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What happened in Bakassi was not an attack on the ADC. It was an attack on the very idea that opposition parties have a right to exist. It was an attack on the civic dignity of every Cross Riverian who might dare to think differently from those in power. It was an attack on the fundamental proposition that democracy means nothing if it does not mean the peaceful competition of ideas.
And it happened under the watch of a man called to higher things.
There is a particular tragedy when men of God occupy seats of political power. We expect from them not less than from secular leaders, but more. We expect that the moral imagination cultivated in prayer might translate into a politics of genuine care. We expect that the shepherd’s staff might actually defend the sheep. When such men fail, the failure carries an extra weight, a theological weight, a weight of betrayed expectation that echoes through the corridors of both the statehouse and the sanctuary.
Governor Otu must now answer a question that no press release can evade: What is the cost of citizenship in your paradise?
If the answer is that citizens must abandon their political rights, must silence their opposition, must accept that only one party may organise in certain local government areas, then the paradise is a mirage and the peace is the peace of the graveyard. If the answer is that hoodlums may attack with impunity so long as they shout the right name, then the chief security officer has become the chief enabler of insecurity.
But if the answer is otherwise, if the governor truly believes that Cross River belongs to all its people, that opposition is not treason, that civic participation is a right not a privilege, then the response must be immediate and unmistakable. The hoodlums must be traced from their nowhere to their somewhere. The arrests must be made. The prosecution must proceed. The message must be sent, in language that even the dullest thug can understand, that the People’s Paradise has no room for the politics of exclusion.
There is a time in history when we humans are meant to enjoy equity in our rights. That time is not some distant eschatological hope; it is the urgent demand of the present moment. It is the demand of every citizen who wishes to register for a party, to attend a rally, to cast a vote, to speak their mind without fear of the splintering of canopies and the shattering of bones.
Cross River State stands at a crossroads. One path leads toward the further entrenchment of the politics of violence, the slow, grinding reduction of democracy to a spectacle staged for the powerful, with the rest of us reduced to extras in our own lives. The other path leads toward the recovery of paradise, toward a politics where the chief security officer actually secures, where the man of God actually shepherds, where the citizen actually matters.
The video is circulating. The world is watching. And in the garden of the People’s Paradise, the question lingers like smoke over Bakassi: Who will tend and keep this place? And at what cost to their soul?
CRD: Briel Unimke Sòts
SB E-news.
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