With 33 of the 36 state governors making grand appearances at the All Progressives Congress’s expanded Presidential Campaign Council last week it seems finally that the time has come to separate the men from the boys. Aside the pomp and panoply the message and the messaging from the grand affair could not have been clearer: hardship – whether orchestrated or not and despite the opposition’s trenchant attempt to make the presidential election a ‘one-liner’ referendum on fuel subsidy; the ruling All Progressives Congress far from yielding quarters in the battle for the mind of the electorate is even now more unlikely to suffer the dishevelled opposition to their devious campaigns of misinformation and manipulation. One would be right to call it as the party’s H-Hour!
Surely a 108-member presidential campaign council by the ruling party could not have been any less remarkable; but then the idea of 33 Generals right there at the battle front commanding the troops would even at the best of time been unimaginable except that the leader to whom they have pledged their support is someone that has truly earned their loyalty.
It is perhaps expected that the opposition would more than fulminate: ‘The ruling party was undermining Nigeria’s multiparty democracy by coercing opposition governors into its fold or incorporating them into its presidential campaign council despite their refusal to defect from their respective political parties’. That was Kola Ologbondiyan the opposition African Democratic Congress (ADC)’s Presidential Campaign Council director of media and publicity reacting to the inauguration.
‘What we are witnessing is not politics but political abduction’ he also said adding ‘You cannot claim to be a democrat while using state power to force opposition governors into your party and then drafting them into your campaign council. This is political banditry.’
The ADC chieftain probably forgot that it was his beloved ADC that actually introduced banditry into the nation’s political lexicon when his principal and his henchmen not only undertook a hostile takeover of the original ADC but turned it into a Special Purpose Vehicle SPV for realising the ambition of one man – Atiku Abubakar.
His co-traveller in the Nigeria Democratic Congress NDC -the Director of New Media and Strategic Communications of the Seriake Dickson-owned vehicle of convenience adopted by Peter Obi to realise his presidential dream Theo Abu Agada has been no less accusatory: His party couldn’t be bothered by the composition of the APC-PCC. ‘If the party likes let it name Elon Musk as its DG and all the moneybags in the country as its members we will still beat them silly in 2027′.
Really?
Why not push ahead with your party programmes while ignoring what is clearly no business of yours?
Surely the opposition parties are rattled: they have neither the spread nor the logistical dexterity that could in any way match those of the APC. Even their messages on the subsidy and the cost of living crisis have since frayed or better still hollowed out in the absence of abiding conviction and opportunistic posturing.
Moreover warts and all Nigerians surely know who their governors are supporting and why. The ruling APC has 31 out of the 36 governors in its fold and with it an unqualified advantage in spread and logistics hence the expectation that they will at least support their own as they surely have! That anyone would dare to suggest that this would hardly matter in electoral calculations is to take residence in fools’ paradise. This is something that the NDC with its disdain for structures and its ADC counterpart with its overhyped sense of relevance will have to learn in the hard way.
But then that is hardly the main reason the governors including some in the opposition have signed on to support the president. Perhaps more than the two individuals trenchantly insisting on their divinely ordained right to the presidential seat the governors have seen the system at close range to appreciate the imperatives of the moment and why the incumbent president Bola Ahmed Tinubu needs more time to push through his reform agenda.
Surely they have come to know what President Tinubu represents particularly his governing philosophy and what this means for a republic only now steadily healing from the trauma of a political structure rooted in centrism. They recognise in him the very bold ideas without which the country would remain a fringe player in the comity of nations; a laser-focused leader neither given to distractions nor frivolities in his bid to get the job done. And as against our emergency citizen-minders they recognise an empathetic leader who understands why some difficult choices needed to be made to guarantee the country a fair chance of survival; a leader who did not hesitate to take the bullet so they the governors could have some respite.
This is where Nigerians could have been presented with a starker choice. Between a Peter Obi who wants the campus life-saver NELFUND out for being wasteful (although he would not commit to scrapping it entirely); an Atiku Abubakar who on his part says NELFUND is more of liabilities rather than true solutions to educational financing. Interestingly neither of them would state exactly how the fund has made its beneficiary poorer or render the burden unbearable; nonetheless they want it out not necessarily because the policy is bad but simply because man they love to hate is the author. Even the duo insists that the Lagos- Calabar Highway is a non-starter and the Lagos-Badagry expressway is the stuff of the dreamland.
Finally on the subsidy question of which the duo has been most vociferous they have still not told Nigerians how its return would impact on our domestic consumption and how they will manage the differential pricing between us and our ECOWAS neighbours without triggering unprecedented cross-border smuggling that is bound to arise therefrom.
Yes it is the opposition’s prerogative to live in denial of the achievements of the Tinubu administration in infrastructure in social intervention as indeed other spheres of governance. It is however Nigerians right to know what the administration has done in the last 40 months. Indeed Nigerians ought to be able to choose between vile propaganda of the opposition and real achievement on the ground. Afrer all – two sorry I mean three can play!