Another season of tension between PDP, APC

WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER

info@medaner.com | justme4justice@yahoo.com

We are here again to the season of campaign build-up to another major election year. In our unique character as a nation and people, we have started throwing up everything feasible and propagating every message possible to access relevance or gain some more undeserving acceptance. It is an accepted etiquette in democratic system for political parties in the system to organise electoral campaign strategies and electorate contact rhetoric that enriches their share of the electorate and thus a strong reason for documentation of performances as a critical integral part of a thriving democratic system; one that becomes the stronghold of political parties and individuals towards campaign messages and approaches.
Democracy cannot however be divorced from morality and justice; the accepted standard for playing the game does not include frame-up lies, forged propaganda and coated fake narratives that wrongly paint an opponent in bad light and take away probity and integrity from its procedures. Eventually, when the process that we permit to thrive is ballooned with immorality and injustice, it boomerangs on all our societal systems and produces deviants in both the leaders and the led of the order that we experience in Nigeria currently.
This is the case of juxtaposition between PDP and APC in the Nigeria. What is given and allowed, the languages and rhetoric that are permissible, the extent we go without restraints are all the undoing of our systems and the foundation of the ills we suffer and continue to suffer. The errors that overtime become infectious and spontaneously spread across sectors and even sacred institutions until nowhere is spared. The contamination has reached the once respected and professional media industry which is now the marketplace of conjured fake information that continues to pull the country down; the streets revels in propagated fake news and propaganda which seems to be preferred above truth and reality; and the politicians and political parties invest5 in the propagation of falsity that engage the two at the detriment of societal health.
We went through the humiliating ordeal of insane fake propaganda in 2015, and again in 2019 and have constantly have to live with PDP’s non-relenting fabrication of self-serving lies all through the dispensation till now; but now, the gear is changing, as PDP is now in top gear in its attempt to discredit the ruling party and possibly redirect the political direction of the country by 2023 – in its favour.
There are many to pick from, but as disturbing as they are, the singular narrative PDP is picking on to anchor its campaign for the 2023 race is mostly appalling and seriously disturbing to the health and wealth of the country; a distraction to the democratic wellness of the country. The decision of PDP to literarily undermine the huge achievements of APC and the President Muhammadu Buhari Administration; the conscious build-up of PDP minions across the country to propagate “a non-performing” APC that has deteriorated the nation, and call for the country’s return to where it was pre-2015 sound both ridiculous and unbelievable.
PDP, speaking through Sheik Khalid and a host of their leaders has continued to echo the need to overthrow the ruling All Progressives Congress from Aso Rock because the party has underperformed and left the country worse than it met it in 2015 when it shockingly took power from them. They have been urging Nigerians to work to return the country back to the “good era” of PDP government; and surprisingly, the party has not realised that by taking that part, it is digging its own grave. PDP fails to understand, or perhaps chooses not to understand that there are facts that could not be blinded by layers of lies or propaganda, no matter how well they thrive. A section of the country might choose to trail along the failed party to believe and accept the lies they project, but the other majority, regardless of the challenges the country faces, would always recognise reality and the changes they have seen. Every sane and rational citizen wouldn’t need a third person intervention to see the marked positive changes from where the country was pre-2015.
Perhaps, what PDP wants us to return to are the years of Father Christmas, the years of economic sabotages of the country wealth, the years where the few in the corridor of power appropriate the wealth of the country for personal usages and then throw crumbs to the streets to create the impression of a booming economy and a flow of money when actually the country is decaying for a lack of real, tangible economic development measured in terms of infrastructural and social rejuvenation. PDP really unrepentantly wants us to return back to the era of talks and no evidence of action; the era when bogus projects are initiated and completed only on paper and word of mouth.
PDP for all they care for, want the country to return back to those dark days of total insecurity in the country. Today, we still witness insecurity, but we have been seeing conscious and serious government interventions that are curbing the veracity of insecurity in the country. We see daily members of the insurgents who fail to surrender their arms, as well as bandits and kidnappers being sent to the grim reaper for ultimate judgment. Yet PDP, thinking we are all shortsighted, wants to take us back to the days when Boko Haram was having a field day in the entire Northeast, where they marched in convoys in broad daylight humiliating Nigerians in the axis without resistance from the Nigeria government under PDP. The days when terror became emboldened by the government’s non-action to spread its tentacles all the way to the seat of power of the country, until nowhere in Abuja was safe.
Perhaps, PDP seriously wants us to go back to the era of ‘stealing isn’t corruption.’ The era of the Dasukis, Diezanis and a host of them that turned the nation’s Central Bank into their private accounts and made a bastard of the nation’s finance by the huge financial crimes they committed against the country and all of us. Seriously, PDP wants us to return back to those days when agencies of government such as NDDC was more or less partitioned by agreement like the historical Berlin Conference as birthright of select citizens who without any fear greedily shared the revenues accrued to the Commission as apportioned, to the point that a single individual was reportedly awarded up to 300 contracts in insane sums in the Niger Delta region with a second unwritten contractual agreement that the contracts are not to be executed, but just to collect the payments. According to the recent NDDC forensic report ordered by President Buhari, only 9 of these contracts were completed till date.
They want us to return to the days when individuals like Edwin Clarke will be presented as trustworthy statesmen, when they are actually the worms eaten off the life of the country, particularly his region of Niger Delta. Otherwise, how could a supposed elder statesman and a fighter for the wellness and development of a section of the country, also be the same person who was awarded a contract of N7,973, 339, 024.74 to his company, Genuine Construction Engineering for a shoreline protection project in Nembe Ogbolomabiri community in Bayelsa state in 2010 and was mobilised to the tune of 90% of the awarded sum, another contract worth 595 million naira in 2013 to his Panama Construction Limited, among several others, collected the money and failed to execute the contracts. Yet, he is a vocal voice for the redemption of Nigeria via returning to the PDP era. These same politicians are the ones misleading the good people of Niger Delta that it is the Northerners stealing the wealth of Niger Delta and would go to any length as we have seen in 2015 and 2019 to support PDP’s return to power for the apparent selfish reason of covering up their misdeeds. That is one clear example of self-interest in politics but an amoral one as it denies the Niger Delta public the services they so much deserve.
Definitely, Nigeria and Nigerians are not returning to that dark era of Nigerian cassava bread on paper, nor of the Second Niger Bridge on paper. Not in this country again; we would not be deceived that the price of PMS is less than hundred naira when in reality some section of the country buys the product for as much as five hundred naira and have grown to see fuel scarcity as part of our national existence. Today, we might be paying more for the product, but we have hope of self-sufficiency beaming in our sight in all the indigenous refineries that are coming to life soon.
No, we are not returning back to darkness, the era of PDP abuse of national trust is permanently gone. And everyone knows that for sure.

God Bless The Federal Republic Of Nigeria!