2023: Our responsibility to play the game differently

WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER

info@medaner.com, justme4justice@yahoo.com

The Nigeria 2023 general elections are around the corner and parties preparations to select reputable candidates to fly their banners for elective positions are in top gear. The All Progressives Congress (APC) is not left out. Political discussions and permutations are on, on who takes over the topmost office across states and at the center in 2023. Just like the periodic game of politics, political parties and politicians alike are stepping up their games to endear themselves to the electorate and Nigerians and get allocated sizable space within the local and national support bases. 

And like the usual practice and our political custom, politicians are suddenly becoming more humane and closer to the people they have abandoned over the last four years suddenly, they are overwhelmingly conscious of the challenges of the country they have altogether failed to do anything about since the last dispensation of electioneering in 2019. An Atiku Abubakar that spent the last approximately three years away from the country minding his businesses and family and had nothing to do with the internal problems and challenges Nigeria faced has suddenly returned to become the messiah the country needed to get to Eldorado. 

They have come again with deceit and lie-coated tongues to tell us how much they care about the country and how they are individually the best hands to salvage the nation. The same elements who had been governors of their various states overtime and had left behind irrevocable and incontestable records of state dilapidation and economic abuses are suddenly very good enough to run the entire country. 

This is a very critical period for us as a people and as a nation. The time for us altogether to recognise that our nation as a federated system needs the constituting states to wake up to their responsibilities as perhaps the most critical in the development mix of the country and the leaders we elect at that level waking up to deliver their mandates as enshrined in the rules and regulations that established the positions they occupy. This is a time for us as Nigerians and as electorate to focus more on elections at state level; this is a time for us to elect governors who would judiciously utilise resources at the state level for the benefit of their citizens rather than sitting on them, converting them to personal properties and blaming the federal government as cover for their non-performances. We cannot afford anymore the non-performers, particularly at the state levels.

The media space is agog with speculations of who the parties would be throwing forward as their presidential flag bearer for the 2023 election. The presumption remains that the ruling party, APC, is very interested in the pedigree and overall capacity of the eventual emerged candidate to deliver the presidency once again to the party. Opinion makers and social media pundits, even elements within the party have been playing up the alleged presidential aspirations of a number of high ranking party members from the southern part of the country. It is the same ball game in the main opposition party, PDP. The list of touted names include the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, Former Lagos State Governor and APC National leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the PDP candidate in the 2019 election, Atiku Abubakar, the former governor of Anambra state, Peter Obi, the incumbent governor of Ekiti State and Chairman of Nigeria Governors’ Forum, Kayode  Fayemi, and the former Governor of Rivers State, the current Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi and the incumbent governor of the state, Nyesom Wike and a host of several others.

Getting it right in 2023, to continue the great legacy of the Muhammadu Buhari Administration would be a task for all Nigerians. The past had been distressing enough for us as a people and a country; we had passed through very difficult and repeating challenges over the decades that are precipitated by poor governance, bred corruption and self-inflicted insecurity. It is now time for us to look beyond the deceits of politicians who now present themselves as messiahs, craving for our support, with crumbs of our collective resources that they have stolen and cornered for themselves. It is time for us to see beyond the lies of “Nigerians love me and want me to become their president,” the lies of “Nigerians are begging me to contest,” the lies of “Nigerians youths paid for my nomination form.”

They are all lies; the repeat of the rhetoric they engage to rob us of our rights and collective capacity to decide who rule us since independence. In the last few weeks, I have taken much time to ruminate on the state of infrastructural and socio-economic development of states like Anambra, Rivers, Delta, and several others across the regions of the country who have their incumbent or past governors presenting the states as their stepping stones to the presidency. It is absurd how the governor of Rivers State, that has nothing to show for the huge resources at the disposal of the state, which remain so undeveloped beyond the parochial view of governors who saw few road constructions and parks as presentable developments they could be proud of as reasons for their popular support to become president of Nigeria. 

The streets would again become littered with politicians’ crumbs; they would soon begin to come again for our souls, buying our conscience and capacity to decide for ourselves who would rule us. They would suddenly walk with us on the streets, play with us like our friends and equals. Like caring leaders, they never have been and could not possibly be. We cannot afford to fall for their games again, in this dispensation, or we would be doomed again across the states and once again, elect nonentities to occupy the nation’s legislature and who will appropriate laws and resources of the country to themselves and their cronies. 

We owe this country the chance to have the right leaders to administer its affairs. It is long due; and it is our corporate responsibility as citizens and electorate. It is about time, we take control of the political processes and exert our responsibility and right to elect out leaders. No more should it be moneybags, who believe we are buyable. 

Where was the development we rightly deserved in this country since 1999 when we returned to democracy? What were the deliverables to us from successive governments between then and 2015? Obviously. Those sixteen years were summarily years of national wastefulness, and stagnation for the country and its people. We spent sixteen years breeding from among us, individuals who are richer than our systems on the back of our stolen resources. 

Nigerians, we are now at the point where, beyond emotional and political biases, we should recognise the need to recognise the foundations of colossal development across sectors that have been built over the last seven years of the current Administration. Political affiliations aside, it is important we take steps to guarantee the preservation and continuation of the unprecedented infrastructural and social development foundation that has been laid already by the Muhammadu Buhari government. 

How do we do this? Nigerians must take charge now; we must allow nothing but the antecedent capacities of candidates to determine our responses to their pleas for votes. A governor who governed a state for eight years without any developmental achievement, or social development of the people that linger, beyond paper rhetoric of praise singers cannot and would never be allowed to have access to power again in the country. This we can do and this we must do for ourselves and posterity.

Let us carefully sieve them out to pick a nationally capable, acceptable, and sympathetic leader for the country. If he could not do it before, at whatever level of opportunity, then he would never do it. That is basic logic. 

GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!