Is APC writing Nigeria’s inmemoriam?

The promises made by the All Progressives Congress (APC) to Nigerians when the party took the country by storm in 2014/2015 now sound to the people like a knell for Nigeria. The APC and its never-ending campaigns and promises now seem to a huge chunk of Nigerians like, at best, a painful nunc dimitts; a sullen in memoriam. Since the party came into being in 2014 and won the presidential election the following year, it has been on a road completely different from what the people had envisaged. The euphoria created by ‘anything but Jonathan’ blitz blinded most Nigerian voters from the party’s shenanigans and the clear writing on the wall.

The handlers of the candidate and his campaigns successfully fire-walled the obvious  profound dangers embedded in the candidacy cum presidency of a Muhammadu Buhari. Now, all that excitement, hope and ‘great expectations’ have turned to harrowing despair. There are widespread lamentations in and outside the country about the crying fails of a once trusted party and government. Looking back, I’ve been wondering the last time people chanted a sincere “Sai Baba! Sai Buhari!” in an open forum? That, (now moribund) ‘entry behaviour’ and proud precursor of a Sai Baba rant has faded like the hope of a egalitarian Nigeria under Buhari.

The APC as a body, and in its actual sense, is not the point but where it has deliberately taken Nigeria to as a vehicle driving governance. There are so many really great individuals in the party yet they are in the same boat that has now been driven to the edge. Great party advocates and well-meaning Nigerians are there in APC even as the country is teetering between tears and anger towards the precipice. Where are the designers of those mouth-watering campaign promises of APC? How do they feel when they cast a glance at the document and shift the gaze to the grim reality of 2015 – 2021…?

Talk with any straight-thinking, sincere Nigerian about Buhari’s administration and the answers are always the same: Nigeria is in dire straits. The tales of woe flow not just from insecurity, but economy, administration, infrastructure, human capital development, etc etc. Don’t go asking and speaking with people who are rude, uncouth and unfeeling like Remi Tinubu. No. People like that would constitute offensive interference in your Smart exasperation and freedom of expression. Such people also would relapse into common refrains, parochial insults and verbal assault if you decide to not play along in their team anymore. They would ask if you were ‘PDP or a wolf in sheep clothing’. There are such tenacious goons – dumb or not; educated and not; privileged or otherwise… And, sadly we were raped again in 2019.

However, before the 2019 elections, the writing was on the wall. The signs were clear and everywhere. For example, Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State was in the same state Senator Smart Adeyemi has just found himself now. He is still in that state (of exasperation, dejection and frustration) along with his beleaguered Benue. That state teleported him from the APC through which he won election in 2015, to the PDP in 2018 where he is holding sway till today. Still, there is no letting off for the state, because only recently, seven internally-displaced Benue people (IDP) were massacred in their camps by people Ortom said were Fulani herders.

The killings have remained seemingly intractable and equally ceaseless, from armed herdsmen who have been tackling the people for supporting a law prohibiting destructive open-grazing in the state.

Benue is a metaphor that has put a face to our now complicated insecurity. So is it in besieged Kaduna; and Niger State (where the chairman of Shiroro LGA had more than once decried debilitating banditry); and bandit-infested Zamfara and noveau Imo and Oyo and so on. We have shifted from our usual sitting position that faced the North East. Our insecurity now sits astride the entire country with his gaze on the air, the land and the sea. His huge hands are ready to smack anyone courageous enough to put a name to him. Ortom also gave a face to the trapdoor of depression his state is going through. He said it’s because our president is a sectarian father and a parent who knows how to pamper his own children but pounce viciously on the children of others like the hunted game. I often wonder what it would look like if the governors of all the troubled states rise in unison to tell President Muhammadu Buhari the truth and relegate party and patriarchal affiliation.

In 1962, Bob Dylan sang: “How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? And how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry? Yes, and how many deaths will it take ‹til he knows that too many people have died? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind.”

That foundation upon which the APC built in 2015 has crumbled and it is sinking fast, sucking-in the country. Reading again the campaign promises the APC satiated us with in 2015, it is obvious that the party had lofty ideas, except if all the promises were still part of the whole gamut of deliberate maneuvering. Some still hold that the APC was not prepared for government, that the party was all huff and puff about what others were not doing right, the ariteni mo o wi… APC cannot take what it gives, and that is why it is all over the place because of Father Mbaka.

With the country in tatters, and with 2023 in the horizon, what are Nigerians preparing for? What are Nigerians looking at? All the talk is about insecurity, what would be the next mantra of the APC? And where would Nigerians be in all of it? Do they really care about us? Will Nigeria pull through this era and still stand? As we wobble on, what would be left of the country? Professor Yemi Osinbajo said our case is like that of the dangling scrotum of the ram – he holds that it would dangle but, that surely, it will not fall.

Soyinka says swallow your pride and seek help. Before he could offer this advice, he would have heard and seen a lot.

Tinubu says no president will be happy seeing his country being overrun by bandits, fractured by ethnicity and torn apart by bitter religious differences. It means that the president knew all these. From inference the speech of Tinubu speech says he knew and does not like what is going on. So, who is helping him to take care of business? Who is the person or who are the people that have abandoned the country at the hands of all the negativities?

Right from the get go, in 2015, the country was put on the path to where we are today. The president condoned so many abnormalities and displayed competency in sectionalism. This and sundry acts nourished the division of the country along various lines. Our division has now matured into a full monster, the type the entire community is battling against. «The situation in Nigeria is threatening but we won›t be consumed by it. Keep praying that the situation would only be threatening, but won›t be overcomed by it,” Professor Osinbajo said and prayed. Something is still not right: the Vice President is saying something like ‘we would have left the office before this dùgbè dùgbè dangling above drops on us.

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