The headline of this piece is used guardedly in the sense that the ordinary Kogite is understandably not part of the charade of Wednesday’s inauguration of Yahaya Bello as the new Governor of Kogi State. As far as a large faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is concerned, both at the national and state levels, it is a pleasant duty to get Alhaji Bello, alias Fairplus, inaugurated as governor. The plot to make him inherit a victory that was not vacant, nor his, was hatched not by the governor-elect himself, but by a handful of men in Abuja who seemed to know more than the rest of Nigeria how the future would look like. Alhaji Bello is merely a pawn; he will remain a pawn until the courts put paid to his pretentiousness.
But on inauguration day, Wednesday, the new governor will give a speech eulogising democracy and promising the starving and tormented indigenes of the state salvation from want, oppression, mediocrity and stagnation orchestrated by the departing Governor Idris Wada. The new governor will not talk about justice, fairness and equity, nor make any allusion to the distinguishing properties of personal character and integrity. Not being a deep person, nor yet a man of great character, he will be silent on the characteristics of a patriot. Alhaji Bello will muddle through on inauguration day with commonplace triteness and piffle.
The injustice perpetrated in Kogi State will remain an albatross around the necks of the APC and the electoral body, INEC. INEC did not need to get a brief or advice from the Attorney General. They nonetheless stifled their conscience and embraced the Justice minister’s illogic. A big faction in the APC did not need to play politics with the Kogi election by plotting an electoral stalemate in a display of brazen power play within the party. But they did, for in their opinion, the consequences of the injustice of today are tolerable to the humiliation and diminution they claim they would suffer should Kogi fall under the wing of someone outside their inner circle.
After the courts will have done justice and reversed the nonsense hatched in the state in last year’s Kogi governorship election, the APC will still be left with its fratricidal factions, and the wounds caused by the machinations in the party will take a long time to heal. The injury is deep and gangrenous. It is clear that those who thought the APC was the harbinger of a truly national and liberal politics are gravely mistaken. The party has not overcome the bitter, divisive and parochial politics of the past, the kind that undermined previous republics and set one schizoid ethnic group against another. It is to the eternal dishonour of Kogi State that on its land were fired the first shots in the futile war projected to limit the growth, spread and endurance of the APC as a national party, in creed and ideology.
Credit: The Nation
