Symbolism with Simbo Olorunfemi
Email: simboor@yahoo.com Twitter: @simboolorunfemi
“Everybody is staying there for eight years. Now it’s our turn. We must complete our eight years. It is a constitution of this country. We will complete our two tenure and hand over” – Dame Patience Jonathan
The six-week postponement of the elections, a desperate throw of the dice to avert the inevitable, may turn out a blessing in disguise for the nation, after all. The more those behind the song denied it, the clearer it became that the hand might have been that of Jega, but the voice was unmistakably that of the trickster. Thanks to Dr Fasheun, one of the men in whom the President is well pleased, we now have it confirmed that the window of postponement was only configured to save their man from an impending loss at the polls. Indeed, only a few, outside the well-heeled circles of Abuja were fooled by the move. Only the gullible could have fallen for the lie that the postponement was cooked up for any altruistic reason.
Six weeks almost done, unintended consequences of their shenanigans stare them in the face, grinning. And they are not smiling. The baby they fathered barely conforms to their specifications and projection. They find themselves with back to the wall, pinned to the corner, ranting and raving at no one and everyone, this last minute. They might have proposed six weeks to clean up the mess and arrest the wind blowing in the opposite direction, but they have failed. They have inadvertently harvested the whirlwind and the worn-out umbrella is flailing wildly in the face of adversity.
If only they knew, they would have invested part of their huge war-chest on an issues-based campaign rather one fashioned around demonising the opposition candidate and fanning the embers of hate. If they knew, they might have devoted more attention to helping the electoral process across the line, rather than stubbornly seeking to scuttle it. Could the Federal Government not have declared a day or two as Public holiday to enable more people collect their Permanent Voter Cards, when the heat was on? They did not, for reasons known to them, even as they took on the role of latter-day crusaders, suddenly enamoured with the plight of the disenfranchised, huffing and puffing over PVCs and Card readers. They stridently sought to roll back the hands of time, rather than embrace a simple technology fashioned to separate the goats from the yam.
They chose not to help the process, but took to attacking the Independent National Electoral Commission and the person of its Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, mobilising thugs to campaign for his removal from offices. Deploying talking heads to media houses to campaign against the use of the PVCs and Card Readers by INEC was rather cheap. Sending the OPC to the streets to intimidate people in a primitive show of force only gave the sponsors away as desperate, pushing a lot of the undecided into the camp of the opposition and hardening the resolve of many to sweep the overlords off their seats.
The signs are ominous for them. The postponement has backfired on those who engineered it. They have run out of excuses. They have run out of ammunition in their puerile attempt at painting the opposition candidate as the devil-incarnate. In desperation, they contradict themselves – the same man accused of having an Islamist, we are now told, is receiving aid from Western powers in support of same-sex marriage. The man they said was being funded by the Western forces, is supposedly now also being funded by ISIS, according to their rabid imagination. How contradictory and unimaginative can a Presidential campaign be, with the garrulity mistaken for intelligence the impact of his verbal diarrhoea measured by the level of bombast and flippancy, rather than the quality of reception elicited from the audience.
If only the President’s men had put more energy into selling their own candidate rather than the juvenile desperation of the campaign Spokesman to employ subterfuge as a strategy for winning elections, perhaps they might have fared better. If only they knew that what March 28 has in its womb is no different from what February14 had on offer, they might not have rejected the date simply for itspoignant symbolism. They wanted 6 weeks, thinking it would deliver to them a magical change in fortune and suddenly wipe clean the five-year dismal record of the incumbent. Now they know better. There is no more place to hide for those who thought to do in six weeks what they had left undone for five years. Postponement will not favour the indolent, bereft of ideas and strategy for winning the minds of the people, in the mistaken belief that what is needed is a massive deployment of cash to buy opinion leaders.
Yet, these things need not be as they are today. The President did not need six weeks when he had five years to make an indelible impact in the minds of the people. He had the world at his feet with the power to shape the minds of the people. With a skilful management of affairs of the nation and an intelligent handling of challenges on his table, he would have written his name in gold. But he fell short by miles. The image projected to the world was that of a man detached from reality, held hostage by vested interests, unable to connect with the people. We saw one who confessed to not being in charge, often highly indecisive when it mattered the most. He came across as clumsy in thought and speech, given to gaffes and misspeak that queried his touted academic credentials. His carriage on the international stage has been less than inspiring, with an array of diplomatic blunders pushing Nigeria down the ladder into docility and anonymity.
Yet, these are no sins that cannot be easily forgiven by Nigerians. We know that flowery words do not necessarily equate to quality of thought. We know that the man elected as President is no Martin Luther King. But what has been difficult to get over is the audacity of the President’s minders to bluster their way through one misstep after another, taking refuge in different contraptions to explain away the groundswell of opinion against their man. They brought in religion and ethnicity, when the issues on the table were simply about incompetence, negligence, mistakes and amateurish attempts at cover-up. The President could have taken the route of levelling with the people but his people thought otherwise. They opted to play the victim card, fly the religious flag and blackmail people on ground of ethnicity, when all that people asked was for their man to deliver on promises made and live up to his responsibility as President and Commander-in- Chief.
The President did not need to go campaign while the casualties from a terrorist attack were yet to be buried. He could have chosen to act more swiftly to save the Chibok girls and exercised greater restraint in public conduct after the murder of the boys in Buni Yadi. He could have restrained his team from needless mudslinging, but he did not. He chose to let loose attack dogs as spokespersons and recruited a loquacious pit bull as voice of the campaign. He could have done things differently. He could have taken a different road, but he did not. What was that about the laborious differentiation between stealing and corruption? What was that on goats and yam? He could have handled things differently, but he did not. He did it his way. The verdict beckons.
