The Final Home Run By Musa Ajiya

Unfortunately, the fumbling Independent National Electoral Commission, led by Prof Mahmood Yakubu, is causing all political parties to spend more money on the campaigns to elect the President, Vice President, the 109 senators, and the 360 members of the National Assembly in the postponed elections. The rescheduled elections will now hold tomorrow, Saturday, February 23.

President Muhammadu Buhari needs to do more than wring his hand at the disaster of election postponement, even if the postponement turns out to be an opportunity for the electorate to reflect a little more deeply before casting their votes at the rescheduled elections.

Indeed, some daring observers, who see no further need to be cautious in their prognostications, have argued that the smaller political parties have been dealt a knock-out blow, as they will certainly be unable to muster enough resources to run election campaigns for just one more week.

In other words, INEC’s decision that political parties can continue their campaigns till February 21, 2019 was a reverse disenfranchisement of the candidates, members, and sympathisers of the smaller parties. It’s looking like the cricket player’s home run for the giant political parties. And it’s unfair, really.

These observers have started to insinuate, maybe rightly, that only the ruling All Progressives Congress and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party would have the deep pockets to run the extra mile. The din of relative silence of the Lilliput political parties, and the vociferous call by both the APC and the PDP to continue the campaigns for another week, is proof enough.

The smaller political parties are not even very visible on the relatively cheaper social media platforms any longer. Their voices and alternative offerings are probably lost to the electorate, at least this time round.

This may not bode very well for Nigeria’s nascent, but fragile, democracy. INEC has inadvertently defeated these smaller political parties by its inability to deliver as it had voluntarily promised to do.

This effectively leaves the politicking arena to the titans, whose intentions for seeking political power bear a second look. The demands of the Nigerian electorate are no more than to have a government that will guarantee the security and welfare promised in Section 14 of Nigeria’s Constitution.

But first take a look at the criteria that a former Governor of Kano State, and former Minister for Education, Dr. Abubakar Shekarau, listed for good governance. He claims that these are the recommendations of the World Bank and the United Nations.

These are: Accountability; political stability; effectiveness in governance; effective regulatory control; rule of law; and control of corruption. The Nigerian electorate must take a long and hard look, to determine which of the two dominant political parties, their presidential candidates, and the National Assembly candidates, can guarantee all these wholesome characteristics.

There is no doubt that the APC is already facing the hot drill from the jury of voters, while the PDP is offering itself as an alternative. While the APC has the opportunity of showcasing its credentials, and promising what else it can do, the PDP is going to only offer a new political vista. The electioneering narrative driven by the APC tore the performances of past PDP governments into shreds.

To the PDP’s accusation that the Buhari government has not achieved much in the roughly three and half years of being in office, the APC refers to what it describes as 16 fruitless years of the PDP’s stay in power. The APC never tires of referring to the $16bn it alleges the President Olusegun Obasanjo government squandered on unverifiable upgrade of electricity infrastructure. It endlessly tars the PDP’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, with the smear of association with a past PDP government that Atiku served as vice president.

While the APC brandishes President Buhari’s integrity credential, and accuses the PDP and its presidential candidate of corruption, the PDP goofed when its Chairman, Uche Secondus, thought he was doing his party some good when he went, “On behalf of my colleagues and members of (the PDP), we apologise to Nigerians that we have made some mistakes. And we are ready to correct them.” He needs to take some lessons in public relations.

The PDP and its handlers should have stuck to the restructuring, the carrot it offered to the South-West flank of the APC’s following, much the same way the APC, masters of contrived reality show, has zeroed in on the economy as the core issue of the presidential campaign. It’s now looking like the APC is winning the game of wits.

In recent weeks, the APC begun to drive its campaign conversations towards infrastructure upgrade. The APC has taken possession, and is flooding the social media with editorials and photographs of railway lines being laid or renovated, rail coaches being dedicated, old roads being rehabilitated, and power plants and transmission lines being constructed.

The preferred economic narrative of the APC is helped by the report that more than 91 million poor people, who live on less than $2 per day, are in Nigeria, and there is an urgent need to bring them out of poverty, if not middleclass them.

The APC is also long on its narrative of social intervention programmes, like the N-Power that has employed more than 500,000 graduates, pays N5,000 monthly stipend to the poorest Nigerians, the free meals served to schoolchildren on a daily basis, and the huge number of cooks that have been employed to cook the food.

The APC also boasts that the school feeding programme has put many farmers and their farmhands to work, and has therefore positively contributed to the growth of Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product.

The Anchor Borrowers’ scheme, engendered by the Central Bank of Nigeria, has helped in a large measure to makes scarce funds available to peasant farmers, who usually have little or no collateral to provide for the traditional bank loans.

The major effect of the Anchor Borrowers’ scheme is two-fold; in addition to encouraging local price production, and thus reducing the pressure for the near-inordinate quest for foreign exchange to import rice, it is providing feeds for local agribusinesses. Of course, it increases the nation’s GDP.

The TraderMoni loan scheme that approves N10,000 to petty traders, who otherwise would not be able to raise even this meagre working capital because they lack the competence to provide the requisite collateral, they further claim, has liberated not a few. But of course, the PDP queries the wisdom or need for the scheme.

Something else that the APC flaunts is the trail of positive economic indices: The Nigeria Bureau of Statistics deployed some facts, obviously on behalf of President Buhari’s government. It says that between January 2015 (still under former President Jonathan’s administration), and December 2018, Nigeria attracted $43.81bn in foreign investments.

The NBS also recently released the information that inflation dropped from 11.28 per cent in September 2018 to 11.26 per cent in October 2018. It again dropped by 0.07 per cent, from 11.44 per cent in December 2018, to 11.37 per cent in January 2019.

This seemingly minimal, quirky, and galloping, but generally positive, turning of the inflation needle, translates to a stronger naira, and should therefore reduce the pressure of demands for foreign exchange.

Due to general fall in the price of crude oil that provides most of the nation’s foreign revenue, the foreign reserves of the nation is falling in recent times. From $43.17bn in late 2018, it dropped by to $42.86bn in February 2019.

But the Nigerian electorate have a task at hand; they must use their own hands to correct any anomaly in their fortunes. When an ifa priest throws the Oracle nuts, and they don’t sit right, he uses his own hands to rearrange them. It is that time of year again.

Punch

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