The democrat Vs the dictator By Lewis Obi

The choice before Nigerian voters on 14th February 2015 cannot be more explicit.

Major-Gen. Mu­hammaduBuhari, former Petro­leum Minister, former Head of State, is the flag-bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC), and Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, the incumbent President of Nigeria, is the flag-bearer of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Jonathan is the beneficiary of a startling sequence of fortunate events. He never knew he was go­ing to be somebody, a big shot. The hand of fate kept moving him from pillar to post, then to be Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State, then to be State Governor, to Vice-President of Nigeria, to Acting President and, finally, to become President. None of this was by anyone’s plan. F or a man whose first name is ‘Goodluck’ it was like prophesy come true.

Gen. Buhari, an ambitious army man, led a coup d’état that toppled a democratically elected Nigerian government on 31st December 1983. He ruled Nigeria unabashedly as a dictator. A high-handed ruler and lawgiver he abrogated the Consti­tution, enacted laws that enthroned totalitarianism, jailed journalists even when they wrote the truth, and incarcerated much of the realm. He set up special military tribunals that conducted trials according to his whims. T he t rial of Chief Michael Ajasin, the executive governor of Ondo State ended in acquittals. Af­ter the third time, the old man was ordered to be held indefinitely.

President Jonathan was and is still regarded by many as a humble man. I ndeed h e i s s o u nderstated, often under-rated, and even some­times mistreated by his bosses. That was his fate as deputy governor and again, this time, openly and scandal­ously, when he was Vice-President. He would not even be informed that the President was travelling abroad let alone being told to do anything on behalf of the President. But he bore his cross with dignity and patience and eventually won the overwhelm­ing sympathy of Nigerians who then pressurized the National Assembly to get Mr. Jonathan named Acting President while his boss was indis­posed. He was sworn-in as President at the eventual demise of President Yar’Adua.

Gen. Buhari, on the other hand, has and is well known for a mar­tial temperament that sometimes goes over t he t op. I t is now h ardly remembered that in 1982, he report­edly initiated military operations against Chad without clearance from his bosses at Military Headquarters which in disciplined armies should have earned him immediate dismiss­al. B ut t he overawed N PN govern­ment had just taken over power from the military and did not have the balls to dismiss him. So, eventually, he turned the scales and ousted the government whereas logic, tradition and discipline dictated the other way round.

The general is known as a man who did not suffer fools gladly. His impatience is noticeable in every­thing he does. He never believed in due process and he doesn’t even now. He has no faith in the legal system. He never did when he was head of state. In the last three election cycles he ran for president. He never ac­cepted h is d efeat o nce. H e a lways felt he had been cheated out of his victory. H e goes to the election tri­bunal to fulfill all righteousness.

He then blames the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), and then he blames INEC’s computers and the commission’s computer p eople. T hen h e t urns on the judges and the judicial sys­tem. Indeed, in his remarks on 14th January 2015 at the signing of the Abuja Accord he stated that he did not believe that a Federal Govern­ment or any incumbent government could lose a case in court. I n other words, it is no use going to the elec­tion tribunal. And this is partly why so many Nigerians are now making active preparations to flee, know­ing that he has made up his mind that if he didn’t win on 14th Febru­ary that means that once again he’s been cheated and as he has warned, “the dog and the baboon will soak in b lood.” H is f anatical, h ysterical zealots, most of them Islamic funda­mentalists and thugs, would then fan out to impose the ‘democracy’ of the mob, having already been convinced that he already had won and any con­trary announcement means that his victory has been stolen yet again.

On the issues, if President Jona­than were a candidate in the United States or in any country in the West­ern Hemisphere all the polls would have declared him winner by a mile because he would have locked up the women vote, being the undisputed champion of the womenfolk. Never in history has any leader appointed 12 women into cabinet. But to hand over the two most crucial ministries in his cabinet – petroleum and econ­omy/finance – to women is nothing short of r evolutionary. O n t hat a c­count alone, Jonathan deserves the title of the change candidate of this election cycle.

Gen. Buhari did not appoint a woman into his cabinet through­out h is t enure a s h ead of s tate. A s an apostle of sharia, this is not sur­prising. I ndeed, it was more out of embarrassment that he grudgingly permitted his elegant wife to come out in public in the last three weeks of the campaign.Gen. Buhari’s cam­paign is trenched on three issues: security, corruption, and unemploy­ment. These are well chosen issues which Nigerians sometimes get emo­tional about and on which the Jona­than administration has been un­certain at best and at times outright incompetent.

The Nigerian military has been rusty, slack in skills and training, ill-prepared and, perhaps, ill-equipped to tackle Boko Haram. It is appar­ently infiltrated by the jihadists. It is slowly waking up, trying to self-correct. When it fully recovers it has more than enough capacity to de­stroy Boko Haram. Gen. Buhari has said he would do better against Boko Haram. H e h as not explained how. Everything he’s said has been in gen­eralities. If he has a plan, it must be a secret plan, like Richard Nixon’s 1968 secret plan to end the American war in Vietnam, which was a ruse.

Corruption is alive and well in Nigeria, it is pervasive. Gen. Bu­hari has been put up as Mr. Integrity. There is nothing to support the integ­rity claim. Indeed, new information emerging from the Petroleum Trust Fund, his last public post, is actually contradicting the integrity claims. Again, Buhari has not explained how he would fight corruption better than the incumbent president who has said that the best way is to set up institutions that would make corrup­tion impossible. H e illustrates t his with the end of corruption in fertil­izer acquisition by farmers, a claim confirmed. He points to the IPPIS system of payment in the public ser­vice which discovered and eliminat­ed nearly 100,000 ghost workers and pensioners saving the government more than N200 billion a year. T he truth is that the corruption cesspool begins from the legislature, the Na­tional Assembly, which no president can even begin to fight and perme­ates the realm and spares neither the clergy nor the clerics and no one has put out a credible proposal to tame that beast.

So many promises of increased employment have been made it is no longer possible to keep track and ascertain the sources of so much op­timism. The outlook of the economy with the crash of the world price for oil is not as good as it should have been. It is both a challenge and an opportunity. Both sides make simi­lar promises. T he jobless must de­cide to go for either the democrat or t he dictator. That is t he beauty of democracy – the opportunity to choose.

OBI 08173446632 SMS ONLY [email protected]