Ekweremadu’s ordeal in Nuremberg

Former Deputy President of the Senate of Nigeria, Senator Ike Ekweremadu recently experienced a dose of the peoples’ fury against what some self-appointed ‘ambassadors’ daubed ‘bad politics’ in faraway Nuremberg, Germany.

The proscribed Independent Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) claimed responsibility for the assault and vowed to attack more Nigerian officials who travel outside the country. Videos of the encounter went viral on social media and sadly most comments on that all-comers’ citizen medium, viewed it with sadistic relish and infantile gloating. It was a sad and embarrassing spectacle watching a state official being manhandled in such a brutal manner outside the shores of the country, rescued only by the kind intervention of some organisers of the programme the senator went for.

The unfortunate incident threw up some of the intense contradictions of our contemporary life – how our people have taken difference to the extreme, how capricious mob actions could be in confronting political issues, how leaders have tragically failed to meet their social obligations to the people, and how we find some ambivalence in totally condemning acts of self-help as occasioned by the Nuremberg experience. It also internationalised the dilemma of the Nigerian people in dealing with state failure and official ineptitude.