The ruling Peoples Democratic Party and the
main opposition party, the All Progressives
Congress, may appear to be two different
entities but they definitely drink from the same
river of delusion. The PDP on its part sees
every dissenting voice against its misrule as
sounds produced by the APC. The APC
assumes that dissent against the PDP is
assent to it. They are two entities blinded by
privilege and power, corrupted by their
distance from modern reality and seemingly
permanently deluded by their assumption that
Nigeria is a sum of their collective lack of
vision and depressing combination of their lack
of ideas for national development. How both
parties cannot see what average Nigerians
see is not only depressing, it comes at a huge
cost for our country. While what both parties
suffer from does not essentially affect all the
members of the parties, the most powerful
people in both parties are the worst affected.
Take President Goodluck Jonathan who,
obviously under the daze of the paranoia that
comes with power immediately, sees dissent as
nothing but sponsored by his political enemies.
The President unashamedly summed up
Occupy Nigeria as a movement sponsored by
the opposition. As if that was not awkward
enough, there is nothing to say the opposition
on its part hasn’t been seeing popular dissent
against the ruling government as some form
of support for itself. Both parties need to
smell the coffee.
Of the two, the APC is easily the most
disappointing; only a person who is capable
of being disappointed by an entity s/he has
no expectations in will today feel disappointed
by the PDP. It is like a wife saying she is
disappointed in a man who has consistently
cheated on her for the last 15 years of a 15-
year marriage. That they are not divorced
must definitely have been because she
somehow could not do it, certainly not because
she expects the man to change. Nigerians can
no longer be disappointed in the PDP, the
party has consistently been a disaster, a
destroyer of our common hope in what our
country can be and the greatest locust to
have ever descended on our people. When it
comes to the PDP, our people know that as a
collective, it is the worst thing to have
happened to our country. You’d find Nigerians
scream, “PDP!” when a referee takes the
wrong decision. The PDP is our national
synonym for cheating, corruption and failure.
There is nothing to say this will not change
sometime in the future but the past 15 years,
the PDP has been as much a disaster to our
country as Boko Haram has been the last
few years. Nigerians are disappointed in the
APC for the same reason they had given up
on the PDP.

Virtually everyone who cared about Nigeria
agreed there was a need for a credible
alternative that’d challenge the PDP’s
hegemonic hold on power. The PDP’s
arrogance was by now sky high. They knew
that irrespective of performance, they’d
always win elections. This explained the
people’s desperation for another party of a
different kind. The APC appeared on the
scene under this atmosphere last year. It had
taken years to form but it had finally formed.
At the beginning, the Heavens seemed to put
everything right for it. The PDP was soon in
disarray as Bamanga Tukur, the then
national chairman, was doing his best to help
it implode. The PDP has since survived that
storm but it didn’t without the APC gaining
from its losses. Idealistic citizens frowned
upon the APC taking in these disgruntled
PDP members but it was what it had to do to
not only continue to get strong but to weaken
the PDP. What cost the APC’s the people’s
goodwill was not as much about what the
party did as it is about what it did not do. As
its big players went on a tour of the country
meeting up with old power brokers like Gen.
Ibrahim Babangida, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar
(who later joined), Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo
and the rest, it appeared to the people the
APC was not about them after all, it was
about the same old gang. There was a
people-movement waiting to be roused, a
movement that had been bred by the current
administration’s nonchalant attitude to
corruption and the people’s welfare. That
harvest was left to rot as the APC looked
away. In the end, the APC, at least in the
eyes of the people, had become the new PDP.
Whether or not the perception is right or
wrong does not matter because elections in
Nigeria are based on perception more than
anything else anyway. Logic is not a popular
candidate in these climes.
As for we the people, we are the reason our
country is the mess it is. We have allowed
politicians set for us the bar of mediocrity,
which we now wallow in as a collective. We
are quick to praise governors for building
roads, we don’t even mind dancing to their
songs of shame when they cut tapes for the
launch of transformers that are likely to see
more days of darkness than light. We have
had our brains transformed by TV ads that
compare one of our worst leaders ever,
Goodluck Jonathan, to some of the best
leaders the world has ever produced. Only in
Nigeria can such an insanity pass. We claim
we want corruption to stop but we will not
vote for those who don’t share bags of rice.
We have now turned the two main political
parties into some of West Africa’s major
distributors of rice. Pretending we haven’t
been part of the problems of our country is to
deceive ourselves. Not only have we been part
of the problems, we are essentially the
problem. We have valued money over
character, we have valued rice over
competence. Our low threshold for leadership
has now meant that men who should be rotting
in jail are not only campaigning to be
governors, some have even won. Even in the
historically enlightened South-West, we have
men who if they dare enter the United States
will be arrested and jailed. Men who have
had crime movies made just for them. If in
doubt, just Google “Orange is the new Black”
to see how one of such men is now a
kingmaker here in Nigeria.
It is easy to say poverty is responsible for
why we no longer care about anything but
money, but no one has scientifically proved
that poverty erodes the human sense of value.
There are poor people who will not
compromise their values for cash let alone
cooked or uncooked rice. That is not to say
some people who collected bags of rice chose
their candidates based on who gave the
bigger bag or who didn’t give at all. Ekiti
State, for instance, has had ‘stomach
infrastructure’ debated against conventional
infrastructure. No one seems to speak about
human development.
There will be no Peoples Political Party, at
least not one that’d be started, funded by and
run for the Nigerian masses. Expectations for
a Youth Party are over-ambitious but were
that to even happen, youth has not been
proved to mean the same thing as sound
character or competence. In fact, we have
seen young people replay the songs of
ethnicity and some of the young people
pretending to want to run for office have
themselves been seen defending corruption
openly. If being a young person is one’s
argument for political power, that argument
will not stand against the fact that leadership
is about capacity, ability and antecedence. In
the end, there is nothing to say we Nigerians
want good governance anyway. We just want
to ‘hammer.’ Prosperity is the gospel!
Simply put, between the PDP and the APC,
the difference is not clear. This is the sad
reality confronting us as a nation.
– JJ,
Omojuwa

Obiagelli: one of the best articles i have read in months.

Please summarize for me.

Yes wen reff gives dubious decison we shout PDP including me becos of their rigging, corruption nature as the writer rightly said then he forgot to say APC is knwn for their involvement in Boko haram and terrorism
Even if bomb goes off now an average nigerian will shout APC
So PDP and APC re both our problem but I fink a right tinking nigerian will prefer the former

For now I still believe that most Nigerians are happy and satisfied with PDP's many yrs of misrule. Maybe after 50-60 yrs of PDP in power, Nigerians will seek alternative to PDP. But for now, the PDP led FG is doing very very well.

As for we the people, we are the reason our
country is the mess it is. We have allowed
politicians set for us the bar of mediocrity,
which we now wallow in as a collective. We
are quick to praise governors for building
roads, we don’t even mind dancing to their
songs of shame when they cut tapes for the
launch of transformers that are likely to see
more days of darkness than light. We have
had our brains transformed by TV ads that
compare one of our worst leaders ever,
Goodluck Jonathan, to some of the best
leaders the world has ever produced. Only in
Nigeria can such an insanity pass. We claim
we want corruption to stop but we will not
vote for those who don’t share bags of rice.
We have now turned the two main political
parties into some of West Africa’s major
distributors of rice. Pretending we haven’t
been part of the problems of our country is to
deceive ourselves. Not only have we been part
of the problems, we are essentially the
problem. We have valued money over
character, we have valued rice over
competence. Our low threshold for leadership
has now meant that men who should be rotting
in jail are not only campaigning to be
governors, some have even won. Even in the
historically enlightened South-West, we have
men who if they dare enter the United States
will be arrested and jailed. Men who have
had crime movies made just for them. If in
doubt, just Google “Orange is the new Black”
to see how one of such men is now a
kingmaker here in Nigeria.
It is easy to say poverty is responsible for
why we no longer care about anything but
money, but no one has scientifically proved
that poverty erodes the human sense of value.
There are poor people who will not
compromise their values for cash let alone
cooked or uncooked rice. That is not to say
some people who collected bags of rice chose
their candidates based on who gave the
bigger bag or who didn’t give at all. Ekiti
State, for instance, has had ‘stomach
infrastructure’ debated against conventional
infrastructure. No one seems to speak about
human development.

ogbronx:
As for we the people, we are the reason our
country is the mess it is. We have allowed
politicians set for us the bar of mediocrity,
which we now wallow in as a collective. We
are quick to praise governors for building
roads, we don’t even mind dancing to their
songs of shame when they cut tapes for the
launch of transformers that are likely to see
more days of darkness than light. We have
had our brains transformed by TV ads that
compare one of our worst leaders ever,
Goodluck Jonathan, to some of the best
leaders the world has ever produced. Only in
Nigeria can such an insanity pass. We claim
we want corruption to stop but we will not
vote for those who don’t share bags of rice.
We have now turned the two main political
parties into some of West Africa’s major
distributors of rice. Pretending we haven’t
been part of the problems of our country is to
deceive ourselves. Not only have we been part
of the problems, we are essentially the
problem. We have valued money over
character, we have valued rice over
competence. Our low threshold for leadership
has now meant that men who should be rotting
in jail are not only campaigning to be
governors, some have even won. Even in the
historically enlightened South-West, we have
men who if they dare enter the United States
will be arrested and jailed. Men who have
had crime movies made just for them. If in
doubt, just Google “Orange is the new Black”
to see how one of such men is now a
kingmaker here in Nigeria.
It is easy to say poverty is responsible for
why we no longer care about anything but
money, but no one has scientifically proved
that poverty erodes the human sense of value.
There are poor people who will not
compromise their values for cash let alone
cooked or uncooked rice. That is not to say
some people who collected bags of rice chose
their candidates based on who gave the
bigger bag or who didn’t give at all. Ekiti
State, for instance, has had ‘stomach
infrastructure’ debated against conventional
infrastructure. No one seems to speak about
human development.

This article is the simple truth. The writer of this piece is one of a very few in this country who are idealistic and objective.
Even this thread won't get enjoy much participants thus depicts the kind of youths we have. The above quoted is the major problem of this country.
The youths shout disintegrate Nigeria but fail to see that the same problems would linger in all the respective regions. Imagine a Niger delta with asari dokuba as politian. I am yet to see any region that won't be burdened with corruption, nepotism,bigotry and mediocrity.