From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will on Wednesday, this week, officially blow the whistle that will formally kick-start the five-month-long campaign activities by political parties to herald next year’s general elections.
Interestingly, apart from the insignificant skirmishes trailing the official release of its presidential Campaign Council (PCC) list, the All Progressives Congress (APC) looks almost ready to roll out drums for the crucial task of taking its victory messages to the Nigerian electorate this week.
As the ruling party, APC ordinarily is expected to dictate the pace by pulling the crowd and appealing campaign messages and living by example in terms of issue-based campaigns.
Many would have expected that the ruling party should have an edge over others by rolling out its scorecards to remind the Nigerian electorate how far and how well it has lived up to its campaign promises since it wrest power from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2015.
Naturally, it should rely on its achievements and fulfillment of social contract with the Nigerian public to campaign and retain power. The party ought to also effortlessly flaunt the competence and capabilities of its presidential and vice presidential candidates and market them effectively to the general public.
The coming window for political campaign will more than ever before, remarkably provide the needed opportunity to the APC-led government, claiming under-reportage of its achievements, to tell the Nigerian electorate what they did not know that will warrant its re-election to continue to pilot the affairs of a country in dire need of resuscitation.
In the calculation of many, the campaign period will provide the ruling party the much-anticipated opportunity to make bold claims on how the country has become the bastion of democracy and an Eldorado of sort under the APC government.
The records of the APC in physical infrastructure, war against insecurity and economy, and the monster of corruption that formed the agenda for its administration, should be some of the weapons the ruling party should soon be showcasing to the people.
As the campaign kicks off this week, the party will certainly brandish the achievements of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration. They will tell Nigerians how the party has improved on the national rail system it met on ground in 2015. They will likely campaign with how the Lagos-Ibadan railway line has been completed and running, and how far the Warri-Itakpe rail service is doing, level of completion of the Second Niger Delta road, among other areas of infrastructural developments.
The ruling party will campaign with how the APC-led Federal Government purchased about 377 Wagons, 64 Coaches, and 21 Locomotives for the Standard Gauge network, between 2016 and 2021. The party will explain to Nigerians about the Kano-Maradi rail project. And more importantly, how an unprecedented estimated number of over 11,000 new jobs have been created from the rail modernisation projects.
Still in the transport sector, APC will campaign with the establishment of a new Transportation University in Daura, Katsina State, and new Rail Wagon Assembly Plant in Kajola, Ogun State already nearing completion.
In the area of road projects, the APC presidential candidate will leverage on the Infrastructure Development Fund (PIDF) expending over $1 billion dollars on three flagship projects: Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, Second Niger Bridge, Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano Expressway, Abuja-Lafia-Makurdi road expansion.
The party will use the opportunity to inform Nigerians about how the setting up of Road Infrastructure Tax Credit Scheme implemented by the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), to tackle public infrastructure deficit in the country has improved their lives.
Has it also been a harvest of achievements in the power sector? APC will campaign with the increase in power generation, transmission and distribution. The party is likely to talk about such power projects as the Zungeru Hydro, Kashimbila Hydro, Afam III Fast Power, Kudenda Kaduna Power Plant, the Okpai Phase 2 Plant, the Dangote Refinery Power Plant, among many others handled by global giants in power infrastructure construction like Siemens.
APC will brag about how in April 2021, its government launched Solar Power Naija (SPN) initiative that delivered five million off-grid solar connections to more than 20 million Nigerians.
The party will defend ASUU strike with the commendable efforts of taking clean and reliable energy (solar and gas) initiatives to federal universities and teaching hospitals across the country.
For the records, four universities, comprising Bayero University, Kano, Alex-Ekwueme Federal University, Ebonyi State, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi and Federal University of Petroleum Resources, Effurun, Delta State, are beneficiaries of the project that have been completed, commissioned while others are ongoing.
In the area of security, the APC government will boldly campaign to Nigerians that the monster, called insurgency, has been technically defeated and reduced to few flashes of attacks on soft targets. To lay more credence to that, the APC government had recently intensified the war against other nefarious criminal activities, visiting them with brute force that has resulted in the relative peace currently experienced in many parts of the country.
In the economy, APC would defend itself during the campaign that it has successfully managed the economy despite the effects of the global meltdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the drastic crash in global oil prices.
However, despite all the laudable achievements the party expects to be ingrained in public consciousness, forming campaign tools, the approval rating of the President Buhari-led APC government since 2015 till date has progressively plummeted.
The situation has become so bad that the Deputy Director General, APC presidential campaign council, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, almost burnt his fingers attempting to disassociate and or distant the ruling party’s candidate from what many Nigerians have come to tag the monumental failure of the Buhari APC-led government.
In the perception of an APC chieftain and member of the party’s presidential campaign council, Arch Waziri Bulama, the ruling party has sellable messages to the Nigerian electorate when campaign kicks off.
His words: “Our achievements should be a thing of pride. Nigerians will appreciate them, especially our performances in infrastructure, tackling insecurity and organised crimes across the country. Worst situations have been arrested in the North East, Niger Delta, South-south, and in the South East. The ring leaders have also been arrested. Organised crimes have been reduced to the barest minimum.”
Aligning with Bulama, the governor of Imo State, Hope Uzodinma, recently said: “I am confident that APC has done so well to the extent that they can win all the states in Nigeria but we still need to engage the people and when the campaign starts, we have to go and market our product.
“By the time we finish our marketing, we will carry out an opinion poll that will give us an idea of how many states we will win proper, because we are talking about human beings, and in this business, one day can change a lot of things.” Similarly, political watchers believe that what could be APC’s biggest asset and perhaps soft landing will be what many considered as lack of viable opposition with competitive edge over the ruling party from the presidential candidates of the other parties.
Fortunately, for the APC, it has an already-made response to whatever antics the PDP or its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, would throw at the ruling party, by just referencing it to what some Nigerians would consider as the 16-year failed government of the now opposition party.
What it implies is that retaliatory attacks and or remarks will form APC’s most potent weapon during the campaign even if they are issue-based in nature. What is incontrovertible is that APC has PDP’s dossier.
The APC has caustic corresponding replies to every message, statement and antics from the PDP. “Whatever the opposition party, especially the PDP throws at us would be a case of the kettle calling the pot black. What weapon will the PDP use against us that they have not been guilty of many times?” APC chieftain quipped in confidence, during a chat with Daily Sun.
“Should the opposition party decide to enter the gutter and fight dirty by accusing APC of failure in security, the ruling party will simply dust documents and remind it of when insurgents were operating freely in Abuja under the watch of the PDP-led government and when several Local Government Areas in the country, especially in the Northeast were under the control of the enemy forces of the State.”
Confirming the party’s readiness to adopt reprisal attack as modus operandi, APC National Vice Chairman (North West), Salihu Moh Lukman, recently quipped that: “the claim that APC government has mismanaged the economy, divided Nigerians and created insecurity is a misnomer. Part of the argument is that Nigeria is now the ‘poverty capital of the world’.
“The so-called poor performance of the APC-led government of President Buhari contrasts with so-called ‘achievements’ of 16 years of PDP. Many PDP leaders and their supporters have even claimed that if PDP failed to win the 2023 election, Nigeria will collapse. But there is no iota of truth in all the claims,” he argued.
However, reacting to what the APC presidential candidate will campaign with, a member of Tinubu media team told Daily Sun that the former Lagos governor will this week unveil his three-point agenda that he tagged his social contract with Nigerians.
“The agenda will be an encapsulation of the solution to the challenges facing the major sectors stagnated over the years. I can reveal to you that it is actually going to be a three-point agenda that will be of immense appeal to the generality of Nigerians. However, I cannot give you more details about the document until it is unveiled this week,” media team member Tinubu campaign council said.
Head or tail, there are strong indications that the ruling party may not kick-start the campaign as a united party judging by the backlash trailing the recently released PCC list.
Ordinarily, the released council list ought to come as a huge relief to many members of the ruling party that have hitherto anxiously waited for it, but the hostile responses prove doubters wrong that only a modicum of graveyard peace still exists in the party.
The cold war between the national leadership of the party, the National Working Committee (NWC) and the presidential campaign council may deepen this week going by the posture of the former that it made little or no input in the released campaign council list.
The source of disagreement was the refusal of the NWC’s request for inclusion of its 18 members into the PCC and the relegation of some party chieftains especially many of the presidential aspirants to inconsequential positions in the campaign list,
A member of the NWC, who spoke in confidence, has argued that the fact that the PCC released the final council list instead of the national leadership of the party indicates that something is fundamentally wrong.
Reacting to the list, the NWC member claimed that there is no way the leadership will accept the list as presently constituted. “There was no courtesy from the PCC to give the party’s leadership prior information about the release of the final list. I can tell you that the NWC did not make any serious input to the list. The PCC leadership got it wrong,” the NWC member fumed.
He added: “ordinarily, the NWC should have announced the list publicly but they did not even see the comprehensive final list let alone announcing it. The NWC had specifically requested the inclusion of 18 members into the council but only an insignificant number were accommodated and even given inconsequential positions.
“I am very sure that if the party’s leadership had been allowed to go through or scrutinise the list, such an error about the inclusion of the former governor of Enugu State, Chimaroke Nnamani, would have been avoided. As it is now, we can only watch to know the outcome of such a unilateral decision from the PCC,” the NWC quipped in disappointment.
The party’s leadership were not the only ones aggrieved over the list. The South East party caucus, some members of the APC Progressive Governors Forum (PGF) and countless party members have equally complained bitterly of neglect.
Commenting on the list in a chat with Daily Sun, a South East chieftain of the party, said: “It is clear that Tinubu has no regard for the Igbos. Why did I say so? If you divide the 422-member council into six geopolitical zones, it should be at 60 persons each, but how many party members from the South East made the list. They are not up to 35 or at most 40 persons.
“If you ask me, Asiwaju and his camp may have concluded that most of the party members of Igbo extraction will work for the Obi presidency and as such no confidence including them in the list. He may be right or wrong but what his action or inaction means is that he has tactically pushed them to work underground for Peter Obi since he does not value them.
“We will not leave the APC but don’t ask me who we will work for because it will certainly not be 100 per cent for Asiwaju. Somebody who has no regard for you cannot get 100 per cent support from you also. We wish him luck,” our source quipped.
With the renewed complaint against the APC Muslim-Muslim presidential joint ticket, the ruling party faces a daunting task of commencing this week’s campaign as a united party.