The picture of the coalition of the wounded a few days ago after Peter Obi’s next bus stop resembles the forty men who worked up a futile conspiracy against Apostle Paul. It was on false charges. They neither ate nor drank as part of their spiritual quest. They waited on God until they slay Paul. They tasted no morsel. A waste of palate. They also lay in a mockery of an ambush.
Well, it had a good ending. Paul lived so they could eat. They were too cowardly to die.
These so-called ADC men are not the types to neither eat nor drink. In fact, they are too fed to be fed up with the gourmet’s table. One of them, though, made a public farce in fancy clothes and pleaded hunger on television in a bash for billionaires. One of them has a Damocles of corruption hanging over his wife for billions of naira 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. He is fattening on the image of a pariah.
The hypocrisy of brothers, 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 over all his fellowship of wounded to a house of refuge. Some of them have a sore head or broken knee. He assumed a proprietary air. Then the owners of the land said he, an interloper, was a squatter. 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. It sounds like someone’s sister or mother or wife. Poor planners that they were, they discovered they had conjured up a copycat. They went back to their vomit. An existing party already had that signature. They were trying to imitate the coalition they were planning to defeat. Their first step was a crash, to copycat a name. A bad case of caricature.
Then suddenly, they all came together under the aegis of the ADC. All we saw was a bad alloy of retirees. The new entrants of the ADC were bloated. Bloated as in bored. Too much money and nothing else to do with it. Preening, privileged, patrician.
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. They are the impostors of the Omo Oniles of Lagos. 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 do a naming ceremony of a party, and cannot form a party. They do not know how to defect. Some of them have not left the Labour Party. Those who left, like our man from Anambra State, did not know how to register. In the name of ethnic parapoism, he ignored the law and process. Enugu stakeholders say he is not of them or with them. So, they lashed at him. They do not know how to take over a party.
Obi cannot leave his Obidient rabble in the lurch. He is hoping for a takeover of his own. If they do not give him the ticket, just as PDP did not in 2022, where would he go? Would he return to his tent to embrace his crowd of hecklers?. They say they will abide with him. Are his followers going to be obedient to Atiku? Is their leader now going back to his vomit as second fiddle? Is he going to content himself by returning to the boys’ quarters as Atiku boy? He cannot abandon his followers. They are his breath of life. He is just a squatter among squatters waiting to be a landlord. As for the other fellow, 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. 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 cretins and the Amaechi amen sayers. When these 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 threatens to end up like the Labour Party and PDP crises. Maybe not as bad. But not good enough for a fighter. Claims of conflicting legitimacy may splinter the organ. Everyone may 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 percent 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 major two past governments. 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. That man who spent the holidays with wife and son in prison for coddling loots cannot be thinking about ADC now. The Jonathan crowd is led by David Mark who this time is going to show us how the poor can afford telephones. For the Genzs and Millennials, this man was a minister under IBB’s military government and mocked the poor who could not 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. They are a parody of the messiah. Jesus bore the sin without committing any. This is what made Jesus angry with the Pharisees. He said they were whited sepulchres full of dead men’s bones.
The coalition should respond to the elimination of ways and means of N30 trillion and the billions of dollars of debts. These were the burdens that these same men created in the years of the locusts.
They are playing 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. It is perhaps the chilliest eyewitness account of that misbegotten time. He wrote of a part of the concentration camp where the inmates were at once out of breath and still alive. Scrawny, wounded, slobbering, febrile, sterile, weak. 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 The Man Died. These men of different stripes in ADC are typing out their last days as an assembly. Cobbled together by expired fantasies of power, they are awaiting ADC’s epitaph.
