APC and PDP are selfish

Sir: The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is quoted as saying it does not subscribe to rotational presidency but survival of the fittest. Yet, any society that fails to organize will agonize. Hence Nigeria has been agonizing since Independence in 1960 till date. There was a Civil War, 1967-70; a civil unrest occasioned by the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, won by a Yoruba, Moshood Abiola, but cancelled by a military Head of State from the north, General Ibrahim Babangida, etc.

Consequently, when Nigeria was returning to civil rule in 1999, political elders agreed in 1998 to rotate the presidency south north. That was how the expression “rotational presidency” entered Nigeria’s lexicon. In line with that gentleman agreement, all the major political parties chose their presidential candidates from the southwest in 1999 and 2003, and General Olusegun Obasanjo (OBJ) won the presidential election on the two occasions, on the platform of PDP. In 2007, it was the turn of the northwest, and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua won from that zone.

Problem started when Yar’Adua died before completing his first term. His Deputy, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ), from the south-south insisted on succeeding him. OBJ’s former Deputy, Atiku Abubakar, from the northeast, also became inordinately ambitious and contested against GEJ for the PDP presidential ticket. Too many Nigerians lost the vision.

Among those who supported GEJ to truncate rotational presidency were OBJ and Senator Ahmed Tinubu (now a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress – APC). GEJ also appealed to his own section of the south south; his Biafra connection, for which he added Azikiwe to his name (hence GEAJ), and he pocketed the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), through its President that time, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor. Provocations from CAN that time made Boko Haram to start bombing churches.

Nigerians again were deceived to vote for a jihadist as the President in 2015. Muhammadu Buhari (GMB) left nobody in doubt at his inauguration on May 29, 2015, when he paid homage to “Shehu Usman Dan Fodio”, a jihad warrior who imposed Islam on many peoples, and enthroned Fulani hegemony, which perpetrates mass abject poverty in Hausaland. Privileged Fulani families, such as Yar’Adua and Buhari, acquired Western education to solidify their holds on power. They use Western literacy to commit haram (hence in Hausa language, book haram –book and documentary fraud).

Christians who advised PMB to use the recovered looted funds to develop Nigeria should also tell him to let pilgrimage-makers source for their own foreign currencies.

• Pius Abioje,
University of Ilorin.