It has come down to hours. Ninety-six hours hence, on Saturday, February 25, 2023, the electorate in Nigeria will go to the polls for presidential/National Assembly elections. The exercise will offer citizens the opportunity to make a decisive decision about their collective fate.
The presidential election of February 25 will be the first part of the two-tier electoral exercise of the general election. The second part will be the governorship/state assembly elections on March 11, 2023.
The 2023 presidential election is, in the truest sense of the expression, a consequential election for Nigeria. The delicate connotation of that expression derives its weight, essentially, from the state of the country in all ramifications. Shehu Sani, former senator representing Kaduna Central, says the election gives Nigerians an opportunity to free themselves from bondage or renew their servitude. The choice is theirs. It ought to be.
Nigerians are going to the polls on Saturday with the fate of their country literally hanging in the balance. Put more bluntly, the country is a bad shape, brought almost to total ruins by the All Progressives Congress (APC) that has superintended over the country in the last eight years. There is no nice way to say it. The performance of the APC in managing Nigeria between 2015 and 2023 is glaringly too dismal to whitewash. No rating that is not dishonest and self-serving will score the performance of the APC anything but woeful. Such a calamity!
Unfortunately, if not incitingly, there is scant compunction in any quarters within APC, up till the eve of the 2023 general election. The gross misgovernance and pervasive misery APC have visited on the land hardly bothers the party’s chieftains. On the contrary, they have elected to carry on insouciantly, taunting the citizenry as it were to do their worse. Not even Rehoboam, son of Solomon, exhibited such insensitive hubris.
With no apologies for their misdeeds and the grief piled on citizens, the APC is strutting towards the polls, proclaiming so gaudily that performance does not count. Their presidential candidate, Senator Bola Tinubu, and his supporters campaign with such amazing disdain for facts on the ground. The confidence of APC beggars comprehension. You cannot but begin to believe that the party knows something the rest of the citizens do not know.
Then the Central Bank of Nigeria initiated a currency re-design policy that called back billions of naira stashed in private warehouses and dedicated rooms in residences. Suddenly, there is bedlam and manifestations of neurotic aggression in some otherwise confident quarters of APC lords. There must be something Nigerians need to know here.
Abdullahi Ganduje, governor of Kano State, made one of most instructive comments on the APC that Nigerians should note as they go to polls. The Kano State governor, obviously one of those jolted by the recent naira policy, became belligerent. He said President Buhari has not achieved anything in his eight-year presidency and now wants to destroy APC on his way out. Ganduje should tell Nigerians more about that.
If only Ganduje could calm down a little to listen to himself. Not many will contest his assertion that the APC, as personified by its President, has not achieved anything in eight years. What is contradictory is that the same Ganduje is, at the same time, asking Nigerians to vote for the same APC to continue to preside over their affairs. That is what Senator Sani meant by Nigerians renewing their bondage. Such is the illogicality of the APC’s bid for the presidency in the 2023 election, their performance making that option untenable.
Nigerians will be going to the polls on Saturday, perhaps in the most deprived circumstances they have ever been under any regime, in war or in peace. People presently do not have access to their hard-earned money. The currency re-design policy, an APC policy, aims to save APC and the country from APC. Meanwhile, the cost of living has driven the majority below the poverty line. The official data at the end of 2022 had it that 63 per cent of Nigerians were multi-dimensionally poor. Bereft of technical accoutrements, the 63 per cent or 133 million citizens are poor. Simple. The poverty figure could not have improved in the first three months. Indeed, it was bound to go south.
As the electorate go to vote come Saturday, they will be grappling with fuel scarcity, which has become a permanent feature in the present APC regime. The energy crisis has its own multi-dimensional faces. A party that, before Buhari won power, called petroleum subsidy a scam by the PDP, with a promise to rehabilitate the refineries and stop oil subsidy, has spent eight years without restoring even one refinery. Worse still, the subsidy has ballooned beyond anything PDP could have imagined. On top of that and, perhaps, more scandalous, virtually all of the over two million barrels of oil being produced by Nigeria under the APC government is not being accounted for. Almost all the oil was said to be stolen. By whom? The APC government says it does not know. With no proceeds from oil, the foreign exchange available to both government and individuals has virtually dried up. With that the value of the naira went belly up.
The profile of Nigeria in the last eight years has been cast in a relief unique to APC. Nigerians live it. They need no reminder. As the economy bled, insecurity ravaged the land. No geo-political zone is now excluded from the throes of insecurity and killings, including the ones that had been oases of peace not long ago. With the high spate of killings, the worth of human life in the country has been so reduced, such that loss of a dozen lives in any incident in a day is no longer newsworthy.
Unemployment. Dismal power supply. Intermittent increase in tariff for services not rendered, as in electricity supply. Crisis in the education sector, reflected in the prolonged industrial dispute between government and university lecturers, which led to loss of one academic year by university students. Crisis in the aviation sector, resulting in constriction of the aviation industry, with its negative impact on the economy. Drastic decline in food production as a result of attacks on farmers by terrorists, herdsmen and bandits. The judiciary is not spared the affliction. A Chief Justice was toppled in a most indecent manner, another was shoved aside after an insurrection by his colleagues, judicial rulings clashed with natural justice and truth, etc. The APC years have left the judiciary in a poor state as well. All in the last eight years.
For years after it came to power, APC had a standard escape defence for everything it failed to do well: PDP. Even till this day, APC has no qualms pointing at PDP that was in government over eight years ago as the reason for its various failures. But then, APC came to power on the strength of its pitch to correct the failures and weaknesses of PDP. Indeed, one of the major sins of the APC is that it has made PDP look better than it was. Of course, PDP was bad and chaotic in many cases while it held sway, but APC has proved itself far worse.
The case against APC is too overwhelming to be patched up. The party is a compound disaster in governance. The attempt to draw a line now between a Buhari APC and a Tinubu APC is a disingenuous scheme to pull the wool over the eyes of Nigerians. APC is APC. Nigerians owe themselves a duty to reject APC on Saturday, February 25, 2023. And PDP too!