Willy Nilly, it seems, the ruling All Progressives Congress’ campaign for 2027 has begun in earnest, amid the mounting challenges facing Nigeria and Nigerians. And there is already an acerbic campaign to demonise and take down anyone and anything perceived as remotely constituting a clog to this ambition.

The campaign is taking on many forms—in newspaper columns, in in-house editorial interventions masquerading as public submissions, in pronouncements by various amorphous groups.

Unfortunately, the campaigns arae not focused on the core issues around which a compelling case can be made for the retention of power, but on rabble-rousing and egregious falsehood, as epitomised by the piece supposedly written by one legal practitioner condemning Governor Seyi Makinde’s assumed 2027 presidential ambition. For a piece purportedly written by a legal practitioner, the publication in question is transparently illogical, and riddled with so much bile.

Acknowledging that Governor Seyi Makinde has not expressed any interest in the 2027 presidential polls, the writer claims that “his track record, political strategy, and the broader national context reveal that his presidential ambition is dead on arrival.” This presumptively arrogant, speculative behaviour that the Yoruba called siwaju-eleede-peede (literally, announcing a figure before the speaker making a promise has said anything) clearly marks out the writer as a partisan hack trying desperately to be seen as a public-spirited writer. For a so-called intellectual, the writer sounds dangerously close to a clown.

For starters, methinks that if Makinde, a formidable leader among the opposition in the country today, were interested in the 2027 presidential polls, he would not need anyone to act as a front for him.

He contested election three times before being elected Oyo State governor and being re-elected with an unprecedentedly high margin, and certainly does not need ruling party elements dazed by his stellar credentials projecting their thoughts unto him, releasing supposed statements of support for his so-called ambition at breakfast and then publishing hollow rebuttals at lunch, to push him to declare an ambition.

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The converse is, of course, also true: within their democratic rights, certain public-spirited individuals deeply enamoured of Governor Makinde’s stellar stewardship at the Agodi Government House and persuaded about the possibilities of his presidency, were he to be interested in the race, have had their say.

However, the governor has shut down such calls, and that certainly ended the matter for those who know him and how he operates. There is no shred of cowardice in the Oyo State governor.

How on earth did the legal practitioner see a nexus between the inauguration of the PDP South-West headquarters in Ibadan and Governor Makinde’s supposed 2027 presidential ambition? Is he suggesting that the presence of the national leadership of the party at that inauguration, not to talk of the PDP governors and other party bigwigs, was about Makinde’s supposed ambition? Is the writer jolted by the apparent unity within the PDP ranks?

By the way, assuming that Makinde or any other Nigerian has an ambition to occupy the highest office in the land, by what logic is such an ambition outlawed? Is it that ambition is the exclusive preserve of the incumbent president? What kind of draconian mindset is this? Why not let the Nigerian people decide? That writer’s submission is made worse by the fact that the man on whom he heaps endless imprecations has made it clear that his preoccupation, or his ambition if you like, is to deliver on the mandate overwhelmingly given to him by the good people of Oyo State, the same people whose intelligence the writer insults by claiming that they made a wrong choice, a claim underlined by the writer’s obsession with the 2027 presidency at a time Nigerians are struggling to feed, with an unprecedented hemorrhage of businesses and jobs and a general climate of despondency.

In his blind pursuit of crimes to pin on Makinde, the writer claims that his 2023 presidential preference would hobble his presidential ambition. One would have advised the hack to cease his impertinence in foisting a presidential ambition on Governor Makinde, but the disgrace he has attracted to his personality by the utter illogicality he purveys should serve as enough punishment of his severely challenged moral and intellectual compass. If his sponsors want to really take on Makinde, they need a writer with some sophistication, not this.

In the writer’s jaundiced view, Governor Makinde openly making a case for regional equity in Nigeria’s political process in 2023 was quite marvelous, but him declaring, against the backdrop of the economic turmoil in which Nigeria is currently embroiled, that the 2027 polls would be a contest between the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and Nigerians is pure treason. What a convoluted reasoning. Is the governor supposed to turn a blind eye to the privations Nigerians are experiencing?

Speaking at the inauguration of the newly built PDP Southwest zonal secretariat in Ibadan, Oyo State, on Saturday, November 2, 2024, Makinde said that the ruling party had failed woefully to deliver on its promises to the citizens.

His words: “The APC has been at the helm of affairs in this country, and they have woefully failed us. The people of Nigeria must now decide whether to retain them in power or vote them out. Nigerians are suffering, and there must be an end to it. We need to unite and push for change.”

That declaration, the actual source of the acerbic nonsense tagged Letter to the Editor, is the real reason the ruling party’s hounds are after the Oyo State Governor. They want a country with no opposition or voice of courage, pushing a potentially ruinous re-election project when they should be channeling their energy to helping President Bola Ahmed Tinubu deliver on his promises to Nigeria.

Come to think of it, if the ruling party was sure of its standing with Nigerians, why take umbrage at Makinde’s declaration? Are the hounds on rampage so bitterly jolted by his absolutely correct declaration that they have literally gone haywire, hurling accusations at the same governor they had praised last year for what they termed his honesty and integrity? Wonders certainly shall never end.

Abdulmalik wrote from Ibadan, Oyo State