Reflections on Dankwambo’s return to Gombe after three years by Muhd El-Bonga Ibraheem

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BY MUHAMMAD EL-BONGA IBRAHEEM, APRIL 04, 2022 | 09:52 AM


Since his defeat in the 2019 general election— where he contested for a Senate seat as a sitting Governor to represent Gombe North in the National Assembly and lost— former Governor, Ibrahim Dankwambo has not stepped his feet in Gombe until today. If you calculate carefully, that’s three good years!

While it is, of course, his prerogative to do that, there are many lessons to learn from the sudden re-appearance, nay political resurrection, if at all the masses can pause and think anyway. With elections just a few months away, Dankwambo decided to visit Gombe today in order to mark the expiration of his self-imposed political sabbatical— shuttling between Lagos and Abuja in the process.

What surprised me the most— though ineluctably very prevalent in our political sphere— is the shocking fact that many people in their multitude thronged the Gombe airport including party bigwigs and governorship hopefuls in order to welcome him amidst raucous jubilations and media frenzy. Most of them are political supporters who have failed to distinguish between i-don’t-care political neglect and actual care. The masses, who are the common people usually manipulated in the political chess game, are usually incapable of weighing up options to determine what is best for them. They’re just electoral tools to be remote-controlled by their prebendal political godfathers.

In retrospect, for good three years, he hasn’t visited Gombe. Not for any reasons whatsoever. Within that period, many things had happened— death, important events, party congress etc. but he didn’t attend any. Now that election is around the corner, he has suddenly appeared and some of them are busy celebrating and posting the “good news” on social media.

Well, they deserve our sympathy to be honest. But then, political lessons are many. And some take a very long time to be learnt. Now that he has resurfaced, he would control and direct them to vote for some candidates and, after election, he would vanish again. Meanwhile, they won’t think towards that angle.

Any politician that genuinely cares about his constituents will never abandon them for many years under any guise. Nonetheless, this is Nigeria. The political elites manipulate the hoi polloi by doing the thinking for them. The manipulated lower class, mostly the downtrodden, are incapable of separating facts from delusion. And that’s why Nigeria is where it is today: because we don’t hold those responsible to account.


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