By Mohammed Adamu

NOTE: Four years ago –precisely November 17, 2016 after the election of Donald Trump- I had recalled, in the ‘Postscript’ to a piece I wrote titled ‘Now That Trump Is President’, what George Bush Senior once said at the 1988 New Orleans Convention Hall after accepting the Republican nomination: “This is America” he had said, “a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky”. But I had said also, with a pinch of ironic undertone, that now with the election of a character like Donald Trump, you wondered where now were the ‘thousand points of light’? Or where was the ‘Star spangled banner’ -that America would risk such terrible electoral misadventure with Donald Trump as president.

In fact in an earlier piece titled ‘The Trump-Hillary Conundrum’ I had grimly painted the electoral dilemma America had inadvertently (?) put herself  into –namely having to choose then, between the ‘devil’ (ably personified by a hawkish Hillary) and the ‘deep blue sea’ (eminently made flesh by the hobgoblin of an enfant terrific Trump). There was, I said, “more to ‘fear’ than ‘cheer’ in the dangerous ‘choice’ between a Trump or a Hillary. One I said was a “barefaced-lying, rabidly bigoted xenophobic out to bite the world” and the other “a stealthily hawkish, two-faced she-devil waiting to mount chivalry charge on the world”. For the so-called ‘bastion of democracy’, I said there was not even “the luxury of settling for that proverbial ‘lesser evil’ -because in reality each of the two ‘evils’ (was) equally as fiendish.”

Now that Trump is on the menu again, I serve you this week, a re-jigged ‘Now That Trump Is President’. It reminds us that Hillary Clinton too had been –almost as sore- a loser, as Trump. She had, had her grumbling, well-nigh anarchic ‘mob’ on the streets too disturbing America about her ‘simple majority’, which was an indictment of the ‘electoral college system’. Such unremitting source of agony –to have the ‘vote’ and yet lose the ‘count’; to win the ‘ballot’ and to be left with an empty ‘ballot box’? Hillary did not leave the scene as a gallant ‘democrat’. She was almost taken out ‘kicking and screaming’.

But ‘Now That Trump Is President’ had also asked the question: ‘having escaped a pax-Hillarica, by rejecting Hillary, could Americans also survive a ‘pax-Trumpica’? An answer which the Americans now know the hard way! Happy reading:

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‘Now that Trump is president’ (Nov/17/16)

In his November 5, 1952 concession speech, after losing the presidential election, America’s Adlai Stevenson was asked how much it pained that a dye- in-the-wool politician like him had lost to a neophyte, General Dwight Eisenhower (rtd). In reply Stevenson had merely repeated Abraham Lincoln’s answer to a similar question: that he “felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark”; and that although he felt “too old to cry”, yet “it hurt too much to laugh”.

The lesson is simple: that in politics as in almost every endeavor of life there is time for everything: time to ‘cry’ and time to ‘laugh’; but most importantly time to suck up, and carry on. And we had thought that Hillary Clinton, in spite of being woman and essentially frail, had managed to pass the test of the Lincoln macho-ness –not to afford to ‘laugh’ in the pangs of a stubbed political toe, yet not to hopelessly ‘cry’ either in redress of a deed that’s already done.

We had thought that Hillary had kept the Lincoln anguished-grit of teeth to suck up the pain of electoral defeat, rather than weep to lay bare the reverence of the vaunted ferment of ‘political age’ and maturity which is the Clintons’ cherished heirloom. But no. We are told that on the night that the writing was all over the electoral wall with the foreboding of a technical defeat, Hillary was all her feminine, ‘frailty’ self –hysterical with the thought of losing to her arch enemy, Trump. They said that she had acted quite un-Al Gore-like, yelling, kicking and –screaming? And maybe that is why Hillary should never be president. She is a frail woman of precipitate action. Which is not to suggest that Trump may not even be worse.

And whether in times of great tribulation a Hillary or a Trump will be quicker to seek instant release from the coded buttons of nuclear bombs, is what the world may never get to know. But whether Trump will do that, we may, sooner or later, know. And what is Hillary saying? If my popular vote will not take me to the White House, let me take it to the streets to work America up. The Hillary majority –like Mussolini’s mob of Italy- is all over the streets of major cities in America, ironically singing not the popular refrain: ‘we shall overcome’; but humming in the muffled tone of the bad-loser, wondering foolishly ‘why should Trump win?’

But isn’t there always a way that cookies normally crumble, especially in America? In politics –as indeed in all other areas of human endeavor- whatever goes around they say, will always come around. Having clinched the popular vote, Hillary should have no anger reserved for the ‘electoral majority’. At least that majority had fulfilled its own righteousness, by rejecting Trump; -even though for many in that so-called ‘majority’, it cannot be said that by rejecting Trump, they wanted to be understood as accepting Hillary.

The system has never been as unfair to the American electorate. This is about the first time in the history of America that voters had to choose between two equal evils. Trump had his support base cut out from day one. His supporters are either racists or they did not give a damn about the emergence of a white-racist president. But most importantly, the Trump supporters –unlike Hillary’s- were self-motivated and ready to rumble with Trump. No amount of Hillary-campaign would deplete this evil Trump-pool. Yet the problem was with the other ‘evil pool’ –namely the Hilary collection of reluctant voters-, half of whom felt stuck with a Hillary they were neither motivated to vote for, nor did they have the motivation to vote against. Many would have wished that the Democrats had fielded a primate with an American flag in his hands; and by God Trump would not have made it.

The many American voters who stayed back home on election day, did not do so only to protest Trump’s candidacy. Some did so because even as they disliked what Trump stands for, yet they hated what Hillary has always represented: namely the hawkiest part of the American war-mongering industrial complex –which, like the Trump-mob too, was waiting in bated breath to form a government and to have a rumble their own way. In the end, America has escaped a pax-Hillarica yes, by rejecting Hillary; but will she survive a ‘pax-Trumpica’? Already he is obsessed with the idea of  a ‘white-only-America’, with he (Trump) as her ‘avenging angel’!

Thomas Jefferson, one of the leaders of the American Revolution, was also the nation’s third president. And that was after having been governor of Virginia and a distinguished Secretary of State. Jefferson in fact could easily have asked for monuments in his name even while he walked the earth –and remember he was the author of the Declaration of Independence- but he did not.

Jefferson chose instead a simple epitaph for his grave which in fact excluded even the fact that he had once been governor, Secretary of State or President. His epitaph simply read “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia”.

It’s been over 200 years since then, and bang, bang comes a Donald Trump, a man with no antecedent for distinguished service to the fatherland but who is determined to lower the ante of patriotic duty. Trump wants to build a ‘wall’ between people. And already he has in mind a ‘monument’, which he suggests should be called ‘The Trump Wall’. And you can tell that indeed between Jefferson and Trump, a lot of water has passed under the bridge.

By Gimba Kakanda 

Behind Nigeria’s problems, over the decades, have been the conspiracies of successive political elites to inflate and politicize population data for partisan agenda. Since those controversial censuses of the early 1960s, the credibility of population estimates across state boundaries has played out as toxic fights, especially between the North and the South, with the former singled out, although unfairly, for tampering with national data to maintain political dominance.

This generational distrust hasn’t only left behind a country where politicians are in a contest to exaggerate the population of their political strongholds to attract fat revenue allocations from Abuja, but also one with vastly undocumented citizens. As Nigeria loses monopoly of force to terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and cybercriminals on a rampage across its territory and cyberspace, this inadequacy of biometric data is telling.

The past governments all rolled out fancy policies to document and manage citizen data, which were more successful in disappearances of billions from the national treasury. The trending call for citizens and legal residents to acquire national identity and have it linked to their mobile phone numbers, is a reminder of the past and it’s easy to see why the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Pantami, is jumping from one media outlet to another to emphasize the difference this time around.

Last Friday, on a Channels TV evening programme, Politics Today, Pantami was reminded of the hurdles in front of citizens and the staff of National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) in this rush to obtain National Identification Number (NIN). The February 9 deadline, the anchor said, was too short, and the minister instantly clarified that the announcement for citizens to have their NIN linked to their phone numbers was made in February 2020. He also explained that the protocols set aside for potential registrants were being grossly violated by citizens attempting to cut corners, and attributed that to the congestion at the registration centres. The consequences are the reason for that short-lived strike by NIMC employees in the field.

Looking past Pantami’s passion to execute a project likely to sabotage his fellow northerners’ political capitals—based on the largely bigoted conspiracy theory that the North inflated their census numbers for electoral advantage—one can also excuse the attitude of everyday Nigerians towards NIN. The responses to the deadlines are classical conditioning sustained by the previous governments’ insincerity in such projects. Since 1979, when General Olusegun Obasanjo-led military government set up the Department of National Civic Registration to manage the nation’s identity card system, Nigeria’s bids to build a credible database were unsurprising wastes of resources.

In 2003, I also registered for the national identity card in Suleja, then under the supervision of Directorate of National Civic Registration (DNCR), and waited in vain to acquire the card promised. My friends and I only got to acquire slips, and the project, as claimed by the government, had over 50 million Nigerians registered. When NIMC was established in 2007 to integrate the existing databases and register more citizens, as its founding Act says, our idea of such “integration” wasn’t rendering the previous identity “slips” invalid.

Nigeria has never taken seriously the task of preserving citizen data, and even basic decade-old records of citizens obtained by government institutions are often difficult to access in a country at the centre of a security crisis. But what has set this renewed call for registration apart, aside from the emphasis on its digital nature, is that, without it, Nigeria is unlikely to bounce back from its quick descent into a criminals’ playground. This bid for comprehensive biometric information of citizens must be treated as a dying nation’s gasp for oxygen, and that’s also our best option in checkmating these multiplying bands of criminals.

Nigeria has also often been defined by the statistical projections of foreign organizations, but local politicians are also quick to question unfavourable rankings where they’ve no superior or alternative data to present. On his Twitter in October 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari referred to the data “developed abroad by the World Bank, IMF and other foreign bodies” as “wild estimates that bear little relation to the facts on the ground.” He also added that “We can only plan realistically when we have reliable data.” But, without harmonized registers of citizens, his preferred data are only as factual as the foreign-generated statistics he disregards.

The choices before Nigeria aren’t as simple as they seem. We are stuck between the consequences of violating coronavirus regulations and underestimating the centrality of biometrics in rescuing Nigeria from the gaping maws of insecurity. The virus hasn’t neutralised kidnap-for-ransom, cybercrime, banditry and insurgency which have stripped Nigeria of its sovereign integrity, with our hopeless and clueless politicians compelled to negotiate peace with bloodthirsty criminals. So, it’s hollow to refer to the pandemic in arguing that the conditional NIN registration is ill-timed.

Despite being victims of past governments’ historical nonchalance in, and subsequent abandonment of, ambitious identity management projects, Nigerians are not ones to willingly submit themselves for stressful exercises if they’ve nothing to lose. When BVN was first announced, the response was slow until banks threatened to restrict unlinked accounts. This time, the motivation to present oneself for NIN registration is the fear of having one’s mobile phone number barred, which is a clever understanding of Nigerian psychology.

The convergences at NIN registration centres are in nowhere different from the daily gatherings at Balogun market and Wuse market, and can be easily coordinated in adherence to the social distancing protocols. The short-lived strike of NIMC staff is also a desired warning shot for Pantami and his team, even though, as revealed in his Channels TV interview, the striking staff did not make known their grievances and that he was unaware of the underscored infrastructure deficit stalling data collections.

For instance, ahead of the United States elections last November, about 10 million Americans had contracted COVID-19, and 230,000 had already died with it. But the significance of the elections couldn’t be dimmed by a devastating pandemic that had left the country’s healthcare system wrecked and the political leadership also vulnerable and dangerous. Like America, Nigeria only needs to rely on the guidance of its disease control agency—and Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has been impressive and proactive in this venture—to devise safe and orderly means of conducting this biometric documentation.

The escalated breakdown in Nigeria’s internal security is itself a pandemic and bound to outlast this disease that originated from Wuhan. Nigerians can’t afford to relegate either unless there’s a secret aspiration to wake up without a country someday. NCDC and NIMC must work hand-in-hand to disinfect and preserve Nigeria, respectively, because both agencies have been tasked with preempting Nigeria’s collapse. The past few months, from the theatrics over the distribution of palliatives to the sights of hoodlums disrupting #ENDSARS protests, underlined this older pandemic that’s the lack of harmonized social registers of citizens and legal residents.

Since renaming his station – Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy, which was once simply Ministry of Communications, Pantami has been obsessed with the immensity and potentials of Nigeria’s digital markets. The minister has been stuck in a game theory with criminal beneficiaries of Nigeria’s dysfunction, and it’s easy to predict their payoff to determine his Nash equilibrium, and that’s when a fingerprint or phone number is enough to track down a criminal.

• Kakanda is an Abuja-based public affairs analyst.