By the time we meet again on this page next Tuesday, the presidential election – dare we hope?–would have been won or lost
The thrill of victory will be ringing harmoniously in one camp and across its political base, and the agony of defeat will perfuse the other camp and its base. In one camp there will be rejoicing and in the other mourning; in the one, celebration and in the other, lamentation and recrimination.
A great deal of re-positioning, to borrow the locution careerists so readily employ to justify their fecklessness – a scramble, the like of which Nigeria has never seen, will be well under way, with elements of the losing party denouncing it with the same or even greater fervor than that with which they had supported it and defecting en masse to the winning party, which they will hasten to canonize as the only one that can “move the country forward.”
Contemplating this latter scenario, a leading expatriate Nigerian academic whose insights and judgment I respect tells me he is substantially sure that, if the APC wins, the foul-mouthed, equal-opportunity slanderer, Femi Fani-Kayode, will dump the PDP without hesitation and without regret, and begin singing the praises of the new people with even greater fervor than he had employed as media director of the Goodluck Jonathan campaign in skewering them.
All this is of course assuming what cannot be assumed even at this point, namely, that the election will actually take place as scheduled.
Leading personalities across the political divide are saying they cannot vouch that an election will actually take place on March 28. The Jonathan administration, I gather, is still shopping around for a court judge who would consider a multi-billion Naira reward worth the risk of declaring General Muhammadu Buhari ineligible for the race. It is also shopping around, by the way, for a judge who will, for very valuable consideration, prohibit the use of electronic card readers during the election.
The national security apparatus, Dr Jonathan’s confederates in administering Nigeria as a police state, may yet come up with another excuse to warrant yet another postponement. Don’t forget that they had requested that the poll be pushed forward by six weeks in the first instance to allow them crush Boko Haram.
We are still in that first instance. And with vast tracts of Nigerian territory yet to be recaptured from the marauding insurgents, who says that there cannot be a second instance, or a third?
Nor can it be assumed, despite Dr Jonathan’s stout denial, that the “Interim Government” option is no longer under active consideration. The former military president and self-proclaimed “evil genius,” General Ibrahim Babangida, who was reportedly awarded the contract for the scheme, may swear by anything he holds dear, but nobody will believe him. He lacks a crucial attribute that his unexplained billions cannot buy: credibility.
He has been peddling the scheme and may yet find a buyer.
I hope they are factoring Chief Ernest Shonekan into the scheme. As the only Nigerian who has the experience of actually running an interim government, he is eminently qualified to head the scheme. It lasted only 83 days, I grant. But I am sure he learned all the appropriate lessons. So that, if summoned to national service again, he may well be able this time around to transform the interim into the interminable.
Nor should anyone be fooled by Dr Jonathan’s frenetic pace these days as he flies to far-flung places to buy support from traditional rulers and ethnic militias. It is almost as if he has just discovered Nigeria. His wife, Madame Patience Faka, is criss-crossing the country seeking – no, I take that back – demanding support for Dr Jonathan, sowing coarse and vulgar abuse and the most delicious infelicities along her route.
It is unsafe, I insist, to conclude from all this coming and going that the presidential election will actually take place. “Betwixt the cup and the lip,” says an English proverb, “there’s many a slip.”
Whatever happens, the election campaign will go down as the dirtiest, ugliest, and the most indecent in Nigeria’s history. It was not entirely devoid of ideas, but the ideas were crowded out by fear-mongering, character assassination, incitement, ethnic-baiting and hateful speech on a scale beyond belief. As the perceptive Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay remarked, some combatants carried on as if the law of defamation was on vacation.
I would add that it was almost as if the civil law relating to invasion of privacy and the criminal law relating to incitement were also on vacation.
There is more than enough blame to go around, but it has to be said it was the PDP’s national secretary, Wale Oladipo, who cast the first stone when he dismissed General Muhammadu Buhari as a “semi-literate jackboot.”
Though Oladipo has the formal designation of professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques at the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD) at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, his antecedents at first blush seem as dodgy as Dr Jonathan’s doctoral dissertation.
At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site. My Internet search turned out more information about him as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field of particle physics. Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.
Perhaps Oladipo is not the type who blows his own trumpet. But settling for such a desultory identity as secretary of the PDP – even if it is still the largest political party in Africa — when he may well belong up there with Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Max Planck is carrying coyness too far.
As they say here, Man, if you’ve got a trumpet, blow it; blow it hard and blow it often. Otherwise, it will get rusty.
To return to the election: Mrs Jonathan has been ordering her fellow women to vote for her husband because more than one-third of the senior officials he has appointed are women, whereas Buhari did nothing for Nigerian womanhood when he held power for 2o months some 30 years ago.
Stop throwing stones (no pun intended) when you live in a glass house.
Was it not under her husband’s watch that about 230 girls were plucked from their hostel in Chibok and spirited to places unknown? For ten precious days, her husband not only failed to rouse himself to launch a rescue effort, he was actually in denial, claiming that that the whole thing was another propaganda stunt by the Opposition to discredit his administration.
And by way of support, Mrs Jonathan personally conducted on national television an inane inquisition seen and ridiculed around the world, blaming the school authorities for what was a failure of security, a failure of anticipation, and most crucially a failure of leadership – her husband’s leadership
Two hundred and thirty young women unaccounted for under Dr Jonathan’s watch. That is an entire generation. Then, there are the tens of thousands of Nigerians lost to Boko Haram violence without serious challenge until lately, under a Commander-in-Chief whose primary duty is to protect the lives and property of citizens. Then again, there are the millions of so-called internally displaced persons, refugees in their own country.
Dr Jonathan has not indicated what he would do differently if elected. In six years when money was not a serious problem, he succeeded only in patching the Lugard-era Lagos-Kano railway line. Now that money is tight, he is promising to link all 36 state capitals by rail if re-elected.
Desperation truly knows no bounds.
A vote for Dr Jonathan is a vote for more of the same, for Continuity.
NATION
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