AN APOLOGY FOR WHAT?
-Femi Fani-Kayode
I received the news of the apology offered to the Nigerian people by my friend and brother Prince Uche Secondus, the National Chairman of the PDP, with mixed feelings.
For goodness sake what is the apology for? Is it the great achievements of President Olusegun Obasanjo or the commendable strides of President Goodluck Jonathan?
In my view Secondus' apology was ill-conceived and unnecessary.
And if PDP must apologise for its 16 years in power then on its own part the Buhari administration and each and every one of the APC leaders must be compelled to pull out a loaded gun, point it at their own temples and blow out their own brains.
It is either that or they must be compelled to take some lethal poison and die a slow and terrible death for the corruption, hardship, penury, bloodshed and evil that they have foisted and inflicted on the Nigerian people over the last three years.
I proudly served in President Obasanjo's government, which was a PDP government, for four years and his achievements were legion.
He inspired and encouraged our people and made them proud to be Nigerians again and he paid off our foreign debt, stabilised the country and pulled us back from the brink of war.
He treated every Nigerian fairly regardless of faith or tribe and he left a total of $64 billion USD in our foreign reserves.
He strengthen the economy and ensured that Nigeria was readmitted into the comity of civilised nations.
He boosted agricultural growth, fought an effective and non-selective war against corruption and ushered massive foreign and local investment into the country.
He built up local industries and assisted the manufacturing sector to prosper and thrive and caused the Stock Exchange to flourish.
He strengthened our Armed Forces, reformed the education sector, improved the health sector, encouraged freedom of speech and ensured that not one journalist, dissident or opposition figure was locked up for expressing his or her views.
He also managed the sharia crisis well and avoided a civil war, pulled us back from the brink of war with the Cameroun, brokered a successful peace deal in Liberia, quelled a military coup d'etat in Sao Tome and Principe and so much more. Is that what we are apologising for?
Anyone may say whatever they like about Obasanjo, and I do not for one minute suggest that he is an angel or that he is infallible, but one thing you can never take away from him is the fact that he remains probably the most patriotic, dedicated and effective leader that Nigeria has ever had and one of the greatest that the African continent has ever been blessed with.
Frankly we need to be careful what we say as a party and we should stop accepting and feeding into the deceitful and mendacious narrative that is being encouraged and fuelled by the Buhari administration and our collective enemies which asserts that we were all hopelessly corrupt and that we never achieved anything at all!
When we say that we are apologising it simply means that we have accepted that false narrative and that is not only a grave error but it is also unacceptable simply because such a narrative has no basis in reality, rationality, reason or truth.
It also does a great disservice to all the former PDP Governments and Presidents over the 16 years that we were in power.
We may have made a few mistakes here and there and we may not have scored 100 per cent on all fronts but to suggest that we are guilty of some heinous crime for which we are now constrained to apologise is not only misplaced, inappropriate and ill-advised but it is also unwise.
Worst still in the coming months we may be forced to pay a heavy price for it as we become the subject of ridicule and opprobrium.
The only thing PDP needs to apologise for is allowing a bunch of incompetent fools, unlettered rogues and uncivilised sociopaths and sadists like the APC to take power in 2015.
That is what we must ask God and the Nigerian people to forgive us for and nothing else.
My friend and brother Donald Duke, the former Governor of Cross Rivers state, and others have suggested that we must reach out to other political parties and form a broad-based coalition to confront and defeat the APC in next years presidential election.
That is a duty that is incumbent on each and everyone one of us and if we fail in discharging it God will judge us and deal with us ever so severely. Worst still, if we fail and Buhari returns to power next year, as Obasanjo has said, Nigeria will collapse.
If anyone needs to be reminded about just how inept and degenerate Buhari's government is I urge them to kindly consider the events of the last few days and weeks which prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they are nothing but a government of unconceivable liars, professional propagandists, disinformation merchants and first class scammers.
First came the Dapchi scam. Then came the Martin Luther King award scam. Then came the Lagos bus terminal scam in which Lagos, the largest city in Africa, was put under lockdown and all its roads were blocked simply because Buhari was coming to open a glorified bus stop and attend a colloquium for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu's 66th birthday.
For the last few days it has been one merry little photo-shoot and disingenuous scam after the other but two events which struck me more than any of the others were the following.
At the colloquium Vice President Yemi Osinbajo reiterated his view that the PDP were corrupt and a party of looters and that the looting under President Goodluck Jonathan's government and in the 5 years before Buhari came to power had destroyed the Nigerian economy.
This is a lie from the pit of hell. Osinbajo is not only a disgrace to his country but also a traitor to his Christian faith and Yoruba race.
He is hopelessly corrupt and he is a pernicious liar. All he ever does, apart from being the resident slave and proverbial Uncle Tom in the Presidential Villa, is accuse the PDP and other members of the opposition of looting and corruption yet the government that he heads with Buhari has indulged in MORE corruption in 3 years than the PDP did in 16.
Worst still they delight in wasting their enemies, shedding innocent blood, locking up their adversaries and encouraging and supporting their friends and associates to indulge in mass murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The second event was the release of the list of names of those who have been described as "looters" by the Federal Government even though not one person has been convicted by a court of law of looting amongst all those whose names were listed.
It is simply ridiculous when a government of murderous slanderers, heartless disinformation agents and vicious scammers says and does things like this.
Simply put it is a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black. Yet before I go into that permit me to touch on an aside.
During the festivities they wheeled out an undoubtedly beautiful black British super-model called Naomi Campbell to pose in pictures with Buhari during his visit to Eko Atlantic whilst he was in Lagos.
Quite what the point of this exercise was I have not been able to grasp or fathom but it is interesting to note that the last African Head of State that this "pretty babe" took a picture with ended up being convicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
His name was Charles Taylor, the former President of Liberia. I wonder whether history will repeat itself and Buhari will end up in the same place ? I guess that remains to be seen.
It was the day after the pose with Naomi that the Buhari government came up with their list of so-called "looters" which did not have the name of Rotimi "Oloriburuku" Amaechi or any other APC leader or government official on it.
Yet the truth is that no list of looters is complete the names of Muhammadu Buhari, Yemi Osinbajo, Rotimi Amaechi, Babachir Lawal, Babatunde Raji Fashola, Abdulrasheed Maina, Maikanti Baru, Abdulrahman Dambazzau, Abdullahi Adamu, Mohammed Buratai and all the other APC leaders and Federal Government officials on it.
They are not only thieves but they literally invented the art of corruption and they are experts in it. They are corrupt in body, spirit and soul. They have stolen and misappropriated vast sums of money from the Nigerian state, diverted billions of naira from state government funds for their 2015 presidential campaign and they have snuffed out and destroyed more innocent lives than any other government in the history of Nigeria outside of the civil war.
When, God-willing, we get them out of power and take over we will open the books, expose them for what they are and each and everyone of them will suffer the consequences of their unprecedented graft and monstrous larceny.
One day Nigerians will discover that Buhari is not an angel but a devil and that his entire government and team is infested with demons and incorrigible rogues.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote the following in one of my essays:
"President Buhari forgets that our system of government is meant to be a modern-day democracy where the rule of law prevails, where dissent and a plurality of views and opinion is tolerated and where freedom of expression, freedom of association, the right to life and the right to a fair hearing is held sacrosanct and is guaranteed.
Worst still he believes in demonising and crushing all his enemies and holding on to power at all costs and through any means both fair and foul. If you doubt any of these things please ask Sambo Dasuki, Sheik El Zak Zaky, Nnamdi Kanu or countless others.
He leads a corrupt government which operates double standards and which turns a blind eye to the theft and graft that is being perpetrated by its officials and their friends whilst at the same time persecuting his perceived enemies and labelling them as being corrupt even though there is no real and tangible evidence of that so-called corruption.
And if anyone doubts that Buhari and his government are hopelessly corrupt then they should please read the latest Transparency International report in which they said that corruption in Nigeria is "getting worse under Buhari".
Buhari is a tyrant and a genocidal maniac who believes in conquest and oppression and who has turned a blind eye whilst his subjects are butchered in their thousands by Fulani terrorists who call themselves herdsmen.
He has brought nothing but carnage, division, destruction, death, poverty and evil to our nation.
On several occasions he has watched silently and done nothing after his security agencies and Armed Forces killed thousands of his own citizens, whether they be Igbo youths that are members of IPOB or Shiite Muslims, after which they are buried in mass graves.
These are crimes against humanity for which he should be charged at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
Those that are not killed are thrown into prisons or horrific detention cells all over the country where they are tortured and left to rot without any form of due process and against court orders to release them.
If anyone has any doubts about that they should please read the latest report by Amnesty International.
To add to all these horrors poverty and hunger have ravaged the land. If anybody doubts that they should please read the latest IMF report where the International Monetary Fund claims that Nigerians are "hungrier today" than they have ever been and that more of our people are living below the poverty line than ever before.
The truth is that apart from being monumentally incompetent Buhari is also shallow, sectional, divisive and vindictive and he has proved that he is wholly unfit and undeserving to be the President of a complicated, multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic mega-nation like Nigeria which needs to be led and handled with sensitivity, caution and care".
I stand by every word that I wrote in that essay and frankly, as each day passes, things are getting worse for the Nigerian people under his watch.
Permit me to conclude this contribution with the following:
Like President Obasanjo's devastating letter, President Goodluck Jonathan's consistent criticism, President Ibrahim Babangida's public admonition and Vice President Atiku Abubuakar's pungent opposition, General T.Y. Danjuma's bombshell, which was unleashed just few days ago against the Buhari government, was not only timely and courageous but also absolutely necessary.
He rightly alleged that our government, through its Armed Forces, are involved in ethnic cleansing and genocide and he boldly encouraged the people to defend themselves4, defend their territory and defend Nigeria.
He has confirmed what yours truly and a handful of others have been saying for the last two years that the Buhari administration and their security forces collude with the Fulani herdsmen to slaughter and commit mass murder against our people.
This is unacceptable, it will never be forgotten and it will not go unavenged. It is only a matter of time before ALL those involved will suffer the consequences of their barbaric actions and be brought to justice.
Danjuma's concerns, coupled with the admonitions of Bill Gates, the worlds richest man, who has criticised the Buhari government viciously both whilst he was in Nigeria and after he returned home to America, prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Nigeria is in danger and that the Buhari government has messed things up very badly. Like Nero, they are playing the fiddle whilst Rome is burning.
If anyone needs to apologise to the Nigerian people it is Buhari, Osinbanjo and their APC and certainly not the PDP or indeed any of the other political parties.
