by Michael Orodare

I have come to understand that in Nigeria, we tend to vest a lot of effort into celebrating process rather than the result, if not we won’t be making a mountain out of a molehill from the visit of the governors to a part of the country.

The media was recently awash with reports of the visit of the yet to be registered APC governors to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, which has been derided as the home base of the dreaded Islamic militant, Boko Haram.
I have come to understand that in Nigeria, we tend to vest a lot of effort into celebrating process rather than the result, if not we won’t be making a mountain out of a molehill from the visit of the governors to a part of the country.

If we may ask the governors, whose cohorts have not stopped castigating President Jonatan for not visiting the state ahead of them; of what imperative is their visit to Borno? How has it proffered any solution to the present security challenge in Nigeria? Even their presence in the city couldn’t stop the ‘big brothers’ from doing their thing; bombing. I am not a fan of PDP, but I will not join in celebrating deceit  either by the PDP or by an opposition party, as its being done by the army of some social media activists who rarely see a wrong in the activities of the opposition parties, and many young Nigerian who seem to have been brainwashed by the propaganda of these self-proclaimed ‘messiahs.’

A friend asked me; “don’t you see the visit of these APC governors to Maiduguri as a good step which could send the PDP government out of power at the central in 2015?” I responded with a resounding NO, I told him if what it takes to win the heart of the people is to go to ‘rejected’ areas, then the PDP will also go beyond Maiduguri when it’s time for campaigns, because it has all it takes to tour the 36 states of the federation in one week.

I see the APC governors’ visit to Borno as a mere familiarization visit and a pre-campaign tour of the city, they definitely need it, because they need to take the gospel of their new “marriage’ to new cities, more than the PDP does at this time, they need to win the hearts of the people. But what happens if they get what they want? This is a country where candidates defy unfavourable security reports and whatever challenges to market their manifestos to the innocent populace, but when they get the mandate, it’s a different story entirely, they tend to forget those rickety and dangerous routes they travelled to reach their ‘prey’ to seek their votes.
Have we also forgotten that President Jonathan was also in Borno to campaign in 2011, which is why I don’t see any peculiarity in the visit of the APC governors. If they are so lucky to get what they want; Maiduguri becomes a forbidden land for them, that is if the condition of the city remains the same. What should we expect from a party desperate for conquest, such party will go any length to gain ground and win peoples’ heart, they will go extra mile and give all what it takes to seek peoples’ sympathy.

One would have thought the APC governors would have seize the opportunity of their visit to open or even attempt to dialogue with BH kingpins on how to put a stop to the insurgency, which the federal government has not been able to achieve. Who says the governors can’t succeed if they attempt it? They might have seen the task as the responsibility of the FG, but its beyond that, it has become a national disgrace. If they had done that, by now they would have become heroes with their names boldly written on the Nigeria’s hall of fame; rather they decided to use their visit as a show of deceit, to dance round the market square acknowledging cheers from people, whose majority are nursing wounds of BH attacks.

Their gospel in Borno must have been: “O ye people of Borno, do not panic again, here comes the saviour, the BH you see today, you shall see them no more, in 2015 all your problems will be over, just vote an APC candidate as the President, even if we field an ex-convict, just vote him, in as much as he’s a ‘progressive,’ and the problem of BH would be totally solved in this city.” But they missed it if that was their message.

With the APC governor’s visit to Borno, the APC seems to be revealing to us what they tend to achieve with their merger; which is competing with the PDP. We still have the choice to shine our eyes and look well before leaping into giving our mandates to APC, which its agenda seems to be to match the PDP, money for money, ‘thuggery’ for ‘thuggery,’ rigging for rigging and violence for violence.
I’m still in doubt if this APC can really be trusted, not only as a substitute for PDP, but also as a gathering of ‘serious’ politicians.

——————————

Michael Olanrewaju Orodare has worked in the Office of the Chief Press Secretary to the Ondo State Governor as a Media Assistant. He has garnered experience writing in the The Nation Newspaper working with the paper’s Sunday Desk. He leans towards the Labour Party. He blogs at www.michaelorodare.blogspot.com and tweets from @MichaelOrodare

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.