Idowu Akinlotan
In order to police Satuday’s governorship and senatorial elections, security agencies militarised Kogi and Bayelsa States, and rationalised the use of overwhelming force to safeguard the electoral process. Bayelsa had the compliment of about 32,000 policemen and security agents, in addition to a host of electoral commission officials. Kogi had about 35,000 policemen and security agents, also in addition to dozens of top electoral officials. How they came about those numbers and raised the logistic to ferry them must remain a mystery. If a one-day, two-state elections attracted nearly 70,000 policemen and security agents, as mindboggling and unbelievable as this is, should this not tell Nigerian leaders that the country’s security and ethical conditions are not improving, and that they must begin to reflect on how to rework the country, design new paradigms for progress, and recognise that the future is indeed very bleak and precarious?
Ratios may not necessarily be extrapolated in such a way that analysts can safely and accurately predict just how many security agents would be required to police the country in the next general election. If extrapolations were so easy, it could be estimated that Nigeria would need to hire policemen and security agents from neighbouring West African countries to police their elections or risk producing more violent and inconclusive polls. For successive election cycles, Nigeria had needed to militarise their electoral processes the more, deploy more security agents than conventional, even though often overstated for pecuniary reasons, ground the country more fiercely with consequences for business, and enact rules and regulations that scar the psyche of the people, batter their image, and exacerbate relationships in a country leaders have refused to acknowledge is broken and in need of repairs, a country subjected by the self-same leaders to abhorrent and repressive laws and practices.
Bayelsa and Kogi eminently prove just how precarious the situation has become for Nigeria, and why it would take more force and more policing to secure relatively free and fair balloting in the 2023 elections. Even then the outcomes are not guaranteed. But what is much worse is that the national political dynamics evident in yesterday’s governorship elections indicate the urgency of repairs that must be undertaken before 2023 if the country is to avoid catastrophe. In Bayelsa, both Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders centred the entire electoral process on their controversial persons, thus making victory and defeat egotistically about themselves, not about ideas and ideologies or about the future and prosperity of their state.
In Kogi, the situation is much worse. Unlike Bayelsa where the outgoing governor Seriake Dickson had performed reasonably well, Kogi governor Yahaya Bello had perfected the art of doing nothing exaggeratedly. Had factions in the Bayelsa political equations reconciled themselves nobly above personal caprices, they would probably have had a more engaging electioneering and perhaps elect persons that would reflect the wishes and aspirations of Bayelsans. It is not clear yet what the electoral outcome in the state would look like. But in Kogi where contrite APC leaders have grovelled before voters theatrically, and Mr Bello’s supporters in Abuja have deployed the country’s financial muscle to aid the lethargic governor and also vicariously display penitence on his behalf, no one is confident how the pendulum would swing.
Kogi and Bayelsa do not only exhibit the numbing dilemmas expected to blitz the country when it votes in 2023, they also indicate more disturbingly how the country has stubbornly refused to get its leadership recruitment process right, and how the body politic seems distorted to habitually produce the wrongest set of politicians to lead their parties and, inescapably, the country. Take Kogi as the archetypal example. There was little talk of the competence and leadership disposition of Governor Bello as a factor in the election. All emphasis was on his connections, the state’s superficial geopolitical dynamics, his disgraceful longings, the pervasive influence of his mentors in Abuja, and the ethnic and religious configurations of the state. Should he return by hook or crook, he is unlikely ever to augur progress for the state. But it is a tragedy that his party even presented him at all and concocted a number of embarrassing variables to aid his re-election chances.
The Kogi example is worsened by the fact that many of those advocating support for the state’s non-performing governor had conspired to gift him the governorship in the first instance, regardless of his lack of experience, competence and judgement. It was enough that they preferred his vacuity above any other consideration, and desired to use him as a weapon in their political, parochial and sectarian calculations. For the 2023 elections, just like the Bayelsa and Kogi polls that are disgraced by a lack of substance, there are already indications that issues, competence, sound judgement and national vision of greatness are being belittled and relegated. There is little consideration for the urgency of the existential crisis the country is facing, and how the survival of the nation is badly threatened.
Top politicians and highly placed Nigerians who should appreciate the dangers the country is confronting are instead playing ducks and drakes with the emotions of the people, arguing not about ideologies but about whether rotation should not finally be discarded in view of current realities, irrationally weighing the religiosity and ethnic backgrounds of potential aspirants, and foolishly determining whether the candidacy of particular politicians would advance their private and selfish interests. Unfortunately, the Muhammadu Buhari presidency has opened a Pandora’s box of ethnic exceptionalsim, nepotism and general administrative lassitude that seems configured to shut the doors against the emergence of great leaders. There is also no thought given to whether the country’s current structure is able to sustain the country and predispose it to development and greatness. Instead the consideration is whether the structure satisfies the longings and advantages of ethnic groups acting as a camorra.
With such muddled thinking and a national environment fouled by years of unrestrained distrust, few imagine that the right kind of leaders can be easily produced by the political parties for the 2023 elections. The Buhari presidency is likely to be the last of its kind, a government dedicated to exclusion and jaded and anachronistic perceptions of nationhood. But whether future presidents can solve the complex equations certain to confront the country in the years ahead will depend on how hungry and oppressed voters forswear the variables and passions that have foolishly shaped the thinking and choices of past and present generations. It should not be about Igbo, Yoruba or Hausa candidates; it should be about who best can aggregate the yearnings of the electorate, who can best lift the country from the doldrums, who can most competently place Nigeria on the path to greatness, and who can most courageously contend with the malformed structure of the country to put an end to its economic decline and dysfunctional politics.
Experience should have been the electorate’s best teacher. Kogi and Bayelsa do not give confidence that the people have learnt anything substantial. But whether they have learnt anything at all will be clear by early this week when the results of their votes are published. It is tragic that decades of suffocating military rule orchestrated by incompetent officers with little minds, and decades more of badly apprenticed political leaders have virtually destroyed the country. Why the pains of almost six decades have not disillusioned Nigerians and encouraged them to reject inept leaders and denounce them for subverting the constitution and the rule of law is hard to fathom. Nigerians seem strangely paralysed by patrician leaders like ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and President Buhari, and their avarice massaged by ex-president Goodluck Jonathan. And being gluttons for punishment, they have endured the knee-jerk policies and punishment inflicted on them by some inspired members of President Buhari’s dysfunctional cabinet and agents of oppressive security establishment.
Kogi and Bayelsa polls do not offer hope that the 2023 elections will be about the right issues and ideas, or about the right attitude and substance. Kogi has been turned into a repressive and closed state, and Bayelsa converted into a violent cesspit of hate and demagoguery. Nigeria could be coaxed to the path of recovery if voters in 2023 recognise that their National Assembly, distracted by obnoxious bills spelling death for nebulously defined hate speech, has become a willing accomplice in the criminal denudation of citizen rights, and that their presidency aided by a fearful and timid cabinet has probably slipped unconsciously into the president’s 1984-1985 default repression mould.
Last week, The Sun newspaper sampled the opinions of some eminent Nigerians about 2023. The opinions revealed an interesting convergence. Former speaker of the House of Representatives, Ghali Na’Abba, according to the paper, said: “My stand is that the Presidency should go to any Nigerian who is competent and will be fair and just; a person of vision and mission who will be transformative. A person who will midwife Nigeria from potential to actual is what we need. It doesn’t matter where he comes from so far he possesses these attributes.”
In the same vein, Archbishop Emeritus of the Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja, John Cardinal Onaiyekan, volunteered this opinion: “The issue that will break Nigeria is if we continue to run a nation, pretending to be democratic where we are not. A nation where the will of the people is not prevailing, where elections are not done properly and where security is seems to be not the priority of government. To me, those are the issues…What should matter is whether my President is a good president, that he serves the nation, that he treats everybody equally and that the common good of Nigeria is his priority. That is what I am looking for because even if he is a Catholic from my village and he continues with this process we have here, I will not want him. I don’t want us to give up the hope of getting a good government. We should continue to insist.”
Both Mr Na’Abba and the cardinal spoke eloquently and sensibly. Kogi and Bayelsa, however, give the impression that the two gentlemen belong to a minority tribe of idealists. In 2023, it will become clear what the nation itself thinks: whether it is no longer fashionable to think idealistically or whether to surrender finally to the dysgenic politics past and current Nigerian presidents have introduced into the country’s DNA. But whatever they think and whatever they choose, the next few years will very likely prove that Nigeria cannot hope to continue along its present dysfunctional lines. If something is done about the malady, she will be saved. If not, there is no telling just how quickly and how far she would unravel, if not before the next general election, then during and after the fateful 2023 polls.
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