For some of us who always look at the spiritual side to even the most ordinary of earthly things, the travail that has befallen the once formidable ruling party and from 2015, the also equally formidable opposition party, the PDP, is not surprising. For us, our belief is that The PDP is paying for the sins of pride, arrogance, insensitivity and its bent towards impunity at the height of its power and dominion over the land of Nigeria. But even if a person, thing or group is getting its or their just revenge for the sin or sins it or they have committed against God and man, the person, group or government that has positioned self to carry out that revenge against it, will also receive its or their just share of justice or censure from God one day. That is how God operates and no one is powerful enough to challenge him for that because God says that vengeance belongs rightly to him and to no one else.
In the run up to the 2027 general and presidential election President Ahmed Bola Tinubu who is urged on by his supporters and admirers as ‘a great political strategist’ came up with a plan as to how to overawe, overwhelm and dominate the political space and eventually win the election and earn acknowledgement of the APC under him as the only dominant and domineering political party in the land.
A key part of that plan is to destroy the other parties, principally the PDP. The arrowhead of that plan is the FCT Minister Nyesom Wike. Others who are arrows in Tinubu’s quivers are greedy, self- seeking, shortsighted, mischievous personalities both within the PDP itself and without the party.
Whether it is Tinubu the master planner or those he is using directly or indirectly to cook and serve his recipe of legal or illegal sauce I describe them all as shortsighted men and women. For in carrying out their designs against the PDP, all of them have revealed their, or rather, Nigerian politicians’ character. And that character is that a large number of them are greedy, disloyal, uncaring about the tenets of democracy. Above all, they do not care a hoot whatever misfortune that might befall their country as a result of the mischief being visited on the PDP and other opposition parties and personalities. When you look at the tricks, the games and the gimmicks being used against the PDP, you will shake up your head in sympathy for the once dominant party. No matter how unsympathetic you are to the plight of your fellow man or thing, you cannot but be sympathetic to the PDP. The PDP has been steadily beaten, battered and broken and it has now become a shadow of its former proud self.
The outcome of this systemic whittling down of the PDP and the equally horrendous assaults on the other inchoate parties such as the ADC, is that we are now effectively running opposition-less political party, the APC. I feel so ashamed of the type of politics that we are playing. A democracy without an effective opposition party or parties, is a sham.
In the modern world, when a people are getting near a general election, such as we are, joy and rejoicing mysteriously fill the air. This is because the people delude themselves that now they have a real chance to change their bad leaders. But in Nigeria today, there is no such sense of joy in the air. Rather, Nigerians are looking morose. We are looking like a people who are approaching a burial day fixed for the traditional mourning ceremony of a departed family member. This is because Nigerians have come to a painful realization that there will be no real changes to the current set of elected officials at any of the levels.
The most painful of this realisation to many of my countrymen and women is that Mr. Peter Obi is not likely to get a platform to stand and contest for the presidency of Nigeria. Many of his disappointed fans and admirers are telling him to leave the ADC and not throw in his hat into the ring of the party’s presidential contest because his main rival, Atiku Abubakar, has the party in his pocket already. Do you want my honest prediction for 2027? It is that Tinubu and his behemoth APC will have a non-celebratory, joyless win in all the elections.
The way things are going, barely two years to the decisive elections, it looks to some of us that the last thing we have not heard but which we are likely to hear in the few days ahead is that Tinubu would decamp from the APC and rejoin the APC. This is because the wave of decamping has gone on so massively that he has forgotten that he is in APC. He will just decamp unconsciously before he realizes that APC is his party receiving decampees in droves ever since and that he does not need to decamp. It is after then that he will realize his folly and rejoin the APC.
We do not need Trump to threaten to invade our country again, this time around, over partycide against opposition parties. We need to know by ourselves without being told by another person that in a democracy, opposition politics is a necessary ingredient for success. We Nigerians must rise up and do something about the predictable death of the PDP and other smaller but nevertheless vital opposition parties. The type of democracy Tinubu seems to desire is not good for Nigeria, for Africa and for democracy and for the people.
