So, when will Jonathan defect to APC?

With the wave of decampments and defections currently going on, one has been finding it difficult keeping tab of who is where. One moment, you meet an ex-governor who boasts of how his former ANPP state structure was the backbone of the new APC in the state, how they were storming the state capital to appoint party executives and how the PDP can never hope to win any election in the state.
Then, two weeks later, the APC state exco is set up. You see the mammoth crowd alright but the ex-governor is nowhere in sight. Three days later, his political associates confirm that talks have reached advanced stage for this same ex-governor to join PDP with his ‘teeming supporters’. Yes, even those who can’t win any free and fair election in their nuclear family all have ‘teeming’ supporters. Today, he’s in CPC, tomorrow he decamps to APC, three days later, he’s back to the same PDP from where he was frustrated out some six years ago. For sure, the wheeling and dealing is on. For now, however, the only certainty is that they remain in politics, but party? Don’t bet on that!
Only last week, a friend jokingly observed, very soon people at political meetings would forget how to reply when somebody mounts the rostrum to address them. It could degenerate to situation like this: APC!!! (and someone would reply); Power to the people!!!. And this would be even as some still confused decampees from the Southwest would be replying with a thunderous ‘Democracy forever!!! to chants of PDP!!!
Of course, the derogatory PDP!!! Share the money!!! chants would also be replicated at APC rallies because the same people, who were making those chants have now intermingled  and can now be found in just every party – including All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), which recently received some decampees as well.
Yes, in this season of curious political marriages, some people also found it politically expedient to decamp to APGA – which many of us had given up for dead, with rumours that its pillar, Gov. Peter Obi, was on his way to PDP.
Of course, I would be the last person to accuse defectors of going after filthy lucre. God forbid! But isn’t it curious that the decampment to APGA is happening in Anambra State, where the party recently won the governorship election and more recently swept all but one chairmanship seat at the council polls?
Our elders in the East have an old saying that it is whoever is holding the palm-fronds that the goats get to follow. Yes, just as our elders in the West also believe that you just can’t tie corncobs around your waist and expect the chickens not to ‘decamp’ from their pens and run after you.
Of course, in the absence of any distinct ideology (even in the Labour Party), the decampees are all citing the ‘absence of internal democracy’. Those trooping into APC from PDP are saying the ruling party has an unbreakable, irredeemable bond with impunity. Those leaving APC back to PDP are citing arbitrariness, the same thing that the alleged 5,000 PDP people, who recently joined APC in Imo State, are accusing the PDP of. Many of us who are politically naïve, for instance, initially thought a party like the Labour Party would have more in common with the slightly radical slant of the APC tendencies but, ironically, we’re increasingly seeing LP, romancing PDP instead. It’s getting curiouser and curiouser. But, I guess, that is why I’m just a bloody journalist, and not politician.
However, something in this my usually-empty head tells me that this ongoing prostitution – whether they call it defection, decampment or cross-carpeting, has less to do with national service than national cake. Everyone is positioning for a platform that would give him the best shot at the famed NNPC accounts (either at the level of JP Morgan, where they put what is left, after the looting or the larger chunk that just never gets declared).
Everyone wants to take direct control of the amnesty programme – not really in the mould of going after Hon. Kingsley Kuku’s job, though. No! Kuku’s office only gets peanuts. The real money, as I read in some newspaper earlier in the week, is the budget for the ex-militants – who are alleged to have gotten a larger chunk of the 2014 budget than our military and police put together.
Everyone wants direct access to the excess crude account – which, as the name suggests, is ‘crudely’ and ‘excessively’ spent. All the politicians are getting tired of little handouts, monthly given them by the revenue mobilisation and fiscal allocation commission.
Since the federal government keeps telling us that it is impossible to arrest crude oil thieves, or giving us the impression that these thieves are of a special breed – both untouchable and above the law, every politician out there is now aspiring to become either an oil thief or, at least, be in a position supervise their operation (and be the one, telling us how ‘government is doing everything to bring the situation under control’).
With all this talk about upstream, mid-stream and downstream – and billions of dollars streaming away, every politician out there now wants to get to the mainstream. Of course, they don’t care if they drown in the process.
As it stands now, one of the few people who have yet to directly declare when (and if) they would be  joining the APC is probably President Goodluck Jonathan.
But all the president’s men, in the name of defending the interest of the president (and the PDP), are daily playing into the hands of the APC. At least, I decoded that from the responses to my article of last week, which, in the main, was a wake-up call on the president and the PDP to the challenge of APC, which was running them ragged. Only very few Jonathan supporters saw it as that. For the majority of them, it was another Tinubu boy paid to run down Jonathan. How did we end up with so many nitwits in exalted positions?
When the opposition party accuses Jonathan of corruption, instead of using the window provided by that accusation to sell the President’s programmes, achievements and all that, what he has quietly been doing to reduce corruption (many of which I can personally point to), the president’s supporters mount the rostrum to tell us how corruption did not start with Jonathan. Now, nobody said it did – just as nobody expects him to totally erase it. But when you say corruption did not start with Jonathan, you are indirectly saying Jonathan is merely keeping up the tradition (or taking it a notch higher). Now, with supporters like these, who actually needs an opposition?