Rotimi Fasan
The camp of the Nigerian opposition parties, made up largely of a mix of disaffected and/or expired politicians, has been in a ferment of excitement in the last few days after they came together under the umbrella of the African Democratic Congress, one of the lesser known political parties that make up the country’s political landscape. In congregating under the ADC, the new entrants into the party have effectively taken over control of the structures of an existing political party without concern for old members of the party.
This is the equivalent of a palace coup that was executed with the acquiescence of a few leaders of the party, led by a chairman whose term in office has supposedly ended and has become the subject of litigation. There’s nothing new here. It’s the regular trademark of Nigerian politicians who are always very quick to sell their patrimony for a miserly plate of pork. We saw it in how some custodians of the June 12, 1993 election mandate, traded it for lucre and jumped into bed with the military.
Some of them are in the coalition that has just been cobbled together as a patchwork of disgruntled elements. They were loud in their condemnation of the award recently bestowed on some of the heroic figures of that era and in their shameless attempt at revising the history of that struggle. They turned to the ADC after their failed attempts at registering a new party. In their confused thinking, they have not entirely closed the door on that option. But they just must show Nigerians that they are doing something, hence their headlong plunge into the unresolved trouble in the ADC. Before the ADC they had wooed the Social Democratic Party with Nasir el-Rufai leading the charge. Some of them saw this rigmarole from one political house to another as a decoy, a master stroke, to throw the ruling APC, which they claim had been frustrating their attempts at coming together, off course.
Everyone, including supporters of the opposition leaders and some moulders of public opinion, are eager to gloss over the obvious contradictions in the so-called coalition. They are inclined to explain away the fact that the driving figures of the coalition have been speaking from different sides of their mouths about their status in the coalition vis-a-vis what one would call their old party. Why have a number of them chosen not to burn their bridges by committing fully to the coalition? They have one leg in and the other leg out of the coalition. What this shows immediately is their lack of faith in their new contraption. Some of them have elected to see this obvious conflict of interest as a strategic move. They call it the Nyesom Wike move of being a member of one party (the PDP) while working for another (the APC).
There is no strategy here but there are many red flags about the ability of the coalition to succeed. The members are united by their common fear or hatred of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who as president, is in possession of what they all wanted. It is because of him that Atiku Abubakar and Nasir el-Rufai can reanimate their dead relationship. It’s the reason why a Peter Obi would be making the rounds of Atiku’s house while fully aware it was he who denied him the Vice Presidential ticket of the PDP in 2023. This development ultimately worked to his favour, paving the way for him to go out on a limb to join the presidential race in his own capacity.
It’s for this visceral dislike of Tinubu that a Rotimi Amaechi, after spending about half of his entire life time in public office, would suddenly wake up to cries of being hungry and poor. He has been trying to stir protests he is not willing to lead. Hatred of one man is the reason a Dino Melaye who has spent the last two years creating content on the internet, looking bored and showing off his cars and living spaces on social media, would jump on the coalition bandwagon to introduce Peter Obi in high sounding verbiage dressed as superlatives. Yet both their supporters and some commentators alike are inclined to overlook all of this without asking the critical questions. For them, it is anything but Tinubu and the APC. The same thinking that brought us Muhammadu Buhari. Thinking like this, they can listen to El-Rufai, a man who is smarting from the pain of losing a ministerial slot while boasting emptily about singlehandedly ousting a government he was critical to its enthronement.
This is why Atiku Abubakar could accuse the present holders of office of corruption while his own principal when he was Vice President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has penned about him and for the benefit of posterity a damning testimonial about his attitude to corruption, not to mention his comment on El Rufai, another one of his subordinates and an Atiku mentee who turned round to kick dust in his benefactor’s eyes. They are together now under the big tent of their coalition.
Our unwillingness to ask hard questions is why Peter Obi can sit before the cameras and deliver his tired spiel with cooked statistics from Bangladesh and China about moving Nigeria’s economy from consumption to production and thereafter challenge bemused Nigerians to “go and verify” as he did three days ago on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics. Òbí has since been fact-checked with a video footage in which he spoke about his meeting with Sani Abacha and how the dictator made him “Chairman” of the Nigerian Ports Authority despite his claim in the said interview that he has never met him. Did Obi misspeak or over spoke? What is it about him always managing to misrepresent facts by adding ‘jara’ to things or downplaying them?
On the substantive issues (removal of oil subsidy and the attendant inflation; unification of the foreign exchange market and insecurity etc.) for which the opposition has been critical of the Tinubu administration, none of them has been able to provide an alternative that is not clouded in obfuscation. What you hear are generalised statements of intent that lack specifics. Obi danced around these questions in his interview with beun Okinbaloye three days ago. All you hear is that he would handle things differently without specifying how. That’s the quality of the opposition some celebrate. Well, if not for anything else, the emergence of this so-called coalition will stave off alarmist talks about Nigeria becoming a one-party state by an opposition impatient to grab power and promising to do for Nigerians what the present government is already doing with good results.
Vanguard
