Are you ready for a little craziness?

No, don't get mad, get even. That may be the modern version of the classic golden rule - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth - but anger is not the type of madness that this post is all about.

Why are some rulers mad, crazy, oppressive, in spite of the overriding benefits of majority leadership under democracy, which Nigeria's legendary Afrobeat originator Fela Anikulapo Kuti once described as 'demonstration of craziness'?

I visited an uncle of mine once and he brought out his Holy Bible to show me a passage about why our leaders could display such unreasonable and abnormal attitudes in public governance.

I should have listened more to recall the chapter and verse because now I have forgotten it and certainly will not ring him up to get it right now for fear of embarrassment.

Anyway, this post was inspired by a music video that I saw about half an hour ago. Entitled "Ara gagba ndiara" in the Igbo language and credited to Nigeria's 'Nigga Raw,' the title translates in English simply as "The mad will go mad" or "madness will make the mad to go crazy."

That rather entertaining song sort of ignited an idea in me and focused my mind closer to home and what was happening in my country's politics. Let me give a little background....

My country's president has been AWOL for close to three months in Saudi Arabia for medical reasons - kidney and heart problems are the double whammy he is facing.

The entire country has been either praying or tongue tied about what next to do about the sudden unplanned trip of the head of state without first writing a letter informing everyone - from his Vice to the National Assembly and the Nigerian public.

So, as would be expected, the rumor mill went into overdrive: the president was dead since nobody had been able to see him physically both privately and officially; his wife wanted to remain the First Lady at all costs and so prevented virtually all visits and delegations, even from relatives and close friends, so that the true state of her husband's health would not cause his cabinet to literally remove him from power, and so and so forth.

The president's BBC piped voice reassuring the nation that he would soon be back home and had not been kidnapped by the Saudis did not make matters better one bit. In fact, it seemed like a foreign insult to many patriots and others in opposition groups.

To make matters worse, those bent on the North-Western part of the country retaining the ruling party-zoned presidency have sworn never to allow the South-South Vice-President to become the substantive head of state now or in the next election coming up next year.

Why all the brouhaha? The Niger Delta is in the South-South and has been the mainstay of the Nigerian economy since the 1960's, when crude oil overthrew hides and skin, cocoa, palm oil, and groundnuts as the national export foreign exchange earners.

Why should that be a problem? Well, unlike Texas, where savvy citizens called in the oil companies to prospect for oil in exchange for royalties, Nigeria's Federal Government - run remotely by a few privileged and armed men - schemed its way into acquiring the Niger Delta oil blocks for sale or gift-giving to a chosen kickback-generating few!

One of such armed/privileged men was once given an oil prospecting/mining lease free of charge (FOC) and he adroitly parlayed the oil block sale into a $500 million profit!

Yes, enough to build a new oil refinery, which has yet to be built in over two decades, while crude petroleum is exported and refined products are imported with scarce foreign exchange, to the detriment of the depreciating local Naira currency!

So, how can these privileged and armed men now allow a Niger Delta man to become President when his people are currently clamoring to have their confiscated land returned, to have compensation paid for the mineral wealth of their ancestral lands that they never signed away to anyone, or to be given the right to choose a responsible/responsive oil company to develop the oil fields in their own backyards?

So, you can now imagine why a few heads in my country are hopping mad right now....