What a week last week turned out to be: Pain and sorrow and blood and the worst of our humanity crawled out of their dingy holes and made life hell for majority of Nigerians. I am talking about saboteurs and government-induced sufferings occasioned by scarcity of the redesigned Naira notes and petrol. Life which hasalready made us natives of the Hobbesian state found a new wickedness, a verve to kick the average Nigerian in the groin, again and again. Life wore a never-before-seen hopelessness which donned a brutish, nasty and short cavalier babaringa. I am talking about such hopelessness that will drive a married woman to go completely naked in a banking hall or a fifty-something year old grand father going unclad to protest their inability to withdraw their hard earned money to take care of pressing family needs.
When I was penning last week’sepisode of An Eye on Politics in which I laid the blame for the shoddy release of the redesigned Naira notes on the banks and collaborating politicians, little did I know that the worst was yet to come. Queues to withdraw the currency notes at ATMs rivalled kilometres long, desperate, snaky car queues searching for fuel. Turning on our comic side, someone wrote: we are queuing all night long at the banks to withdraw money to go and queue all night at the filling stations so we can go and queue to collect our PVCs. Desperation turned to shouting matches, to fisticuffs, to rivers of blood; and death in the banking halls. We are talking of such raging anger that fuels a crowd to descend on armed soldiers who tried to jump the long queue at the ATM, starred bullets in the eye, and beat the hell out of them.
The Almajiris in Kano were the only ones bold enough to take it out on the high and mighty, pelting the convoy of Mr President, Muhammadu Buhari with stones, to a surprising no repercussion. This was when the president went to commission some projects built by the Kano State Governor, Alhaji Ganduje. Anger, hunger, desperation ruled the land. Neither the old Naira notes nor the redesigned ones were anywhere to be seen except in hidden bank vaults and the sequestered cupboards of the high and mighty who, despite the CBN regulations managed to fill their tills to the brim with the new notes. Late Abami Eda, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, couldn’t have sang it better: it was a week of sorrow, tears and blood for the average Nigerian.
Predictably, in the cacophony of anguished voices which enveloped the land, amidst hurried ineffectual meetings, which left the substance and solutions, our politicians still managed to make the whole situation all about them. First was the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who shouted to high heavens that he was the major target of the redesigned Naira notes and the unending fuel scarcity. Not providing any explanation, he went nevertheless, in the dark of the night to meet with the President. His party and members taking a cue from him have shouted themselves hoarse painting their candidate with dubious victimhood. They too fail to show in what way their party and their candidate, and not generality of Nigerians, are the major victims. All the APC governors met up and paid the president a visit whose outcome led to the president promising to look into the matter in 10 days, if the issues around the redesigned Naira notes, getting into the hands of the ordinary Nigerians, have not been resolved by then.
Then came in the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and its candidate into the fray. They pointedly accuse the APC and their candidate of crying foul because the redesigned Naira notes has denied them the ability to use money to buy votes. The roforofo fight is still on, even as the courts have foolishly lend themselves to the politicians to use as their battering rams. One of them has already issued an exparte order granting the wish of some to compel the CBN and the federal government not to extend the expiration date of the old notes. Other cases, in other courts, are urging the contrary, to wit, that the CBN must be compelled to extend the expiration date. In typical Nigerian fashion, Nigerians are left to lick their wounds while the politicians and government fiddle away.
PDP TURNS THE HEAT ON WIKE, G5
Please join me in laughing in Ikwerre and in Igbo, as the the gang of Governors, first known as G5 and later Integrity Group, scamper about looking for a hiding place. The PDP having given up on its errant members in the Integrity Group, of ever coming back into the umbrella’s covering, has brought out the long knives. The party did not even wait until the end of January before it started showing its hands. Recall that Governor Nyesom Nzenwo Wike had boasted, and later recanted, that his group will unveil to the public the presidential candidate it has adopted for the 2023 elections in January, 2023. Suddenly, as January was coming to an end, Wike, not known as a born again Christian started speaking in familial tongues. He claims, unsuccessfully, that he never told anyone the Integrity Group will publicly announce their choice candidate. Only those who should know will be subtly informed, he now says.
That was just before he started crying that a case he instituted against the APC and LP in Port Harcourt, was thwarted by the National PDP whose legal adviser wrote to discontinue the case since only the national body has the legal teeth to so institute a case. Sensing the door about to slam in his face Wike rushed to the Federal High Court, in Abuja, begging that PDP should be compelled not to expel or suspend him. The hunter has suddenly turned the hunted and Wike’s bravado is evaporating and a wimp is emerging therefrom. But there is no doubt now that he is all for the APC candidate, Tinubu. This has made Rivers State a three horse race from which I suspect Bola Tinubu will get at least a mandatory 25 percent but might still come third in the state. PDP is the traditional party in the state while Peter Obi’s Labour Party has developed a strong following in the state. If Wike thinks he can deliver the state for Tinubu in the sweeping form the PDP used to, then like I wrote last week, he has a dirty slap heading his way.
While it was purely unexpected that the hand picked PDP governorship candidate in Abia state wouldsuddenly fall ill, felled by a stroke, a fatal heart attack which took him to England, in a desperate search of a cure and eventually death, Governor Okezie Ikpeazu has found himself castrated. Spineless groveling has become his lot. PDP national holds him in a very bad place: they are the only one who can conduct and did conduct the new primary to choose Professor Uche Ikonne’s replacement. The national chairman must sign the letter nominating the new candidate, Governor Ikpeazu’s former Chief of Staff, Okey Ahaiwe, to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC. Ikpeazu has been forced to eat his vomit.
As Fela Anikulapo Kuti would say, for the G5 Governors and their Integrity Group, yeye don dey smell. They have boxed themselves into a rabbit hole and there appears to be no way they can dig themselves out.
Mideno Bayagbon: mideno@thenewsguru.com