Third Force: Matters Arising

There is no doubt anymore that the two main political parties in Nigeria are relative, if not totally, the same. And the two have in the past and present failed the country in the guise of developing and building a prosperous nation for all Nigerians whose dreams include seeing a great country they can call theirs.

The successive governments have been cashing in on the people’s yearning for an overhauling of the economy and social-political system of the nation, promising that they bring the needed transformation, change and hope Nigerians desire. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), after the return to democracy, had its grip on power for almost two decades, yet nothing but corruption, bad and poor governance, insecurity and dying economy are all that could be pointed at as the available dividends of democracy.

And when the then opposition party, APC, brought its change mantra, Nigerians, having exhausted their patience, quickly embraced the ideology of the party in which they saw glimmers of hope. The APC, perhaps out of miscalculation, thought that the people would exercise more patience and continue to wait for as long as they gave the PDP some benefits of doubt. And it backfired!

Criticism began shortly after the inauguration of President Muhammadu Buhari. It took the shortest period of time to detect the ironies in “I belong to nobody, I belong to everybody”. Nepotism, favouritism, ethnicity heralded the current government. The Nigerian economy is plunged into further crisis leading to an avoidable recession. The government and its party resort to a blame game shifting the responsibility to the defeated opposition party, PDP. At the peak of the criticism, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo came with a 13-page statement to nail his 2015 anointed candidate, Muhammadu Buhari. But there are more issues to be treated as per the opinion of the former president. The differences between the APC and PDP are not the ideologies and policies of the two but in their names and other identities. The third force, expectedly, won’t thrive without the current class of politicians. The trend is there for the purported coalition to follow, and further prepare fertile land for corruption to soar higher.

And the former president didn’t mention it in his statement that the new force should be dominated by youths who have been sidelined and locked out of the political arena. If the force isn’t meant for the younger generation to take over from the older one that has almost totally wrecked the country, making use of such a suggestion would only further plunge Nigeria into darkness because neither new ideas and ideologies nor new blood would be introduced to salvage the country.

Timothy Faboade,

Gbongan, Osun State.