Security is the issue, stupid!

The long telephone discussion I had with a Germany-based Nigerian Reverend Father over my column of last week, gave me yet another reason to believe we can still salvage whatever is left of the unity of this country.

The cleric, who is of Igbo extraction, insisted the country had degenerated so much under the present Goodluck Jonathan presidency that anybody but Jonathan would do as president come February.
Now, that sounded like ‘blasphemy’ (going by the way the presidency takes such criticisms these days) and I tried to stop him, by reminding him that a brother, in whom his South East zone was well pleased, is actually in power. But that seemed to infuriate him the more. He said the Igbo and Igboland were in the sorriest state of all the major tribes in Nigeria today. According to him, Ndigbo have been deceived into accepting the improvement in the financial fortunes of the Igbo politicians, working with and around Jonathan to mean an improvement in the lot of the zone. In other words, the parochial interest of a handful of presidential jobbers and taskmasters has been elevated to represent the collective interest of the citizenry. So, even as the zone continues to lag behind in every material index of development, the people have been sold the idea that Jonathan’s government is their own government – with their ‘son’ (who, for political correctness, is called, ‘Ebele’, and sometimes, ‘Azikiwe’) and his wife (whose ancestral home is in Abia State), in the saddle.
I had to stop him. I had heard enough. Clearly, this Germany cleric is suffering from the same ‘disease’ that is ravaging Fr. Ejike Mbaka’s brain in Enugu. I’m sure medical and political scientists will soon find a name for their malaise. Maybe they would call it The Mbaka Syndrome (TMS).
But there was no hushing the ‘blasphemy’ spewing forth from the mouth of this reverend caller: “Although, I’m a Reverend Father, if I’m in Nigeria today, I will not only vote for (Muhammadu) Buhari but also ask my congregation to do likewise,” he said, adding that all the blackmail about Islamic fundamentalism was no longer impressing anybody. He would go on to point out that even many of the countries in the ‘dreaded’ OIC (Organisation of Islamic Countries) were actually better run than Nigeria, noting that Nigeria, being a democracy, would be almost impossible for Buhari to run it like an Islamic state.
For him, therefore, religion, which some politicians are determined to put on the front burner ahead of next month’s elections, should hardly be an issue for the hunger-ravaged masses of this country.
But our politicians would have none of it. Those of them in the PDP, for instance, would want us all to believe that Buhari is a religious bigot – and woe betide you if you think otherwise. In fact, if our Germany-based priest were to be in Nigeria, he would probably be in the same hot soup that Fr. Mbaka is in right now. I’m sure, by now too, the Enugu-based cleric would have had an idea of the kind of heat Sheik Abubakar Gumi experienced when he dared criticise Buhari.
Like the clerics, writers are also under a different kind of heat. In fact, these are indeed difficult times to be a columnist in Nigeria. As the elections draw nearer, desperate politicians and their hirelings are becoming even more desperate.
For them, there is no such thing as a middle-of-the-road position: It’s either you’re for them or against them. There’s no room for that time-tested objectivity and balanced reporting that we journalists love to delude ourselves about. Or better still, a politician would only regard you as ‘objective’ if you’re in support of his cause. At times like this, the politicians want to have none of our theories about informing the readers and allowing them make up their minds. In these very critical last weeks, the only ‘E’ that seems to matter to the politicians is ‘E-ndorsement’ – don’t bother to E-ducate, E-xpose, E-spouse or even E-ntertain. Just endorse!
And so, while one politician, after reading the same article, called to accuse me of cunningly endorsing Jonathan instead of a ‘more credible’ Buhari, another called to thank me for exposing the weaknesses of Jonathan and, therefore, indirectly saying that he should not be re-elected. Yet, some others insisted I was not man enough to stick out my neck for any candidate.
Another was very angry that I said Princess Stella Oduah was a popular choice for the Anambra North senatorial ticket of the PDP while yet another was even angrier that I had ‘nice things’ to say about Ikedi Ohakim, as opposed to Gov. Rochas Okorocha.
He totally ignored the fact that the issue at hand was strictly about the PDP primaries in Imo State. Okorocha is in APC (and had picked his re-election ticket without as much as breaking a sweat), how could I possibly drag him into PDP fracas?
But then, I totally understand: The watchword these days is ‘endorsement’. irrespective of whatever you write, everyone out there only reads to see which of the candidates you’re endorsing.
Understandably too, since there is actually no difference between the PDP and the APC, we have decided to narrow the debate to the individual candidates. Now, I have a problem with this practice of elevating the individual over the party. Such an individual soon starts to believe these superhuman attributes of his and begins to see himself as bigger than the party – and ultimately, bigger than the country. That is how we came to have on our hands today, a tin god called Olusegun Obasanjo. We had projected OBJ as the man who knew Nigeria more than anybody else, the only man who could keep the military boys in check, the only man who could stabilise our polity, the only man who could fix Nigeria. He ended up putting us all in a fix. And we would see hell trying to kick him out of power. Even when we succeeded, he has yet to purge himself of that messianic air we created around him. Eight years after, he keeps muddying up the water of our democracy from ‘retirement’.
That is why the alarm bell goes off in my head every time we begin moulding Buhari (or even Jonathan) along that line – as the last clean leader standing.
Of course, I’m not saying we should not consider the character makeup of our candidates, but that’s if we are genuinely looking at their positions on the key contemporary issues of our development, like security, power, corruption, unemployment, falling oil prices, subsidy regime, foreign policy, rule of law, constitutional reforms, cost of governance, etc. But no, instead of that, we are raking up murk left, right and centre. Yet we daily pledge to make the campaigns issue-based. Na wa o!
With a few weeks to the election, what issue can we sincerely say has been properly addressed by either of the candidates?
Now, let’s forget power supply, unemployment, our prostrate economy, falling oil prices, our battered Naira and so on, the security challenge in the country right now alone is enough reason for anybody to win or lose next month’s elections.
But the problem is: Who is offering the solution? Not PDP, not APC.
The PDP government is experimenting with a couple of trial-and-error approaches, without any discernible anti-terror strategy. But most of all, it is praying and praying that God touches the mind of the insurgents and cause them to have a change of mind. Of course, God can intervene but if the idea was to throw all our problems at God and go to sleep, then there would not have been any need to elect a president, governor or government in the first place. And whatever makes us think that God would first answer the prayers of a Nigerian that prays, without working, before He attends to the prayers of other countries that not only pray, but also work?
As for the APC, we keep hearing their boasts about how they would arrest the situation as soon as they take over Aso Rock. However, there is no clear-cut roadmap to bring about this miracle yet.
But they mouth it so much that one begins to suspect, like the PDP goons, that whoever is behind Boko Haram takes his orders from the APC high command, and that the only way Boko Haram can be arrested as quickly as the APC wants us to believe, is that it would only take a phone-call.
In saner climes, this is the tide of insecurity on the crest of which any great politician can ride to power. It is also a tide the waves of which can drown the clueless politician. But what do we get in our country? Idle political talk; no substance. PDP is letting the opportunity slip through its fingers, APC is too distracted to make a pitch for it, let alone, grab it.
What I mean is that, irrespective of all the noise, I don’t believe anybody in the APC has any solution to this security meltdown beyond what has so far been tabled before Jonathan by his security chiefs. One such option is the scorch-earth approach that the Obasanjo administration used on Odi. The other is the full military (civil war) option used against the Igbo to quell the Biafran insurrection. Incidentally, the APC would be the first to cry foul if the Jonathan administration settled for any of these options.
So, if the APC is so sure that it has the antidote to this insurgency, why not give it to Jonathan to enable him stop this senseless bloodshed? That way too, the opposition party would have stood up to be counted as having buried party rivalry to save Nigerians’ lives? I’m sure too that we, the voters, would not forget this good turn when the time for payback comes in February. We would always remember that we owe APC a huge debt. And we would pay with our votes.
What I don’t like, however, is this idle talk of always throwing Jonathan’s obvious failure with this security matter on our faces and offering no panacea other than we should just vote Buhari as president.
Why wait to use this matter of life and death as an election bait to blackmail us to vote out Jonathan? The elections are still about six weeks away. How many more people would die before then? And from then till May 29, next year when Buhari, if he wins, is supposed to begin to work this his security magic?
Incidentally, every time I listen to Buhari to hear snippets of this cure-all medicine he is coming with, all I get to hear goes like this: “The problem of Nigeria can be classified into two; security and corruption”…But we have known this since the Nzeogwu coup of 1966!
“We will tackle corruption and security”… But even Jonathan has said that over and over again, yet we’re still where we are. Tell us something new!
All these unfounded fears that you don’t want PDP to steal your ideas won’t work. I don’t think Nigerian voters would want to risk voting in someone only to discover he was only blowing hot air; that there was really no master plan after all. We have already made that mistake with Jonathan – at least – in the South East. They voted for him without extracting any promise. And when he got in, it was now left to his fancy to give whatever tokenism he so felt like giving.
But this security issue is more serious than that. It is no longer enough to say, “I will stop Boko Haram”. We’d like to know how this would be done  – not the full details, just snippets. That is the only permissible way we can play politics with the security challenge at hand. It is not about taunting Jonathan to visit Chibok or about the president’s senseless sycophants, ridiculing the campaign to free the girls with a #BringBackJonathan campaign. For me, bringing back those girls is nearly as important, if not more important, than the 2015 elections. Security is the issue!
Unfortunately, our politicians are busy looking for Buhari’s certificates – and those of Namadi Sambo too. They are busy mortgaging whatever is left of our national patrimony to raise money for the electoral ‘war’. Even as both parties stand in default of our electoral laws, which put a N1bn ceiling for campaign spend on presidential elections, they are accusing each other of breaking the law. While PDP has amassed an official war chest of N21 billion, APC says “farmers” have donated five million yams, which they will sell to raise N5 billion. And that is not saying anything yet about former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s personal donations yet.
And, just in case you didn’t hear, the N21 billion raised by the PDP is for completion of the PDP secretariat building. Yes, even when they did not tell us they were raising any such funds that weekend, Jerry Gana, who is a professor that professes very well, now says the money is for the abandoned project. Smart people? Smart by half?
source:http://sunnewsonline.com/new/?p=99098

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