On the 29th of May, 2015, General Mhammadu Buhari was sworn in as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He had emerged from an electoral process that had about 11 aspirants, one of which was Prof Remi Sonaiya who also happened to be the only female candidate.
Fast forward to mid-October, the ministerial list had already been seen, fuel scarcity had already started rearing its head, about one or two other promises had been denied to have been made during campaign, the national assembly had been sitting and getting salaries with nothing tangible to show, the wardrobe allowance amidst other allowances had already been discussed.
The promised immediate CHANGE had begun to look like WAIT a little while for the CHANGE, #BabaGoSlow had already come and gone and a sizeable fraction of the populace were starting to question whether the PROMISE of CHANGE is not beginning to become a CHANGE of PROMISE.
Fast forward again to January 2016, the budget had already been presented and reportedly been withdrawn, the contents of that budget had meant different things to different people depending on which camp people belonged. If at all the wave of CHANGE had hit the EFCC Office, the wave of CHANGE had skipped the Ministry of Budget and National Planning like the historical Angel of Death skipped the houses of Isrealites in Egypt in those days.
One common question that people continue to ask is where is the opposition party? PDP of course wouldn’t be the proper answer to that question seeing that the people who were feeling the heat brought by the wave of CHANGE to the EFCC Office werethe PDP as a political organization. The smart ones had decamped to APC as the torch of Mr President’s anti-corruption is “yet” to shine there.
A good observer would see how people have continued to demand for KOWA seeing it as the next clean alternative. Mr President cannot “finger” anybody in the party for corruption seeing that it is relatively new and from the people’s moral code, he that must question the almighty APC which is led by Nigeria’s most incorruptible man must do so with ‘clean hands’. Clean hands here meaning no known case of alleged corruption.
Now, KOWA is here! Madam Presidential Candidate has announced that all it takes to join the PARTY is to visit the website, download the form and pay the membership fee and you are a member. Wait for the convention next month, attend as a delegate and elect leaders into the party executive and lead the kind of opposition that you want.
However, there will be no political godfather who would finance all the activities, we would all put our monies together to achieve what we want. There would be no imposition, an internal democracy that would ensure that those who are competent and qualified are the ones that emerge as leaders of the party, whether 20 years old or 50 years old. The party would not condone any form of monetization by entrenched interests trying to control the party to their own interests, and so on and so forth.
Is this kind of politics even possible? Can we birth a political system where people are elected based on merit and not based on referral by the godfathers that be? Is Nigeria’s political system even ready for that? Can they survive like that? Will the party last long? These and many more are the pessimistic questions I have seen so far.
Unfortunately, they are the real questions that need to be answered as birthing a political system that is entirely devoid of all the negatives of our political system in this country will require a paradigm shift and only those who can foresee a future where our politics is clean at the party level will be able to participate in this kind of political disruption.
Monetizing Politics has been the root cause of all our problems in Nigeria. It is the antecedent of all the consequences that we face right now as a nation, from fuel subsidy to Biafra to north east insurgency to unemployment. He who pays the piper dictates the tune and like Prof Remi Sonaiya said “KOWA does’t accept to have somebody dictating the tune to the piper; no, we’re all piping together! No pot of money somewhere”.
Will this party survive, as it hopes to bring political disruption to the already stinking, corrupt, non-progressive system that we currently run? Only time will tell.
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
The author, Jude Feranmi, tweets @juded27. Follow for more insights.
