On July 31st, 2013 a day after All
Progressives Congress (APC) was registered by Independent National Electoral
Commission, I got a surprising call at dawn from the storming petrel, warrior
of the pen, essayist and a poet who uses words like a sculptor, Mr. Odia Ofeimun
with troubling apocalypse thus:
"Erasmus,
do you know that Senator Bola Tinubu has sold Nigeria to the devil for accepting
the merger of Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) with Congress for Progressive
Change (CPC) and a few little known political parties".
*President Buhari |
I was caught off
balance. Moreso because I had barely retired from my study to the bed before my
sleep was rudely ruptured by the call.
Even though I
was caught in the bid, I battled to put up spirited defences, that Buhari is
redeemable — a self-confessed repented tyrant — against his argument that the
former military dictator is an unrepentant ethnic potentate, a bigoted Islamic
Mullah and unregenerated recidivist who will resist restructuring — and would,
in the long run, destroy all that the Nigerian progressives have laboured for
and ruined all that Asiwaju represents, politically.
The poet
posed a posal: "couldn't Asiwaju have sought a merger with Balarabe Musa's
progressive political party or found a way to reach out to Dangiwa Umar to
achieve alignment across the Niger ".
He further quipped: "Asiwaju should have opted out of the merger the
moment Buhari told him that he will never discuss the restructuring of Nigeria
should he become President under the planned merger".
Ofeimun went further to paint the apocalyptic picture of the coming anarchy darkly — much more than the present unremitting massacres and ethnic cleansing that drabs the nation — should Buhari become the President of Nigeria.
Ofeimun went further to paint the apocalyptic picture of the coming anarchy darkly — much more than the present unremitting massacres and ethnic cleansing that drabs the nation — should Buhari become the President of Nigeria.
The
frightening doomsday scenario he masterfully outlined of a Buhari's Presidency
punctured my optimism for a new Nigeria ,
restructuring or any possible redemption in the near future. True to type,
President Buhari has become the butcher-in-chief through his ethnic Fulani
herders terrorists, as predicted by the poet. "The poet didn't lie"!
The first
ominous sign that the APC will destroy itself emerged when the party failed to
outline 'who gets what, how and when' on or before the 2015 victory at the
poll. Because of the party's leadership directionlessness or selfishness, the
nPDP members who joined and shored up victory for the APC secretly aligned with
the PDP in both houses of the National Assembly and seized its
leadership.
For refusing
to share the boots of victory with the nPDP who led five sitting governors into
APC was a fundamental error that hunts APC to date. It was even reported in the
national dailies then that Chief Bisi Akande boasted that "APC will not
discuss sharing formula with the nPDP".
That was
ill-advised and unimaginable greed alien to political history. The APC
leadership's intellectual and emotional indiscretion validates Harold
Lasswell's reputable definition of politics in the 1930s nearly a century ago!
that politics is a "competition about who gets what, when and how".
That was the
day APC died a natural death. Mr. Buhari's response then was: "I'm for
everybody and I'm for nobody", a phrase he plagiarised from existing
political lexicon without crediting the source. President Buhari's calculation
also was to distance himself from the national assembly leadership squabbles,
even though it's a known fact that he actually ordered his footsoldiers — now
his enemies in the national assembly to seal Senator Bola Tibunu's overwhelming
influence. Now, the chicken has come home to roost.
The third
time President Buhari deliberately whittled and weakened Asiwaju's political
influence, using his northern footsoldiers to actualise it was the emergence of
Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi
State at the demise of
late former governor Abubakar Audu, who died at the eve of his victory. Even
when the election into the governorship race had been concluded, which would
have meant that Mr. James Faleke would be declared the winner of the election,
President Buhari used Chief John Odigie-Oyegun and Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) to teach Asiwaju Pols 101 lesson.
Fourthly was
Governor Rotimi Akeredolu's imposition and his eventual victory at the poll in Ondo State
against the preferred candidate of Asiwaju. President Buhari neatly used Chief
John Oyegun and Senator Bola Tinubu's political sons turned enemies to burnish
Akeredolu's governorship.
One of
Asiwaju's known political kinetic forces who hinted this writer, described this
as Chief Oyegun's most heinous crime against his political leader: "even
if Oyegun heeded President Buhari's counsel to stop Mr. James Faleke from
becoming Kogi State governor, which he actually won as of right, it was
circumstantially debasing to have Asiwaju disgraced in the South West by
imposing a governor on him from the South West.
The fifth and
most troubling is the purported inexplicable role President Buhari used Chief
Oyegun to play during the Osun re-run senatorial election after the sudden
death of Senator Isiaka Adeleke, that led to Senator Mudasiru Hussein losing
the senatorial seat to Senator Ademola Adeleke, the dancing Senator.
The bottom
line remains that the political marriage between the reactionary, hegemonic
northern political bloc, which President Muhammadu Buhari's ethnocentric government
represents — holding the nation perpetually down into the abyss — and the
progressive tendency that advocates restructuring, celebrates open governance,
complete education, industry and economic revolution, has set Nigeria a century
backward.
Nigerians
have come to the sad realization that their salvation is neither in the APC's
bloodcurdling government that slaughters them on an hourly basis, courtesy of
President Buhari's Fulani's herders' terrorist organization nor the past PDP's
brazen looting government that emptied the treasury unto the bargain.
It's time
Nigerians look beyond the devil and the deep blue sea. That way, we would have
bought back our country from the devil.
*Erasmus Ikhide, a Public Affairs Analyst writes fromLagos . Email: ikhideerasmus@gmail.com
*Erasmus Ikhide, a Public Affairs Analyst writes from
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