The Promotion Witch-hunt

The horde of hyenas! They were all seated there before the Panel Chairman came in. Not even the feigned smiles with which they tried to mask their evil intent could conceal the over-brimming undercurrent of bitterness whirling within their hearts. They were restless in their eagerness to sink their lethal fangs of hate into the flesh of their long awaited ‘enemy’.

I entered into the interview room and sat down as directed. The panel chairman, DCM Osinuwa, asked me to introduce myself. I did. Then he requested members of the panel to ask their questions. Hardly had he finished speaking than Adab, the officer I replaced as the Zonal Commanding Officer in Lagos and Port Harcourt, unleash a furious tirade against me. He was raucous as he raged; his face mutating into ugly, angry contortions.

“You went about, telling people that I refused to vacate the ZCO’s official residence in Lagos. Why should you be scandalizing my name? You have the temerity to even mention my name? You…you…okay…” On and on, he railed.

Adab was relentless. He let loose a  torrent of invectives on me, while his friend and alter ego, Bappa, who had some years back, given an illegal written directive to the then Mess Administrative Officer, Simdi Wesley, to ‘INCARCERATE’ me at the Mess, was scowling at me, with the intention of destabilizing me.

Then, Osinuwa, the Chairman of the interview panel called Adab to order.

“Gentlemen, we should not lose sight of what we are here for.” He cautioned in a firm voice. “Chike, what really transpired between you and Adab?” He asked in a mild tone.

“Sir, if ACM Adab heard from someone that I said anything untoward about him, he had never called my attention to it before now. I am really taken aback by his emotional outburst here.” I stated calmly. “For the ten months I served in Lagos as the Zonal Commanding Officer, I stayed in a hotel for seven months. Occasionally, someone would want to know why I was staying in a hotel when there was an official residential accommodation in Lagos for the Zonal Commander. And I would always tell them that I understand my predecessor had not been provided with a residential accommodation at his present location, therefore, he could not relocate his family. That is all, sir.” I responded.

Osinuwa again stepped in. He was visibly displeased with Adab.

“Adab, why have you chosen this place and moment to noisily grouse against Chike, for what somebody told you he said? How could you be exhibiting such an unrestrained malice at someone you are supposed to be interviewing? I have therefore resolved that you will not have a part in Chike’s assessment.” He emphatically announced.

They lumped all of us together, even those far junior to me. They organized the same promotion interview for us. I was the most senior Corps Commander in the Corps then, having for no excusable cause, remained stagnated at the rank of Corps Commander for more than ten years. Deliberately, against public service rules, I was appointed Zonal Commanding Officer in acting capacity for five years at a stretch, despite the fact that there was vacancy. My promotion to the rank of Assistant Corps Marshal, ACM, had been overdue several years back. When the clique could not stop my promotion to the next rank, in their usual ploy of altering the rules of the game at their whims and caprices, they devised other plans to deprive me of my position as the most senior ACM, by hurriedly appointing an officer junior to me, to make the promotion acceptance speech on behalf of the promoted officers. 

  

Looking back at the previous encounters I had with Adab and Bappa, and the experience I gathered from the crude displays of the duo during that promotion interview, I came to the conclusion that many people would just start hating on someone because of what they heard from others, while a few would endeavour to directly hear from the one, encounter and interact with him, before forming an opinion of the one.

 Bappa was assigned the hatchet-man’s job of presiding over the kangaroo FRSC Disciplinary Court (FDC), set up by Danyak to try me, no, rather to find me guilty, on nebulous charges that were maliciously trumped-up against me in 1998. In a chance meeting with Bappa before the date of the trial, he virtually told me that he was going to pronounce me guilty of the charges and my appointment terminated.

There was this unmistakable supercilious smile scarifying Bappa’s face. In a voice laced with a generous dose of condescension and unassailable superiority—as of one conferred with the authority of life and death over other humans of lesser worth, he said to me;

“Chike, what I will only tell you is to brace up as a man and accept whatever be the outcome of the trial. You could make it better outside FRSC.”

Puffed up with conceit, he was already basking in his vainglorious moment of hallucinatory victory over their stubborn ‘nyamiri’ foe. So obsessed he was with his appointment as the would-be callous extinguisher of an innocent man’s career!

How disappointed Bappa must have been when DanYak was compelled by powers beyond his control to hurriedly call off the kangaroo trial, and all the unfounded charges against me dropped at the last minute!

However, Bappa who was biding his time all this while, thought he had seen another opportunity to get at me when I was having issues with BaGo. It was the case of huge financial malfeasance involving BaGo and another principal staff officer in the Zonal Headquarters, and the subsequent attempts on my life. All these happened while I was the Zonal Head of Operations in Kaduna.

I had gone to Abuja to personally brief the Acting Director, Operations, as he formally directed me, about the assassination attempts on my life. After concluding with the Acting Director, Operations, I made a request that I be accommodated in the Officers Mess for the night since it was already late in the day. The Ag DOps referred my request to the PMC, Bappa. However, Bappa, rather, in a written note, instructed the Mess Administrative Officer, Simdi, to “Incarcerate Mr Chike Nwaka (ZHOPS) RS2 Kaduna at the mess, on the orders of the Ag DOps.”

 Of course, the Mess Administration Officer understood the implications of obeying such an unlawful order, and therefore refused to carry it out. The Ag DOps later denied ever being aware of such an order when the case got to the office of the Inspector General of Police.

I was subsequently posted to head the Anambra State Command of the FRSC, which was under Zone 9, with its headquarters located at Owerri then. Mr Adab was the Zonal Commanding Officer, I was directly reporting to him. I was next to Adab in rank, and the most senior officer after him in the zone. The personal relationship between us was alright for a while. However, he suddenly became antagonistic towards me, taking offence at whatsoever I did and concocting falsehoods against me. He, at the slightest excuse, contrived errors purportedly committed by me. When I introduced Kung Fu into my command’s physical training regime, he descended to ludicrous depths and alleged that I was training an army. In a crass abuse of institutional procedural and administrative order, he handed over my Annual Performance Evaluation Report, APER form, to an officer junior in rank to me, to appraise me, and that fellow did, with his signature boldly appended on the form.

Having already become used to such open antagonisms by supposed fellow Nigerians and colleagues, I was ready to receive more of such from the likes of Bappa and Adab.  I knew I would eventually overcome.

Ever since the end of the 1967 to 1970 phase of the Nigeria – Biafra war, there has been this collective evil enterprise of instinctive national antagonism against the Igbo, mutually consented to, by a high percentage of the rest Nigerians—a deep-seated aversion induced by reflexive jealousy against the ‘exceptionally progressive’ Igbo.

Indeed Igbo-phobia has been a silent, yet emphatic official policy of the Nigerian state. Ethnic profiling of the Igbo, based on deliberate mischievous misconceptions is prevalent, and misinterpretations of positive ethnic traits running through the Igbo, have become the norm. While ignoring the many notorious criminals of other ethnic extractions, especially, those occupying high profile Federal Government offices, the overwhelming positively hardworking Igbo persons are purposely tarred with the same contemptible brush used for the few Igbo perverts who engage in criminal activities.

Unscrupulous selfish individuals and groups therefore exploit this unjustified prevalent anti Igbo animalistic hysteria to easily recruit haters against any Igbo person they intend to malign. Most of those enlisted ‘disciples of hate’ might neither have previously peripherally nor substantially encountered the target of hate. Yet, they would, fixated in their herd-mentality of Igbo antagonism, which they have been conditioned to mindlessly see as a patriotic duty, asininely inherit their Hate Master’s self-created enmity in order to convince him of their loyalty and become his favoured followers.

It is in this category of Nigerians that Adab, Bappa and their ilk fall into.

Any Igbo person within the top echelon of the career public services or political domain in Nigeria, who is ‘favoured’ and propped up by the stranger ‘Masters of the Nigerian Manor’, is but a stooge serving the interests of these duplicitous pseudo masters—usurpers who crookedly catapult themselves to unmerited heights—pretenders to the place of leadership—the ultimate profaners of all that we hold dear.

In such a fellow, that vital intrinsic attribute of the Igbo person—that essence which, unwavering, demands that there be fairness, justice and equity for all, has indeed been sorely suppressed, or even extinguished. Such a fellow has become awfully compromised. He could easily, for expediency sake, sell out his fellow Igbo.

Where things are done strictly on merit, such a person can never be considered among even the outermost fringe of those the Igbo would ever present as their representatives.