Between Adesina and Anambra

Femi Adesina and Anambra are metaphors here for APC: the schizophrenic ruling party pulling in different directions, unsure of its growth and winning joker.

In Anambra, the partisan snatch-show-and-grow vision of Mai Mala Buni, Yobe governor and APC national caretaker chairman, just collapsed!

In spite of rushing to President Muhammadu Buhari with APC’s latest captures, from PDP and allied victims; and grabbing presidential photo-ops, the APC spectacularly crashed in the November 6 gubernatorial election.

The Buni pantomime in the run-up to that poll was the defection of Nkem Okeke, APGA’s Anambra deputy governor — and he got rewarded with a presidential pose.  Okeke too, “hot, fresh and smoking” from Aso Villa (to borrow that immortal phrase from old-English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer), spewed local Anambra bragging rights: some bits about the state playing at the centre, to rally the herd.

But despite all of that braggadocio, Mr. Okeke failed to “deliver” to his new party, his Umueze Awozu, Enugwu-Ukwu Ward 3, Polling Unit 005.  APGA’s Chukwuma Soludo (82 votes) prevailed there, over APC’s Andy Uba (61 votes).

The Okeke cross-over was followed by a rash of APGA state legislative defectors, no less estranged from Governor Willy Obiano; and a couple of other federal legislators.

Yet with all of that, the Buni growth strategy of grab-and-howl crashed!  Poor Andy Uba, APC Anambra candidate was right — and prescient.  After casting his vote, he declared he’d win otherwise the defectors would be disgraced!  Yeah right, they were!

But even more “disgraced” was the Buni strategy of raiding rival parties for growth, when he could better have leveraged the APC government’s hard-earned achievements, in the worst of socio-economic seasons.

That’s where Femi Adesina, chief presidential spokesperson, comes in as counter-metaphor.

For starters, Adesina with his “From the Inside: … Fridays with Femi Adesina” weekly, is fast becoming nemesis to his former media colleagues, who feel they can peddle personal bile as legit government criticism, because they have access to people’s mind, through their sacred mediums.

Without prejudice to the Fourth Estate’s function to call the first three estates to account, Femi Adesina is matching these media commentators in own games; and pushing the government’s democratic right to have its own say.

But Adesina has been more than devastating.  He not only pushes that right with absolutely no apologies, he does so amassing facts and figures, served in simple and fetching prose.

That only makes his opponents — and those of the government he serves — that wax poetic on empty emotions, to squirm and fidget.

While previous holders of that office got defensive and submitted to avoidable peer blackmail, under ferocious media slaughter, Adesina chose instead to go on the offensive, pushing the achievements of his government in very hard times.

But perhaps that is the telling difference between Adesina and his predecessors: his government has a lot to flaunt, in a season of scarcity; the previous ones rippled with pathetic excuses, in a season of plenty.

Yet, that same government is putatively the most demonized, though it has the potential to be the most impactful since 1999 — if not in Nigeria’s democracy since the 1st Republic (1960-1966).

Read Also: This Kumuyi is simply different, by Femi Adesina

Kudos to Femi Adesina for speaking up with facts and figures.  Yes, you can’t always agree with his glad-handing and glad tidings.  You might even decry his breezy, cheer-leader style.  But you sure cannot fault or question his brutal facts and figures.

That should have served Chairman Buni well in growing his party to the best of its strength.  Yet, the Yobe governor would rather play in the defection jungle of dubious value, than zoom on the smooth freeway of hard-won achievements!

As the Anambra electoral debacle was unfolding, Adesina was in Paris, France, with his principal.  He penned his normal weekly stuff from there, and it ended with a devastating clincher:

“Those who have consigned themselves perpetually to the complaint counters,” — and those are quite a number! — “should wake up.  The market is over.  It is time to go home, and do something better”!  Some euphonic though brutal poetry, there!

He called the piece: “They said nothing was happening — how about these?”

And he proceeded, as he is wont, to marshal the government’s achievements, the very same President Buhari was reeling out to his stellar audience in Paris: the 2nd Niger Bridge (which finally is coming to life), Bodo-Bonny road (35.7 km, first to connect oil-drenched Bonny Island to mainland Rivers), the Lagos-Ibadan expressway (West Africa’s busiest freeway), Abuja-Kano-Kaduna expressway and the Loko-Oweto Bridge, which links the Middle Belt, via Benue State, to the South East, North East and the Niger Delta.

He listed other potentially game-changing infrastructure and life-changing public assets as the Lagos-Ibadan rail (the first rail project to be started and completed by any government in Nigerian history), “brand new” airports in Abuja, Kano and Port Harcourt, and new runway and terminal building at the Enugu Airport.

Aside from infrastructure, Adesina listed the Buhari great strides in agriculture, with its tremendous results via the Nigerian rice and putative food security, despite the grave insecurity challenge which, he added, the government was tackling head on.

He toasted the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN’s Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), which aside from giving all grades of farmers a healthy jab in the arm, has resulted in rice mills quadrupling from 10 in 2014 to 40 today; and fertilizer blending plants: from five in 2014 to 46 today — and all of these in the face of two economic recessions and a crippling COVID-19 pandemic that brought the globe to a virtual standstill!

Adesina, never one to take prisoners, then — for the road? — strafed his media sparing partners and beyond: “The apostles of ‘nothing is happening, except insecurity’ should look for other music to sing, and for other dance steps,” he declared. “Honest Nigerians can see and feel the good things happening” — and so they can!

Imagine Chairman Buni clinically staying glued to this clinical theme of hard-won achievements in a season of far-less resources — feats locals can easily see and verify — while pitching new members to join the ruling party!

But alas!  It’s a path not taken.  After the Anambra debacle, however, Governor Buni should change tack.

PDP, after a 16-year rule, has pretty little to point to as lasting legacy.  That’s why its members bluff and wax lyrical on empty emotions: abusing, traducing and maligning; sure they could scam the naive, the simplistic, the unwary.

But the ruling party can, with ease, puncture the PDP bubble with verifiable facts. That’s what Adesina offers — and luckily, the ruling party can pick and choose.

Adesina’s is the narrow path to salvation against the Buni wild and merry defection way  to perdition — and the Anambra debacle is living proof!