How records, legacies, history will decide 2027 Presidential election - The Guardian Nigeria News
The run up to next year’s presidential election in the country has continued to be land-mined by intrigues and weaponised side and leg kicks including those that go for fouls and outright murder of facts. They are all being employed in outright display of crude and sometimes brazen desperation, all in the name of the end justifies the means. Nigerians must beware of name callings, empty sweet talks, double-speak and playing to the gallery; they must demand issue-based campaigns; they must vote for records, legacies and history, not fabricated history, distorted records, photo-tricks or internet generated legacies. So far history, records and character assassination have suffered the greatest ordeals and have been dominant victims of this desperation, especially from the two camps of “One chance” and “Last chance.”
In recent times, history and records have been distorted and even literally murdered, throwing away honour and dignity. Or how best could we describe Atiku Abubakar’s 360 degree distortion of history and U-turn when then as the country’s number two citizen, he did not only work and campaign extra-hard to sell withdrawal of petroleum subsidy, but actually chaired one of the committee’s under the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency, now only for him to turn around to become the arrow-head of the proponent and exponent of return of subsidy, which he is now weaponising against President Bola Tinubu. The latest in the assault against history and records is also coming from the camp of “One Chance,” Mr. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC), who at all fora had sermonised it to every ear that he made Anambra an Eldorado state and left it as paradise where nothing is lacking as a state flowing with milk and honey. Today the wind has blown open the anus (yansh) of the fowl; there is no place for Peter Obi to hide. He can no longer hide under the fake record of achievements he had been brandishing at churches, conferences, rallies and IDP camps except he wants to celebrate N127 billion left-behind debt profile, unpaid salary arrears as well as the paltry N2.13 billion left for his successor, as legacies qualifying him to seek Nigerians’ votes in next year’s presidential election. Of course, this recent report from Anambra State may not be saying anything new except that it complemented and vindicated similar position earlier released to the Nigerian public by one of Obi’s closest associate and his running mate in the 2023 elections, Datti Baba-Ahmed, who few weeks ago dropped the bomb-shell that his principal, just like Atiku, lacked the antecedents, pedigree, experience, performance record and competence to lead Nigeria to prosperity, calling on him to withdraw from the presidential race.
If anybody still doubted Datti, what about the hard fact coming from Obi’s main constituency and his kinsmen in Anambra that public schools and public health institutions were in high deficit or almost non-existence after Obi’s departure? The unmistaken message is that it is time Obi stopped parading himself as a Messiah of sorts and heed the message, “physician heel thyself.” He can start the self healing processes by returning to Anambra to contest for the Senate or the House of Representatives and come back in another 12 years for the Presidency. And if he insists not to back down and return to his federal constituency, he should be asked what business he has with the larger Nigerian constituency when he could not fix public water supply, public schools and public health as little as dispensaries in his state. If any iota of honour is still left in Obi, now is the time to publicly advertise this honour by resigning from the presidential race as he had publicly vowed to do if found with any infraction negating his self-advertised holier than thou. He cannot give what he doesn’t have.
The damning revelation about Obi’s economic management past in Anambra State has come to confirm the veracity of the general saying that when you point accusing finger to someone, not one, not two but the rest four point to the direction of the accuser. And this is the appropriate junction to put Obi and his sworn political enemy, President Tinubu, on the same lens, especially as both are former state governors and speak to their records. First, let us examine how both of them handled the economy, particularly the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). When Tinubu became governor of Lagos State in 1999, he astutely grew the IGR from paltry monthly N600 million to N7 billion when leaving office in 2007. It is absolutely necessary to point out Tinubu’s economic wizardry of creating novel support institutions to drive and sustain his IGR revolution. To this end, he established the Lagos State Inland Revenue Service (LIRS) patterned after the central government Inland Revenue Service and the first of its kind by any of the 36 states including the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. To support the LIRS, Tinubu established Alpha Beta, and the novel Enron, an Independent Power Producing Plant intended to become the source of energy to drive the emerging Lagos economy. Obi in Anambra inherited an IGR of N400 million monthly and left it at N1.5 billion per month when leaving office in 2014, seven years after Tinubu had left office and at a period when the international price of crude oil was at its peak. Obi had no LIRS-styled agency nor did he conceive any independent power plant. Tinubu as governor of Lagos, even to the disbelief of his political adversaries, pioneered the establishment of many novel agencies and institutions to expand and energise the state’s economy, modernise the public service, widen the revenue base, create new employment base, build and sustain security of life and property in the state. It was to the admiration of all when he established the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority, the State Waste Management Agency, the State Security Trust Fund, the State Neighbourhood Watch, the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, the BRT and the Lagos Atlantic City Blueprint among numerous developmental initiatives he pioneered as governor.
All these agencies including Kick Against Indiscipline (KAI) automatically led to the creation of thousands of direct and indirect jobs in the state and adjoining state of Ogun. It is a common thing to find similar agencies and institutions across all the states of the federation today. It is however instructive to acknowledge that Tinubu’s Lagos holds the “patency rights.” All of them including Abuja took after “Eko o ni baje …” Obi in his strive to grow the state established the Anambra Integrated Development Strategy (ANIDS) to drive the development of the state with which he embarked on the rehabilitation of some roads and erosion control, especially in Onitsha and its environ. However, he has no institutional-legacy footprint as seen in the case of Tinubu. Obi also did not have mass job creating agencies as in Tinubu’s Lagos. Both Obi and Tinubu have the record of returning mission schools to their original owners – the missionaries – while Obi has the additional record of giving grants to these schools and moving Anambra from 24th position in WASCE to the first position. Tinubu too was never found wanting in the road rehabilitation sector. He made his mark in road rehabilitation in Victoria Island area, part of Ikeja, Agege, Ikotun, Surulere, Ikorodu, Yaba and Obalende. He also took his first among equals award to be on some federal roads in the state, becoming the first governor to start the initiative of reconstructing abandoned federal roads in the country that are of high economic value to states as he took it upon himself to rehabilitate parts of the famous Agege Motor Road beginning from the Mushin end. He also built the famous Lekki-Epe Road leading to the springing up of new towns and settlements in that axis and decongestion of the traditional Lagos towns of Yaba, Surulere, Ikeja etc. One of the greatest landmark achievements of the erstwhile Lagos State henchman was his litmus test on the 1999 Constitution when, as opposition governor, he dared a sitting civilian dictator, then President Olusegun Obasanjo, to create 37 new local councils euphemistically called Local Council Development Areas (LCDA) from the existing 20 local councils in the state. The decision rattled the ruling People’s Democratic Party, the Presidency and apologists of the 1999 Constitution. Expectedly, pace-setter Tinubu had drawn the ire of the dictatorship in Obasanjo and his party backed his overwhelmingly controlled National Assembly members, while on the part of Tinubu of the Alliance for Democracy it challenged him to bring out his economic and leadership wizardry to survive the financial blockade imposed on him by Obasanjo, which he survived to the stunning astonishment of the dictator and his cohorts. Obasanjo was to confess later after leaving office that Tinubu and his government survived the financial sanction of stopping federal allocations to the state’s local councils was a remarkable testimony to Tinubu’s exceptional leadership prowess. Just as light and darkness cannot be compared, it would be an absolute mismatch comparing Obi and Tinubu in developmental blueprint and mentorship. From Tinubu (now referred to and accepted as Emeritus Governor) to the current Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, it is the economic/developmental blueprint conceived and laid down by Tinubu that till today remains in vogue and applied by every successive governor. Probably for this factor, Lagos remains the only South-West state never governed by another political party since the advent of this Fourth Republic other than Tinubu’s party! This is never the case for Obi’s Anambra. Apart from the absence of an Obi laid blueprint, there is no common developmental roadmap for the state just as the state could not enjoy the monopoly of the same political party or ideology governing it from 1999. For Obi’s Anambra from all indices, it has been an incongruous affair. Tinubu’s most inestimable political asset is undoubtedly in mentoring, building followers and human capacity building probably second to the late legendary Yoruba leader, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. This asset dated back to the epochal June 12, 1993, presidential election won by the late MKO Abiola when he successfully assembled associates during their sojourn overseas. This he effectively built on a mega basis when he became governor in 1999. It is not an overstatement to conclude that those mentored by Tinubu as well as direct and indirect beneficiaries of his large-heartedness can constitute a major political party across Nigeria. The names are definitely inexhaustible. He mentored and made all the state governors that came after him, not to mention political heavyweights all over Nigeria who he substantially had a hand in their political fortunes whether it is the “career” presidential contestant, Atiku Abubakar, or the late President Muhamnadu Buhari. It will be of immense help to this comparative analysis to reference the late old Imo State governor, Chief Sam Mbakwe (the respected weeping governor), who when asked in 1983 why he was not campaigning hard for re-election like candidates from other political parties said, “I don’t need to spend money on campaigns anymore after my first tenure. The roads I constructed campaign for me. The industries I built campaign for me. Adapalm, our shoe industry, Imo Poultry, and Aluminum Extrusion campaign for me. Imo Airport campaigns for me.”
*Alabi Esq., a politics commentator and civil liberty lawyer, is the National Chairman, Ondo Eminent Persons Group.
