The formal declaration of General Muhammadu Buhari for the 2015 presidential contest on the platform of the All Progressives Congress no doubt electrified the Nigerian polity in general and sent shock waves down the spine of the Presidency in particular. The size and calibre of people that thronged the Eagles Square, venue of the declaration, was a clear pointer that GMB, as Buhari is popularly called, is most likely to clinch the party’s ticket ahead of the other aspirants, including former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
With that permutation, expectedly, attention shifted swiftly to who may likely emerge the General’s running mate for the main elections come 2015. Most public commentators, intellectuals and writers/columnists, including Chido Onumah and Godwin Onyeacholem, have been clamouring for a presidential ticket that will feature General Muhammadu Buhari and Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola of Lagos State for the opposition APC. And to counter this clamour, there has been sponsored hue and cry to kill that dream before it is hatched on the basis of both candidates been of the same religious persuasion.
The chief sponsors of this outrage are from the ruling political class and politicians are hardly known for pursuing the interest of the masses. Their doctrine is: No permanent friend, no permanent enemy, only permanent selfish interests! That is to say, their outrage is not in the interest of the people as they try to feign, but in the interest of their personal political survival and relevance.
This is their calculation: General Muhammadu Buhari enjoys a large followership, which no other Nigerian politician living can boast of. On his name, under a newly formed political party that couldn’t even garner enough resources to pay party agents round the country and without any form of financial inducement, as showcased by the sharers of rice and kerosene in Osun and Ekiti States, he polled a whopping 12.2 million votes in the 2011 presidential election. Even in states where the Peoples Democratic Party held sway such as like Katsina, Bauchi, Niger, Sokoto, Kebbi, and Adamawa, Buhari overwhelmingly trounced President Goodluck Jonathan, the PDP candidate, who was the sitting president and had every instrumentality of the state and the national treasury at his disposal.
Therefore should Buhari be paired with a running mate of the calibre of Babatunde Raji Fashola, who symbolises hard work, intellect and development and whose name has become the S.I. Unit for measuring good governance and performance among political office holders in Nigeria, the Presidency would definitely be more elusive to the PDP than it has ever been. Fashola enjoys a generally acknowledged goodwill across the entire Western Region, the South South and beyond due to his unbeatable record of performance and his proven mettle. And he superintends over Lagos, the state that has the highest number of registered voters in the country, which stands at 6.1 million at the last count. It is closely followed by Kano, which stands at five million. In essence, Lagos and Kano States alone account for over 11 million registered voters, whereas only a total of about 38 million people voted in the 2011 presidential election.
With the overwhelming votes from Lagos State coming to the APC courtesy of Fashola on the ticket, and with Kano already totally lost to the firm grip of Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the frosty relationship between President Jonathan and Emir Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and the absence of Ibrahim Shekarau in the presidential race to divide the votes, the PDP is as good as dead and buried, bearing in mind that they have also lost Rivers State, their strongest base in the South South in terms of number of registered voters, to the doggedness and resilience of Governor Chibuike Amechi. This explains why any card, including the religious card, must be played in order to stop a possible Buhari/Fashola pair.
However, one is tempted to ask where these noise makers, who are needlessly fanning the embers of religious dichotomy, were when Governor Jonah Jang ran for the governorship seat of Plateau State with a Christian running mate, Ignatius Longjan, and won, regardless of the vicious polarisation of the state between the Muslims and the Christians?
By the way, isn’t President Jonathan evidently a “Christian President”? Isn’t he using his office to divide the country along religious lines? When a President wants to discuss important government policies and make important security statements about the Boko Haram insurgency and finds no better place to do that other than the Church, what is he propagating?
I have more questions for the Nigerian electorates. Do Nigerians truly vote for a presidential candidate because of the religion of his running mate? If that is the case, then Moshood Abiola would certainly not have won the June 12, 1993 presidential election and General Muhammadu Buhari would have coasted to victory with a lot of Christian votes to complement his Northern majority votes in 2011, having fielded not just a Christian as his running mate, but a renowned pastor at that. But on the contrary, Pastor Tunde Bakare, with due respect to his person, did not contribute up to 100,000 out of the 12.2 million votes garnered by the Congress for Progressives Change in 2011. Or is President Goodluck Jonathan more christian than Pastor Tunde Bakare?
Fellow Nigerians, it’s time to jettison useless primordial sentiments that will further sink our country into the abyss of dysfunction, underdevelopment, insecurity and abject poverty and opt for competence, accountability, incorruptibility and hard work. That General Buhari is a Muslim did not stop him from being amongst the most upright and incorruptible leaders Nigeria ever had.
And that Babatunde Fashola is a Muslim did not stop him from transforming Lagos State from the slum and gutter it had become into a standard for measuring development in Nigeria. Besides, politics remain a game of number – like it or leave it. And to that extent, even if Governor Babatunde Fashola is more Muslim than Prophet Muhammad, I do not see any Christian who is alive today from the entire South West, who can galvanise more votes for the APC than him. Mention his name if you know one. Why then should Nigerians be denied the blessing of having this beautiful mix of honesty and hard work-cum-dexterity only on the basis of the God they pray to and how they worship?
The ruling Peoples Democratic Party has set Nigeria on the reverse gear and on full throttle. They have expended over $20 billion on electricity and our country still generates a paltry 4,000 megawatts to power our industries and cater for a population of over 170 million people. They have increased the pump price of petroleum products beyond the reach of the average civil servant who is on a minimum wage of N18,000 monthly. In two years, they increased the electricity tariffs three times. They have looted our public treasury with such impunity as humanity has never witnessed before. They have exposed us to a calamitous level of insecurity never before witnessed in our recordable history. Their list of failures is endless. In summary, they have been tested and they have failed. It’s time to try an alternative. It’s time to do things differently. It’s time to abandon the status quo and move on. It’s time for change. We do not have the luxury of time to gamble. Our country is at the precipice, and we urgently need tested and trusted hands to turn things around for the better.
Forget about the crap they spread about Buhari been too old to be the president of Nigeria at 71. We’ve had a Goodluck Jonathan who is relatively young for about four years now, but the only area in which he has excelled is in how to multiply ones wealth in a geometrical progression from N295,304,420 declared as total assets and cash in banks as a Vice President under Umar Musa Yar’adua to $100 million (about N16.5 billion) in four years to become the sixth richest president in Africa.
With this in mind and many more examples of pretty young politicians like James Ibori of Delta State and Lucky Igbinedion of Edo State who have used public offices for self rather than for service, don’t you think the older the better?
Abu Bilaal Abdulrazaq bn Bello bn Oare writes from Kaduna, Nigeria and can be reached on: sahaabah@aol.com.
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