The Jagaban of Borgu, the lion of Bourdillon and Asiwaju of Lagos, Ahmed Bola Tinubu has been called out of the woods to heal the festering wound within the APC, All Progressive Congress party. The remoralisation of that party had been long overdue. There had been internal wrangling and passionate grassroots rebellion against the party, especially in its inability to deliver the dividends of democracy as promised through the change mantra sold to millions of Nigerians. It had been a long slumber for millions of APC supporters but now everybody seems to be awake to the sobering reality of the cluelessness of the party to discharge its covenants with the people.
Supporters are left in do doubt that the stakes for good governance through the APC are high and that Buhari’s integrity is solidly woven to the success or failure of APC administration. However, since the coming of APC government there have been many wreckages on the road. APC politicians are just like the discredited PDP politicians. In its initial success and victory, everybody wanted to associate with it. We saw many shameless defections from PDP to APC and the onset of dilutions and contaminations of the true APC genetic makeup.
Many of the old PDP defectors or rather traitors, once they began to mushroom like algae in the swampy waters of the APC, started a quiet revolution to steal, dominate and destroy the purity of the party. Since this mass defection, there had been no softening of their spirit of opposition to the Buhari’s government from the National Assembly to the states. The idea of deserting their old party and serve a new captain is, to them, a political suicide. These political lepers once they found a colony to absorb them began to infect everything in sight with their leprosy.
Today, the noxious cold war among APC members is creating a certain schizophrenic paralysis of good governance which is causing massive loss of goodwill among APC sympathisers across all classes of Nigerians. We can say that the internal rupture within the party is epic in scope. As I write five serving governors, twenty senators and reps are set to dump the party for SDP – the Social Democratic Party. There is absence of unity, cohesion, loyalty but the same old appetite for hierarchical grandstanding, rebuke, tribal jealousy and outright rebellion towards the party leaders. The politically powerless constituency of this nation – the voters – can only watch as events are being driven by ego, insecurity, greed, self-importance and appetite for power.
Now enter Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He is a famous conciliator whose genius for bridge building is legendary. He is given the arduous task of opening up the walled up souls of his party members and bring illumination to the coven of dark forces. He has to reign in dissenters, political thugs, rebels, polluters, grumblers, post seekers, the marginalized and those whose voices have been sidelined through raw power of coercion and political intimidation. Here, the jagabanisation of APC has to be done through vigour, subtle ruthlessness but without fanaticism. However, Tinubu’s buoyant optimism to do a thorough job of recasting APC through moral re-engineering has been dealt a vicious bite by an unsuspecting pitbull in the mould of its internal overlord
Who is this internal overlord? Chief John Odigie Oyegun is the internal overlord and Chairman of APC whose adversarial vanity is quite astonishing. It is either Tinubu hate the shadow of Oyegun or Oyegun hate the shadow of Tinubu. These two political titans, who loath to yield any inch of common sense to each other must come together to epitomise statesmanship, unity and disallow patriotic distractions or, at worse, stop behaving like sewage rats from Mushin.
Tinubu’s pastoral passion for reconciliation and dream of bringing the party members to repentance and penance must not suffer on the altar of personality ego of contending forces.
If it is true that the resurrection or jagabanisation of Buhari’s dead politics and by extension APC rest squarely on the shoulders of Tinubu, are we massaging his ego or sentencing him to eternal doom? Can we expect Tinubu the peace maker to heal the multifarious wounds of APC members from Akure to Zamfara? Would he be able to bring together the mosaic of little factions in virtually all the states of the federation that are bumping against one another in less than dignified way?
Of a truth, Nigerians are angry. Angry against APC. Angry against the Buhari/APC government that had lost moral focus of its core mandate. Even the Jagaban of Borgu is himself not happy with Buhari and his inner cabinet members. Tinubu has suffered humiliation and had been sidelined in the past. Probably the horror and fear of what to come at full speed in 2019 informs the choice of Tinubu as the mediator-general to recapture the lost fortune of APC and made it electable and winsome again in future election. Probably…….
President Mohammadu Buhari as leader of APC now evinces more of revulsion than the old time adulation. Why? He is yet to have a complete mastery of the complexities of democratic politics. He still harbours partisan passion as seen in most of his high profile appointments. There are still loud lamentations of the state of the nation’s insecurity. Morality and integrity are no longer supplying energies to his government. There is diminishing goodwill across the land for the APC party and its apparatchiks. Foolish people are governing Nigeria from the center while the intelligent ones are sidelined and marginalized. The Fulani herd mentality and superiority is still at play in his government.
Even APC members have surpassed the discredited PDP in its vulgarity and excesses. Can a Jagaban of Borgu unravel all these conflating and mysterious aberrations? Is the Jagaban on a mission to smoothen the ground for a clueless Buhari to return another landslide come 2019? Is the Jagaban on a mission of class preservation especially when the nation’s appetite is sharpened for restructuring? Yes, the Jagaban has the uncanny ability to build bridges across deep division, but he has to divorce from the 2015 illusion when Nigerians gave President Mohammadu Buhari their hearts and minds only to realize that the old history of bad government is repeating itself all over again. That lesson is learned and if a supernatural Jagaban can force Nigerians to learn that lesson all over again, only 2019 will tell. So, can jagabanisation make APC electable in2019?
