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Category: Idowu Akinlotan

Before Tinubu reshuffles cabinet

President Bola Tinubu is about 15 months in office. Even before he marked one year, many Nigerians began clamouring for a cabinet reshuffle, the periodic administrative bloodletting that leaders in these parts love to indulge. Last May, on the administration’s one year anniversary, analysts speculated that the reshuffle would coincide with the occasion. It didn’t happen, not even a whisper. Then expectations again rose to fever pitch a little after the anniversary, complete with tendentious analyses of ministers’ performance records. Still, not a word came from the president, for he seldom grant interviews, nor from his aides unable to masquerade as sources. But in the past one or two weeks, with the administration buffeted on all sides by a barely responsive but still distressed economy, and critics and opposition forces running riot on traditional and social media with thunderous blather, Nigerians have once more begun to speculate a reshuffle. A reshuffle will come, undoubtedly, but it may not be on the scale analysts have cursorily calculated.

But before President Tinubu carries out a reshuffle, he needs to take advice on issues he must deal with first. Early in his administration, after emplacing a cabinet, he set up a Result and Delivery Unit headed by a special adviser, Hadiza Bala-Usman, to measure the performance of each minister. There are indications she has done it, and may continue to tweak the report until a reshuffle is done. However, it was inappropriate both to set up such a unit as well as to publicise its formation. There is no way the president himself, not to say his close staff, cannot estimate his appointees’ contributions, including judging their commitment to his administration while making allowances for their idiosyncrasies. Even in the absence of a scientific measurement, presidential intuition should guide his appreciation of cabinet members’ competence. Moreover, most of his appointees were political IOUs that needed to be repaid and sustained for possible reelection. If the president allows himself to be pressured to wield the knife and cut too deeply, he might jeopardise his future chances and further alienate his thinning support base.

Taking a cursory look at his cabinet, it is unlikely there are many incompetent or disloyal ministers around him. Some of them may be somewhat prejudiced or harbour misgivings about the administration’s regional and even cultural predilections, but they were not recruited from an alien society. There is hardly a minister without one bias or the other, some explicit, others vague. The president may feel pressured to sacrifice a few ministers to sate the appetite of proponents of reshuffle, thus buying himself some time and deflecting criticisms and animosities against his government, but he must satisfy himself that he has provided the kind of leadership and close staffing environment needed to get his appointees working at their best. He appears genuine enough to still retain the trust and administration of a still sizable percentage of his admirers and supporters, but few extend those good wishes to his kitchen cabinet. The president must have read that some Nigerians think his close staff have been grasping, self-centred and too timid to joust with him over his more daring and complicated ideas.

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It is also not clear that his cabinet, as opposed to himself, is responsible for the desultory execution of some of his radical and far-reaching policies. As a policymaker par excellence, it is surprising that he buckled to suggestions of applying untested palliatives to both expiate the idealism of his economic measures and to remedy the stifling impact they have had on the people’s cost and standard of living. He is too visionary to countenance those ad hoc measures, let alone enunciate them, many of which he knows some of his appointees would take advantage of. If he was optimistic about the can-do spirit of Nigerians before he assumed office, he must by now be disillusioned about their immense capacity to, as they put it in Nigeria, chance the system. If he is assailed today in terms probably none of his predecessors had ever been, it is because they sense a gap in his methods and resolve. He was expected to firmly and quickly tackle the Humanitarian and Poverty Alleviation ministry’s Betta Edu and the Internal Affairs ministry’s Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo snafu; instead his administration waffled over the matter and kept it in view, perhaps waiting for a cabinet reshuffle. But the issue was a godsend to enable him very early in his presidency set a template of firmness that would brook neither irreverence from opportunists nor ethical tardiness by appointees. And there have been a number of other faux pas that sent mixed signals of governmental weakness and shortfall in altruism. But the president is extremely lucky that all this is happening early in his presidency. He now has a great chance in the next one year to really cut to the chase, take the bull by the horns, eschew laxity in administration, and preside over the affairs of Nigeria with firmness of the most engaging type, and with the competence and synchronicity he demonstrated in Lagos.

Critics and admirers have wearied the president to accept the necessity of cabinet reshuffle. He may choose to tighten the belt a little more by reducing or merging ministries, and quietly easing out some underperforming ministers who will not cost him much and more support. But he must be wary of those urging him to reconfigure his cabinet like the Britons or Americans do. Nigeria and those countries are culturally and even politically poles apart. The latitude presidents enjoy elsewhere may prove politically costly in these parts. Luckily, President Tinubu does not lack the boldness to act in ways not in consonance with public or opposition expectations. He needs to structure his administration in such a way that he will be seen as being in very firm control of his government. Sometimes, he seems inscrutably detached. If he does not first look inwards, whatever he does with the larger cabinet will be of little consequence. Yet, he simply cannot afford to maintain the status quo in his administration. Nigerians sense that something is wrong, misplaced or incomplete about his administration. But they cannot quite easily put their fingers on what the matter is.

Unfortunately, the president may have allowed the issue of cabinet reshuffle to be politicised. His critics crave it; opposition leaders, despite their scepticism, want it; and even his supporters angle for it, perhaps hoping they or someone they know would clinch a post. Had the president reshuffled the cabinet when Dr Edu drew public flak, and had there been one or two major movements in the cabinet since then, no one would be clamouring for any concerted change. Whatever he does now, including satisfying public longing for a cabinet massacre, the president should henceforth run his administration in such a manner that cabinet reshuffle would no longer become an issue, let alone a politicised matter. Reshuffles should be routine, minimal, unpredictable and brilliant. A reshuffle may give the government reprieve from criticism as well as serve to distract public attention, but it has no real value except when necessitated by political and administrative upheavals. Worse, the euphoria that accompanies a reshuffle lasts barely a week or two, leaving the administration to still contend with the relentless challenges of bloated cabinet, hunger crisis, insecurity, among others.

As he prepares for a reshuffle, the president also needs to rethink his presidency and let its undergirding ideals inform the movements in, and the shape of, his cabinet. His presidency is unique, coming as it did against the run of play, and against huge obstacles, including a remorseless opposition working in tandem with the social media all determined to delegitimise the election victory that brought him into office. He, therefore, has a responsibility to imbue his leadership with a transcendental theme, far beyond the rudimentariness, and in some cases opacity, that has partly unnerved his administration. Given its unusual birthing, with everyone acknowledging the hand of God in the election, his presidency must not travel the usual Nigerian trajectory or end up undistinguished like his predecessors. So far, he has produced an inundating slew of policies and measures – doing too many things at once and in a hurry – and overawing the country; but there has been little of the contemplative originality capable of producing a great an inspiring presidency. It is, therefore, not enough to simply reshuffle his cabinet; it must be an opportunity to reset the rubric of his presidency and lay the foundations against which his successors would be judged.

September 8, 2024
Social media anticipates, promotes Armageddon

Without a shred of doubt, Nigeria faces multitudinous challenges, some of them potent enough to threaten its stability and unity. Social dislocations are at an all-time high. Political dysfunction has deepened to a point of stasis and decay, fuelled by insecurity and entitlement. And the economy, which has for more than one decade been subjected to massive depredation, is proving stubbornly resistant to medication. It is in the midst of these challenges that the social media is flexing muscle in promoting all kinds of divisive, ego-driven and often childish and portentous campaigns. Social media has its good side, minimally good side even in the best of times, but because it is unregulated in Nigeria, its bad side overwhelmingly corrodes societal fabric.

It is not certain that a growing economy could attenuate the social media’s fondness for extreme rascality, but because the economy is distressed, the government’s voice has diminished to a whisper, and radical postulations by impressionable youths, complete with recipes for textbook revolutions, have flowered all over the internet, aping unrest in other countries, and advocating through opposition politics total system collapse. The social media may not have created the economic catastrophe being witnessed in the country, but it has seized upon that existential crisis to campaign, without fear of consequence and with little understanding, for anarchy. The campaigns have begun to permeate ethnic relations, political opposition, and insecurity, while poisoning everything in its path.

Consider this brief overview of the economic crisis which Nigeria is immersed in. In a succinct analysis by BudgIT last July, quoting Nigeria’s Budget Office, the economy is portrayed as being in dire straits. The analysis reads: “…Between 2016 and 2022, the Buhari government raised total revenues of N26.67tn and expended N60.64tn, leaving a deficit of N33.97tn. The gaping hole was financed with FG domestic debt, which rose from N8.84tn as of December 2015 to N44.91tn as of June 2023, while external debt rose from $7.35bn in December 2015 to $37.2bn in June 2023. This excludes support provided by the Central Bank amounting to N25tn. Ultimately, President Buhari moved Nigeria’s debt profile from N42tn to N77tn. This has had attendant effects on debt servicing, which rose from N1.06tn in 2015 to N5.24tn as of 2022. In fact, under President Buhari’s administration, the debt-service-to-revenue ratio grew from 29% to 96%…In the end, President Buhari leaves a legacy of debt which almost doubled from 18% to 35% of GDP. He leaves inflation at 22.4%, with 133 million Nigerians in poverty…” This unbearable situation is compounded by a series of crude oil-backed loans, which between last year and now is estimated to be over five billion dollars, ensuring that except oil production rises significantly, not to talk of the production of goods and services, Nigeria would continue to suffer naira depreciation, inflation, increase in poverty, and a dizzyingly high debt-to-GDP ratio currently estimated to be about 53%. This appalling situation is not caused by the social media or even the opposition; however, the response to the crisis has given plenty of room for concern.

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The crisis has indirectly birthed ethnic recriminations on a scale where no one is sure whether social media will not tear the country asunder even before economic crisis gets half the chance. Consider two short and recent examples. In late June and early July, organisers of the hunger protests produced a list of 12-20 grievances for government to resolve in order to avert street actions starting August 1. The problem was not that any group mustered protests, but that by the instrumentality of the social media, they managed to make the largely farcical list look sexy, and their protest tag, 10 Days of Rage, cool and acceptable. Others tagged their action Revolution Now. Days after the protests fizzled out, some other fellows announced their plan for what they tagged Fearless in October, starting from October 1. Again the problem is not that many of these actions are sponsored – that is for the security agencies to uncover and grapple with – the danger is that the tags are enormously appealing, and those who whimsically generated them or buy into the agendum have little understanding of the consequences. Similarly celebratory pro-democracy and human rights protests shook Sudan between 2019 and 2020, produced a coup d’etat in 2021 which in turn led to more protests in 2022, and finally culminated in a civil war begun in April 2023. Now, no one is protesting.

Social media confers a measure of anonymity on trolls, leading many angry youths and heedless and unreflective opposition figures to boldly advocate protests in extreme language and terms. Ethnic bigots have seized the difficult and contentious effort of national rebirth to promote all kinds of agenda, with some threatening ethnic genocide and others warning that secession could follow any coup interpreted as targeted against their ethnic group. Such extremisms are a natural follow-up to the bad-tempered campaigns on social media, campaigns rendered in infantile but beguiling slogans. The anarchy the campaigns are capable of breeding is hidden in the thicket of ‘days of rage’, ‘revolution now’, ‘take back Nigeria’, and ‘fearless in October’. Nigeria’s economic and existential crises are real and in need of urgent and serious remedies; but if nothing is done to rein in the naivety and madness on social media, they will provoke anarchy, or worse, war. Real life is more than sloganeering. Here, the opposition parties, which have refused to acknowledge their defeat in the last election, are encouraging the stultification of Nigerian politics, mindless of the fact that the template they are sculpting today will undermine them on a hypothetical tomorrow.

Given the battering the economy had received, it seemed assured that a president would come sooner or later to grapple directly with the disease. President Bola Tinubu, on assumption of office, elected to be that man, braving the odds to apply unpopular measures that strike at the core of years of national indolence and complacency. It is not clear that some of his measures had been properly calibrated or executed. But he took away fuel subsidies, and in its place introduced a debilitating regime of steep price increases, while he also hit at foreign exchange round-tripping by positioning a numbing floating exchange rate that has made many people destitute and manufacturing concerns to teeter on the brink. Rather than print more money and risk total economic collapse, the administration at first went for oil-for-cash loans, before convincing itself that only comprehensive surgery stood a chance of solving the crisis. If not President Tinubu, anyone else would inevitably have to face the same conundrum, whether a coupist or any of the two leading opposition candidates in the last poll. Regardless of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) histrionics, or the subterranean interference of their lackey, the highly politicised and unreflective Briton, Andrew Wynn, who is on the run, or any threat to instigate civil disorder or social media-led insurrection, whoever is president will find the current panaceas in one form or another inescapable. The country was so broken that there is no easy way to fix it. But perhaps some other ways might be more tolerable. However, the sooner Nigerians come to terms with their brokenness, the shorter the pain would last.

September 8, 2024
Ajaero’ll destroy NLC

Apart from heavily politicising the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), its president, Joe Ajaero, is now also turning the union into a militant movement. To answer a simple police invitation regarding a tenant of the Labour House suspected of terrorism financing, Mr Ajaero disconcerted the law enforcement agency with antics of the most vexatious kind. But when he finally honoured the invitation of the police, he cajoled union members into swarming police commands in their states over a matter that had nothing to do with workers’ welfare. And they all obliged. When he was battered for playing partisan politics in Imo State last November, he also cajoled the union into shutting down the country. A man so naturally and relentlessly disposed to using strong-arm tactics over the least provocation, he is also upending the Labour Party, unable to draw a line between labour matters and the partisan woes his private yearnings have elicited.

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By the time Mr Ajaero is through with the NLC, unionists will no longer recognise their organisation. It is becoming militant, opinionated, uncompromising and partisan. Former labour leaders have a responsibility to restrain him, but they won’t, especially in the age of social media where dissent could be demonised as supporting the hated ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). And the government itself, acutely aware of its unpopularity, is increasingly loth to confront the NLC for deploying militant and politically partisan tools for union ends. Unfortunately for the country, the police invitation and the interview ended anticlimactically, lasting just a few minutes, and focusing mainly on the suspected Labour House tenant. Perhaps he and his supporters and lawyers will think their mobilisation and scaremongering tactics compelled the police to relent. That they are intimidating security agencies, working towards a partisan end, and probably gradually predisposing the country to anomie mean nothing to Mr Ajaero and others like him not civilised or nuanced enough to recognise the dangers of their anomalous and cantankerous methods.

September 1, 2024
Insecurity: CDS should broaden request for tips

In an address read of his behalf in Abuja at a conference last week, the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Christopher Musa, insisted that curbing insecurity should not be left to the military or security agents alone. Last June, at a town hall meeting on security, he had also advised Nigerians to be deeply involved in combating insecurity, regretting that the country allowed asymmetric warfare, which is complicated and nightmarish, to take root. He said: “My advice always is no country should allow asymmetric warfare to commence. It is difficult to eradicate. Why? You are dealing with ideology. And once you have that ideology built in, it is difficult because (when) you see the person, you don’t know what he is thinking about. We have seen people that we have told them (they are wrong), they are still telling us that we are wrong and they are right. So, we need to come together as a country to be able to tackle this.”

In the Abuja conference, he also restated his advice to Nigerians to own the fight against insecurity. In his view: “Security is everybody’s business; everyone must be involved. It should not be left to the security agencies alone. People must give us useful information.” The general is right that asymmetric warfare is difficult to stamp out, but there are examples of countries that have managed to face the crisis and won eventually, including Sri Lanka in 2009 in the fight against the Tamil Tigers. Nigeria has no choice but to face its hydra-headed internal conflict and win. Having allowed the Boko Haram insurgency to fester, it was a question of time before other non-state actors sensed the state’s weakness and began to provoke a fight. Had the Boko Haram/ISWAP war ended fairly quickly, and the state firmly reestablished dominance, banditry was unlikely to break out, regardless of its socio-economic underpinnings.

But far beyond the issue of Nigerians owning the fight and providing useful tips, Gen. Musa must find an answer to the allegation that banditry has festered because of a lack of political will to combat it, rather than the paucity of tips. There was nothing he said in Abuja last week or in June during a town hall meeting that is misplaced. His analyses on both occasions are sensible; but they are not far-reaching. After the March 7, 2024 Kuriga combined schools abductions, during which some 137 pupils and students were taken from Kaduna by bandits and rescued weeks later in Zamfara State, community leaders confidently traced the movement of the abductors, including their rest areas and terminal hideout, and even mentioned names of some of the bandits. Victim communities, according to community leaders, know the bandits, their genealogies and their redoubt. So, what tips exactly does the CDS want?

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In nearly all the local government areas where banditry is rife in Niger State, for instance, particularly in Mashegu and Shiroro LGs, not to talk of the recent attack on Allawa community, residents and bandits know the borders between victims and assailants. It is inconceivable that the communities would know where the bandits hide and the military would not. Even during ransom payments, victims and their families always located the bandits’ hideouts. The security forces have an idea of where the bandits are, the provisions merchants who service them know, and arms dealers also know the hideouts. The terrain may be difficult, and informants may sometimes compromise counterinsurgency operations, and appropriate weapons to stamp out banditry may also be in short supply, but if the political will is present, Nigeria’s security forces will make short work of them. The military may be spread thin complementing police operations in different parts of the country, but it is unlikely they lack the capacity to exterminate the menace.

In the past one decade and more, insecurity in the Northeast and Northwest had ebbed and flowed in a bloody pirouette. The rhythm may no longer be as predictable and constant as before, but in recent weeks, it has once again become priority concern. The Bola Tinubu administration must avoid being consumed by a ragtag army of young outlaws who have continued to wrong-foot the security services and give the administration a bad name. Ariel surveillance should reveal where the bandits hide. Thereafter, if the political will exists, the military should mobilise on the scale they did during the civil war. Total and probably prolonged siege may also be an option. One after the other, bandit cells in Kaduna, Zamfara and Katsina will be snuffed out. It is not an option to sustain the current near inertia. After all, the recent bandit attack on Allawa community in Niger State was suspected to have been motivated by revenge against government informers. The problem is not whether informants are unavailable for the military, nor is the problem the reluctance to take ownership of the battle, as hundreds of Sokoto people demonstrated late last week in reaction to the District Head of Gobir’s murder. The problem appears to be political will. If the administration does not do something big and radical soon, the rampaging non-state actors may be used by those still embittered by the outcome of the last elections to undermine the government’s legitimacy. The choice is mercilessly stark.

September 1, 2024
Bode George takes on Atiku

Apart from being eloquent and scholarly, Bode George, former Ondo State military governor and Board of Trustees of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) member, also has the courage of his convictions. Before the last elections, he took on candidate Bola Tinubu with caustic pleasure, advising him to disqualify himself from the 2023 presidential race. Convinced that the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate couldn’t possibly win, Chief George swore he would go on exile should the president take the crown. So, the PDP chieftain never shirks a battle. Now, he has taken on former vice president Atiku Abubakar for being the spoilsport who denied southern aspirants from the presidential race last year when it was obvious he could not win as a northerner. Trust the Lagos-based politician, he will go at Alhaji Atiku hammer and tongs in the coming years, and the former vice president will not have an answer.

Chief George’s argument is simple. He says: “…In 2027, Atiku will be 81 years, and this is the time for him to embrace the President Joe Biden option of allowing the younger generation to run for the highest office in the land. I have nothing personal against Alhaji Abubakar. He is my friend. But the truth must be told. By 2027, by God’s Grace, I will also be in my 80s. So, what am I looking for in public office as an octogenarian? The same principle should apply to Alhaji Abubakar. We all saw what American President Joe Biden did recently when he stepped down for Kamala Harris to contest the November presidential election…Alhaji Abubakar should do same so that in 2027, the PDP will field a Southerner as presidential candidate.” Chief George needn’t worry. Alhaji Atiku, should he choose to run, will contend with herculean obstacles to take the PDP ticket in 2027. The chances of doing that are very remote, not just because of the formidable array of forces against him in the party, but because of both his age and the inescapable lethargy that goes with it as well as his lack of ideational depth and relevance.

Almost sarcastically, Chief George dismisses the former vice president’s ambition. He says: “But if Alhaji Abubakar is desperate to contest again, I will advise him as a friend, a party man and brother to wait till 2031. By then, he will be 85 years. As loyal party members, we must continue to respect the PDP constitution. Fair is fair. I joined the PDP in 1998 and I have remained in this party since…The two of us know the principles guiding this party. We should not do anything that will destroy our party and the country. In 2027, the concept of Turn-by-Turn Nigeria Limited must be strictly followed by our party. The PDP must look for a southerner to wrest power from the All Progressives Congress (APC)…So, Nigerians are waiting for us to rescue them in 2027, but a southerner must lead the battle.” Clearly, Alhaji Atiku will not only contend with obdurate insiders, some of them governors interested in the presidency, he will also find himself bruising with insiders uninterested in the hot seat. And they are plenty, some of whom, like Chief George, never migrated from the party but have sustained it out of office since 2015. On the contrary, Alhaji Atiku had twice migrated, demonstrating both his fickleness and obsession. Even now, he is merely waiting in the wings waiting for the opportunity to fight for the ticket and take it by all means, perhaps in a future alliance with the other opportunist in the Labour Party (LP), his soulmate Peter Obi.

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Chief George is a political pugilist of the first rank. Alhaji Atiku’s spokesmen will, therefore, be wary of taking him on directly. Paul Ibe, the former vice president’s aide, was even warier in his response to the suggestion that his principal should rest his ambition and find a younger, more electable aspirant to back. “It is about 2025 and 2026 and beyond,” Mr Ibe said tersely. “His (Atiku) concern is about the plight of Nigerians who are literarily going through hell because of the failed trial-and-error policies of this administration. The average citizen, and indeed all Nigerians, need to survive… It is insensitive to talk about 2027 now, when the 2023 mandate has not yielded any tangible benefits to Nigerians.” Mr Ibe is preaching to the converted. Chief George never doubted the circumstances of the people, nor how the economy had pulverised them. All he says is that the PDP will need a southerner as their champion in the next election cycle. And it is precisely the southern candidate issue that Alhaji Atiku and his aides and supporters seem inured to and unwilling to discuss. For him, and unlike Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi, the last election is history, with a winner emerging in fact and in law. His main concern is the next poll for which he is not willing in any circumstance to contemplate a northern candidate. In other words, in 2023, the dispute was about the PDP’s rotational presidency formula; and in 2027, according to him, it will still be about the same issue. Given the patronising view of Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed not to contest the presidency if ex-president Goddluck Jonathan showed interest, it seems certain that many PDP leaders are alarmingly not indisposed to another northern candidate. The war in the PDP is just beginning, and it will be marked by many battles, some of them spilling over to the LP also riven by conflict over suspicions of infernal and unpopular merger plans.

Happily for Chief George, and despite his trenchant views, no one in the PDP has yet accused him of supporting President Tinubu, either directly or indirectly. They know where he stands on the president. More, the vice president’s aides are tongue-tied because they also know where the PDP chieftain stands on the PDP imbroglio. He has been consistent in both his opposition to the president and support for a southern PDP candidate for the presidency. He has not been quite as sympathetic to the president on the issues confronting the administration, but he acknowledges that before the last administration left office the country teetered on the brink as a result of economic mismanagement. And while in his estimation President Tinubu’s policies and measures have been in some respect suspect and even conflicting, he appears convinced that Nigeria would have fared worse under an Atiku presidency. He told a television channel: “If Atiku had won, I would have stayed in my house because I know for real that in future he would collapse. This country would never accept. If he had won that election you think this country would have been stable? Because somebody from the north had just finished eight years, and our own norm is that after the eight years, the presidential candidate must come to the south…”

While the PDP may be shaping up for a titanic battle, and the LP is mired in the mediocrity of its ambitions and internal dissensions, it would be a mistake for the APC to think it could not be punished for the economic hardship it has brought upon the people. At the moment, President Tinubu is unpopular. Even after the economy has turned the corner as he hopes, the aftershocks of his economic reset agenda and the inconsistencies of some of his policies will leave a lingering and bitter taste in the mouths of many. He has stepped on toes, powerful toes, and has shown he is not beholden to anyone. These attributes may yet prove consequential to his ambition. In his first term, ex-president Muhammadu Buhari ignored powerful voices in the Republic in an admittedly perverse and heedless manner. Had he not rallied late in his first term and grovelled before many of the leading politicians he had initially alienated or humiliated, and had he not resisted the desperate but sensible urge to reform and recalibrate the economy, he would have lost reelection. Chief George may refuse to take issue with the current administration, but it is cold comfort for President Tinubu that in the months ahead his opponents will remain in disarray, and highly-placed critics are a little restrained. However, for now, he can sit back and enjoy Chief George skewering Alhaji Atiku.

September 1, 2024
Drafting Goodluck Jonathan for 2027

One of the stories that dominated the media last week was the noisy whisper about drafting ex-president Goodluck Jonathan for the 2027 presidential race on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed spoke in Abuja about his speculated interest in the race, but sighfully suggested he would step down if Dr Jonathan declared interest. Mr Mohammed, PDP governors’ forum chairman, is one of the leading lights of the PDP. Since he flew the Jonathan kite, a number of PDP top hats have lent their voices to the call to draft the former one-term president. In their calculations, Dr Jonathan would fit the northern bill of finding a southerner to take the South’s second term in place of the disfavoured President Bola Tinubu. The self-appointed PDP spokespersons assume naturally that they speak for the entire North, despite the insurmountable presence of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the region. They also flagrantly discountenanced the 2018 constitutional amendment on term limit or the legal interpretation of Section 137 (3) of the 1999 Constitution. Even if he likes to run, it is hard to determine how he can. But the nation can indulge the political romantics who think that in Nigeria everything is possible.

In 2022, despite constitutional provisions and months before the PDP and APC primaries, Dr Jonathan was rumoured to be interested in contesting the presidency on the platform of the APC, a rumour engendered and nurtured by his dithering over the race. The prospect tantalised the former PDP president, and he gave audience to a few APC/northern delegations bent on drafting him. But he also waffled over whether he would run or not run, hinting obliquely that he could embrace a draft only if he was made the consensus candidate. He said nothing about the constitution. Perhaps he and his supporters know something Nigerians don’t know. In the end, despite a group of northerners buying the N100m expression of interest form for him, and despite his brutal sense of caution, he allowed the process to dissipate itself. Today again, he is embroiled in a cynical presidential draft game by another group of PDP big wigs. It would be out of character for him to dismiss the speculation out of hand, especially this time because the speculation comes from his natural watering hole, the PDP. And why would he not want to be the cynosure of all eyes even when he knows his ignorant drafters are engaged in a fool’s errand?

Dr Jonathan has matured into statesmanship. He may, therefore, be wiser today than when he presided over Nigeria. He remembers quite well that in 2015, the North repudiated him in favour of their son, Muhammadu Buhari, who went on to win the presidential election. Indeed, he probably watched as they nearly repudiated Candidate Bola Tinubu in favour of their son, Alhaji Atiku, who flattered their northernness and baited their primordial instinct. And in 2022, Dr Jonathan also probably recognised that fearful northerners chary of being out of the presidency for eight years plotted to use him to hold the reins for only four years. He vacillated in 2022, briefly succumbing to the blandishments of APC mandarins who thought to use him to thwart the wider objective of rotational presidency and a fundamental change of direction after ex-president Buhari had run the country aground. If Dr Jonathan feels humiliated to be seen only as a tool for thwarting noble goals and putting political leaders’ noses out of joint, he has been careful and cautious not to say anything so far. In 1998, when northern and military schemers thought to offer ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo the presidency, he was pretentious enough to ask how many presidents they wanted to make out of him. His question was rhetorical. Soon, as events later proved, he eagerly seized the opportunity, won the election, and even sought to outfox God by scheming for a third term.

There is nothing in Dr Jonathan’s rule book that shows him up as a hypocrite like Chief Obasanjo. But he won’t run for the presidency if he is not certain he would win the nomination, get the backing of the law, and of course go on to win the main election. Unlike Chief Obasanjo, he is averse to risk-taking. To run for the coveted post, he would have to take the nomination consensually after the constitutional conundrum is resolved, and be sure that the APC had become so discredited nationally that a freshman politician from any party could win by a landslide. And of course, finally, he would have to be sure that his conscience does not trouble him to be seen as a tool in the hands of northerners disenchanted with President Tinubu. The drafter engineers may flatter him to no end, but he will have to be certain that their rhapsodies hold a ring of truth beyond deploying him as a political battering ram. Indeed, the northern PDP big wigs have begun to compose dulcet hymns about him and the generally uneventful time he spent in office. But he can never be sure how inelastic their sweet tongues are when they strain the truth and veer into flattery and lies. So, for now, he will watch the composers and drafters with quivering amusement, waiting to see which way the cats jump.

Moreover, the former president is not an idiot to think that former vice president Atiku Abubakar would in a year or two suddenly become a non-factor. When Alhaji Atiku engages in political fights, he bites ears, scratches faces, thumb noses, and gives headbutts. To the former vice president, truth is a mistress to be ravaged, as his continuing fight with President Tinubu has revealed, and he does his battles with undiluted ferocity and bitterness. An aspirant, particularly of the dovish kind like Dr Jonathan, must wear armour designed by archangels to fight the battles the entrenched party behemoths will bring against him. Unfortunately for him, since losing the 2015 presidential election, he has played little or no role in the survival of the party to this day. Alhaji Atiku himself has of course been opportunistic and Machiavellian, completely undeserving of the attention the PDP still gives him, but Dr Jonathan has been nothing more than a cipher in the existence of the opposition party. For a party orphaned since 2015 and suckled by surrogates like Nyesom Wike, former Rivers State governor and current FCT minister, it is deeply ironical that estranged ‘fathers’ are fighting for the baby’s attention as another election beckons in the distance.

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The truth about the PDP is, however, more disconcerting than the attention being paid to the speculated interests of Dr Jonathan and Alhaji Atiku. As it stands, the opposition party does not stand any chance of winning the presidency if elections were held today or tomorrow. The reasons are clear. The party lost in 2015 because of the cumulative damage done to the party by all three PDP presidents, starting with Chief Obasanjo who introduced so much instability into the running of the former ruling party. After the PDP lost the presidency that watershed year, no one of enough intellectual heft or character has been able to conduct a proper laparotomy on the party to diagnose why it lost power, not to talk of repairing the breaches. Instead of remaking the party’s platform and positioning it ideologically or even emotionally to appeal to Nigerians, party apparatchiks have focused on the personalities of their political suitors, men with money but no principles, men capable of raising a storm but impatient to take the wind when they see or feel it.

Secondly, and more sobering for the party, neither the embittered and immensely self-centered Alhaji Atiku nor the dour and humourless Dr Jonathan is capable of swinging victory for the PDP. It is not even clear that either of them will be in a position to campaign in 2026, let alone run for the post. The APC administration is despised and blamed for the hardship and hunger pervading the country by a people long accustomed to gorging on national surplus, but the economy will very likely yield to medications soon, and by the end of 2025 probably roar back to life. All the indications are there, despite the string of unforced errors committed by the Tinubu administration. The PDP will not only have to redesign their platform and imbue it with strength and character, they will also have to find credible and committed leaders to fly their tattered flag. The party is already shaping up for a bruising battle for its soul. Whatever the outcome of that internecine battle, it is unlikely the wounds will heal on time for the next election, regardless of the North’s speculated loss of confidence in the Tinubu administration.

August 25, 2024
Ajaero, NLC effectively above the law

Lawyers, activists, opposition politicians, and trade union executives and members have all but deified the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) president Joe Ajaero. Last Monday, the union leader was invited by the police for an interview on a number of allegations against him relating to terrorism financing, cybercrime, and treasonable felony. He declined the invitation through his lawyers, insisting that because of prior engagements, he could only present himself on August 29. The police are likely to ignore the arrogance in his response and wait for him till then. It is after all only days away. But immediately the NLC received the invitation, the union went ballistic, convened a National Executive Council (NEC) meeting, and came out with fire-breathing resolutions. Among other measures, they would shut down the nation immediately the union leader was arrested, they threatened, including shutting down telecommunication services and the national grid. It is not clear whether there is any nation not at war that would allow such massive and disruptive shutting down of critical national infrastructure, but Nigeria allowed it the last time the NLC went on strike in June.

After its Tuesday meeting the NLC NEC determined as follows: “The NEC notes with grave concern that rather than extending the apology demanded by the Congress for the earlier invasion of its national headquarters by security agencies, the Nigeria Police has chosen to embark on this spurious and fortuitous journey of intimidation, harassment, and witch-hunting. This is nothing but a travesty and a blatant attempt to stifle the voice of the working people and their leadership, as enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Conventions 87 and 98.

“The NEC directs all affiliates and state councils to immediately commence the process of mobilising their members across the nation. The Congress will not hesitate to take all necessary actions, including mass protests and industrial actions, to protect the integrity and independence of the labour movement. If anything happens to the President of the Congress or any other leader of the Congress in furtherance of these tendentious allegations by the State, NEC puts all its affiliates and state councils on notice to proceed on indefinite nationwide strike action by 12:00 Midnight today (Tuesday).

“The NEC calls on all civil society allies and the general populace to stand in solidarity with the Nigeria Labour Congress in this critical moment. The fight against injustice and oppression is a collective one, and we urge all Nigerians to rise in defence of our shared democratic values.”

The Tuesday NLC NEC meeting was a sad day for democracy and unionism in Nigeria. Effectively, the NLC put the cart before the horse and indicated that they and their president were above the law. For a union that hypes the need for the rule of law and due process to prevail, and worries about what it considers the decline of democratic practices due to collapsing institutional guardrails, it is shocking that they thought nothing of their contempt for due process. It is of course possible for the administration to nurse a grudge against Labour, and even more possible that it might want to harass the union. However, what the police issued was in the interim nothing but an invitation to Mr Ajaero to clarify the allegations against him. Should the NLC not have waited to hear out the police? Should they not have waited to see whether their leader would be detained? Would the police, pursuant to the invitation, not at one point or the other be forced to issue a statement detailing what transpired between them and the union leader had Mr Ajaero honoured the invitation? At what point does an invitation amount to harassment? And what shared democratic values are they talking about? The NLC neither knows what that means nor respects it.

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From the three paragraphs quoted from the NLC NEC statement above, a few disturbing things emerge. Firstly, the union has become so badly politicised that it now sees itself as one of the three legs of the official political opposition. Secondly, it is alarming that the NLC acts like a herd, with no voice of reason or caution among its leaders. They are giddy with excitement and heady and impatient about issues pertaining to the current administration. Thirdly, it is remarkable that just one invitation was enough to cause the NLC to jump to so many conclusions, including describing the police letter as ‘spurious’, a ‘witch-hunt’, and an ‘intimidation’, etc.

Better judgement should have led the NLC to wait to know what the police had on Mr Ajaero. As a matter of fact, whatever actions the NLC opted for would have been informed by the outcome of the interview. Even more depressing, the NLC seems to be saying that Mr Ajaero as an individual could never run foul of the law, and that the Labour leader is equivalent to the NLC and vice versa, in short that he is indistinguishable from the union. Is this the sad depth the union has sunk that it will not wait to weigh the evidence the police claimed to have against their leader? And in any case, what is Mr Ajaero afraid of: arrest, detention or damning evidence? He has led series of harassing industrial actions against the government; why is he loth to be harassed, if indeed he is being intimidated? Neither the NLC nor its leaders are above the law. After all, they have erased the dividing line between the union and its political subsidiary, the Labour Party (LP). They cannot expect to be treated solely as Organised Labour, behind which they take refuge to play partisan politics of the most pernicious type.

When next the NLC attempts to shut down the national grid or cut telecommunication services like coup plotters do, they must be prepared for the repercussions, for there is nothing in Nigerian law that gives them the right to levy such catastrophe on the nation. Mr Ajaero has promised to make himself available later this week; he had better, if he is not to send the signal that he and the union are effectively above the law. After the interview, he should address the press and give the public insight into why the police longed to have his company, especially after they stormed a shop located inside the Labour House building in Abuja.

August 25, 2024
Obasanjo more disillusioned than ever

Those who plan to write former president Olusegun Obasanjo’s biography will labour to make sense of his person, his philosophy and many jarring contradictions, and his times in office, both as a military dictator and democratically elected president. If the biographers want to be true to their art, they will find themselves skewering him on every page, and perhaps in every paragraph. Even the redemptive part of his leadership will, under their pens, turn out as a vice or caricature. After he relinquished office as dictator in 1979, no elected or unelected successor was ever good enough for him or the country, even though he masterminded the elections that cobbled the Second Republic’s constitution, produced his successor, and erected the 1979 political dispensation on quicksand. And after he left office as a two-term president in 2007, again, no one could hold the candle to him. Since then he has given everyone, his successors and public alike, the full length of his waspish tongue.

Last week, he was again at his dogmatic worst in the presence of proselytising lawmakers who sought his endorsement for the constitutional amendment they hoped to sponsor. They are probably shamefaced by now. Led by Hon. Ikenga Ugochinyere (Ideato North and South constituency of Imo State), the lawmakers sought the former president’s buy-in, believing, strangely, that his support would go a long way in helping them push the agenda of one-term rotational presidency. Never one to shun the limelight, Chief Obasanjo welcomed them but poured cold water on their enthusiasm. Their goal, he said firmly, was both tangential and inconsequential to the real issues bedeviling Nigeria. He said: “The issue is not whether Nigeria should adopt a single six-year term or maintain the status quo. If the mentality of the people in governance does not change, then Nigeria will remain where it is. For me, the issue is for us to get it right. Whether we have one term of six years or two terms of four years, where it’ll work is our mentality. Our main problem is ourselves, and until we are taking care of ourselves it doesn’t matter. We may have one term of four years, one term of six years, one term of seven years, if it’s the same people and the same mentality and the way we do things then it won’t change. Yes, the system; yes, democracy. We have to rethink democracy. We have to rethink the form of government. But what about the character of the people in government? With all due respect, most of them should be behind bars, some should even be on the gallows and that is the truth.”

In one long exhalation, Chief Obasanjo threw out the reform agenda of his guests and redirected them to the more salient issue of leadership character. Given the controversy swirling around Hon Ugochinyere and the NNPC probe panel he chaired, it is not clear whether the former president meant to fry any small fish other than the successor presidents he has loathed since he left office. On the surface, Chief Obasanjo was right about the inconsequentiality of term limits, and he may have even begun to rethink his specious argument about the need to rethink the liberal democracy bequeathed to Africans by Western powers. But it is remarkable that in his lengthy and didactic pontifications before his chafing guests, during which he boxed the air and thumped the table, he was not struck by a sense of irony that his eight unbroken and largely uneventful years as president did not afford Nigeria the benefit of his quaint moralising.

Thereafter, Chief Obasanjo launched into what he considered the indispensable core of leadership, the issue of character. But no matter how hard anyone tries, they could never get the former president to define the term beyond his sophomoric platitudes with which he has inundated his longsuffering guests. He has written books, some of them panegyrics on his time in office, led Nigeria for about 11 years, and addressed the world, the continent, and Nigeria too many times to count on diverse subjects. But in none of these, whether in books or public fora, had he ever addressed the subject of character in its most intellectual, transcendental and nuanced sense. Undoubtedly, he frequently talks about character, belabouring friends and enemies in equal measure, as indeed he did to the besotted Hon. Ugochinyere and his co-travellers, but he suffuses his speeches and references with the romantic and rudimentary notion of what character means rather than offer the deeper, classical definition. Nor could he resist the sanctimonious urge to ask for the jailing of leaders who lacked the character he talked about, insisting laughably that “most of them should be behind bars”. Surely, he does not think he would be excluded from that hypothetical list, especially given his massive investments in lands, agriculture and education while still in office. He is like Nigerians who romanticise revolutions and coups d’etat, imagining that revolutions can be confined to test tubes, and coups could never lead to war, and they and their families are immune to the sanguinary and cataclysmic consequences of coups and revolutions.

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Chief Obasanjo’s sweeping dismissal of other political leaders gives the impression he really thinks he is above suspicion. Such delusions are a consequence of his lack of introspection. Throughout the 10 days of protest in some states of Nigeria, a probably disillusioned Chief Obasanjo drew the attention of the administration to the dangers of not heeding the cries of the youths. He said: “As I have warned earlier, we should know that we are all sitting on a powder keg if we fail to begin to do the right thing. For instance, what the youths are demanding is very legitimate and should be listened to. Or why should they be denied what rightfully belongs to them? They make demands, and we are not listening to them. Many of them are frustrated, desperate, angry, and unemployed. What do we expect? They deserve to be given listening ears.” As a former president who unconvincingly claims to respect democracy and has spoken about reforming the country’s democratic system away from its Western straitjacket, he did not seize the opportunity of the visiting legislative reformers to denounce the idiocy of protesters calling for a coup, nor did he think it fit to denounce the obviously partisan call for the overthrow of the constitution. Most of the 15 or 20 demands of the protesters were unrealistic in the extreme; but Chief Obasanjo glossed over any jarring contradiction to instead sound the alarm while banging the table before his guests, engaging in outright mendacity, and feigning passion, patriotism and impatience.

In the past few months, and in fact since last year when he hoped a revolution would sweep away the result of the 2023 presidential election, he has spoken pessimistically about Nigeria, democracy and the administration. There were no encouraging words from him, no attempt whatsoever to inspire the country into believing in itself, no attempt to rally the country behind great ideals to sustain and improve constitutional rule, and no indication at all that he expects the country sometime in the future to surmount the difficulties it faces. Everything from him has been about depression, discouragement, alarm, and catastrophe. If the country does not revolve around him, he always hoped his prophecies about its impending collapse would be self-fulfilling. But perhaps he is not even conscious of his pessimistic and dismissive characterisation of modern Nigeria, and he has drawn no lessons at all from the anomie in Somalia, the confusion in Kenya, the great example set by Britain in dealing with violent protesters and those who incite them on social media, and the global economic crisis from which Nigeria is certainly not immune.

August 18, 2024
Acquiescent National Assembly not helping democracy

The National Assembly is much sturdier than many Nigerians give it credit. Their lawmaking ability may be questioned and even ridiculed, but that is hardly the real reason they are viewed with suspicion and, in some cases, derision. They are not often fractious, notwithstanding the aberrant lawmaking of the 8th Senate under Bukola Saraki, the defiance of the House of Representatives under Aminu Masari (2003-2007), or the fiercely independent late Ghali Umar Na’Abba (1999-2003). They have been heavily criticised by former presidents, notably the self-righteous Olusegun Obasanjo who, despite posturing as the archetypal democrat, took the extraordinary step of intruding upon the independence of the National Assembly and whimsically dethroning some of the legislature’s presiding officers as well as his party chairmen. No matter what anyone thinks about the national lawmakers, and irrespective of the different ideological and nonideological political parties they belonged to, they have managed over the past two decades and more to balance their unity and methods on the fulcrum of their humongous budgetary allocations.

Despite the critical mass of public opinion coalescing against them, displacing them from their luxurious perch will, however, not be easy. Backed by statistics and the damning campaign by top economists, including former CBN governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Chief Obasanjo accused the National Assembly of consuming a disproportionate percentage of the national budget, estimated at about a quarter of all government revenue. But the former president did little to redress the matter when he was in office; instead he got between the sheets with them in a bid to secure their endorsement for a third presidential term. Since then, after his failure to set a great foundation for the Fourth Republic, succeeding presidents have kicked the can of legislative profligacy down the road. Ex-president Goodluck Jonathan sucked up to the lawmakers, considering how nervous he was in wielding presidential power in the midst of feuding religious and ethnic behemoths, until he was cuckolded by the legislators. Ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, probably Nigeria’s most taciturn leader, was too exasperated with their antics and intransigence to bother about their profligacy. Under the current Bola Tinubu administration, both the executive and the legislature have stalked each other, and are too chary of the risks of open confrontation, especially because in the eyes of censorious Nigerians, neither has kept their nose clean.

But the wind of change may be blowing. In the past, some lawmakers had broken ranks with their colleagues and spilled the beans over their total emoluments, but the National Assembly always rode the storm and berthed safely, often with great mirth and backslapping. Now the storm is much severer, and the mood of the country decidedly and truculently foul. Riding it will require virtuoso surfing, which none of the presiding or principal officers have, having been weighed down by decades of pampering and indulgence. It is not certain what is prompting the self-immolation now begun in the legislature, but a few lawmakers seem bent on repudiating the ironclad solidarity that has pervaded the Assembly for decades. Last week, Senator Sumaila Kawu (Kano South) indicated that each lawmaker took home N21m every month, but added that it included running costs of their offices. The Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC) has, however, clarified that each senator takes home a salary of about N1,063,860 per month. Kaduna’s Sen. Shehu Sani explained that during his time in the senate, each senator took home in salary and running costs about N13.5m monthly. There is really little or no controversy about the huge sums the lawmakers get, in salaries and running costs, whether all the components making up the allocation are available for each lawmaker to spend privately and directly or not. What angers the public is the huge cost of running lawmakers’ offices. They insist the cost must be considerably reduced in order to justify the sacrifices they are asking of others. In the alternative, Nigerians ask for a constitutional amendment to make the legislature unicameral, and emoluments restricted mainly to sitting allowances.

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But rather than get bogged down in needless controversies, the National Assembly should admit that they have been so battered by negative publicity over the decades that they are no longer popular, not to talk of being useful to both the president, whom they appear anxious to please, and the country, which they have provoked with their indifference. The executive branch at the national and state levels is being pressured to cut the cost of governance; the legislature needs to change tack and follow suit. They must not wait until the public and protesters seize the initiative from them. It is true that the huge amount allocated to lawmakers end up servicing their insatiable constituencies and contacts, but they are involved in an argument they cannot conceivably win. Wisdom should direct them to rationalise their costs in all legislative ramifications. Crucially too, it is time the presiding officers recognised the sensitivity of their offices. Speaker of the House of Representatives Tajudeen Abbas cannot afford the legislative faux pas he embroiled himself in last week before public fury compelled him to step down the Counter Subversion Bill, 2024 which he introduced late last month, perhaps without deep reflection. He has an office and a retinue of aides, not to talk of opportunities to sound many top-level politicians and intellectuals out on the integrity of his sponsored bills. Why didn’t he?

It is also time Senate President Godswill Akpabio upped his game by conjuring the gravitas that befits his office and weighty bills under legislative consideration. He has tried to balance the interests of powerful groups and individuals in the senate, and has so far walked the tightrope delicately; but his cultural and elocutionary shibboleths have disabled him from rising beyond the provincial merriness he got away with as a governor. His borderline solecism, sometimes baffling laughter, forced humour, and completely tactless conclusions and poor judgement have denuded his senate presidency of all gravitas. The question he must address going forward is whether he can conjure the seriousness and studiousness his office absolutely requires, assuming he has it tucked somewhere in the inner recesses of his heart. Hon Abbas has some gravitas, but he too appears prone to careless wanderings and distractions.

But more worrisomely, the National Assembly’s presiding officers have yet to appreciate and cultivate the sense of responsibility needed to enable the country and the president work on and pass impactful bills. Sen Akpabio was cavalier about the question of a new presidential jet, a subject he should have addressed with all legislative and placatory finesse in view of the anger on the streets; and both presiding officers were, to put it mildly, conspicuously maladroit in considering the bill on a new national anthem behind which they sentimentally goose-stepped. They have so far inadvertently shown themselves to be a couple of fawning legislative chambers destitute of a sense of history. Even if they must pass contentious bills, couldn’t they do it with class? It is time to put their shoulders to the wheel, acquire the excellence needed to court the trust and respect of Nigerians, and become keenly aware that the judgement of posterity can be cruel, unforgiving, and often irreversible. But if they are reluctant or incapable of self-examination and reform of the legislature’s bureaucracy and budgets, the presidency should cajole them; for in the end both democracy and the republic, which Nigerians have managed to sustain for about 25 years, are threatened by the legislative laxities, if not inanities, of decades.

August 18, 2024
After the deluge

Even before the hunger protests of August 1-10, 2024 began, it was clear to the judicious that it was unlikely to have the thunderous effect its organisers hoped. Cocky and self-entitled, the Gen-Z planners of the protests were unwilling or unable to learn anything from the Kenyan protests that served as their inspiration. The Kenyan protesters targeted President William Ruto’s 2024 Finance Bill, and won the battle; but they tactlessly veered into unfamiliar territory by expanding their list of demands, including ‘ordering’ the president to step down, until the crisis became stalemated and Kenya, once a tourist destination, is now becoming a tourist pariah. Nigeria’s hunger protesters, right from the beginning, produced an unwieldy list of demands that flew in the face of common sense and logic. It was unsurprising that after the first two days or so, the protests were quickly hijacked and all restraining voices of moderation drowned out. The scale of violence, looting and destruction, mainly in the North, complete with the novelty of exhibiting allegiance to a foreign flag, was unimaginable. Nigerians will consequently thread very gingerly in future protests, sensing the violent direction they could or would inevitably head.

Hopefully, the Bola Tinubu administration is conducting a dispassionate postmortem to understand the protests and their aftermaths. The government won this round of protests not because there was no justification for the hunger marches, but because the young people who marshaled the protests lacked tact, believing that brute and overbearing actions could overthrow the constitution. The administration must, therefore, examine what they had done administratively wrong before the protests, what concessions they must now be prepared to give whether they like it or not, how they grappled with the protests, either ham-handedly or heavy-handedly, and how the youths lost the plot without losing their appeal. The protest leaders may not constitute the future set of young leaders the country hopes for, but because someday in the future the baton must be handed over to the young, it is important for the administration to look at the protests holistically and determine how to reorient and equip Nigeria’s future leaders. Too many people in high places, whether they are legal experts or human rights activists, or even former presidential candidates or opinion moulders, may have displayed their ineptitude and poor judgement before and during the protests, but the administration has an obligation to winnow the grain and redirect the country’s energies towards a great future.

Now, after the August 1-10 deluge, the Tinubu administration must grapple with a future none of his predecessors had prepared Nigeria for, including ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo whose apocalyptic and sanctimonious warnings two days ago about the country sitting on a powder keg belie his complicity in electoral malfeasance and failings as a visionary president. The president’s task will be made doubly difficult because of the economic rot he inherited, but it is not an option for him to kick the ball down the road and pass the nuisance to any successor. It is good that he does not shirk a fight, and even better that he seems mentally prepared to absorb the worst kinds of abuse, but the frenzied situation he is being called upon to contend with will test his mettle beyond human forbearance. Success is not guaranteed; and though most of his opponents wish him to fail on all counts, the country as a spiritual and abstract entity must hope for his success. When he elected to be silent over his predecessors’ appalling economic and political mismanagement of the country, particularly under ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, it was tantamount to optimistically jumping from a low-flying aircraft without a parachute. His aides had sometimes vented their spleen on the former president, and he had occasionally come very close to spilling the beans, but he had managed by herculean efforts to remain reticent.

Reticence, sadly, can sometimes be costly. It meant the president could neither put the country on war-footing over the distressed economy nor sensitise them to the abysmal depths of the economic morass he inherited, not to talk of coaxing their fortitude in the event of a fairly long and ghastly recovery effort. The problem is worsened by the fact that most Nigerians, not excluding supposedly enlightened people and media professionals, are almost completely ignorant of the country’s macroeconomic calamity. Redressing the malady, even for the most adroit and perceptive leader and economist, would take tons of appropriate drugs and nothing less than two years. But though his diagnoses were sound and his determination unflinching, President Tinubu’s timing had sometimes been off-key. In addition, he had become so accustomed to acting like a doctor who forgets to be manifestly empathic. He needed many town hall meetings; but he was not organising them. He needed to get media professionals smack and unrelentingly by his side instead of the side of his detractors; but he was slow in reaching out to them. He also needed the instinct of a populist in connecting with families and individuals in different parts of the country, but he seemed weighed down by esoteric theorising in Aso Villa. And he also needed to take the battle to his remorseless opponents on and outside the social media, but he gave them too much room. On August 1-10, he was punished for those oversights. He has probably learnt the right lessons. The next protests will probably be farther than the October 1 which some youthful nihilists had conjectured on social media, but he will need to take preemptive steps to mobilise the country in a direction other than the ones mischievously predetermined by his enemies.

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He gave an indication of how his mind worked when The Patriots led by former Commonwealth secretary general Emeka Anyaoku visited him last Friday. He was determined to reset the economy first before venturing into other more rarefied grounds, he said, for as he observed, everything hangs on that most profound and complicated of issues. He is right, but he doesn’t have time. The flag-waving idiocy by sponsored youths during the hunger protests in the North, the jaundiced ranting of one Lagospedia Twitter post ordering the Igbo to vacate Lagos, and the faceless promoters of violence and rebellion in the North and on social media all point to the urgent need to refashion Nigeria. There are some politicians in the North unaccustomed to ‘taking orders’ from a southern president, and there are some south-westerners whose bigotry is matched only by the ethnic exceptionalism of south-easterners. Indeed, these ingredients power a seething cauldron of crisis which the president needs to begin to deal with. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer shows how violent protests and the madness on social media should be tackled. President Tinubu must deal with those who think no protest is worth its name until it is violent, conducted disruptively in the streets, or designed to procure unconstitutional change of government. It does not matter where the promoters of such protests are, within or outside the country, they should be tried for calling for the overthrow of the government. If 25 years of democracy is not to be lost, as imperfect as it may be, and notwithstanding the connivance of top political leaders and grandiloquent former presidents, the law must be applied expeditiously without fear, favour and exception.

The hunger protests also exposed how the disconnection between lawmakers and the electorate catalyses instability. Nigerians have not yet learnt to engage, pressure, and unseat their representatives in the legislature. Had they imbibed the right lessons in line with their presidential system of government, the unhealthy and concentrated focus on Aso Villa as the main agent of change as well as satisfaction of national needs and wants would have been diminished. The Tinubu administration needs to refocus the electorate’s engagements with their lawmakers. Closely leashed to this is the fact that the administration needs to find out what model of political and legislative engagement would be most appropriate: the Chinese model with all the consequences of excessive centralisation, or the Western system with all its permissiveness.

What is clear is that neither the country nor the Tinubu administration can afford to remain conservative or to downplay the crisis which a lack of engagement instigates. Waiting defensively for the next violent protests will be counterproductive, partly because it nearly always ends badly, as Bangladesh, Kenya and Russia, among others, have shown. Declining to respond firmly to those calling for the overthrow of constitutional rule, especially when the promoters are known on social media, is a gross dereliction of duty. Shortly before the inauguration of the Tinubu administration, there were open calls for a coup d’etat. The Buhari administration approached the calls with a blasé attitude. The calls were repeated during the hunger protests by known individuals, with some of them whooping for revolution. It would be a disaster to ignore them again. Nothing justifies anarchism, even in a country which has found it difficult to make up its mind to be united.

August 11, 2024