By Farooq Kperogi
I wrote a tongue-in-cheek, intentionally sarcastic status update yesterday that I won’t be surprised of the INEC chairman gets an APC presidential nomination form while still an INEC chairman given the norm-bending absurdities that we’ve been seeing in APC’s presidential nomination exercise where a serving CBN governor has thrown his hat in the ring of presidential contest without first resigning his job.
I wrote: “The CBN governor, who manages Nigeria’s money and who should be apolitical, is running for president without resigning his position.
“I honestly won’t be surprised if I hear the INEC chairman say that a group of concerned Nigerians have contributed N100m to buy the APC presidential nomination for him.
“APC has normalized absurdity, indecency, and outrageousness to a degree we’ve never seen since Nigeria’s independence.”
In apparent reaction to my sarcasm, INEC issued a statement today insisting that the INEC chairman will not run for president.
“Our attention has been drawn to innuendoes in certain quarters that Nigerians should not be surprised if the INEC Chairman joins the Presidential race or urging him to do so.
“It is a preposterous proposition. It will not happen,” INEC said today in a statement signed by its Chief Press Secretary, Rotimi Lawrence Oyekanmi.
I initially said satire was dead in Nigeria when I read the statement. I was wrong. Satire is alive and kicking at INEC. It writes itself there. All you have to do is read it.
Seriously, though, the fact that INEC has a need to officially respond to a joke, an obvious joke, about its chairman joining the APC presidential nomination charade dramatizes the depths of silliness to which our politics have sunk under APC.
The statement didn’t even mention that he is constitutionally barred from running for office while he is the INEC chairman, indicating, as someone said in a comment on my Facebook status update, that they think this is in the realm of possibility.
In a different political climate, say in 2015 or even 2019, they would have ignored my satire, and possibly laughed at it. But in today’s political climate, anything is possible, and their response confirms it.
Notes from Atlanta
