The many ‘ifs’ on the road to 2019

There are too many permutations flying around in the polity. People are making too many conjectures about 2019. Some can be described as pure hallucination!

Many years ago, during an end of year party of our community school, a 10-year old girl staged a drama based on ‘if’. The girl came on the stage, sobbing and imagining vain things.

She began: “Assuming I had grown older; assuming a man had approached me and said he would want to marry me; assuming I had agreed and my parents had also given their consent; what if we had married and I had gone to live with him; what if I discovered I was pregnant and assuming that I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy; what if that boy had started scrawling, and assuming that one day he had crawled under a coconut tree; what if a coconut had fallen on his head at that same time, wouldn’t that result in the boy’s death?”

At this point, the girl burst into a loud lamentation that her son had died. Her weeping attracted other girls who rushed to join in the grieving and mourning. They were all shouting “our sister’s son is dead ooo”. That’s the power of imagination. Crude and vain imagination!

Indeed, many Nigerians are already involved in too many permutations. For instance, as we inch closer to the 2019, some people are already sensing war in the air. Some are saying that President Muhammadu Buhari may decide not to run upon his return from his leave in London. Some others believe that there would be no election the way things are going.

Some said that the President traveled to consult with the power brokers in Europe who are trying to prevail on him not to seek re-election on account of the fragile state of Nigeria in the last three years.

The other day, someone joked: “What if President Buhari fails to return after 10 days? What if he announces he is no longer interested in running in 2019? That would be huge relief for Nigeria.”

Yet, another thinker, chipped in: “What if the PDP does not field a credible candidate from the array of presidential aspirants already pulling down the umbrella? What if the likes of Kingsley Moghalu or Donald Duke should emerge on the platform of whatever alliance?”

Yet, at a meeting of some egg heads last week, another permutation came up. Someone among them said, “By the way, I hear that the Avengers, the Niger Delta militants, have called off the ceasefire and threatened to resume hostilities? If they begin to burn everywhere in the Niger Delta, a development that may threaten electoral timetable already rolled out by the INEC, what do you think will be the fate of the election?”

There is also the thinking that if the alleged harassment, intimidation and persecution of the opposition parties by the ruling party persists, the coalition of opposition parties could decide to shun the election.

There is also this hallucinatory fear that if President Buhari is, for any reason, voted out in 2019, the dogs and baboons would surely soak in their own blood. So, for this reason, many Nigerians are not willing to go collect their permanent voters cards (PVCs). But, are there some merits in these permutations? Only time will tell.

 Zebulon Agomuo