I told you in the first part of this series: Politicians are not worth losing a night’s sleep over, let alone risking your health for or, worse still, dying for. Many of them have no CONVICTONS. They live by the minute only for self-interests. That is the story line of the APC defeat by PDP in last Saturday’s governorship election in Osun State.
The APC roof caved in. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was absent in Osogbo when the APC top brass, of which he was a number two, went there to give Governor Isiaka Adegboyega Oyetola last-minute backing. So was two times Osun governor Rauf Aregbesola, the Minister of Interior. Reportedly, he was away in the United States at this time of all times. If scammers are not at work, Two recent videos suggest he may have turned his back on the party. One video cited him settled before a meal at a restaurant in the United States. A Nigerian spotted Aregbesola and began to video him. Aregbesola objected, threatening to seize the camera, and they almost came to blows. The video went viral. The second video, shot in Nigeria, featured Aregbesola in a victory dance with the Adelekes. This suggested that the video may have been shot before the election victory because Aregbesola was away in the U. S. when the poll results were announced. Reading between the lines, some APC watchers believe Aregbesola may have made a widow’s mite contribution to PDP Victory .The contrary would be the case if the videos were old videos maliciously released at this time. If Aregbesola was in the video, the victory video must have been pre-recorded! It may not be out of place, I believe, for President Muhammadu Buhari to be among the first well-wishers of victorious Nurudeen Ademola Adeleke, while his party man, Oyetola, was planning to contest the election results in court. President Buhari is President of all, and it is not out of place also for Adeleke and Atiku Abubakar, a psychological beneficiary of Adeleke victory, to make mountains of the President’s felicitation. No one always knows where Buhari stands on any crucial issue.
PDP victory must have been upsetting to Tinubu’s presidential election camp. Former vice president Atiku Abubakar, Tinubu’s main rival, must be gloating and beating his chest, hopeful of a major inroad into Tinubu’s Southwest political fortress. He is searching for a director-general for his campaign organisation and is asking former president Olusegun Obasanjo for help. They have been arch political foes since he was vice president to president Obasanjo.
The garrulous former president once thought he had the legal muscle to arrest his deputy, and actually tried to lift a finger against him. Atiku Abubakar fled abroad. Garba Shehu, the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the amoebic or chamelionic President Buhari, a position he held before in Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s office issued at that time and instructive press statement in which he said…”for goodness sake, the vice president is the vice president of Nigeria”. President Nelson Mandela of South Africa paid an official visit to Nigeria to help the president and the vice president resolve their differences in good time for the 2011 presidential election. Does it not surprise you that, in their 2011 election clash, Atiku told the courts Buhari was uneducated and unfit to be president, while Buhari told the courts Atiku was a Camerounian and not a Nigerian, but after Buhari won and Atiku lost, Buhari accepted from Atiku the gift of Garba Shehu as his Senior Special Media Adviser!
Obasanjo supported Buhari against Atiku Abubakar in the 2015 presidential election after Buhari agreed to not run with Tinubu, a Moslem like himself, Yemi Osinbajo, a Christian. By 2019, Obasanjo and Buhari were so politically miles apart that Obasanjo swallowed his vomit and backed Atiku in a game plan that may have been designed by some major Pentecostal church leaders. For next year’s election Obasanjo had turned away again from Atiku Abubakar who is waving the olive branch.
Like Tinubu, Atiku is indefatigable. He has game plans to cage Peter Obi of Labour Party and will continue to rouse the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) against Tinubu’s Moslem Moslem ticket. CAN may sleep off on a bicycle and forget it is dealing with another Fulani and a northern Moslem who may succeed a northern Moslem and Fulani it is accusing of a plan to islamise and fulanise Nigeria. It may not realise that a Southern vice president, like Alex Ekwueme or Yemi Osibanjo has little or no offset value in the president’s agenda.
Peter Obi
Nigeria’s tempestous election season continued to toss many of us up and down and 360 degrees everyday, rumbling and swirling our tummies, I’m not worrying our minds. We would be lucky if our hearts do not palpitate and our brains do not begin to work anti-clockwise. I was at a public events which had nothing to do with politics, and politicised persons in the group tried to slam Labour party Presidential candidate Peter Obi on the audience as if they are babies.
There was too much to talk about Obi being the only politician in the Presidential election race who can “Reclaim Nigeria for Nigerians” and change Nigeria from a “Consuming Country” to a “Producing Country”. One after another, angry speakers rose to burst the Obi Baloon. The summary is as follows
- Obi is a trader not an industrialist
- A trader can not industrialise a nation, for he cannot give what he is not
- Obi and Aliko Dangote were traders at about the same time in their business lives. While Obi is still a trader, Dangote has become an industrialist, producing virtually all the products he used to import and sell, such as salt and cement. Soon, with his oil refinery which is reputed to be Africa’s biggest, he would begin to export refined petroleum products, hopefully from next year. He is creating and will continue to create jobs and save Nigeria some foreign exchange.
- On the contrary, a trader will destroy jobs and make the nation poorer. Is it not the trader who grounded Nigeria’s crude oil refineries, imports refined petroleum products for huge subsidy pay offs and this week got the pump price of petrol to rise from N165 to N179. Will Obi be courageous to ban the importation of used clothes? The armada of used clothes imports was a reason for the closure of cotton farms in north, and the collapse of gaint textile companies such as Aswanin in Isolo, Lagos, Teijiin, also in Lagos, Nigerian Prints, Arewa Textile mills in the north and Aba Textile mills in the east. The textile association reports that about 117,000 jobs were lost. The collapse of textile mills created jobs in other countries and deprived Nigerian tailors of their livelihood. It demolished the human dignity of Nigerian women and girls, for it reduced many of them to wearing second hand pants and brassieres. Had the trader more leg room to operate, some Nigerian women and girls may have resigned themselves to used menstral pads!What about Nigerian men who wear second hand boxers and singlet?
5.Will or can Obi stop the importation of fake pharmaceutical drugs or of those dangerous prescription drugs such as Codeine and Tramadol which are destroying the lives of young Nigerians hooked on them? Will he bring to book local farms which produce fake pharmaceuticals? Will he be able to revive genuine local pharmaceutical firms such as biode which were forced to shut down by massive illegal pharmaceutical imports. The trader does not care if his fake drugs kill other people. All he wants is money. Can Obi stand on the rostrum and tell this man that, in the reclamation of Nigeria from its wreckers, he will shut the door against him? It is not enough to don the garb of Mr Incorruptible and Mr Production. He must let the voters know the persons he wishes to reclaim Nigeria from. Surely, the list must include the trader!
- What about revival of the automobile industry? Practically all the automobile assembly plants, which created jobs, produced some local content and gave the government tax revenue have given way under the importation of used vehicles and used spare parts. They have gone with their jobs. Name them… Steyr, Volkswagen, Leyland, Mercedes, Peugeot. The motorcycle assembly plants have also disappeared, unable to compete with used motorcycles. Today, used, imported motorcycles are everywhere in Nigeria, used for genuine purposes, and for banditry and other forms of terrorism.
As Nigeria’s automobile industry went down under the yoke of the trader, Innocent Motors deserve praise.
Innocent Chukuma Nwala from an importer of motor cycle spare parts and completely knocked Down (CKD) parts, he is now the largest manufacturer of motorcycle crash helmets and household plastics in West Africa.
According to a citation, the 62-year-old Nwala produces high quality household and industrial plastics, health and safety accessories, storage containers, fixtures and fittings, electrical components and accessories, makeup high-capacity City bus, safe, cost-effective mini and midi buses, pick-up trucks and garbage collecting vehicles”, and among others. Mr. Nwala missed university education.
For one year, he learned as an apprentice how to repair broken down motorcycles. From there, he opened motorcycle spare part shops. From there, he began to assemble knocked down parts of motorcycles and vehicles and to manufacture local content for them. Importation of used vehicles killed the assembly plants. In addition, there were massive imports of automobile spare parts, used or fake. I ran a Peugeot car in those days.
Peugeot filters often leaked petrol in the engine, threatening engine fires. So, I changed over to Mercedes-Benz 200 fuel filters. The trader did not care if you died in a burning car. All he wanted was money and more money. The Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) did nothing to arrest the rape of the market. Used automobile tyres discarded in other countries found their ways to Nigeria. Eventually, Dunlop Tyres and Michelin tyres relocated to Ghana.
- Nigeria used to have a Singer Sewing Machine plants in Ilupeju, Lagos. Singer sold these machines and set up training schools nationwide for women who wished to learn tailoring. Massive importation of used sewing machines forced the company to close.
- The shoe industry is gone as well. Massive importation of used shoes killed it. But we must praise the ingenuity of the Nigerian. Young Nigerians began to make shoes from all sorts of local resources. All my shoes are home made.The bottom is made from spent motor vehicle tyres. I do not know where the tops come from. Certainly, they cannot be from the hides and skin in the North. I cannot wear the shoes already worn in Asia, Europe or America. I believe I still have some human dignity. Thus, I pray that, some day, the young Nigerians who make first hand shoes for many of us from used motor vehicle tyres will scale up someday to the standards of Lennards and Bata, providers of our footwear a long time ago but now forgotten
- The cooling industry is another example of how the trader has set Nigeria back. We had Thermocool, we had Adebowale electrical industries. Mandillas was known not only for mini- Volkswagen buses. It sold carrier brand air conditioners as well. These and many other companies assembled their products and created jobs nationwide. They went under like Berec, the battery giant when the trader began to assault them. Like imported disused motor vehicle tyres, imported disused deep freezer, refrigerator and air conditioner housing littered the land from Sokoto to Lagos and from Lagos to Maiduguri. So do imported disused spare parts for them from which they are reconfigured into barely walking forms
- If Obi has a plan to “reclaim Nigeria” from the wreckers of Nigeria, the responses go, he should begin from the starting block and address what killed Nigeria’s industrialisation efforts in the First Republic. From small beginnings, Nigeria was developing manufacturing muscle. For this purpose, there were factories in many parts of Nigeria. Lagos led the way with industrial estates in Dopemu, Ikeja, Illupeju, Mushin, Sabo/Yaba, Isolo and Apapa. The trader has made carcasses of them and stalled industrial growth. We must not forget, also, that Nigeria had a paper industry and that some of the plants were located at Iwopin in Ijebu waterside, Jebba and Oku Iboku. What killed them all? The trader, of course! The trader has humongous sums abroad which is laundered home to kill the land and then buy up its carcass to resurrect and rebuild it someday, and then owning it. In this regard, will Peter Obi have the courage to address the problems mentioned above in the public? Can he ban importation of used clothes and rice? For example, Chief Obafemi Awolowo in 1979 publicly promised to do so as part of his ways and means of reviving the economy which had begun to wane at that time under the assault of the traders. Today, Obi does not appear to be doing that.
He is only mentioning the ills of society without stating how they arose and who the culprits are. But there are many folks who know the differences between a monkey and dog. These are raising dust against “Obidient” paraphrase of the Nigerian challenge. the clash between young followers on the social media and the custodian of Nigerians history may almost defeat us when the campaigns come to a head. May swirl our tummies, make our brains work anti clockwise, palpitate our hearts, raise our blood pressure or even cause us sleepness nights.
The PDP
This party is developing the habit of getting through the law courts what it cannot obtain from the ballot box. As in 2019, it began to search for legal technical knock-out(TKO) points. The most striking of the TKOs then was the Bayelsa governorship election which was won by the APC. The PDP went to court, claiming that the deputy governor had discrepancies in his name and certificates.You will understand this TKO if I use myself as an example. My birth certificate shows I am Olufemi Babatunde Kusa. Olufemi was my father’s choice of baptismal name for me. Babatunde was my cultural name, suggesting I am the reincarnation of my father’s father, ikurimisa. Kusa is a shortened form of Ikurimisa ( death sees me and flees), the family name. In high school, I baptised again, this time as an adult, and adopted John. My certificates do not bear Babatunde. If I do not swear to an affidavit that John Olufemi Kusa is the same person as Olufemi Babatunde Kusa, the court would not recognise me as either, going by the Supreme Court judgment in respect of the Bayelsa governorship election. The APC deputy governor faced this problem. The Supreme Court nullified the APC victory, saying the governorship candidate and his deputy were one legal person before the law and that what affected the heels affected the toes! The governor- to-be inspected the parade ground where he would be sworn in the morning after only for the Supreme Court to announce its verdict on the day of the swearing in. Now, the PDP is out again seeking a legal knock-out of Obi and Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Presidential candidates of Labour Party and APC.
He says they cannot change their running mates under the law. Both named temporary candidate to beat the deadline for the submission of names,stating that the elections empire would be advised later of the actual candidates. PDP would like Peter Obi to be struck with Doyin Okupe, Southerner like him on a Southsouth/Christian-Christian ticket, which it thinks may not fly. It would be interesting for Nigerian politics if Obi gets stuck and wins the election. I said: “interesting” because this machination would be a political poison the North would neither taste nor swallow. But what if it helps Nigeria evolve from a state to a nation? Dr. Nnamdi Azikwe fled from it in political partnership with Chief Obafemi Awolowo.
As for the APC, the PDP wishes in my veiw to lock up the Northeastern votes for itself and restricts APC northern vote hope to the Northwest where it can hope to share the votes with APC and Kwakanso’s Party, the New Nigerian Party (NNP).
In that, senior citizens and some of the young people will go with it. While Peter Obi may have no effective response to a Southsouth/Christian-Christian ticket should PDP win its court case, the APC may pursue its legal agenda that Atiku Abubakar’s PDP’s presidential candidate is a Camerounian and not a Nigerian. How the Supreme Court will ride this storm and how it will affect us all remains to be seen.
