By Rotimi Fasan
IT’S been a week since Muhammadu Buhari was declared winner of the 2015 presidential election. After what seemed like an impossible mission having tried a number of times to be president without success, Buhari now becomes one of two individuals (the other being Olusegun Obasanjo) to occupy the office of an elected president after holding office as a military dictator.

This ordinarily should be a very rare thing, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence among people of the same generation. But the fact that this could happen in a space of about seven years (counting from 2007 when Obasanjo finished his second term in office), underlines the fact that Nigerian politics is still very much in the hands of the military or their surrogates as one must classify the Peoples Democratic Party that has been in power in the last one and a half decades.

The PDP might have been founded by politicians with professional backgrounds outside the military. But it was the military that ensured its continued existence having hijacked the party from the original founders and handpicked Olusegun Obasanjo, the same man who had handed over power to the civilians 20 years before, as the man to lead the party and the country into the 21st century. It is a measure of how close we still are to our military past that after nearly two decades of post military rule, their civilian successors were such terrible failures that the only viable alternative to the wasteful, non-performing administration of the PDP is a government led by another former soldier. The fault is not entirely the military’s. It is rather the outcome of the mismanagement occasioned by so-called democrats who inherited the obvious anti-democratic reflexes of the military without the attendant virtue of disciplined dedication and commitment to duty that is to be found in the armed forces.

The emergence of Muhammadu Buhari was not inevitable. That is if the PDP in particular, and Nigerian politicians as a whole, had made just a little effort to learn a bit from history and remembered that it was the mindless worship of power and unbridled corruption that ruined Nigeria’s first attempt at popular democracy in the 1960s. But the PDP operated like a conquering army, a political behemoth whose past and contemporary managers touted as the largest party in Africa, and had boasted would hold power for at least 60 years. So certain of its dominance of the political space was the PDP that it practically did nothing by way of serious campaign until the last six weeks before the rescheduled date of the 2015 election. Mercifully, the only link between 60 and 16 are the first four letters of both words. Like the ancient Hebrews of Pharaoh’s Egypt, God heard the cries of Nigerians and mercifully came to their rescue, cutting 60 years down to 16.

It is in the best interest of Nigeria’s democracy for the PDP to lose the 2015 election. Nigeria was fast becoming a one party state under PDP control. Disaffected party members who either left in a huff or after much deliberation still crawled back under its banner even as many others crossed carpet to join the PDP gravy train. The party operated as the only party in Nigeria, with every politician struggling to stand under the cover of its big umbrella of corruption that is as accommodating as the thighs of a commercial sex worker. But thank God, Nigerians chose to terminate the party’s whoring career.   And here we are with a Buhari presidency.

After three failed attempts, Buhari must be after something greater than the mere desire to savour what it means to live in Aso Rock Villa. Granted that his tenancy as Nigeria’s leader was at Dodan Barracks, he appears to have more up his sleeves than ordinary vanity. Otherwise, he would not have endured the horse trading that appears alien to his character but which he nevertheless had engaged in with many of the shady characters that populate Nigerian politics.

As a former head of state, a maximum ruler whose words had the immediate impact of law, Buhari’s determination to return as an elected leader smacks of a strong desire to contribute to the well being of Nigerians. It was either this or he would not have borne the rigours and pain of the 2015 election campaign that was characterised by raw mudslinging and outrageous insults directed at his person. But through it all, he remained his aloof and dignified self- neither complaining nor paying his PDP adversaries back in their own coin. His dignity in the face of the disrespectful comments of his opponents was both remarkable and worthy of emulation. It was, perhaps, only matched in this era of politics as homicide by the dignified equanimity of Attahiru Jega, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, in the face of the rambunctious, bolekaja antics of Godsday Orubebe.

Orubebe, a former minister of Niger-Delta Affairs and agent of the PDP at the national collation centre, put up a despicable show that was aimed at truncating a process that was on the cusp of conclusion. His behaviour was worse than shameful if not treasonable. For what he was up to, had it succeeded, had the potential of annulling the result of the election that has now been won by Mohammadu Buhari. Jega’s quiet and unruffled mien is a study in human mastery of emotion.

If he had reacted as aggressively as Orubebe’s behaviour demanded, not many would have blamed him. Indeed, he would have been praised for standing up to a common bully out to scuttle the wish of millions of Nigerians who had openly expressed their preference for change from a PDP government that has long lost its bearing to any alternative that has the slightest potential of steering our ship of state off the cliff of destruction. But then, reacting to Orubebe in the manner many of us would have considered totally human and justified on Jega’s part would also have meant granting Orubebe his unspoken wish- aborting the peaceful process of transition.

Attahiru Jega’s maturity gave Nigerians their heartfelt desire, which was the expulsion of the PDP to the unaccustomed wilderness of opposition politics. Nigerian politics can now begin the process of growth provided the PDP is ready to play the role that the APC had played by the PDP, until Buhari was declared winner of the 2015 election. At last President Goodluck Jonathan, apparently an easy going man whose natural simplicity is his vulnerability, is now free from the loafers and spongers on our commonwealth, not the least of them the several ‘witches’ in his administration that have, through their stranglehold on his government, bled Nigeria to a state of near-unconsciousness.