President Tinubu during his recent inter-faith breaking of the fast with members of the National Working Committee of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the leadership of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) advertised his democratic credentials. “Some of us had been bruised struggling for it. We were detained, we had street demonstrations, we went into exile, and we formed NADECO. There’s no doubt about it. I am a die-hard democrat”, he told his well-wishers.
He also spoke on the values of aspect of the new electoral law that mandates direct or consensus primaries, abolishing delegates voting, requires digital membership register submitted 21 days before primaries and restrict court from stopping electoral process.
I am not sure his political foes are interested in his democratic credentials or in democracy for that matter. It is doubtful if seasonal migrants who owe no allegiance to their parties, who are canvassing for a return of a delegate system that allow people with big election war chest to buy off delegates in dollars, sore losers who will not congratulate winners after three years, and those who instead of preparing for election are busy looking for reasons to delegitimize outcome of election, can be regarded as democrats.
But beyond Bolaji Abdullahi , a seasonal migrant himself who had moved from PDP to APC and now to ADC speaking for an assemblage of the disgruntled politicians including Atiku Abubakar, Rotimi Amaechi, Peter Obi, Nasir El Rufai and David Mark, the man widely reported to have personally threatened to shoot MKO Abiola if his annulled landslide 1993 victory was de-annulled, there are others who are only interested in de-marketing the country and undermining its institutions because they have nothing to offer the country.
But let those who are not only interested in being politically correct join me on a journey through history to see how our love for the game of self-sabotage has come to define our history.
The Igbo people and their Fulani rivals, who share identical world view on how Nigeria should be run, have always held our nation to ransom. The truth is that both seem to be interested only in what they can get out of Nigeria. And what they cannot get, no one else gets. We have the experiences of January 1966, July 1966, the civil war, 1993 MKO Abiola’s annulled pan-Nigerian mandate and Tinubu’s 2003 unscripted victory as proof.
But the rain started beating us long before this. During the run up to our paper independence in 1960, the colonial masters told us that as a multicultural and heterogeneous society where different cultural groups are at different level of cultural development, what we needed was a federal arrangement, a social system that guarantees unity in diversity. The rival groups holding Nigeria by the jugular reluctantly embraced this only to derail it in January 1966.
And precisely because we like playing the ostrich instead of confronting our own demon, 60 years after the military coup that changed the course of our nation’s history, there is still an attempt to bury the truth. A coup that wiped out all senior military offices from the north, some senior military officers and their wives from the west, all political leaders of the north while sparing all Igbo military and political leaders, the masterminds of that tragedy have continued to deny it was an Igbo coup. Even with self-evident facts of attempt to consolidate power by holidaying President Nnamdi Azikiwe, acting President/Senate President Orizu Nwafor, Ozumba Mbadiwe, Aguiyi Ironsi , the Supreme Military Commander and his Igbo intellectual advisers, with the promulgation of Decree 34 of 1966, the denial has continued. However, the admission by their Fulani rival who executed the July 1966 coup that it was a vengeance coup against Igbo military officers who were never tried for the mindless killings of their military superiors in the January 1966 coup, provided an additional insight.
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