By Zogbobia Selomo
In one week and a day, it will be Christmas, the day appropriated for the birth of Jesus Christ. In how many homes across the nation will there really be Christmas? The question haunts me, without end, without reprieve.
Yet I am in no way responsible for any of the ills that trouble the nation. The APC has ensured that in so many homes, there will be no Christmas. Either there is no food and no money to buy, or they are in the refugee camps or even in the hospitals, having survived kidnapping or banditry, or even recovering from the pains inflicted by a devastating flood, for which this government showed only remote but confused empathy.
For days, I have been labouring in the precincts of reminiscences, a constant recall of the luxuriant but beautiful way of life in the days of yore. My friend stoked the fire even more a few days ago as we reflected on Christmas, what life used to be in Nigeria. How those in the cities would return to the villages at that time of the year, when there would be dances all through the night, when men would gather around bonfires and even roast yams as they tell tales of good life. All that have faded into history as life gets increasingly difficult and very desperate. Peace has departed from most parts of the country and those who longed to return to the villages for the annual celebrations perish the thought on the grounds of safety.
The more things change the more things remain the same. The ruling party reinforces that notion very strongly. In 1985, We are the World, a song written by Lionel Richie and late pop icon, Michael Jackson, was released by a super group of artistes under USA for Africa, to raise money for charity works in parts of Africa that was blighted by famine.
One point driven home then is that there are some people who would never know it is Christmas. That was a natural disaster. This year, a huge population of this nation will not experience the smell of Christmas because of the disaster visited on them by the ruling party. There is insecurity on a large scale. There is hunger on a large scale. There is even death on a large scale, and uncertainty or more precisely, the fear of tomorrow, is the looming umbrella the people see. Were a group of artistes to gather today to do a charity song for Nigeria (God forbid?) what reason would we give, that the politicians decapitated the country? You can call this leadership disaster.
This is why the time is most appropriate for good campaigns to take place since Nigerians can no longer wait for this government to vamoose and just disappear for ever. Never again to return with their evil. The times we are in call for ideas from the presidential candidates, of what they will do to stir the country from a debilitating stupour occasioned by large scale incompetence.
Those who are campaigning know that they must not only say things that give hope but also release details of how they will execute their plans to give life back to the people. It is based on this that the PDP presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, had said that he would take out Boko Haram terrorists from Sambisa forest in Maiduguri, expressing surprise that they enjoyed cover where there is real no visible forest for such hiding.
That has drawn a reprimand from the APC or the Nigerian government whose spokesperson, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said that for six years, for an evil that started in 2009, the PDP did nothing about it.
Such manner of speaking is the reason so many Nigerians will not enjoy the smell of Christmas. Because instead of looking at problems needing urgent attention, the APC has spent nearly its entire two terms looking back in anger. The only reason that parties campaign to take over the top job of a country is because they sense gaps that they can quickly fill by initiating projects that benefit the people. In the case of Nigeria,when the people got tired of PDP, they voted in a new government, and that seemed to have been a fatal error.
Government, they say, is a continuum. Not with APC. When the party came to power in 2016, it spent the whole of six months searching for angels to fill cabinet positions. Within the period, the country’s currency was destroyed. International businesses who were not so sure of the capacity of the new government, took their cash to the black market to buy foreign currencies for remittances and cut their losses. When the cabinet was eventually set up, it was pure anticlimax; most of them incomtent folks. They have ruined the country with their incompetence, and have driven the nation to the edge.
Things that should stagger the mind are now very trite and despicably acceptable. The dollar is on the rise daily, some say it is heading towards the thousand mark before the end of the year. A bag of rice is between N40, 000 and N50, 000 depending upon the specie. The national minimum wage remains stubbornly at N30, 000, that is for those lucky to be employed. Ironically the minimum wage cannot buy a bag of rice. Families don’t think of a gallon of cooking oil any more, they buy in sachets.
APC is one party that has no time for self introspection or even evaluation to put a mark on history. Instead of improving the fortunes of the nation, in just over seven years, the party has taken everything down – economy, security, standard of living, infrastructure and just anything that supports good living, the party has destroyed them all, leaving 133m people of the population in multidimensional poverty.
So when somebody like Atiku speaks, they must criminalise him because they don’t feel any sense of guilt. There is no sense of remorse that the party has done wrong. If after seven years the party can hardly point to any positive thing but ruins, how will it ever turn around to fixing things? If problems are not acknowledged, how will they ever be solved?
My pain for Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu is that he is running around preaching hope, but that is on the ground of falsehood, on the ground of patent insincerity by a party which believes it has done nothing wrong. Such positioning diminishes his political
status. Such abnegation of the truth invalidates his message of hope.
So if PDP is planning a return and it’s message gaining traction, it is because the party has admitted to a past which is not so perfect, but such a past established some landmark projects and policies in the country. Such a past put food on the table and grew the country’s economy. Such a past built some level of prosperity that the ruling party has totally ruined.
For a majority of Nigerians, they live under the debris of these ruins and will have no stomach to sing Christmas songs. They won’t even know it is Christmas because their hopes are deferred.
The PDP and its presidential candidate are promising a new beginning. It is only reasonable to interrogate their proposition for the joy it brings instead of dwelling on a cornflake of lies that has been the forte of this administration in the past seven and half years.
Selomo writes from Lagos
