If politics is played to win, and the All Progressives Congress actually wants to play to win, it is imperative that it takes certain crucial and bold decisions with regards to some of its candidates for the 2019 elections.
Such decisions may involve the replacement of some of the candidates vying for elections especially as state governors on the APC platform.
Bluntly, one such candidates that needs to be substituted by the party is Nasir Ahmed elrufai of Kaduna state for several reasons, chief among which is failure of governance and broken promises.
It is elementary that all politicians know that the key to winning elections is to make great promises. But in practical terms, the key to maintaining power is keeping those promises; elrufai therefore, can not attain power as Kaduna state governor by making promises then breaking them and still be expected by his party to retain that power beyond the first mandatory four-year term which expires next year.
In 2015, elrufai and his campaigners promised to cure the ills of society including illiteracy, disease, unemployment, and poverty. Many supporters and independent voters alike got caught up in a sort of mass delusion of inflated expectations.
Instructively, despite the public acclaim that ushered his administration just two years ago, elrufai has failed to bring about the promised vast improvements in health, education, employment, infrastructure, the civil service and the economy.
Incontestible too, elrufai and his government have failed to deliver even at the local level, from where he extracted most of his votes after promising to improve specific problems that the rural people care about the most.
In addition to spreading insecurity and widening communal distrust, Kaduna was also recently rated as the most indebted state in Nigeria along with Edo and Lagos.
With people’s hope for urgent and obvious results from his administration thus dashed when the results failed to materialize, they naturally should be expected to react with outrage and contempt which could translate into electoral loss for the APC in 2019.
Already, negative climate in politics has gotten worse in Kaduna State in the past two and a half years, with voter discontent fast becoming a phenomena among the population as shown in the manner each of elrufai’s many inconsistencies now go viral within minutes of their discovery.
One such instance is the trending concern over his reluctance to strongly relate with the grassroots, his obvious contempt for workers, his reckless and hurtful statements about politicians and his general bully persona that are impacting the state for the worse.
Elrufai’s failure in many respects is so glaring that even without the need to further detail his many broken campaign promises that have accumulated throughout the last three and half years, one can safely conclude that Kaduna is no longer set up for an additional four years of an elrufai administration.
Noteworthy is that in many ways in the past, voters in the state have proved they are not the optimists who can’t learn from experience. The pendulum is therefore going to swing a different way in 2019 – definitely.
By his omissions and deliberate commission, elrufai has thus simplified the task for his opponents who only need to capitalize on the growing angry mood of disillusioned voters in the state and then take a slight detour by basing their candidacies on the premise that they would fulfill a new set of realistic promises.
The APC therefore is left with only to options: replace elrufai and nurse a fresh hope of retaining Kaduna state, insist on his candidacy and be prepared to cope with the mounting voter anger in the next few months.
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