All the mud that is fit to splash

As last week ended, PDP’s campaign team succeeded in making APC candidate General Muhammadu Buhari’s school leaving certificate a big campaign issue. Leading the PDP cavalry charge was the new head of its campaign’s media and publicity office Femi Fani-Kayode, a man known to take no prisoners in every circumstance. In his new assignment Fani-Kayode […]

As last week ended, PDP’s campaign team succeeded in making APC candidate General Muhammadu Buhari’s school leaving certificate a big campaign issue. Leading the PDP cavalry charge was the new head of its campaign’s media and publicity office Femi Fani-Kayode, a man known to take no prisoners in every circumstance. In his new assignment Fani-Kayode is already raising enough dust to divert a cargo plane. He demanded at the weekend that Buhari be disqualified from the race for failing to prove that he was educated up to secondary school level. He also accused INEC of engaging in a cover up for Buhari.
Actually, the campaign to make Buhari’s certificate an issue was started by Minister of State for Works Mr Dayo Adeyeye who said, “It is very compulsory that he presents his certificates. Otherwise, how are we going to prove that he was educated to the school certificate level or its equivalent? The constitution is very clear in Section 131…If Buhari did not have a certificate to show, he should voluntarily withdraw from the presidential race.”
 Nigerian schoolchildren must be wondering at this point why their parents are talking about the school certificate of a man who has exceeded the Biblical age of three scores and ten and has been a governor, minister, army divisional commander and even Head of State. We used to think that a person has no further need for his school certificate once he or she secures admission into a higher institution. That was the case until politicians and the Constitution came along.
Now, Fani-Kayode’s demand that INEC disqualifies Buhari is visible mischief because the commission does not have the power under the Electoral Act 2010 to disqualify any candidate nominated by his political party. This is apparently the case even in clear cut cases such as failure to meet the minimum age stipulated before one can contest for an office or failure to have the minimum level of education. Instead, a candidate’s election opponents must go to court and seek an order to disqualify him, a waste of precious time if you ask me.
The big surprise in this matter is that the APC machinery and the Buhari Campaign Organisation handled this matter so clumsily that PDP got a chance to score a cheap point with it. The chance to put APC on the defensive must have come as very welcome relief to the PDP campaign, battered as it has been by everyone from Obasanjo to Reverend Mbaka to MEND. From what I understand of it all, Buhari has lost his original certificates and does not have copies, a common occurrence in Nigeria. He is however smugly confident that copies of the certificates exist in the files of the Nigeria Army, where he served as an officer for two and a half decades. Yet, rather than saying that certificate copies can be found with the Army, the ex-General should have taken steps long before now to obtain copies. For, if the Nigeria Army were to become half as partisan as the Department of State Service [DSS] has become in this election, the Army Secretary could hide the file and say there is no evidence that Buhari ever served in the Nigeria Army. I am not giving PDP evil ideas; I am just reminding APC to stop relying on government files for proof of their legal rectitude.
Even before Fani-Kayode arrived at the scene, PDP’s national secretary Prof Adewale Oladipo threw up mud of his own when he said last month, “The next election is going to be between light and darkness. It is going to be between a cosmopolitan highly focused PhD holder and a semi-illiterate jackboot.” It was mud well sprinkled in all directions. There could be a lot of debate regarding just how cosmopolitan his party’s candidate is given his Niger Delta-centred entourage, projects and contracts splash. The Jonathan administration’s cornerstone program called Transformation Agenda is the opposite of focused, while a debate could ensue about the real quality of a Ph D in modern Nigeria.
Even before Oladipo, the Director General of PDP’s presidential campaign Dr. Amodu Ali splashed mud of his own. He said, “In this 21st century where great nations of this world are fielding young men and women in their forties and fifties as presidents and prime ministers, it is ironic that Nigeria’s APC is fielding a septuagenarian with fossilised ideas of how to run a government and social engineering. Nigeria deserves a better leadership than their candidate who has no certificates to tender as requirement for entering an election.”
That is very interesting because Ali is about the same age as Buhari; both were Lt Cols in the Army when the Gowon regime was overthrown in 1975. Talking about fossilised ideas, it was no small wonder that PDP resurrected Ali, chief proponent of the principle of Garrison Politics, to lead its 2015 campaign. If not because Nigerian students of today were not born during the Ali Must Go crisis of 1978, PDP would have shopped for an alternative campaign leader.
Now, I have every respect for Dr. Amodu Ali, if you know what it means for a young Northerner to go from Barewa College to the University of Ibadan in the early 1960s and bag a medical degree with full honours. However, I was hoping that he learned a lesson from 1978, the year he resigned from the Army and quickly became NPN’s senatorial candidate for Benue West. At his very first media interview Ali launched an attack at Malam Aminu Kano, saying he is always rebelling. The next day Alhaji Sabo Bakin Zuwo responded in the radio. He said, among other things that, as Federal Commissioner for Education Ali created JAMB in order to deny Northerners admission in universities!
 The most vitriolic of all political statements made last week was by Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose who said on Saturday that APC has “dragged Nigeria to the brink of crises by branding its presidential candidate Major General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) as candidate of the North, an Islamist, Jihadist and Sharialist who is out to return power to the northerners and implement Islamic agenda, thereby triggering a kind of reasoning in the mindset of stakeholders in other parts of the country, especially the Niger-Delta.” Of course APC never branded its candidate as such; it is its opponents that would benefit from such a branding. With that statement, Fayose stepped out to play a role as one of the nastiest mud splashers in the still unfolding campaign.
President Jonathan did some little mud splashing of his own when, at his official campaign’s launch in Lagos, he brought out and read a copy of the coup speech read by Major General Ibrahim Babangida when he overthrew the Buhari regime in 1985. APC’s media director Garba Shehu responded by saying that “Nigerians do not expect a political commentary from President Jonathan of a nearly 30-year-old speech delivered to the nation by IBB. What Nigerians expect to hear among others is what he has achieved in the last six years, why corruption remains endemic and why the economy is in shambles.”
It is not as if APC deserves a lot of pity, having splashed a lot of mud of its own since its formation in 2013. Among its biggest inventions is the concept of President Jonathan’s regime as “clueless.” The depiction so rankled PDP chiefs that they spent quality time at a rally trying to refute it. Perhaps the biggest bucket of mud yet splashed by APC was contained in its chairman Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s New Year message when it threatened to form a parallel government if PDP rigs the election. How APC will determine that, Oyegun ominously did not say.
I was thinking of the New York Times’ motto “All the news that’s fit to print.” The motto of Nigerian politicians is “All the mud that is fit to splash.”