Those who have been following my writings and social media activities will know that I had long called last Saturday’s presidential election for President Muhammadu Buhari. You may be partly right if you conclude that I was able to do so because I am a long standing fan of President Buhari. They also know that in 2015, I emphatically called the election for Buhari and he won. Baring any delays, President Buhari will soon be announced as the winner of last Saturday’s election. From all exit polls, he has comfortably coasted home to victory in an election that exerted lots of wasteful toll on his main challenger, AtikuAbubakar and his party, the PDP. As to how I rightly called these two last elections, they are topics for a more detailed future report.
By nightfall on election day, I knew Buhari had won. This was the same thing in 2015. All those that called me to know the situation of things on the night of Saturday, March 28, 2015 still attest to this. Those that also called me last Saturday night, can further attest to my surety on the fact that President Buhari had won the 2019 presidential election. This is not prophecy, not guessing, not augury but simply a fact of knowledge of how the electoral system works. Shortly after the close of polls in 2015, results started flying in from the various polling units across the country. When big wigs, prime movers and influencers of the erstwhile Jonathan government lost their polling units, it was easy to see that the former government and PDP were on their way out of power. The same thing happened last Saturday. When virtually all the backbones of the Atiku presidential project and leading PDP aficionados in the country lost their polling units in last Saturday’s election, it was clear to any cerebral observer that the game was up for Atiku and the PDP. This is no rocket science but just a careful application of educated reasoning to view elections.
The anticipated Buhari winning of last Saturday’s election is a revolution. Why do I say so? Buhari was virtually riding against a mountain in this election. This was borne out of his commitment to rein the coffers of government and ensure that state resources are only channeled to governance. This was enough to spark off a counter-revolution amongst those that have, for decades, been feeding from the public treasury and when this class is hurt, a huge chunk of the citizenry is dragged to share its bruises. This frugal policy even affected his campaign and of course the general trend of the 2019 general election. Being Spartan and tight-fisted, Buhari’s insistence that no public money should be spent on his re-election was way out of trend with known fads in the country’s electoral process before now. It was a given that a siting government would latch open the national treasury to pursue its re-election dream and the 2015 election was a topping of that notorious act. But this year, because Buhari sat tightly over the public treasury, therewas no outlandish laundering of state resources for his re-election. Everyone queued in line and the desperate opposition against him found it difficult laundering their heavy tranche of illicitly looted money for the election because an eagle-eyed security watch was placed on them.
For the past four years, Buhari has practically battled the principalities and powers that dominate Nigerian governance and economy and who led the defenestration of an oil-rich country and its abandonment in a valley of tears, despair and rot. He had walked through the opposite direction of the filth-ridden Nigerian officialdom to dismantle age-long fountains of corruption, decay and atrophy and displace a class of deeply entrenched but powerful carnivores that had been raping Nigerian treasury for ages. Welding an impeachable and unassailable moral high ground, Buhari has burgeoned those who deign the country’s treasury as their birth right’ to plunder and scavenge at will. He has capped very many rat holes through which the ethically bankrupt Nigerian elite salt the treasury and enrich themselves; to the advantage of the underprivileged, the poor and wretched of earth. Buhari has so tamed official corruption that it has become impossible for the sybaritic knights of atrophy that hitherto feed off the lifeblood of the Nigerian poor to eke out their cursed living. He has dispersed the cult of predatory buccaneers and savages used to freeloading from the common till and rendered their base businesses nugatory.
With the savings made from plugging the fonts of corruption, Buhari has embarked on perhaps the most ambitious infrastructural investment in our country’s history; building rails, roads, bridges, power plants, fixing decrepit airports, investing in health and educational sectors in a revolutionary effort to build real economy through investment in regenerative capital projects. With the much saved from his anti-corruption drive, Buhari has stabilized states that were bankrupt and on the brink of chaos when he came, ensured states are able to meet their statutory obligations, pay salaries, pay for projects. His investment in agriculture as a way of ensuring food security and tame rabid importation of food items is yielding high dividends. He had been able to kick start and run the most ambitious social intervention scheme in the history of the country which targets the poorest of the Nigerian poor, the unemployed youths, the vulnerable and those victims of the predatory Nigerian state that existed before he came. What more, Buhari has paid decades of pension arrears and saved a generation of senior retired citizens from untimely perdition and extinction.
Buhari has been able to cleanse the economy of the cobwebs of graft so as to free hitherto stolen funds to attend to the needs of the poor. Save for obviously politically-machinated killings here and there, Buhari has tamed the ravenous cancer of insecurity that once threatened to overrun the entire country and had ensured that the country’s security agencies are equipped to meet challenges that spring up to threaten the country and its citizens.
For all these, he has attracted the raw venom and bile of the idle knights of freeloading who had spared nothing to sponsor insurrection against him and his government. The angry, bitter and inconsolable moths that used to feed on the commonwealth were so angry at Buhari that they launched the most vicious campaigns of hate against him, using any tool they could lay their hands on. These distressed nabobs found nest in a hurting PDP that was irredeemably sore over its loss of power and its exclusive corruptive privileges and their desperation saw Buhari at the receiving end of the most virulent syndicated attack a Nigerian President has ever faced. Using religion, ethnic and class weapons, they mounted a strident effort to seduce the same hapless citizens that were collective victims of their nefarious misrule to wage a war against Buhari. It got so bad that they hid under the shadow of age-old herdsmen to sponsor and perpetrate heinous murderous acts on targeted casualties so as to paint Buhari black.
Buhari’s agony was not helped by the fact that he ignored the media in projecting his governance. A media that was wrapped under the foil of corruption was easy to seduce to lead the war against his government. With Buhari, not ready to pander to its voracious appetite for slush patronage, the media turned full-force to an anti-Buhari bayonet. At a time, it was hard to count just one radio station, one television station, one newspaper that was standing with Buhari. His war to rid the country of filth was not popular with the media so they leased their spaces to the hurting opposition and mangled and twisted news items to anti-Buhari sentiments in a bid to stop him. Thank God, the social media came to the rescue as the millions of Nigerians who saw what Buhari is doing, commissioned themselves to deal with Buhari’s government communication shortfall. Of course this proved very decisive both in mitigating the injuries of the compromised orthodox media and seeing Buhari through another term.
Buhari faced well known opposition from the two other arms of government; the Legislature and the Judiciary whose penchant for corruption was not spared by Buhari’s all-encompassing war against filth. They both stood as impregnable bulwarks against his dream of a clean polity that is not encumbered by the relics of graft. Because Buhari refused to patronize their elephantine greed, they constituted institutional oppositions to him for the four years he had been in power.
The worst but unusual casualty of the Buhari anti-corruption war is the religious bodies and personalities. Ostensibly because his regime’s war on corruption reduced the flow of illicit, stolen and coveted fund to their tills, so-called men of God went berserk in their anti-Buhari tirade. They spared nothing to paint Buhari black among Nigerians. In a worrying dimension, these religious leaders turned their pulpits into podiums for the spread of despicable lies, incitement, manipulation, hate, lies and fabrications against Buhari. They worked on the gullibility of their congregations to pit them against Buhari. They spared no lie against him and when AtikuAbubakar, with his elephantine moral glitches came up as PDP’s candidate against Buhari, they embraced him so shamelessly as the Jewish rabble embraced Barnabas against Jesus and were disgustingly so unscrupulous in hoisting him as the divine recommendation to save Nigeria from Buhari, despite his filthy history and his rich corrupt past. Like lascivious mongrels, these religious leaders damned all that is good and desirable to promote Atiku and used all antics to de-market Buhari amongst their congregants. At a stage, they became main purveyors of PDP’s ‘we are hungry’ antic despite the fact that Buhari’s agricultural revolution has not only led Nigeria to a self-reliant nation but is drastically reducing the prices of foodstuff with mass food production.
The ethnic slave drivers, the tribal bigots, the civil servants stripped of their illicit stealing of public money, the businessmen whose businesses starts and ends from milking the treasury, the political jobbers who saw Buhari as a nemesis to their predatory business, the displaced crooks and scammers, the political hustlers, the apex leaders, all the desperate interests that live on the stolen sweat of the Nigerian people were all united in the burgeoning anti-Buhari orchestra that led to last Saturday’s election.
But mercifully, as Buhari was retching enemies from his anti-corruption war, he was gathering innumerable admirers and followers from the poor, the downtrodden, the less privileged, who, for the first time in Nigerian history, became the focus of governance. They remain the unheard cadres of the country’s population who have been persistent victims of the state. For the first time, a government that not only identifies with their sordid fates and which was not reluctant to thread on the toes of the filthy powerful rich and influential was on the throne. For the first time, a government that believes in fixing the sectors to holistically address their traditional woes, is in power. It was easy for them to identify and stand with Buhari even as their voices were easily drowned by the propaganda of the embattled filthy rich who deigned the removal of Buhari as a battle of their lives. But as these desperate forces got more agitated in their anti-Buhari campaign, they were unknowingly recruiting more fans for Buhari and making them more hardened to ensure he continues what he was doing. These poor fans of Buhari knew a day of reckoning would come, which was last Saturday’s general election and they batted no eyelid to return him amidst the distressed antics of the anti-Buhari coyotes..
So, from all the darts, arrows and spears targeted on him, Buhari was able to triumph and emerge victorious. He was able to slay Goliath and his mighty army through his fidelity with truth, integrity and honesty. He was able to defeat the forces of Baal that had worked studiously for four whole years to undermine him because he is of God. His coming in 2015 was an act of God. His governance so far is an act of God. His emerging from a critical health challenge while many of those that wrote his obituary died in shame, was an act of God. His defeat of the forces of evil last Saturday is an act of God. His known public life is a testimony that you can get God’s approval by living right and just. Sadly, many of his traducers who hide under the banner of religion and who are defaming God by appending ‘men of God’ to their names while blatantly supporting evil, don’t know this.
So that Buhari was able to triumph over the huge web of conspiracy weaved against him enroute last Saturday’s election is a revolution. It is an ethical revolution that targets the atrophies that trouble Nigeria since creation and which he had battled for the past four years; to the discomfort of the pests. What we had last started was a resolution of the poor against the filthy rich. It was a loud thumb-up for Buhari for what he had done these past four years and an encouragement for him to do more, especially in dealing with those that grew fat from the commonwealth. Last Saturday’s election was a massive endorsement for Buhari to deal decisively with the principalities that arrested the growth and progress of Nigeria for their selfish benefits. As the election was between two direct parallels; a stoic, Spartan, tight-fisted, impeccable, honest Buhari and a morally-wrecked, corrupt, spendthrift, Atiku, a Buhari win remains the loudest signal that Nigerians want more of the things he had been doing that have made thieves and treasury raiders grow inconsolably agitated these past four years. Through this revolution, the masses have spoken, loud and clear and the message is that we want more of the vintage Buhari touch. Congratulations My President!
Peter Claver Oparah
