By Joni Akpederi
Seems like it took President Muhammadu Buhari half a lifetime to lay down the rules on how his unruly cabinet could go about pursuing their individual ambitions as the curtain descends on his own bumpy tenure in Aso Rock. When he finally did a week ago, he ordered them to resign their appointments if they wished to run for elective office in next year’s general elections after, watching their antics, bemusedly, from his perch at his remote Abuja fortress.
The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) characteristically came down hard, causing jitters and regrets in the rank of mushrooming Presidential and governorship hopefuls who thought nothing of salivating over his exalted seat at the nation’s powerhouse while at the same time taking easy pickings from the corridors at the expense of the populace and national treasury. Apparently, a good number of them wanted to hedge their bets; they wanted to have their cakes and eat them too!. They figured they could play for the big-time office while retaining their easy, lucrative, day jobs in the event of losing.
Before the deft Presidential move, the ruling APC had an unwieldy thirty (30) so-called Presidential aspirants, many of whom were serving ministers and officials still drawing humongous, indefensible pay as well as official and unofficial perquisites of office from the country’s badly dented and depleted national coffers. It did not matter that each aspirant was expected to pay an unprecedented, ludicrously high sum of N100 million for a chance to vie in the party primaries for the APC’s flag-bearer. It did not matter that the entry fee is equivalent to the Presidential pay-cheques aggregated over eight years! It did not matter that the entire populace and media were abuzz with sound criticisms and condemnation of the blatant, immoral commercialization of the political system. The ruling party’s top brass just carried on like the Nigerian arm of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus troupe with painted political clowns laden with excess cash from questionable sources gamboling in the nation’s muddied political turf.
Hours after President Buhari threw the book at them, a good number of current APC political office holders living in the euphoric “anything goes” atmosphere that Nigeria has been stuck in since the inception of the APC administration, were bumped into their senses. Attorney-General and Justice Minister Abubakar Malami suddenly lost interest in his ambition to be the next governor of his home state Zamfara; diminutive but tall-dreaming Labour Minister Chris Ngige came to the realization that he was even lucky to have that portfolio and was too insignificant to aspire to the Presidency, while former Akwa Ibom governor and Senator, now top dog at the corruption-riddled Niger Delta Development Commission (NNDC), Godswill Akpabio woke up to the fact that he had no business eyeing the number one office in the land; and the list of “repentant” current office-holders go on!
Suddenly, the wheat is being separated from the chaff. The rowdy cloud of “aspirants” is thinning out, albeit at a pace still too slow for a country that sets so many stores by the quality and antecedent of personality who they hope will address the concatenation of chronic challenges confronting the country.
That’s good news for the serious, determined ones among them who promptly turned in their quit letters to the President. It is also good riddance for the top-range, ambitious politicians who have been signaling intentions to run for the top political office long before Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) cleared the way for preliminary races in the contests to begin. And for the populace and electorate, it is a welcome development in a polity marked and marred by jokers and outright nonentities whose pastime is to muddy up the playing field just to earn dubious titles of former Presidential aspirants or candidates after the entire elections are conducted and concluded with winners declared. The most egregious of them hope to use their hollow candidacies in the course of the races to negotiate plum appointive positions either in the party machinery or state administration going forward.
The current Ministers and political appointees who developed cold feet after the President’s ultimate quit order are as good as dead meat in future political tussles in the country, for no self-respecting party would consider them for any meaningful position in the future. Analysts wonder why the President would even keep tolerating the timid weasels in his cabinet in his waning days at Aso Rock.
Now that the rules and guidelines for the coming elections are being well spelled out, country watchers can only hope that INEC and the political parties would step up to their bounden duty of sifting out the clowns from the A-list performers in the 2023 general elections. Nigeria has had too many jokers in power. It’s time to clear the room and let only the very best minds and fittest among us run the affairs of this long-suffering coalition of ethnic nationalities.