OPINION: The desperation of the members of the ruling class to take over and continue from failed President Buhari stopped is more than alarming. But this is very understandable given the fact that Nigeria has gone pass sitting, but dancing on a keg of gunpowder.
As it stands, the Nigerian rulers employs religious, ethnic, and such other divisions to keep the people enslaved, and ruled. From Obasanjo to Buhari, ethnicity; regionalism, religion, and minority agitations (in the case of Jonathan) has been the deciding factors with which such mannequins of exceptional failures have been directing the social, political, and moral compass of the most populated black country in the world.
Verily, the double victories of the ruling party, the All Progressive Congress (APC), since 2015 were hinged on these factors above. But in order to perpetuate their irresponsible ruining hold on the socio-economic undergrowth and mal-developments, the Tinubu/Shettima candidature is stocked trying to shift the goal post.
Alas, with the terrorism and banditry, rising from the Northern hemisphere and particularly targeting and killing more Christians than other religions ( at least recently), the Muslim -Muslim ticket is becoming a raging anger all around the country. I was in a bus where an Alhaji was even saying the ticket “will open the Muslims to more attacks and hatred.” He lamented that his Christian business partners are already behaving somehow to him. This is plus the facts that Tinubu himself is well hated by Lagosians because of the mass hardships, excessive taxations, insecurities, multiple extortions by both state and private thugs from commuters and mass unemployment.
While we were moving from Ikeja to Ogba, I pointed at the Ikeja Industrial Estate and most companies there are churches. Workers have been turned to worshippers, watching and praying more than three times a week. Mechanic villages are being privatized and turned to expensive real estate while informal workers roam around without work. After all, aside the Technical School at Agidingbi, Tinubu’s Lagos has no other College for skilled training.
The way Ikeja Industrial Estate has been turned to Ikeja Gospel Estate is a handiwork of Lagos and Nigeria rulers who are kowtowing to IMF/World Bank policies of destroying the production system and impose the services sectors. Through importing and exporting, the raw resources are daily sold off while second-hand goods or even brand new ones are imported. The Naira has to be fraudulently devalued to dollarize the economy, while the NNPC is being sold off to private hands in the name of unbundling.
In all of these years of sapping the economy through various articles of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP); the church has been complicit. In exchange for their loyalty to the ruling class, their sermons transformed from “righteousness” to “prosperity.” Motivational speaking became a blue collar job. False hopes were sprinkled all around the books and corners of the streets, towns, and cities while the cancer of primitive capitalism is ravaging, killing, and destroying the now and futures of generations upon generations for over three decades.
Just like Pastor Yemi Osinbajo was criminally silent and complicit all through in the ruinous and failed Buhari government, Nigerian Christian leaders as represented by Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) have been complicit in how we have gone from the African giant with lands of milk and honey to one of sorrow, tears, and blood. Buhari has failed to compensate the loyalty of Osinbajo with the presidency and has approved a Muslim -Muslim ticket.
But it’s encouraging that Christians are rising. And I agree with the criteria spelt out by CAN of who Christians should vote for. Competence, Character, Capacity, and Policies are outstanding four items that a real president that would lead Nigeria should posses. That document carries real substance that Christians must hold CAN accountable to. This is very important. CAN is never supposed to be association for the Church leaders alone. It should be for all Christians. Same for PFN.
I challenge all Christians to hold on to the four criteria spelt out by CAN and make good researches both individually and collectively. The objective should be to have total liberation for all Nigerians and not for christians alone. The January 2012 Uprising and the #EndSARS Revolts show that we can all live together as citizens sharing love irrespective of religion and ethnicity. What matters is a better society for all!
By the time the fake Bishops employed by Tinubu/Shettima yesterday wake up this morning, they would have discovered that they should have gotten beyond what they got. The national disgrace alone is priceless. Not to talk of the fact as confessed by one of them that he was promised #100k but was handed #40k finally. That’s about 60 percent rip off!
Aside the APC, both the PDP/Atiku ticket and their Obi/LP feeders Team live in the old tradition of private capitalism. This is obvious to even the blind. Nigerians must be ready to go the hard way. We must be ready to choose revolutionary candidates that would do totally away with the past, and dispel the wicked counsels of the babaric old as represented by Obasanjo (the authorizer of Odi and Zaki Biam massacres) and Babangida (the executioner of the Structural Adjustment Program SAP that destroyed the social Welfarist economy in favour of crude Consumption economy which has plundered Nigeria into mass poverty, hardships, and insecurities today.)
That hard way is the Sowore/Magashi ticket of the African Action Congress (AAC) that is hell bent in moving Left and building a new Nigeria through Collective Economic restructuring, pan-Africanist modernisation, and the unity of all oppressed!
Written by Kunle Wizeman Ajayi. To write for Clariform, click here
