During the formative years of the now-ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), a common song that became a familiar refrain sonorously on the lips of most of the characters that converged to birth the party was ‘anybody but Goodluck Ebele Jonathan’. Nigerians were tricked into believing that PDP, specifically then President Jonathan, was the worst thing that ever happened to the nation and must be shown the way out.
Somehow, due to the gullibility of Nigerian voters, coupled with Jonathan’s meekness, these elements had their way, and the rest is now history. But have Nigerians fared any better? Has the APC changed the citizens’ fortunes like it promised before the 2015 general election? Is there anything to suggest that things will change for the better under the APC?
The Exit
Earlier in the week, one of the founding members of the APC who governed Kaduna state for eight years, Nasir Ahmed El-Rufai, dumped the party for the opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP). Days before his formal defection, it became crystal clear that El-Rufai, who had sometimes back-vowed to remain in the APC until his last breath, had parted ways with the party.
The former Kaduna governor stated emphatically that APC has derailed. “I recognize that the party has since strayed and left me stuck in the vision of its well-meaning founding fathers and mothers”, he noted.
The APC strayed? Really? To say the party drifted means that, at some point, it did the right thing. There was never a time, including when El-Rufai was a diehard member and defending the party, that the APC did what it promised Nigerians.
El-Rufai spent eight years as governor on the APC platform, and within that period, he not only defended the party but politically attacked those against it. Now, let’s look at APC under the eight years El-Rufai served as governor. Those are the years of former President Muhammadu Buhari, the man who promised to combat corruption, retool the economy and address insecurity.
Failed Promises
Even though he campaigned on the promise to fight corruption, Buhari’s antecedents in combating corruption were disappointing. Nigerians were made to believe that the former military ruler had a reputation as a no-nonsense leader with a hard stance against corruption and would combat graft.
To the chagrin of most Nigerians, there were widespread allegations of massive corruption and looting of the treasury under the Buhari administration. For instance, the Special Investigator on the CBN and Related Entities, Jim Obaze, accused Godwin Emefiele, who served as CBN governor under Buhari, of unlawfully lodging billions of naira in at least 593 bank accounts across the US, UK, and China. These reportedly occurred without the necessary approvals from the CBN Board of Directors and the bank’s Investment Committee.
The report claimed that Emefiele also manipulated the CBN’s Ways and Means. Documents reportedly reveal instances where senior CBN and government officials padded approved amounts, leading to an alleged misappropriation of funds. Emefiele is being prosecuted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
Sadly, also under Buhari, the anti-corruption crusader, the Humanitarian Affairs Minister, Saadiya Umar Farouk, is alleged to have mismanaged N37bn and, like Emefiele, who was rewarded with tenure renewal by Buhari, is currently being prosecuted by the EFCC.
Who else could have imagined that under Buhari, who promised to combat corruption, there would be a Hadi Sirika who duped the nation with a phony Nigeria Air project? Like Emefiele and Saadiya, Hadi Sirika is having his day in court for alleged corruption. Let’s not even talk of the former Accountant General Ahmed Idris, who is standing trial for alleged N109bn fraud. Idris served from 2015 to 2023. Under Buhari!
In 2022, Nigerians were told that termites ate vouchers totalling N17.12bn at the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF) storeroom. The vouchers were for transfers from the NSITF accounts in two banks to accounts belonging to individuals and companies.
Before Buhari assumed power in 2015, the Nigerian economy was growing at 7 per cent and among the top 15 fastest-growing economies in the world. However, under him, Nigeria entered a period of stagnation. Macroeconomic reforms were reversed, and economic policies became increasingly unpredictable. The nation witnessed a deterioration in the security situation, with thousands of Nigerians either killed or abducted in the midst of widespread extrajudicial killings by nonstate actors.
Under APC, Nigeria earned a place as the poverty capital of the world. In 2018, The World Poverty Clock, an online tool that monitors progress against poverty and provides real-time poverty data across countries, ranked Nigeria as the poverty capital with about 87 million people in extreme poverty. India would eventually beat us to it in 2022 when about 83 million Indians, representing 6 per cent of the country’s 1.3 billion population, were plunged into extreme poverty.
In a piece titled “Why Buhari Failed”, the Council on Foreign Relations noted that “Buhari managed to turn wild enthusiasm about his candidacy into grave disappointment, going from a regime of which many, rightly or not, had high hopes, to one that most can’t wait to see the back of…It was clear within the first few months—the initial struggle to put together a cabinet being particularly telling—that Buhari, for all his desperation to take power, had not done his homework and was ill-prepared for the demands of the office”.
In spite of this abysmal performance, El-Rufai wants Nigerians to believe that the party he played a fundamental role in forming derailed a few moments after he left office. C’mon! If Buhari was a failure, Tinubu is a failure pro max. I like El-Rufai for his brilliance, but his politics is mediocre. His current posturing notwithstanding, he cannot absolve himself of the mess we now find ourselves in as a nation.
Like Buhari, Like Tinubu
If we lament the hardships under former President Buhari, we are doing far more than that under PBAT, where the statistics are startling. Food inflation is at 39 per cent, 130 million Nigerians are multi-dimensionally poor, 53 per cent of youth are unemployed, with joblessness exacerbating insecurity and citizens being abducted, tortured and killed on a daily basis with the security operatives feeling helpless.
In the health sector, the nation recorded an astronomic increase in the prices of medications. Universities and unity schools increased tuition fees by up to 100 per cent while the cost of transportation steeply rose amidst worsening economic conditions. Nigerians never bargained for this.
Despite this dreadful record, the ruling APC recently passed a vote of confidence on President Tinubu and endorsed him for a second term in 2027.
John Vaillant’s ‘The Tiger: A True Story Of Vengeance And Survival’ tells the story of a Russian poacher, Vladimir Markov, who shot and injured a tiger and then stole its kill. But the tiger tracked Markov to his cabin, tore apart everything that smelled like him, and then waited. For nearly two days, the tiger stayed outside, silent and patient, holding onto its anger.
When Markov finally returned, the tiger killed him, dragged him into the forest, and ate him. “The eating may have been secondary,” Vaillant explains, adding, “I think he killed him because he had a bone to pick.”
It is believed that if you harm a tiger, it won’t forget. It won’t forgive. It will wait, and it will strike when the time is right. The ruling APC should know this for free. Nigerians won’t forget. Nigerians won’t forgive. They will wait and vote you out by 2027. We have had enough.
In any case, the results of the 2023 presidential polls showed that Nigerians no longer want APC. Had Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar, who paired in 2019, worked together, APC would have been sent packing for good. How else can one explain the fact that APC’s Bola Tinubu got 8.79m, while PDP’s Atiku Abubakar polled 6.98m and LP’s Peter Obi scored 6.10m? A repeat is possible and with a merger, APC will be sent packing come 2027. But Nigerians must watch out for the merger of persons whose only motive is to grab power.
