he maxim of equity states: "one who comes into equity must come with clean hands.

Late Professor Chinua Achebe would be ruefully turning and miffing in his calm catacomb with those who invited Mr. Tortoise to his posthumous birthday a few days ago. With nostalgia, Professor Chinua Achebe outrightly rejected a tainted national award bestowed on him by the former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

In a normal society, former President Olusegun Obasanjo would have no moral credential and pedigree to give a lecture at the posthumous birthday of the epitome of grace, honor and integrity late Professor Chinua Achebe. Mr. Tortoise's poorly written lecture was also a gross intellectual indictment to those who wrote the falsified speech for him, and for unfit moral consumption of the unsuspecting audience at the occasion.

As espoused by the special adviser to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu: "On matters of integrity, honesty, and morality in public leadership, Chief Obasanjo is certainly not a paragon of virtue for anyone to model after." Mr. Tortoise's smacks and periodical insults on our collective memory has continued to put shame on all Nigerians dead or alive. Mr. Tortoise is a man who willfully put the entire Nigeria into total darkness with the 16 billion dollars national power project unaccounted for. In a sane clime, the likes of Mr. Tortoise would have fizzled into the dark side of human history.

With unsolicited insult, Chief Obasanjo used the platform extended to him by Chinua Achebe Leadership Forum at Yale University to moat his latest self-glorification on leadership and public morality. Those who invited Obasanjo to the befitting Achebe's event lack moral vision; reel in hypothesis of hypocrisy and their extended invitation to Mr. Tortoise is a smack on the revered man-Chinua Achebe, and an intellectual travesty to all progressive and honest Nigerians.

Meanwhile, Nigeria is currently going through its challenging and turbulent years. The country's lost collective conscience and consciousness need to be reordered. No nation can advance in the socio-economic spectrum if corruption, greed, hypocrisy, blissful ignorance, wasteful and needless Owambe parties are the order of the day.

A nation whose hapless citizens dance to the celebration of their own defeat by their oppressors: oligarchs, religious bigots, bandits on the pulpits and citizens' nonchalant attitudes cannot achieve meaningful progress or any iota of growth and development.

Moreover, until Nigerians unanimously discarded and ostracized Mr. Tortoise's grandstanding and opportunistic mien, he will continue to rent free an undecorated moral apartment in the cognition of gullible Nigerians.