Running on frivolities

Aliyu Musa

As the February 14, 2015 election draws nearer the ruling PDP’s desperation is becoming increasingly nauseating. It is acting as if its entire existence as a political party depends on the election and win it must. And in the process it does not matter to it whether the means it employs is fair or foul. And foul much of it has been so far.

I was not surprised, one bit, when President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’s campaign spokesman, Femi Fani-Kayode said the campaign would focus on the person of General Muhammadu Buhari, the opposition candidate. It’s, in fact, in perpetuation of this desperation that the president appointed Fani-Kayode, a man whose unstableness knows no limit, the media spokesman of his campaign team.

Fani-Kayode was until recently facing a number of corruption charges. He was a member of the opposition party, to which he ported from the ruling party, and a ‘staunch’ critic of the regime. So, the discontinuation of the charges has nothing to do with fair trial and acquittal. It’s one of the numerous benefits that accrue to characters like Fani-Kayode in exchange for patronage in societies as clientelistic as ours. It’s, therefore, incongruous for anyone to expect the president’s campaign to focus on serious issues.

Those who remember the run up to the 2011 election would recall how even then, when the president was relatively less unpopular, he and his party always found reasons to escape from serious discussions challenging his capacity to assimilate information, process it under pressure and reason appropriately. For example when he was invited to a debate with other contestants he declined. But he went on to organize another debate in which he would have undue advantage over opponents.

It is against this backdrop, and in view of the threat the opposition candidate embodies, that the ruling party continues to cleverly (actually stupidly) evade real issues by over flogging trivialities since campaign for the 2015 election started. Throwing punches below the belt, which attacks on General Buhari’s private life unambiguously represent, appeals more to the ruling party because such polarizing prisms like religion and ethnicity are no longer yielding expected results.

This hullabaloo about General Buhari’s secondary school certificate, which the PDP has turned its campaign slogan and had hoped it would be damaging enough to truncate the General’s candidacy, has all along been unnecessarily overhyped. General Muhammadu, an officer and gentleman, is one of the finest products of our military. His record of service, which the opponents have vainly tried to distort, speaks for itself.

At this point in our history we should be worrying more about the security situation in the country and the fast rising number of people out of job, with corresponding poverty level. We should be more concerned about what would become of Nigeria now that our black gold (oil) is no longer earning the much needed revenue to run the mono-cultured economy we have constrained ours to being.

We should be worried about salaries that have not been paid and the possibility of such trend continuing until we are able to effectively diversify our economy or, per adventure, oil recovers and its value shoots to the sky, once again. We should lose sleep over our collapsing education sector - an industry that should be producing those to turn around our country but currently produces people with suspect intellect; people that do not know that certificates often do not have duplicates and cannot be reissued; people who find it hard to differentiate a statement of result issued in 2015 from an original certificate released in 1961!

Our prestige as Nigerians has hit an all-time low because of all of this and the fact that our once well respected military has been trounced again and again and smaller countries like Chad now call the shots in a region we once dominated and proudly led. We should worry about this too. We should starve ourselves of sleep until we find solutions to these problems for our and our successive generations’ good.

The ruling party knows it is marketing a weak candidate whose record in office, in the last five years plus, is appalling and whose intellect is outrageously low despite his claim to a PhD. A PhD develops, challenges, lubricates and constantly triggers one’s critical reasoning. Our president has in addition to a PhD held important positions requiring the demonstration of these skills in addressing problems. But in every case the outcome was always a trail.

But for the fact there’s no time to waste, we should be asking questions about the authenticity of his PhD.

Postscript:

Did Sambo Dasuki actually write INEC chairman Attahiru Jega requesting the Feb 14, 2015 election to be postponed? Seriously? Then these guys need their heads examined if they think Nigerians are ready to take this crap. This call is analogous to a lazy student, who spends the entire term distracted from his studies, turning up hours before an examination or submission of a coursework to ask for a deferral. Give him another term he will still be back with the same old story.

President Goodluck Jonathan and his team spent a better part of the time allotted for campaign invading General Muhammadu Buhari’s closet and attacking his person in the hope his popularity would diminish; on the contrary it has increased. Now they come up with their last joker – postponement, elongation of tenure. Were they good students of history they’d know how unkind history always is to those who refuse to quit when 'the ovation is loudest'.

My word of advice: President Jonathan and PDP MUST NOT send an OPEN invite to ANARCHY by shifting the election even by a day. INEC had more than three years to prepare. And the insurgency in the northeast has raged for five years. None of these can be resolved in six or nine months or whatever, under this regime. Change we want and change we shall have!