Every day the PDP governors are keeping quiet and keeping a low profile, APC governors accentuate the contrast with their endless jamboree photo-ops.
I have been looking at Ogbeni Ayo Fayose and his fellow PDP governors with the corner of one eye.
I think I know what they are doing.
I think I admire what they are doing.
Really, I am starting to be intrigued by Fayose and his PDP colleague governors. They have been uncharacteristically quiet and invisible lately.
Their low profile is starting to draw a sharp contrast between them and APC governors. From Benue to Zamfara via Borno and countless other places in the country, the land is soaked in rivers of blood and the body count is mounting.
The dead have escaped a fuel scarcity that an APC-controlled government is no longer pretending to have a solution for. This is the national mood, the national tone, the national setting.
It is against this setting that APC governors have been flooding the national airwaves with photo-ops of their political bacchanals – endless 2019 endorsement solidarity visits to Abuja and Daura, endless 2019 political rallies.
They are in too deep.
The are too far gone to notice the cumulative optical effect of their collective madness.
Alone, on stage, APC governors are collectively acquiring an identity of irredeemable, unfeeling sociopaths, wholly incapable of reading the national mood.
Everyday finds them as a group dancing on the graves of thousands of our compatriots. They have no respect for any ordinary citizen. Yes, they eventually went to Zamfara but that was a useless afterthought. They deceived nobody but themselves. After mixing a political and condolence visit to Daura on account of two deceased relatives of the president (they were condoling with him for the umpteenth time and we are lucky none of them declared a public holiday in his state to mourn with the president this time), there was no way for them to avoid a face saving “condolence” trip to Zamfara.
Collectively, they have been a group in celebration and in merry calibrations for 2019. And they have been doing this as blood flows, bodies pile up, and the living has no petrol.
Nobody around any of them has sprouted enough brain matter to advise that the optics are terrible.
When your enemy is dancing this way on the national stage, the smartest political strategy is to keep a low profile and not interrupt the dance.
You can see that Wike and Fayose, the two most obstreperous PDP governors, have totally disappeared. Why disrupt the madness of your opponents?
Every day the PDP governors are keeping quiet and keeping a low profile, APC governors accentuate the contrast with their endless jamboree photo-ops.
If this political strategy is handiwork of some cunning PDP operative, shake his hand for me, buy him a beer for me.
Alone, on stage, APC governors are collectively acquiring an identity of irredeemable, unfeeling sociopaths, wholly incapable of reading the national mood.
Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada.
