BY Sodiq Yusuff
In what has been hailed as a landmark initiative ahead of next month’s presidential election, President Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari – the two biggest combatants in the 2015 presidential election – embraced each other on Wednesday at an election sensitisation workshop on non-violence before signing a peace accord.
Both men, as well as other presidential candidates, promised, among other things, to take “proactive measures to prevent electoral violence before, during and after the elections” and “run issue-based campaigns at national, state and local government levels”. It is unclear yet if this is yet another tokenism, seeing how the spokesmen of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) previously admonished each other to stick with the issues in their campaigns.
If that happens, these are five of the most pungent campaign-ground missiles we expect not to hear again.
Fiery-talking governor of Osun state, Rauf Aregbesola, played host to the APC campaign delegation on Wednesday, just hours after the signing of the peace accord and his opening utterances were far from peaceful.
“PDP ti jona o; PDP ti jona patapata,” Aregbesola blurted in Yoruba, meaning “PDP is burnt; PDP has burnt completely.” As though the law of Karma was at work, Aregbesola, initially, mistakenly substituted PDP with APC. So he actually started by saying “APC is burnt!” That’s what happens with evil thoughts; everyone – including the protagonist and the supposed victim – is consumed.
What and whose interest would a burnt PDP serve, anyway? We don’t want any party to burn – not APC, not PDP!
At the same PDP presidential campaign rally in Osogbo and during that same Aregbesola speech, there was a mention of someone who called himself Goodluck but had brought bad luck upon the country.
Here is how the governor specifically put it: “Someone says he is Goodluck, but bad luck is all over the country. What do we call that?
“We have seen good luck. We want better luck. But God has now brought best luck… Obasanjo gave us Goodluck. Goodluck turned to bad luck. Nigerians want better luck, but God has brought best luck. Buhari is the best luck. We will chase them into the dark forest, the deamons.”
That’s pure name-calling. Perhaps Aregbesola did not know, he would have won a few hearts if he concentrated on what Jonathan promised to do that he hasn’t done, and what APC wants to do and how it will be done.
And one way to make Jonathan eligible for some more sympathy votes is to continue calling him names, setting him up as the victim. There aren’t many better ways to inadvertently campaign for your opponent, Mr. Governor!
Certainly, Aregbesola himself hadn’t devised the most formidable way to chase “demons” in “the dark forest”. And Nigerians don’t want leaders who are either demons on demon chasers. We want a political space purely dominated by humans!
So, Buhari does not remember ANYTHING?” That would be scandalous!
Buhari has granted interviews to journalists from both the print and electronic media; we have read him in the papers and watched him on television. Like Jonathan, Buhari does not know everything. But, again, like Jonathan, he does know something. It would be unfair to say either man does not know anything.
One man who doesn’t share this sentiment, though, is Yekeen Adeojo, erstwhile national vice chairman (south-west) of PDP.
“Buhari doesn’t remember anything. He is old…,” Adeojo said on Monday at the party’s presidential campaign rally in Ibadan, capital of Oyo state.
By saying Buhari remembers nothing, Adeojo, like Aregbesola, indicts himself. Anyone who spends minutes addressing the crowd to vote for the opponent of a man who does not remember anything surely does not remember that the man he is campaigning against does not remember anything. To put in a clearer form, it’s futile to campaign against a man who remembers nothing – because a landslide victory is automatically awaiting his opponent.
At that same rally in Ibadan, Olusegun Mimiko, the governor of Ondo state, described Buhari as a man who wants to be president yet does not know how to use a computer,
“Some people want to be president, but they do not belong in this generation,” he said. “Some of them cannot even use the computer. We want a 21st century-compliant president.”
It would be interesting for Mimiko to supply proof of Buhari’s computer illiteracy. Anything short of that, his utterance is merely one other needless jibe.
The most appalling campaign missile has been reserved for the last mention, and any guesswork on the author is a no-brainer.
It’s Ayodele Fayose, the man under whose watch seven members of his state assembly impeached the speaker and announced a new one, despite stiff opposition from 17 other members of the house; the man who would later come out to say he was “very much prepared to work with” the illegally-named speaker “without apologies”.
This time, he has said, indirectly, that he can be violent.
“They have been going about with a campaign of violence but they should know that nobody has the monopoly of violence,” Fayose said at a PDP rally.
Well, Fayose, that has got to be a joke. A very huge joke. Nigerians do not want violence – or people who have the effrontery to flaunt their penchant for violence.
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