Finally, the chips are down. There is no longer a hiding place. Long before the primary election for its presidential candidate which happened in June, we had written here in this column that whoever emerges the flag bearer of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC] had his campaign work cut out for him. We wrote against the blustering of some of the then leading aspirants and those who assumed that they had been anointed by the Caliph including Vice President Oluyemi Osinbajo, former Transportation Minister, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, former junior Education Minister, Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba, ex-Science and Technology Minister, Ogbonnaya Onu, and former Lagos state Governor, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, that if chosen they would build on the achievements and legacies of the current President, Gen.

Muhammadu Buhari. We knew then, and we said so, that they were lying so that the obviously failed President would look favourably at their respective aspirations with a view to endorsing one of them.

The endorsement did not happen. Instead our President who has visited more countries in the world than states in Nigeria, including states which had suffered all manner of disasters, opted to continue with his callous and insensitive and wasteful junketing. But in spite of Buhari’s Ajala travels and contrived indifference, an attempt was nevertheless made at the 11th hour to suborn the process of electing the party’s presidential candidate for the February 2023 election. On the eve of the primary, and from the blues, the name of the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan was put forward by the party Chairman, Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, as having been anointed by the Caliph as his preferred successor. The cabal had shown its hand. Some APC governors mostly of the northern extraction who suspected that their political future was about to be extinguished moved quickly and deftly and aborted the planned imposition.

They reportedly met the President and vowed to pull down the roof on everybody’s heads if he did not disavow what had been said in his name. The rest, as they say, is now history.

Since Alhaji Tinubu outspent others to procure the presidential ticket in a transactional primary where he allegedly purchased majority of the party delegates and the majority of co-aspirants with the deployment of his war chest of United States dollars [USD], the talk about building on the phantom achievements of Buhari has since taken the back seat.

Indeed, Tinubu and his surrogates and spokespersons, some of whom are still actively serving in the Buhari regime, have been strident in decoupling Tinubu from Buhari. Seldom do they now talk about the candidate following in the footsteps of Gen. Buhari. The candidate and his surrogates are preoccupied with espousing the vision and strategies of Tinubu in pulling Nigeria out of the pit of backwardness and poverty and debt and despair and despondency and hopelessness where the extant regime had dumped the country and its peoples. Buhari, in spite of being named the chairman of Tinubu’s presidential campaign council, has become a leper. For good measure the PCC chairman has, as usual, travelled to London for ‘’routine medical checkup’’ that is projected to last for about two weeks. There is a likelihood that the APC campaign may be flagged off while the chairman is away.

For the candidate, the gloves are off. Presidential campaign is a serious business especially for a country which is in dire straits like Nigeria.

Buhari has run the country aground. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Poverty is crushing. insecurity is pervasive. Terrorists, kidnappers, killer-herders and sundry criminals are having a free reign.

The country’s fault lines are becoming more and more pronounced because of the nepotism and parochialism of Buhari. The economy is tanking. Dead really. Inflation is soaring. The exchange rate of the Naira against other minor and major currencies has become a nightmare.

Related News

Subsidy on petroleum products which are imported in the wake of our moribund refineries has been turned into a criminal enterprise with the involvement of state agents. The theft of crude oil has attained industrial scale level with reports that up to 80 percent of production is stolen every day. Corruption in the public sector has since assumed a proportion not witnessed before the self-acclaimed anti-graft regime of Gen. Buhari. One public officer, the suspended accountant-general of the federation is on the one hand about to stand trial for allegedly stealing over N80 billion while on the other hand he is reportedly negotiating a plea bargain with his prosecutors. Just. One. Public. Officer.

For a score card the foregoing performance of Gen. Buhari is pathetic.

And that explains why Tinubu is a hurry to cut loose from the governing faction of his APC. But the divorce will not be easy. And it could be messy. At this time Tinubu needs Buhari more than Buhari needs him.

Tinubu needs whatever is left of the disillusioned herd followers of Buhari in parts of the north to stand any chance of winning the 2023 presidential election. But Buhari comes with a baggage, a huge one at that. The danger notwithstanding, Tinubu served Buhari a formal divorce paper through his manifesto which was issued about two weeks ago. The first salvo in the manifesto was the pretention by Tinubu that there had not been any administration in the past seven years. The candidate of the ruling party hardly acknowledged that there was any sector of our national life that needed a consolidation on the solid foundation already laid by his own party which is currently in power.

The impression in the manifesto is that nation building will start if he wins in 2023. And this assumption ranges from his proposals on the economy, national security, education, health, employment, industrialization etcetera. Apparently in the quest to impress, the candidate fell into the deceitful style of the 2014/2015 APC of overpromising. The manifesto was full of fanciful but false promises of delivery but light on the how to deliver the promises. And there was scant attention to details. In one breath, it promises ‘’a real GDP [Gross Domestic Product] growth averaging 12 percent annually for the next four years,…’’ This is a blatant falsehood for a man, in the unlikely event he wins, will inherit an economy which GDP growth rate had averaged one percent since 2015 that the party in which he is a national leader took office. And the man that he installed became President.

Tinubu’s manifesto indicted the Buhari regime for being opaque when it said:’’My administration will usher a new culture of transparency, openness and excellent service delivery into the new federal government’’. More telling, however, is the fact that Tinubu has jettisoned restructuring of the country on which he has been associated for decades. He only promised that his ‘’administration will move away from a centrist government structure and devolve more revenues and powers to the states and Local Governments to bring governance and decision-making closer to the people. I will strengthen our local governments and give proper autonomy to state legislators’’. A person committed to restructuring should know that the local governments are not part of the federating units and so should not talk about strengthening them. Indeed, our local governments as they presently are, should be scrapped and deleted from a new Nigerian Constitution.

States, regions or geo-political zones which should form the federating units should be at liberty to create as many local governments or whatever names they would be called as they deem needful. The addendum that he [Tinubu] ‘’will sponsor appropriate laws and constitutional amendments to support these true federalism initiatives’’ is nothing but bunkum.

The Tinubu APC manifesto of 2022 is more dangerous and disingenuous than the Buhari APC manifesto of 2014. In 2014 APC was brazen in the promises in their manifesto but Tinubu’s is deceitful with the promises couched in sophistry that lend them to deniability. Or at best different interpretations. Whatever the case, the point to note is that the 2023 elections will be either a referendum on the eight years of APC government at the centre or a choice from amongst the leading candidates. And both appear not to bode well for Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu. If it is a referendum, APC will not pass the muster in a free, fair and credible election. If it be by choice, the APC candidate looks frail, fragile, sickly and forgetful. And his situation is not made any better by the baggage he carries including his ancestry, parentage, names, schools attended, certificates obtained, sources of his stupendous wealth, among others.