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AN APOLOGY FOR WHAT?
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.
Naomi Campbell and President Buhari
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.