PDP, your time is up

Aliyu Musa

Last week I listened to the emotional testimony of a 13-year-old victim of the insurgency in the northeast of Nigeria. Amidst sobs the teenage boy told of how some gunmen had visited their home and shot his dad as he was about performing one of the daily Muslim prayers. His mum had died during childbirth and his only brother, an older sibling, had been killed in a bomb blast in a secondary school. As I listened to the boy’s story especially as he told of the moral lessons he learned from his dead dad I almost shed tears. The boy is one of many victims whose stories are hardly heard. They are gradually swelling the ranks of young orphans and victims of the insurgency whose travail would sooner than later hunt the society that has cruelly allowed this to happen to them.

I recall the boy telling the BBC Hausa reporter that because he has no one to run to he has been taken in by a neighbour; a woman who is obviously a victim too and possibly a widow; a victim who most likely lives off crumbs as the insurgency stubbornly rages. For these victims no fund raisers are ever held and no N21 billion would ever be raised in their name even if it would not eventually get to them.

Last Saturday the ruling PDP continued its free fall down the pit of history. It gave us one more strong reason why we must concur that its time is up and help it vanish into the oblivion. Apparently, while victims of the insurgency wallow in their travail the PDP was planning a grand fund raiser, not to raise money to bring help to the victims but to provide more largesse for an over pampered president, who recently put a request to borrow $1 billion to fight the ‘insurgency’, and party officials that see government as a clique business in which they are major shareholders. And the fund raiser was a perfect alibi.

And from the charade, which as best smacks of a spiteful mockery, a whopping sum of N21.27 was realised. And among the donors were businessmen that have immensely benefitted from the regime’s financial recklessness, politicians that have been party to the pitiless plunder of our commonwealth in the last decade plus and their masked friends, government appendages and state governments that have been unable to pay workers’ wages for months running.

I do not intend going into the legality or otherwise of the donations, which a number of analysts have already discussed, but the morality or otherwise of stealing from the already impoverished to add on to what greedy politicians have amassed is what my remit in this piece is.

N21.27 billion is a huge amount. It was only last week that Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose presented a budget of N80.774 billion to the State House of Assembly – the entire amount available for spending in the next one year, based on a meticulous plan. N21.27 billion is a little over a quarter of that amount. With such money Governor Jonah Jang and his counterparts in Abia, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Benue, Enugu, Cross Rivers among others would be able to bring the payment of workers wages up to date and do much more for their respective states and people. But in PDP’s fiefdom the welfare of the governed is not a priority.

I have listened to two BBC Hausa interviews, one each with an official of the party and a spokesperson of one of the Father Christmas governors. And in each case the interviewee struggled to parry back questions because in all honesty there’s no justification for such insult on the intellect of suffering Nigerians.

Plateau is one of the states seriously affected by the insurgency. In fact the city of Jos witnessed one of the earliest mysterious bomb attacks that have now become a recurrent feature on Christmas Eve 2010. It has since then seen more than a dozen more, the latest of which was on December 11, 2014, in which more than twoscore lives were lost and many more injured. Bauchi State is another key victim with Monday’s bomb blast in a busy market in the state capital being the latest.

With all this, especially the growing army of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees thronging neighbouring countries, it completely defies logic that the governors of these states did not and still do not see anything wrong with being a Father Christmas at a worthless fundraiser. In any case, they even promised more in the future.

Nigerians have now been left in no doubt of the injurious effect of the intoxicant that power is. Our rulers have drunk too much of it for too long and they now badly need to be done a favour by taking it off them. The PDP fund raiser typically demonstrates that power drunkenness. And Nigerians would only have themselves to blame if on February 14, 2015 they reward them with re-election.