As his reforms take longer than expected in yielding fruit, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must by now be accustomed to being abused by his opponents, or constantly hectored if that opponent is the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC). He could, like his predecessor, choose to be indifferent to the campaigns against his administration and person, or he could choose to be impatient and intolerant. Fortunately for him, despite the trenchancy of the opposition, he has chosen to respond to the attacks with the equanimity of a true democrat. At every turn, such as at last week’s Democracy Day celebrations, he boasts of his democratic credentials, and he is justified to exult; but he is from now on fated to thrive or perish on that scaffold. He spent his first year in office laying a great foundation for the future, resetting the economy, paying off critical debts, retuning the country’s finances, and turning his gaze on some legacy infrastructural projects. Despite the relevance of these policies and programmes, none of them has definitively yielded direct or immediate benefits to an increasingly famished population.
Unfortunately for the administration, only the president’s die-hard supporters and knowledgeable economists think he has done the right thing or is headed in the right direction. Of course, he and his team believe that without the resetting of foundations which he has embarked on, the future would be fraught with extreme danger. They are all probably right, but his critics and abusers, particularly the hungry and the dispossessed battling with life-and-death situations will remain unimpressed, if not disgusted. They will get testier as hunger deepens and as the months pile on without a significant amelioration of their conditions. The president’s salesmen may not have sold his reforms and efforts with panache, but their nervousness does not diminish what he has accomplished in one dizzying year. His confidence in his plans and policies is infectious, though minified by incomprehensible reversals; but until his plans and policies begin to translate into a substantial softening of the hardship many are experiencing, his attitude would be viewed as intransigent, World Bank/IMF-inspired, or even altogether incompetent.
In his second year, he will gradually discover, as many great leaders have experienced, that he will need forces higher than he is to make the economic weather inclement. He has planned and promoted policies, but like wartime leaders, he must hope that the elements will flow in his favour. He probably already knows that, especially what it means for unseen forces to coalesce to someone’s advantage, as his election itself demonstrated last year to the consternation of his opponents. And as president who must take responsibility for virtually everything wrong or well with Nigeria, seeing that the buck stops at his desk, he must be wary of espousing celestial interventions or giving such interventions precedence over his efforts. Overall, in the second year, he must instill bigger confidence in his measures, work doubly harder than he has promoted, and make far fewer mistakes and reversals than he has done so far. The work clearly strains him, as some of his infrequent and unexplained trips overseas suggest, but fortunately for him, the strain is countervailed by the pure, almost unearthly sense of joy and accomplishment he feels being in Aso Villa where instead of continuing to postulate from the sidelines and be rebuffed or even rebuked, he now makes things happen.
He has a listening ear, and will in his second year continue to read all sorts of analyses, both foreign and local, about his social, economic and political programmes, with many of those essays ignorant, some of them unsparing, and others encouraging. Rather than take umbrage, the analyses must serve as an opportunity for him to receive a fresh perspective from outside experts not beholden to him or his government. One year is more than enough to steady his policy and administrative gait. He should now proceed more deliberately and surefootedly, be less given to impulsiveness, and be cleverer at consulting widely and building consensuses. It probably took a few months to convince himself he had won the presidency he once dreamt of. Now he has the diadem, and he must now walk it, talk it, and more loftily cast visionary glances at the future of his presidency. He has gloated about his democratic convictions, but it must never be at the expense of letting his opponents or even organised labour trample the rule of law underfoot. During last week’s Democracy Day dinner, Senator Shehu Sani lauded him as the father and funder of Nigeria’s recent protest movements. The senator is partly right, but the president has the constitution, not sentiments, to guide him. Besides, the shoe is on the other foot now, and he has more than 200 million people to lead. He must find the wisdom and resolve to balance patience with firmness in dealing with those who allow themselves considerable latitude with the law.
More importantly, sensing that the people he leads have become increasingly impatient, especially as their misery appears to be compounded by the administration’s policies and programmes, it is time the president adopted a more radical approach both in his public engagements with the people, despite the occasional sneers, and in his measures. He needs to orchestrate a massive and overwhelming nationwide return to the farms in his second year, including deploying prisoners to designated farm settlements, and he should find the sword to slay the insecurity ogre hindering that return. The war against insecurity, as it is currently waged, will take far too long. Other than his kerfuffle with the states over the status of local governments, the president has seemed to cede, at least publicly, to national lawmakers the responsibility of championing political reforms. Yes, plausible deniability comes to the fore here, but whether this ‘indirect’ approach is also the wise thing to do in a polity operating an unsuitable and seemingly calcified constitution remains to be seen.
It is doubtful whether President Tinubu can postpone doing something about the justice system. It is overdue for reform, both in the appointment of judicial officers and the administration of criminal justice system itself. He has started by dramatically augmenting the wages of judicial officers; he now needs to do more by retuning the practice of law in Nigeria and dealing effectively with the politicisation of the courts in the states and, in some instances, their wilful and humiliating subordination to governors. Simultaneously, the president must find ways of cajoling the national legislature, despite the independence of the three arms of government, into being less flagrant and provocative in their expenditures and lifestyles. It won’t be easy, given the near unanimity of the lawmakers in inspiring and defending their luxurious lifestyle. President Tinubu needs to reconnect them with the reality of living in Nigeria. Asking him to prune the legislature into a unicameral assembly may be farfetched, for it would amount to asking the lawmakers to fall on their swords, but getting them to be more prudent in their spending might be a conceivable request to make.
President Tinubu’s predecessors did little to entrench democracy in Nigeria, starting from the hyperbolic Olusegun Obasanjo era, through the sedate Goodluck Jonathan period, and, worse, through the hybrid and detached Muhammadu Buhari presidency. During the June 12 Democracy Day dinner, speaker after speaker lionised the president’s contribution to the revival of democracy in Nigeria. He deserves the praise; in fact, it is believed that his contributions have been understated. He may in this wise be anxious to live up to the expectation of being the first real progressive and democrat to occupy Aso Villa. However, his presidency will be challenged by the country’s religious and ethnic ossifications as well as by the nuanced fact that democracy or elections alone are not sufficient in putting the best man in office. It is, therefore, not too early in his second year to begin rethinking the subject of leadership recruitment. The inattention paid to this issue nearly undid the country in the First Republic. It can undo the Fourth Republic if it continues to be treated cavalierly.
