Unless you belong in the group of the expatriate Nigerian here who told me matter-of-factly the other day that Nigeria was “no longer relevant” to his life, monitoring the returns from last Saturday’s presidential and presidential and House of Representatives election was almost as anxiety-filled as the experience of any candidate engaging in the same activity.
It was like waiting – more likely sitting on the edge of your chair in the family area of a hospital or pacing up and down or feigning to be reading some recondite material — waiting for the doctor to emerge with news that the surgery or delivery was a complete success.
To be sure, you had not sold off landed property nor borrowed money from the bank or from the neighbourhood loan shark and invested it in a political race in the expectation that winning would enable you pay off your indebtedness in just your first year in office and then live happily ever after. There was no fear that if the gamble failed, you might be ruined forever.
Still, as you waited for the election returns to trickle in, you were almost as tense, as frazzled, and as restless as those who had staked their all in it, hoping for a particular outcome.
Will it be a resounding vote for more of the same, for continuity? That was essentially what the Jonathan camp was offering. But it never used that term, for obvious reasons. If it did, well might the person being importuned ask: Continuity of what?
Even the most fork-tongued operative in its ranks will be flummoxed by the question. Continuity of drift, dilatoriness, making peace with corruption, insecurity? Continuity of delusion of grandeur and parade of false affluence, of vacuous claims of achievement, of tinkering around the edges of fundamental issues?
Continuity of what?
Far better to speak of transformation, or of a Transformative Agenda. Even here, it is the lives of the agents and their cronies that have been transformed above all else.
But you do not immediately run into a head wind when you wave the banner of Transformation. You can at least point to the patched-up railways, as a result of which parents would no longer have to take their children all the way to England just to see what a rain looks like, as Herself the Dame of the Rock, Patience Faka Jonathan, was obliged to do several years ago.
And very soon, when all state capitals will have been linked by rail, no child will have to do anything more stressful than just looking out of the window of his home or school room to see a sleek bullet train streaking past
You can also point to the refurbished airports where the toilets actually flush, reel off figure after figure attesting to the superabundance in food production, the great culinary breakthrough in making bread from cassava flour, and the award of contracts for re-building the school from which the Chibok 219 were abducted and the privatised power plants what will in several years render generating sets as archaic as ceramic oil-and-wick lamp.
You might create the illusion of transformation and even succeed in selling it as the real thing to some people, not all of them gullible. So why talk about continuity and give the game away?
In the epochal contest, would the loud, vibrant and insistent chorus of Change drown out the desperate and increasingly weary riff for transformation, which is nothing but more of the same by another name? A catchy term, Change; seductive even, but what does it really mean at bottom? What will it consist in?
Those who came up with the term have had a far easier job of explaining it than have those who have been hiding behind Transformation to peddle Continuity as Nigeria’s best hope.
Arresting the drift, putting a dent on the pervasive corruption – beg your pardon, stealing; restoring faith in the institutions of governance, and hope in the present and in the future; putting an end to business as usual: these would be indications of the will to change, if not of actual change.
So, would the day go to the usually recumbent incumbent who, following the postponement of Election Day by six weeks, finally roused himself to action when he saw defeat staring him in the face and launched a marathon sprint with the energy few knew he possessed, and a desperation that few thought he could muster?
Or would it go to the lean, ascetic, angular challenger who, in a curious reversal of roles, stayed above the fray with dignified calm even as the other side suborned the instruments under and even outside its jurisdiction to assail his character and his integrity and his person and his principal associates in an orgy of demonisation that went well over the top, even by Nigeria’s exorbitant standards?
I was mulling over these and other concerns when around midday here – early evening Nigerian time –I got a phone call, literally from the ringside. Another debacle was in the making, the caller said.
Stunned by the tide that seemed set to sweep them away, top officials of the governing party are frantically scrambling for a formula by which they can have the presidential election declared inconclusive, thus paving the way for their favourite deus ex machina, an Interim Government.They are pivoting, he added, on the problems that had come up with the use of Electronic Card Reader, and on new or old re-worked charges that INEC Chair Attahiru Jega was irredeemably compromised by his secret dealings with the Opposition.
For clarity, I turned once again, as I usually do at moments like this, to one of the wisest and most knowledgeable persons in this clime. His response was at once calming and alarming. GEJ is sinking. The important thing is to make sure he doesn’t take the boat and the crew and the passengers with him.
At this writing Monday evening Nigerian time, fears that the election results will be doctored have not subsided but have in fact moved the British and American authorities to issue strong warnings against recourse to such shabby tactics this time around. The fears are grounded, at least in part, on Femi Fani-Kayode’s claim to possession of private data indicating that the PDP is well in the lead.
From the official and unofficial but reliable figures I have seen, the indications are that General Muhammadu Buhari appears to be cruising unstoppably to a historic victory.
But no matter how the election turns out eventually, it is already a new day in Nigerian politics.
Foremost among the architects of this improbable conjuncture would have to be the tenacious Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who took the leading part in forging the strategic political re-alignment that has created this new day and new era in Nigerian politics.
He could not have wished for a greater present on his 63rd birthday.
Since emerging APC candidate, General Buhari has at every point carried on like a president-in-waiting, a picture of regal imperturbability even when they painted him ceaselessly as the devil incarnate. His running mate, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, evolved seamlessly from academic and technocrat to rousing and engaging political figure.
Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s steadying hands kept the APC in good temper, and as a party with a different way of doing business. Not for him the bluster and the boisterousness of Tom Ikimi who fortunately left the party in a huff when he lost his chairmanship bid.
Even under grave provocation, INEC chair Attahiru Jega displayed calm resolution, a picture of grace under extreme pressure.
It was as if the more discriminating section of the attentive audience, for whom enough was already too much, took a collective resolve to transform itself into bus-conductors and to demand in one united voice: Change.
No matter the outcome of the election, its voice can never be ignored again.
NATION
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