WEDNESDAY COLUMN BY USSIJU MEDANER
Last week, I submitted the fact that the battle for the topmost seat of governmental power of the nation Nigeria has started. It was not as if it is new by any measure; the country has perennially been known for its characteristic all-year-round politicking. What is calling for concern is the emerging insidious politically trending events and the nature of preparations political parties and interested individuals are making and the actions we have seen thrown up by groups who want to command street narratives as part of a bigger scheme to have an upper hand as 2023 arrives.
Last week, I also created an obvious link between the terrible ENDSARS destructive outing of 2020 that still leaves its many scars on the body of Nigeria and the anticipated 2023 general elections. Politics is a game; a game of control and a game of numbers. While democracy, in popular view presumes the public or crowd would gather around performance and popularity, the players of the game in Nigeria have altered this long standing notion to a new system, where the crowd is crowded around framed up narratives of lies and propaganda; of deceptive narratives that polarise the populace into the sensible and the senseless, and see the senseless, a totally truth-denying set, notoriously congregating around the money bags, the faithless politicians, political parties and self-made leaders who would throw apples to the crowd to deceptively gather followership.
This is a known structured game plan of PDP since 2014, when it lost its value totally as a responsible political party of worth in the country. The party thereafter resorts to outright carefully orchestrated propaganda, lies and framed up acts and actions that are aimed at heating up the polity and turning the masses against all opposition to their power goals. They have gone outrightly out of the normal to take advantage of the citizens’ sensitivity to religion to break us up and draw support at the back of the over-bloated islamisation propaganda that rather than deliver the presidency to them, broke the country deeper along religious line. Not satisfied, they had played the ethnic card, summed up the rhetoric of the fulanisation agenda to pitch the rest of the ethnic nationalities against the Fulani fold and the northern Muslim community, very much at the detriment of the peace of the country. The entrance to 2019 electioneering saw us witness a new dare demonic willingness to use insecurity as ploys to win elections. Across the country, from Benue to the Eastern block and down to the Ekiti and Ondo axis of the Southwest, artificial and created insecurity were unleashed on the country leading to mass killings of innocent Nigerians only to be used as election campaigns against the ruling party.
The Sunday Igboho drama was another attempt from the stable of the same power-desperate elements; Oyo state suddenly went up in crisis; narrative of killer herdsmen pervaded the air as we woke up daily to fresh news of attempts and actual perpetration of the dreadful acts of attacks against innocent citizens. In a planned counterattack or defense of the indigenous settlers, a messiah was created, in this case, in Igboho, who would save the Yoruba race against the marauding Fulanis. While there were actually no Fulani killings in Ibarapa, the self-inflicted terrors which were the make-belief tactic to press home their plan, was to make Igboho become a rallying point for organising the youth and people of the Southwest against the ruling party come 2023. Suddenly, with the arrest of Igboho, the entire state became as peaceful as peace itself; the killer herders suddenly went on long vacation, the very way they left Benue state on the eve of 2019 election the moment PDP has achieved its goal of using them to win the state election.
Nigerians must have to gird their loins; the signs are already everywhere, the mass return of insecurity is a tactic and it is certain these people are bent on using it to force the people to support them again in 2023. Soon, the killer herders might return to the South to resume after the long holidays since the end of the 2019 elections. They began with the Ibarapa experiment; they are already moving upward North and we would be anxious to see how ugly they are willing to go with the deadly act again.
In 2015 and again in 2019, they recruited Christian clergies across the country and corrupted their callings to the point that their pulpits became campaign stands where hate messages against the candidate of the ruling party became the regular sermon and are doled out without regard to any other consideration, not even ethics, but the monies that have exchanged hands. The same clergies who witnessed the mammoth destruction perpetrated by Boko Haram in the days of PDP and Goodluck Jonathan and were mostly calm as they prayed for the country because they considered him one of their own; the same clergies who were at home collecting money from the former administration in support of its reelection quest.
Now, preparing for 2023, they have re-strategised; they have turned their attention to Muslim clerics, dangling economic hardship and insecurity as failures of the APC government. Yet, they seem to have forgotten how, in those years when they were in control and Boko Haram was ravaging the nation, these clerics could not freely call and lead prayers anywhere in the affected Northern states of Nigeria. The two who summoned courage to speak up against Boko Haram, we remember how they were brutally murdered, but today, we have them (clergies) moving freely, performing their duties and with all safety, condemning the activities of the insurgents and bandits without fear of the same consequence as before. This is because, though we still have pockets of insecurity across the country, the superpower of the nation’s military power has changed the narratives. Urban settlements have become relatively more safe and peaceful while the military continues to dislodge attempts to attack in the hinterlands.
As part of their attack machines for 2023, they have recruited the same elements that looted and shared the funds meant for arms and ammunition to be purchased in the bid to respond to the insurgency, to become the paragons of national concern about insecurity. Atahiru Bafarawa who without remorse took N4.1 billion from the arms fund to sponsor special prayers for the country instead of using the money for what it was meant for, is now criticising the president over insecurity in the North.
This is exactly the sign of things to come. 2023 would definitely see the shameless PDP give every reason to explain away all the undeniable infrastructural development across the country. They would tell us why the rice revolution is immaterial; why the railway development is not what we should be celebrating; they would tell us why N-Power and other similar social interventions are irrelevant. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear PDP sponsored narratives that they paid to the last kobo for the second Niger Bridge project before leaving power in 2015.
They want to use the rhetoric of economic hardship to turn the Northern youths against the ruling party. Yet, they wouldn’t want Nigeria to know that currently the global world is facing the same economic attack on purchasing power and survival. They wouldn’t tell them how difficult it would have been for the country to survive the time if it had been PDP that is still in control of the nation’s treasury. The same party that oversaw the purchase of 70,000 goats at N250, 000 each at a time when the maximum cost of a fully grown goat in the north was below N25, 000. The party of Atiku, Dasuki, Diezani, the party of Patience Jonathan, would tell the youths, this Administration has bastardised the national economy. What an irony?
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
