APC Changed The Game Completely by choosing Osinbajo

I like to talk politics but I don’t like to write it. People like myself are regarded as ‘armchair’ analyst and one with limited knowledge on the subject. That set aside, if you have to talk about Nigerian politics, even armchair analyst have a good knowledge and sense of what could be if you open your eyes very well. What is there that is hard to say. Didn’t we hear and didn’t they confirm that $9.3 million was on a flight to South Africa? Have we heard the last of it? NO.

Wasn’t Stella Oduah accused of spending N255 million on just two bullet proof cars which cuts far above what she had powers to append her signature on? She now runs the campaign organization of the GEJ re-election camp. Allison Maduekwe or whatever her name is will forever be eked in luxury and wanton wealth for generations to come. Is it her fault that over 100 million Nigerians are living in cluster poverty and class want? NO

So, as much as I am an armchair political analyst, I can speak boldly about the things I see and the things I think I would want to see in my dear country. I traveled to Dubai during the summer and my perspective changed totally (Well, it wasn’t as if I didn’t know already) that things can be better in the country if we want it to.

Jonathan’s problem isn’t that he is slow or not an orator as many would want us to believe. His major Hercules heel is that he is classily clueless. A president that had to wait for Malala, the Pakistani teenage girl and human rights activist before he could call the parents of the chibok missing girls to Aso rock? He didn’t even acknowledge them in his acceptance speech for his presidential party s’election. 

There is no doubt that he is trying the best that he can but his best could have sailed through when Nigeria had a population of 50 million people and when internet was a thing of dream and when the Naira was equal to a dollar. Today, in this jet age pari passu the high poverty rate amongst young innovative Nigerians, no excuse is excusable. It is either you are getting it right or you are right out of the door.

And that is where APC has gotten it all completely right. The emergence of Buhari as the Presidential candidate for the Valentine Election has opened a vista of plausible ticket to Aso Rock in Abuja. Not forgetting that in 2011 at the last election, despite his ANPP party’s lack of popularity in the South East and South West, he got a considerable number of votes that showed his popularity amongst the teeming Northern voters and some south west Muslim faithful. 

This article is not to sell Buhari as a candidate of choice (Nigerians are definitely convinced who their next President would be), it is to try and explain the political maneuvering and positioning the opposition party has been playing which is garnering sympathy for maximum sell-ability. This is not really about Jonathan’s ability to win Buhari at the polls, he already did that in 2011 but in a completely different scenario. It was a year of sentiment; (2015 will be a year of sympathy too; just that it will be a completely different player who will gain from this sympathy) a year when Nigerians voted a guy simply because he didn’t grow up with ‘a shoe’ and Nigerians didn’t bother to check the content of his character. The ‘now grown man’ with so many shoes ironically has used those shoes to step on the same Nigerians that voted for him. They didn’t bother to check if he had expertise in administration, qualitative reasoning and military control and strategy.

After all, God chose him. He was the man who didn’t want to become a deputy in Bayelsa state but somehow managed to become the governor after the then convicted state ‘lootist’ Gov. Alamaiyesegha was caught and convicted for corruption. The same man now has state pardon and I heard he wants to run for another political office. Interesting!

Not so soon will Nigerians forget the calamitous incidence of the 1^st of January, 2012 debacle. They woke up to the announcement of an increment in PMS, from the assailable N65 per litre to the ridiculous N143 per litre. After some avoidable scrabbles and a total shut down of the country’s economy, Labour, Pressure groups and the impoverished population had to accept N97 as the new price and every New Year, the bitter pill of a New Year gift by Mr. President can’t seem to leave the taste bud.

On this front, you can see why it is no gainsaying that the citizens want change. It doesn’t and wouldn’t matter if that face and phase came from the PDP or APC (as witnessed in Ekiti) but in the kind of candidate that they can trust, one who has a pedigree of leadership and a track record of sincerity, honesty and strong character. Politicians don’t have permanent friends, today they are at each other’s throat and the next they are sleeping in the same bed (case in study; Aregbesola vs Oyinlola, OBJ vs Atiku, etc)

If politicians have devised means to accommodate each other irrespective of their different ideologies (or lack of one), the citizens too have left behind voting in line with party affinity or ideology back in UPN days for individual candidates that can bring the desired change. Buhari’s, or should I say APC’s joker came in the person of a renowned and well respected technocrat and accomplished career man, professor Yemi Osibajo. He is a man of many reputations and on this front the party has scored a fantastic goal towards their wrestling of the Presidential totem from the PDP.

Professor Yemi Osibajo is a true Yoruba son, an unblemished attorney general of Lagos and more (electorally viable) importantly, an RCCG pastor. Why did I put this into it? I will explain. Last month I was listening to a radio program and a lady called into Inspiration Fm 92.3 to lament about how impossible it was for her to get her PVC (permanent voter’s card). What struck me most was the statement she made after some vociferous recant, ‘if not that our G.O (i.e Pastor E.A Adeboye) told us to bring the PVC to camp during the convention, I won’t be bothering myself…’

That part hit me with the reality on ground. Christians in Nigeria are as fanatic as Muslims are and they probably harken to their G.O’s voice more than they would their president or any public office holder. Professor Yemi Osibajo is a pastor in RCCG and a close confidant of the G.O and I used to listen to his message on radio every Sunday evening years back. I heard Buhari consulted with the G.O yesterday and asked for his blessings before announcing his choice VP. imagine the G.O today say 'Hey Redeemers, vote for your own son Osibajo', I am almost certain that he would have the vote of about 90% of the about 10 million worshippers + ripple effect of such statement.

That is a master stroke because RCCG command at least 10 million strong memberships in Nigeria alone and most ministries respect and adore the RCCG, some even come for major conventions and pay obeisance to the MOG. With the RCCG, and as a ripple effect other Christian bodies and organizations strongly behind the APC candidates because of his affinities with the church and the North in support of Sai Buhari as the Muslim warlord they have always known him to be, only rigging will bring GEJ back to Aso Rock in 2015.

GEJ is reaping from his uncalculated and anti-people policies that had put him at logger heads with many government and pressure groups. His lack of will to visibly pursue and prosecute malfeasance in his government led people to tag his tenure as a ‘corrupt administration’. The OBJ administration might have had more corrupt officials but people can’t judge it thus because we all could see that he pursued to a candid focal end the apprehension and prosecution of ‘big names’, one which GEJ just granted state pardon.

If GEJ loses the 2015 elections, it will be because he failed himself. He fell into the clandestine estate from his supposed sentimental zeniths all by his own actions or inactions and because he didn’t have enough bite in his teeth to tackle the many faceted problems facing this unique nation. Yet, when he finally got his teeth cut, he used it on the wrong set of people; the Nigerian people and players who assisted him to the position he found himself. 

The ball has been set rolling and it sure will be a very interesting political exercise come 2015. If I didn’t want to vote for Buhari before, there is no way I wouldn’t want to vote for Professor Osibajo. Just like it will be easy for me and most Lagosians, as I have heard, to vote for Jimi Agbaje despite the fact that he is in the PDP. No one cares anymore whether or whether’nt the party your name and face appears in; after all, it takes less than an hour to cross to another party and claim emancipation.

With Professor/Pastor Osibajo in the race and not Tinubu or Fashola, it will be easy to dissuade people from seeing the APC as a party that wants to Islamise the country (I never believed that crap though) like most detractors would want us to believe. I can’t wait to see how all these pans out.