The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Redressing counter insurgency paradigm

    Redressing counter insurgency paradigm

    The word ‘counterinsurgency’ is used broadly in the context of this piece to mean the state’s fight against threats to national security, whether it involves Boko Haram/ISWAP, unknown gunmen, or bandits/herdsmen. All three major threats are sponsored by shadowy financiers and politicians with sinister objectives, and are fairly well organised. Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP) is a Sunni jihadist group that broke away from Boko Haram sometime after the latter affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). United or divided, the hydra-headed monster has only been degraded, not defeated. Its ultimate goal is a caliphate whose short-run locus is the Northeast. The unknown gunmen group has projected itself as the fighting arm of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), an organisation dedicated to the establishment of independent, not a confederate, Biafra encompassing the Southeast geopolitical zone. Its fairly well-oiled campaign has been vicious and relentless.

    The third group is loosely framed in banditry and herdsmen militias, with a number of emergent spinoffs such as the Lakurawa and Mahmuda militia groups. This agglomerative group does not project jihadism but espouses and unifies in themselves the ruthless despoliation of the Dacoits of India/Myanmar, and the genocidal ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Arab nomadic Janjaweed operating in the Darfur region of Sudan, Chad, and speculatively perhaps in Yemen. While the core North of Nigeria flirts dangerously with the first and third groups, the Southeast romances the second group. What has kept Nigeria from keeling over is the restraining and even countervailing influence of the few oases of peace and stability in some parts of Nigeria. Indeed, it is not even clear that the federal government, starting with the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency and on to the present, has a clear and holistic understanding of the catastrophic threats facing the country. So far, going by the stridency of the warnings they have continued to issue the country from time to time, the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Christopher Musa, and the Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen Olufemi Oluyede, have seemed to have a more solid grasp of how close the country is to apocalypse.

    One of the results of the shallow understanding of the existential threats facing Nigeria is the government’s inability to properly calibrate its fight against the jihadist and separatist groups already fragmenting like a cluster bomb and inching closer to metastasising. Publicly, the government has announced a two-pronged approach to combat the looming disaster. First, it has tried to identify, expose and prosecute the sponsors of the threats, most of whom are Nigerians. The shadowy sponsors deploy economic and Islamic ideological reasons for their sponsorship. Second, the government has also tried to combat the centrifugal forces through textbook counterinsurgency methods, some of it kinetic and non-kinetic. In the end, due to an incomplete understanding of the threats facing the country, the government’s efforts have been largely desultory. As a result, the threats are multiplying, stretching the country’s security agencies thin, endangering democracy, and making the fight costly and increasingly disruptive.

    When Boko Haram began, there was no affiliation with ISIL. But because the fight against the group was incompetent and disorganised, it became protracted, enabling it to seek affiliations and finding one in the Middle East. Then, the group split into two dangerous monsters instead of one. As the Northeast crisis dragged on and on, and seeing how fairly shambolic the counterinsurgency operations had become, informers and collaborators proliferated and began whittling down counterinsurgency operations, and ambitious and militant adventurers in the other regions saw how easily money could be made by organising themselves into non-state actors without fear of consequence. Now, a whole economy estimated to be running into billions of naira has developed around insurgency, banditry and separatist organisations. Even counterinsurgency operations are reportedly not immune to financial shenanigans. The fight against sponsors of militant groups needed to become a crusade, instead it has become farcical. Counterinsurgency operations needed to be intensified and fierce, instead it has largely remained a thrust and defend pirouette lacking in the bite and relentlessness major military campaigns are noted for.

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    The paradigm has to change. The back and forth of the government is a reflection of indecision, confusion and poverty of debate. At one moment, they speak of taking the fight to the insurgents; at another moment they publicly announce, to the satisfaction and relief of the insurgents, that kinetic methods alone cannot end the menace, thereby encouraging militias to try and outlast the government. In short, while the diagnosis may sometimes be fairly sensible, the treatment has been largely shambolic. Whether the government likes it or not, given the upheaval in the Sahel, the whole Nigerian edifice is alarmingly close to caving in. It is, therefore, time to take the fight to the insurgents and morphing militias which threaten the peace and stability of the country. It is time to quit pussyfooting around with loose talk of non-kinetic methods of deradicalisation and reintegration of terrorists. These non-kinetic methods reflect a poor understanding of the nature and trajectory of the terrorist organisations threatening the country. It is time to first defeat the insurgents and other non-state actors before thinking of deradicalisation or reintegration.

    Nigeria’s predicted collapse is not inevitable if the government has a deep and convincing understanding of the country’s existential threats. It is assumed they have studied why states collapse, and have benefited from contemporary examples from Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, Syria, Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, among others to learn from. Most of the threats to Nigeria are region-specific, implying the recklessness and complicity of traditional, business and political elites of those places. Regardless of the influences of these powerful elites, which can disquiet the ruling party in a democracy anchored on elections, it is time the government showed that the lessons it learnt from other state failures are not superfluous. It is time to pursue insurgents without any let up until they are destroyed. No fits and starts. It is also time to mobilise the country’s security forces through large-scale recruitment of troops in order to fight this battle once and for all. To shirk this responsibility is to predispose the country to eventual and inevitable collapse. Insurgent groups fragmented and metamorphosed, and banditry and separatism have lasted so long because the militants sense national weakness. It is time to change the paradigm if the country is to survive.

  • Bandit Ado Alero pontificates

    Bandit Ado Alero pontificates

    Ado Alero, a bandit kingpin, continues to mock the country and thumb his nose at the authorities. Declared wanted by the police since 2020 and with a N5 million bounty on his head, he has casually entered into and exited peace treaties with the authorities, the latest of which was about two weekends ago, according to a post on social media. It is not even his Houdini act that astounds the public, or his reputation for violence; it is his insouciant disregard for public feelings and anguish. Turbaned as Sarkin Fulani in Tsafe town in 2022 by the Emir of Yandoton Daji Emirate in Zamfara State, Aliyu Marafa,  Adamu Aliero-Yankuzo, aka Ado Alero, has since continued to pontificate in the presence, as always, of security agents during what they describe as peace meetings.

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    In the said social media post, he lashed out at the government, saying: “I’m calling on the Nigerian government, for God’s sake. In light of the current situation, they should stop referring to us as terrorists while claiming that they have built schools for bandits or provided us with education. They should also stop saying that bandits have been rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, which is simply not true.” In the said video said to have been shot at a peace meeting somewhere in Danmusa LGA in Katsina State, the brash and cocky bandit leader also cautioned the government to stop lying that the rehabilitation and reintegration of repentant terrorists were ongoing. No such programmes were ongoing anywhere, he fumed. In other words, the bandit leader wants peace on his own terms. Worse, it is now incontestable that the whereabouts of bandit leaders in the Northwest, just as herdsmen ravaging the Middle Belt, are not secret. So, what kind of game is really going on in those regions? If Katsina State could publicly disavow negotiations with terrorists, could the federal government conceivably be conducting peace talks with the bandits? Indeed, is there any desire to end the wars?

  • Tinubu, Wike and APC

    Tinubu, Wike and APC

    President Bola Tinubu can’t seem to resist taking a dig at the floundering Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). In his inaugural State of the Union address before a joint session of the National Assembly on June 12, the president suggested that the opposition should put their house in order instead of crying wolf over one-party state. “It is indeed a pleasure to witness you in such disarray,” he quipped. But a more telling quip came when he commissioned a road project undertaken by FCT minister Nyesom Wike. He said: “We have somebody in Nyesom Wike. He’s not a member of my party, not yet, but the day he changes his mind and registers with progressives, we will welcome him because we will enjoy him singing ‘as e dey pain them, e dey sweet us’.”

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    The president may be openly enamoured of Mr Wike, but as long as the FCT minister can continue to engage successfully in the most disingenuous political straddle ever in Nigeria, nothing will compel him to make a choice between his concupiscent attraction to the APC and his cuckolding of the PDP. It suits his unorthodox politics to have his cake and eat it too. The PDP is incensed to be openly and contemptuously cuckolded, and the APC is beside itself having a piece of the Casanova. But with two lovers flanking him, Mr Wike is delirious. There is indication the PDP is nearing the end of its tether, and may soon damn the consequences and get rid of the FCT minister; but they are sobered by the fear that it might amount to cutting their nose to spite their face. Yet they must do something.

    If the APC can tease nature to keep the PDP disquieted until a little later, or at least until it sunders irreparably, then they would feel accomplished. It is useless guessing how the dice would roll. After all, all sides to the ongoing farce know they are gambling, and will continue their indulgence until the crisis comes to a head sooner or later.

  • The Fubara/Rivers snafu defies resolution

    The Fubara/Rivers snafu defies resolution

    Before May 29, some Rivers State indigenes entertained high hopes that the suspended Rivers State governor Siminalayi Fubara would be reinstated. Since 1999, May 29 has become symbolic in Nigeria’s political calendar. It was, therefore, expected that President Bola Tinubu would be inspired by that symbolism to end the proclamation of a state of emergency in the state. The suspension was, however, not lifted. Newspapers then gave wing to stories of Mr Fubara’s reinstatement on June 12 as a fitting gift to Rivers to mark Democracy Day. Indeed, days before, after visiting the president in Lagos, the governor had enabled stories of imminent restoration of his governorship. That also didn’t happen. The governor, not to say his aides and supporters whom he has begun to restrain from their customary loquaciousness and cantankerousness, may begin getting desperate as time goes on.

    That would be a mistake. First, after privately but unsuccessfully energising agitations to defeat the emergency proclamation, Mr Fubara later expected that somehow, by some political sculduggery, he would be restored in less than a month. It was obvious he missed the real reasons for his suspension: the impression he gave that he was above the law, that he could defy and subjugate the legislature, and also determine what parts of the Supreme Court judgement he would comply with, redact or implement with considerable abridgement. The federal government simply read mutiny into his doings and statements, especially when he began to caress amateur revolutionaries clumsily borrowing from the rule book of pipeline sabotage. To secure reinstatement, he would need to prove fealty to the constitution and the rule of law, and demonstrate by words and actions that he had a lofty appreciation of the two concepts.

    In many respects, however, Mr Fubara is not cut from that cloth of deep cogitations. He has a distorted comprehension of the rule of law, and has not shown indication of any readiness to take lessons on, or abide with, the provisions of the constitution he took oath to execute, in fact justifying his aggression and defiance on the grounds of the democratic malfeasance and excesses of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister Nyesom Wike. His peace moves have so far been desultory, reflecting his desperation rather than his conviction. In April, in company with a few Southwest governors and political leaders, he had audience with his nemesis Mr Wike in the search for peace. His host reflected upon that meeting on April 18 and hinted at a subsequent media chat where he holds flamboyant and sometimes inquisitorial court that he was unsure he saw genuineness in the governor’s intentions. Despite being guarded in his comment on Mr Fubara’s shuttle diplomacy, if not subtly intransigent, Mr Wike has nonetheless been more perceptive.

    As part of his peace efforts, the suspended governor has since gone on, perhaps symbolically as his enemies argued, to direct his supporters to stop complicating his rapprochement with his bitter mentor by their verbal fusillades. Mr Fubara has found it difficult restraining his fanatical supporters. They may comply with his wishes, but they have privately seethed with resentment. But needs must when the devil drives. The governor has intensified his peace moves, even travelling overseas to confer with the president during his last presidential trip. Their discussions have, however, been kept relatively sealed, with some unnamed sources suggesting that both parties were near a resolution. Nearly three months after emergency rule started, there are again suggestions that the whole crisis might be sorted out finally. Mr Wike’s supporters scorn the suggestions, insisting that it would amount to building something on nothing, for according to them they are yet to see any genuine moves for reconciliation. They are not any more right than Mr Fubara is pretentious.

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    President Tinubu, not Mr Fubara or Mr Wike, is probably in a quandary. Both the FCT minister and governor understand the travesty of their roles in the emergency proclamation, and are cocksure they are baiting each other. As the referee, however, the president may probably be truly under pressure to blow the whistle to end the game one way or the other. He could cut to the chase and decide to end emergency rule for the sake of democracy, or he might resist pressure and seem to side with Mr Wike whom he has consistently praised to the heavens for both his work ethic and loyalty. Whatever he decides and whenever he does it, it is unlikely he or the FCT minister can really mould the governor into what he is fundamentally not. Mr Fubara, this column has consistently maintained, is flawed, truly and tragically flawed. But so, too, is Mr Wike who consistently undermines his own position by his tactless and unedifying approach to his combat with the governor. The president can’t leave the problem unresolved; for even if he does not end emergency rule after three months or before the six-month expiry date in the first instance, he still cannot leave it intractable. No one envies the president. While he may find Mr Wike an asset, and has rhapsodised him repeatedly for being the ultimate civil servant, he cannot imbue his ministers’ style of combat with any nobility whatsoever, just as he cannot genetically reengineer Mr Fubara.

    What is certain for now is that the president will remain unperturbed by any consideration of round dates – three months anniversary or any other anniversary for that matter. It does not of course require any gift of clairvoyance to know that the president will end emergency rule sometime in the future; but given the seemingly irresoluble dilemmas he must contend with, he will do so with a heavy heart. In the end, the two combatants, complete with their agitated and instigative supporters, not to say the president who is at the moment on the horns of a dilemma, will call time on their wars and help sustain a tentative peace for the duration of Mr Fubara’s tenure. The Rivers crisis is a thoroughly bad case the combatants must both manage gingerly and learn to live with, even if it gives them nightmares.

  • Combustible Middle East

    Combustible Middle East

    To every perceptive international relations expert, it was clear that when the Palestinian group Hamas stepped on the tail of the Israeli adder two Octobers ago, the Middle East would change in ways no one could have predicted years ago. With Gaza’s Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Yemen’s Houthis serving as Iran’s proxy armies and imperial teeth in the region, Israel has picked up the gauntlet and struck all the proxies and their master severely in the past few months. But it is getting much worse, and the Middle East may change more radically than it has done so far.

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    Last week, by blitzing Iran’s nuclear and missile facilities and decapitating a section of its military leadership and injuring its national pride, Israel has in short declared war. Iran’s response, including how the tit for tat escalates, will determine just how fundamentally and radically the region will change. The notable thing about this latest fiery exchange is not who is right or wrong, but how immoderately Iran talked itself into a bind from which it cannot easily extricate itself, especially being encompassed by neighbours fearful of its imperial agenda than Israel’s zionism. Expect political tragedies, including endangered governments, at the end of this crisis as the situation gets very costly, bloody and messy in both Iran and Israel.

  • Nigerian democracy more threatened than acknowledged

    Nigerian democracy more threatened than acknowledged

    It is inaccurate to suggest that since 1999 most Nigerians have found their country’s democratic record fascinating. When ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo won the 1999 poll, the opposition secretly harboured the desire for poll abortion. When Umaru Yar’Adua won a fractious poll in 2007, admitting along the way its failings, condemnations rang out that democracy was troubled and undesirable. When Goodluck Jonathan won a bad-tempered poll in 2011, massacres broke out in parts of the North, with the losers indirectly instigating the crisis. And when Bola Tinubu won the poll in 2023, beneficiaries of past poll victories, including Chief Obasanjo who ruled between 1999 and 2007, worked for the abortion of the polls or, worse, a revolution. Incited and tormented, opposition supporters and religious and ethnic bigots seized the opportunity to call for a coup d’etat or revolution. Nigerian politicians and past or party leaders who advocated for drastic actions to undermine democracy because of defeat reflect the uncomfortable truth that despite achieving 26 years of unbroken democracy, the idea of civil government is yet to take firm root. To them, democracy is dispensable.

    In celebrating more than two and a half decades of democracy last month, a few Nigerian political leaders and commentators promised that democracy had come to stay. They are wrong. Neither the passage of time nor the purity of a democratic system promises the survival or longevity of democracy. Under the Weimer Republic system (a federal system comprising 18 states, and electing a president every seven years), Germany turned to democracy in 1918 after the disastrous World War I that led to the collapse of the Second Reich. Fifteen years later, in 1933, German democracy was gone, its death knell sounded by the events that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. As the election of Donald Trump is showing in the United States, with his relentless demyelination of the US constitution to wear it down in favour of the rule of the strongman, nothing guarantees the permanence of democracy. Russia also enjoyed a brief period with democracy, starting with a parliamentary election in 1989, and on to the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and 1996, Vladimir Putin in 2000 and 2004, and Dmitry Medvedev in 2008. By the time the presidency reverted to Mr Putin in 2012, after he had made Mr Medvedev a placeholder for four years, the office and all pretence to elections had turned Mr Putin into a dictator. Democracy in Russia simply suffered escalating denudation.

    Nigerians may be celebrating 26 years of democracy and promising themselves that it had come to stay, the truth is, however, a little different and more unnerving. Since the 2023 All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential poll victory, opposition leaders and closet ethnic champions have refused to accept defeat despite clear evidence they had no path to victory. They argued implausibly that the poll was grossly undermined by electoral fraud. They also turned a blind eye to the fact that the winner, President Tinubu, lost his base, Lagos, lost his predecessor’s base, Katsina, lost his presumed state, Osun, and equally lost Kano and Kaduna where he was backed by powerful party chieftains, all pointers to the integrity of the process. The controversy over Rivers votes did not indicate that the overall presidential election result would have been substantially different nationally. Nevertheless, the opposition has kept up a barrage of incendiary messages likely to be sustained in 2027. Worse, the opposition is laying the foundation for deploying ethnic and religious propaganda as well as threats of violence in the coming poll.

    If Nigeria surmounts the opposition’s general lack of sensitivity to the delicateness of its democracy and the overweening politics of the ruling party, it will still not guarantee the survival of democracy. Tragically, there is the axis of revolt going on in parts of the country: banditry is laying the Northwest waste, foreign and even local herdsmen attacks are pursuing their genocidal and land seizure goals in the Middle Belt, Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency is suffocating the Northeast, and unknown gunmen are bleeding and retarding the Southeast. These agents of destabilisation are all ramping up their attacks, and it may be safe to assume that should they not be sufficiently checked in the months ahead, they will constitute a huge threat to the integrity of the coming polls, not to talk of the peace and stability of the country as a whole. In fact there are days when it looked dangerously possible that both the political opposition and insurgents would have the upper hand. In an election year, if the tactics of the insurgents and the political opposition are not altered, it could spell disaster.

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    The problem of Nigerian democracy is not so much its imperfect constitution, which is admittedly more unitary than federal; the problem is the political elite who are unable to sensibly gauge the troubles assailing the rest of the world in order to moderate their often disruptive and fanatical quests for power. The US has abandoned its traditional role in the preservation of world order, thereby rendering the world less safe; the Sudan has imploded after uncertain steps in the direction of democracy, while the Darfur is ravaged by genocidal militias pursuing ethnic cleansing agenda; Somalia has proved difficult to weld back together after decades of chaos; Russia and Ukraine are at daggers drawn, with no hope of peace in sight; and the Middle East has in the past two years been turned into a killing field, threatening to get far worse than projected. If the global economy, now subjected to repeated stress, should tank and create the kind of conditions the world experienced in 1929, world peace would be significantly impacted. Unfortunately, the Nigerian political elite are unable to read the signs of the times. Their exuberance and general political dereliction have created a national powder keg waiting to explode at any moment.

    It is cold comfort that the Nigerian economy is on the path of recovery after hovering for years on the edge of collapse. But the fallout and harsh impact of economic crisis on the lower and middle classes have become fodder for the opposition. For a democracy that continues to teeter dangerously on the brink, it is catastrophic to see the Nigerian political elite engage in brinkmanship capable of triggering a huge explosion. In addition to the role being played by the political elite, it is also frightening to imagine all kinds of apocalyptic possibilities that could shatter a democracy undergirded by a weak constitution and even weaker institutions. Democracy is not an abstraction; it is in some ways the sum total of a people’s cultures and ambitions. It will not survive simply because it is 26 years old, or because the people wish it to survive, or because God so loved Nigeria. It will survive if the country would stop living in denial, and embark on erecting powerful guardrails for its survival, including creating a balanced and durable political structure that factor in ethnic, religious and regional differences.  

  • Trump, Elon Musk meltdown

    Trump, Elon Musk meltdown

    Last week’s spectacular, predictable and messy falling out between United States President Donald Trump and billionaire businessman Elon Musk has riveted the world like no other subject in the past one year. Nothing compares to it. Now, seedy details of drug addiction and titillating mention in sex dossiers are flying around on Mr Musk’s social media platform inappropriately named X (formerly Twitter). The businessman reportedly spent about $250m to help get Mr Trump and a majority Republican congress elected. In return, in addition to heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) programme, juicy federal contracts have continued to flow into Mr Musk’s space and electric vehicle projects. Beyond the surface frills, it is clear that Mr Trump’s inner circle exasperated by the boisterousness and obtrusion of Mr Musk had won the day. It is not clear yet how the fight would go down, but there are precedents elsewhere where billionaire businessmen close to the seat of power became too big for their britches.

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    In China, Jack Ma, the founder of the e-commerce giant, Alibaba, also ran his mouth in 2020 against state-owned banks which he described as having ‘pawn-shop mentality’. The repercussions were swift and damaging, including the cancellation of his $34.5bn stock market flotation of his Ant Group fintech giant, and presaged a general crackdown on China’s tech industry. When Russia’s Vladimir Putin kick-started his fight against the Russian oligarchs in 2000 and 2001, most of whom rose into financial prominence under former president Boris Yeltsin, it quickly degenerated into a brutal struggle. First to be hit was Vladimir Gusinsky who built his wealth from scratch, including owning a television station that skewered Mr Putin. The president ran him out of town. Next was Mikhail Khodorkovsky who bought the state-owned oil giant Yukos for a pittance. In 2005, he was jailed for nine years and then forced out of Russia. Considering his irreverence and abuse, there are already talks of forcing Mr Musk back to South Africa. Would Mr Trump go whole hog?

  • Military chiefs and the Sahel fire

    Military chiefs and the Sahel fire

    Gen. Michael Langley, Commander of United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), warned last month in Kenya that terrorists might be eying Nigeria and the West Africa coastline. According to him, “Attacks are resurging in the Lake Chad region as well, and extremist groups are growing more aggressive. The recent attacks in Nigeria and across the Sahel are deeply concerning. The scale and brutality of some of these incidents are troubling. So we’re monitoring this closely. One of the terrorists’ new objectives is gaining access to West African coasts. If they secure access to the coastline, they can finance their operations through smuggling, human trafficking, and arms trading.” He was not exaggerating. Nigerian military chiefs have also been warning about the fire in the Sahel spreading southwards. It is now clear that it is not just about jihadist goals, it is also about the region’s coastline and the economic advantages it confers.

    In May, while visiting Yobe State, the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), Lieutenant-General Olufemi Oluyede, told Governor Mai Mala Buni that the “fire from the Sahel region will consume Nigeria if urgent steps are not taken…We have no choice but to curtail insecurity, because if we don’t, at some point, we may not have a country to live in.” In the same May, while addressing State House correspondents in Abuja after a security meeting with President Bola Tinubu, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Christopher Musa, confirmed that “What has happened of recent is that there’s a global push by terrorists and jihadists all over the Sahel area, and that pressure is what actually came into Nigeria because of the nature of our borders.” As Gen. Langley confirmed, the Sahel is on fire, and Nigeria is vulnerable. The situation requires urgent attention, especially with the brutal Wagner Group of Russia taking their leave of Mali almost at the same time as jihadists have started a major push southwards in Mali with deadly attacks on military bases.

    The Alliance of Sahel States (AES) of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger may in fact have underestimated the jihadist crisis unfurling before their eyes in the Sahel. They assumed that their crisis revolved around the exploitative French who have been kicked out of the three countries, or around the meddlesome Americans who kept sentry on jihadist activities in the region but who have now also been kicked out in favour of the Russians. The crisis, however, transcends the struggle against neocolonialism or imperialism, as the AES states naively argue. Having forcefully taken over the reins of government in coups d’etat years ago, and disagreeing with ECOWAS on the restoration of democracy in their countries, and denigrating Nigeria and the rest of West Africa as neocolonial stooges of the West, they have nevertheless been unable to curb the fiery march of jihadists southward. Nigeria has two major headaches it must now contend with after hearing the warnings by the three military chiefs quoted above. First, it must find a way to get ECOWAS to respond to the jihadist push, regardless of the naivety of the AES states. The regional bloc last month announced some initiatives in that direction, but it must reassess whether what they are proposing and implementing will be adequate to respond to the massive scale of the challenges before them.

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    Second, President Bola Tinubu needs to urgently put Nigeria on a war footing, necessitating massive recruitment of soldiers. Fortunately this is not an election year which could prompt the opposition to accuse the president of trying to militarise the polls. The elections are still nearly two years away. But, meanwhile, the northern borders of the country remain inefficient, porous and still vulnerable, causing Gen. Musa to suggest that something other than just the clash of arms, including perhaps the fencing of Nigeria’s northern borders, should be contemplated. In his view, “the Sahel is heating up, and if it falls, it is Nigeria that they are interested in.” Unfortunately, the northern elite are oblivious of the looming catastrophe, and have continued to trifle with Nigeria’s grave existential challenges in their careless deployment of religion and ethnicity to achieve social and political agenda.

    But it would cost a tidy sum to fence thousands of kilometers of borders; and while this may deter some illegal migrants, it will not deter determined attacks by jihadist forces. The Maginot Line experience of France during World War I and II comes in focus. The defensive and so-called impenetrable French fortifications were breached in an instance by Germany’s blitzkrieg through a flanking manoeuvre in Belgium. The Nigerian border fence, even if built, would be paperweight compared with the Maginot Line fortifications.

  • Coalition: dancing naked before the North

    Coalition: dancing naked before the North

    It will take a little more time before the leadership of the political coalition being formed to unseat President Bola Tinubu properly crystallises. But for now, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, former governors Nasir el-Rufai and Rotimi Amaechi are mentioned as belonging to the first tier of coalition leadership. First, there was talk of the coalition fusing into the Social Democratic Party (SDP), but the leaders postured too arrogantly to be welcomed warmly. Then they began talking glibly about moving en masse into the African Democratic Congress (ADC); but here, too, they met with some resistance and unnerving preconditions. Now, they are actively thinking of setting up a new party, where they can have the freedom to do as they please. It will undoubtedly cost a pretty penny, and a lot more arduous and sleepless nights to develop the rubric of a new party, but in the end they may have no choice. Whether they set up a new party or fuse into an old one in their desperate attempt to find a shortcut to power, they will go through many painful and sleepless nights, and they will spend a fortune.

    Meanwhile, in their urgent quest to take the presidency in 2027, and regardless of whether they have found the vehicle and the drivers to take them to the promised land or not, the coalition has begun to agitate for change using two methods. First, they believe that casting the Tinubu presidency as either irreligious or too religious would be effective; and second, they think belittling the administration’s record in the fight against insecurity, including accusing it of being anti-North in appointments and policies, would impress sceptics. Their allegations fly in the face of evidence, but they recognise that they are appealing to illiterate northerners incapable of deep reflections or envious southerners consistent in their resentment toward the president, all of them united by the pains and hunger they have been made to endure as a result of the ongoing economic reforms. They begin with the implausible proposition that without the North, no southerner could win the presidency, ignoring the equally salient inverse that no northerner could win the presidency without southern support. Unsure whether this illogic about regional influence would fly, they have begun to suggest that the North – for the amorphous coalition is essentially inspired by northerners – would repudiate support for President Tinubu if he could not find a solution to insecurity in their region.

    Former vice president Namadi Sambo is the latest proponent of the insecurity caveat. Mallam el-Rufai, despite being accused of predisposing the North to insecurity by his bigoted support for herdsmen and Fulani militias, has also been mouthing the subject of insecurity as a critical factor for denying President Tinubu support. Insecurity, especially in the North, may seem intractable, but it is hard to explain why any northern politician or leader would use that as an electoral weapon, especially considering that they have been accused of inspiring it, while the present administration has put them entirely in charge of reining in the madness and chaos in the beleaguered region. The coalition, when it finally crystallises, will, however, not be discomfited by logic or common sense. They know the people they are targeting: the talakawas susceptible to the twin emotional appeal of hunger and insecurity; and the core North ravaged by banditry, Boko Haram/ISWAP, Lakurawa, and now Mahmuda terror groups.

    It is hard to understand why northern political leaders, whose derelictions engendered and entrenched poverty and insecurity in the North, are politicising the conjoined issues of mass hunger and insurgency. They will, of course, be cross examined at the campaigns; but even if they think they can explain their complicity in the tragedies and disasters afflicting the North, they may find themselves being nudged into responses certain to make their coalition inchoate or malformed. In late May, the National Political Consultative Group (North) invited the coalition leaders to address them on their plans for 2027 and the issues affecting the region. The itinerant Peter Obi, former Anambra governor and presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the last poll, made a presentation where he assailed the Tinubu presidency for neglecting the North. Sucking up to the North, and deploying his usual Asian Tiger developmental statistics in addition to Nordic sprinklings, he praised the region, describing it is a sine qua non for Nigeria’s development and renaissance. He would rewrite the region’s trajectory, he fawned in the presence of Alhaji Atiku and Mr Amaechi seating at the front row. It is not clear what the coalition aurochs thought as Mr Obi pontificated, but they wore glacial expressions as they ruminated on their own pending presentations. They probably knew that they must still argue their programmes before more northern groups in the months ahead as they frantically hope to retake office which they had incompetently deployed for decades to the mass impoverishment of the region.

    But they are all barking up the wrong tree. First, despite his political peregrinations and pell-mell financial donations, Mr Obi, either as presidential candidate or running mate, will still have to address the conundrum surrounding his candidacy in the last presidential election when he described himself as the Christian champion in a race he characterised as a religious war. It is not clear how he will navigate or drain the swamp he walked into by his opportunism, but it is clear he cannot be persuasive. Second, the coalition leaders obviously hope that the old Nigerian political dynamic, influenced by decades of military rule monopolised by northern military officers, can be restored and would need northern political leaders to organise or inspire. Alhaji Atiku had hoped to ride on that wave in the 2023 poll but was shocked by how ancient the idea proved to be. He had obviously learnt little from the Muhammau Buhari years. In his speech before the northern consultative group, Mr Obi clearly and amateurishly tried to ingratiate himself with the North, believing, as Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a former presidential assistant, recently argued, that the North could single-handedly determine winner of the next presidential poll. The coalition, when it finally takes form, may discover to its dismay that it is trapped in the past. President Buhari broke the mould, and President Tinubu proved beyond reasonable doubt that new dynamics are at play.

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    Passion has cooled considerably in the run-up to the coalition formation. In March, after a few months of fancy footwork, Alhaji Atiku, Mallam el-Rufai, and Mr Obi spoke elegantly in Abuja about the coalition to unseat President Tinubu. Since then, Mr Obi has hemmed and hawed, sometimes insisting that, to him, what mattered was good governance, not simply winning the presidency. He was of course simply throwing a red herring. His presidential campaign in 2023 and his insular team and ideology proved beyond all doubt that he valued power more than any other thing, especially seeing how clearly he anchored his every statement on the stump on moral exigencies and abstract statistics than on the existentially germane issues of federalism and secularism. His politics is, after all, one of paternalism, as his Obidient movement hinted by their unrelenting and unorthodox methods of browbeating dissenters.

    Since that fateful March too, Mallam el-Rufai has vacillated between one fringe party and another, between a high today and a low tomorrow. He has even gone ahead to assume the coalition’s victory in 2027, has formed the cabinet in his mind at least partially, and indicated that the campaign that would procure success for them would rest on both the alleged inability of the Tinubu presidency to rein in insecurity and the mass misery in the country. He has, however, not been as cocksure as before about the fulcrum of the coalition, whether it would be the SDP which he rhapsodised in Kano very freely or the ADC which some of his coalition leaders muted in private discussions. Just as those who surround United States President Donald Trump clipped the tempestuous Elon Musk’s wings, even before the opposition coalition is fully formed, Mallam el-Rufai’s wings have suffered damage. Yes they will need an unprincipled and loquacious and eloquent speaker who could argue both sides of a position fluently and persuasively, but they fear much more his recklessness and the considerable baggage his Kaduna governorship might bring to a party that seeks to overthrow a behemoth.

    A critical mass may already be forming in the North around the idea that four more years of President Tinubu, given the increasingly positive effects of his reforms, will not harm the country. There is hardly any governor, across party lines, who does not view the reforms positively, seeing how their swelling state coffers have enabled them more latitude to reengineer their finances and embark on major projects. And there is hardly any knowledgeable analyst who does not see the reforms as more promising than the time-worn hypotheses peddled by the coalition leaders. More critically, opinion is hardening even among the northern elite that it would amount to insensitive promotion of northern or Fulani exceptionalism to want to abridge the eight-year tenure for the South barely four years after a northerner spent eight years in office. Like it or not, as unorthodox as the principle might appear, it has helped to moderate Nigeria’s power game and the contest for high office. Regardless of the malicious campaigns by any coalition, the North will allow sleeping dogs to lie, and do everything to sustain the formula. They will prefer to play safe rather than embrace either Alhaji Atiku’s self-centred plan to win office for only one term and cede a second term to Mr Obi or the revenge attack by the spurned Mallam el-Rufai still hurting from his exclusion from the Tinubu cabinet.

  • Babachir Lawal: from hysteria to boastfulness

    Babachir Lawal: from hysteria to boastfulness

    In the run-up to the 2023 presidential election, former secretary to the government of the federation Babachir David Lawal was livid when he was overlooked for the running mate ticket of the All Progressives Congress (APC) standard-bearer Bola Tinubu. The party decided that a Muslim-Muslim ticket was more likely to fetch it the presidency than the politically correct option of balancing the ticket along faith lines. Mr Lawal, who together with former House of Representatives speaker Yakubu Dogara had briefly formed an alliance to undermine the APC, their party, described the same-faith ticket as a satanic option that would destroy the ruling party. Not done, he also described running mate Kashim Shettima, a former Borno State governor, as an excessively ambitious politician with unflattering image, a Greek gift from the northern governors.

    The maligned APC candidate went on to win the presidency, and Mr Lawal’s hysteria and dire prognostication proved misplaced. If the election had been a two-horse race between President Tinubu and former vice president Atiku Abubakar, the APC candidate would have had some difficulties. But nature intervened and made the poll a three-horse race, thereby rendering Mr Lawal’s choice and self-proclaimed Christian champion, Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), a spoiler. His former ally in rebellion, Mr Dogara, saw through the fog and reluctantly backed Alhaji Atiku, the PDP candidate.

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    But Mr Lawal has not learnt any lesson from his woebegone political tactics of opting for and operating from extreme positions. He is once again shouting himself hoarse over the 2027 presidential election, bellowing that the coalition he is masterminding with the Atiku and Nasir el-Rufai crowds would win the next poll even if all the 36 governors defected to the APC. Obviously exasperated with the defections rewriting Nigerian politics and redrawing the country’s political map, he alludes to some mysterious and inscrutable inner workings of the coalition to bolster his predictions. But history and experience should instruct him to weigh his options far gentler and more rationally than he did in the last poll. Alas, it is not in his nature to pontificate with caution. He would rather let the chips fall where they may, and risk being left once again to hold the short end of the stick. Mr Lawal writes beautifully and, despite his frenzied summations, speaks eloquently; surely, he must know what it means to be hoisted with his own petard.