BY REV. FR. GERALD NWAFOR
The redesigning of the Naira is good, the fuel scarcity hitting the country now is a very bad thing, and the political terrain looks very ugly, in a country where a peace accord has been signed and resigned. No country has survived two civil wars.
The way the political class is handling the public as if there is nothing wrong is very disturbing. The government of the day is from APC and the presidential candidate of APC is telling us that the APC-led government has failed and that we should vote for him. What is the consequence of such innuendo?
The government you helped install has failed according to your own statement and you are telling us to vote for you? So, we are so foolish that we do not recognize a bad government and a bad political party? I am wondering what the APC government would be campaigning on during the campaign, but I was not proven wrong because now the presidential candidate of APC wants to disassociate himself from the APC-led government by picking quarrels with the very government they put into power.
El Rufai said it was some people in APC, not the government. I want Nasir El-Rufai to please tell me in clear terms the difference between APC and the government of Buhari. El Rufai said it was some individuals in the villa (Aso Rock) who lost the primaries in APC and do not want APC to win the election.
While Femi Fani Kayode said it is some PDP miscreants who find their way into the villa who was the problem of APC? Which one are we to follow (kedu nke anyi ga eso)? Let us look at these things one-by-one because we are Nigerians too.
Money redesign put everyone into financial difficulty in the process because of the lack of orderliness on the part of the CBN. The worry is not the inadequacy and failures of CBN to manage the process but out of the 18 political parties in Nigeria, only one party is complaining bitterly and wants to arrest the governor of CBN by all means and put him behind bars and revert the policy.
It is the ruling party. We may ask what are the reasons why? We know that the presidential candidate of the ruling party APC has two bullion vans stocked with cash in his house, which they told us came to his house by mistake. Not only that, they told us that they have looked at the bullion vans and they were empty.
If the bullion vans missed their way into another person’s house, should they remain there for one month or two years? Your guess is as good as mine. That money in the van may be the problem why the APC presidential candidate is unsettled with the CBN policy of redesigning the currency because the CBN wants to know how some of the politicians made their money.
I do not have petrol to take my small, old Naira to the bank for exchange. The price of petrol has gone from the official price of 170 to 500 Naira. How can we plan and how can we budget? The minimum wage is still 30,000 Naira and the prices of food items and other essential commodities are skyrocketing.
The landlord beside me who used to put on his generator every night when the power went out told me that he can no longer afford the fuel to power the generator. I was advising him to put solar power to cushion the effect of the fuel price. He looked at me and said, “Nkea o kobo.” (That one, is it so cheap?) He was correct because when I called the solar man the price he called made me drop my phone on the floor.
Thank God the floor was carpeted, not tiled. Because we could have gotten into the market by buying the snuff. The danger of not knowing what the price of petrol would be the next day is the greatest omen facing the public now.
The other danger we do not want to contend with is the possibility of unavailability. Since, if the marketers decide to hide the fuel even with your 500 Naira per liter it would be unavailable. By the way, I did not tell you that the presidential candidate of APC said that it was a plan by the APC government to sabotage him. There is nothing I would not hear from this APC people in this time of town hall meeting different from “bulaba balablu.”
It is now very ugly if the political class is planning to disrupt this election which the President has sworn to the world, that this election would be free and fair. This is the most unfortunate thing that will happen to this great nation, but as I said in the first paragraph that no nation has survived two civil wars. APC is an amalgamation of six political parties and I can assure you that some of the parties who collapsed their structure to form APC are not happy with the outcome today.
Some of them who have the bulls returned to the old party and some dropped off from the party and joined another party. The Labor Party is doing so well and PDP is not doing badly at all, therefore the ruling party APC is looking for reasons to forestall the process.
They have called for the resignation of the INEC chairman that did not work. They did not convince the President. They tried to scuttle the use of BIVAS but that failed. They wanted to arrest the CBN governor, that one did not go through.
Now, who knows the next plan? Maybe to cause a major commotion in the build-up to the election coming up on the 25th of February and 11th of March. That is why I termed the political situation the ugly one because they can destroy this nation because of their selfishness and political aspirations.
