By Suyi Ayodele

“I have not knelt since China’s liberation.” Those were the last words she spoke before the executioner put a shot in the back of her head. She refused to kneel down at her execution. She died standing!

Yan Jianhong was a Deputy Secretary of the Guizhou Provincial Planning Commission, People’s Republic of China. She was also a former member of the Standing Committee of the Guizhou Provincial Political Consultative Conference, and former Chairman, Guizhou International Trust and Investment Corporation. Her husband, Liu Zhengwei was Communist Party Secretary of Guizhou Province. She took undue advantage of those positions. She was executed on January 16, 1995, for corruption, her status did not count. She was not alone.

On September 14, 2000, China executed Cheng Kejie. He was the Chairman of the People’s Government of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. China’s Supreme Court approved his death sentence on September 7, 2000, and he was executed a week later!

Cheng was executed for accepting bribes and was also accused of fraudulently procuring 7,000 tonnes of sugar from Guiyang Sugar Factory at a reduced price for resale, thereby generating a significant profit margin. Such a practice, the authority reasoned, was capable of ruining the nation’s economy.

Earlier on March 8, 2000, the Chinese Government executed Hu Changqinga, a prominent Chinese politician who served as vice governor of Jiangxi. He was found guilty of bribery and corruption and was executed by firing squad!

The same fate befell Lai Xiaomin, who served as Chinese Communist Party Committee Secretary and Chairman of the Board of China Huarong Asset Management from September 2012 to April 2018. He was executed on January 29, 2021, for bribery, embezzlement, and bigamy. His private assets were also seized and his family left with nothing!

The former vice governor of Anhuli, Wang Huaizhong, was on February 12, 2004, executed by firing squad, also for corruption. The same thing happened to Wang Shouxin on January 8, 1980 when she was executed for the “biggest scandal of the People’s Republic of China prior to 1979.” She was said to have embezzled “at least 536,000 yuan of state funds”.

There were other executions for corrupt practices such as Wen Qiang, a judicial officer whose life was on July 7, 2010, snuffed out for taking more than 12 million yuan ($1.76 m) in bribes. Zheng Xiaoyu, Director, State Food and Drug Administration, who was executed on July 10, 2007, for “corruption and allowing possibly tainted products in mainland China.”

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China’s largest corruption case involved Li Jianping, a former official in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. He was said to have been involved in fraud running into $421 million (over three billion yuan). The 64-year-old was executed in August 2024.

I have taken the time to list the above cases in China since the present administration is likely to copy the one-party system operational in China. Unlike how we have messed up the presidential system of government we copied from America in 1979, Nigerians owe it a duty to ensure that as the nation slides, gradually, to a one-party State, a la China, we should also copy those things that make China great.

In China, it is a capital offence for politicians or government officials to be caught on camera stuffing dollars in their suits pocket. Such persons don’t live to spend the dollars. In multi-party Nigeria, such people get promoted!

Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the immediate past governor of Kano State and current National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Alliance (APC), loves China and its development. In contrast, given the examples above, China hates characters in Ganduje’s mould.

That Ganduje loves China for its development is good enough. It is equally noble that our leaders love the developmental strides they see in the sane nations of the world. But unfortunately, as much as Ganduje loves China, the countryhates the Gandujes of this world because it knows that people like Ganduje would hamper, hinder and retard its development.

China is not just a developed country; it is a nation that has converted its huge population to greater advantages for the Chinese people. Every rational mind and leader should be proud of a nation like China. Nigeria was also once on the path of greatness like China before wasters took over the reins of leadership, and the locusts we have as leaders ate up our vegetation!

China, contrary to Ganduje’s warped reasoning, is not developed because it practices a one-party system. One of the major factors, the most prominent, I say without prevarication, that made China what it is today, is that the country gives the worst treatment to its corrupt leaders.

Ganduje is happy that members of the opposition political parties are trooping daily to the ruling APC. The latest was the defection of the three senators from Kebbi State (Adamu Aliero (Kebbi Central, Yahaya Abdullahi, Kebbi North and Garba Maidoki Kebbi South), who all abandoned their Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the APC.

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The APC National Chairman took the trio to the Aso Rock Villa on Friday to see President Bola Ahmed Tinubu like trophies. He was accosted by State House correspondents who asked him about his feeling concerning the shift towards a one-party State in Nigeria.

Ganduje, rightly though, noted that nobody should quarrel with the fact that politicians were moving in droves to the APC. He assured that leaders who worried “about a one-party State have no need to fear.”

Then he posited: “A one-party State is not by force; it is by negotiation. It is by other political parties seeing the effect of the positive governance of our party. If they decide to come to our party willingly, I think there is nothing wrong with that.”

To further allay the fear, the Kano politician drew a parallel from China’s one-party system, saying, “Today, China is one of the strongest countries in the world and is a one-party system. We are not saying we are working for a one-party system, but if this is the wish of Nigerians, we cannot quarrel with that.” He went further to slam the current multi-party system Nigeria runs philosophising, “You know they say too many cooks spoil the soup; too many political parties spoil governance.”

There are some fundamental issues in Ganduje’s submissions. One, the APC National Chairman lied when he tried to project that those moving over to the APC were doing so because they were “seeing the effect of the positive governance of our party.” We all know that nothing can be farther from the truth than this assertion. Except Ganduje lives in another Nigeria than the one we have; every rational mind knows that the APC-led government since 2015 has led Nigeria to the bottomless pit of poverty and despair. I cannot see anything enviable that should attract this level of bandwagon folly going on in our political space!

Again, the attempt by Ganduje to condemn the multi-party system is equally an unfair judgement on that system by the very people who made nonsense of the system. If, for instance, the PDP had behaved the way the Ganduje APC is behaving, there would not have been a party called APC today! It is people like Ganduje and the intolerant president like his principal that make the multi-party system to look like it is a failed system.

That Ganduje also made the attempt to hoodwink us to believe that his party and government were not forcing people to join the APC goes to confirm the hopelessness of our situation in the hands of these guys whose penchant for the tall tale is legendary! The most doltish of us knows that there is nothing ‘voluntary’ in the gale of defections we are witnessing.

It is also fallacious for Ganduje to think that China is developed because it practices a one-party system! We need to impress on Ganduje that a nation that hates corruption is bound to develop. China abhors corruption and executes corrupt leaders. Anyone who shows any sign that could hinder China’s paths to greatness does not live to tell the story. Evidence of that attitude abounds. That is what makes China great. That is what can make Nigeria to be great again, if we all desire greatness.

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It is also perilous for Ganduje to think Nigeria becoming a one-party State will have no consequences. For him to believe that the heavens will not fall if Nigeria slides to a one-party State as the APC is wont to have it, tells more about the shallowness of his discernment!

So, justifying the intended perfidy of a one-party State, Ganduje drew an analogy from China. Can we ask the former Kano State governor, who was once caught on camera stuffing dollar bills into his babariga, what would have been his fate if he were Chinese? If Nigeria were to be China, what would have happened to Ganduje and his acolytes in the face of the allegations of corruption the Kano State Government brought against them after he left office?

Honestly, a one-party State like China would not have been a bad idea here if only we could copy China wholesale by doing to people like Ganduje what China does to its citizens who are caught with their hands in the nation’s cookie jar. The elders of my place say that when one prays to be as rich as the man with a big mansion, the one praying should also be prepared to go the same route the owner of the mansion passed through (Òòsa òkè jé kí ndà bí onílé yí gbúdò se òhun tí onílé se). Is Ganduje ready to be given the Chinese treatment for corrupt leaders? Is his neck thick enough for the Chinese hangman’s noose?

This is what Ganduje should consider before drawing a parallel between Nigeria and the one-party State of China. He should have mentioned that China has no room for the type of leaders we have in Nigeria. That if it were to be China, there would have been no way President Tinubu would be occupying Aso rock Villa now. That 99.9 percent of our political leaders would have either been in jail or serving as manure in their shallow graves having been executed by the State.

How do we reconcile the fact that the man once adjudged “the most corrupt governor in Nigeria” is the current President who is also desperately chasing his second term? How do we come to terms with the fact that the number three man in the hierarchy, Senate President Godswill Akpabio, did not contest the primary of his party where the senatorial candidate was nominated, but today, he ‘won’ an election to the senate where he emerged the Senate President because the Supreme Court said so?

Would China have closed its eyes to the fact that while the returning officer for the 2019 senatorial election in Akpabio’s Akwa Ibom North-West Senatorial District, Professor Peter Ogban, is in jail for announcing fake results in two local government areas – Oruk Anam and Etim Ekpo – in Akpabio’s favour, the sole beneficiary of the electoral heist is busy “sending prayers to the emails” of other senators today?

Go to Imo State. Would China allow a man who came fourth in an election to be the governor of any of its provinces? Can any minister in China ride a Rolls Royce to the office without the State interrogating his sources of income? Or can the son of President Xi Jinping embark on ‘state visits’ to any of the provinces in China with crass impunity as we have here in Nigeria?

The axiom: “a nation gets the type of leaders it deserves”, has proven to be true of our calamity as a nation. The possibility of a one-party State before 2027 is something that should not scare us again. If it happens, we SHALL all live to savour the sour taste! So, for the Gandujes of this era, I say, ride on!