Eulogy: A Reckoning, Not Remembrance
Today, we gather not in reverence, but in sober reckoning. The curtain has fallen on a man whose occupancy of high office was less a chapter in governance than a prolonged national tragedy. He rose not by the merit of intellect nor the weight of vision, but by the accident of sentiment and the manipulation of primordial loyalties. Tribal to a fault, and zealously blinkered by religious intolerance, he was a leader to a few and a stranger to the rest — a parochial mind in a position that demanded panoramic vision.
He bore no appetite for enlightenment, nor respect for seasoned counsel. Advice—however informed—was discarded with imperial contempt, while sycophancy was rewarded as policy. Under his watch, the economy was not managed but mutilated, subjected to whimsical decrees and economic illiteracy. Inflation soared, livelihoods were shattered, and hope became a distant luxury.
Corruption, once covert, became an institution — rampant, audacious, and unashamed. He sanctified mediocrity and weaponized appointments to serve ethnicity over excellence. The bureaucracy groaned under the weight of incompetence, while entire regions became policy orphans in their own country.
His priorities were grotesquely misplaced: cattle were protected with state machinery, while citizens were left to the cruelty of insurgents, hunger, and despair. Fastidious in trifles yet catastrophically blind to suffering, he embodied the peril of ignorance fortified by arrogance.
And now, as the dust settles, the nation does not weep. It exhales. History, unclouded by propaganda or fear, has placed him not among the giants, but among the cautionary tales — a lesson in what happens when the reins of a republic fall into unready hands.
Let no revisionism whitewash this legacy. Let truth stand, sharp and unbending. For in his departure, a nation inches toward reawakening and the future of uncertainties
Chief ib Agwu
