Again, we
are in the political silly season. Not that it just kicked off. No, Nigeria is a
country in a permanent state of politicking. In reality, there is never time
for governance. The end of one election circle jumpstarts another and the
actions of incumbents are informed not by the desire to deliver on good
governance but the need to win the next election.
*Obasanjo and Buhari
So,
ministers and board members of government agencies are appointed not on the
basis of capacity and competence, but who has the political muscle and
“structure” to deliver on the next election. Ditto for heads of security
agencies who are appointed on extraneous considerations such as who helped in
rigging the previous election and who can be counted upon in the next election.
So, while in other climes, the political silly season is short
and defined in a sense, being “the time, especially just before the election,
when undeliverable promises and wild accusations are the order of the day,”
here in Nigeria
we are perpetually entangled in the vicious web of the silly season.
But even
if there was any pretense at governance in the 32 months since the All
Progressives Congress (APC) upstaged the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and
enthroned the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, every discerning observer of Nigeria’s
politics knew 2018 would be a year of political bare-knuckles.
The 2018
budgets of both the federal and state governments will be deployed in funding
elections. There will be redeployments in some strategic government agencies
that provide the slush funds. Heads of security agencies whose loyalty cannot
be guaranteed 100 per cent will be replaced with ultra-loyalists, those who will
not only jump when asked to but demand to know how high. This is a season of
defections when politicians will change parties as effortlessly as women change
their wrappers.
Nigeria’s political silly
season is a time of pilgrimage when men without any qualms of conscience will
troop to the seat of power to plead with and cajole the incumbent to run again.
Of
course, the pilgrimage has started. On January 12, barely 24 hours after 73
people who were gruesomely killed by Fulani herdsmen in BenueState were given mass burial, a group
of seven APC governors led by the guileful and scheming Nasir el-Rufai, KadunaState
governor, went to Aso Rock to plead with President Buhari to seek re-election
in 2019. The group that included Abdullahi Ganduje (Kano),
Yahaya Bello (Kogi), Abubakar Bello (Niger), Simon Lalong (Plateau),
Ibrahim Geidam (Yobe) and Jibrilla Bindow (Adamawa) told Nigerians that they
were at the villa because they were “politicians.”
“Those of
us you see here want the president to contest the 2019 election; we have no
apologies for that,” said El-Rufai arrogantly.
“We
believe in Mr. President, we want him to continue running the country in the
right direction. People can speculate about 2019; we have no apologies.”
Coming on
a day when the tears were yet to dry from the eyes of those who lost loved ones
in the Benue massacre, that endorsement was “a sad symptom of insensitivity and
callousness,” as former President Olusegun Obsanjo poignantly observed on
Tuesday.
El-Rufai
would want Nigerians to believe they were motivated by the desire to ensure
“continuity and stability” in the polity, but nothing could be farther from the
truth. They are not even interested in the welfare of the man they are goading
to his imminent political eclipse, and definitely not bordered about the health
of Nigeria’s
badly bludgeoned democracy and the country’s tenuous bond of unity that has
been stretched to the limits since Buhari became president. They are
narcissists motivated solely by their own political survival. These are
governors who ascended the throne on the apron strings of the president and
have no political value other than that conferred on them by the continued
tenancy of Buhari at Aso Rock.
Thumbs up, Editor!
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