by Ganiyu Adeolu
In the past few months, the All Progressives Congress (APC), the leading opposition party in Nigeria, has heaped all kinds of insults on President Goodluck Jonathan and his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP, APC claims, is the worst thing to have happened to Nigeria, a corrupt outfit merely distributing rice to the people every four years instead of creating jobs, as Mr Babatunde Fashola, Lagos governor, says with a bold face. In short, PDP is synonymous with darkness while APC is synonymous with light. It follows then that APC governors are the ones who provide Nigerians with a great light, unlike the PDP governors who walk in darkness. This is the simplistic gospel that APC has been taking round the country, believing that Nigerians lack the power to sift between fact and falsehood.
Indeed the airwaves are so suffused with “CHANGE” and APC apologists so intolerant of dissenting views that the party might justly be accused of intellectual anarchy. For starters, Buhari, the arrowhead of CHANGE, does not even know where his certificates are. When he ran for president between 2003 and 2011, he did not consider his academic qualifications an issue, and so did not depose to any affidavit. This time around, however, buoyed by an overdose of confidence, Buhari raced to court and swiftly deposed to a lie. Is Buhari’s affidavit not perjury? Does the rule “He who comes to equity must come with clean hands” no longer apply just because he happens to be Buhari in this instance? What is progressive about a false affidavit? And what does the Buhari narrative say about those who cleared him to run within the APC? Had the certificate mess been Jonathan’s, would the nation by now not have been under the siege of learned SANs, columnists and Editorial Board writers sermonizing about integrity and calling the President names?
Couldn’t Buhari have enrolled for the GCE all these years and gained admission into any university of his choice, particularly since 1999? Surely, funds could not have been his problem because a former Nigerian Head of State can never be poor given his stupendous pension!
So, Abacha should be praised for moving Nigeria forward? Hear Wikipedia: “During Abacha’s regime, he and his family reportedly stole a total of £5 billion from the country’s coffers. In 2004, Abacha was listed as the fourth most corrupt leader in history. An estimated $1.4 billion in cash was delivered in this way. In March, 2014, the United States Department of Justice revealed that it had frozen more than $458 million believed to have been illegally obtained by Abacha and other corrupt officials.”
How can a fraud rescue Nigeria? The APC’s change mantra is a fallacy. It has no chance of advancing Nigeria’s quest for development and will proceed no further than the pages of newspapers and online forums.
Ganiyu Adeolu is a freelance writer.
Opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author
