Nigerians please shine ya eye. In the coming 2023 general elections, there will be no free lunch. As they say in Yoruba land: eniti yio wo ina, aa se wahala (even he that will make hell must sweat for it).
This time around, the dominant elites will pay for their incompetence and strategic indolence – and it will be a just reward for their sins against good governance dividends – that metaphorical Golden Fleece that was promised in 1999 when the nation trembled to divest from military rule and reinvested the proceeds in a constitutional democracy. The augury of that comeuppance is what has been explored in this piece.
If anything has become obvious, the critical innovations in the new Electoral Act of 2022 were engrafted by power outsiders in a silent coup while the highly indulgent and pampered political class was asleep.
Eternal vigilance is the price of retaining anything of enduring value that is never enough to go round, and that the society will tolerate being coveted – in this case, political power. Power and morality are strange bedfellows and from the tending narrative by the emerging third force movement they too are still short on this understanding for all they have done and gotten right so far. Sad as that truism is, it has been so from time immemorial and all across the globe.
If the battle ahead is between good and evil (where APC and PDP represent evil) as being defined by the third force, it will be naive to expect anything but a rofo-rofo fight. History affords us no precedent where such a fight between good and evil was ever free, fair and transparent or with both parties triumphant.
That the ruling parties are oblivious of the force of disruption being rolled out by the third force and have kept making seemingly pedestrian missteps in planning their primaries, as well as structuring their selling messages, in keeping with its provision is telling.
Too many groundbreaking and transformational booby traps are embedded in the Electoral Act 2022 (in particular the statutory validation of BVAS and electronic transmission of results from polling units). This has tempered public cynicism of the electoral process and heightened an understandable belief that votes will count as advocated by third forces (whose mole in the legal reform effort are the tireless CSOs).
In other words, the APC government enacted a law to guide an election whose implications on their intent to hold on to power by all means possible they played scant regard to, blinded by their overconfidence of incumbency advantage. And the hapless populace is grateful for the unexpected gift.
It is obvious now that the established political class thought wrong. As a result, the coming 2023 general election is not looking to be like anything that’s ever happened before in Nigeria.
When I read the likes of Prof Attahiru Jega (ex-INEC boss who has the distinct honour of supervising the only election in which an incumbent Federal Government in Nigeria was not only DEFEATED but actually UNSEATED) Prof Pat Utomi, Femi Falana (SAN), Senator Shehu Sani etc, NLC, TUC, ASUU teaming up with the vocal youths, endSARs army reserves and making actionable and action-backed declarations and referencing provisions in the new Electoral Act as motivating factors for their conviction that votes will count and rigging scuppered, it would be delusional to write them off. They can be seen methodically and deliberately taking positions in the front seat of an unfolding coalition that is now focused on cataclysmic power change.
They have moved from the fringes of power as intellectual guides to the arena of the contest. Most of them are no more as politically naive as they were during the June 12-inspired pro-democracy struggles that culminated in the restoration of civil rule in 1999. They went on loan into the field to understudy the ways and wiles of the political technocrats in the course of the last two decades.
They flirted uncomfortably with AD, PDP, NCP APC etc but the liaisons led to no union or offspring. But they are back now; better equipped and with a practical store of actionable experience.
Their victory at the polls will not just be an upset – it will have devastating revolutionary implications for the entrenched political class as we know it. You cannot wage a successful war against ‘evil’ ( as the third force is making out) and then preach accommodation of agents of devils in victory. That will be mocking God for His grace.
The third force is gaining momentum steadily by a combination of compelling messaging and rigorous, strategic political engineering helped by the absence of any alternative that is refreshingly resonant with the disaffected but partisanly uncommitted majority of the ordinary voting public.
It is largely driven by the adoption of a strategic disruption game-plan. On the other hand, the established power elites are not trained in upsetting the apple cart that disruption entails. They are a band of closeted conservatives united largely in keeping the political status quo through trade-offs, compromises; and occasional bluffing.
The credibility of intent and purpose is on the side of disrupters which makes for savings in political advertisements and campaign expenses. Conversely, credibility deficit is the albatross of the entrenched political parties. The Act is now more voter-friendly but disruptive of traditional rigging designs built into previous Electoral Acts – the job of election riggers has suddenly been made more onerous.
In a more serious polity, a comparatively radical electoral law like was enacted in 2022 should only have scaled through after hard-nosed negotiation by all interested stakeholders. And everyone would have been alert to its consequences to plan ahead and restrategise for their survival under it. Eerily the entrenched parties are still thinking and acting ‘business as usual’ less than eight months to a defining election that has no precedent.
Anybody who has a passable knowledge of the theory and praxis of adapted disruption should make no claim or boast that the present challenge posed by the third force, emerging largely to benefit from the enabling provisions of the 2022 Electoral Act, can be safely dismissed.
An open source online definition of disruption may not be out of context to presage this exposition.
Simply defined, “The theory of disruption predicts that when an entrant tackles incumbent competitors head-on, offering better products or services, the incumbents will accelerate their innovations to defend their business.”
In a more illustrative explanation culled from Harvard Law Review – What Is Disruptive Innovation? by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald. The writers postulated in summary: “Disruption describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Specifically, as incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a foothold by delivering more-suitable functionality-frequently at a lower price. Incumbents, chasing higher profitability in more-demanding segments, tend not to respond vigorously. Entrants then move upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents’ mainstream customers require while preserving the advantages that drove their early success. When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants’ offerings in volume, disruption has occurred. (See the exhibit ‘The Disruptive Innovation Model’).”
Based on this theory, an adaptation of it to present political contestation will reveal that the emerging third force is feeding and gestating on the theory of disruption. But are the incumbent parties restrategising or innovating to respond to the emerging third force?
Perhaps it is too early to call them out for their palpable inertia and defensive response. Rather than confront the challenge, they are pitifully reacting by citing what weaknesses they observe in the third force, such as their supposed lack of finance, structure or pedigree in the field.
Coming months will tell if this overhyped Achilles heel of the third force suffices to outfox them in the field. The people’s critical point of pain (if accessed and politically canvassed) is less about religion, ethnic balancing, party identity or loyalty than about good governance deliverable only by merit-guided, competent leaders who have demonstrable empathy and compassion beyond mere promises. That message is fast catching on online and an unprecedented eight months of the campaign will strike me as a generous leg up to effectively replicate the crusade offline right on the field.
Their added advantage is that the market is flat and unsegmented – every vote by their disruptive effort carries the same weight as any other in the electoral stable.
It’s likely going to lead to an implosion of the country if the major parties take too long to appreciate their threat and respond in kind by recalibrating and retooling their winning formula to make it fit for the new purpose. Being defenders of the staid status quo they are the target for disruption, but so far they come across as fixated- unprepared and probably ill-equipped to compete on the disruptive turf. They are so far, in denial that the market is going to be receptive to the new deal on offer by the third force.
On the other hand, the disrupters are also merely exploiting the momentum while adapting and improvising on the road. This is because the third force is feeding on popular anger and disaffection with the current power wielders. The composition and contradictions will inevitably lead to a cacophony of dichotomous objectives – workers, the left-behind and marginalized members of the middle class as well as ethnic jingoists disguising as nationalists are mingling with some upper-class members in forging a joint venture to rival and take on the two, highly resourced and entrenched competitors that are in the business for blood diamond profit – there is bound to be schism at the annual general meeting of the third force which reverberations may decisively disrupt the market .
We are arguably heading to another June 12 where the likes of ASUU, NANS, NLC and ITT ( previous class enemies ) suddenly and unexpectedly locked themselves in a rainbow battalion to battle against established order that was heavily invested in keeping a business asset jointly owned and run with ITT before disagreement ensued. The old order is alarmed. They might go for broke in their desperation by resorting to war tactics outside the rule book of the Geneva Convention ( as was the eventual culmination of June 12).
Meanwhile, it had better dawn on the seemingly entrenched parties (APC and PDP) that they are endangered regardless of their gut feeling to the contrary. The burden on them to rebrand and reinvent themselves cannot be dismissed or wished away if they hope to stave off or effectively compete with the marauding machine of political disrupters in the medium to long term. The third force is here to stay. It cannot be wished away by the bombastic bravado of the dying hegemons in the Nigerian political space.
Now, the right attitude to adopt by all stakeholders who have something to lose, if hell breaks loose and PRESCIENT POSSIBILITY (even if a distant probability ) happens, is to manage and cope with the possibility that the third force may prevail in the general election. It is counselled that everyone psyches themselves to live through the shock that it portends and wait for better luck another day. The shock of June 12 more than the fact of it was its undoing – it was an unplanned and sudden revolution that nobody prepared for and so could not be assimilated and endured by the losers and could not be competently managed by the victors.
It bears acknowledging that modern history is not a stubborn goat repeating and reproducing itself; it’s a cloned version injected with a modifying DNA of a chameleon.
Only the biophysicist who engineered the modified DNA can predict the end product. Who is that biophysicist in this instance? The jury is out. Hopefully, the jury will be the electorate; not one dark-goggled Aladdin.
Owonikoko is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN)