Nigeria: The Saboteurs Of A Sinking Ship

 By Kenechukwu Obiezu

If Nigerian politics had a single currency, language, sign language, or definition, it would be money. But very close to it would be the concepts of betrayal and opportunism.

To preclude political opportunism and fry the chances of its elite practitioners in Nigeria, the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria makes salubrious provisions to arrest the vice of cross-carpeting. However, with many of the politicians who have engaged in it over the years getting away with it, it appears that judicial interpretation and enforcement have failed to stop the scourge.

So, for many politicians here, especially those who succeed in getting elected into political offices, all that matters is the immediacy of their ambitions. They usually adopt the no-frills approach, and without much fuss, they pursue their goals. They usually spare no thought for what is lost in the process or what is picked apart. For many of them, all that matters is now and no more.

For Nigeria’s ruling party, the All Progressives Congress, and its cast of characters, some as shady as they come, 2015 was a pivotal year. As the year in which the Peoples Democratic Party’s bumbling empire finally crashed, it marked the year when power changed hands to herald the promise of a new dawn for Nigeria.

Nigerians had soaked up the promise of change like frozen animals emerging into the sunshine. However, the promise was brutally short-lived. 

For all the APC promised then, it took only a while for Nigerians to discover that the APC was nothing more than a hollow husk.

Now, with the country on the verge of the 2023 general elections, Nigerians have had eight years of a leadership that has shown itself to be visionless many times over. Even the anti-corruption campaign on which President Muhammadu Buhari campaigned for Nigeria’s highest office has not yielded many results.

A mishmash of poverty and insecurity has ensured that Nigerians have never had it tougher than in the last eight years, during which the APC has held power.

Maybe, someday, a combination of the gracious light that history casts and the therapeutic aroma of hindsight will take Nigerians to a place where they can finally forget the eight years of President Buhari and the All Progressives Congress. But for now, there is a famine of frustration that grows fiercer by the day.

Beyond the fuel queues and the endless queues at ATMs, it appears that the frustration that currently abounds in Nigeria has also become a staple of the high and mighty.

In many ways, Nasir El-Rufai has come to embody the anaemia and amnesia that have plagued the current administration in the country under the ruling All Progressives Congress. Elected to the highest office in Kaduna State in 2015 and returned in 2019, the cerebral former FCT minister has been vocal about defending the interests of his party.

He had ridden to power by riding roughshod over Christians in the state by ditching a historic and critical power-sharing agreement between Christians and Muslims in the state. While renewed slaughter has surged through the predominantly Christian Southern Kaduna region of his state ever since, he has maintained a posture of dismissive helplessness.

It is not a helplessness he is willing to show as far as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s bid to become president is concerned. He recently accused unnamed members of the presidency of working against the interests of the party’s candidate in the upcoming election.

His words alluded to a house divided against itself, and Nigerians hope that house collapses completely.

When Nigerians conspired to midwife the political demise of the Peoples Democratic Party in 2015, it was based on a general consensus that Africa’s largest party had failed to make an impressive feast of governance in the country. It was just what the APC was brought in to do, and it is exactly what it has woefully failed to do.

Under the All Progressives Congress, Nigerians who thought they knew the depths of frustration have been forced to learn new ways to be frustrated as a stuttering country has continued to totter under the weight of corrupt and clueless administrators.

Only last year, in the midst of a cutthroat race to determine who would fly the flag of the party,  Tinubu went on a tirade about the perceived efforts of some nameless folks within the party to ensure he did not clinch the ticket, while Nigerian students languished at home amidst an ASUU strike action while government ministers splashed millions to buy party forms.

If the camp of the All Progressives Congress is truly in disarray due to the activities of some saboteurs, as El-Rufai suggests, then it may not be such a bad thing after all that a distillation of opportunists is stewing in its own juice.

*Obiezu, a commentator on public issues, wrote from Lagos