under Maj.