By Cham Faliya Sharon
I’m not kidding with the headline above, because when the APC was registered as a political party in 2013 and it began to mobilize for the 2015 general elections, a very virulent campaign of religious bigotry and divisiveness was waged against it by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at that time alongside their faithful, long-lasting partner, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), which earned for itself a sad reputation of behaving more like a political association than a spiritual organisation that should be a moral compass for the whole country.
The two partners sowed so much fear and anxiety among Christians by bombarding them with streams of lies that the APC was an Islamic party and was going to islamize the country if allowed to come into power. Because they feared and envied Muhammadu Buhari so much for his ramrod integrity whom many rightly believed was going to do a lot of good things with public funds, which the ruling party failed to do since 1999 because of their unbridled affection for misrule and absolute devotion to corruption, they seized on his Islamic faith and his sound moral character as their evidence that he and his party, the APC, were going to turn Nigeria into an Islamic State.
They began to weave all manner of conspiracies against him, including even using the waves of terrorist attacks that were plaguing the country at that time (many of which I strongly believe were false flag operations) to falsely accuse him of being the sponsor of “Islamic terrorism” so that they could pollute the minds of Christians and other Nigerians against him and his APC. The error they made was forgetting to remember that he was a military Head of State and has held other top public offices even before becoming military Head of State without Islamising anybody.
Another error they made was that even though the terrorists were bombing churches, they were also bombing mosques, schools, markets, public offices, military establishments and police stations, and the terrorists eventually began concentrating their massive attacks in states and communities that were favourably considered as strongholds of Buhari and the APC in the run-up to the 2015 elections. How come? Why was that?
Their lies and propaganda became even more deflated when it was clear that the terrorists were more interested in assassinating only leaders of the opposition APC and clerics that were viewed as more sympathetic to bringing political change in 2015, so much that when it increasingly started becoming clear that Muhammadu Buhari was going to win the 2015 presidential election, the “Islamic terrorists” attempted blowing him off with their bombs in the city of Kaduna in June 2014, but mercifully, God saved him and eventually crowned him President of the country the following year.
The misinformation and disinformation dished out by the PDP and CAN against Buhari and the APC worked effectively in certain places, especially in the Bible Belt, which large parts of Taraba and Plateau states fall into, including Southern Kaduna, the Southeast and the South/South. They became afraid of change and faithfully held onto the corrupt, dysfunctional system that economically raped and plundered the country, which was manifested in the glaring failure to provide basic things like roads and electricity for years without even mentioning the import-dependent economy they were operating, which basically turned Nigerians into parasitic consumers instead of productive entrepreneurs.
The ingenuity of the disinformation and misinformation was so effective in such places, so much that rational thinking became an aberration among most people to the extent that it was common sight on social media to see people from such places attacking worthy leaders and developmentalists like Buhari and El-Rufai who were working themselves off building roads, bridges, railways and other very visible impactul infrastructure while they see failed Governors like Samuel Ortom and Darius Ishaku as the epitomes of leadership. Please, don’t laugh!
The summary of the result of the whole campaign of disinformation and misinformation was that those very people targeted by the disinformation and misinformation held onto the PDP as an article of faith while they labelled the APC as an Islamic party. The fact that the majority of the people who formed the PDP in 1998 were also Muslims was either immaterial to them or was totally lost on them. In any case, those feeding them with the propaganda know the impossibility of using any administrative fiat or any method, frankly, to Islamize the country, but because they had a long-running material relationship with the ruling party, their common interest became the sustainance of the rapacious status quo, not the interest of development. They camouflaged the protection of their selfish interests with the colours of religion, and history has shown that it is always easy to mobilize and cajole people into doing anything, including absurd things, for the sake of religion even if it means living without access roads to their communities, which must have been why Karl Marx famously said religion is the opium of the masses.
After they spent years painting very frightening pictures of Buhari and the APC leading heavily turbanned Mullahs galloping on horsebacks with gleaming swords in their hands to force everyone into Islam, what we ended up seeing rather were revolutionary projects springing up across the country, with the project locations chosen without religious or ethnic bias. Instead of forceful conversions to Islam, we ended up seeing new roads, bridges, seaports, remodelled airports, railways, dry ports, new federal hospitals, new infrastructure in existing universities and colleges, new refineries, ambitious new gas depots and pipeline projects, new universities, polytechnics and colleges, unprecedented procurement of military hardware such as warships, military boats, fighter helicopters, fighter jets, military drones, armoured tanks, MRAPS, and many other sophisticated military and security merchandise.
Actually, it didn’t even take long for Buhari and his own brand of the APC to expose the fact that the fear-mongering waged on Nigerians by that kleptocratic coalition of ethnoreligious bigots and corrupt politicians against him and his party was grossly unfounded, because, upon assumption of office on May 29, 2015, Buhari bailed out all the 36 states from their financial insolvency, which caused 27 of them, including Taraba and Plateau states, to owe workers’ wages ranging from 7 to 14 months. Now, imagine being told by politicians who looted everything from you and even left you in acute squalor by refusing to pay you your monthly wages for several months, that a certain man was coming to forcefully convert you from your religion if you elected him but instead of the man forcefully converting you, he simply sourced for funds to bail out your state so that you could be paid what you were owed! That’s just a simple way to explain what happened between Muhammadu Buhari and those shameless political hacksters.
A lot can be said about how Buhari opened up the economy by causing a massive revolution in rice production and the production of other food items, which caused a massive leap in the number of rice mills and fertilizer blending plants across the country, and which equally resulted in millions of new jobs and business opportunities, and how he also caused a massive investment in social investment schemes like N-Power, TraderMoni, SMEs grants, school feeding schemes, etc, and how he also began a massive Federal Housing Scheme across the states and the FCT, all of which gave Nigeria a new lease of life, which couldn’t have been possible if we had all listened to the liars and looters who totally opposed the possibility of his ascendancy to power just because they feared and hated the prospects of a positive departure from the dark past which they profited heavily from for 16 solid years!
It’s not as if they stopped opposing him even when they were seeing all his projects and economic policies going on and taking roots across the country. They kept at it till he left office and wouldn’t brook any question about naming even just one person that was forcefully Islamized during his eight years in office as President. Well, but here we are today; they’re shamelessly moving into the APC in droves, probably putting their Holy Bibles aside and embracing the Holy Koran, since they were the ones who said the APC was an Islamic party. It’s possible that they have all willingly converted to Islam because, up to this moment, none of them has come forward to denounce what they have been saying about the party in the past 12 years or so.
Those of us who are Christians and who chose to embrace the APC since its creation due to our unwavering belief in the excellent leadership qualities of General Muhammadu Buhari received the worst insults and mockeries from these charlatans. They called us anti-Christs, or betrayers of the faith, or betrayers of our tribes, or simply any other nonsensical adjectival phrase their poorly formed brains could come up with.
The bold ones among them – and you know how idiots are usually full of confidence and boldness – even approached us to counsel us on the need to “see the light” and reverse course by joining them to continue to support the system that plundered them for 16 years and even left their towns and villages without feeder roads and pottable water. Till today, if you ask them to show any laudable projects or legacy projects done either for them or in any other part of the country during that era, they’ll resort to mumbo-jumbos.
If you looked at their firm embrace of the PDP at that time, and then you also considered how they turned it into an article of religious faith, you could be tempted into thinking that the party was formed by New Testament apostles during their missionary journeys in the Acts of the Apostles in the Holy Bible. However, majority of those who formed the party were also Muslims in the same manner as the APC which they dubiously labelled as an Islamic party so that they could scare away gullible Christians from the project of sending plunderers out of power. What they ought to have learned and imbibed as an enduring lesson for themselves was the fact of how the Muslims who formed the PDP yanked Olusegun Obasanjo (a Christian) out of prison in 1998 and made him President in 1999.
Well, now they are defecting from their PDP to the APC – the Islamic party – in droves. What has changed? Since they are defecting shamelessly without issuing any apology to the APC over how they deliberately slandered the party over the years, it is safe to conclude that the only reason why they are defecting from the PDP to the APC with such ease and without remorse is how they have seen President Bola Ahmed Tinubu quickly transform the APC into worse than everything that the PDP was known for from 1999 to 2015. The corruption, impunity, lawlessness, and brigandage are all back in mega dimensions so much that the President can even initiate and begin the implementation of projects worth trillions of Naira without appropriation by the National Assembly.
Budgets can be ignored for up to three years; subsidy savings can just disappear; huge loans taken in the name of the country can also vanish into thin air; revenues from regular sources can also not be seen driving any development in the country; federal government contractors can even hold weeks of protests in Abuja over nonpayment of their entitlements, and when federal lawmakers (National Assembly members) get the opportunity to demand accountability from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, they would begin to sing his silly anthem of “ON YOUR MANDATE WE SHALL STAND”, clearly telling the whole world that they have been suborned into the vortex of his corruption, his lawlessness and impunity, which also explains why they can pass tax reform laws and Tinubu will sign them into law but end up forging fake versions of those same laws that he signed and even gazette them without any compunction, and the lawmakers will just be clutching at straws as if a grievous crime of gross misconduct has not occurred.
This is the APC those charlatans are defecting to, and then you get the proof that their opposition to Buhari’s version of the APC was simply due to their primitiveness and their abiding inclination towards societal dysfunction, which I am willing to wager that it could be due to acute cases of idiopathic disorder in their skulls, and which, therefore, belies their claims to Christian religious convictions because you cannot claim Christianity as your faith and at the same time be a purveyor of misrule, lies and injustice or be a servile tool in the hands of the manufacturers and purveyors of lies, misrule and injustice. Otherwise, why are you, as Christians, commanded to be the light and salt of the earth if you end up being the ones that extinguish the light of the society and making their lives tasteless without salt?
To be clear, it is not only “Christian politicians” in Taraba and Plateau states, including Southern Kaduna and some Southern states, that are defecting to Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s version of the APC, some Muslim Governors, federal lawmakers and other prominent politicians from predominantly Muslim states have also been defecting to this version of the APC. But like their Christian counterparts, their defections are not rooted on any cause for public good or any noble quest to advance the cause of development or democracy or social justice, because the Tinubu regime has not exhibited any trait of those attributes to warrant any justification of good cause as the casus belli of the defections.
With corruption being the trading capital of the Tinubu regime, it has become all too easy for corrupt and indolent Governors as well as corrupt and indolent lawmakers from all shades of the political spectrum or religious persuasions to coalesce together with the regime to form one big oppressive criminal force against Nigerians. There was never ever a time in which this country was thrown into deliberate economic difficulties like it has been done by the Tinubu regime, and when you add to it his practice of tribalism as his main principle of governance, and still add to it his failure to implement national budgets, and you also add the shocking lack of accountability in subsidy savings and huge loans to the mix, you get to see that there’s absolutely no altruistic reason for anyone to defect to this system that has wrecked the country in just two years.
The defections are clearly procured or compelled to happen through possible blackmails, especially since it is absolutely clear that Bola Ahmed Tinubu is now the most unpopular President in Nigeria’s history and cannot win reelection or win even a senatorial seat if a free and fair election were to be conducted at this moment. The only option is to destroy democracy itself in its truest form and replace it with the fascist oligarchy of corruption and gangsterism, which we now clearly see taking shape beginning from Rivers State. The investment deployed to kill the PDP, as well as the desperate effort to infiltrate and cripple the ADC through procured individuals, is enough evidence that shows how fearful Tinubu is about democracy, and possibly how he even never ever liked democracy at all, or how he probably always saw it as a mere tool to grab power for the sake of being in power and have his sons and daughters driving long motorcades and living large at our expense. Of course, if he ever loved democracy and if he isn’t afraid of democracy, he wouldn’t be deploying our country’s resources to kill it.
Having said that, let me come back to the people who lived their lives preaching that the APC was an Islamic party. Now that they have abandoned the Christian faith and become Muslims by joining the APC, what is next? Let me address them like this: Apparently, you were not Christians. You were just a bunch of primitive hypocrites with no roots in faith or morality. Time only found you out and exposed your true selves. But you still have time to reflect and free yourselves from being used as tools for perpetuating national dysfunction. You were not created to be organs in the hands of the manufacturers of lies and purveyors of misrule. You were not meant to be hypocrites who should be perpetually used and tossed around as playthings in the hands of conmen who know nothing about using power for the good of all. You were meant to be vessels of truth, champions of transparency, advocates of accountability and integrity in public service. Anything short of that calls your faith to question.
