By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Published: March 31, 2009
How many of you wake up from sleep these days with the feeling that you are being transported back to the years of 2005 and 2006? That is the feeling I get now. This is the season of political endorsements. It doesn’t matter that the elections are still more than two years away. It doesn’t matter if those being endorsed have nothing to show for the billions of Naira they appropriated on our behalf. What is important is that some pockets must be filled with our patrimony. And to do this, groups are springing up like mushrooms, declaring emphatically that there is no vacancy in one Government House or the other. These are indeed interesting times. It is even going to be more interesting as the months roll by and the 2011 election year draws near. Like I pointed out recently, governance has ceased in the country, except, perhaps, in Lagos. It is not as if there has been much of it in the last 22 months, anyway. But it is bound to get worse because even the pretence at governance will stop. From now on, it will be raw, red politics. Whatever decisions the President makes from now will be informed, not by the needs of the people and desire to make life more meaningful for them; not by a genuine desire to solve the many problems confronting Nigerians; not by a longing to help the country surmount the dire economic problems facing it, but the inordinate ambition to consolidate and cling on to power. As it is with the President, so it is with every other “good politician” in the country. That explains the uproar that greeted the government’s White Paper on the Uwais Electoral Reforms Committee Report. It is all about politics. It is indubitable that whatever changes were made by the Presidency were informed by the politics of 2011 and not a sincere desire to make the electoral process more credible. Ironically, even the so-called opposition groups shouting at the roof top are also not doing so because they believe in the sanctity of the ballot box. They are alarmed that the man they thought was a political dove is not one after all. He is as hawkish as they come. He is also a man adroit at the game of politics Nigeriana. Yar’Adua is the archetypal Nigerian politician, also schooled in the ways of the “master tacticians” like Bola Ahmed Tinubu, former governor of Lagos State, who is being celebrated as a political whiz kid from the Oduduwa race. From his body language, the President wants a second term and he is working very hard at it. Just like every other Nigerian politician he is busy politicking, building political structures in order to have a wind at his back in 2011. But in the process, governance has been thrown to the dogs because, for sure, he is not going to run for a second term on his record of achievements during his first term. Truth be told, in Nigeria, nobody ever does. His ability to win a second term will depend not on his track record of performance, and by extension the endorsement of the people, but the efficiency of his ‘political structure.’ There is also a school of thought which believes that what is going on now in Aso Rock is tactical maneuvering. They insist that Yar’Adua won’t re-contest, that he will anoint someone else to succeed him. Not a few pundits believe that the cap fits his newest son-in-law, Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State. Time will tell. But Yar’Adua is not alone. The governors are also busy using the people’s commonwealth to set up political structures which is no more than recruiting thugs, those who will, if need be cause mayhem in the polity. They are busy arming them. These are the people who will snatch ballot boxes in 2011.
