They came in trickles first, elements that toyed with the idea of a mega party to challenge the then ruling party, the PDP. Just Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Major General Muhammadu Buhari Rtd., and a few others…
Then the merger talks between the then ACN and the then CPC.
The fall out of some major stakeholders in the PDP, with included seven Governors, with the National leadership of the then chairman, Alj Bamangar Tukur, was what the newly emerging conflagration of the elements to later berth the new mega party needed to launch their new party with these dissenting PDP stakeholders who had gone ahead to form a parallel new PDP party the nPDP, and a new party was born.
Through a torturous route, that culminated in the registration of the APC, the die was cast for a history amalgamation of the most unlikely elements to ever sit around a political table in an Accord of some sort.
The first of such agreements to come from the APC elements was a slogan to drive their campaign to wrest the power from the almost invincible PDP, the slogan the APC chose was “Change”
What is “Change”!?
The APC got it wrong from day one with this concept as change in its management concept is quite different from the meaning the party gave to it and the meaning, Nigerians derived from it.
What then is, “Change”!?
In a broad concept, Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change both from the perspective of an organization and the individual. It is a “Now” thing, rather than a idea of a coming change.
It is a continuum, rather than a determination to change.
Change is everyday.
APC failed to realize this.
The people also held tenaciously to their own idea of a coming change.
The appeal of Change overrode the “Transformation” slogan of the PDP.
The election was aptly decided on this APC’s promised change.
Same change today that has now become a burden to the APC and a mirage to those who voted on the premise of a Change that never was.
Bouyoed by the seemingly over subscribed acceptance of the change mantra, the APC simply audacious and bold with more promises, more ostentatious, showy, pretentious, gaudy, almost theatrical, throwing impossible figures of election promises of jobs to be created, energy contents, stipends to be paid to unemployed Nigerians and just about any other Kitsch and ornate ideas that as many as they pop up are added to the change slogan.
One year after the APC won the general elections, the change mantra has become their albatross. The slogan, no more as catchy and Nigerians in a state of dejection and despair.
How did we get to this point, especially as people who had reservations about Transformation agenda of the PDP and who were thrilled that an alternative has been able to unlock a thirst for a different set of politicians within the electorate, in a way that we haven’t seen in our democratic life, and in a way that we hoped may change the landscape of what is possible?
It’s been a gradual process. Here’s how it happened, with the warning that this article is not a comparative assessment of the two parties or a campaign platform for any; I’m well aware that Nigerians have their preferences and each party has their weaknesses and strengths, and I’m not trying to persuade anyone here to agree with the APC or the PDP; what I’m trying to explain is how and why I have come to the change mantra as what made the APC to win which may also likely make them to fail — even though of course it is just the first year out of their 4 year term:
MWhen I saw that the estimates the APC rolled off as part of their change agent in 2014, throwing up figures not backed by any reasonable data, let alone any reasonable assumptions, I knew the APC would win and also that they would fail!
The Economic situation in which Nigeria was in in 2014 was glaring, even to the average man reading free newspapers under the bridges from Molete in Ibadan to Ojuelegba and Ikeja in Lagos, to Onitsha market in Anambra to, to Folawiyo Bridgeton Kaduna.
International oil prices has fallen as low as $58 per barrel of crude oil.
On what then was APC to plan on the assumption that the Nigerian economy would have an average growth at an assertion that would sustain, building 40,000 megawatts of electricity, payment of N5, 000 stipend to unemployed Nigerians, building of 4 petroleum refineries when an average refinery costs about $8 billion, the private refinery that Alj Aliko Dangote is building is estimated at $14 billion alone.
Not many voices raised about the possibility of these Ventures promised by the APC could rise above the din if the thunderous change mantra, but to some analyst, most of these promises, had been dismissed as “magical thinking” — or in more straightforward terms, “pulled out of electioneering Rhetorics ”!
There was no precedent for a sustained income and growth rate that high; commentators pointed out.
A few sustained voices asked the APC, how it would fund it’s change agenda, but such an explanation Never happened — And so the entire basis of APC’s promises for (promises I wanted to believe) was a historically, Economically, unprecedented assumption. You can’t base a radical re-imagination of the Nigerian economy and the imposition of an change mantra and a made-up numbers Ex Nihilo – Out of Nothing, but the APC did just that.
The APC was Not able to find a single economist to weigh in positively on their campaign promises, which were mere false pretenses of a plan they had for Nigeria.
So I concluded then, that the backbone of APC’s “plan” was founded on, functionally, a lie.
I concluded then that APC was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than they were in staging protests against PDP’s government where they could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the serious issues of getting to familiarize themselves with the problems the PDP were battling and doing anything to actually achieve a better goal within the context of solving these problems, they were only fixated in winning the election.
This Article put APC’s supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily in one year of winning an election close to managing the infrastructure they met let alone adding a any capital projects to it.
We are in the 6th month of a continued fuel scarcity.
The exchange rate as practically doubled. Costs of living so high that inflation has reached the double digits of 12%.
All of these, happening, while doing while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives.
I did more research than the above, but the two overarching themes I just described (magical thinking and ideological purity over practicality) seem tied together in terms of what Sanders has to offer the country with respect to governance. Further, those themes reveal a person who, while he has deep convictions about the ills of income inequality (which I wholeheartedly share), seems to be constitutionally incapable or unwilling to undertake the difficult task of actually coming up with workable, meaningful legislation and therefore who, in his own way, actually lacks character. What I started to see, and which seems to be on view more and more as this campaign goes on, is a person and a campaign that is intellectually and actually dishonest, hypocritical and sanctimonious, sexist, unprepared, lazy, cultish, and dangerous — and he has a poor temperament to boot.
Intellectual and actual dishonesty:
The tax plan is not intellectually honest. Using economic assumptions that have no basis in historical reality (i.e., making up numbers) so that you can make promises that are literally impossible to keep — even if you are elected and manage to sweep Congress — is not intellectually honest.
Pretending that these plans could be enacted, without acknowledging the reality of how the legislative body works, is not intellectually honest.
The Blame Game!
Rejection of compromise is not intellectually honest. Nor is it a workable strategy. It is intellectually dishonest because it is the absence of RESPONSIBILITY!
And this is the strategy the APC has adopted ever since it came to power – Blaming the past administration(s) for all its failures, including its failure to plan, which is planning to fail!
Whereas, compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer in any litigation, legislation, and governance.
The buck cannot be passed without compromise.
At it is, the buck stops on the APC’s table.
A joint dort of responsibility with previous administrations and a vigorous, rigorous attempt to get to work quickly, while alleviating the sufferings of the people by a series of quick – fix measures would sure help the APC rather than the almost overused and now annoying Blame Game.
As politicians, some elements in the APC, know this, and, actually, some have begin to echo this, compromise is not a bad thing.
APC won about 57% of the votes… Should 57% of the people impose a broken Rhetorics of blaming others on 43% who didn’t want them?
In rejecting their own blame in its inability to deliver the said change and improve the lives and we’ll being of Nigerians, APC is in a clear and present danger of losing the people. Arrogance is a mark of lack of integrity, or worse, the corruption they claim they are fighting pales when the basic needs of the people are not provided for.
The APC as a party during electioneering, accomplished two deeply disingenuous goals: (i) They set themselves apart from the others, especially the PDP as the only one party that is allegedly “true” to their “values,” of “Progressivism”, thereby creating the myth that they are morally superior and incorruptible; and (ii) That they have a Presidential candidate, Mohammadu Buhari, who is a man of Integrity and Incorruptibility — without which literally nothing could have distinguished them from the PDP or any other party.
However in its close to one year in power, the APC is yet to translate any of these alleged “virtues” into workable advantage and Nigerians are seeing the same element, the same attitude, the practices they voted against in the PDP reenacting practically in the very way the APC handles almost every facet of governance — a testament to the reality of the supposed integrity of the APC members that have always been deemed suspect.
Attacking the PDP for supporting the retainership of petroleum subsidy, even claiming such subsidy is fraud, while APC itself is paying subsidy but the fuel is not made available like the PDP did, is intellectually dishonest.
This is so on several grounds.
First, the APC attacks omit that they themselves did not bother to verify the subsidy claims by the PDP;
Second, APC keeps demanding that Nigerians should be patient and allow them time….
But juxtaposed with the change mantra which came with a catalog of Promises, the time is already far spent.
A year is just about all the time they need to get their acts together.
So the blames, the games stop NOW!
President Muhammadu Buhari in his first incarnation as a military Head of State was better known for his draconian sentencing rules and laws that the APC opponents kept referring to as his greatest flaw in transiting to a civilian President in a Democracy.
Many non political analysts contributing to the discourse have their own narratives that show the fear of many still that Buhari has not constructively transited enough to a democrat yet.
That Buhari is not actually a Democrat yet, as the Rule of Law has been severally trampled upon, is also an indictment on the change mantra.
In a clear and very concise and constructive criticism of APC’s first year after winning an unprecedented victory of an opposition party, and an impending first year in governance in just a few week, it is only very judicious to infer, the party slogan of the change mantra has seen the rise, culminating in the actual victory of the party in the 2015 general elections, and in just about a year, we are seeing the waning, the fall of such a vehicle upon which such an historic success at the polls was made, come crashing down like a stacked plates of China broken into very tiny fragments…
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