By Femi Fani-Kayode
I received the news of the apology offered to the Nigerian people by my
friend and brother Prince Uche Secondus, the National Chairman of the PDP,
with mixed feelings.
For goodness sake what is the apology for? Is it the great achievements of
President Olusegun Obasanjo or the commendable strides of President
Goodluck Jonathan?
In my view Secondus’ apology was ill-conceived and unecessary.
And if PDP must apologise for its 16 years in power then on its own part
the Buhari administration and each and every one of the APC leaders must
be compelled to pull out a loaded gun, point it at their own temples and
blow out their own brains.
It is either that or they must be compelled to take some lethal poison and
die a slow and terrible death for the corruption, hardship, penury,
bloodshed and evil that they have foisted and inflicted on the Nigerian
people over the last three years.
I proudly served in President Obasanjo’s government, which was a PDP
government, for four years and his achievements were legion.
He inspired and encouraged our people and made them proud to be Nigerians
again and he paid off our foreign debt, stabilised the country and pulled
us back from the brink of war.
He treated every Nigerian fairly regardless of faith or tribe and he left
a total of $64 billion USD in our foreign reserves.
He strengthed the economy and ensured that Nigeria was readmitted into the
comity of civilised nations.
He boosted agricultural growth, fought an effective and non-selective war
against corruption and ushered massive foreign and local investment into
the country.
He built up local industries and assisted the manufacturing sector to
prosper and thrive and caused the Stock Exchange to flourish.
He strengthened our Armed Forces, reformed the education sector, improved
the health sector, encouraged freedom of speech and ensured that not one
journalist, dissident or opposition figure was locked up for expressing
his or her views.
He also managed the sharia crisis well and avoided a civil war, pulled us
back from the brink of war with the Camerouns, brokered a successful peace
deal in Liberia, quelled a military coup d’etat in Sao Tome and Principe
and so much more. Is that what we are apologising for?
Anyone may say whatever they like about Obasanjo, and I do not for one
minute suggest that he is an angel or that he is infallible, but one thing
you can never take away from him is the fact that he remains probably the
most patriotic, dedicated and effective leader that Nigeria has ever had
and one of the greatest that the African continent has ever been blessed
with.
Frankly we need to be careful what we say as a party and we should stop
accepting and feeding into the deceitful and mendacious narrative that is
being encouraged and fuelled by the Buhari administration and our
collective enemies which asserts that we were all hopelessly corrupt and
that we never achieved anything at all!
When we say that we are apologising it simply means that we have accepted
that false narrative and that is not only a grave error but it is also
unacceptable simply because such a narrative has no basis in reality,
rationality, reason or truth.
It also does a great disservice to all the former PDP Governments and
Presidents over the 16 years that we were in power.
We may have made a few mistakes here and there and we may not have scored
100 per cent on all fronts but to suggest that we are guilty of some
heinous crime for which we are now constrained to apologise is not only
inappropiate but also unwise.
Worst still in the coming months we may be forced to pay a heavy price for
it as we become the subject of ridicule and opprobium.
The only thing PDP needs to apologise for is allowing a bunch of
incompetent fools, unlettered rogues and uncivilised sociopaths and
sadists like the APC to take power in 2015.
That is what we must ask God and the Nigerian people to forgive us for and
nothing else.
My friend and brother Donald Duke, the former Governor of Cross Rivers
state, and others have suggested that we must reach out to other political
parties and form a broad-based coalition to confront and defeat the APC in
next years presidential election.
That is a duty that is incumbent on each and everyone one of us and if we
fail in discharging it God will judge us and deal with us ever so
severley. Worst still, if we fail and Buhari returns to power next year,
as Obasanjo has said, Nigeria will collapse.
If anyone needs to be reminded about just how inept and degenerate
Buhari’s government is I urge them to kindly consider the events of the
last few days and weeks which prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they
are nothing but a government of unconsciable liars, professional
propagandists, disinformation merchants and first class scammers.
First came the Dapchi scam. Then came the Martin Luther King award scam.
Then came the Lagos bus terminal scam in which Lagos, the largest city in
Africa, was put under lockdown and all its roads were blocked simply
because Buhari was coming to open a glorified bus stop and attend a
colloquim for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s 66th birthday.
For the last few days it has been one merry little photo-shoot and
disingenious scam after the other but two events which struck me more than
any of the others were the following.
At the colloquim Vice President Yemi Osinbajo reiterated his view that
the PDP were corrupt and a party of looters and that the looting under
President Goodluck Jonathan’s government and in the 5 years before Buhari
came to power had destroyed the Nigerian economy.
This is a lie from the pit of hell. Osinbajo is not only a disgrace to his
country but also a traitor to his Christian faith and Yoruba race.
He is hopelessly corrupt and he is a pernicious liar. All he ever does,
apart from being the resident slave and proverbial Uncle Tom in the
Presidential Villa, is accuse the PDP and other members of the opposition
of looting and corruption yet the government that he heads with Buhari has
indulged in MORE corruption in 3 years than the PDP did in 16.
Worst still they delight in wasting their enemies, shedding innocent
blood, locking up their adversaries and encouraging and supporting their
friends and associates to indulge in mass murder, genocide and ethnic
cleansing.
The second event was the release of the list of names of those who have
been described as “looters” by the Federal Government even though not one
person has been convicted by a court of law of looting amongst all those
whose names were listed.
It is simply ridiculous when a government of murderous slanderers,
heartless disinformation agents and vicious scammers says and does things
like this.
Simply put it is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. Yet
before I go into that permit me to touch on an aside.
During the festivities they wheeled out an undoubtedly beautiful black
British super-model called Naomi Cambell to pose in pictures with Buhari
during his visit to Eko Atlantic whilst he was in Lagos.
Quite what the point of this exercise was I have not been able to grasp or
fathom but it is interesting to note that the last African Head of State
that this “pretty babe” took a picture with ended up being convicted for
crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
His name was Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia. I wonder
whether history will repeat itself and Buhari will end up in the same
place ? I guess that remains to be seen.
It was the day after the pose with Naomi that the Buhari government came
up with their list of so-called “looters” which did not have the name of
Rotimi “Oloriburuku” Amaechi or any other APC leader or government
official on it.
Yet the truth is that no list of looters is complete without the names of
Muhammadu Buhari, Yemi Osinbajo, Rotimi Amaechi, Babachir Lawal, Babatunde
Raji Fashola, Abdulrasheed Maina, Maikanti Baru, Abdulrahman Dambazzau,
Abdullahi Adamu, Mohammed Burutai and all the other APC leaders and
Federal Government officials on it.
They are not only thieves but they literally invented the art of
corruption and they are experts in it. They are corrupt in body, spirit
and soul. They have stolen and misappropiated vast sums of money from the
Nigerian state, diverted billions of naira from state government funds for
their 2015 presidential campaign and they have snuffed out and destroyed
more innocent lives than any other government in the history of Nigeria
outside of the civil war.
When, God-willing, we get them out of power and take over we will open the
books, expose them for what they are and each and everyone of them will
suffer the consequences of their unprecedented graft and monstrous
larceny.
One day Nigerians will discover that Buhari is not an angel but a devil
and that his entire government and team is infested with demons and
incorrigible rogues.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following in one of my essays:
“President Buhari forgets that our system of government is meant to be a
modern-day democracy where the rule of law prevails, where dissent and a
plurality of views and opinion is tolerated and where freedom of
expression, freedom of association, the right to life and the right to a
fair hearing is held sacrosanct and is guaranteed.
Worst still he believes in demonising and crushing all his enemies and
holding on to power at all costs and through any means both fair and foul.
If you doubt any of these things please ask Sambo Dasuki, Sheik El Zak
Zaky, Nnamdi Kanu or countless others.
He leads a corrupt government which operates double standards and which
turns a blind eye to the theft and graft that is being perpetrated by its
officials and their friends whilst at the same time persecuting his
perceived enemies and labelling them as being corrupt even though there is
no real and tangible evidence of that so-called corruption.
And if anyone doubts that Buhari and his government are hopelessly corrupt
then they should please read the latest Transparancy International report
in which they said that corruption in Nigeria is “getting worse under
Buhari”.
Buhari is a tyrant and a genocidal maniac who believes in conquest and
oppression and who has turned a blind eye whilst his subjects are
butchered in their thousands by Fulani terrorists who call themselves
herdsmen.
He has brought nothing but carnage, division, destruction, death, poverty
and evil to our nation.
On several occassions he has watched silently and done nothing after his
security agencies and Armed Forces killed thousands of his own citizens,
whether they be Igbo youths that are members of IPOB or Shiite Muslims,
after which they are buried in mass graves.
These are crimes against humanity for which he should be charged at the
Internation Criminal Court at the Hague.
Those that are not killed are thrown into prisons or horrific detention
cells all over the country where they are tortured and left to rot without
any form of due process and against court orders to release them.
If anyone has any doubts about that they should please read the latest
report by Amnesty International.
To add to all these horrors poverty and hunger has ravaged the land. If
anybody doubts that they should please read the latest IMF report where
the International Monetary Fund claim that Nigerians are “hungrier today”
than they have ever been and that more of our people are living below the
poverty line than ever before.
The truth is that apart from being monumentally incompetent Buhari is also
shallow, sectional, divisive and vindictive and he has proved that he is
wholly unfit and undeserving to be the President of a complicated,
multi-cultural, multi-relgious and multi-ethnic mega-nation like Nigeria
which needs to be led and handled with sensitivity, caution and care”.
I stand by every word that I wrote in that essay and frankly, as each day
passes, things are getting worse for the Nigerian people under his watch.
Permit me to conclude this contribution with the following:
Like President Obasanjo’s devastating letter, President Goodluck
Jonathan’s consistent criticism, President Ibrahim Babangida’s public
admonition and Vice President Atiku Abubuakar’s pungent opposition,
General T.Y. Danjuma’s bombshell, which was unleashed just few days ago
against the Buhari government, was not only timely and courageous but also
absolutely necessary.
He rightly alleged that our government, through its Armed Forces, are
involved in ethnic cleansing and genocide and he boldly encouraged the
people to defend thrmselves, defend their territory and defend Nigeria.
He has confirmed what yours truly and a handful of others have been saying
for the last two years that the Buhari administration and their security
forces collude with the Fulani herdsmen to slaughter and commit mass
murder against our people.
This is unacceptable, it will never be forgotten and it will not go
unavenged. It is only a matter of time before ALL those involved will
suffer the consequences of their barbaric actions and be brought to
justice.
Danjuma’s concerns, coupled with the admonitions of Bill Gates, the worlds
richest man, who has criticised the Buhari government viciously both
whilst he was in Nigeria and after he returned home to America, prove
beyond any reasonable doubt that Nigeria is in danger and that the Buhari
government has messed things up very badly. Like Nero, they are playing
the fiddle whilst Rome is burning.
If anyone needs to apologise to the Nigerian people it is Buhari,
Osinbanjo and their APC and cetainly not the PDP or indeed any of the
other political parties.