Mariam Mariam
In the next two days, Nigerians will be going through one of the most important routines in our post-colonial history; the process of electing a new president after eight years of the most incompetent, arrogant, criminally-centered and anti-people Obasanjo administration. An eight-year period between 1999 and 2007, when hope turned to despair; government became an avenue to systematically loot our country by Obasanjo and a group of his cronies in a dubious privatization process; eight years when over one trillion naira went down the drain to consolidate darkness instead of provision of electricity; eight years of megalomania by a president who ruled with a very questionable mandate but who believed he is the best thing that ever happened to our country.
Never in the history of our country, not even in the dark days of military dictatorship, were we saddled with a ruler who finds happiness when he inflicts sadness and unhappiness on the people he rules. Obasanjo’s name will enter history as the most reviled to ever preside over our country, and it is part of the tragedy of his rule that a near-bankrupt felon, who Nasir el-Rufai said had only N20, 000 in his bank account soon after he was released from prison, and whose debts totaling over N100 million were settled by Atiku Abubakar, has now become arguably one of the richest people in our country.
Obasanjo, the ‘anti-corruption Czar,’ reputed to now own a university, is believed to have commanding interests in banking, aviation and through the controversial TRANSCORP, interests in hotels, oil prospecting, telecommunication and God knows what else he has used his eight years in power to amass. Obasanjo is hated with passion by the majority of the Nigerian people because his name and policies are bywords for sorrow, unemployment, destruction of properties, retrenchment from work, bad roads, lack of electricity and vulgarity in a leader of the country.
This is the background against which the electioneering process has been built in the past few years. The ruling party, the PDP, has not performed to the expectations of the Nigeria people, largely because even the party was conquered by the despotic Obasanjo, purged of its rational kernel and transmogrified into a monster in the image of Obasanjo; heartless, anti-people, dictatorial, wicked and a cult-like organization, headed by hand-picked sidekicks of the man. This blatantly illegal takeover of the party and its purge has turned the PDP into a soulless, empty, vote-rigging contraption, far removed from the realities facing the Nigerian people, but dedicated only to the capricious intentions of its master, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Obasanjo is nevertheless a very smart character. He realizes how unpopular he is and how reviled his name is amongst the Nigerian people. Realistically, he can never allow the electoral process to run genuinely freely, because across the country, the PDP has become very unpopular due to the arrogance of its operatives and the incompetence of it sure. It was inconceivable that a party with such a record was going to an election with the level of arrogant confidence the party has continued to exhibit over the part few months if they are genuinely free and fair. If anybody was in doubt that PDP was determined to massively rig the elections, then such a person should think again, given the evidence from last week’s election.
It was obvious that the way the PDP can ‘win’ elections is to lay ambush, like true bandits, for the Nigerian people and rob us of our votes in broad daylight. This is what has happened in Ondo, Ekiti, Adamawa, Enugu, Edo and Anambra to mention a few of the more brazenly criminal points of subversion of the will of the Nigerian people. Subversion has taken place within the context of the incompetence of INEC itself, which spent far more time fighting to prevent Obasanjo’s opponents from getting into the electoral race than prepare adequately for the elections. In cahoots with security forces, the INEC and their thugs, the PDP went to town to conquer states across Nigeria.
The Nigerian columnist, Pini Jason, writing in VANGUARD newspaper of Tuesday, April 17, 2007, captured the essence of the problem which faces us today when he says that the problem “is simply because our society has been captured by devious men and women who insist on being rewarded for incompetence, who get away with the hardship they inflict on the society and who divert public attention from their ineptitude with arrogance and addictive sense of infallibility”. And who can context the arrogance with which Professor Maurice Iwu has conducted the operations of INEC over the past few years? The fears expressed by well-meaning individuals and civil society groups have in turn been met with a bellicose response; Iwu and his INEC have been more interested in protecting the interests of Obasanjo and his vote-rigging moster, the PDP.
This is the background against which we shall be going to the polls on Saturday. In the first place, the Obasanjo/INEC joint conspiracy to ban candidates has been rejected by the Supreme Court, and rather than accept the decision, they have made some contemptible last-minute moves to ban electioneering, without doubt calculated to ensure that Obasanjo’s nemesis, Atiku Abubakar, cannot rally the people in the last few days before the elections; this was exactly what they did with the Araraume decision in the Imo State governorship race. In contempt of the Nigerian Supreme Court, Ararume was expelled from the PDP and they rejected him as the party’s candidate and before you could spell Maurice INEC towed the line of the PDP that Araraume would not be in the election.
So disgusting was the conduct of last weekend’s election, especially the brazen manner that the PDP rigged the elections in many areas of the country, that Pat Utomi, one of the presidential candidates, has withdrawn his candidacy from the elections. “It doesn’t make sense for us to continue with the remaining process. The federal government has proved that is cannot conduct the elections in this country…From what we had seen on Saturday, is it possible for us to protect our votes? It is not possible that the present government will give us the kind of elections we want”.
This was his statement of protest. Other politicians and party leaders have also spoken, including even General Buhari who had endorsed INEC’s so-called readiness for the election. He even berated the Nigerian media as harbingers of misrepresentations in respect of the electoral process. Maybe without wishing it, his statement might end up haunting him by the time INEC and PDP bunch together to massively rig the presidential elections. He will lost the moral ground to protest because of this initial. And as if to further mess him up, his statement during the National Council of States has become a publicity bonus for a discredited INEC. By next week, I have no doubt in my mind that Buhari and other candidates would be singing a different tune about INEC.
But let’s not overtake ourselves just yet. Saturday’s presidential election provides the Nigerian people a unique opportunity to vote for change. In eight years, Obasanjo and the PDP squandered the goodwill of the Nigerian people. They ran a very incompetent regime which did not fulfill promises made to the electorate in respect of the basic amenities of life. The regime imposed an economic policy which systematically led to the transfer of our national assets into the hands of a few cronies. Nigeria’s oil policy became a captive of the oil importation lobby of Obasanjo’s cronies, those how contributed billions of naira for him to massively rig the 2003 elections, who put money into his controversial presidential library and similar programs of the despot. Obasanjo appropriated over one billion American dollars to ensure that Nigeria’s refining capacity stays dead, so that his cronies can continue to impart refined petroleum products. What we have said about failure in petroleum policy is applicable in electricity supply, in the provision of healthcare, water, housing, jobs and so many areas of our national life.
Obasanjo and his PDP regime have been a fraud, a monumental failure and literally pyramid scheme set out to entrap the Nigerian people in order for Obasanjo and his cronies to milk us to death. This is why the same set of people in order for Obasanjo and his cronies to milk us to death. This is why the same set of people behind the financing of the massively fraudulent 2003 elections are determined to ensure that the PDP wins again in a few days’ time. They have the money; they control the security forces, have INEC in their pockets and will do everything to subvert the will of the Nigerian people. This is because for them, they must protect the massive thefe which Obasanjo’s presidency allowed them to perpetrate over the past eight years. They want to continue under a new regime which they hope to impose on Saturday.
The Nigerian people have a choice to make; it is either to acquiesce in the serial rape of Nigeria by PDP bandits or to find a way of using our ballots to make a clean break with a regime of suffering, deceit, theft, lies, sale of national assets, unemployment, retrenchment, crony capitalism, surrender to imperialism, lack of electricity, inadequate health facilities, etc. we have the unique opportunity to plant the cancer of unhappiness inside Obasanjo forever by using our votes wisely to ensure that a regime that will protect him from going back to prison is not installed in Aso Villa in the next few weeks. This is why ‘do-or-die’ has been the slogan of the despicable tyrant. He wants a cover from the unraveling of the crimes he has perpetrated since 1999, but especially in the past four years, by using the security forces and INEC to rig the elections coming up on Saturday just as we witnessed last weekend.
We can begin the process of our own liberation by massively voting for a pro-people change of government. Nigeria needs a new beginning, a break from the way that Obasanjo has run our country with utmost contempt for the basic tenets of democracy. Democracy has suffered a lot of reverses under the PDP regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo largely because of the arbitrariness that is his preferred means of conducting the business of governance. He destroyed inner-party democracy in the party which brought him to power and was constructed by its founding fathers with genuinely idealistic intentions; Obasanjo did everything to emasculate other arms of government, especially the legislature and showed utmost contempt for the jugement of the nation’s judiciary. It is incredible that this largely uneducated, colonial soldier and ex-military dictator could hold a country of 140 million people in a contemptuous, dictatorial and suffocating bear hug for all of eight years. The time to change has arrived and with very courageous political moves and an iron determination to break free from the shackles of underdevelopment which the PDO regime of Obasanjo has presided over in the past eight years, the Nigerian people can succeed. But the political elite must be ready to make the necessary tactual sacrifices, build the alliances and effect the mobilisation to succeed. If we fail to effect change this weekend, we shall have ourselves to blame for eight more years of pain, sorrow, underdevelopment and poverty under a PDP regime.
Kebbi’s welcome strides in education.
The Abdullahi Fodio Centre in Birnin Kebbi is a fascinating expression of the modern and the traditional in the search for educational excellence. Located opposite the palace of the Emir of Gwandu, the centre is a research centre into the works of Mallam Abdullahi Fodiyo, the jihad scholars and other works of Isalmic scholars in the Western Sudan. So far, over 73 works of Sheikh Abdullahi Fodiyo have been collected at the centre.
One of the plans in the offing is to effect translation of these works, to achieve a very wide dissemination of the amazing thoughts of these scholars, activists, statesmen, military and political leaders, whose many-sided contributions led to the most all-encompassing revolutionary development in our part of the world over the last 200 years. It is an affirmation of the fact that learning is very old in our region and in fact is a major aspect of our heritage. It is therefore an unacceptable aspect of history that we have also become the most backward part of modern Nigeria.
The Abdullahi Bayero Research Centre is also a place of modern education, and already the secondary school in the centre is running. It is determined to be a centre of excellence in modern science and liberal arts, in information technology and all these within the disciplined ambience of fidelity to the Islamic traditions of our people. This ensures that people learn modernity without losing their own cultural beings.
It is equally noteworthy that over the past eight years, education has been a major item of very high expenditure by the Kebbi State government. Teachers are paid 30 percent more than other civil servants; schools have been rehabilitated around the stat, while there has been a steady improvement in the pass rate in WACE and NECO examinations. To crown it all, the Kebbi State government is building a university from the scratch, located in Aliero. I believe that the investment in education in Kebbi will bring huge dividends in the future. I feel happy that there is a realization that we must invest in our future in education. I think that is one major gain of the past eigth year under the government of Adamu Alero in Kebbi. This was what I found very pleasant when I travelled around Kebbi the other day.
Postscript
“it is not that they (PDP) have all that support and popularity. It is just that losing to either Buhari or Atiku is not an option. It is indeed a matter of life and death. Imagine the fortunes of OBJ, Nasiru, Nuhu, Aliko, the Transcorp people, et al, under either Atiku or Buhari. Nobody wants a drastic change in fortune. Or going to jail. And they have the wherewithal to stave off defeat, so they will. Games theory in mathematics tells us that once there is an economic incentive to cheat, people will cheat.
Underpinning this are two other facts: (1) Our complacency, docility and fatalism. (2) The opposition is still divided, even within its individual units, and this can and will be maximally capitalized upon to massage the numbers. Plus, the PDP knows that we won’t (march) and keep (marching) in the streets to demand restitution.’
