The destruction of state neutrality and effectiveness is the death knell of the Nigerian state. The ultimate national challenge is to rescue Nigeria and rebuild an effective state that is neutral and uninvolved in the virulent religious and ethnic completion that the present administration has indulged. Only a president whose pedigree, personality and engagement give assurance of a  demonstrable commitment to a secular, democratic and egalitarian Nigeria that aligns reward to work will stop the drift into the type of the violence-ridden feudal states in the Middle East and South Asia, where violent feuding between families and sects continually derails human development.

So, our next president should be someone who can bring Nigerians together and lead them to pursue the collective social and economic well-being of all Nigerians in a spirit of justice and fairness. He or she should be a person who is able to lead a broad coalition of policymakers and managers and must be  determined to recreate Nigeria’s political economy to institutionalise productivity, and focus resources on sustainable development. He must be one who can professionalise the state to deliver on social and economic goods to all Nigerians, strictly on the basis of citizenship, not ethnicity or religion”, quoting Sam Amadi, mutatis, mutandis. – Amadi is an Associate professor of Law, and director of Abuja School of Social and Political Thought.

Three weeks ago on these pages, I indicated to all presidential candidates that their starting point should be the realization that Nigeria is at the tipping point. I redirect that admonition to all of us, Nigerians today, by saying that everything in our country points to a Nigeria actually nearing disaster point. We must, therefore, not deceive ourselves in plotting ourselves away from this imminent road to Golgotha.

At the recent 62nd Nigerian Bar Association. Annual General Conference (NBA-AGC) Peter Obi, the Labour party presidential candidate, aptly described the Nigerian extant condition when he said that the country has qualified to be a failed state. Said he: “Today, we are among the top terrorised countries in the world; we are among the top kidnapping countries in the world. Banditry has taken over part of the country and Nigerians are being killed daily.”

The sheer truth of that statement is why I am always amused each time I hear Festus Keyamo, the APC Presidential Campaign spokesperson, say that “Bola Tinubu will run on the template of President Muhamadu Buhari if elected president in 2023”.

Keyamo should please stop this, if he is not out to deliberately de-market the Tinubu-Shettima ticket since, as a top chieftain of the ruling APC, a cabinet member to boot, he cannot be ignorant of the fact that President Buhari has, since 2015 been running what can only be best described as a personalised government underpinned, mostly by ethnic and insular considerations, both of which have so negatively impacted the Nigerian diversity that, at no point in its history, has Nigeria been as disunited as it is today. Unfortunately, out of sheer respect for his person and office, his party members simply did not complain despite the deleterious consequences.

These consequences have been absolutely benumbing: exacerbated insecurity, pervasive poverty, a collapsing economy, and people being killed or kidnapped daily, in numbers, with life becoming so bestial it has literally lost meaning in the country.

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I am, however, not suggesting that the Buhari years have been all doom and gloom. Indeed, the administration has chalked up some incredible infrastructural developments, especially in transportation, majorly in rails and roads, housing inclusive, and  it will be no exaggeration to say that in these areas, it has outperformed any government before it.

Ditto for it’s Social Investment programme where it has chalked up an impressive performance. As at 2021, verifiable information attests to the fact that millions of Nigerians have benefitted from the programme. Among these are beneficiaries of the N-Power scheme  which doubled from 500,000 to 1 million as well as beneficiaries of it’s Enterprise and Empowerment Programme (GEEP) which on 24 August, 2021 was restructured to GEEP 2.0, and has since registered over 600,000 potential beneficiaries all over the country. Another vibrant arm of the programme is the Home Grown School Feeding (NHGSFP) which seeks to boost school enrolment, improve nutrition of the pupils while patronizing agricultural and women entrepreneurs in the various communities. It presently feeds no less  than 10 million primary school pupils daily.

Impressive as these are, President Buhari, it is now guaranteed, will be leaving behind, come May 29, 2023, a country that is broken in many respects.

Hence, the great urgency of now is who, of the 15 presidential candidates will be best suited to take

over the onerous, indeed gargantuan, business of fixing a Nigeria that would be very much akin

to a post war country?

Unfortunately, not the conventional war, which our well trained military would have vanquished in no time, but an asymmetrical one in which the enemy is daily being beefed up, in numbers, both locally and  from their ethnic compatriots from outside Nigeria, as well as enjoying considerable domestic support, inspired by ethnic and religious consanguinity.

While individual interests will certainly differ, this is one area where Nigerians cannot afford to deceive themselves because these are not problems tribe, religion,  or political party, simpli cita, can solve as they have become very intricate existential problems for our country.

Our choice must, therefore,  be somebody who has gone through the grill, and whose track record must confirms as a can- do personality.

I do not say this lightly because I am not unaware of the long running debate regarding Holism and Individualism, a debate in which highly reputed scholars, world wide,  have pitched their support on either side of the debate.

What then are Nigeria’s immediate challenges?

According to Sam Amadi, quoted in the intro to this piece, the best diagnosis of Nigeria is that it is a country heading towards disaster and which needs someone to drag it off that course. In his own words, this disaster has three dimensions.

The first, he says, is that past leadership, but majorly the present,  have left a legacy of disunity and bitterness which have landed the country in utter despair, desolation, and distrust amongst its peoples. Left to him, there is no Nigerian state any longer and, to buttress this, he cites the mass exodus of Nigerian youths out of the country,  not in the usual desperate search for greener pastures of old, but rather, as a vote of no confidence, not only in the present, but also on the future of Nigeria.

Therefore, the president Nigeria needs come 2023, in his view,  must be someone who can recreate the country in a moral and social sense.  Someone whose emotional intelligence must reflect in how he treats different parts of Nigeria, and who can resurrect a simple faith that Nigeria is not out to kill its citizens. According to him therefore, the  person must be a unifier – a steady hand on national unity, and equal treatment of all Nigerian citizens.

The second, he says, is economic stagnation which goes far back to decades of weak and incompetent neo-liberal economic management, resulting in Nigeria becoming an unproductive economy, spending more than it earns to service debts.

Finally, his third dimension of the diagnosis of the Nigerian failure is the corruption of its institutions. According to him, since 2015, we have witnessed a consistent degrading of the capability of our state institutions, and their capture, by nefarious tendencies. Every day, he says, we see evidence of the erosion of the integrity and the effectiveness of core state institutions.  For instance, he cites the Nigerian military which is held to ransom by a ragtag Boko Haram partly because of the complicity of the rank and file of our intelligence and security agencies. To retake our country from Boko Haram and such other dangerous forces, he posits, we need a leader whose distance from dangerous ethnic,  and religious, sentiments  and commitment to democratic citizenship, will ensure that he can rebuild the integrity and effectiveness of state institutions.

The above, therefore, represents in a nutshell, the theoretical underpinnings of Nigeria’s multitudinal problems, to resolve which we would need somebody with hands – on experience in demonstrable, and verifiable, leadership qualities, measurable past performance in terms of leadership, social engineering, and mental development, and with a blind eye to ethnicity – indeed, a statesman.

God willing, next week in the final part of this piece, I shall zero in that candidate, justify his pick and await reactions in very civil, and dignified language.