The Yoruba have a saying that if you pick a date, even if it is sometimes 20 years away from now, with time that date will eventually arrive. So it is with the postponed election which is coming up in about nine days from now.
Many Nigerians had before the February 14 date stocked their homes with food as usual in anticipation of any eventuality, but when the date was shifted, the entire storage became history. Since the postponement, a lot of things had happened, the equation had surely changed. Along the line, Jega taku, saying he would never resign even if some people wanted him to.
Baba also shocked everyone when he said the Boko Haram was right in their destruction of lives and property in the North East and several other places where they had struck. Or how else does one explain his statement that the militant sect has legitimate grievances. Haba, Baba! Legitimate grievances? If the level of education in that corner of Nigeria is 19 per cent, was Baba not president for eight years?
What did he do to reduce the level of illiteracy there? At least it was not as if there was a high level of literacy there when he was president, and it then dropped drastically after he left. While the political parties were restrategising, Mama Peace also went virtually all over the country mobilising the women, stepped on APC toes so badly that they could not find anyone to report her to except the International Criminal Court.
They said she said (please pardon me) opposition party aspirants should be stoned, blah, blah, blah. The enfant terrible of the PDP, Femi Fani-Kayode, trust him, had more time to throw jabs and darts at the APC, such that they now seem to be reeling from a hangover of hard punches coming from him. Where was PDP before this time?
Did they take their mouth to the dry cleaner? The verbal war could have been more interesting than this, but anyway it is better late than never. Just a few more days to get this lingering anxiety off our chests, but the question is, even with the six-week postponement, are we still ready?
At a time like this we need a strong leader to gear us up and tell the whole world that we are ready. That is why I love the statement made by the Chief of Army Staff, Lt Gen. Kenneth Minimah on Monday while speaking at first quarter Chief of Army Staff Conference, that the military is on the verge of victory. Said he: “We are already there, we are on the verge of the promised land. The challenges we are faced with have again brought to fore the strength, perseverance, long suffering and resilience of the Nigerian nation and its people.”
That reminded me of the “We will fight on the beaches” speech of Winston Churchill. Here was a man who was unfortunate enough to be the British prime minister during the second world war. With Hitler raging and taking over the whole of Europe like ISIS is doing in the Middle East, Churchill brought courage to an otherwise jittery countrymen.
“If we can stand up to him (Hitler),” he said, “all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.”
How I wish President Goodluck Jonathan would, like Churchill, put a big cigar, not Gold leaf or Target or any of those cheap cigarettes, I mean Cuban cigar in his mouth and move round the country, flashing the victory sign and telling APC that they would be routed, warning the APC of the Ides of March and that they would soon become history.
How I wish, apart from jogging, he could, like the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, ride a horse bare-chested, challenging General Buhari to do the same if he could.
How I wish he could challenge Buhari to a 100 metres race with the whole world as spectators. The old men would have easily been separated from the young men. How I wish Jonathan would have been able to rouse his countrymen and women like Churchill did with his ”This was their finest hour” speech.
The truth of the matter is that the whole world is watching Nigeria, watching whether we could pull this one off; wondering whether we could do the impossible, wield the magic wand and hold a free and fair election after which there would be no violence with the winner and the vanquished embracing. If only this could happen, then the whole world would have been able to at least say to Nigeria that in spite of all the achievements of the past, this, indeed, was their finest hour.