By Olakunle Abimbola

Why would Prof. Attahiru Jega, former INEC chair, latch onto the APC-PDP-are-same-and-useless rhetoric, as entry strategy for his new-found partisan politicking?

How King Solomon wisely cracked the riddle of the two harlots, and averted the premature killing of a sinless infant, might just offer a pointer.

The evil harlot, who had carelessly crushed her own child, wanted both babies slashed.  The good harlot, who had hers intact, wanted the living baby spared.  Who knows?  It might yet gravitate toward its mother, later in life.

King Solomon, rippling with wisdom and intellect, pronto figured out the motive of each woman.  He ruled the living baby be given, not to the woman that voted senseless butchery, but to the one that voted life.

Case closed.  Verdict was pinnacle of wisdom.  All hail Solomon the Wise!

But what has this brief Biblical allusion got to do with the Jega declaration?  Just that whoever tries to muddy waters — and Jega did, in his sweeping denunciation  — probably hopes to scam the naive or the unthinking or the shallow-minded.

That was the hurdle Solomon brilliantly scaled. But those tricks didn’t die with Solomon.  So, here we are!

Still, to be fair, that claim wasn’t Jega’s original.

It accrued over time — defensive PDP buffs under public odium for how their party ran the polity aground under President Goodluck Jonathan; the piqued public, riled that the APC Egypt-to-Cannan trip was dragging too long in the wilderness between; and the millions of plebs, who just echo anything — sense or nonsense — like the good old plebeians, in the streets of Rome!

So, when Jega filched and pitched it for own partisan spin, it had assumed the gabble of some truth — as good, old propaganda.

Yet, it is not.  Before King Solomon, even the two prostitutes were never the same.  But again, that’s left to the discerning to figure out — as Solomon did.

Still, such sleight of hand was never Prof. Attahiru Jega’s way, going by his earnest public persona, since he broke into public consciousness.

He was Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) president (1990-1994); Bayero University, Kano (BUK) vice chancellor (2005-2010) and the most definitive INEC chair (2010-2015), rising on the solid wave of public trust, from a member of the Yar’Adua-era Muhammadu Uwais Panel on rotten elections, to be appointed INEC chief, under President Jonathan.

Indeed, Jega’s track was most uncommon.  As a leftist-leaning scholar, he fought the IBB military regime to a standstill.  That made him a non-conformist, which would later gross him the ASUU presidency, among his Aluta scholar-comrades.

That alone should have tagged him “Danger — keep off”, to the conservative order, an establishment often too scared of own shadows.  Yet, the ASUU presidency never stopped him from nicking the BUK vice-chancellorship.

Nor, for that matter, a membership of the Uwais Panel, after Olusegun Obasanjo’s “do-or-die” 2007 elections had set new lows in election butchery, to shame the winner, the decent but ill-fated Umaru Musa Yar’Adua enough, into some urgent electoral reforms that solidly resonated with the polity.

Indeed, at that critical juncture, the Jega establishment/iconoclastic cross-appeal peaked, to eventually fetch him the INEC chair, after the much compromised and fairly vilified Maurice Iwu, who delivered that 2007 electoral outrage.

It was not only tribute to his personal reputation as a scholar of deep conscience and rigorous ethics, it was also the triumph of his winning leftist rhetoric, without betraying any Samson complex that sought to bring down the roof on all in patriotic ire, at the height of impassioned theorizing — or is it grandstanding?

Read Also: Jega to voters: reject PDP, APC in 2023

With that mild and trusty temper, Jega pulled off Nigeria’s two most definitive elections to date: the triumph of Goodluck Jonathan, scion of the tiniest minority of his own Ijaw minority, as Nigeria’s first president from a minority ethnic stock; and the electoral burial of the PDP dream of 60 long power years, at a first instance.

Jega’s zenith, of personal glory, may have come with the immaculate delivery of those historic mandates.

But INEC Chair Jega, as a moral Leviathan of a sort, came with his calm but vicious strafing of the pathetic Elder Godsday Orubebe, and his tragic stunts, as the presidency was slipping through the fingers of Goodluck Jonathan!

Still, do all of these clothe Jega, as some moral Daniel come to judgment, dismissing both APC and PDP in frothing moral rage, just to make a case for his own PRP?

That was hubris taken too far!  Such “we-are-good-they-are-bad” emotive lather is just too rich and too mushy, for even saintly Jega to pull off, without doing tremendous damage to own reputation — if not among the neo-plebs, then among the discerning.

That has been clear from the swift partisan flak, from the two dominant parties — and just as well, for both exchanges fall within legitimate partisan thrust and riposte.

Still, in 2023, every party would fly or sink, carrying its own cross.  But that might not be such a drag for both APC and PDP; as it would be a lift for PRP, as Jega tried to spin.

For good or for ill, APC and PDP have records by which voters can judge them.  Both have formed the federal government: PDP for 16 years; APC, for six, though that would climb to eight, when voter revalidation or rejection knocks in 2023.

PRP can’t boast such records, though it’s a far older entity, dating back to the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), when it was formed by the late Mallam Aminu Kano, the great champion of the northern Talakawa.

But even at his heyday, Aminu Kano’s PRP was a fringe party.  True, it won two governorships back then in 1979: Kano, under young, charismatic and radical scholar, Abubakar Rimi; and Kaduna, under that great socialist ideologue, Balarabe Musa, both now dead.

But Malam Balarabe would lose his Kaduna governorship after 21 months (1 October 1979 – 23 June 1981), for refusing hardball cohabitation with the corrupt National Party of Nigeria (NPN)-dominated Kaduna legislature.

Rimi, on the other hand, would fall out with Mallam Aminu, leading to the birthing of the bathetic Sabo Bakin Zuwo, aka ”Banking Zuwo”, PRP three-month governor of Kano, of the government-money-in-government-house fame, at the collapse of that republic, in 1984.

APC would run on its great infrastructural and agricultural strides, and hope voters would remember only that good, sans its serious security challenges.

PDP would run on its normal bluff and bluster, and hope voters would have forgotten its smelly and wayward power years, including own insecurity woes.

Pray, what would PRP run on?  Jega’s saintliness and PRP’s exceptionalism?  Jega had better get real, if his PRP won’t remain the fringe player it has been since birth in 1979!