FEATURE ARTICLE

E O EkeSunday, February 1, 2015
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VOTE FOR A LESSER EVIL

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have not been bewitched. I have no vote in this election. Hopefully, the next government will give Nigerians in diaspora vote before 2019, and if I am alive by then, I would have a vote. As I have said several months before Buhari was chosen as the presidential candidate for APC, Buhari and many in his generation should no longer matter in Nigeria's politics. They have had their time and left a legacy of corruption, sectarianism and a failed and broken country incapacitated by graft and, threatened by an Islamic insurgency and ethnic cleansing by Fulani herdsmen.

I do not see Nigeria changing much under either Buhari or Jonathan because both are heading political parties controlled by corrupt and unscrupulous men, whose only aim of being in politics is to enrich themselves.

They have done nothing to make Nigeria a better place. Things that were better before they came to power are now worse. Many people in APC are disgruntled PDP members whose differences with PDP are not based on principle. Obasanjo who is now supporting Buhari, was once president under PDP and Chairman BOT of PDP. His loyalty is to his greed and ego.

If Buhari has the ability to control corruption, he would have started with his party. He could have done something about 27 million Naira price tag for presidential form.

The corrupt gang behind him wishes to capitalise on his image as an 'honest man' to gain power to plunder.

Why did the last presidential candidate Nuhu Rabidu, leave APC for PDP? Why is Atiku in APC?

What is the ideological difference between APC and PDP?

APC is a marriage of convenience by strange bedfellows and like all such marriages, will crumble once the inordinate aim is achieved.

I believe in reason. Giving a choice between Buhari and Jonathan in Nigeria of today, knowing what I know about both of them, I will vote Jonathan, whose government I know to be corrupt, not because I condone or minimise the extent of graft in his government or, because he is Christian or a southerner; but because he will always make a better democrat, albeit a corrupt one and stands a better chance of leading Nigeria towards the 21st century, than Buhari

Jonathan has already done his worst, what more damage can he do? He reminds me of the corrupt demagogue in Asope's tale of the fox and the tick. This is a book many Nigerians should read, if they can before the election,

Moreover, Jonathan has less religious baggage than Buhari and lacks the capacity to incite Christians in the South to violence, if he loses, unlike Buhari, who gave oxygen to sectarian violence in the North the last time he lost. Jonathan has not called his opponents cockroaches and threatened that their blood would flow.

Most of the politician who support Buhari, are interested men who are not to be trusted, and men who lost out in PDP. Such men are bitter, vindictive and arrogant and, will only do as they please. What good can Obasanjo, Tinubu, Okorocha and Amaechi, who used his state fund to by an aeroplane do for Nigeria, that Jonathan cannot do? They have history of moving from one party to another. They have all used state money for political purpose. Okorocha and Amaechi are using their state resources and allocations to bankroll APC. They are all politicians of fortune.

Politics is not a game of saints, it is a game where saints must wine and dine with sinners, but always looking for ways to do good. A country is full of good and bad and all must work together to build it under the rule of law and with time, the law will catch up with the corrupt. This was the lesson Jesus taught in the parable if the wheat and tar.

I will tell you more why I would not vote Buhari. He was a Nigerian soldier who killed Igbos. His career as a soldier began and ended by killing Biafrans and I cannot honour and support a man who once carried fire, guns and destruction into my land and visited death and humiliation on my people.

I was a small boy during the civil war and Lost relatives in the Nigeria- Biafra war. Supporting Buhari's attempt to become president of Nigeria, would be a betrayal of the memory of those freedom fighters, who rebelled against tyranny and carried arms for freedom, but were cut down at the prime of their lives.

I did not support Obasnjo for similar reasons and time proved me right. I said that the man will do no good and he proved me right. He spent 8 years stealing even though he claimed he was a born again Christian. For serving Nigeria for 8 years he is now worth billions of Naira, has an elite secondary school, a university, multimillion farm, and a multimillion Library. Not bad for an ex-soldier who was down to his last thousand when he was released from prison.

Atiku institutionalised corruption in Nigerian Customs and as Vice President stole enough to pay for free education and health care in Nigeria for many years. What good can such strange bedfellows who have reunited in APC do for Nigeria?

I am unmoved by Buhari's orchestrated religious piety, because I know that the next election is really about who will preside over the sharing of the next oil allocation. Supporting Buhari for the presidency of Nigeria is like asking the son of Ahmadu Bello to honor Patrick Kaduna Chukwuemeka Nzeogwu, who killed his father. or the son of Aguiyi Ironsi to honour Theophilus Danjuma who killed his father.

Reason tells us the person who has once tried to kill you, is not the right person to protect you or trusted to protect you, no matter how much he proclaims he has changed because the leopard does not change its spots.

Buhari overthrew an elected government and imposed autocracy and favoured Islam and northerners. He humiliated anybody who is not from his ethnic group. He was a law unto himself.

It is simply safe, not to trust one's liberty to a man who had once found good reason to restrict it. At 72, he is not the the best candidate APC could produce and I detest the very system that throws up people like Buhari and Jonathan.

Yes, we should forgive, but forgiveness does not demand that we should help the person who has hurt us to benefit from the evil he did to us.

Buhari has a right to contest, but we do not have to elect him.

I do not need to share the delusion that he is a political saint, when I know that he has a dark side, which is not amendable to reason. There is no morality in the choice of candidates in a democratic election.

When Buhari was chairman of PTF, 70% of projects were in the North and PTF was a very corrupt organisation. He panders to Islam in the North and talks secularity in the South. He and Sambo Namadi speak from both sides of their mouth and I can only conclude that it has something to do with Islam. This simply shows how complex and intertwined the Nigerian problem is.

You see, necessity may make something like the election of somebody like Buhari convenient, but in the end and with time, it will become clear that it is a wrong and oppressive choice. Just like the election of Obasanjo.

As Thomas Paine argued in the rights of man and common sense. Expediency and right are different things. Something that appears expedient today, may become clearly wrong tomorrow and in a choice between two evils, wisdom demands that a man choose whatever he considers a lesser evil.

I can see the expediency of electing Buhari. But I do not think that it would be right to do so at this time in the history of Nigeria. No one should desire change for the sake of change.

To me, it would be a backward step in 2015, for Nigeria to elect a 72 year old ex-dictator to lead her in a post modern world.

How can the person who represents my past , be the future of my children? Buhari is far too gone to offer Nigeria a future. He had his time in the 1980s and he gave Nigerians koboko.

This election is a choice between two gangs of thieves. One is made up of overfed and corrupt men. The other, of equally corrupt, but hungry and rapacious men. History and common sense tell us that the more men have to lose, the less willing they are to venture, including stealing more. I WOULD LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT PDP with Jonathan would steal less in the next 4 years than APC, with Buhari, Tinubu, Atiku, Obasanjo Okorocha , Amaechi and Saraki. I rest my case. Neither Jonathan nor Buhari is the Nigerian messiah, but one of them is a lesser evil than the other.

I rest my case.

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