Last Thursday, the outgoing president of the Federal Republic, Mohammadu Buhari, conferred the highest national honour on the incoming president, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Something far more profoundly symbolic than the conferment of national honour took place. In spite of himself and the widespread disappointment with his tenure, General Buhari might have succeeded in laying the foundation for a new political order in Nigeria.
The way all this has come about may wrong foot even the most astute social scientist or patriotic political pundit. The social space abounds with such intellectual casualties. It is the way of all flesh to allow our prejudices and biases to impose their own schema on the outcome of events and to totalize what is still unfolding.
But history is not anybody’s favourite uncle. It obeys only its own schedule and punitive time frame. Those who have tried to alter its course, however heroically, have always brought severe retribution on themselves and their people.
There is a cruel and almost clinical symmetry to events unfolding in Nigeria that has left both partisans and naysayers gasping for breath. Thirty years after President Buhari’s military nemesis and bête noire, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, passed up the opportunity of charting a new political course for the nation through the cruel annulment of the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation and the subsequent evisceration of the winner, power is finally passing to a new generation of politicians led by a man who toiled against the annulment and who has been in the trenches against tyranny ever since.
It will be recalled that it was the selfsame General Buhari who first broke with the protocol of absolutism established by his military cohorts by conferring the highest national honour on the presumed winner of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election, MKO Abiola, in a dramatic change of course that stunned the entire nation a few years back.
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History will always vindicate the just. But it is always after a hard slog through the jungle of perfidy and treachery. Ordinarily, this profound resetting of the political clock of the nation ought to be a cause for epic celebration and much national jubilation.
But because it comes against a backdrop of fresh contradictions, maddening detours and diversions and of course the great cunning of history itself, the whole thing reminds one of what William Shakespeare had to say about the murder of Christopher Marlowe: A great reckoning in a small room.
Consequently, it feels like a damp squib to many of our compatriots rather than a cause for great jubilation and celebration. As a result, twenty four hours to the dawn of a new order in Nigeria, the mood among enlightened Nigerians is of a cautious wait and see and reluctant expectations rather than ululation. Rancorous litigations are still flying all over the place while the DSS is shouting itself hoarse about plots to truncate the orderly transfer of power.
Yet within the tribal ramparts, something more intriguing is taking place. While many of the most desperate ethnic opponents of the new president appear to have reconciled themselves to the inevitable, a mood of understated optimism has taken hold among the ancient Praetorian guard of Tinubu’s Yoruba constituency.
As the weeks wore on and the post-election status quo remains unyielding, the ferocious sabre-rattling among Tinubu’s most militant adversaries appear to be giving way to a sober pragmatism and canny realpolitik. There are many who have reached the conclusion that Tinubu’s ascendancy may well be a divine instrument of breaking the deadlock of hegemonic blocs that has hobbled Nigeria’s post-independence developments.
But hegemonic animosities die hard indeed. All this has not completely eliminated the disconcerting and eerily pervasive feeling that something is not quite right, or that something nasty is about to happen, despite the surefooted and clinically coordinated programme of disengagement by the federal authorities.
In many circles, there is the deep-seated fear that elements of the old deep state that are not happy with developments may be poised to cause mayhem. Others finger agents of separatist movements and other ethnic irredentists as waiting in the wings to unleash violence and chaos at the appointed hour. In an extreme instance of counterproductive and ultimately destructive self-isolation, IPOB has already placed its catchment region on a war-footing.
It must be conceded that these morbid threats, pervasive fears and apprehensions are a reflection of the geopolitical contradictions that drive the nation’s electoral fortunes and its post-election political reality. To get a good analytic grip of the development, we need to go back to the last presidential election.
While many compatriots appeared to be completely pissed off by the lacklustre performance of the Buhari administration, they did not consider the irredeemable PDP as a worthy alternative. The Labour Party which seemed to have galvanized the national opposition to the ruling party soon dissolved into an ethnic and religious rampart which made it a very dangerous customer in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation.
In the event, it was the candidate with the least polarizing baggage, the least divisive package and the least unified and cohesive opposition in the countervailing ethnic and religious redoubts that prevailed. The incoming president’s mandate does not boast of an overwhelming pan-Nigerian endorsement, but it is the only one that cuts through the strongholds despite suffering the equivalent of an electoral carpet-bombing in the South East.
As this column warned while the wagon-cycling was unfolding in the east, this kind of “total voting” was bound to provoke similar electoral neurosis in other nationalities with the possibility of poisoning the post-election atmosphere and the evaporation of early national reconciliation. This is precisely what has happened.
It can now be seen why given the circumstances and the obvious mismanagement of ethnic diversity by the Buhari administration, no overwhelming pan-Nigerian mandate was possible in the last presidential election. In fact, it can be seen in retrospect that Nigeria narrowly avoided a major ethnic and religious conflagration. The threat has not completely evaporated.
For a moment, it would appear as if some hardliners in the inner sanctuary of General Buhari’s Ottoman presidency were bent on forcing some confrontation until the ball was miraculously dropped on that historic night of the party convention. We have to thank once again the group of northern governors who demonstrated enough presence of mind and acuity of strategic awareness to see through the dangerous self-entrapment.
If the hard men who briefly held Buhari’s attention had gone ahead with the obtuse insistence on fielding a northern ticket after eight years of the Buhari presidency, they would have succeeded in uniting the Southern elements in a confrontation with the north which could have put a question mark on the continuing viability of the nation. Luckily for Nigeria, it turned out to be the Moor’s last hiccup.
It can now be seen why in such desperate circumstances of bitter polarization and animus among the political elite, the very idea of perfect elections or a sweeping pan-Nigerian mandate is a delusionary mirage. Perfect elections or pan-national mandate can only arise from substantial elite consensus or in a revolutionary situation in which diverse nationalities achieve organic cohesion capable of imposing their vision and will on the nation.
The notion of a pure democracy is a pious fiction anywhere in the world. In fractious multi-ethnic and multi-religious nations bristling with atavistic antagonism, elections are neither a tea party nor a street carnival. They are disguised warfare, often with the possibility of the real thing erupting at a short notice. Disputed presidential elections have led to civil wars in many countries on the continent, most memorably in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Congo Brazzaville, Algeria and briefly in Kenya.
In all likelihood, our former colonial masters and international do-gooders, now showing belated awareness of the Pandora Box of active volcano they have foisted on Africa in the name of nationhood and its capacity for apocalyptic eruptions when mildly vexed, might have come to the conclusion that any election in volatile African nations whose outcome shows substantial believability and compliance with state mood and balance of electoral forces is preferable to elites coming to blows.
In an emerging world order in which western hegemony is threatened by new global powers, in which dollar sovereignty is being fiercely contested by new players in the world market and in which simultaneous conflicts are draining the west of its once seemingly inexhaustible resources, the western powers and old champions of textbook democracy can hardly afford to add Africa to their current troubulous portfolio.
As the unfolding tragedy in Sudan has shown, age long animosities need only a spark before the state implodes taking the entire society with it. Observers note that despite numerous coups, insurrections, war in Darfur and assassinations, the last time street fighting actually occurred in Khartoum was in 1898 when the then Major General H.H Kitchener( Later Field Marshal Kitchener) came to avenge the murder of General Charles Gordon, aka Chinese Gordon, by the Mahdi and his followers.
One of the great ironies of Nigeria’s and Fourth Republic and post-military dispensation is the fact that General Buhari has turned out to be the greatest disruptor of the electoral status quo, despite being an archconservative and even mildly reactionary in ideological outlook. Wielding state power with maximum severity and ruthless efficiency when it matters most to him even while feigning a coy innocence, Buhari has been able to cage the old selectorate and put their nose out of joints.
The general from Daura was paying back his old tormentors who put him through the electoral meat grinder for twelve years. By refusing to have any truck with them, particularly the most malignantly self-important and obstreperous among them, Buhari made it impossible for them to act with a unified objective and without the critical oxygen of state power.
When they acted in genuine pan-Nigerian concert and with the backing of state power, they were unstoppable, determining who ruled Nigeria and for how long. This time around, they went into electoral battle without any credible candidate and with their ranks completely decimated by state attrition. One of them, having sated his hunger and slaked his thirst, proclaimed that he had found the revolutionary messiah to rule the nation in a mendacious conman.
The stalemate of the selectorate allowed a third force to pass through the middle to create a new hegemonic coalition at the centre. It all began in 2015 when a coalition of contraries and countervailing tendencies led by the long-forsaken general from Daura took the nation by storm. Four years later, an attempt by the old selectorate to unseat Buhari was brusquely shrugged off by the taciturn former infantry officer. Now, and in spite of himself, he has succeeded in imposing a new hegemonic order on the nation.
In the event, the portents and scary prognostications which have accompanied the last elections and the turbulent aftermath may well be the birth pains of a new political order. It is a brittle triumph. There is still a lot to play for and it is a situation which will test the mettle of the new commander in chief. Luckily, he has proved himself a master bridge builder and elite conciliator.
Let us not deceive ourselves. Nigeria is in a very parlous condition, economically, politically and spiritually. What we have achieved so far is to prevent a collision of shrines. But going forward, the crunch will come when it comes to laying before the entire nation a vision of a structurally harmonious and egalitarian society which requires a substantial buy in from all the critical sectors of the nation. It is morning yet on creation day in post-military Nigeria.
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