Nigerians are aghast over the ballooning list of people who want to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari as president. There were at least 40 such people last Friday.
As most of these people are known to be the men of easy virtue, many Nigerians are outraged. By the time this story is published, the list may have expanded even further. This article aims to explain what this phenomenon means, and what may be going on.
It is true: some of the people who want to be president, in the case of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) paying as one million naira—I repeat, one million naira—in filing, not campaign engagement, deeply offend public sensibilities. We are talking of about four billion naira accruing to the party so far.
Some of these presidential hopefuls—a term I use very loosely—are on the record as having caseloads of crimes they have got away with or are getting away with in a country that is the world’s easiest in which to get away with crime. Given that such persons also claim to believe in God, it stands to reason that they ought to have been making public penitence, including accounting for their offences.
In Nigeria, nobody does, and they have not.
Everyone knows we run a kleptocracy, not a democracy. In a democracy, many of the persons who have so far publicly declared for this race would be in jail, given how much they desecrated their previous offices or have demonstrated they are incapable of giving.
The first implication of this deluge of presidential candidates, therefore, is that Nigeria is a joke, a drunken, drugged, sick joke. We are not the story of a joke; we are the joke. Only in a joke—a drunken, drugged, sick joke—would it make sense for persons who are either drunk, drugged, or sick (literally or figuratively), to stagger into the streets in broad daylight to anoint themselves as presidential material.
To be sure, some of these people who are campaigning for president in the palaces of traditional rulers did go to school. While we have endured so-called leaders and officials who lied about their education and offered dubious certificates in evidence, some of these presidential pretenders have documentary evidence they studied and were so certified.
But going to school and being educated are two different things. That is particularly so in a situation where, rather than serve as a fire to melt the wax of indifference, ruthlessness and incompetence around you, your “education” seems to make you so oblivious to that wax that you become a part of it and harden into rock with it.
As part of this joke, then—in this political charade—the buffet and the bar are free. You eat, free. You drink, free. You smoke, free. On the way out, you may even collect “transport money” or they have it logged to the trunk of your car. It is free because it is government money. Sometimes, you are even surprised at the largesse in the trunk of your car because—wait—it is YOUR government!
Yes, your government…and therefore your money. What deeper power can there be than to realize that all of this—this vast estate of money and power and influence as far as the eyes cannot even see—is yours?
That must be a liberating loss of ‘innocence’. Innocence that you are human, or at least were when you ran for office and promised to care for and about humans.
Such liberation—such power—is alcohol itself. Such alcohol that you lose sense of time and place and matter. You see enemies everywhere, but you are not the enemy. And certainly, EVERYONE ought to be able to see that your eyes are the very best in the world!
Such liberation—such power—is a drug. Such a powerful drug that you can fly, and everyone can see that you fly above them. Which is why it is wrong of the NDLEA, you sneer, to advertise that it wants to test presidential aspirants to certify them as being chemically fit for the race.
Yes, there are many others seeking the presidency, but can’t the drug law authorities see that you are simply flying higher than everyone else because you are higher than anyone else?
Remember: of APC’s flood of candidates, we are talking about a government which hawked C-H-A-N-G-E. I like to remind Nigerians of this 2014 Manifesto by which they begged and blackmailed for power in 2015. Their standard of measurement was the PDP, which they promised to be superior to, but to which they quickly became inferior.
Read it and see if what APC has done and failed to do is not man’s inhumanity to self, which is far worse than man’s inhumanity to man. Read with it, “What Buhari Promised Nigerians,” as published by Vanguard newspaper on May 28, 2015, one day before he took power. Read also, “Campaign Promises of Buhari (and APC),” as documented by The Cable on May 29, 2015, the day he arrived in his El Dorado, the land of abundant power but not of responsibility.
Somehow, this dung heap of history has managed to yield a mountain of people who have become so rich that each of them is able to buy a candidature form for N100m (they are often cleverly “gifted” the form), none of whom refers to the documents above. For seven years this same junta has participated in making a jungle of Nigeria, in arrogant insouciance, with none of them squeaking in caution.
Why has this arisen, you ask? Well, they have seen power so closely they are power itself. In the Buhari Years, presidential power has been so cheapened it is now merely an absurdity anyone can have. Remember that these are people who have seen Buhari at close-up: worked with him, played with him, eaten with him, seen him react, seen him sneer at Nigerians, and have come to calculate that the only tree-top that is superior to what they already have is what he has.
This is why the third-most of third-rate officials, ex-officials, standby-officials, expired former officials and glorified palace officials want the job. This is what typically happens when there is a vacuum, and excellence is thought to be unnecessary.
APC has become a place where the criminal does not even bother to leave the scene of the crime: he wants to benefit from his crime.
Clearly, APC never intended to rescue Nigeria. Nigerians should offer none of them the credibility of claiming to possess solutions unless they first accept responsibility for the part they have played in it. Buhari’s Fulani agenda, about which I address singer Tosin Ajao’s story next week, makes every party chieftain complicit. Claiming to be a presidential candidate without addressing the nepotism and irresponsibility by which it has been fostered and permitted to throw Nigeria into chaos is a crime.
In the end, the party will most likely field Buhari’s choice as a “consensus” candidate, no matter how filthy or drugged or sick that person is.
Journalists will forgive. And the public will forget.
This column welcomes rebuttals from interested government officials.
• @Sonala.Olumhense
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