By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Nigerians will elect a new president in less than 48 hours from now. Both excitement and anxiety permeate the air. Whichever way the election swings, its outcome will be consequential.
I am as excited as I was four years ago.
This time in 2015, I concluded that President Goodluck Jonathan, a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was not fit for purpose and supported Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Today, I have also concluded that Buhari is not fit for purpose and I am determined to use all my God-given talents to ensure that, as Jonathan was sent back to Otuoke, he is sent back to Daura.
Two groups of Nigerians oppose Buhari’s re-election.
The first are those who ab-initio never saw anything good in him; never believed in his capacity and who perceived him as a dyed-in-the-wool dictator and irredeemable ethnic jingoist.
They are not disappointed at the unravelling of the Buhari presidency and the sentiment is more of, “But we told you.”
The second group comprises those who believed that Buhari was a democracy-convert as claimed, who had purged himself of unbridled nepotism and could provide the leadership Nigeria sorely needed, despite his antecedents.
I belonged to this group.
I had just left secondary school when Buhari shot himself to power on December 31, 1983. At the time his colleagues dislodged him from his high perch on August 27, 1985, I was in higher institution.
So, I knew firsthand what he did in the 20 months he was in office as a maximum military ruler.
His regime’s warped economic policies, particularly the curb on imports, led to job losses and business closures.
I witnessed the disingenuous introduction of a new currency supposedly to tackle corruption and the consequence. Prices rose, living standards fell, and Nigerians queued up for essential commodities.
I saw the retroactive application of a law under Buhari’s watch leading to the public execution of three young Nigerians convicted of drug peddling, a crime that did not carry a death penalty at the time it was committed.
But I believed him when he said he was a changed person. I convinced myself that he would put together a formidable team and provide the disciplined leadership sorely lacking in the preceding administration.
At 72, I reasoned that Buhari must have purged himself of every vestige of ultra-ethnic agenda, having fully come of age.
I was wrong.
But it is surprising that in spite of everything that has happened in the almost four years of the Buhari presidency, there are still some Nigerians who think that Buhari will be re-elected. They deploy illogical reasoning and hackneyed permutations, ignoring the fact that unlike in 2015, Saturday’s election is a referendum on the Buhari presidency.
Try as hard as the APC is doing to put Jonathan on the ballot, truth is, he is not and cannot be.
Besides, the conditions that made the 2015 Buhari victory a fait accompli have changed dramatically.
In 2015, Jonathan’s candidacy united the North behind Buhari. Support from the South West became an icing on his victory cake.
But even at that, he won the election with only 2.57 million votes, scoring 15,424,921 (53.95 per cent) of the 28,587,564 total valid votes cast, against Jonathan’s 12,853,162 (44.96 per cent).
In 2015, Buhari received 2.4 million South West votes, a plurality of 600,000 over Jonathan’s. Even in Lagos, with all the noise and the fabled Bola Tinubu factor, the APC prevailed with only 160,000 votes.
In 2015, Jonathan ran on his record and failed because Nigerians didn’t think much of the scorecard. Buhari ran on promises, propaganda and lies.
Now, that paradigm has shifted.
After four years in office, Buhari will run for election not on promises, innuendos and propaganda but on his record of achievements.
The simple but important question that will agitate the minds of discerning, albeit ordinary, Nigerians as they cast their ballot on Saturday is: Am I better off today than I was four years ago?
Buhari lost the South East and South South in 2015 when the crocodiles were not smiling and pythons were not dancing.
Things have changed dramatically since then. Today, pythons are busy exhibiting new and fatal dance steps in the South East every year with dire consequences for the beleaguered youths of the region.
When Buhari won in 2015, the Shiites were part of the 15,424,921 that made the victory possible.
Before the election, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai, led Buhari to visit the leader of the group, Ibrahim el-Zakzaky, at his Kaduna lair to seek support. He was obliged.
A lot has happened since then.
In 2015, the Zaria massacre occurred during which 348 Shiites (some accounts put the number at over 1,000) were killed by soldiers and buried in mass graves.
The dead included three children of el-Zakzaky. Since then, he has been locked up together with his wife, even when the courts have granted them bail.
In April 2018, clashes broke out as the police fired teargas at Shiites protesters demanding the release of their leader. The clashes left many dead and several others injured. The police detained at least 115 of the protesters.
In October 2018, Nigerian military again killed at least 45 peaceful Shiites protesters.
Today, el-Rufai, the president’s Man Friday, has exacerbated the distrust between Christians of Southern Kaduna and Muslims in the state.
Benue, a stronghold of the PDP, had no IDP camps before 2015. They voted for Buhari, elected an APC governor.
Today, thousands of indigenes live in IDP camps in Makurdi, afraid to go to their homes taken over and occupied by armed herdsmen. The victims blame the president for their woes, accusing him of vicarious liability because of his deliberate lack of action.
In 2015, the ubiquitous and very powerful college of retired generals that have determined how the political pendulum swung since the first military coup of January 15, 1966 were in Buhari’s column.
Today, many of them, including Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, Theophilus Danjuma, Aliyu Gusau, are not.
And some people say it does not matter. Really?
In 2015, the all-powerful Lagos-Ibadan wing of the human and civil rights community was behind Buhari. Today, some of them, including Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, have distanced themselves from him
In 2015, some of the country’s most prolific and powerful columnists were with Buhari. Today, the likes of Farooq Kperogi, Sonala Olumhense and Dele Momodu have openly rebelled against him.
In 2015, the international community, particularly the United States under President Barack Obama’s watch, and Britain with David Cameroon as Prime Minister, overtly supported Buhari.
I doubt if those countries are still queuing up behind him today.
In 2015, Buhari contested against Jonathan, a Southern minority Christian with no political base.
Today, he is running against one of the most formidable politicians in this dispensation, a man with a solid political base, clout and deep pocket, a Fulani Moslem, from a region – North East – that last held power when Tafawa Balewa from Bauchi State was the Prime Minister in the First Republic.
In 2015, the APC went into the election as a united, pragmatic and determined party hungry for power, eager to make a resounding political statement against a highly fractious, disorganised and disoriented PDP.
Today, the reverse is the case.
A strong, rejuvenated and virile PDP is going into Saturday’s election against a highly fractured, hemorrhaging APC where some governors are not on talking terms with the National Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole.
Five years ago, some governors elected on the platform of the PDP defected to the newly formed APC. It was a political tsunami. In 2018, three APC governors kissed goodbye to the party and went back to PDP together with the incumbent Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara. Most of the PDP bigwigs that defected to APC in 2014, thus making Buhari’s victory possible, have gone back to PDP. These include grassroots mobilisers like Rabiu Musa Kwakwanso, two-term governor of Kano State, former Defence Minister and scion of the Talakawa School of politics.
In many states, debilitating intra-party squabble has shredded APC. In Rivers for instance, the supremacy battle between Rotimi Amaechi, former governor of the state and incumbent Minister of Transportation and Senator Magnus Abe has ensure that the party will not field any candidate in these elections.
In 2015, it was the PDP presidential campaign convoys that were stoned, booed and jeered. Today, it is the APC’s. On Monday, Buhari nearly took a stone meant for Oshiomhole at a campaign rally in Abeokuta.
Yet, some people insist that Buhari still has his fabled 11 million votes locked up somewhere.
Short of blatant and unconscionable rigging, the kind that will be so obvious the electorate will be hard put tolerating or ignoring, Buhari will be roundly defeated on Saturday.
Another prediction: If Buhari falls on his own nepotistic political sword as he should, and will, on Saturday, that will be the beginning of the end of the APC.
The PDP has dramatically reinvented itself and staged a remarkable comeback. The APC cannot because of its inherent contradictions.
