A DESPERATELY DESPERATE LIAR AS PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

Goodluck Jonathan has no regard for Nigerians and therefore doesn’t believe it is wrong to look us in the eye and lie to us.  Much as I respect the office of the President, I must confess the office has been so diminished by the president occupant of the Aso Villa, that it does not deserve the respect of any self-respecting Nigerian.  At every given opportunity, Jonathan has been embarrassing the country and Nigerians, all in his desperation to retain power by all means possible.  We have been forced to listen to the president’s fables in the past five weeks after he and his security goons forced Attahiru Jega to shift the general elections earlier scheduled to take place in February.  Not content with churning out barefaced lies by him and his crude spokesmen, Jonathan has upped the ante of embarrassment by lying against a fellow country’s leader and to the international community through his interview with the BBC.

Before the dust settled on the Moroccan phone call scandal, Jonathan told Will Ross of the BBC that he is not desperate to win the 2015 election, something I find insulting to me.  If he is not desperate to win the election then can he explain the unnecessary tension he has been subjecting us to in the past six months or so?  It will be a herculean task to attempt to list all the desperate moves Jonathan made in order to win the 2015 election by crook – he doesn’t care about the ‘hook’.  But let us attempt to itemise them, anyway.

The contrived “adoption” of Jonathan by all the organs of his party, the PDP, which culminated in his coronation as the sole candidate for the presidential election, was purely because of his desperation to avoid facing a credible – or even an alternative – candidate in his party.  The party and its apparatchik made sure no one was allowed to challenge Jonathan because of the fear of rejection by his party men.  If this was not a desperate move, what is?  The INEC fixed February 14^th, 2015 as the date for the presidential elections but the commission was forced to eat humble pie by Jonathan and his party because they saw defeat facing in the face and the only thing they came up was the insecurity boogie.  The elections were shifted in order to give Jonathan and the PDP more time to corrupt the system and the populace.  If this is not desperation, what is?

We have seen the heightened level of criss-crossing the country including Jonathan’s temporary relocation to Lagos and the states of the south west while Namadi(na) relocated to Kano and Kaduna, distributing money like confetti to voters.  They were unmindful of the damage they were doing to the electoral process.  If this is not desperation, what is?  The series of fictional documentaries produced and directed by his campaign team (which is made up of people with questionable characters) trying to smear the presidential candidate of the APC and the leadership of the party falls into the desperate pattern which must have been directly approved by Jonathan himself.  If this smear campaign is not desperation, what is?  The newfound bravery of our armed forces in attacking and chasing Boko Haram insurgents from hitherto occupied towns and villages after six years of running from the rag-tag insurgents says a lot about the government’s commitment or otherwise in fighting the scourge.  We suddenly have the “ferocious” Boko Haram elements running with their tails between their legs at the sight of the Nigerian army.  It took the smell of defeat before Jonathan got serious about the sanctity of human life, if this is not desperation, what is?

With a naval force and the Civil Defence, Jonathan decides in his wisdom to outsource the protection of our shores and pipelines to criminals who are euphemistically called ex-militants by a media wowed by brown envelopes and sectional mind-set.  These are the same guys who routinely break the pipelines and steal oil, yet are now rewarded for their criminality.  This comes barely two weeks to the presidential election.  May I suggest that since there are oil depots in Maiduguri, Bauchi, and Yola – areas considered spheres of influence of Boko Haram – the protection contracts should be extended to Boko Haram and other militants in Plateau, Nassarawa and Benue states to make the reward system for treason and murder national in outlook.  This is not desperation but an avenue for creating employment for youths from a section of the country to the detriment of other areas.

Then the persistent call for the sack of Jega as INEC chairman before the conduct of the 2015 elections.  The calls range from pseudo-statesmen like Ekwueme, to old militants like Edwin Clark, to oil thieves like Asari Dokubo and Tompolo and those with blood on their hands like Gani Adams.  These are Jonathan’s current bedmates whose main bond is the prevention of General Buhari from winning the elections and sending them to oblivion or the gulag, where they rightly belong. 

Not desperate?  Try this.  In his desperation to cling to power, Jonathan is not loath to use the ethno-religious card, unmindful that this road may lead us to Kigali.  With the Abidjan scenario becoming more real to Jonathan, he would rather that Nigeria take the Kigali road.  His dim wife has been traversing the country inciting jobless, hungry youths against the opposition and in the process insulting her betters.

Jonathan is desperately desperate and he shouldn’t deny that.  For a chief security of a country to be seen hob-knobbing with treasonable felons like Asari Dokubo, Gani Adams, the MASSOB guys and the rest of the oil thieves a few days to a national elections says much about his frame of mind.  Though Jonathan and his wife have been trying to give new meanings to certain actions like corruption and stealing, they can’t change the meaning of desperation.  They are desperate to cling to power at whatever cost to the nation and Nigerians shouldn’t make the mistake of lowering their guards believing that Jonathan is not desperate.  The wife, who wants to remain the First Lady, but behaves like an unrefined street food hawker, in her characteristic dimness, let out her fears of facing her just desserts when she said she is not ready to feed her husband in jail.

It was Gbagbo’s desperation that plunge Ivory Coast into a needless war in 2010; it was also the insensitive insults by journalists and politicians that led to the massacre of over 800,000 innocent souls in Rwanda in 1994.  Nigerians should be mindful of desperate politicians who would rather the country disintegrate than them losing the paraphernalia of office.  The Jonathans have done enough damage to an already fragile union.  Let’s boot them out of the Aso Villa on March 28^th before they take us down the road to Kigali.

NIGERIANS DESERVE PDP

The 2015 electoral campaign exposed the Peoples Democratic Party for what it is – a party peopled by bigots, thieves, irredentists and people without honour or decency.  It also exposed the chieftains of the party as liars and shameless.  The campaigns further exposed the rest of Nigerians as cowards who deserve the PDP.  Since the beginning of the campaign, Nigerians have been inundated with uncouth speeches, outright lies, blackmail and harassment of opposition politicians and hallucinatory fable tales by certified schizophrenics.  We have been bombarded with hate-filled documentaries on respected individuals by a party in the throes of death.  A section of the country was ridiculed and insulted by a woman who cannot even spell the word ‘refinement’ and may not even recognise it where it is written for her.  In all this, we kept quiet.

Were General Muhammadu Buhari not to emerge as the presidential candidate of the All Peoples Congress (APC), I don’t know how PDP’s campaign was going to be because their whole campaign is centred on the APC candidate.  The whole machinery of the party and Jonathan’s campaign organisation are deployed towards destroying the hard-earned reputation of the ascetic General.  Nigerians were treated to what can only be politely described as a pack of lies by a group whose stock-in-trade is becoming clear to all of us to be no more than irredentism.  The fulcrum of their campaign has been Buhari from the get-go and it remained so throughout the campaign period.  Telling lies comes naturally to these people and impugning the character or reputation is no big deal to them because they neither know the meanings of the words nor do they possess the qualities.  Their god is lucre and they believe the same for all of us.

The latest attempt to malign Buhari and may be turn him into a hate-figure to his millions of supporters is the ridiculous charge that he promised four western countries to scrap the Anti-Gay law passed by the National Assembly.  The irony is lost on those making this patently false accusation that they were the ones who accused Buhari of being an Islamic fundamentalist and that both the dominant religions practised in Nigeria clearly prohibits same-sex marriage and the punishment for doing so explicitly spelt out in the holy books.  It is the likes of Funny Kayode, who made the accusation that opposed the Act in the first place, while wearing the borrowed robes of human rights activism.  So if Buhari is an Islamic fundamentalist, how could he have promised to scrap a law that to all intents and purposes conformed to the dictates of the Shari’ah Law they accused him of intending to implement on the country once he is elected.  How low can these people go in their desperation to cling to power?  Actually, do they have a ‘low’?

As if attacking Buhari and the opposition is not enough, the president and the PDP have now resorted to attacking national institutions.  Attahiru Jega, the Chairman of Independent (?) National Electoral Commission (INEC) is pilloried on a daily basis for insisting to not only go ahead with the rescheduled elections, but to also use Card Readers in the authentication of voters.  In their desperation to scuttle the elections, Jonathan and his party are not loath to attacking the very fabric of our unity.  Not being satisfied with the verbal assaults targeted on hapless Nigerians, they released the uncouth wife of the president on us, who in her verbal diarrhoea cannot differentiate between the good, the bad and the ugly.  In an unusual clarity, she unwittingly let out the nation how northerners are perceived in the Aso Villa, yet some unscrupulous politicians are asking us to support the PDP.  Patience and her husband take pleasure in denigrating our cultures, customs and institutions and they do this in a period when they need us most – at least our votes to help legitimise their misrule and kleptocracy.  The tell whoever care to listen that our Emirs and Chiefs, the very custodians of these cultures and customs, are there to be bought and sold by the highest bidders and to prove this insult, Jonathan has been going round the country and allegedly dropping huge amounts of money in the various palaces where he is received.

The clearest indication that Jonathan and his PDP doesn’t care if Nigeria will break up today is their resort to ethnic champions (militias, for lack of a better word).  These are men and women who took up arms against their fatherland for personal gains and not for any altruistic cause as they are now exposed for what they are.  We have seen the likes of the Niger Delta militants forgo any pretence to environmental protection once the amnesty allowance began trickling into their bank accounts. “Pipeline protection contracts” and other juicy add-ons were given to sweeten the ‘sweetheart’ deals between these blue collar criminals and their white collar colleagues in government.

Thank God for the Moroccans, the Gooddluck Jonathan gang have been exposed for what they are – a bunch of thieving liars.  Knowing fully well that Jonathan did not speak on phone to the Moroccan monarch, they went to town with a story that a phone conversation took place between Jonathan and King Mohammed VI.  The no nonsense King ordered the immediate recall of his country’s Ambassador to Nigeria and issued a press statement, which in essence, called the Nigerian ruler a liar.  Shame of a nation!  We may soon see a press statement from Funny Kayode accusing the opposition APC of orchestrating this national embarrassment.  Since they are used to lying to Nigerians without being forcefully challenged to substantiate the wild allegations they constantly make, they believe they will get away with their lies on the international forum because of diplomatic ‘correctness’.  All discerning Nigerians should “shine their eyes” and know them for what they are.

To further compound their stupidity, General Martin Luther Agwai was fired from his position as SURE-P Chairman for daring to tell the president that change is inevitable.  This is the president who recently bemoaned that “80%” of his advisers give him bad advice.  Do you wonder why they give him bad advice?  With the help of treasonable felons like Uwazuruike, Gani Adams, Edwin Clark and co. Jonathan is lining up Jega for the Agwai treatment and all you hear from Nigerians is a deafening silence.  Jonathan and gang got away with suspending Ayo Salami; they practically bundled Sanusi Lamido Sanusi from office for calling them thieves and they fired Agwai via a press statement for failing to harken to Patience’s admonishing of not uttering the word change at the pain of being stoned – so he got stoned by her husband.  Still we kept quiet.

Now they are organising protests in collaboration with their ‘contractors’ against Jega conducting the 2015 general elections – which they have morbid fear for.  The chick of it.  We are behaving like mumus in the face of this assault against common sense and decency.  May be we all deserve the PDP.