Is'haq Modibbo Kawu
9 July 2009
analysis
Abuja — Last Friday, an agitated member of the All Nigeria People's Party [ANPP] made a very angry call to me. He complained that contrary to expectations, the much-vaunted effort to effect 'regime change' in the leadership of the ANPP has ended as a big charade.
The incompetent leadership of Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and Sa'idu Kumo, has not only survived all the efforts that were purportedly in the works to sack it, but it seemed to have been emboldened by their fizzling out. Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and Sa'idu Kumo, like cats of many political lives, are sitting pretty; they are consolidating themselves and working assiduously to the benefit of their PDP minders. Long live incompetence; fare thee well quislings! The crumbs from the tables of the PDP will continue to feed thee!
The story of the effort to remove the ANPP leadership dominated pre- NEC discussions in several caucuses of the party. A forum of ANPP Gubernatorial/Senatorial candidates had issued a well-circulated release that enumerated the woeful state of the party under the current leadership as well as the serial betrayal it has suffered in the past, in the hands of other leaders working at the behest of the PDP. If that forum's position was canvassed clearly in the public space, even more clandestine manoeuvrings were taking place at other levels. It was said that the Kano State Governor, Ibrahim Shekarau, actually financed the meeting in the first place. It was a move read to be part of an effort to seize the leadership of the party, in preparation for a shot at the presidency in 2011. Other governors, led by Ali Modu Sheriff of Borno would not allow Shekarau's hijack of the party apparatus.
On the other hand, Edwin Ume-Ezeoke's son was also said to have mobilized party members from the South East, to avert his father's disgrace from party leadership. Shekarau was not politically man enough to accept that he was the financier of the push for a change in the party leadership and therefore backed down. It was this clash of ambitions which ensured the survival of Edwin Ume-Ezeoke and Sa'idu Kumo. The hopes for a change of direction was scuttled, and for the umpteenth time, the ANPP was left with greater paralysis and a deepening of its irrelevance as a party which can somehow engineer or even be part of building an alternative political platform for the Nigerian people. Many of its leaders are working strenuously to weaken it further before eventually crossing into the only 'mega party' in town, the PDP; yet others are sworn to ensure it denudes so much that it cannot be a credible platform for General Buhari to run as presidential candidate in 2011.
Those who run the ANPP have made a uniquely negative contribution to Nigerian politics; they took what started out as the most vibrant political party of this dispensation, and became its undertakers, bleeding it to death gradually in years of dishonourable service as agents' provocateurs of the PDP. In the states under its control, the PDP's authoritarian method is also replicated. It is treachery which has no parallel in contemporary political practice, but a disreputable record out of Nigeria. If the truth be told, those who believe the party can still be rescued delude themselves, because the Don Etiebet-UmeEzeoke attitude has eaten too deep into the party. It is very lucrative business for those who betray the party; they get a lot from their minders in the PDP. Besides, those who want change have not done the painstaking work of mobilization to galvanize change within the comatose structures of their party. That is why the ANPP will always be locked into an interminable crisis! The ANPP died a long time ago, and what the undertaker-leaders do, is to present the embalmed body of the party in the public place, once in a while. That is the essence of the charade we witnessed last week.
POLITICAL LIFE AS FETISHISM
Last week Nigerians saw naked pictures of a member of the Ogun State House of Assembly, Hon. Wale Alausa, performing some ritual oath taking that has since become a source of controversy. The two sides to the story, Governor Gbenga Daniel and his opponents in the Assembly have tried to favourably spin the story. Ambassador Sam Edem, former Chairman of the NDDC, was also in court on Wednesday, explaining how he lost N715million to a 34 year old herbalist.
In Ogun State, the governor that released the pictures of Alausa, said the oaths were taken against him, but Alausa countered that it was ordered by governor Daniel to extort obedience from candidates of the PDP in the last election. Ambassador Edem on his part said the young herbalist threatened him as a 'militant' to extort the money. But the herbalist, Mathew Sonoma, said Amb. Edem lost the capacity to have sex but he cured him of the problem. Sonoma said Edem still owed N200million for services he rendered. Just before the 2007 elections, naked pictures of a South East state governor also emerged from the Okija Shrine. In response to the revelations from Ogun, a former Speaker of the Oyo State House of Assembly, Hon. Kehinde Ayoola, confirmed that most Nigerian politicians are cultists. The reader might recall that after the 1999 elections, the losing candidate, Chief Olu Falae, presented an affidavit in court that as a member of the Ogboni fraternity, the disgraced despot, Olusegun Obasanjo, was unfit to be Nigeria's president!
Our political elite's consciousness is still too hostage to pre-modern rituals and mumbo-jumbo, to be able to provide leadership for change and modernity. The world of the Twenty First century can only be apprehended through a scientific world view and frankly, it has no use for the cult practices which our backward elite manipulate for advantage and control. It is no surprise that our schools are not redoubts of scientific knowledge today. Identity, cast as ethnicity and religion, undermines the space of critical inquiry in our society. It is so frightening how people argue for rituals, cults and those belief systems which belong in the times when nature completely dominated mankind, and he was only capable of the rudimentary practices of primeval man. Our nation must discover the path of scientific knowledge, not the absurdity of members of the elite with distended stomachs- the product of over-indulgent consumption, swearing oaths in shrines. What we saw last week about the cults of Ogun State as well as Amb. Edem's naked tango in a cemetery with an herbalist, expose just how primitive Nigeria's ruling elite truly are!
FROM EDUCATION&HEALTH TO ROADS
Last week, the David Mark-led Senate, moved budgetary allocations from education and health to the construction of Abuja roads. It was done at the request of President Yar'Adua, a former teacher! Nigeria's fate, in the hands of Yar'Adua, resembles the witch in the proverb, who keeps giving birth to girls: it multiplies the tribe of witches! Wahala dey o!
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