Those who one day sift through the putrid rubble of Nigeria’s political history will find the APC carcass nestled cosily beside the PDP’s, both equally fragrant with broken promises and selective amnesia. The difference is that the APC has refined the art of irony assassination into a national sport, one that now enjoys the full presidential endorsement of Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Renewed Hope era.
A nation’s mind dies when it can no longer recognise irony even when the irony is wearing agbada, boarding a presidential jet, and lecturing the rest of us about sacrifice. No previous assemblage of Nigerian power-brokers has democratised this particular form of intellectual blindness quite as thoroughly as the APC under first Buhari and now Tinubu.
If the condition were confined to the leadership, one could shrug and leave them to their private funerals. But the party has successfully exported the disease to its foot-soldiers. Irony can now hit a loyalist like a fully-laden Dangote truck on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and still be celebrated on social media as “strategic communication.”
The earliest shots were fired years ago. After winning on the platform of “change,” the party’s then-chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun, solemnly informed the nation that it was the defeated PDP that ought to retire its campaign funds. The APC, he explained with a straight face, had no such obligation. President Buhari, who had made such theatre of borrowing money for his nomination form, never retired a kobo either. The pattern was set: change is what the other people must do first.
Frugality followed the same script. The presidential fleet remained intact. Foreign trips multiplied. The only interruption was Buhari’s prolonged medical absences, which merely relocated the junketing to London’s Harley Street rather than eliminating it. Tinubu has continued the tradition with characteristic flair. Billions have been spent maintaining and upgrading the presidential air fleet. A new Airbus was acquired. Meanwhile, ordinary Nigerians are told to tighten belts that have already disappeared into their spines. The irony sails serenely above the clouds, first-class.
Restructuring received the classic APC treatment. The 2015 manifesto was a masterclass in euphemism: devolution, true federalism, ending feeding-bottle federalism everything except the actual word “restructuring.” Once in power, the party suddenly needed committees to help it understand what it had promised. Under Tinubu, there have been encouraging noises about local government autonomy and state police. Yet the instinct remains the same: form a committee, announce a framework, declare victory, and move on before anyone notices the gap between announcement and lived reality.
But it is in the health sector that the APC’s war on irony reaches its most exquisite pitch. The original manifesto promised to turn Nigeria into the Dubai of healthcare within five years, with visible progress in two. Foreign medical tourism was to become a thing of the past. Buhari and his entire leadership class promptly made London their secondary capital. Governors, Senate Presidents, Speakers, and Acting Presidents all took turns at the medical safari breakfast table.
Tinubu’s administration has produced reports claiming medical tourism spending has dropped sharply. Officials point to revitalised Primary Healthcare Centres, new cancer centres, and initiatives to unlock the healthcare value chain. The President himself regularly urges diaspora doctors to “come home” because “there is nowhere like home.” The same week he issues these patriotic appeals, the brain drain continues at industrial scale tens of thousands of health workers still leave annually and whispers of presidential medical trips to France and elsewhere refuse to die.
The supreme irony is almost too perfect. The party that promised to end elite medical tourism now begs the very doctors who fled its hospitals to return and fix the system their predecessors and current leaders still prefer to escape when the chips are down. Leadership by example on this front has, historically, come more reliably from the “cancerous stables of the PDP” than from the changers.
And so we remain in Yeats country:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Only now the worst have better media teams, more sophisticated talking points, and an entire generation of supporters who have been trained to treat irony as a personal insult rather than a national emergency.
The APC did not invent Nigerian political hypocrisy. It merely professionalised the inability to see it. Tinubu’s election has not reversed the trend; it has given it a new lease of life, a new fleet of aircraft, and a new set of press releases about “Renewed Hope.”
One day the historians of the dustbin will examine the carcass. They will note the empirical failures, of course. But their sharpest observation will be this: the party’s most lasting contribution was not the unfinished roads or the unpaid salaries. It was the successful campaign to make an entire country forget how to laugh at the absurdity of its own rulers.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change you can almost believe in until the next medical trip is announced.
