by Sam Omatseye
The gathering of the coalition of the wounded a few days ago resembles the 40 men who worked up a futile conspiracy against Apostle Paul on false charges and, other than false charges, they neither ate nor drank until he was killed, a waste of palate. They also laid a mockery of an ambush.
These so-called new ADC men are not the types to neither eat or drink, although one of them made a public farce in fancy clothes by pleading hunger in a bash that cost tens of millions.
Others among them relish their lavish dinner tables and even one of them has a Damocles of corruption hanging over his wife for billions of dollars without a month of work. None of them would even fast except the mullah among them with a beard and a forked and profane tongue who is fattening on the image of a pariah.
The hypocrisy bothers, but much more. It started with the squat figure among them who was shooed out of Kaduna like a bleating goat in a garden. He moved from the APC to the SDP, and asked all his fellow wounded whether with a sore head or broken knee to come over to a new place of refuge.
He assumed a proprietary air until the owners of the land said he, an interloper, a squatter and the landlords had no place for him. He had no grassroots cred, no papers, no love.
The habitual noisemaker turned voiceless and even meek.
They all, the wounded, remained in limbo for days. They developed an independent spirit, and wanted a party of their own. They were not good at it as they formed a new party known as ADA, and they were at it until they discovered they had conjured up a copycat. They went back to their vomit. An existing party already had that signature. For a people trying to imitate the coalition formed by their foe and nemesis, they suffered from a bad case of caricature.
Then suddenly, they all came together under the aegis of the ADC. All we saw was an assemblage of retirees. If El-Rufai left APC as a bleating goat, the new entrants of the ADC were bloated. Bloated as in bored with too much money and nothing else to do with their happy and delicious privileges.
`They had hardly enjoyed their new home when the true owners, just like the SDP, told them they are squatters. They came with area boys’ swagger. They are banding together to take over another person’s property. If they are not bandits, what other word can describe them? They are the Bello Turji of today’s politics.
They are all experienced politicians. But so far, they have shown that they do not know how to form a party. They do not know how to defect because some of them like Peter Obi have not left Labour Party. Bode George made that point of his PDP folks. They do not know how to take over a party. They are a pestilent lot.
There is as yet no commitment to the party. Two of them, Rotimi Amaechi and Obi, gave notice that they were there because of their ambition so they announced their ambition ahead. His move to ADC is feint. He knows it will faint.
So, Obi, who cannot leave his Obidient rabble in the lurch, is waiting for a takeover of his own. If they do not give him the ticket, just as PDP did not in 2022, he would return to his tent to embrace his crowd of hecklers. He cannot abandon them. They are his breath of life. He is just a squatter among squatters waiting to be a landlord, a self-indulgent opportunism. As for Amaechi, his hunger is a grudge match. He has nowhere to go but to bow to an inevitable crash.
Atiku, the grand patron of defectors, has a bigger grudge than Amaechi. This is his last chance, and he is going to fight like a bear with a sore head. What we have in this new coalition are coalitions within a coalition. We have the Atiku crowd, the Obi crowd, the El-Rufai crowd and the Amaechi crowd. When such bacilli of ambitions coalesce, we can only wait for the end of the story. We are in the first act of an interesting drama, and the most important conflict is not their ambitions and party nominations. It is the prospect of a legal and ego turmoil that will end up like the Labour Party and PDP crises. Claims of conflicting legitimacy will splinter the organ, and everyone will realise that they are tenants of a tenant. Ralph Nwosu, a self-imposed place holder as ADC leader, will tell them, “I thought I was a landlord, but I cannot return your rent. Sorry.”
The other issue though is that none of them has a big hold on their states or regions. Not David Mark, not El Rufai, who was shooed out, not Amaechi, who cannot hold 13 per cent of Rivers State, not Rauf Aregbesola, who can only fete Atiku to a protem breakfast, not Atiku, who has been dishonoured from a title.
The bigger point of this so-called delusion is their claim that they are the rescuers of Nigeria.
They are trying to play on our collective amnesia. They forget that we know all of them. This new group can be divided into two.
The first are the Jonathan men. The second are the Buharists. These are the men who battled against each other just a few years ago. It shows us ideas have no traction in their action. The only outlier in the group is Atiku Abubakar, who has always been for everyone and for nobody.
For instance, was Amaechi not a Buharist? Of course, just like Malami, who rose from fringe lawyer to attorney general. The Jonathan crowd is led by David Mark, who this time is going to show us how the poor can afford telephones.
These two governments, Buhari and Jonathan, precipitated the crisis that the present government is trying to solve.
The Jonathan era wasted the boon of oil and had no rubric for solving the security burden. They spent the nation into huge deficits and rolled the country into foreign exchange rut.
The Buhari administration was a footloose amalgam of failed men like Malami, who ran the country into a spend-and-waste economy in which N30 trillion and billions of naira in debt made the present government the real rescuer.
Now, they want to turn the logic on its head. They committed the sin and they are calling themselves the saviour. The sinner and saviour in one breath. Jesus bore the sin without committing any. This is what made Jesus angry with the pharisees. He said they were a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones.
What is happening with the coalition is a lack of reckoning, what Joseph Conrad describes as “the adventurer’s easy morality, the bravado of guilt.”
They have committed the sin, and but are acting as though they are sinned against. They should act like real opposition and develop ideas. They have advanced nothing. What can they do better against insecurity? This administration has not solved it, but remarkable progress has been made with the dispatch of not a few bandit leaders.
Azu Ishiekwene wrote a piece about travelling with a few editors to Zamfara. They feared the air they breathed, but they went to and fro unscathed.
His prose was so tremulous he might have pondered on the faith that made them undertake the journey in the first place. How many bandits did Buhari eliminate, or Jonathan? The Benue and Plateau recent sparkles of death may have deviated from the progress but the facts speak for themselves in that, unlike in the past, the bandits are fighting for their lives in Niger and Katsina. Boko Haram is also having a resurgence that is suffering quite a few bruises.
The coalition should respond to the elimination of ways and means of N30 trillion and the billions of dollars debts. These were the burdens that these same men created in the years of the locusts.
What they are playing is geriatric politics, the game of old men who know that the time of the end has come for their dreams. It reminds me of the chilling biography about Nazi holocaust titled: Cold Crematorium by Josef Debreczeni, perhaps the chilliest eyewitness account of that misbegotten time. He wrote of a part of the concentration camp where some people were alive but practically out of breath even though they were still alive. They were scrawny, wounded, slobbering, febrile, sterile, weak, and waiting for the grim reaper. Crematorium is hot by definition. But he called it cold because they did not need to go through the gas chamber to go.
In the case of the coalition, time is their cold crematorium. In his prison memoirs, Soyinka called such fate slow lynching, the title he wanted to call his The Man Died. These men of different stripes in ADC are cobbled together by expired fantasies of power, and are waiting for their epitaph.