Afenifere agonises; and from that agony comes a gratuitous counsel: President Muhammadu Buhari should not anchor run a sole anti-corruption agenda.
But where did Afenifere get the idea that fighting corruption is the sole goal of the Buhari administration? Did Lai Mohammed, the Information minister, say so? Or did it slip from the president himself?
Well, maybe Afenifere heard it from Afenifere News, the exclusive news wire of Afenifere, byAfenifere and for Afenifere, now that a pillar of the once-peacocky body is deep in the odium ofDasukigate.
O, Hardball gets it! As an old woman frets at the most innocuous mention of dry bones, Afeniferenow frets at the mention of sleaze! Ah, it bluffs and blusters, to be sure. But certainly, the Julius Caesar quip that Caesar’s wife should not only be above board, it should be seen to be above board sort of registers with the Afenifere gerontocracy and their young Turks. But too bad, their paradise appears lost; their bragging rights as puritans in the public space appears gone — and gone forever!
Still, waxing pedantic, Yinka Odumakin, Afenifere’s publicity secretary, who briefed the media on its deliberations, lectured on the imperative of growing the economy and chalking up development, instead of President Buhari getting fixated with crushing corruption.
No bad advice, to be sure. But is it not trite that sleaze wrecks the economy faster than anything; and that an economy riddled with corruption will never, ever deliver development? So, is it not common sense to lay the right foundation by solidly burying corruption, and then go ahead to build a strong and sustainable economy?
And, of course, the apologia: the tryst between the puritan Afenifere and the corrupt Jonathan government was triggered by “restructuring”, which made the grandees to embrace Jonathan’s National Conference (NC). Jonathan’s NC itself was the first point of contact for the sheep of Pa Olu Falae’s Social Democratic Party (SDP) to frolic with the dogs of the ancien regime; and are therefore, by that popular Yoruba saying, condemned to eating faeces.
So, if Afenifere must lose its puritanical bragging rights on the straight-and-narrow, it at least must be for a worthy cause: hence, Buhari must do “proper restructuring”. Again, not a bad advice, for that might turn the eventual glue to hold Nigeria together in productive federalism, rather than the present consumptive unitary state posing as a pseudo-federation.
The snag, however, is: which part of it is sound advice, and which part is air freshener to deodorise the stench that is Afenifere’s lot, by Chief Falae’s involvement in Dasukigate?
This question is imperative because the corruption of thought — sophistry: that penchant to think you are too wise and your listeners are too stupid — crept into Odumakin’s thinking. Dasukigateinvolved SDP. Falae is national chairman of SDP. So, Dasukigate has nothing to do with Afenifere!
Great yarn. But it is doubtful if Falae himself believed that crap. But all is fair in war, particularly faced with a shameful loss in the war of integrity!
But even as Afenifere makes peace with its present hall of shame, it should agonise in such a way that it doesn’t sink further in the bog. Sophistry is the last thing it needs.
It holds the Yoruba fulsome apologies from dragging in the mud a body they loved so much; and for bastardising the Omoluabi ethos the Yoruba so much cherish, all for crass politics.
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