By Moses Ochonu
ABUJA (Sundiata Post) So the APC is mocking PDP for holding a contentious convention. Wow, the chutzpah! This is a party that won’t hold a National Working Committee meeting let alone organize a convention to elect substantive officers for fear of exposing the widening fissures in the party, or worse, falling apart under the weight of factional infighting.
The APC people know how to obsess over other people’s problems while ignoring their own. They have a president whose popularity is waning as his performance has underwhelmed and disappointed a critical mass of Nigerians. Yet, instead of helping to right his administration in the remaining one year of his tenure to earn back the confidence and trust of Nigerians, they are going crazy over happenings in the PDP, including Atiku’s interest in the PDP ticket and the presidency.
They have giddily gone to town to reinforce old negative memes of Atiku and to create new ones. They say they’re salivating at the prospect of an Atiku candidacy because they believe he is tainted and thus unelectable. Yet, they conveniently forget that until 2015 when the mood in much of the country shifted to “anybody but Jonathan” Buhari was widely seen as toxic and unelectable, including by those who would later do a U-turn and prop him up in the last election.
As Simon Kolawole argues in his current column, the APC people are underestimating the level of frustration with Buhari and poverty in the land, overestimating the power of the “Atiku and PDP are corrupt” meme in the current climate of desperation, and foolishly dismissing the growing possibility of an “anybody but Buhari” sentiment determining the 2019 election.