By Nick Agule, FCA
nick.agule@yahoo.co.uk
Twitter: @NickAgule
Those of us alive today have witnessed history made. It is the first time in the 245 years of the existence of the United States as an independent nation that a Presidential address to the Congress had two women seated behind the president.
The two seats behind the president are reserved for the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Vice President who doubles as the President of the Senate. When Joe Biden addressed Congress both seats were occupied by women for the first time in history.
Both women had made history in their individual capacities before jointly making history .
The 81-year-old Speaker, Nancy Patricia Pelosi, who has served in Congress for 34 years and counting, became the first woman to become a party leader in Congress and thus was elected as the first woman to the office of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives in 2011 when the democrats seized control of the House of Representatives. History was also made then when her husband, Paul Pelosi, whom she married in 1963, became the first husband to a Speaker of the US House of Representatives!
Fifty-six year-old Kamala Devi Harris, who was elected to the Senate in 2017, became the first woman elected to the office of the Vice President of the United States on the Joe Biden presidential ticket. Her husband, Douglas Emhoff, whom she married in 2014, also made history when he became the first Second Gentleman in the history of the United States!
Thus for the first time in US history, the first and second persons in the presidential line of succession are women!
This was a great day for America and a bright ray of light for women empowerment around the world. God made man and woman EQUAL and nations that are or will be great or successful are those that open ALL opportunities to women without any discrimination whatsoever. I look forward to the day when Nigeria will attain this status and even exceed it by making a woman our number ONE citizen!
Notice the following:
1. Nancy Pelosi was born in Baltimore, Maryland. But she represents San Francisco in the State of California which is six hours by flight from her home state. If it’s in Nigeria, we will tell her to go back to Maryland! Her sterling qualities won’t matter much to us!
2. Both women are children of immigrants. In Nigeria even children of Nigerians who are born and bred in other states cannot claim anything in the states of their birth! They are asked to return to their states of origin even if they have never set foot on the states!
3. Pelosi has represented her congressional district since 1987. The tenure of US House of Reps members is two years, so Pelosi has won elections 18 times to return to Congress each time. If it’s Nigeria, regardless of her experience and competence, we would have asked her to step down after a few terms because it is the turn of another clan to also go and chop! And it won’t matter to us the qualities of the candidate from this other clan; the only qualification is that it is their turn!
4. Both VP Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi represent the same state of California! In Nigeria this will not be possible to have the VP and Speaker from the same state! The personal qualities and competencies of the persons won’t matter!
5. VP Harris and Speaker Pelosi are not billionaires! They did not go into politics to make money but to serve their people! In our case, we have people who hitherto could not hold down a steady job, did not have a business or farm and possibly out of nothing to do decided to join politics and got elected and we see their personal economies boom and overnight they become billionaires and consequently, above the law!
America that manufactured the democracy we are driving, they have a manual to operate it which includes sanctity of the electoral process, independence of the arms of government – executive, legislature & judiciary, which leads to strong institutions.
We bought the democracy but are not operating it in accordance with the manufacturer’s manual. It’ll never work for us! What we are trying to do is to power a car with water when the manufacturer says we must use fuel! Nothing will happen if we continue to use water regardless of who the driver is! The car will simply not work for us! We may think the problem is with the car but it’s not, the problem is with us the operators.
So change has to begin with us, the people. Our eyes must turn red and when the politicians see it, they’ll know we are ready for them. Minimum is for everyone to get a PVC and begin to sing war songs that our votes must matter! Because our votes are the only power we have against the politicians. If we don’t vote then the politicians will simply declare a walkover against us; that is, we did not show up at the contest! It is hallucination to think that the politicians will care about us and work for us when our votes don’t matter to them. We must, therefore, make our votes count!
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• Nick Agule, a Chartered Accountant and fellow of ICAN, is an international oil and gas expert who worked for 3 of the top oil companies in the world – Chevron, Shell & BP where he worked at their global HQ in London for 9 years before leaving to form his consultancy practice
