The top policy-makers of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) think, in self-delusion, that they can take for a fool’s ride the swarming number of Nigerian workers, tax-payers and voters whenever they so desire.
That, truly, was the attitude that they betrayed when, in what was an after-thought or shallow show of remorse, for nearly two decades of maladministration, by the PDP, they unsealed their beaks and begged Nigerians to forgive them.
Since Nigerian voters are no fools, it’s doubtful whether they will hearken to the plea of the PDP for a long time to come. Recall that the sixteen years of the PDP administration, which featured President Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan, was the longest by any democratically-elected political party in the history of this country.
Recall, also, that out of a misplaced sense of security and invincibility or an exaggerated sense of privilege, the same top-policy makers of the PDP, parroted, for a fairly long time – in a show of arrogance – that their party would “govern or rule Nigeria for sixty years”. The party succeeded in governing for only a quarter of its leader’s projection.
By the PDP’s plea to Nigerians for forgiveness, the party’s chairman, Uche Secundus, who made the plea did so from the mistaken belief that Nigerians have no sense of history. And even if Nigerians were to give a nod to that plea, the PDP leaders should not delude themselves that they would be brought back to power in 2019. Is it that the PDP wants to come back to power to continue with crass leadership, especially gargantuan corruption for which it was – and still is – famous?
The PDP does not deserve to be forgiven by Nigerian voters who it has hurt so badly. If it were, indeed, remorseful – that it had sloughed its ugly wasteful financial habit, it should not have dollarized its recent Port Harcourt convention.
That dollar jamboree was an indication that the PDP leaders would rather the Naira sinks in exchange to the dollar. Besides, Nigerian voters are waiting anxiously for the PDP leaders to convince them that their presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is not being economical with the truth concerning his tax declaration.
That’s the same Atiku who was, for eight years, Nigeria’s vice-president. He is a nomadic politician who has flirted with diverse political parties in his bid to become president. He should tell Nigerian voters his role in the poor performance of the PDP up to the period when the recent recession set in.
Given the harrowing experience of bad leadership, under the PDP, Nigerians – especially voters – have come to the conclusion that there is a grave danger in forgiveness. They have resolved never again to trust the PDP, rather so naively as they did to have allowed it to misdirect the affairs of the country for nearly two decades.
And if the leaders of the PDP were, indeed, contrite for their maladministration between 1999 and 2015, they should realize that Nigerians now have a renewed sense of history. Therefore, Nigerians would rather the Buhari administration be given a second chance so that he would remain in power until 2024.
Hopefully, within the distance, Boko Haram would have been history, that it rightly deserves, and the economy back firmly on its feet based, primarily, on a robust contest between agriculture and crude oil.
Nigerian tax-payers, whose tax money was squandered, and voters, whose invested trust and confidence in the party were shattered, have resolved that the PDP as a party and its leaders should be denied further role in the politics of the Fourth Republic; into the political Siberia should they all be sent. That was the ringing statement that they made in 2015, when the voted massively for the All Progressives Congress (APC).
And yet, as most Nigerians who cast their vote for the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Muhammadu Buhari – its presidential candidate in the 2014 elections, would honesty attest, the unusually long years of the PDP dominance of the Nigerian political firmament was an agonizing period of the locusts. And the ugly effects are still being felt today: if, it’s not the recession that the PDP bequeathed the Buhari administration, it was the culture of mindless and flagitious looting of the country’s treasury by its members at all three tiers of government.
If it was not Dasukigate – a corrupt and treacherous betrayal of public trust, in which more than two billion dollars meant for the motivation of the Nigerian military and purchase of top-class materiel for its operatives was shared amongst a handful of top PDP officials, it’s the ongoing insurgency by the Boko Haram terrorists group, the attendant destruction of life and property in mainly the North-East geo-political zone and the kidnap of Chibok and Dapchi school girls in the region.
Time there was, during the sixteen years of the PDP administration, when Nigeria was so buoyant that crude oil – upon which her economy was heavily dependent – sold for nearly $150. Whatever happened to all that huge funds? The PDP leaders should explain in detail to the Nigerian tax payers and voters that they expect to vote for them in 2019 general elections.
Sixteen years of PDP administration was, therefore, a grossly mismanaged opportunity for political advancement and sustainable economic opulence. With such an egregious record of criminal profligacy in the management of the economic fortunes of the country, why should the PDP, however deep its contrition, be ambitious to govern this country again? With the PDP’s poor performance, Nigerians were bitten by a venomous snake and they have always been suspicious, since then, each time they saw a rope.
Whichever way you look at it, the PDP would go down in the history of political development in Nigeria – for as long as the Fourth Republic lasts, say – as the party to have proudly invented or invited terrorism of a monstrous proportion – a la the Boko Haram group – to the country.
Left to the PDP, amidst Dasukigate, Boko Haram would have been a way of life: let there be countless camps of internally displaced persons; let villages be torched or flattened by impoverished explosive devices (IEDS) and let there be an open field of deserted villages and towns.
But it’s on record that for his gallant fight against Boko Haram, Dasukigate and ocean-deep corruption, and that very well explains why at, Buhari was crowned as the continent’s foremost fighter of corruption a recent summit of the African Union, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The PDP should be thanked for its gargantuan corruption which not only made that unique crown possible, but also sharpened Buhari’s integrity profile!
On account of the huge corruption perpetrated by the PDP, it’s been argued that Nigeria’s economic development has been set back by nearly 30 years. Indeed, the World Bank and some development economists figure that given the depth to which the PDP has drawn the Nigerian economy, it would require nearly $280 billion, in the next twenty years, to rebuild the devastated parts of the North-East geo-political zone, re-tool the country’s four refineries so that they could be efficient to purify crude oil for local consumption in place of wasteful importation of the product, improve upon security, roads, health centres, education and reactivate such ports of Warri, Onne, Koko, Port Harcourt, so as to ease the huge burden on the Lagos ports.
It’s to the credit of the Buhari administration that it unearthed the Dasukigate. Otherwise, what the PDP meant by Dasukigate was that it could plunder the Nigerian treasury at will and go almost unscathed. And, so, let the country’s military be starved of sorely-need funds and the Nigerian economy should, naturally, collapse.
If Nigeria was going to be a failed state – a country in which insecurity reigns supreme and teeming graduates of tertiary institutions roam the streets, in search of non-existent jobs, so be it.
- Uzuakpundu, a former senior editorial staff with the Daily Times, writes from Lagos.