It’s not about Buhari

The way our current presidential election campaign is going, it’s apparent that retaining political power is far more important to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) than life or death. While the daily carnage due to insurgency continues unabated the opposition presidential candidate for the All Progressives Congress (APC) retired General Muhhamadu Buhari is being subjected […]

The way our current presidential election campaign is going, it’s apparent that retaining political power is far more important to the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) than life or death. While the daily carnage due to insurgency continues unabated the opposition presidential candidate for the All Progressives Congress (APC) retired General Muhhamadu Buhari is being subjected to a series of officially sanctioned abuses and intrigues.
It all started with fraudulent reports that he was suffering from cancer, and had travelled for treatment overseas. This falsehood was debunked when he appeared in person. Next all sorts of faceless groups spent millions on advertisements geared towards smearing his reputation and libelling his character. Then the Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose who is renowned for his lack of pedigree and decorum, behaved true to type by sponsoring a despicable advertisement with morbid reference Buhari’s expected life span. The latest tragicomedy concerns the General’s academic qualifications. This is the fourth time Buhari is contesting for the presidency and this matter has never been brought up before. This is because the previous three times no one actually expected him to win, so he was left to fail alone. This time things are different.
 Today he is riding the crest of a wave and the PDP is running scared. The fact that all underhand methods are being employed to ruin Buhari’s chances at the polls is only to be expected, since Jonathan has no track record to speak of with which to campaign, therefore orchestrating attacks on his opponent is the only line of action left open to him. In the “south-south” where pidgin-English is the general lingua-franca there is an adage which says “where person grow reach, na there im head dey”, meaning don’t expect a child to think or act like an adult, or expect unintelligent people to act intelligently. It’s difficult to come to term with the shallow thinking of PDP top echelons which has led this nation to the brink of disaster. Their hullabaloo over the General’s WAEC result only indicates that “dem head no dey house”! Their claim that WAEC or a Secondary School Leaving Certificate is required before as a pre-condition for contesting for the office of President is simply not true. The Constitution is very clear on the meaning “school leaving certificate or equivalent”, and by any interpretation the retired general is more than qualified to contest.
  Any attempt to disqualify such a massively popular candidate is courting disaster. Although military authorities released a statement saying “the Army holds the retired senior officer in very high esteem and respect and would not be a party to any controversy surrounding his eligibility for any political office”, their overall handling of the issue was disappointing. Rather than making it clear that becoming a General requires far more integrity, training and qualifications than becoming an elected President, they denied knowledge of his qualifications and inadvertently made it appear as if stark illiterates can rise to the rank of General in our Army.  Worse, all sorts of intellectual pigmies masquerading on television as “legal experts” and “public affairs analysts” sought to cloud the issue. Their pedantic and libellous arguments vividly illustrate why dispensation of justice is so poor and litigation takes so long in our country. To the detriment of justice our lawyers myopically concentrate on the letter of the law instead of concerning themselves with the intent. PDP supporters fail to understand that these incessant attacks on Buhari are irrelevant. Those who will vote APC in the election will do so even though they know Buhari isn’t a God- sent saviour; they know he isn’t the cleverest person in the country; they know he made mistakes as a military head of state; and they may not sympathise with his religious convictions.
 It’s not about Buhari as a person, they will vote for him simply because they want change. They want an end to the ineffective, incompetent, ethnically biased, monumentally corrupt, insensitive government of the past six years. The Director of Media and Publicity for the PDP Presidential Campaign Organization Chief Femi Fani-Kayode once said that Goodluck Jonathan is a man who “prides himself on his weakness, and incompetence”.  The election isn’t about Buhari, it’s about changing a president who, Fani-Kayode said, “has abdicated his responsibilities, destroyed his own political party, divided his own country, abandoned his own people, brought ridicule to his own faith, cowers before his own officials, scorns the international community, and breaks his solemn oath to protect and defend the Nigerian people”.  It isn’t about whether Buhari has a secondary school certificate, it’s about asking if Jonathan with his PhD has run the country well or fulfilled his electoral promises? As Chief Femi Fani-Kayode once said about Jonathan “May God bring us a real leader that can save our nation and may he take away this one who feels no pain and has no empathy when Nigerian blood, nay even the blood of innocent children is shed with impunity”.