The General, who has been gunning to return to presidential office since 2007 with not much success, and who has been running on the steam of anti-corruption and incorruptibility was reported to have paid the whopping N25 million party fee for the presidential nomination form. Presidential ambition is quite steep.
This democracy is certainly not for John Citizen, that poor bedraggled fellow whose rights of suffrage are mediated by Nigeria's current cash-and-carry politics. How can democracy grow and function if political parties require their members to pay such outrageous sums just merely to indicate interest in the contest of political office?
How can political aspiration, the desire to represent underserved communities and people become public service if political parties compel candidates for political office to cough up millions of Naira in fees just to pick nomination forms.
I'm told by veterans of this system that picking the form is just the tip of the iceberg, there follows other kinds of charges, including what I call the "touch-bobby" fees that oils the "ihe-ose" politics and mentality in contemporary Nigerian politics.
For the benefit of those who may not clue on to this language, "Ihe-Ose politics" is the kind of stomach politics that speaks not to the mind but to the visceral hunger that impoverishes the Nigerian mind. It deadens the spirit and deadens the possibility of robust political growth. It led the great tortoise willy-nillyingly into the abyss.
I should tell the story, straight out of the Igbo morality tales of "Mbe Di Ogu" or the willy "Mbe Nwa Aniga" who as the story goes lived in those immemorial years, when the skies were still the playgrounds for the squirrels, and a great famine had descended in the land of the animals. It was the kind of hunger that made things seem futile because it did not only grip the stomach, it turned the mind also. Well, the tortoise, who always lived by his wit suddenly found himself at his wits end.
So, he left on a great journey - a sort of journey that had all the possibilities of great danger and from which he knew he may never return, for he told Aliya, his long-suffering wife, never to tell anyone that he had journeyed forth, but to rather say, no matter the situation, when anybody asks that he, Mbe had gone into a great spiritual trance in the inner sanctum of his home, from which he did not wish to be disturbed. So off, the Tortoise went, driven hopeless by hunger and the desire for food.
He journeyed for so long until he came to what seemed like the boundary between the living and the dead, and he saw an old infirm woman who bore on her head, a great mound of well pounded yam foo-foo and a fine pot of the very best Nsala soup.
Well, the short of it is that the Tortoise tricked the old woman into let him carry the load for her, and in due course, staged a disappearing act. Little of course did he know that what he had stolen was the food of the spirits.
The Tortoise bore the great load of food on his head until he reached a point where he felt safe enough to rest and do some justice to the food. Just as he brought down the great mound of foo-foo, the damned thing developed a mind of its own! Thus began a great and epic struggle between Mbe and the foo-foo which was rolling away, to the Tortoise's determined will to subdue it and eat it.
The foofoo rolled away, but the Tortoise clung to it, saying to it, "wherever you like, roll on to today, I shall roll all the way with you!" and so indeed was it that the foo-foo, which was no ordinary foo-foo because it belonged to the spirits of the land rolled with Mbe until they fell into a great, abysmal hole.
The story continues, but the chief point of this part is that the struggle between Tortoise and the great mound of foofoo is the allegory of our descent into the hell of unconscious greed driven by the powerful force of hunger.
The tragedy in the Nigerian case is that our hunger is not merely the hunger of the stomach, it is the hunger of the spirit. It is the kind of hunger that has transformed the great promise of Nigeria's democratic renewal into a pale, plutocratic corruption.
Plutocracy has compelled the alienation of Nigerians to the degree of a deadening self-hatred and disengagement from this nation and a truly national spirit. It is the kind of deadening of the spirit that makes the opposition All Peoples Congress (APC) which is campaigning to replace the PDP on the premise of the alleged lack of performance of the current Jonathan administration and the corruption in his government, fail its own corruption test even before it gets into power, because it is indeed corrupt and unconscionable to compel party candidates to cough out inexplicable sums to buy party nomination forms.
From where does APC want her candidates to get such large sums? How many Nigerians, other than those who have made their hands dirty can easily secure APC's nomination forms? This party, I dare to say, has not even started, and we are just seeing its signs. General Buhari has said he had to take a bank loan to buy his own nomination form? How did he secure a N25 million loan?
Well, said the General, he put a call to his banker, with whom he has some close understanding. In other words, the General has compromised the integrity of a banker, who has endangered his investors capital by giving out a potentially bad loan to a candidate for public office, with scant security, since it must be argued, that given General Buhari's claims of incorruptibility, he did not earn anything in his entire public service career to the tune of the sum he has just taken as loan. It is not an investment loan, and politics, unless has other ideas, is not regenerative investment.
He cannot therefore have commensurate equity to secure such a loan. So, what happens if he loses? And if he wins, from where does he intend to pay off his current indebtedness? On his presidential salary and emolument?
Does it mean that Muhammadu Buhari does not have enough support base that ought to raise money through private donations to support his platform? If he does not have such a support base that could raise money for his nominal fees as a candidate, what the heck is the General doing running for a public office.
Indeed, in response to questions about this The drama of the Nigerian presidential elections next year is already gathering steam. Last week newspapers, General Buhari suggested that he could not influence the party policy that set high fees for office seekers in the APC.
If the General cannot now influence a change in bad party policies, how or why should Nigerians trust that he would have the gumption to stem the corruption of his party when they get to run the government? Nigerians deserve answers to these questions.
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