by Dimeji Ladi
Nigerians will head to the polls to elect a president on March 28 and it is clear that the winner of that election will be either Goodluck Jonathan of the PDP or Muhammadu Buhari of the APC.
Buhari and the APC have built an industry out of the ‘Change’ mantra and there is no doubt that large segments of the population are buying the message. Good for them.
There are millions of honest ordinary Nigerians however who are really scared about all this talk of change, especially the brand of change that Gen. Buhari and the APC represents. They are worried about what the future might hold for them under a Buhari presidency. For them, changing the incumbent and enthroning Buhari could be a very costly experiment.
Dimeji Ladi visited major streets in Lagos in a bid to sample the opinion of Nigerians and the following is the feedback he got about ‘Change”
1. STUDENT
Whenever the APC screams change, Nigerian students – especially those from poor families – shiver. They look at how school fees at federal government universities are cheap whereas APC states have become noted for steep increase in fees paid by students.
Take Ogun, for instance, do you know that medical students in the state-owned Olabisi Onabanjo University pay over N300,000 as tuition. The lowest being paid by any student in that school in N120,000. All that remains is for the university to publicly say: “THIS INSTITUTION IS OUT OF BOUNDS FOR POOR PEOPLE.” No wonder there were violent protests by the students last year.
The story is the same in LASU and EKSU under the now-ousted Gov. Kayode Fayemi.
2. NIGERIAN WORKERS
Check the news headlines: Workers protest in Osun state over being owed for 5 months (almost half of the year, my goodness!); workers protest in Edo; school teachers protest in Yobe; and even in Lagos doctors are about to go on strike once again.
All the headlines above are just from within the last week. Can you believe that?
Now notice that every single one of those states are controlled by the APC, making it seem like it is a deliberate APC policy to deprioritise the welfare of workers who break their backs and toil daily for the progress of the states. Even the Bible says, “a worker is worthy of his wages.” If APC does not believe that paying diligent workers is a priority, then it might be sad days ahead for Nigeria’s civil servants if the party takes over at a time when oil revenue has dwindled.
3. WOMEN
Has anybody ever heard the APC as a party or any of its top party chiefs come out to publicly condemn ex-governor of Zamfara, Sani Yerima’s distasteful marriage to an underage girl?
Why did it take media pressure and piles of newspaper columns to convince Gen. Buhari that his wife needed to be integrated into his campaign?
Most importantly, where are the women in Buhari’s inner circle?
Jonathan’s most powerful ministers are women – so where are Buhari’s women?
Buhari has been promising that he will be different this time but can the women folk trust him to keep his word or are they better served by sticking with the incumbent who has clearly done great for them?
Every day, Pres. Jonathan targets the women folk with deliberate interventions like the special YOU WIN for women and just this week he launched another empowerment initiative for women called GWIN (Growing Girls and Women in Nigeria Initiative).
4. NIGER DELTA
People like Gov. Amaechi scream ‘change’ in Rivers state, but for those in Rivers and the South South where most of the nation’s revenue is generated, the question is “change, for what?” and “change, to what?”
You are asking them to endorse the removal of a ‘son of the soil’ who might never have reached that point if fate did not take away his former boss (may his gentle soul rest in peace).
Let us be realistic here: Is there any region that will gladly support the removal of someone who is a trail blazer and path finder for them? Even the sophisticated South West embraced Obasanjo when it was time for reelection. Was it because of anything extraordinary? NO. So try to remember that when next you wonder why the Niger Delta is uninterested and even afraid of all this change talk.
5. JOURNALISTS AND ACTIVE SOCIAL MEDIA USERS
I cannot count the number of journalists who have expressed fears to me about what would be their fate if Buhari wins, considering his antecedents. You may never know the value of a thing until you have lost it. People take for granted the fact that Pres. Jonathan has enriched our democracy by his high tolerance threshold, something that is absent in opposition leaders.
Consider Gov. Amosun, for instance, who ordered the arrest of an ordinary Facebook user because the man criticized him. WOW!!!
Buhari was a major opponent of free speech in his time as head of state and he has still not backtracked if his recent interviews are anything to go by. He continues to believe in the righteousness of his attacks on journalists whose only offence was that they chose to do their job and hold his government accountable. And if the press was tough in 1985, it is even tougher now with the addition of social media and the rise of citizen and guerrilla journalists. Does anyone believe that the Buhari we know has the required tolerance threshold to manage this new generation of troublemakers?
The presidency is very powerful – if we have someone with the temperament of the 1985 Buhari as president again, we will definitely regret the change.
6. THE NORTH
Some people are busy selling the narrative that the whole North is like one bloc waiting to handover its entire votes to Buhari. Nothing can be further from the truth. There are at least two groups of Northerners (Buhari’s supporters and opponents) who worry about what a Buhari presidency might hold.
Why are Buhari’s supporters worried? The fact is that when Buhari went to the UK recently and was hidden from view for several weeks, it brought back memories of the last president from the North – Umaru Musa Yaradua. What if Buhari is truly terminally ill and a Northern president gets to serve for less than four years again and hands over to the South West vice president? Buhari’s loyalists are scared of that proposition.
Several Northern leaders are also worried that they were unable to reach Buhari in the UK as he was surrounded mostly by Southern leaders. They reason that it might be better to wait till 2019 when a younger and healthier Northern personality can come in. Of course no man is God and anything can happen, but with a younger leader, the probability of tragedy is minimized.
The other groups of Northerners scared of a Buhari victory are the ethnic and religious minorities who still suffer discrimination under the dominant Hausa/Fulani groups. It is easy for some of us who live far away from their reality to dismiss their fears, but trust me, it is hard to look forward to this change when you know how hard it is for Christians to get permit to build churches in some parts of the North.
It is hard to look forward to change when you hear of how a Fulani police commissioner joined Fulani marauders in launching attacks against minorities. Not to mention Buhari’s famous “your people are killing my people” speech some years ago.
Would Buhari rule with that “us against them” mentality if he wins? If you are a minority in the North will you not be worried?
7. THOSE WHO HAVE TASTED THIS CHANGE
The thing about APC’s change is that there are several people who have tasted it and know that the way it sounds sweet when they are campaigning is not the way it turns out to be when the party wins. You can ask the okada riders who Fashola bought helmets for during the campaigns and banned their operations afterwards. Those ones have tasted change.
You can ask Lagosians and people in the South West who have watched that AIT documentary on Bola Tinubu? Oh, my goodness! Just one man pocketing all the money and keeping ‘change’ for the masses! And that is the man all over Buhari right now.
How about the change of Amaechi since he got reelected as Rivers governor? See how he has crippled the Rivers judiciary.
Let’s not even talk about the decidedly incompetent Abdulfatah Ahmed of Kwara. Is that the change we want? The change that is tied around a Godfather Saraki’s apron strings… Hmmm…
Fellow Nigerians, we must ask ourselves: Is change worth it for these seven groups of people who are honest patriotic Nigerians and for the several more groups not listed? Put yourselves in their shoes.
