The clock is ticking, taking General Muhammadu Buhari and President Goodluck Jonathan inexorably towards their political destiny. The fate of some 170 million Nigerians are tied up with that of the two men in the presidential election tomorrow.
Nor must we forget the millions of their supporters who have staked their lives on permutations that point them to either remaining in the corridors of power or entering therein. How the decision time affects each man would determine the political, social and economic fate of these men and women. So, ask not for whom the clock ticks.
It ticks for you and me.It ticks for all Nigerians.
Buhari and Jonathan have fought the bitter political fight.They have run thelong distance race along paths filled with bile and bumps, potholes and every imaginable obstacle. Each man has marketed himself to us. Each man has told us the titanic things he would do for us and our country if elected or re-elected.We have heard them. We know the lies and we know something about political deception.
Their political fate is now arguably in our hands; we, the electorate, that is. As you read this, the process of delivering that verdict, the people’s verdict, is less than 24 hours away. In the fiction of democracy, power lies with the people, its sovereign custodians.
In the fiction of democratic elections, the people, unencumbered by such airy nothings as financial inducements and other bend-bend influences, make rational choices among the seekers of political offices.Still, the choice we make tomorrow would be in line with the time-honoured tenet of democracy, no matter that ours appears to be a paean to autocracy.
Sadly, no one needs telling. We will deliver our verdict tomorrow under the low hanging clouds of fear; fear of violence during and after the election.
This fear has stalked our country since the electioneering campaigns began. The entire world is worried stiff. Would there be Nigeria after tomorrow or are we collectively about to sign the country’s death warrant?
These are not idle questions. This country has had a tortuous political history but it has never passed through this Holy Ghost fire of bitterness in electioneering campaigns. This bitterness is an axe at the root of our very foundation.
Africa and African leaders are worried. Three weeks ago, Mr. Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, joined our former head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, to preach peace to the two political parties and their leaders. This week, the Ghanaian president led an ECOWAS team to the country for the same purpose. T
The world is worried. This week too, President Barack Obama of the United States found it necessary to issue a special appeal to all Nigerians to save their country by refraining from doing and saying things that would set it on fire during or after the elections. The full responsibility for what happens tomorrow is in the hands of Nigerians and their leaders. That is not even debatable.
As I have had reason to point out in this column and elsewhere, the tragedy of our situation is that Jonathan, blinded by his consuming ambition to remain in office at all cost, refuses to recognise that a peaceful, free and fair conduct of the elections is his constitutional and moral responsibility. If the elections turn out well, he takes the glory. If they fall short of national and world expectations, he carries the watering can too. Fair is fair.
He and his party were the architects of the politics of bitterness and calumny that saturated the electioneering campaigns from the beginning to the end. Not once did he raise his weighty presidential voice against his minions, such as the daring liar and forger, Ayo Fayose, his spokesman, Femi Fani-Kayode, who verily believes that politics is war by another name and there are no decent boundaries and his wife whose expressed contempt for Buhari and his fellow northerners made the decent cringe.
This week, Jonathan’s public relations agent in the United States, one Grenell, a hack who claims to be a former ambassador, as if it is his badge of authority to pronounce on our country, dished out the very tendentious and treasonable claim in a minor US newspaper that Buhari’s campaign was funded by ISIS, an Islamic insurgency group fighting Syria.
Jonathan and his people were too glad to splash the rubbish in selected Nigerian newspapers. They believe it proved their point that Buhari is a fundamentalist Islamic monster out to Islamize Nigeria. How awfully sad.
But whatever we, the people, make of the political fate of Jonathan tomorrow, we cannot deny him these negative transformations he has wrought in our national politics.
Firstly, he is by far the most divisive leader this country has had so far. He is a polarizing agent. He fails to appreciate the weight of his office and the enormous responsibilities it carries. Even those close to the president do admit privately that Nigeria has never been this divided before.
Secondly, he has managed to comprehensively corrupt every segment of the Nigerian society. Money has never talked this loudly in our national politics. Campaign bribes used to be something done under the table. Not any more. When the president’s purchasing power is in full display, it is folly to think that this is not a game by the rich for the rich.
Thirdly, in his blind quest for power, Jonathan has brought ethnic militias into the mainstream of Nigerian politics. Dr. Fasheun has confessed that the elections were postponed for six weeks to save Jonathan. For its role in that unholy shenanigan that put the country and its future in clear and visible danger, Jonathan has awarded juicy contracts to Fasheun and Gani Adams. Sweet are the uses of evil plots.
Jonathan has courted MASSOB, a lunatic fringe challenging the sovereignty of the Nigerian nation by insisting on the resurrection of Biafra that died some 45 years ago. Is this the kind of group that the president of this country would help to fund just because its members have electoral nuisance value?
Fourthly, to his credit, Jonathan does not pretend that he loves Nigeria more and Jonathan less. I believe he does not give a damn who knows.
I do worry about Nigeria after Jonathan.
What sort of country would it be? I do not know for sure but this I know: Nigeria is now a badly fractured republic. It is fractured along religious, ethnic, political and sectional lines. The cruel irony is that Nigerians and their past leaders honestly gave their blood, sweat and tears, to prevent the country from being a fractured republic.
If this is what the president’s transformation agenda has done for us and our country, I feel tempted to say, pox on transformation agenda and its paid hirelings called, tongue in the cheek, ambassadors.
