And word spread of a stupendous miracle in the rugged anonymity of California. Strike a rock, dip your pan in some sluggish stream, and you draw a fortune in gold. And, overnight, California became a magic city. Men pawned their possessions, left behind wives and children, and ran to the anonymity of the California wilderness, hoping to strike their fortunes there. Old men forgot their age and dignity and ran to California in search of gold. Poor men, hungry men, began to dream of sturgeon and caviar and castles and women, beautiful women. By the end of this lunatic rush, when reality had dealt lavish slaps on the cheeks of the horde of the unwary, many retired with middling fortunes, some retired with nothing at all to show for their lunatic rush, and yet others were ferried home broke as bread, dead.
A similar scenario is playing out in Nigeria’s political space, where the All Progressives Congress (APC), the major opposition party, thanks to the intractable insurgency in the Northeast of Nigeria and sundry problems plaguing the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the current national leadership, is beginning to gain a measure of acceptance as the flag of hope, change, and regeneration. Expectedly, impatient and desperate politicians, the disgruntled and the irresolute, distinguished for unceasing political harlotry, are doing the “needful” – denouncing their old affiliations and streaming gleefully into the APC in their lust for gold. The party is growing fat and confident and more contemptuous and spiteful of its main adversary, the PDP. The APC would have the Nigerian electorate and even the world believe it is not just a change agent but change itself, a cosmic choice, in a field of ragged and ineffectual alternatives.
As more politicians stream into the APC, a party where one becomes “progressive” by mere possession of a membership card, the bystanders and the undecided begin to clamour for the broom, the APC insignia, as well. Their gold, their fortunes, now lie in the APC, they believe. With the party’s numbers swelling, most people are beginning to believe, in addition, that the party commands national acceptation. APC chieftains, veterans of political wars and feints that they are, never miss the opportunity to foster this specious belief. Now and again one comes across “opinion polls” giving the APC the upper hand in the coming elections. In the euphoria of an expected victory, the APC house is now blind to the reality that Nigeria is not the United States, where opinion polls are a definitive index on the outcome of elections.
For those bolting to the APC in the hope of drawing fortunes in gold, like most of the Forty-Niners, as the men of California’s gold rush epoch came to be known, gold may turn out a dream that never was after all, the chimera of famished imaginations. For one, at the moment, the stability and even life of the APC rests on a precarious pedestal – the hope that the party will win the presidential election in March.
Can the APC wrestle power from the PDP? Having “won” the (presidential) election via some opinion polls, I doubt the APC, distinguished for its irascibility, will accept an unfavourable result in March. Well, as we can see from Nigeria’s political history, fortune favours the incumbent president. The possibility of an incumbent president losing an election in Nigeria is embarrassingly slight. No elected president in Nigeria’s history, however inept, ever lost a second term not even Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. It is open to doubt that President Jonathan will be the first to lose out in a second term bid.
If President Jonathan wins a second term – a possibility gone to cliché – the noisy house of “progressives” will bicker and disintegrate. For now, well, we await the verdict of the electorate.
Views expressed are solely that of author and does not represent the view of www.omojuwa.com nor its associates
