A Clown Car Of Wannabe Presidents

By Dan Abubakar

What do they know that the rest of us don’t? Why is it that in a time of such grave challenges to the very existence of the country, challenges that would tax the ingenuity of even the most gifted in the art of statecraft, would -be presidents are dropping like confetti almost on a daily basis?

At the last count about 35 would-be presidents had either declared their ambition or were warming up to do so. Check out the roll call of candidates.

Several of the aspirants are state governors whose record of achievement is such that they should hang their heads in shame.

Standing out is Yahaya Bello, the accidental governor of Kogi State who was a fixture in Aso Rock where you could be forgiven if you thought he was Man Friday rather than governor of a state. When he started making a play at being president some years ago, claiming the mantle of the youth, you thought that, surely,he could not be serious and was only exercised by a diabolical sense of humour to relieve us of the tedium of the misery our lives have become. But, apparently, he was serious and now the joke is on us.

Last week he officially announced he was running for president. No grand pronouncements or ideas as to why he was running. The event was notable for the particular fallout of the ruckus in the family of MKO Abiola as one sibling denounced another who had been recruited into the Yahaya Bello enterprise and had proceeded to favorably compare him to the late patriarch!  This is not to forget the domestic crisis he must have caused in his home when he forgot the name of one of  his wives!  I wager to say that the outrage of Yahaya Bello’s candidature is only just beginning.

The clown car is replete with other quixotic candidates that make you wonder whether they are in audition for Ali Baba’s humour ensemble rather than the serious business of governance of a nation in the throes of despair .

Take Nyesom Wike of Rivers whose bawdy approach to life and politics would in more normal times provide much ribaldry in a fellowship of the inebriated. But he wants us to believe he  is serious. And that alarms the grandees of his party, the PDP. Generously fuelled by  an ample supply of cash with which he wins friends and damns his enemies, he sows trouble wherever he goes and at every turn. But he may yet leave us with some good –  stopping another wannabe president, Transport Minister Rotimi Amaechi in his tracks in their Rivers homestead which, if Amaechi is to be believed, has suddenly transformed into the bastion of Igbo identity.

Our politicians fail to reckon with the memory which social media draws upon. Someone helpfully posted a statement from years ago attributed to him where he allegedly said an Igboman could not be president.

Amaechi’s identity politics was earlier demonstrated by the traditional title conferred upon him by the Emir of Daura who decked this knight of the Roman Catholic Church with apparels and a turban fit for a feudal potentate. It was all of course a recognition for the many national debt-financed  projects Amaechi has blanketed the President’s hometown with. This  endeared him to the president who one wag has said belongs to nobody but himself, a pun on his 2015 inaugural speech where he said he belongs to nobody but belongs to everybody.

Amaechi is now expecting to be amply rewarded for being such a good boy. His apparent good standing was reflected by the visit of the First Lady to his home to congratulate him on his Daura title. Of course Amaechi is now making the motions of a presidential run.

Space would not permit a consideration of the many other characters in the clown car. But how can one forget CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele who helped preside over the ruination of the economy and thought his reward had to be the nation’s highest seat. I found his posters which adorned the streets of Abuja as reflecting the lack of political sense that had informed his hare-brained enterprise. There he was in the picture seemingly enjoying the endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari who loomed in the background.

Recent reports have it that he is beating a hasty retreat, denying that he ever intended to run, following belated official displeasure at what tantamounts to a most egregious act of impunity even in a land punch drunk from such disgraceful conduct.

But pray what is the source of all the money he and other candidates have splurged so far on publications, consultants, vehicles, traditional rulers and other public opinion influencers? In the present climate of impunity and irresponsible leadership,to talk of people being held to account is to be laughed out of court. But that day of reckoning will surely come.

Apparently what eggs many in the ruling party to run is whether they can get President Buhari’s nod. And with a president whose primary constituency is himself as earlier alluded to, being in his good graces assumes primary importance even more than  character or qualifications for the office.

Of course courtesy dictates that aspirants in the President’s party such as poor Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu or Vice President Yemi Osibanjo,  if he does run, inform him of their aspiration before they publicly declare but not necessarily to seek his endorsement. This is one instance when the President unlike his gambit at his party’s national convention should truly be for everybody and for nobody.

In any case in normal political climes where substance rather than sentiment rules and votes and the electoral machinery are not gerrymandered towards a predetermined outcome, endorsement from a non-performing figure like Buhari would  ordinarily amount to a kiss of death.

I have written earlier that only two personalities, Peter Obi who has since declared and Vice President Osinbajo who is still apparently taking his time to do so, are worth our attention. They in their individual ways stand for something. They have solid pedigrees and have plans on how to get us out of the present quagmire.

The rest of the field is made up of some dubious characters with oodles of cash and who former President Obasanjo says belong in jail, unserious fellows who may not even plausibly defend why they are running and, especially for the PDP, some career presidential candidates whose history and character make them patently unfit for the nation’s highest office.

They are muddying the waters and making a long abused  electorate even more disgusted with politics and the present breed of politicians.

Abubakar, a Political Analyst, wrote from Abuja