Category: Jide Oluwajuyitan

What will I do when fraudulent people drove me away from the party they claim belongs to them?” Those were the words of Chief Tom Ikimi, a founding member of APC who played a leading role by working tirelessly to ensure its registration by INEC. He is presently at war with the party over what he described as ‘unresolved fundamental issues’ he had raised before and after APC convention that produced Chief John Odigie-Oyegun as party chairman

We know APC was not a party of angels long before it was joined by all manners of people from the ruling PDP some of whom were haunted by their past and have since retraced their way back. Nuhu Ribadu, a man who should know better as former EFCC boss, told us that much shortly after decamping to PDP last week. Looking for saints among Nigerian politicians will be an arduous task. And of course Tom Ikimi, who as the chairman of Babangida’s decreed NRC, lacked the grace to concede defeat after MKO Abiola of SDP had won ‘round and square’ (apology to Adamu Ciroma) cannot by any accounts  be said to be an angel. Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt by attributing his failure to assert himself to apparent threat from the owner of the party he headed, he lost that sympathy by going ahead to become the foreign minister of Abacha murderous regime. He was junketing around the world, justifying the state murder of Saro Wiwa just as he did of the incarceration of MKO Abiola, the winner of the 1993 election. Twenty years is a long time in a nation where our children are not taught history in schools and where the elders often suffer from collective amnesia. But I think one of the best things to have happened to APC despite its current challenges was that Ikimi did not emerge as the party chairman. That would have brought the past to pain to those who believe today is but an extension of yesterday.

Of course Ikimi knows political parties have to be owned by stakeholders who as guardians of the ideals of the party are often saddled with providing a moral voice and direction. The idea that a political party can be an association of ‘equals without joiners and founders’ was a fraud sold by the fraudulent Babangida military regime and its state house professors of political science that took the country for a ride for eight years of ‘transition without end’ (apology to Professors Larry Diamond and Oye Oyediran), frittering away in the process N40 billion, ostensibly on building of political party headquarters, teaching democracy and breeding a hybrid of ‘new breed’ politicians in a laboratory who would have no relationship with the past. It was this fraud that produced short-lived SDP and NRC. It was a fraud carried over to the Fourth Republic where President Obasanjo, using military tactics, hijacked PDP from its original stakeholders and turned it to a personal instrument for running the country according to his instincts following his public declaration that he was on a messianic mission ordered by God while in prison. He shuffled PDP chairmen as if they were cards. When Audu Ogbe resisted being treated like an errand boy, he effortlessly replaced him with a retired military officer, Ahmadu Ali while Ogbe was honouring an invitation for lunch of pounded yam and bush meat inside Aso rock seat of power. That process was replicated several times over during his presidency.

Building on his godfather’s legacy, Jonathan saw the office of PDP chairmanship as personal tool for his own political survival. This found expression in the unceremonious removal of Ogbulafor over his insistence on adherence to PDP constitution which barred President Jonathan from contesting the 2011 election and the imposition of  Bamanga Tukur as part of the calculation for the 2015 election despite resistance from PDP elected office-holders and party officials many of whom were frustrated to joining the opposition to find expression for their ambition.

In a democracy, political parties are not the properties of individual temporary office-holders be it president or governor but that of the party oligarchy. This is the trend among the long established political parties that have operated as modernisation agents for close to 200 years in America and Europe  And crisis between the party oligarchy often constituted by founders or former office-holders and current office-holders and ambitious younger elements of the party is also a common phenomenon The challenge has always been finding a compromise position between both groups whose interests are not always altruistic as quite often the former is driven by a desire to remain relevant because of their initial sacrifice and services to the party and the later by ambition.

Nearer home, we saw this played out in the First Republic when SLA Akintola resisted control by the AG party oligarchs. But for the interference of outsiders, the owners of the party who were in effective control would have been able to sanction its erring premier. In the Second Republic, the oligarchs in UPN were equally in effective control sometimes sanctioning erring governors. In the run up to the 1983 presidential election, an attempt to revolt by younger and ambitious governors of the party such as Alhaji Jakande and Bola Ige was effectively checked by the towering figure of Awo who had the unalloyed loyalty of the Ajasins, Akinsanyas, Fasorantis and Ayo Adebanjos among many others.

In the Fourth Republic, the Afenifere oligarchs were in effective control of Alliance for Democracy (AD) until they shot themselves in the leg by dining with Obasanjo to whom all is fair in war. With his 2003 re-election threatened by Vice President Atiku supported by the ‘South-south’ governors led by James Ibori of Delta, Obasanjo had sought the help of Afenifere, the owners of AD. He reneged on the terms of agreement leading to the routing of the AD governors in the South-west with the exception of Lagos, which ignored the directives of the oligarchs. The younger elements abandoned Afenifere and AD to form their own AC party and an Afenifere renewal group.

But what goes round comes around. The new oligarchs, who are now in charge of APC in the South-west, are facing their own demons as the governors they helped into office are resisting their control. This probably contributed to the overrunning of Ekiti by PDP, a development ironically blamed on the masses who because of apathy look up to party leadership that on that occasion failed them. The same war of attrition is currently raging between local oligarchs and their governors in Ogun, Oyo and Edo. We have seen this play out in Sokoto, Kano and Borno states.

These party squabbles are normal in competitive liberal democracy. This was why this column suggested to APC shortly after its registration about a year ago that the stakeholders should take the control of the party away from the governors. The idea of presidents and governors taking over the control of political parties that produced them by virtue of access to state funds that could be used for mobilization is a carry-over from an ill-equipped military that destroyed the natural evolution of our party system. A situation where an elected governor claims superiority over the party that fielded him is an aberration. It only undermines party discipline.

The emergence of Odigie-Oyegun whose reputation for integrity, ‘resoluteness and forthrightness’ is widely acknowledged as APC chairman gives the party oligarchs an opportunity for a much-needed moral voice and leadership by example. The tragedy of Ekiti which was the failure of leadership and not so much of those who voted against the governor, should enable the new chairman see the urgent need for compromise and if need be sanctions in the on-going war of attrition between governors in Ogun, Oyo and Edo and those who provided the platform and the support for them to attain their current positions. The oligarchs quite often have greater stakes in their party. Current actors who today lead must also be taught some lesson on how to follow.

As I watched Femi Fani-Kayode, and Akin Osuntokun swear by the name of Iyiola Omisore and PDP during a press briefing supervised by Musiliu Obanikoro, the minister of defence, to round-off PDP campaign for their candidate, in Osogbo last Thursday, the memories of yesterday brought the past to pain. It was like history repeating itself all over again. Their forebears, driven by passion for power employed similar tactics in the first republic. It only encouraged desperate federal government power mongers to impose a culture of impunity and a regime of injustice on the Yoruba people who by their culture always want the best for others as they want for themselves.

But it must be admitted from the onset that minus their politics, the Fani-Kayodes and the Osuntokuns, as leading light in education are a pride of the Yoruba race and a gift to Nigeria. Femi’s great grandfather Rev. Emmanuel Adedapo Kayode earned Master of Arts (Durham) degree from Fourah Bay College, an arm of Durham University in 1885. His grandfather, Victor Adedapo Kayode earned a law degree from Cambridge University in 1921, and his brilliant father Chief Remilekun Fani-Kayode, ‘born in London, bred in Lagos” (apology to Aiyekoto), like his illustrious father, earned a law degree coming on top of his class in Cambridge University in 1945. Femi the scion of an illustrious family is also a phenomenon. Born with a silver spoon in London, where he acquired all his education, he admitted feeling fulfilled for matching his father’s record in Cambridge.

The Osuntokuns produced the late Professor Olukayode Osuntokun, a world celebrated neurologist, Prof Akinjide Osuntokun, a respected intellectual, eminent historian and  a diplomat, who was described by Dr Kayode Fayemi, the governor of Ekiti State  during his recent 70th birthday celebration as “one of the greatest examples of the famed Ekiti integrity and honour”.

Of course, there was Oduola Osuntokun, Akin’s father, a resourceful man and an Awo protégée who became a minister in his 30s and served without blemish between 1955 and 1963 when according to Akin, he “took sides with Akintola and stoically grappled with the negative fallouts attendant on this choice all his life”. He was an honest man who after serving as a minister for 10 years, returned home to become a school teacher to sustain his family   Akin himself, from his brilliance and exploits as a journalist, there can be no doubt he is a true scion of his illustrious forebears.

Awo celebrated the brilliance of young Remi Fani-Kayode who rose rapidly from the leader of the youth wing of the Action Group to become the Assistant Secretary General of AG. He along with S. O. Ighodaro, E. O. Eyo, Adeyemi Lawson and S. G. Ikoku, teamed up with him to represent the Action Group at the 1957 London Constitutional Conference. But the late Olabisi Onabanjo, a veteran journalist alias Aiyekoto, who chronicled the events of the period, told us how Fani-Kayode took a gamble in 1959, when he joined NCNC as leader of opposition in the House. According to him, Fani-Kayode, “born in London, bred in Lagos, who went home only when ambition for political office was ripened”, lost the Ife Constituency 1 election in 1959 and lost the Ile Ife constituency in 1961. He thereafter embarked on a battle to bring down the regional government. Following the prosecution of some members of his militant youth wing for criminal activities in 1960, he called on the prime minister and the federal government to take over the West because of what he described as ‘breakdown of law and order’. He repeated the call in 1961 and in fact staged a walk-out in the House.

His appeal to the federal government to take over the West finally found expression in 1962 when following the throwing of chairs by some NCNC sympathizers of embattled Premier SLA Akintola, the federal government declared an illegal state of emergency and clamped Awo and members of the ruling AG into detention. At the end of the emergency, Akintola was imposed as premier without election while Fani-Kayode became deputy premier. Emboldened by this act of injustice and impunity by the federal government, Fani-Kayode called the bluff of Yoruba voters by predicting that their new party, NNDP would win the 1965 regional election ‘whether the people voted for them or not’.

They went on to award themselves a pyrrhic victory. According to Akin Osuntokun, “many of the NNDP candidates were returned unopposed because the candidatures of their opponents were invalidated fraudulently. Everyone knew that Akintola had stolen the election”.

But the Yoruba, who sometimes first welcome evil perpetrators with talking drum, swore that those who sowed the wind would reap the whirlwind. When he was arrested in the wee hours of January 31, 1966 by the coup plotters, it was Fani-Kayode’s lot to lead the plotters to the premier’s lodge where he witnessed the brutal murder of SLA Akintola. He later relocated to London only to emerge in 1978 as a founding member of NPN. But the brilliant lawyer never again found the rhythm after becoming an accessory to the destruction of the ladder with which he climbed up.

Aiyekoto, writing about Chief Remi Fani-Kayode in Daily Express of August 8, 1961, also says “he has the courage of a mischief maker and knows how to exploit a situation”. He, according to him first warmed himself to the hearts of the people through a series of powerful articles and later by fighting conservatism only to return to those he fought to get the limelight…” It was as if Aiyekoto was writing about the Femi, the scion of an illustrious father. Femi not too many seasons ago took on the gab of a Yoruba irredentist, dished out powerful articles to propagate and celebrate the values, character and integrity of his Yoruba people. As the nemesis of PDP in the South-west in the last two years, he even helped in building APC into a formidable opposition. But like his illustrious father did in 1959, he has now shifted his allegiance to the centre.

Speaking at the said press briefing as if there was no yesterday, he boasted PDP would win the election. He went short of adding his illustrious father’s infamous phrase “whether the people voted for (NNDP) PDP or not”. He did not say why Omisore with all his celebrated character flaws is the leadership Osun State deserves. Obviously, like his late illustrious father, all that mattered was the raw power of the federal government who often fraudulently claim to know what the people want without asking them.

Oduola Osuntokun was brilliant and honest, a man of character like most of his Ekiti compatriots of his day. He was the apple of Awo’s eyes. He was a trusted minister saddled with supervising the building of Bodija and Ikeja GRAs, the task he carried out without blemish. But in 1962, he betrayed his party and Awo. He teamed up with Akintola who Akin admitted in the above quote as having stolen the people’s mandate. He chose to take sides with injustice, a vice abhorred by his Ekiti people who according to Akin ended up burning the Osuntokun family houses in Okemesi.

The only plausible explanation for an acclaimed man of culture and character to side with injustice is greed for power.  And now Akin has said publicly he has no regret embracing the politics of his illustrious father despite wise counsel from his respected uncles. And the only plausible explanation for a man of good breeding taking sides with those alleged to be deficit in honour, integrity and character is greed for power. His detractors for instance alleged he turned his back on AD to join Obasanjo because he couldn’t secure a senate ticket.

Welcome. First Republic, lost through the perfidy of illustrious fathers, swept away for choosing to swim against the tide. It is a new dawn for their illustrious scions who think they can repeat the same mistake and get a different result. As the scions publicly identify with those who proclaim night as day, history repeats itself

The Council of State, made up of the President, Vice President, the Senate President, Speaker of the House of Representatives, all living former Heads of State, all former Chief Justices of Nigeria and all state governors rose from an emergency meeting in Abuja last week and resolved to ‘support President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure that the current spate of terrorism in parts of the country ends before December’. This is an ambitious undertaking when from experience, such target dates set by the commander-in-chief only brought more daring raids from initial soft spots like churches and mosques to military barracks and fortified prisons and airports.

The council also resolved to end all discriminatory practices in states including the registration and “deportation” of non-indigenes as well as different school fees for indigenes and non-indigenes in state-owned institutions among others. The council did not also say how it hopes to achieve this within a federal set-up where some states earn from the federation account in a month what some others with greater responsibilities earn in a year. Finally the council resolved to ensure that the predictions by some foreigners that Nigeria would cease to exist as a united nation beyond 2015 remained a wishful thinking. The council did not disclose its strategies for achieving that noble and patriotic objective. For this reason it is difficult not to see the council as a body that has continued to live in denial.

He who comes to equity, as they say, must come with clean hands. The tainted records of some members of the council while in office have deprived them of the much-needed moral voice to check the current drift. Like the current PDP, Shagari NPN’s desperation to hold on to power through fraudulent ‘landslide and sea slide’ victory in opposition strongholds in 1983 brought in the military. In a failed attempt by Babangida to prolong his regime described by Obasanjo as “deficit in honour”, after the longest transition programme in the nation’s history, he annulled an internationally adjudged free and fair election that produced MKO Abiola as President-elect. Ernest Shonekan, another prominent member was an interloper used to subvert the victory of his kinsman. Obasanjo as president, destroyed opposition, supervised the rigging of 2003 and 2007 elections and ended imposing ailing Yar’Adua and an ill-prepared President Jonathan on Nigeria following his own failure to secure an unconstitutional third term. Jonathan’s five years remains the most divisive period in our nation’s history comparable only to the civil war period by his own assessment. David Mark was an active participant in the 1993 debacle. Apart from Muhammed Uwais whose valiant efforts to sanitise our electoral process was sabotaged by the PDP, governors without character who for political expediency proclaimed 13 to be greater than 16 cannot be regarded as democrats or patriots.

It is therefore not a surprise that their resolutions are a lesson in denial. We are not inventing the wheel. The state had existed for over 400 years where they became agents of modernization and industrialisation in western societies long before our own experiment at state formation. The role of the state in a democracy has been clearly defined. Citizens live and breathe through the state that keeps records of everyone in the society from -your finger print, your blood group, the salary you earn and your mortgage arrangement to ensure your children complete repayment if you die. The state dictates by its economic policies the time to procreate and the number of children you can have. The state keeps a tab on you every minute to ensure you don’t become a danger to others or threaten the system. The state even controls your thoughts through the media and making funds available for academic pursuit in areas that have impact on their society. For the state, information is power to mould society in its own image.

Here, we are not sure whether we want the modern state or a reign of warlords that preceded them. Because of the greed of inheritors of power in our new emergent states, we operate without facts and figures. In the last 14 years, thrice multibillion dollars contracts were awarded for ID card project to end planning without statistics. Thrice the money was misappropriated by PDP buccaneers who constitute the majority of the current council of states. The sabotage was also aided by those who claim to have half of their empire spread across Nigerian borders that can be ferried in during census headcounts and elections. Today, the Nigerian state has no idea whether those herdsmen armed with sophisticated weapons, engaged in mindless killing of our compatriots in the trouble spots in the north are Fulani herdsmen or not. Yet the council of state now says the self defensive measure taken by Niger State in deporting hundreds of herdsmen who descended on their state is unacceptable.

Then we are not told how the council resolutions fit into the quota system of admission policy into the federal universities without which all the available positions in Nigerian universities can be filled up by qualified candidates from Delta and Imo states. Some of the resolutions also ignore the existing federal character policy which guarantees states have equal opportunities of representation at the centre. What the council seem to be advocating by deemphasizing indigene-ship clause in our constitution is a negation of this policy.

We have chosen to run a modern democratic state with federal arrangement for development and to resolve some of our crisis of cultural cleavages yet live in denial that we are a multi-ethnic society with different world views. For instance, the Yoruba wherever you found him on the planet will readily admit “ile ni abo isimi oko” meaning they dream of returning to their roots. Chinua Achebe put the Igbo worldview better when he said something to the effect that “we are strangers in this land, when calamity befalls the owner of the land we go home leaving the owners of the land who know how to appease their own gods”. If the Fulani that spread across West Africa have no primordial attachment to a particular place, it is because it is part of their culture to adapt by marriage and through economic relationship with elite of their host communities or conquered territories. But today we run a modern state with federal system, where Fulani herdsmen cannot justify their lawlessness of invading other’s territories since their 200 years membership of Nigeria multi-ethnic society does not confer any superior advantage over those who have inhabited their land for centuries.

Like the marauding Fulani without borders, the Igbo with over 60% of its people outside their ancestral home want indigene-ship clause expunged from the constitution so that like the Fulani, they can also control the political power of their host communities. Our council of state members that live in denial forgets that it was the greed of Fulani political elite that was at the root of ongoing bloodletting in Plateau and Benue which started with a popular uprising shortly after independence. And behind the mutual suspicion between ordinary Igbos and Yorubas was the greed of Igbo elite’s attempt to take over the rein of political power in Yoruba nation, a move resisted by Yoruba elite in 1952. And contrary to the claim of the national security adviser the civil war was as a result of registration of non indigenes but more by northern elites’ desire to avenge the elimination of their political leaders by Igbo who they accused of taking over political power through unconstitutional means.

Preventing disintegration of a state is not by the council’s wishful thinking but by the state performing its responsibilities to its citizens which is today not the case when we have no idea who Nigerians are, and federating units are prevented from taking responsibility for those who inhabit their territories.

What can be described as President Jonathan’s Freudian slip occurred during the breaking of Ramadan fast with senators and members of the diplomatic corps at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, last Thursday when without necessarily claiming to be a mind reader said to his visitors: “one thing that is dear to your hearts is what the elections in this country will look like next year; it will be very peaceful in nature, that it will even surprise the whole world”. That was all  sceptics needed to confirm their fears that nothing else matter in Abuja besides obsession with 2015 election  All pretence to governance and other government projects  including the inconclusive N8 billion Confab that many had thought was designed to address most of the problems bedevilling the nation before the election were but a ruse to divert attention.

But if you asked me, I would say the concern of many Nigerians who today entertain fear about their future and those of their children is not 2015; that their concern and indeed the worries of the international community today are the over 200 impressionable school girls marooned in Sambisa forest 100 days after their abduction from their school dormitories. It is about sense of guilt, daily anguish and nightmares which all Nigerians who have daughters share with the parents of the abducted girls. It is about  finding solution to daily harvests of deaths in north eastern states of Nigeria and in particular the Chibok district where rampage and  killing accompanied with destruction take place unchallenged nearly on daily basis.  It is about monumental corruption in government. It is about the missing $20 billion as alleged by Lamido Sanusi the former CBN governor, or the over $10 billion yet to be accounted for as admitted by government through the minister of finance. It is about our army of unemployed university graduates roaming the streets. It is about the outcome of the Confab Nigerians had hoped would chart a better future for them and their children.

If Nigerians have a choice between addressing their current worries and 2015, they will probably wish 2015 away. Many now believe the scheming for 2015 by those who have indicated they will win “whether the people voted for them or not” (apology to Chief Remi Fani-Kayode for this infamous threat made and actualized in the first republic) is not about them. Many leading lights of PDP have continued to boast the party would rule for the next 60 years and that it would do anything to ensure power doesn’t slip off their hands. Only few days back, while the president was admitting that Muhammadu Buhari has a massive following in the country, an admission that should ordinarily pose a threat to those who have faith in democracy as a game of numbers, Olisa Metuh the PDP national publicity secretary also issued a statement dismissing Buhari and his massive support as posing no threat to PDP. “He lost three times to our great party in the past presidential election and will lose the fourth time if he emerges the candidate of the APC”.

Tarry a while before questioning the basis of this overconfidence. To Metuh’s boast, add that of Tony Anenih, the celebrated PDP Mr. Fixer who recently arrogantly reassured his PDP members by declaring “when it is time for election, PDP will do what it knows how to do-win”. Add that to the president’s “it will be very peaceful in nature, it will even surprise the whole world”; then you can start to interrogate if indeed these men are talking about democracy and election as games of numbers.

And more. When you now imagined this feeling of ‘force majeure’ or we have won even before candidates are known is  coming from a party that has an unenviable record of having many of its past chairmen, and elected governors either in jail, in court, or on the run from justice, on charges of corruption; whose flag bearer’s record in office has been less than  impressive whether in fighting corruption, arresting infrastructural decay or ensuring security of life and property, and who was recently described by New York Times editorial as “Mr. Jonathan, who leads a corrupt government that has little credibility and whose deeply troubled government cannot protect its people, attract investment, lead the country to its full potential and cannot contain a virulent insurgency” – a damning verdict that instead of being contested, led the government to hire a Washington based Public Relations firm- Levick Strategic Communications  to assist in promoting “transparency, democracy, and the rule of law throughout Nigeria”, it is only then you can appreciate PDP probably plan an improved version of Obasanjo’s “do or die election” for 2015.

When a party with despicable antecedents openly boasts of winning election even before candidates declared interests, they are probably not thinking of democracy where elections serve as verdict for performance or failure. What they have in mind is probably the replication of Ekiti’s unique form of participatory democratic experiment   where a performing governor was defeated by deeply tainted candidate in an election where 200,000 voters decided the fate of about two million people under the combined supervision of card carrying PDP ministers of defence and police affairs leading 35,000 military and other security personnel, armed with a list of opposition members to be put under house arrest on the eve of the election.

Morning as they say shows the day. With the lawlessness of a few PDP lawmakers in Port Harcourt, Edo  and the gale of impeachment in Adamawa and Nasarawa of governors for misdemeanours  they perpetrated as PDP members three years before their defection to join the opposition party, with EFCC that for seven years was unable to successfully prosecute former governor Boni Haruna now a minister or an Ayo Fayose now a governor elect  and a body that has for close to three years failed to make appreciable progress in prosecuting  the children of PDP former chairmen Ahmadu Alli and Bamanga Tukur for their alleged involvement in oil subsidy scam, now embarking on a frenzy of  freezing account of opposition governors even before they are served with notices of impeachment, one can no more take the determination of PDP to secure a landslide victory in 2015 for granted.

By his actions, inactions or acquiescence, the president is not in a haste to disabuse the minds of sceptics who insist that neither ethics nor morality matters in the battle for 2015 which started with the president’s curious support for Pastor Jonah Jang who lost the Governors’ Forum election by 13 votes to Amaechi’s 16. Jang did not only go to church to celebrate his victory but accompanied the president on pilgrimage to the Holy Land probably to celebrate victory as well as atone for perfidy. The president has also maintained a dignified silence as lawless lawmakers who claim to fight in his name make Rivers and Edo states ungovernable. In Adamawa, 2015 more than Nyako’s unfounded allegations against the president over his handling of the war against the Boko Haram insurgency led to his ouster In neighbouring Borno State where everything -from setback by our ill-equipped military to the abduction of the Chibok girls which PDD and the president’s wife initially claimed was a ruse to discredit Jonathan presidency, was blamed on the governor.

And now the president’s good gesture of providing   armoured utility vehicle that finally saved Buhari’s life during last week assassination attempt has been described as a Greek gift to prepare the ground for explanation of the result of 2015 election by sceptics who think that for the battle of 2015, no conspiracy theory no matter how bizarre or tenuous should be thrown away.  In the event of an expected  curious landslide victory in 2015, a humble godly president-elect of a discredited party can turn around claiming his efforts after all once saved Buhari’s life, if he is defeated the fourth time by those who currently control our lives and insist on controlling our tomorrow.

Except for the lessons that can be drawn from some of the unwholesome activities of PDP leading lights, the party has never really come out with clear-cut agenda to define its vision of Nigeria. Obasanjo in 1999 talked of ‘a total transformation of Nigeria’ through urban development and privatization, stable power supply, roads and infrastructure and constitutional review, etc, all of which remained mere promises at the end of his presidency. Yar’Adua came up with his own unwieldy eight-point agenda which neither the party nor Jonathan paid attention to after his death. As a candidate, the closest to vision or mission statement by Jonathan was his less than insightful statement about “respect for law and order, sound economy and stabilizing power”. As president, his transformation agenda, a five-year development plan 2011-2015 which “focused on ‘strong, inclusive and non-inflationary growth; employment generation and poverty alleviation and value re-orientation of the citizenry’, all of which to the unemployed youths, citizens of besieged north-east and other aggrieved Nigerians remain mere words.

Asked recently about his strategy for his victory and what his agenda would be, Ayodele Fayose told reporters “If I enumerate my agenda, we would be here forever”. As for his strategy for winning without a party manifesto, he said, “Fayemi gave cooked rice, I gave uncooked rice. This is politics and you need everything to entice voters and rice was shared by me, almost two weeks before election. Are we saying that people should remain in hunger perpetually because we are providing infrastructure?” But far more important to him is how to empower his people through awards of contracts which he alleged the defeated governor gave to outsiders.

In neighbouring Osun State, challenged to a television debate of his party agenda last week, Iyiola Omisore looked for an escape route. He wanted an assurance from the organizers that he would not be assaulted by a ‘less than ‘literate Governor Aregbesola’, who he said may not be able to control his anger when confronted with facts at his disposal. He did not say what the facts are about. But like Fayose, he also did not forget to tell the reporters he was terribly upset that Aregbesola awarded Osun State contracts “to godfathers, relations and party leaders, especially persons from outside the state”. He was particularly grief-stricken that the internationally acclaimed Osun State Opon Imo initiative which according to him was nothing but “an N8.4 billion scam” was allegedly handled by the governor’s siblings.

For PDP, power is all about patronage. Close observers of PDP over the years and the pronouncement of some of its leading lights tend to confirm this fact. John Campbell, a former US envoy for instance described PDP during proceedings at a hearing on the topic “Nigeria in Turmoil” in the British House of Commons on March 19, 2010 as ‘an elite cartel at the centre of power in Nigeria, a political party that came together … as essentially a club of elites for sharing of oil rents and political spoils.’ Audu Ogbe, a former PDP chairman gave credence to Capmbell analysis when he said; “When I was chairman of PDP, my son never got involved in oil but two PDP national chairmen after me, their sons pocketed over N400 billion without supplying a tea cup of oil”. Dr Okupe was to later confirm sharing is all that takes place in PDP while admonishing his Yoruba people to join the PDP.  According to him: “In things that are not enough, when people sit down to share and take decisions, if there is nobody to speak for you, there is problem’’.

Beneficiaries and other key actors have also given credence to this claim. Asari Dokubo, leader of a militant group in the Niger Delta, who along with other repentant Niger Delta militants got mouth-watering multi-billion dollar contracts according to Financial Times of London, for instance later told newspaper reporters that he secured bigger contracts under Obasanjo than he got under Jonathan, his kinsman. Nasir El ‘Rufai, former BPE Director General, also told a House of Representatives probe panel how blue chip companies were sold to privileged PDP members and their sympathisers at give away prices.

And as if to confirm there is little governance going in Abuja outside the scramble to award contracts,  Obiageli Ezekwesili, a co-founder of Transparency International and former minister of ‘Due Process’, solid minerals and later education, all in Obasanjo’s PDP administration, recently  asked the National Assembly to ask the president why it has suddenly become his duty and that of the Federal Executive Council to hold meeting over award of contracts when there are statutory bodies responsible for such duties. But of course the National Assembly cannot ask such questions since as beneficiaries of N250m Constituency project contracts per senator, they cannot dissociate themselves from the Abuja contract scam.

Our tragedy is that PDP has consistently demonstrated it doesn’t give a damn about Nigeria. Unlike other societies where those who hold hegemonic power protect their stakes in their nation by ensuring its survival, PDP members are ravaging our land while lying through their teeth declaring all is well. As 2015 approaches, they are spending taxpayer’s money like water on media campaigns to deceive the impoverished taxpayers. As Minister of Power and Energy, the late Olusegun Agagu claimed in 2002, the nation generated 4200MW of electricity. Twelve years later with an injection of between $24 billion and $50 billion into the energy sector, the nation generates less than 4500MW. Yet PDP and the president say they have solved the nation’s energy problems by selling all the generating companies built through the sweat and blood of taxpayers to government-favoured private investors  that have turned around to appeal to government to buy equity share in their newly acquired companies.

Car accessories such as tyre, battery and break pad manufacturing companies inherited by PDP in 1999 have all collapsed due to energy crisis and stiff competition from sub-standard imported products brought into the country by companies that enjoy government waivers. Putting the cart before the horse, we celebrate the inauguration of another car assembly plant despite the fact that the country has derived no joy from those inaugurated in Kaduna, Enugu, Ibadan and Lagos, some 40 years ago. With virtual collapse of our iron and steel industry due to bare-faced stealing by NPN buccaneers and its PDP successors, except PDP and its World Bank economists who fraudulently tell our people that growth is synonymous with development, most right-thinking Nigerians know that for or every N3m car assembled in Nigeria, about N2.6m is repatriated.

A large chunk of our territory has been made ungovernable by insurgents who ravage villages unchallenged killing innocent Nigerians at will and abducting women and young girls including the latest 300 Chibok girls, the cause of world outrage. In the midst of daily harvest of deaths from the trouble spots in the north of the country, we are daily assaulted with an on-going media campaign claiming President Jonathan ‘has fought insurgency to a halt’. Amidst the entertainment, a nation that fought a three year civil war without external borrowing  and which has spent about a trillion dollars, a quarter of her annual budget on defence  yearly in the last  three years, is seeking $1billion external loan ostensibly to fight insurgency.

Just as PDP with its cluster of criminals has continued to demonstrate its lack of faith in our country, with the moles planted in the in APC by PDP now returning  back to base, with APC governors behaving like the lords of the Manor, lacking the spirit of compromise, with their party elders  behaving like warlords insisting it must be their way or nothing, and with the APC lacking the discipline of a political party to call everyone to other, I think it is time apathetic Nigerians who look up to the current crop of politicians for salvation should start thinking of how to take their county back from politicians of all hue. I honestly don’t know the methodology to achieve this beyond asking them to do what they know how to do best: prayer and more prayer, if only God will listen in view of our transgressions and impunity for which no one has been held accountable since independence.

What went through my mind last weekend as I watched Abba Moro, the minister of interior as he inspected a guard of honour mounted by a contingent of immigration officers is the sense of helplessness of Nigerians who come under daily assault from government’s various acts of impunity  Subdued prayerful and miracle seeking Nigerians have come to accept  all government  foibles and eccentricity which have  attracted strident criticism from our  neighbours and  the international community with a sense  of ‘it is God’s will’ since they are coming from Goodluck Jonathan, whose leadership our religious leaders claimed was ordained by God. We have been told to ignore ex-President Obasanjo’s recent confession that he immorally imposed him on Nigerians after dismissing a clause in the PDP constitution which disqualified Jonathan’s candidacy for the 2011 presidential election.

Moro, supervised the March 15 immigration recruitment exercise which some cynics described asa swindle organized by PDP swindlers who feed on the blood and sweat of the weak. In the exercise, about 1.5m application forms were sold to fill 4500 vacancies and the ensuing organized anarchy at various stadia across the nation led to the death of 20 job seekers. DREXEL Technologies Limited, the outsourcing company engaged by the Nigerian Immigration Service, (NIS), for recruitment was according to umbrella body of outsourcing companies in Nigeria, Human Capital Providers Association of Nigeria, HuCaPAN was an unregistered company. Political enemies even libelled the senate president claiming without proof that the company belong to his wife. While not a few called for the sack of Moro, students of Jonathan presidency predicted he would survive the scandal because as Senate president’s former aide, his nominee and a PDP stalwart, who like Princess Oduah, a former aviation minister who knows how to mobilize people for electoral victory, he is beyond reproach. Typical of President Jonathan, he set up a committee headed by the chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Deaconess Joan Ayo. It has been business as usual afterwards. In fact Moro has been receiving all manners of awards of excellence from all manners of bodies just as Stella Oduah was recently celebrated by her Akili-Ozizor community of Anambra resident in Lagos for her outstanding performance as minister.

But to be fair to President Jonathan, he was not responsible for the institutionalization of the culture of impunity He might have found it an effective political tool among miracle-seeking Nigerians who attribute all acts of inhumanity of man to man including exploitation of our fears and anxieties to God. The credit should go to his godfather, ex- President Obasanjo. It was in fact the act of impunity of Obasanjo who often tries to play God that produced Jonathan. If the president is guilty of anything, it is that impunity has thrived under him. And I am not sure if anyone can blame a man who was never given a chance for cultivating a political strategy that has served him well in the race for nomination as his party’s candidate, and the landslide victory he secured from his miracle-seeking compatriots who in their various churches and mosques successfully secured God’s intervention on behalf of Obasanjo and Jonathan who undermined their party’s constitution, dismissing their act of betrayal as ‘an act of God’.

President Jonathan has continued to pile up victory after victory through what many have described as his politics of impunity while the landscape is littered with carcasses of critics of this winning policy. Obasanjo who accused the president of impunity by his imposition of Buruji Kashamu, a man he alleged has criminal cases to face in the US as the leader of PDP in the South-west has become the latest victim. To spite Obasanjo, Kashamu and President Jonathan in turn imposed Ayo Fayose whose impeachment was organized by Obasanjo  and who, in spite of criminal cases still hanging on his neck on Ekiti PDP has gone ahead to win an unprecedented landslide victory over a highly rated incumbent governor.

While Obasanjo is still licking his wounds, Fayose is already threatening to have him expelled from PDP if he fails to toe party line. The governor elect told The Punch over the weekend: “It doesn’t matter whether you are a former president or former governor; if you disparage the party again, we will take you out….. If former President Olusegun Obasanjo wants to join the APC, let him go to APC…Obasanjo should stop making uncomplimentary statements about the party, if he continues, we will suspend him; nobody is bigger than this party”.

Who now says impunity does not pay?

But before Fayose, there was Boni Haruna, also a former governor of Adamawa. Reprieve came his way after being drilled in court for about seven years by EFCC over corruption charges when he switched allegiance to PDP after denouncing Abubakar Atiku his godfather. It took just three days to get an acquittal and another one week to become a minister. Before both was a convicted former governor of Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha who secured a presidential amnesty while still on the run from justice in Europe. He is today a distinguished member of the ongoing Confab.

It will also be recalled that the President’s Christian  fold  hailed him when he openly embraced Pastor Jonah  Jang who lost a governors’ forum election by 14 votes to 16 as a winner as well as when Oduah, embroiled in armoured cars deal with Coscharis,  went as an advance member of the president’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Today, Muslim faithful among Kano PDP stalwarts are also hailing him for his recent presidential order to withdraw all criminal cases against Ibrahim, a scion of Abacha family over parts of about $4 billion siphoned from the Nigerian state by his father. It is said Abacha is being groomed to confront Governor Rabiu Kankwaso, the president’s estranged Kano political ally.

As 2015 draws nearer, Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria and Protectors of Nigeria Posterity have reminded us of the qualities our president share with President Obama, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. They have insisted Nigeria’s energy crisis is over even when it was only late last year the minister for power said “only 25 per cent of Nigerians have access to electricity” a nightmare he said was “caused by human beings used by evil forces”; his Minister of State, Zainab Kuchi, would say that “We have 160 million Nigerians now and we are only giving power to 40 million of that population”.

Perhaps with the string of successes chalked up through various acts of impunity including the Ekiti miracle where an impeached former governor without an agenda, ran and secured a landslide victory, the president seem to have become persuaded that that performance, issue-based campaign and public perception of candidates are distractions that don’t guarantee victory in elections in Nigeria. This probably explains the impunity displayed by the president’s promoters who stormed Unity Fountain Abuja where grieving parents have kept vigil for about 10 weeks over the abduction of Chibok girls with ‘customised vehicles and giant electronic billboards, with engraved achievements of the president, his picture and that of his vice, Namadi Sambo’. They seem determined to finally dislodge the irritants that the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ campaigners have become to government after an initial stand-off to a sponsored group, who according to Oby Ezekwesili “came in a bus and turned the Unity Fountain into a joke”.

A people deserve the leadership they get and a society where leaders and the led pray for miracles trying to reap from where they have not sowed is a nation of 419ners. Even exasperated foreign friends of our nation have now left us to our fate. The British Deputy High Commissioner said over the weekend that they ‘expect the federal government to double its efforts’ to bring back our abducted girls. The New York Times, reacting to our president’s bored celebration of his administration’s achievements in an op Ed page in Washington Post simply wished Nigeria ‘good luck’.