Nigerian voters will expectedly troop to polling booths to perform their civic responsibility in the first of two elections, of which by far the presidential ballot will be the one that the eyes and ears of the entire world would be focused on.
By Tiko Okoye
Come Saturday, Nigerian voters will expectedly troop to polling booths to perform their civic responsibility in the first of two elections, of which by far the presidential ballot will be the one that the eyes and ears of the entire world would be focused on. In one of my candidates’ analyses in this column, I predicted that the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, would only lose the election if his opponents could ingeniously conjure up ways to lure Muhammadu Buhari into turning his back on him, considering that the president still has a cult-like following in large swathes of the North regardless of what his traducers might be meal-mouthing.
I, however, noted that with only about a month to go to the election, Tinubu’s hardcore political opponents had run out of time to deliver any arresting spectacles. I turned out to be wrong on that score. It is now an open secret that the highly influential ‘Brotherhood of the Cabal’ deeply entrenched in Aso Villa, who have the president’s ear, and have doggedly decided to play cat and mouse with Tinubu since the APC came to power in 2015, was secretly cooking up something sinister.
My take is that members of the cabal succeeded in selling a dummy to the president with respect to the naira design policy. They got his assent after making all the right pitches about how it would enhance monetary policy implementation and prevent money bags from corrupting the electoral process. However, what the conspirators didn’t disclose to him was that they were nursing an entirely different agenda – one that involved using the policy as a ruse to create social and business upheavals and provoke voters to turn on the ruling party and its presidential candidate in their strongholds!
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And the gambit almost paid off. Not only did they initially succeed in achieving their short-term objectives, but they also succeeded in getting Buhari to act in a manner that unflatteringly pitted him against the highest court in the country – the Supreme Court! It took the uncommon courage displayed by Tinubu and APC national chairman Abdullahi Adamu, together with principled Northern APC governors, to publicly call out the president in response to the consternation the deliberate mismanagement of the naira swap by CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele was causing among them.
They became very determined not to allow the lame-duck president get away with adopting a cavalier attitude to destroying the ruling party and stymieing the advancement of their own budding political destinies after attaining the height of his own career based on their support. This culminated in the unprecedented scenario where leading lights of the ruling party publicly crossed swords with a sitting president!
In retrospection, Buhari must’ve recoiled from the idea of betraying the very man who chiefly cobbled the coalition that facilitated his victories in 2015 and 2019 after three previous failed attempts on his own. He must’ve had second thoughts about being remembered as a selfish individual who threw away the ladder with which he climbed to the top and shoved his erstwhile comrades under the bus by destroying the APC. He must’ve been repulsed at the impression being created by duplicitous vociferous civil society organisations and political support groups – and inadvertently enabled by him – that he is above the law and that obedience to the Supreme Court’s interlocutory injunction inexplicably amounts to a vote for Tinubu, and support for the president’s top aides and Emefiele translates to a shaming of Tinubu.
The video message transmitted to the nation by a usually reclusive and taciturn President from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where he’s attending the African Union Heads of State Summit, in which he glowingly endorsed his party’s presidential candidate while simultaneously appealing to Nigerians to massively vote for him, must’ve been done on the spur of the moment in the light of a cognitive re-education. The main drift of the message is unprecedented as no president before Buhari had ever canvassed votes for a particular candidate in an official national broadcast outside the confines of a campaign event.
It goes without saying that an outgoing president whose utterances and body language indicate that he just can’t wait to+ exit from office to his less turbulent cattle farm in Daura is now up to it in his eyebrows. And I am fully persuaded that the gambit by Emefiele and the cabal has really stung Buhari and you can henceforth look forward to his committing what accountants call the “error of overcompensation.”
You can fully expect him to double-down on the Tinubu project. And whether he’s faking a commitment, as some are still insisting, or acting out of a genuine remorse, this game-changing Saul-to-Paul ‘conversion’ only days to the election is hardly what Tinubu’s traducers were hoping for.
Enter the Church. It can be argued that the Christian Church didn’t adopt a principled stand on politics and elections in Nigeria until 2015. The only aberration to that would be in 1983. All hell broke loose when Professor Godspower Oyewole – who ironically was a para-psychologist and star-gazer who never believed in the power of God in line with his baptismal name – announced that the name of the winner of the impending 1983 presidential election was written in the Bible, as presidential candidates and their supporters scrambled for bibles.
That was when Nigerians knew that the rarely-used baptismal name of the Great Zik of Africa was Benjamin and that Ikenne-born sage Awo was christened Jeremiah! But Oyewole directed Nigerians to zero in on Judges 3:31 and 5:6 that showed “Shamgar” – a word with a dubious phonetic semblance to Shagari! About 40 years later, the General Overseer of Christ Embassy, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, citing “an angelic revelation,” called on Christians to shun the “first candidate who’s under the influence of a demon” aka “Jackal” (Tinubu?), turn their backs on the “thief” who “will sell the country” (Atiku?) and bestir themselves to vote for the “saint” whose “name is (again) in the Bible,” even though “he’s scared of winning” (Obi?).
Pastor Chris is not known to shy away from making a beeline to high-wire controversies. His take on the 5G technological origins of the ravaging Corona virus reverberated around the world. Still, I most respectfully fault his call on two grounds.
First, as then-President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Archbishop Anthony Okogie, poignantly pointed out to members of my advocacy group when we visited him under similar circumstances in 1993, the cloak does not make the monk. That someone has a Christian name isn’t a guarantee that his heart is right towards God or that he’s specially favoured by God, as can be seen from the case of the Persian pagan king, Darius the Great.
Second, a worship house consists of people of different political affiliations united by a common spiritual purpose. Just as it is inappropriate for a father to single out one of his children for special treatment, a worship centre cannot discriminate in political matters. The best it can do is to instruct members to prayerfully seek direction on how to vote. Or is the man of God implying that his worship centres would henceforth reject offerings, tithes and sacrificial seeds of members who work for employers whose names cannot be located in the Bible?
Let me conclude by saying for the umpteenth time that I unreservedly endorse Peter Obi. I very well know his storied pedigree as I worked with him while he was serving as governor of my home state of Anambra. But as a public affairs analyst of considerable repute, I’m predicting Bola Tinubu to win the contest based on realpolitik. Politics is a game of numbers. The candidate with the largest coalition of eligible and willing voters carries the day.
I’m consoled by the fact that Obi has become a proven trailblazer much in the same manner Reverend Jesse Jackson was. In 1984, Jackson was the second person of colour – after Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm – to mount a nationwide campaign for the presidency. He received 3.5 million votes (21% of the total national primary vote!) in the Democratic Party Presidential Primary, sensationally winning three primary contests and coming a very close second in the fourth. He occupied the third position behind incumbent Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale with unrivalled financial and organisational advantages.
Through the primaries, Jackson helped underscore the black electorate’s importance to the Democratic Party in the South at the time and laid a firm foundation for a president of African-American extraction to emerge 24 years later. If nothing else, Obi’s strong performance in the run-up to the election and expected commendable showing in the polls would pave the way for a president of Igbo extraction to emerge much sooner than later, if the factors of an early start, inclusiveness and strategic thinking receive deserved attention.