By Moses Ochonu
ABUJA (Sundiata Post) The depressing possibility of Buhari squaring off electorally against Atiku or any of the other establishmentarian candidates hovering over the PDP presidential ticket puts us at a crossroads of despair.
This time, though, the disgust with the available choices on offer may have reached such a level as to open the door to anyone willing to upend the current APC-PDP political rotation.
We may have now have reached a juncture at which we need a Donald Trump figure. I am not trying to be controversial or provocative. What I mean is that we may need a leader with the disruptive, paradigm-shifting capacity of Donald Trump without of course his hate, misogyny, moral indiscretion, pettiness, puerility, vacuousness, intellectual emptiness, and impulsivity.
We need, in other words, a positive Donald Trump figure, if you like, who will depart radically from the familiar modus operandi of politics in the country and move the nation swiftly toward a new kind of politics.
Such a leader would shock us into a new political reality with an unorthodox governing technique unmoored to the interests of political brokers. He or she would scramble the political system, shaking us off a familiar political establishment governed by corruption and patronage networks. Such a leader would shock us out of our complacency and comfort with a dysfunctional status quo and present something refreshingly new, even if imperfect–anything to get us away from this APC-PDP dictatorship.
In essence, we need a leader who is not beholden to the existing political elite and can thus boldly reject the politics of patronage that they’re known for.
We need someone who does not mind offending and displacing the current political class; someone who will appoint competent people and demand accountability from them regardless of political loyalty.
We need someone who will not put the anxieties of reelection above a commitment to doing the right thing for Nigerians.
We need a leader who will either ignore the prospect of a second term or is willing to risk the ire of the political class by pleasing the Nigerian people, deciding to put his/her reelection fate directly in the hands of Nigerians rather than in the hands of political godfathers and kingmakers.
We need someone in essence who will take their reelection chances with with the Nigerian electorate rather than hold back reform and radical change to please party honchos in a bid to secure reelection.
Better yet, we need someone who will focus on doing the right thing, providing succor to Nigerians and being indifferent to the political class, while letting reelection sort itself out. We need someone who will lead as though they have only one term and are constitutionally barred from pursuing a second term.
I look around the emerging 2019 landscape and I see no such person……yet.
Source: Facebook
