But the contestants can themselves make the job a lot easier for the party by giving the pride of place to Nigeria rather than to self.
Before delving into our ongoing discuss on the ideal presidential candidate for the APC, it will be interesting to hear the views of our delectable 82-year-old Mama Adebimpe Okunade, a retired University of Ibadan teacher, on the immediate past governor of Ekiti, Dr John Kayode Fayemi. She wrote as follows on ekitipanupo this past week under the caption:
‘A DIGNIFYING EXIT INDEED
“Dr John Kayode Fayemi is a man of honour, integrity; highly educated, civil and committed to the welfare of his people. As a decent person, he went about doing his work with diligence. Dr. Fayemi changed the land scape of Ekiti State and how government business should be done. His work and comportment resonate throughout Nigeria and beyond the shores of this country. There is no doubt that he stepped on many toes. In a predominantly corrupt society, changing the fraudulent ways the affairs of government are run will no doubt incur the wrath of entrenched interest groups. Dr. Kayode Fayemi did a lot to block leakages. Some of his policies to improve education ran into stone walls! How can the quality of education improve when teachers are incompetent? Dr. Fayemi “offended” teachers and pilfering civil servants.
I salute your wife for being so supportive and for her love for Ekiti people.
Kudos to all the members of your team for a job well done. My dear Kayode, you did well, you did very well. We are proud of you. As you bow out of office in style and dignity, you step into peace; you step into progress and into higher calling. “Usedale Ekiti a gbe o. ”
And in that same thread, may I use this opportunity to salute the gentle intellectual giant, Professor Dupe Adelabu, who stepped seamlessly, though in a particularly difficult circumstances, into the delectable shoes of her sister, our own beloved Moremi, the late Mrs. Funmi Olayinka, as Deputy Governor, and so effectively complemented the governor. Ekiti remains grateful for your impeccable service to Motherland.
PERISCOPING …
“Since 1999, PDP has presided over our country’s decline. Nigeria in my experience has never been so divided, so polarised by an unthinking government hell bent on ruling and stealing everything. We in the APC are resolved to stop them in their tracks to rescue Nigeria from their stranglehold” – Gen. Muhammadu Buhari.
Since the PDP assumed the reins of government in 1999, incompetence at the highest levels of our government has transmogrified into a Boko Haram, about the most dangerous insurgency group on the continent of Africa, easily outpacing Al-Shabab and like the dreaded ISIS, decapitating humans by beheading them; lack of moral turpitude since that time has turned our country into a citadel of corruption, just as impunity has turned us to a laughing stock in the comity of nations. No Nigerian now, not even Mr. President, can sleep with his two eyes closed.
These are but only a few of the demons which must concentrate the mind of the All Progressives Congress as it sets out to choose a candidate that will square off against a powerful PDP incumbent come February, 2015. Mindful of how few and far between it is for incumbents to be defeated at elections in Africa -God bless Ghana -APC needs not be told that this is a task that must be handled with the greatest sense of responsibility.
As the columnist, Gbogun gboro of The Nation, reminded us this past week, no thanks to the PDP, Nigeria is now one of the foremost contributors to poverty in the world and, according to him, quoting a World Bank Report, it ‘will by 2030 be one of the main contributors to global poverty’. On the Human Development Index which is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development, Nigeria has, since 1999, occupied the lowest of the three categories of high, medium and low, placing between 147 -182 in company of lowly countries like Djibouti, Lesotho and Zwaziland. Nigeria actually currently ranks 158. No thanks to a kleptomaniac PDP government which, rather than deal decisively with corruption, prefers to romance it, serially dropping corruption charges against its members. Although the government has been touting its annual growth average of over seven percent, I think it needs be told that with the country’s dilapidated infrastructure and over dependence on oil and gas, massive youth unemployment and with between 60-70 percent of the population living below the poverty line, there is absolutely nothing for the Jonathan government to gloat about despite those voodoo statistics by the likes of TAN. Fifteen years after, Nigeria now generates far less than the 4000 MW of electricity it generated in 1999 after having most of the 20 billion dollars claimed to have been spent in that sector stolen. It will be interesting to see what sane people would vote more of the same come 2015 and thereby consign Nigeria into purgatory.
In choosing its candidate, therefore, APC must ensure that it will not be bogged down, wasting precious time, trying to extricate its candidate from any corruption baggage from his past. Starting out so late in its national campaign whereas PDP, through its various surrogates, had jump started its own campaign for the last six months, APC can only ill afford such distraction.
With a list of contestants that boasts a past Head of State, a former Vice President, a two-time state governor and former Minister of the Federal Republic as well as a respected publisher, picking its candidate will certainly not be the easiest of tasks. But the contestants can themselves make the job a lot easier for the party by giving the pride of place to Nigeria rather than to self. In other words, the contest must never be allowed to degenerate into a do or die affair. This plea is important given Nigeria’s extremely precarious circumstances. Nigeria is in dire straits which, unfortunately, those milking us cannot see owing to our government’s visionlessness; a situation that has turned Nigeria to something totally unthinkable some two decades ago. Corruption now roams the nation making nonsense of everything decent and developmental. APC must, therefore, see itself as being on an urgent rescue mission. I suspect this must have motivated Dotun Falua, a technocrat, when he suggested that APC must confront a prurient PDP with its very best, the MR CLEAN, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari.
He wrote: Name any Nigerian who had been a state governor, a GOC in the Nigerian army, a minister of petroleum resources as well as a past head of state who is, today, not living in unspeakable opulence. Buhari, he says, has been all these but has only a house in Kaduna and another in his native Daura. Here, he says, is a Nigerian, against who nothing despicable has ever been found or even alleged. As GOC in Jos, Buhari, he says, taught Chadian rebels who crossed into Nigeria the fear of the Lord by pursuing them straight to the very gates of Njemaina, the Chadian capital, thus implying that with a decisive president like him, Boko Haram would not have stood a chance of becoming the menace they have since become, seizing over 200 of our girls for over six months now. Concerning allegations of being a religious fanatic, Dotun asks if Buhari is more religiously fanatical than President Jonathan who he claims was the only known head of state who abandoned his official duties to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria in tow? He concludes by saying that all the moral deficiencies both Buhari and Gen Idiagbon, his Chief of Staff, wanted to correct in his first coming, have since grown into demons tormenting contemporary Nigeria.
Need I add a word as my own contribution except to suggest that Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, should, for strategic considerations, be Buhari’s ideal Vice-Presidential candidate.
