A beauty contest enchants the hour. Three vixens entrance the runway. They preen and prance to bewitch our eyes. But who is the fairest of them all?
For thighs, we ogle for text. For voice, we lust for clarity. Instead of bosoms, gait, hips, and the warmth of a pair of electric eyes, we want the full body of ideas. Rather than what they manifest, we flip the pages of the manifesto.
So, we have them all now. The Labour Party, after shally-shallying, is no longer fighting shy. It has bowed to pressure and released its document of desire. It had conflated off-kilter rhetoric for prose. We have seen that of Atiku’s People’s Democratic Party, and also the offering of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress. It now falls on Nigerians to compare, to see who flatters our secret hopes, whose drop of water banishes the thirst on our dry spot. They would now look at the three contestants and wonder who seduces our fancies, who lets “witchcraft blend with beauty,” apologies to Shakespeare.
For this essayist, the PDP manifesto is so cliché, so humdrum, a jejune transcribing of our debates. It is like a secretary taking minutes of our dialogues with an imaginative play. A faithful scribe. What we want is not a faithful servant of our deliberations. We need a scribe of thought, a scribe with an attitude. So, PDP showing is a regular beauty, a boring beauty. Its eyes have no Shakespearean witchcraft allure, the ability to stun without a stunt.
As for the LP, I will look at it for its pretension to originality, which is remarkable in itself. For one, it is a dodgy affair. It is called a manifesto of a Labour Party but manages to forget to say something that all labour people want to know: Subsidy. Where is its stand on oil subsidy? If its candidate removing subsidy against the stance of its philosophy of protecting labour from the wave of turbulence that it might bring? Is it philosophical cowardice? It cannot touch its own pulse, a labour movement’s reason of being?
I looked at the whole document, and it is not even engaged on the question of oil and gas into which the APC manifesto immerses itself. Is it memory loss? For its candidate who suffers statistical amnesia, we may want to pardon it for forgetting its roots. Maybe, it is because the hours are hectic, especially with quite a few of its honchos hunched in open wrestling. The floor is dripping with sweat and swear words. Okupe, hefty and growling, against the others snarling to the media.
They are no mean fighters. The internet is afire with their fumes and fury. I am not sure where to find the director general of its campaign, my good friend Doyin Okupe. We have not seen the presidential candidate who appointed him either. With his God-given twitters ( the bird sound, not the social media platform), his voice is probably too thin to roar the fighters into line. He, a former governor who is supposed to be our mister clean without a skeleton in his cupboard. He who owned an offshore account while governor and set up a supermarket. He would not say a thing or two about suspensions and reinstatement and suspension of Okupe. It is over another memory loss about losing revenue to pay people to throng its mass rallies in the country. It is not about obeying the call of a nation. It is about obeying the call of filthy lucre. We were made to believe that the LP was a party of refreshing new persona, to invigorate new ideas, to stamp out the corrupt past. PDP has had its own stories about money changing hand. Rivers State Governor Wike lashed out at Ayu for handcuffing a billion Naira. The party gave housing allowances with nowhere to warehouse an explanation when the beneficiaries started turning it back. APC may not be pure. But we have not read a scandal on their presidential race. If they have had, at least they are not like PDP and LP where we don’t need to pry in order to see.
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How do we not distinguish document from the makers of document? The LP manifesto speaks of fighting corruption. Physician heal thyself.
We cannot read the LP manifesto and not see the imprimatur of Prof. Pat Utomi, and one might giggle at the use of the phrase “state capture,” one of his favourites, as though his biography does not yawn with yarns of state capture since his NPN days.
They may not have had time to do this manifesto, especially when it seemed the public browbeat the LP to produce one. Perhaps that accounts for some grammatical and spelling stumbles in what is supposed to be a great document on the Nigerian condition. They could not even spell Oronsanye’s name. They use words like “potentials.” It asserts that “Nigerian people… are awaken…,” transform the live of its people,” “leverage on.” Etc, etc. That’s by the way.
But its lack of rigour makes the document more critique than agenda. When it seems to come with a new idea, it is muffled. For instance, it will establish a special counsel to prosecute corrupts office holders. It is a mockery of the American model, nurtured by law and accepted by tradition. LP does not show who will appoint, and how does that position shield the presidency from such action. What is its place in the constitution, and how does it relate with the EFCC and ICPC? It is the same thing in its decision to remove 68 items from the exclusive list. It states it as though it is the job of the executive, rather than that of the legislature. It has to engineer it. It cannot just do it. The document has no such nuance.
Citing the World Bank report, it denies the role of Covid-19 and Ukraine war on the economy. Is that how to interrogate a society. Its tone also tries to whitewash the Jonathan era while saying the era of Buhari is worse.
But the APC manifesto has such original ideas as credit scheme, revolutionising budget anchor from dollar to the entire economy, creating economic hubs, fighting corruption by credit, education student loan. For me, the most fundamental factor in this season of ideas is Tinubu’s release of credit into the economy. The United States economy did not blossom until its finances worked through credit. This began with John Pierpont Morgan who released finance for rail projects and even for the Panama Canal. He predated the Reserve Bank. He inspired the formation of American Central Bank under President Woodrow Wilson. He had bailed the government out under President Theodore Roosevelt.
America became a country in which big capital let ideas turn tame industries into giants. One of such was Sears, a supermarket that was a small-time player. Henry Goldman collaborated with Phillip Lehman and Samuel Sachs to put Sears on the stock exchange. Sears had been ignored because of its Jewish heritage. Goldman had no such issues, he being Jewish himself. Sears festooned into a behemoth overnight, and became a phenom with stores everywhere because it raised on one fell swoop an equivalent of a billion dollars. It is what grew Goldman Sachs from a staid enterprise in a giant today. We can do same today. Sears is an ancestor of such big names like Wall Mart.
We can unleash such ideas here. For instance, we waste about 60 percent of our produce yearly. If there is credit, there are many with entrepreneurial brio who can make silos and turn the oranges into juice and the yams into dundu for packaging.
Prosperity is not what you have but what you can make. In school, I was taught that economics is a study of what is and not what ought to be. It is what ought to be that inhabits dreamers. You are not for progress if you don’t dare the imagination. As Einstein wrote, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”
The LP candidate says he would “create wealth through…frugality and enterprise.” They don’t belong together. His pastor friends should show him Proverbs 11: 24 and 25. “There is that scattereth but increaseth. There is that withholdeth than is meet, but it tended to poverty. A liberal soul shall be made fat and he that watereth shall be watered also.” When the poor groan, it is for lack of grains locked in the barn.
Whose idea will bring gain to all of us? Solomon’s lines mark the difference between LP and APC manifestoes. One coils, the other dares. I would go with courage any day.