With the presidential elections four weeks away, Nigerians are set for a spectacular déjà vu. The APC, despite the din of its premature celebrations, is headed for a pasting. The reasons are obvious. Take the APC hawkers and their ware, to begin with. An Igbo proverb says that the eye eats before the mouth. But the leading APC vendors happen to be Alhaji Tinubu and Chief Obasanjo. Their mention is nothing to do with their physical appearance. After all, neither created himself. It rather has everything to do with the ugliness of their politics.
Obasanjo carries on, regardless. But he it was that wiped out Odi and Zaki Ibiam with military expeditions, and he also contrived a futile third term project that set off a hemorrhage in the nation’s finances. Tinubu, for his unflattering part, is fronting a campaign against corruption, a topic he has never referred to in all the verbiage he has deemed fit to harangue the wary and weary with. How, then, can the duo market a product from which the masses, who remember, screen their faces? It was Buhari, the military dictator, who cancelled the Lagos Metroline Project conceived by Governor Lateef Jakande. The spiteful action cost Nigeria billions, and continues to cost Nigerians even greater billions in terms of endless traffic jams and the daily loss of incalculable man hours. Yet, Alhaji Buhari has never apologized for that unpatriotic action.
How does one expect this man in whose dictionary the word compunction does not exist to be the harbinger of change? Invited to the presidential debate, people hoped Buhari’s participation would reveal whether or not he has progressed from the stone-age policy of trade-by-barter (countertrade), which his junta inflicted on the polity decades ago. He demurred, citing negative press. People laughed who believe that he ducked to mask his diffidence. But, where else in the world would a presidential candidate with pretensions to seriousness dodge an interlocution with colleagues? Rather, Buhari headed for London in the teeth of winter, there to confer with Mr. Tony Blair, a former Prime Minister who vacated office nearly a decade ago!
Had Buhari’s handlers packaged his UK trip with a modicum of honesty, some of his less alarming deficits may have been overlooked. Instead, they posted 2013 pictures of the man in London, in an untidy effort to deflect charges that he hit British capital for health reasons. Not only that, they excavated pictures taken at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, and claimed it was Buhari in London granting an interview. It all brought to mind another of their disingenuous lies – the posting of the photograph of a mammoth congregation at a Reinhard Bonnke religious crusade which it named Buhari’s Kano campaign. Why does the APC believe that Nigerians are so gullible that they would confuse its penchant for mendacity with the magic of change?
Despite the raggedness of its product, the APC managed a lot of traction, it must be acknowledged. How the party contrived this is not difficult to tell. Using huge sums of money the source of which it dares not declare, the party engaged lobbyists in America and Britain who influenced leading Western publications into dishing out sawdust aimed at demonizing President Jonathan and discrediting his administration.
Back in Nigeria, the APC appropriated the social media, using it to skew polls and promote a façade of Buhari invincibility. In the wake of the media blitzkrieg, textbook Marxists, Communists and Socialists around tertiary institutions who previously speechified students on the fine points of progressivism, shamelessly lined up behind stationary broom-wielders with a fake promise of change on their tongue, vowing to go blindfolded with them into battle! It didn’t occur to the lot that, in the age of vacuum cleaners, the broom is anachronistic. It all explains why, without realizing that a lot of these “revolutionary” characters are actually anticipating another Yar’Adua-out-Jonathan-in scenario, Buhari claimed victory well before the first vote was cast! What if he lost, journalists asked. “I will not answer that question because I cannot lose”, he responded. But defeat already stares him in the face because the people have seen through the hypocrisy of the APC, a party so unpatriotic that it has, so far, contributed absolutely nothing to the efforts to defeat Boko Haram.
Gallant and youthful Nigerian soldiers, with pluck and gumption, are dying every day to save the country from the blight of terrorism. The lines of their widows and the queues of their orphans are lengthening by the hour. But whereas Cameroonians, Chadians and Nigeriens are united in their own countries against Boko Haram, the APC has nothing but orchestrated blame and censure for the best efforts of our Commander-in-Chief and our armed forces. That is not the way to win elections. The APC already danced itself lame while the music has just started. It since ran out of gas. And the ballot is still four weeks away.
President Jonathan was asked what will happen if he lost. “I will hand over power to the victorious candidate” he answered. That is the real face of democratic change, which is self-evident in his Transformation Agenda. He will not lose; he has four more years of selfless service torender to his appreciative countrymen and women.
Chucks Iloegbunam