By Anayo M. Nwosu
When a man gets older and crosses age 70, his sense organs begin to wane and malfunction. The brain articulates slower.
It is normal to hear old men complain of ear, eye and joint problems. Human body is like a car. It gets older by each day. It also needs frequent medical checks.
A young wife of an old man seldom gets a full ration of sex. She gets excuses while the husband bores her with stories of his great days as a young man. It’s like a history class.
The old man only has early morning half or feeble erection or no erection at all. He keeps promising and promising with little or no results the nightmare of his expectant wife. It’s frustrating if the wife is a faithful one. Like Nigerians who are forced to live, work in and consume Nigeria
The best of a man is when he can do what real men can do. That is, when he can transmute part of his sexual energy to create new things or to transform his environment. When he can dream dreams and live his dreams.
Once a man is past his prime, no promises could be kept. Privately, he rues the loss of his youthfulness.
By 2019, Buhari shall be 76+. If he were a judge or a professor, he would have retired. If he were any other civil servant, he would have also retired 16 years before.
But the job of the president is more tasking than that of a judge, professor or any other civil servants. He works 7 days a week and every hour.
Is it not an irony that people retire due to declining performance or old age only to take up a more tasking job and expect to excel?
In the absence of strong institutions, the President of Nigeria is saddled with onerous responsibilities enough to bend the back of a a willing septuagenarian. That’s why everything in the country is going slow to the frustration of those who believe that we could have progressed faster.
How many files can President Buhari read and treat at his current age? How long can he sit in meetings? What quantum decibels of voices can his ears take? How far can an old man run without breaking down? What happens to productivity while the vehicle is being fixed, in a country where everyone waits to be directed by the president before acting.
Many developmental economists and genuine business people who have serious investments in Nigeria don’t want this nightmare to continue. They got Bill Gates to help them speak truth to power.
The disillusioned business people can’t complain aloud lest their previous sins like unpaid taxes are remembered. They speak through reductions in their workforce.
We all know that as a man gets older, he makes no hasty decisions and would surprised if anybody pushes for urgency. Didn’t we wait for about 7 months for ministers to be nominated in 2015?
Most people dancing over the president’s re-election announcement are happy because they would retain their privileged positions not minding whether the president can still carry the weight or not. Unlike Simon of Cyrene, they are will to help carry the presidential cross for their own benefits.
Also dancing are those other Nigerians who believe that Maradona or Pèle can still reenact the heroics they were known for. They wanted to watch the president perform his action film IBB aborted in 1985 forgetting that there can’t be “with immediate effect” again. He also doesn’t have the “Idiagbon factor” anymore.
The hailers want all looters dealt with but they have a misplaced hope. It will take legal reforms and investment in human resources and technology to make criminal justice more effective and faster. You cannot travel from Lagos to Abuja by a bus and expect to arrive in an hour. Governance outcomes are products of deliberate actions or inactions.
However, few of the initial hailers are smart enough to have realized that they misplaced their hope. They want the “change” changed.
Strikingly, many hailers have aged parents at home; the former powerful parents they no longer allow to take decisions for them. But, they want Papa Yusuf to be deciding for them and their numerous millennial kids in Nigeria.
If Buhari wins in 2019, our grandfather president would continue to be a meal ticket to those around him who would be exercising the presidential powers by proxy just like drivers, cooks, maids and other domestic staff control the old men they are meant to serve.
All the old men are not known for disciplining young children and domestic servants living with them. They indulge them. We have seen it happen in this presidency.
Nigeria as a country is like a nymphomaniac (that is a woman with insatiable desire for sex).
Imagine a 77 years old man appealing to an energy sapping nymphomaniac Nigeria saying: “choose me, I will make you moan, I will make you want me some more, I will satisfy you beyond your imagination!”
It is the same Nigeria, the old man has been sleeping with for the past three years without making her wet as his feeble phallus has refused to rise to a hopeful strength.
It is sheer madness to expect a pregnant sheep to give birth to a baby elephant. That’s the illusion of the backers of this re-election bid.
Let someone name a 77 years old man who is efficiently running any cooperation or a multinational in Nigeria 7 days a week.
It is wicked to abuse an old man just as it is very atrocious for any child to allow his or her father to be abused by those who derive their relevance or existence from the such abuse.