I fully understand and Nigerians should fully understand that the naive belief in the North that their salvation or interest is better served by the PDP and not any opposition party in Nigeria, is a narrow-minded view.
I fully understand and Nigerians should fully understand that the naive belief in the North that their salvation or interest is better served by the PDP and not any opposition party in Nigeria, is a narrow-minded view.
For too long the North has gotten used to pitching their tent with the ruling party in Nigeria that they no longer understand what it means to lose an election or what it means to be in the opposition. Nigerian voters have a duty to serve them notice in 2011 that they are not only selling Nigeria short, they defeating the purpose of Democracy and denying Nigeria of the full benefits or dividends of Democracy by that kind of foolish mindset.
I have just read on the internet that some powerful northerners who do not welcome the emergence of Atiku Abubakar as their consensus candidate are ganging up to find another consensus candidate from another zone of the PDP in the North. The whole notion of a consensus candidate from the North is very silly in a highly diversified country like Nigeria. What if the South decides to replicate what the northerners have done. That would mean setting the North up against the South in a country where the South alone currently lays the golden egg that has financially sustained Nigeria for much of her 50 years as a sovereign state.
I am talking of crude oil from which no less than 98% of Nigerian revenues come from. Nigeria before and after independence used to be sustained mainly by agricultural produce like cocoa, timber, palm oil, fishing in the South and cotton, cattle, leather works and tanning, and groundnut pyramids in the North. It is only in the food basket of Nigeria around Zaki Ibiam in the old Benue Plateau that agriculture still counts for something in Nigeria. Nigerians no longer patronize farming as a major occupation. The main occupation of Nigerians today is partisan politics and the hooliganism that go with it.
Nigerian business men and money bags are busy running around looking for allocation of oil blocks and subsidizing it with illegal bunkering all at the expense of the Nigerian Commonwealth. The region where the oil comes from is totally neglected and impoverished and that is why groups like MEND are now fighting back. Nigeria is a bundle of contradiction where the North is feeding fat on revenues coming from oil while they are talking of running a consensus candidate to run out of town the first minority man from the oil-producing area to ever become President? Can you believe that?
Much of the revenues going to the 36 states of Nigeria including the Federal territory of Abuja, all come from oil and liquefied gas from the same Delta. Nigeria has more or less become a one product economy. If the oil wells dry up tomorrow, Nigeria as we know her today will be a goner. What does this observation say about the foolish move by the North to want to wrest power from the first Ijaw man to ever come near the presidency by producing a consensus candidate that the whole North can then run against him because the North claims the presidency has been zoned to them not by the Nigerian Constitution but by their party’s constitution. As far as the North is concerned, the PDP’s constitution trumps the Nigerian Constitution because it has always been that way and Nigerians have to live with that for good.
I can tell you that most of the 19 states in the North today will go bankrupt, in a heartbeat, if the oil revenues stop coming. The same thing is true of most of the 17 states in the South. Because the Northerners have managed to prove to the Southerners they are the boss when they smuggled in 19 states in the North to just 17 for the South and nobody raised any objection in the South, they now want to stretch their luck too far by now telling the south that if they sponsor a consensus candidate, the presidency is theirs for life. They forget that Democracy is a game of numbers and that if a realistic and accurate census is done, the south will easily show it is much larger in population than the north. Libya, in land mass, is much bigger than Nigeria but only a fraction of Nigeria’s population because much of Libya is desert just like much of northern Nigeria. How could the North be higher in population than the South? Awolowo had said it all when in 1974, at a convocation address at the University of Ife, he told the world only a mad person would buy the theory that Kano is twice the population of Lagos State. The north is still claiming that Kano State is still higher in population than Lagos state even after Jigawa has been carved out of the old Kano State. It was the most unsustainable statement that anyone could ever make, but the North is saying so and standing by that figure.
I come from Ondo State where the first Akure man to be appointed a military Governor at one point in our history in that State was nicknamed “Governor Ofifo” because at that particular time, Ondo State was ranked as one of the poorest states in Nigeria. That was before Ondo State was recognized as an oil producing states with a right to share out of the 13% oil revenues set aside for oil producing states in Nigeria. If you discount the oil revenues coming to Ondo State today, there is little left to write home about. The state will be as poor as the proverbial Church rat. I laugh when I heard the new Governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Fayemi promising the moon to his people, and saying he wants to introduce Social Security benefits or safety net for the old and the aged in Ekiti in addition to free education and free health or medical coverage in a society where the concept of Insurance is a total mirage.
Dr. Fayemi whom I support and whom I like very much, has definitely meant well, but if I was advising him and my brother, Ganiyu Owolabi, his new Secretary to Government, I would just tell them to stop raising too high an expectation that could later come back to haunt them. When Sani Abacha created Ekiti State, he knew Ekiti State was not viable. He did, it nonetheless, to get some support from the so-called intellectual power house of Nigeria where every household can boast of one Ph.D or another from coast to coast in Ekiti Land. That is the home of the “Agbes” and the “Alukos” of this world as hinted in a satire or play upon words by the late Samuel Ladoke Akintola.
If you take away revenues coming from the Federal Government from Ekiti, you are left with nothing other than the tourist attraction of the Ikogosi Warm Springs which is yet to be fully developed into a revenue generating venture. The other cash crop people talk about in Ekiti is Igbemo Rice which cannot be exported to bring in additional revenues because it does not even satisfy local demand in Ekiti talk less of export to other states. Dr. Fayemi therefore has his job cut out for him as he takes over from Engineer Oni. He will soon find out like they say in Nigeria that “khaki no be leather” Ekiti is a very poor state. Dr. Fayemi would have to work very hard to turn that perception around without a heavy reliance on Federal revenues.
The point I am making is that oil revenue is what has been sustaining Nigeria. The North producing a consensus candidate whose sole mission is making sure that power returns back to the North because the presidency has been zoned to the North can only serve the interest of the North, on the short run, and not the ultimate interest of Nigeria as we all want to see her. No less than two of the opposition parties in Nigeria are going to end up nominating northerners as their flag bearers in the 2011 elections. General Muhammadu Buhari and young ideologically-driven Ribadu are two of such candidates and either of them would make a better president than any of the consensus candidates the PDP may be putting forward. The PDP has outlived its usefulness in Nigeria and it must be forced give room for new blood to take over the governance of Nigeria, if for any reason Goodluck Jonathan is knocked out of the PDP primaries by their consensus candidate which is a dog dream at best. The PDP is now doing to herself what it has been doing to undermine other opposition parties in Nigeria for so long. The world has turned one full circle for the PDP in Nigeria and we must all welcome her implosion under the burden of her own weight as a party which thinks she is too big to fail.
What better consensus candidate can the Northerners be looking for, if they are really looking out for the best interest of Nigeria and not their own selfish interest? Is Buhari not a northerner and is Ribadu not one? The opposition parties in Nigeria have shown greater maturity in the way they have approached the selection of their flag bearers. Since no opposition parties has ever been allowed to win any presidential election in Nigeria because the PDP has been rigging those elections as the Appeal Court decisions are now proving to Nigeria from Benin City to Ado Ekiti and from Akure to Osogbo. If the 2011 elections are free and fair, there is no way in the world the PDP can win because Nigerians seriously want a change and we truly deserve a change. We do not want to continue to re-circle the same generation of leaders that have been ruling the country for 50 years and counting with nothing to show for it.
Any political party that has never been in the valley is not in a position to understand how it feels and what it takes to keep herself on the mountain top. That has been the main problem of the PDP. The party has no motivation to want to work hard to drastically change the “status quo” to really move Nigeria forward. Let the voters give them not just a yellow card but a red one for a change, and they would learn their lessons the hard way.
Many of their members who cannot wait in the wilderness for any length of time will do a somersault and do what their consensus candidate, Atiku Abubakar has been notorious for, by moving from one party to another in his morbid craze for the presidency at all cost. He single-handedly bankrolled the Action Congress into a full-fledged opposition Party in Nigeria, but because he lacked the patience and any core convictions as a leader, he ran back to the PDP despite his condemnation of that Party when he left. He is again bad-mouthing Olusegun Obasanjo today because he feared that Obasanjo might not support him. Don’t be surprised if you see Atiku tomorrow running back to Ota to recant all his condemnation of Obasanjo. He is that kind of politician, and politicians of that caliber don’t go far in politics.
In more civilized countries of the world, what Atiku had done would have been the end of his career, but in Nigeria, anything goes, because the PDP is out to ruin Nigeria and to keep her under perpetual bondage forever.
Nigerians should rather vote for individuals like Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu and Chief Bisi Akande who have remained in the AC to fight the PDP to the very end because they have a different ideology from the PDP and they have the courage of their convictions to fight on. They suffered hell doing so but they never buckled under pressure. Those are the kind of leaders Nigeria needs. Today their perseverance is paying off. The Appeal Courts have now nullified the election of no less than 4 PDP Governors in favor of the ACN and the Labor Party in Ondo State. Oshiomole, Mimiko , Fayemi and now Aregbesola have now regained their stolen mandates and the Southwest is right on her way back to the fine legacies and moral rectitude of Obafemi Awolowo in the old Western Region. “Allahu Aqbar” God is truly awesome!
The big losers today are shameless turncoats like Ebeno Topsy who has betrayed Awolowo. The spineless man is now criticizing the Judiciary for making themselves the last hope of the common man in Nigeria by nullifying the elections of PDP Governors who did not win, to begin with. The big winners in Nigeria today are men like Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu and Chief Bisi Akande and Lai Mohammed and their colleagues in the Action Congress.
The great Ahmed Tinubu has now proved himself to be the natural successor to Obafemi Awolowo as leader of the Yorubas and the Yorubas must now acknowledge that loud and clear. Ahmed Tinubu has fought a good fight and he has shown his peers how to lead. The northerners have a case study in Ahmed Tinubu. Their pursuit of a consensus candidate is a wrong-headed strategy for a country as complex as Nigeria. They must learn that the PDP does not have a monopoly of wisdom in Nigeria. They must understand that having the opposition to take over power in Nigeria is the best way to keep the PDP on their toes to want to do better in the future if they ever regain power again. That is the way politics is played in more civilized and more progressive countries around the world. Nigeria needs to emulate that is my point.
I seize this opportunity to congratulate the new Sheriff in town, Goodluck Jonathan and Yar Adua before him for letting the judiciary do their job without let or hindrance and for not putting the Judiciary under pressure to continue to pervert the cause of justice in Nigeria like the previous administrations before them have done.
I salute the judges of the Appeal Court at Ibadan for doing a marvelous job. You only need to read their verdict and the very sound reasoning behind it to understand that the Judiciary has come a long way in Nigeria. My only regret is that Governors Oyinlola, Agagu and Oni should never have been kept in office for as long as they did, because getting justice in Nigeria should not have been delayed for as long as we saw. The lower courts or the election tribunals in Nigeria have all done a lousy job by generally perverting the cause of Justice and leaving the Appeal Court to be the one to clean up their mess.
I seize this opportunity to congratulate Rauf Aregbesola for calling the bluff of Governor Oyinlola, and taking him out with ignominy, and Ahmed Tinubu for his great leadership and tenacity in taking back the Southwest from the PDP Gestapo. Long Live Ahmed Tinubu and Long Live Awo!
I rest my case.
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