Crass inanity, as electioneering strategy, dogs the 2019 elections, as they draw close.
That is why the electorate must be clear-headed; listen to the right stuff, and ask the right questions.
A prime inanity is the sterile uproar over President Muhammadu Buhari’s school certificate. Despite the attestation by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), not a few still jabber and yammer to the contrary.
This rather passionate nuisance bickers over all sorts — the photograph affixed on the attestation paper; who or who didn’t request for the attestation; WAEC’s alleged “diving” into partisan waters for PMB; the summary dismissal of the attestation itself as a “forgery” — rabid rallies just to hold on to wilful falsehood. Ignorance was never so combative!
That is inanity in its crudest form.
But it also comes “refined” — for lack of better words to define lobbies, passing off personal bitterness as sweet public good. For another election-eve inanity, look no farther than the Afenifere camp.
The pugnacious Baba Ayo Adebanjo may not symbolize Afenifere at its most sublime and politically correct form.
But he epitomizes, more than any other, its id — to borrow the language of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis — without the filtering powers of the ego and the super ego: the basest, of Afenifere’s essence, complete with its dark ethnic dross.
Baba Adebanjo just decided to push his constitutional right to “sell” the Yoruba to Atiku Abubakar.
According to his logic, Bola Tinubu made a mistake by, in 2015, “selling” the Yoruba to PMB, with his Afenifere, he forgot to add, kicking, screaming and squealing, in protest-support for Goodluck Jonathan, and his raining dollars!
Now, Baba Adebanjo is bent on making his own counter-”sale”. The snag is no one remembers any Yoruba assemblage gifting him that power to play Hobson, for all the Yoruba.
But no prize for guessing — that self-imposed mandate is “restructuring”, admittedly, a Yoruba political project, that has its root in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s espousal of ethnic federalism, in his 1947 classic, Path to Nigerian Freedom.
Still, in the Afenifere context, “restructuring”, as this column has always maintained, is nothing but a survivalist racket, tapping into the deepest of Yoruba ethnic recesses, after the Afenifere 2015 debacle.
Besides, Baba Adebanjo, from his statements, would appear assailed by two major dissonances — PMB, on the ethnic plane; and Tinubu, on the partisan front.
Chief Adebanjo was quick to dismiss PMB’s integrity as “fake”. That was vulgar abuse, to be sure. Still, even a child knows what partisan bile doesn’t confer, it can’t possibly take away.
PMB has lived his integrity all his life. That’s why he is facing down the everlasting vermin that dub themselves “owners of Nigeria”; and sending that camp, scuttling in sheer panic. Still, those blinded by ethnic hate can’t see that!
The Tinubu conundrum, among the fiercely contending blocs within the Yoruba progressives, is tantamount to Mark Anthony’s painful musing over Augustus Caesar, in Shakespeare’s tragic play, Anthony and Cleopatra.
While crushing the anti-Julius Caesar conspiracy, Augustus was nothing but a mere lieutenant, while Anthony was already a full general. Yet, as a co-member of the second triumvirate of Anthony, Augustus and Aemilus Lepidus, Augustus always trumped his old general!
So, the Afenifere old guard might feel really hard done by Tinubu — and for good reasons.
The one had peddled Awo and his name, all their long, long political lives; with little or no value-added: just fiery inheritors and fierce wielders of the lucrative Awo franchise.
The other has used the Awo pedestal to build a surfeit of new generation leaders, true to their Yoruba progressive essence but uninhibited by the ethnic ancestral feud that limits the old guard; and can therefore view Nigeria from a more total picture.
Besides, one camp shrivels while the other sprouts; and yet another judgment — nay, harvest — time is near!
You can, therefore, see the shrivelling party hug, in sheer ecstasy, an especially virulent form of Yoruba irredentism, if not outright supremacy, to rally a crowd. In that fevered nightmare, Tinubu is the perfect scapegoat! Yet, the electorate isn’t that daft!
All of these manouevres, nevertheless, belong to Afenifere’s spite-filled but vocal minority, a cabal that has seized that conclave and chisselled it according to its whims and caprices. That Baba Ayo Fasanmi just called their bluff is ample proof.
Still, beyond Afenifere is another ensemble of pretentious inanity — the so-called “objective” army of media critics. This clan rattles with so much violence when they declare things are wrong. But when things are right, they lose their thunder and become absolutely coy — if not outright miserable!
No thanks to their patriotic clatter, a country at a dire strait can’t achieve a consensus to get out of its bind. The social tragedy from this camp is huge: that their so-called analyses are rich only drives them to more rabid mischief.
But again, it behoves the reading or watching or listening public to be wary — lest they be misled.
The 2019 elections are as defining as any, in Nigeria’s chequered electoral history. The choice is simple, really: to discard the gains of 2015 and go back to pre-2015 Egypt, Olusegun Obasanjo’s era of rot; or join PMB to consolidate on building a new Nigerian order, even if it is early days yet; and things are tough.
But it is this stark choice that those who have nothing to offer try to obliterate and complicate, by throwing in all sorts of inanities — ethnic, religious and sundry noises. Still, it’s the PMB’s camp bounden duty to keep the electorate focused. That is crucial to wise electoral choice.
By this time in 2014, a rattled President Jonathan was posing as “persecuted Christian” president, shopping for orchestrated but rogue blessings; and sending his Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) collaborators, in cant and in mammon, tingling with faith and ethnic hate!
Shortly after would follow a massive dollar rain, from which even a pillar of the moral palladium of Afenifere could not but “obtain”! Of course, Jonathan’s grovelling for pity followed four years of presidential collapse.
Mercifully now, PMB hasn’t gone on his own sortie of illicit blessings, from mosques nationwide, as “Muslim” president. He has made his own mistakes, no doubt. But all he has done is concentrate on his work.
Well, the only pre-election sortie, right now, is Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s Tradermoni financial inclusion crusade, to the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of Nigerian hardworking folks, gritting it out in Nigerian markets, nationwide.
What is more? The seed money, for Tradermoni, comes from retrieved Abacha loot! That makes a definite statement — a radical departure from the old Obasanjo order of feeding a few but powerful parasites, to spending Nigeria’s scarce resources on the majority of Nigerians.
That critical shift is what the 2019 elections are all about — and why a panicky Obasanjo has abandoned his much vaunted “Third Force”, to gobble his twin vomit of PDP and Atiku Abubakar, incidentally Afenifere’s new beloved twin champions!
True, it’s only in crises that folks really show who truly they are — and the Afenifere is living proof!