By Idowu Akinlotan

When the Ekiti State House of Assembly leadership crisis broke out on November 15, it was important to let all sides to the story have their say before anyone came to judgement. No one inside and outside Ekiti can now claim ignorance of the dynamics of the crisis: the election on November 15 and dethronement on November 21 of Gboyega Aribisogan as Speaker, the foisting of Bunmi Adelugba six days later as the new Speaker, the partiality demonstrated by the police pretending to keep the peace, the suppressed chuckles by vengeful ‘powermongers’ pulling the strings from barely concealed backgrounds, and reassuringly the umbrage taken by the state’s leading, if not also legal, lights. While the rigmarole lasted, Governor Biodun Oyebanji, who assumed office about a month before the crisis broke out, maintained stoic indifference in a matter that demanded candour, courage and involvement. He was probably being diplomatic and calculating.

Hon. Aribisogan was not the candidate of the state’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) hierarchs, but he had mustered a coalition of independents and the disaffected to pull an upset against the party’s favourite, Hon. Adelugba, a woman, by a healthy and unbridgeable margin of 15 to 10. There was no accusation of rigging or coercion. But incensed by their audacity and defiance of party wishes, party leaders instigated the police to lay siege to the Assembly on the excuse that arsonists threatened the complex, prevented any plenary from taking place, and bought some days within which to perfect strategies to procure what is now humiliatingly referred to as a legislative ‘coup’. Five days of dizzying rigmarole followed, culminating in the ‘election’ of Hon. Adelugba by, again, a chasm of 17 to 0, with seven obstreperous legislators suspended. No one has yet explained the sleight of hand that made those who voted for Hon. Aribisogan to turn apostate. But the gloves are off now, and the hapless pawn, Mrs Adelugba, has been introduced to the governor and other applauding and consenting party leaders. The beaming Adelugba crowd lauded the governor’s ‘benevolent neutrality’, and they praised party leaders, mainly ex-governor Kayode Fayemi, for their fairness.

The entire revolving door now widely acknowledge as humiliating to Ekiti State was plotted by relatively youthful politicians whose ethical sensitivity has been dulled by years of playing politics unmoored by great values and principles. They had plotted so many murders and got away with them, and have thus become accustomed to taken metaphorical blood at will. Luckily for Ekiti, the state still has elders, brilliant and learned men of steel and character. They had been quite loth over the decades to intervene in some of the shenanigans enacted by the state’s politicians, wary of being soiled by heedless youths and irreverent, obdurate politicians. Indeed their years of patience is now construed by the Ekiti APC spokesperson as a reflection of their indolence and partiality. However, unable to stomach the indignity of being affronted by the malfeasance of Ekiti politicians, the elders have finally stirred themselves and have given short shrift to the manipulators in the state legislature. They not only rejected the legislative ‘coup’, they have insisted on its reversal. They stopped short of mentioning names of those behind the plot, but they left no one in doubt who they were. Indeed, Hon Aribisogan was quite explicit in blaming Dr Fayemi for the whole imbroglio. The former governor’s spokesperson and the party’s spokesperson have denied the attributions and insinuations.

Read Also; Intrigues, power tussle tear Ekiti Assembly apart

The Ekiti elders led by the redoubtable Afe Babalola and Wole Olanipekun have taken up the gauntlet and will see the matter to the end. It is hard to see them lose. They may be slow to anger, and have demonstrated over the years an uncanny ability to stomach a lot of political provocations and indignities, starting from the bohemian Ayo Fayose era; but once roused, they are even more wary of giving up on issues and principles they know to be true and unassailable. The state APC leaders may have their reason to back Mrs Adelugba, but their approach was wrong, controversial and provocative. They know it themselves, but they had become complacent to think that the elders would be as usual chary of meddling in political issues, not being strictly politicians and not wanting to openly join the fray. But the revolving door at the House of Assembly was too flagrant to ignore. Mr Fayose’s buffooneries were happily terminated before he tipped the state overboard. Given the disrespectful manner the changes in the Assembly were mediated last week, the elders were simply unwilling to endure lightning striking the same place twice. Chief Olanipekun, chairman of the Body of Benchers, was the first to react a day after Mrs Adelugba was foisted. He counseled respect for the rule of law and legislative order. One day later, the elders came out with a strongly-worded statement that denounced the ‘coup’ and asked for a return to status quo. The statement warned that the ‘constitutional and democratic rascality (in Ekiti) must stop henceforth’.

While the elders’ statement was rough around the edges, and could have profited from some scrupulous editing, its logic and rationale are incontestable. Point by point, the statement tore apart the nefarious exercise of changing the Assembly’s leadership in just six days, not to talk of the appalling manipulation of the process and the unconstitutional suspension of seven members. The elders then concluded that the change was a legal and procedural travesty that must be challenged and not sustained. They restrained themselves from mentioning names, but they never hid their disgust at the manner the so-called progressive party and leaders failed to appreciate the burden of history placed on their puny shoulders. As indigenes of Ekiti, they of course knew those who orchestrated the infamy, but they have couched their statement in general terms in expectation that the malfeasant politicians who perpetrated the anomaly would initiate redress. They, however, did not spare the governor whom they surmise would be ultimately held liable should the problem escalate beyond civilised boundaries. They probably remember the Edo example where the potentate, Godwin Obaseki, governs with a minority legislature.

It was clear why the Ekiti elders mentioned the governor directly. It has perhaps not fully dawned on Mr Oyebanji, but the fact is that he is governor, not anyone who backed him in the election, mentor or otherwise. He was expected to rein in the police who sent in policemen to cordon off the Assembly just a day after Hon. Aribisogan was elected Speaker. The governor also knows those behind the coup, though no one thinks he was one of them. The public can only guess that he does not wish to be confrontational yet, and has not purged his mind of the time he was Secretary to the State Government, though he probably knew that the legislative coup was provocative and unconstitutional. He is an intelligent man, but last January, he also profited from unwholesome political tactics that gave him the APC governorship ticket after his opponents had been mauled insensate. After lending his soul and conscience to the coup plotters for this brief insurrection, he must hope that when they return them to him, they will still be intact, and that he can still recognise them and subject them to his will and control. Sometimes, one surrender may be all it takes to damage a personality for life.

It is inconceivable that Hon Adelugba and his backers can win this unseemly joust. No, they can’t. No judge in Ekiti or on appeal will give judgement in favour of Ekiti’s ‘political rascals’. Judges may in some delicate legal cases sometimes lack the integrity to deliver justice. But they are not stupid. They know what is happening, and they will not risk their reputation and career for a foolish, shortsighted and self-gratifying case such as the unconscionable overthrow of a Speaker who had not even acted in office for a day, let alone be accused of infractions such as sabotaging the supplementary 2022 budget. The plotters may be banking on fostering a stalemate in the Assembly until their term expires next year. They do not like Hon. Aribisogan for his outspokenness and sometimes iconoclasm. They think he is too full of himself, is not a team player, and would not take dictations. By his combative antecedents, he has seemed to justify the accusations. Even those who voted for him on November 15 may have done so not to endorse the Speaker’s style and personality but to demand their own pound of flesh from party leaders who denied them return tickets to the Assembly. What is clear overall is that the state’s elders will not be cowed and cannot be defeated, for they are standing on the moral high ground.

But if the elders think the case, assuming it is litigated, and their opposition to ‘constitutional rascality’ can be used to reform those who orchestrated Hon. Aribisogan’s overthrow and get them to toe the path of democracy, they are mistaken. What informed the coup was not just a loathing for the irreverent Hon Aribisogan, but a clear case of political self-aggrandisement that failed to take cognisance of the cultural and political dynamics of Ekiti State. The Ekiti plotters had probably hoped to reenact the tight political control evident in Lagos without quite appreciating the parallels between the two states. The ‘control’ in Lagos is predicated on successful programmes, policies and philosophies, all of which were embedded in a blueprint that luckily for Lagos leaders had a short gestation period. On top of these was a leadership style founded and anchored on deep empathy and self-effacement that somehow became inclusive and unintendedly avuncular. Ekiti leaders had no such foundations, no such style, no such resonant programmes, and were for the most part aloof, offensively patrician, and decidedly undemocratic. It was impossible for them to forge the kind of political environment that would enable them produce the outcomes they desire. Worse, they even lack the elementary strategic thinking required to successfully upend democratic norms.

After the Ekiti plotters failed to persuade Hon. Aribisogan to embrace their goals, and unable to divide the ranks of those whose ambitions for second term they had crushed at legislative primaries, Ekiti APC leaders adopted a more forceful approach, an approach that has now backfired spectacularly. And lacking the strength of character to own up to their shenanigans, they have cajoled APC as a party, through its spokesman, to rebut the Ekiti elders’ unimpeachable statement. The APC spokesman, Segun Dipe, issued a statement thereafter that tried to ape the legalese of the elders and imitate their reasoning and style. How he thought politics could successfully imitate law is hard to explain. But paragraph by paragraph, Mr Dipe tried to put the lie to the elders’ convictions and arguments, struggling in some parts not to sound ridiculous and offensive, and alternating between reverence for the elders, whom he dubbed Ekiti Wisemen or Ekiti Seven in one paragraph, and irreverence in another paragraph. But he was clearly tilting at windmills.

The APC spokesman baited the elders with suggestions that described them as wise men, but accused them in another breath of being partial. He even attempted to hoist them with them own petard by accusing them of acting sub judice since the House of Assembly ‘brouhaha’ was already being litigated. In other words, he was saying that these eminent lawyers didn’t even know their legal onions. He also wrote grandly of grundnorms, falsely denounced legislative independent-mindedness by drawing equivalence between loyalty to party and slavishness to party leadership, and in the same vein abjuring independent candidacy which he said the constitution forbade. In Paragraph 4, he accused the elders of ignoring and demeaning the APC constitution, and in Paragraphs 6 through 9, he berated the elders for suffering from amnesia and acting either duplicitously or not at all in similar and grave political situations in the past. Then he questioned their neutrality, gave them a slap on the wrist for flouting the principles of natural justice and coming precipitately to judgement in matters that required reflection and restraint. The remaining 10 paragraphs were little more than gratuitous insults that negated the essence of the Ekiti people, with a few of the paragraphs devoted to either sanctimonious drivel or homilies about the good citizen. Would the elders feel slighted? Unlikely. Instead, the insults would likely stiffen their resolve. Onlookers may be dismayed by what has come over Ekiti, a galling metamorphosis that had been in the offing since the state cut its nose to spite its face with the election of Mr Fayose, but they will hope that the litigation will not stretch to the point of making any victory nugatory.

Could the overthrow of Hon. Aribisogan have happened without both the surrender of the Clerk of the House, Tola Esan, and the recantation of legislators who initially voted for the dethroned Speaker when they could call their souls their own? It is doubtful. There was nothing wrong with the voting that brought in Hon. Aribisogan, nor did he get the chance to preside over the House before he was accused of wrongdoing and ‘impeached’. Mr Esan would graciously tell the public what went wrong with the first voting and who ordered another round of voting. Perhaps he may not be guilty of the demonstrable lack of character and courage for which he is being accused of and ridiculed. The legislators themselves owe the public explanation as to how easily they turned coat, what political sorcery instigated their remorseless show of cowardice, and whether they didn’t care about their image going forward, at least in the years ahead. Fifteen of them voted Hon. Aribisogan on November 15, with perhaps no one to prick their conscience, and 17 allegedly voted Hon. Adelugba. It is not the arithmetic that went wrong; it was their character, assuming legislators of that number actually turned up at the Assembly complex. There are states like Kogi where legislators have become mannequins, completely impassive to human feelings and destitute of any morality or character. Ekiti was not exactly cut from that cloth, but it had given the impression that regardless of the indifference of its first Fourth Republic governor Niyi Adebayo, and the gangsterism of the second, Mr Fayose, it was above suspicion. Now, no one is sure anymore. Dr Fayemi was always thought to be an intellectual in government, perhaps he still is, even out of government. But no one ever accused him of being a democrat. He is living up to that billing admirably, insouciantly.

Since Ekiti seems to be full of surrender, could the rest of the country please admonish the state’s leaders and elders as well as the principled lawmakers still standing, to stay the course. If the state’s APC leaders are too proud to let democracy bloom in the legislature, the Ekiti Seven, Hon Aribisogan, and the suspended lawmakers should in the name of God stand firm and litigate the monstrosity let loose on the state. This column and many other analysts and well-meaning Nigerians have invested too much in Ekiti to stand idly by as political adventurers play ducks and drakes with the affections of many people who love the state. Dr Fayemi does not appear incommoded by the crisis, so too the governor. Instead of disclaiming their participation in birthing the crisis, should they not more sensibly be outraged that the madness is being enacted on their watch?

In the past few weeks, Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, may have begun to fancy his chances of winning the 2023 presidential poll. He has not only infected himself with that optimism, he has reinforced it in his doting and exuberant supporters and seduced the normally cautious Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) into contemplating and planning for the possibility of a run-off election in case no candidate emerges clear winner. It is humbling to the New Nigerian Peoples Party’s presidential candidate, Rabiu Kwankwaso, that the 2023 presidential poll is shaping up to be a three-horse race, and what seemed a clear impossibility to the Labour Party (LP) months ago before Mr Obi plotted his insurrection in the hitherto fringe and sedate party has become a clear and present danger to both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Except INEC declares a force majeure, in February, the contest will be between the APC, PDP and LP. The electoral body is right to exercise administrative caution in planning for the fateful poll, and should be encouraged to plug all the conceivable loopholes that might rear their heads. And whether he is encouraged or not, Mr Obi will also press ahead with his plans, trade-offs and relentless vacillations to snatch an implausible diadem. But the chances of having a run-off next February are unworthy of serious consideration.

The indomitable Mr Kwankwaso is, however, not the only person to be humbled by the transmogrification of the 2023 poll, the PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, should also feel queasy, not safe or lucky, that the APC and LP have squared off in the public domain as if they are the only ones in the race. On social media, the APC candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is the most vilified candidate and politician in Nigeria today, a vilification obsessively authored by LP adherents and Obi fanatics as well as many freelance independents. Vice versa, Mr Obi is excoriated by all and sundry as a pretentious and superficial politician who is at bottom a Catholic fanatic. Alhaji Atiku, for the most part, is left severely alone, both in the traditional media and on social media. It probably suited him just fine in the early weeks of the campaign; it is not altogether certain that he has not begun to feel uncomfortable with the dominance of the Tinubu and Obi crowds in the media. In all this, Mr Kwankwaso is a cipher.

In fact, Mr Obi continues to command attention in a way and fashion inversely proportional to his performance, capacity and quality. His eight years as governor, as attested by his successors in the Anambra State House, Willy Obiano and Charles Soludo, had been uneventful and insignificant. His carefully cultivated rhetoric has shifted attention away from the lack of depth and vision of his programmes to the controversial morality of his actions, person and policies. Last Monday, Professor Soludo tore at the heart of Mr Obi’s sanctimonious rhetoric so much so that the former governor was left stupefied. His response, when it eventually came the following day at the Lagos Business School Alumni conference, to all the posers raised by the eminent professor, apart from being tepid and desultory, can be summed up in one disingenuous statement, to wit, if Obi used the amenities of a trader to govern Anambra, the current governor should feel free to deploy the facilities of a professor to govern. The response was facetious and self-deprecating and even elicited smirks from his audience, but it was shockingly a reflection and admission of the superficiality of his governance style, his lack of depth, and his enduring incapacity to properly understand issues, let alone frame wise and inspiring answers.

Prof. Soludo had during an interview on Channels TV the week before seemed to disparage Mr Obi’s economic ideas and investment choices. Mr Obi and his crowd of acerbic supporters, however, took exception to the professor’s judgement and called him names. The cyber bullying that followed elicited a lengthy and scathing rebuttal from the governor, which was widely disseminated last Tuesday to even more acrimonious debate and, in some quarters, approbation. The professor declared matter-of-fact that Mr Obi could not win, and that more pertinently the candidate himself knew, but was playing games. He reiterated his contempt for the amateurish economic policies of Mr Obi, and went on to denounce the wild-pack defending him and the futile politics of the candidate, convinced that these would further hurt the laudable Igbo project of producing a president in the near future. The professor was of course not the first person to decry the undiplomatic and frantic approach of the Igbo to national politics, with Imo governor Hope Uzodinma being the first last September, and both describing the Southeast style as Nzogbu-Nzogbu, but the Soludo challenge comes at a time when the acerbic crowd around Mr Obi had completely coalesced and begun to bud and even flower. The inflamed crowd, some of them educated and supposedly enlightened, swooped on the professor, denounced him and his family, and threatened his life. It probably does not occur to Mr Obi’s supporters that Nigerians, including some people initially favourably disposed to Mr Obi, were taking notes that these are the same people who would surround the candidate should he win the coveted office.

The Soludo attack and the frenzied and irrational response of the Obi crowd have, however, produced results. Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the apex socio-cultural and political group of the Igbo as well as other Igbo groups have all come out from the closet to defend Mr Obi, own him and his ambition, and have, to a man, finally given indication that their embrace of the candidate has little to do with his talent or competence, but his cultural background. In bullying the Igbo who warn of the dangers constituted by the unscrutinised candidacy of Mr Obi, the Southeast does a lot of harm to whatever is left of the modest accomplishments of their coveted candidate who has shown himself destitute of ideology or party loyalty. Prof Soludo will of course not back down, and the restless and instigative Obi supporters will soon find some other cause célèbre to draw their fiery ire. The point the Anambra governor has made is to invite the public, particularly the Igbo, to take another look at the horse they are betting their whole race on. He wants them to see whether Mr Obi is capable of any altruism, or even depth of understanding of issues, economy or politics. And he wants them to carefully consider how to produce a candidate who would build bridges, create networks, and cobble together a coalition that could win future presidential election. They won’t listen to him, however. The candidate and his supporters are mesmerised by the crowds around him, and what seems to be his acceptance in some states and among some Christians.

Apart from displaying no ideological and emotional affinity to the LP, in both Benue and Rivers States, Mr Obi also allegedly traded off LP governorship candidates on the spur of the moment for presidential votes, and is increasingly tantalised by the possibility he might actually win the poll or force a run-off which can then be traded, no pun intended. Everyone but the fanatical knows that Mr Obi cannot win on the first or second ballot, or any ballot for that matter, and they know in addition that Alhaji Atiku is trailing badly. So both the LP and PDP crowds will focus on the APC candidate, exploit his shibboleths, distract him with obtuse legal cases, cast aspersion on his health and fitness for office, and engineer falsehoods of all kinds on social media. Notwithstanding all the attacks, the APC candidate still remains mystifyingly the frontrunner. In the weeks ahead, the public may eventually be primed into taking a closer look at the quality and competence of the PDP and LP candidates, beyond their ethnic, religious or regional backgrounds. The public will be disturbed by what they will hear, but it will hardly matter to the supporters of the two candidates. However, enough unsettling facts will be unearthed and coalitions reinforced to make a run-off a chimera.

APC, CAN try a different tack

After playing cat and mouse with Christian groups for weeks over its choice of Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket, the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate finally met with the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) leadership over the 2023 poll. The APC had been harried by internal and external wrangling over its same-faith ticket, and in response, had tried to engage with as many Christian leaders as possible. The groups were at first too livid to engage with the APC presidential candidate, and evangelical Christian leaders had framed the issue into fiery sermons of denunciation against the ruling party which they accused of insensitivity and sectarian conspiracy. Initial attempts to involve key Christian leaders in APC public gatherings and conferences were rebuffed and visited with much backlash and ridicule.

Nearly three months later, and about two months into the campaigns, passions have cooled enough to allow for a dispassionate consideration of the issues and personalities involved in the 2023 race. The choice before CAN was stark: either to go with Atiku Abubakar, the Northern Muslim Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate after eight years of another Muslim northerner, or to amble along with Peter Obi, a Christian, of the Labour Party, or to resign themselves to the inevitable by sticking with the secularist Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC who had picked a Muslim running mate to their dismay. Now they know that the choice is not theirs to make. It is also not clear how the minds of the Christian leaders work at the moment, whether the listening ear they gave the APC candidate last Wednesday was unanimous or whether it was a reluctant exercise to fulfill all righteousness. Whatever it was, their consultative meeting with the APC candidate, which they indicated would also be extended to the other leading contenders, met the universal principle of fairness.

The Christian leaders were wrong to initially dismiss the ruling party for what they alleged was their insouciant disregard for balance and religious sensitivity. But having finally relented to give the APC a hearing at all, the Christian leaders appeared to have satisfied one of the tenets of their faith: eschewing bitterness and extending love to everyone, even their enemies. Though unplanned, they have also stumbled into a far better position, to wit, displaying both kindness and willingness to hear everyone while strictly refusing to endorse anyone. In the heady early days of the APC decision to go with a Muslim-Muslim ticket, CAN had sworn at the party and seemed to indirectly endorse Mr Obi to spite the ruling party. They did not consider that by the tenets of their faith they had no business corralling votes or herding their members into any particular pen. They also alarmingly turned their pulpits into soapboxes for expounding and disseminating political doctrines, in affront to the political plurality of their members.

But all is well that ends well. CAN has now calmed down to do what it should have done way earlier: interacting with the APC to hear them out, giving them a charter of demands, and letting the ruling party, should it retain the presidency, know how Nigerian Christians think and feel, what their fears are, and what their expectations are. Beyond public remarks and body language, it is possible that CAN leaders now have a better understanding of what led the APC to fly that controversial chute. It is also possible that, as Bishop Matthew Kukah later counseled after also denouncing the same-faith ticket, CAN leaders may be prepared to ask their members to vote their conscience. The fact that they will also go on to hear out the other leading contenders poignantly reference their determination to be ingeniously neutral. They know, even though they have not publicly declared it, that their survival and the blossoming of the gospel do not depend on who is president but what that president does, whether he endorses fairness, justice and righteousness or he does wickedness and oppression.

It is not yet known how CAN came by their resolution to give the leading contenders a hearing, whether they initiated the dialogue or they were prevailed upon. What matters, however, is that they have saved their bacons by adopting a form of neutrality that infers involvement as well as dispassion. They cannot now ‘order’ congregants to vote one way or the other, and so cannot be held responsible for the success or failure of the elected president. They will marvel why this brilliant position had not occurred to them much earlier. But better late than never. They had watched the Muslim community stay somewhat neutral, almost aloof, perhaps because head or tail they were not disadvantaged. And they had watched leading northern groups, such as the Arewa Elders Forum engage the leading contenders without seeming to overtly take sides. Surely, neutrality, even if disingenuous, has its usefulness. Having taken this stand now, Christian leaders can in future, if the shoes were to be on the other foot, stand on a superior moral ground to pontificate on tolerance as a model for public political behavior.

More, Christian leaders can now lecture both the Ayo Adebanjo-led Afenifere and George Obiozor-led Ohanaeze Ndigbo on the safety, logic and beauty of maintaining neutrality as well as engaging the leading presidential contenders to hear them out on their ideologies and programmes. The North set the example of engaging with the candidates rather than endorsing any of them. Pretending to have the authority to endorse a candidate or party may be fraught with huge difficulties. It is even meaningless. It is unlikely that the emotive Ohanaeze and Adebanjo-led Afenifere will take counsel from CAN. They are too far gone to change direction, even though both seem to be backing a losing horse. Whether by design or accident, the North keeps wrong-footing southern groups and showing them how politics should be played. They may not always achieve great results with the tendencies and policies they embrace, but they now seem to hold a patent on how political goals can best be achieved. Reassuringly, CAN leaders have at last done the right thing; hopefully they will now go on to restrain church leaders from politicising their pulpits and unleashing secular and incendiary bombs against opponents.

EFCC’s Bawa and currency theories

Last Wednesday, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) chairman, Abdulrasheed Bawa, caused widespread bewilderment in the financial markets and among students of Economics when he suggested that naira redesigning could crash the dollar to N200 instead of the over N800 in the parallel market. Well, he at least did not go as far as President Muhammadu Buhari who before assuming office projected a magical parity between the dollar and the naira. But N200 to a dollar? Just by redesigning the naira? Were it so simple, why, every Nigerian would urge the Central Bank to redesign the naira until N0.50 exchanges for one dollar. Mr Bawa should stick to crime fighting and stop pontificating on currency and economic matters.

In the first instance, the parallel market is not the official forex market in Nigeria. If one dollar exchanges for about N442.66 in the official market, how on earth could the exchange rate be crashed so dramatically? Alas, just by redesigning, and perhaps by pursuing parallel market dealers up and down the nooks of Abuja and crannies of Lagos? And secondly, where did Mr Bawa get the strange notion that currency value no longer responds to the country’s economic output, inflation rate, interest rate, and current account balance, among other factors, but to redesigns and harassment of BDC dealers. If the EFCC chair wishes to delve into fiscal economics, let him go back to school first before propounding currency exchange theories.

Despite spending 16 unbroken years in office, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has forgotten how to win elections. Its first loss to the neophyte but feisty All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015 shocked the party to its marrow. Losing again in 2019, despite the ruling party becoming conceited and tardy in executing its discordant policies, altered the opposition party’s mindset and sucked its confidence. Nearly eight years after those losses, the PDP seems more than ever at a loss what next it should do and how to take the fight to the APC. They were warned. Now, instead of retracing their steps and finding ways to worm themselves into the hearts of the electorate, PDP leaders, many of them political nomads and revisionists, are taking refuge in methods that degrade their logic and demean their image.

Last week, as a result of a Federal High Court judgement in September that declared all the actions taken by Governor Mai Mala Buni, one-time ad hoc chairman of the APC, illegal, the PDP has gone to court to get the ruling party disqualified from the 2023 race. Firstly, there is no indication the APC would fail to upturn the judgement on appeal. Secondly, there is also no indication that legal extrapolations can void the election of the APC chairman Abdullahi Adamu and the primaries his executive committee superintended. Mystified by the bottlenecks it has encountered since gifting the presidential ticket to former vice president Atiku Abubakar in May, and frustrated that the party and its presidential campaign had made little headway in persuading the electorate to swoon over PDP candidates and the party as a whole, they have resorted to erecting multiple hurdles in the path of their opponents, the ruling, and arguably more purposeful, APC.

If it has occurred to the PDP that it is making heavy weather of the 2023 campaigns, its leaders have not shown it. They may be Spartan in their endurance of pain, but there is no doubt that their methods betray both the desperation and anguish they have begun to experience. Given the nature and dynamics of Nigerian jurisprudence, the PDP is unlikely to concoct any judicial sleight of hand against the APC. They won’t even be able to slow the ruling party down. If the courts find that they had overreached themselves in delivering certain judgements, which interested parties might want to exploit, why, they still possess enough juridical creativity to wipe the grin off the faces of interloping petitioners. It is in fact more likely that the PDP is merely clutching at straws to slow and distract the party by instigating stories the media would eagerly exploit to harry the APC. Awarding exemplary costs in case of litigious mishaps should be able to discourage the legal adventures political parties and other individuals periodically embark on, sometimes just for the heck of it.

The PDP is lashing out at the APC in the courts. But its real animus is against some of its own members, some of whom have proved enormously fractious and intransigent. The party’s confusion, surprisingly, is not masterminded by the ruling party or any other co-contestant in the 2023 race. The problem is from within, and that problem is gnawing at its political innards in a way that is insidious and cancerous. Insidious because it began almost harmlessly years ago when many first-generation leaders of the party abandoned the PDP for other excursions, leaving the party to be sustained by its second-generation leaders who did and probably still do not share the ideological underpinnings of the party. Returning years later to meet a considerably weakened party that nevertheless still displayed some spunk, the oldies muscled their way in and forcefully claimed the commanding heights of the party. The ensuing fracture was naturally seismic, leading to ruptures they have been unable to manage with any dexterity.

The main implication of the rupture is that of the 13 governors left in the PDP, five are working against the presidential ambition of Candidate Atiku Abubakar. The five are Nyesom Wike of Rivers, Samuel Ortom of Benue, Seyi Makinde of Oyo, Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia, and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu. The five may not necessarily be lying on the same bed facing the same way, but citing irreconcilable differences with the structure of the party’s north-centric leadership, they have announced themselves unalterably opposed to the ambition of Alhaji Atiku. Their main grouse was the refusal of party chairman Iyorchia Ayu to relinquish his position for the South, but it was not always clear that the fracture within the party did not predate the Ayu snafu. Senator Ayu himself is implacable. Even if he could not be forced to resign, should his altruism, if indeed he had any, not make him think of and act in the overriding interest of the party?

The last one month has, however, shown that Sen Ayu is the least of the problems of the PDP. The biggest problem of the main opposition party is the PDP presidential candidate’s utter lack of principles, for in the last six or more weeks he has shown just how destitute of political strategy he is. Apart from brazenly dishonouring his promises as soon as he makes them, he does not even appear to understand that he needs to pull his chestnuts from the fire consuming his presidential ambition, an ambition he had labored for decades to keep aglow, an ambition whose fire remains incandescently disproportionate to his methods and whatever sacrifice he claims to have made. Last week, on the Voice of America (VOA) Hausa Service, he declared in response to a question on the Ayu-Wike conundrum that it was irresoluble and that in any case he had since moved on. Days later, he began his idiosyncratic genuflection, suggesting that perhaps something could still be done.

Well, perhaps having heard what Alhaji Atiku said on VOA, and having also been taunted by the undignified remarks Sen Ayu directed against the Famous Five, the ‘rebels’ have in turn finally made up their minds to seek other shelters. But here precisely is their dilemma. Nigeria’s political exigencies make it impossible for all the five to seek one shelter, though they are bonded together by a common antipathy for the injustices enacted by their party. They will help one another, and will keep their friendship and camaraderie intact, but they may end up backing different presidential horses. Of the five, only Mr Makinde is up for re-election. Even if he wants, he still cannot back Peter Obi of the LP, because his people will have none of it. Mr Wike is the most assertive and recalcitrant, but probably also the most politically astute and daring. He will not back a losing horse in Mr Obi. Messrs Ugwuanyi and Ikpeazu, because of the ethnic dynamics of the 2023 poll, will feign to back Mr Obi, but in reality, they will be non-committal.

That leaves Mr Ortom high and dry, perched dangerously as it were on the horns of a dilemma. No matter how hard he tries, the 2023 presidential poll will not be about religion, except of course President Muhammadu Buhari goofs badly, as he is wont, and mishandles the smouldering ASUU crisis on the instigation of the relentless meddler and politically dead Chris Ngige. Mr Ortom has a senatorial race to prosecute, and Sen Ayu, a fellow Benuean, snapping at his heels. He may end up just focusing on his own race and letting every other thing go hang. The ultimate loser will of course be the PDP and Alhaji Atiku, both for different reasons: the party for its failure to renew itself, and the candidate for his indecision and lack of principles. It is an understatement that the PDP is at a loss.

Adebanjo and Fasoranti: storm in a teacup

It is unlikely that the disagreement between the two nonagenarians leading the Yoruba socio-political and cultural organization, Afenifere, qualifies to be described as a leadership tussle. Last Sunday in Akure, the 96-year-old Reuben Fasoranti, leading scores of credible Yoruba leaders, endorsed the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for the 2023 presidential election. The endorsement was open and unanimous, and was festooned with prayers. Earlier in September, however, 94-year-old Ayo Adebanjo, acting leader of Afenifere, endorsed Labour Party’s Peter Obi for the same office, insisting that for equity and justice, it was the turn of the Southeast to produce the Nigerian president. There was no indication of how the Pa Adebanjo endorsement was reached, nor were the criteria for the endorsement stated other than that it was the turn of the Southeast. No debates, no public sitting, no Yoruba consensus.

Consequent upon the two endorsements by what now seem like Afenifere factions, the media has helped to amplify the disagreement and label it a leadership tussle. Complete with interviews and press statements, including the Akure endorsement communiqué, the media has had a field day disseminating facts and figures about the disagreement between the two leaders. First, Pa Fasoranti was quoted as saying he had reclaimed the leadership of the group, and subsequent meetings of the Afenifere would be held in Akure. Then a few days after, he was reported to have recanted. He also reportedly acknowledged that Pa Adebanjo still led the group but insisted that Asiwaju Tinubu had been endorsed because he is competent to lead Nigeria and has the track record. The Adebanjo camp insisted Pa Fasoranti stepped down some two years ago and wrote a letter to that effect. Even though the Adebanjo camp said nothing about why Pa Fasoranti stepped down, it was widely speculated at the time that he did so because he had become lethargic. However, it was also speculated that apart from the enervating effect of his daughter’s killing by herdsmen, Pa Fasoranti was also frustrated with the abrasive style of Pa Adebanjo, particularly his inexplicable endorsement of Goodluck Jonathan in 2015, despite the then president’s ostracism of the Yoruba, and Atiku Abubakar in 2019, despite the then candidate’s considerable waffling over Fulanisation.

Sensing news that could sell their papers or increase their broadcast ratings and social media hits, the media has plunged into the disagreement and ravenously fed on it. But alarmed, some Yoruba leaders have taken it upon themselves to raise a contact group to mediate between the two squabbling nonagenarians. They needn’t bother. The animus between the Adebanjo camp and Asiwaju Tunibu, despite all attempts to keep the discord civil, is implacable. Pa Adebanjo has endorsed Mr Obi, whether due process was observed or not. He is unlikely to recant before the election. The endorsement has neither moral nor electoral value anyway; and Pa Adebanjo might, at best, restrain himself from openly campaigning for Mr Obi in the media. But he won’t back down. The Akure endorsement, on the other hand, has moral and electoral value: the Southwest has an instinctive feel of Asiwaju Tinubu’s competence and likelihood of winning, having built bridges across the nation and cobbled enduring relationships and party structures. Unlike Mr Obi who does not stand a chance of winning, the APC candidate is in pole position to win. The Akure meeting was thus both pragmatic and calculatingly frugal in backing a winning horse and not frittering political capital.

Though the media has fed voluminously on the essentially geopolitical and ideological spat between the two Yoruba leaders, newsmen and headline writers will not be able to drive the squabble beyond a few weeks. It is not the kind of squabble that lasts. It is specious and superficial. Both the Fasoranti and Adebanjo groups, despite belonging to the same organisation, reserve the right to back anyone they please, but must carry their camps along. It would have been neater to back just one horse, but as stated earlier, it is only the Akure endorsement that has any meaning. That meeting attracted heavyweights of the Southwest. The Adebanjo group, no matter how ingeniously it pretends, cannot muster such a crowd, not to talk of people of calibre. No matter the intensity of the contact group’s shuttle diplomacy, they will be unable to produce a meeting of minds on the endorsement subject. They in fact don’t need to. The Southwest, like other regions in the country, has sensed where the pendulum is swinging. They can rationalise that swing, and they sense that it meets their underlying political belief, which they dub progressive, and that it also accords with their calculations about what needs to be done with Nigeria and who best fits the bill to do it. The Southwest, like the other regions, is fairly despondent about producing knowledgeable leaders for Nigeria. For once, as the Yoruba leaders chorused in Akure, they sensed that Asiwaju Tinubu, much more than Mr Obi or Alhaji Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), can do the magic. For them, there will be no buyer’s remorse.

If the media had not dignified the spat with tons of newsprint and broadcast hours, the disagreement between the two nonagenarians would be precisely the perfect storm in a teacup. But despite the media’s best efforts, the storm will dissipate soon, the discord will remain insoluble, and the two positions will harden. It is meaningless abusing either group, for one is inherently superior to the other, by reason of the logic that underpinned its conclusions. Both positions were unlikely attained by monetary suasion; they were ideologically prompted, with the Akure meeting more progressive, and the Adebanjo camp more conservative and eclectic.

Xi Jinping gets third term

Judged by GDP growth rate since 2013 when he assumed office, President Xi Jinping of China has been an unremarkable leader. Until 2021, when he achieved GDP growth of 8.11 percent, the figure had consistently fallen from 7.77 percent in 2013 until it reached a nadir of 2.24 percent in 2020, the year of Covid-19. His affinity for strategy, rather than principle, saw him rise through the Chinese Communist Party ranks until he assumed leadership in 2013, won re-election in 2017, abolished term limits in 2018, and has now secured a historic and unprecedented third term of five years, in short a life presidency. The sixth Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping’s openness policy, he is set to become as influential as the country’s founding father, Mao Zedong.

President Xi treats human rights and Western-style democracy contemptuously. He believes in party supremacy, with the CCP boasting a membership in excess of 85 million, and the subordination of business to party. Might this clear subordination explain the low GDP performance since he assumed office, on the average seven percent, in contrast to nine percent since 1978, which sometimes rose to 12 percent or even 14 percent?

The troubling part is not that President Xi has probably reached a point of diminishing return, going, especially, by his pigheaded zero Covid policy, but his shortsighted annulment of term limits, and rejection of collective leadership and responsibility in favour of dictatorship. The stability and renewal that underpinned high growth rates since 1978 have virtually been stamped out. His election for a third term has seen him stack the leadership team, the Political Bureau Standing Committee, with his allies. The tight rein Chinese leaders have exercised over politics, and under President Xi, over business, has probably helped China to avoid the fate of Russia and other communist countries. But whether that tight control and elimination of term limits can survive sustained economic downturn remains to be seen. Last year’s growth rate has climbed back up from a dismal 2.24 percent to 8.11 percent. To retain his grip, President Xi will hope that the economic miracle that lifted more than 800m Chinese out of poverty since 1978 will endure for much longer.

Eloquent Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai has the courage of his convictions. At Monday’s Arewa Joint Committee interactive session for presidential candidates, he spoke effusively of the social and political character of the North, insisting that that character underscores the approach of “Northern Nigeria” to issues pertaining to Nigeria. He described the North as a region shaped by the values of honour and justice, and by the historical imperatives vivified by the politics of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, Tafawa Balewa, the former prime minister, and Aminu Kano, exponent of Talakawa politics and radical politician. Mercurial in temperament and unafraid to own his views, whether they are popular or not, Mallam el-Rufai seems always poised to needle his critics with sarcasm and coruscating remarks. Last Monday, in a packed hall in Kaduna, and in the presence of an animated crowd, he once again indulged his passion for oratory and boldness.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar, was at the interactive session earlier on Saturday, days before both the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Labour Party candidate Peter Obi took their turns last Monday. Alhaji Atiku must be credited with setting the tone for the interactive session by signposting the importance of the northern stakeholders’ meeting with his combustible and controversial statement directing northern voters to support him for obvious reasons. He had said: “…What the average Northerner needs is somebody who’s from the North and also understands that part of the country and has been able to build bridges across the country. This is what the Northerner needs. He doesn’t need a Yoruba or Igbo candidate. I stand before you as a pan-Nigerian of northern origin…” The statement had triggered a firestorm, and Nigerians looked forward to what Asiwaju Tinubu and Mr Obi would say.

Few expected any of the candidates to alarm anybody through their formal presentations. But a question and answer session followed every presentation. That was where the Arewa House audience hoped to ensnare the candidates. It was during the question and answer period that Alhaji Atiku fell on his sword, when communication and the use of language failed him, and when his closet conservatism, dogmatism and narcissism exploded into the open and exposed him as a risky leader the country should be chary of electing. As usual, Mr Obi, despite the social media hype by his men after the Monday event, was both lackluster and politically straitlaced, unwilling to explore beyond his constant and enervating homiletical politics. And it was during the question and answer session that Asiwaju Tinubu, despite his unease with fecund speeches, felled many a learned man with his answer to a question on climate change. Few, it turned out, had heard the metaphor “a question of how do you prevent a church rat from eating poisoned Holy Communion”. So they interpreted it literally and concluded it was inappropriate and offensive to Christians.

There was no question who performed most creditably during the Arewa Joint Committee interactive sessions, or who was most prepared to govern. It was certainly not the jingoism of Alhaji Atiku or the staidness of Mr Obi. But Mallam el-Rufai’s plea to the Kaduna crowd, eloquently delivered, also struck a distinctive chord that belied its brevity. He opened a window into his own worldview, as he always managed to do when he speaks, and an even larger window into the mindset of the core North. The rest of Nigeria may not always be enamoured of those windows, considering what controversial views they give a peep into, but politicians who curry those regional votes must be wary of infringing the northern mindset or becoming alarmed by it. Indeed, the purpose of the interactive session was to find out whether the candidates understood the northern worldview and had prepared to accommodate it. Mallam el-Rufai reiterated that worldview, but as usual gloated about it in a mildly offensive manner that betrayed the ethnic exceptionalism that had long formed the leitmotif of his politics.

In his short admonition, Mallam el-Rufai did not mince word about the candidate he supported, the APC candidate whom he said resisted entreaties not to present himself for the scrutiny last Monday. Though he said the occasion was not meant to politik, he nevertheless managed to endorse his candidate and recommend him for general endorsement, arguing that he was the only man fit and prepared to assume the mantle of leadership in 2023. But in endorsing the APC candidate, the governor predicated his choice on a few moral facts which he insinuated gave an unassailable view into the character and persona of the North, assuming the North could be likened to a man. He then brusquely went on to appropriate the mind and spiritual essence of the North for his political party by declaring that the region had the sense of honour and justice to always do what was right. More, he claimed ostentatiously, the North had a sense of history rooted in the politics and worldview of Sir Ahmadu Bello, Prime Minister Balewa, and Mallam Aminu Kano. Mallam el-Rufai also glowed about the support northern APC governors are giving Asiwaju Tinubu because the North does not know how to pretend. Once they said something, he crowed, they did it, unwilling and unable to dissemble.

Shortly before he ended his brief remarks, he indulged his mercurial gifts again as he subtly but poignantly shredded Mr Obi’s politics. He recalled an incident in 2013 or so when the APC sought to participate in a by-election in Anambra State. Mr Obi, who was then the governor of the state, he alleged, ordered him detained for 48 hours. He did not elaborate on why he was sure Mr Obi was behind his ordeal. In any case, he growled, he was now in a position as Kaduna governor to recompense Mr Obi measure for measure. But his birth as a northerner, the Kaduna governor suggested icily, did not permit him vengeance. “We are northerners; we are civilised; we don’t do things like that”, he boasted. Perhaps it is okay to boast of possessing such virtues, but it is not clear whether he did not in the same breath imply that such virtues were region-specific, almost as if those virtues were exclusive. What is clear, however, is that he had planted a seed of doubt in the minds of his listeners, inviting them to not trust Mr Obi for his pettiness, undemocratic proclivity and lack of principles.

Mallam el-Rufai appeared to have reserved his most penetrating barb for Alhaji Atiku, absolutely without mentioning his name. In fact, few would suspect the barb was aimed at the PDP candidate. Alluding to a sense of justice in the APC but inextricably connecting it with, again, that regional exceptionalism and nobility that both hallmark the politics of the North, the Kaduna governor painted an effervescent picture of northern APC governors convoking ‘one Saturday evening’ to redeem the image of the region by insisting on power rotation to the South. Some have described the effort as a ploy to get the governor or any of the governors’ assignees the coveted running mate position, but Mallam el-Rufai suggested the aim was much nobler than that – a regionwide gesture to higher moral principles and standards. “We insisted that power must rotate to the South”, the governor bellowed to underscore the principles of justice, fairness and honour. After eight years of Muhammadu Buhari administration, he opined, it was futile asking for another four years in the presidency for the North, as if others do not matter.

What Mallam el-Rufai said made ample sense, whatever his motives. But it becomes even far more poignant when contextualised against the ambition of Alhaji Atiku who throughout his politics had shown an idiosyncratic lack of reverence for rules, agreements and fairness. Not only was Mallam el-Rufai now insinuating the serial presidential contestant’s shortcomings before the northern audience, he was probably also drawing their attention to his provocative Freudian slip denoted by the inexpert appeal to the regional sentiments of his northern compatriots. Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike at various times alluded to the unreliability and self-centredness of the PDP candidate, insisting that he could not be trusted to keep his word or extend the virtue of fairness to others since he didn’t have it in the first instance. In a few short minutes, Mallam el-Rufai, while facetiously deploring politking at the Kaduna interactive session last Monday, managed to sell his candidate and demarket the PDP and LP candidates. In that dizzying moment too, he sold the virtue of the North with the typical gusto his politics of exceptionalism could drive. But who could blame him, or cavil at his virtuoso performance?

Kanu, Igboho and mismanagement of dissent

Once the federal government moved against Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, two well-known self-determination activists, it was constitutionally duty bound to prosecute them according to the laws of the country. The problem, however, for many Nigerian governments is that the rule of law appears ponderous, demanding and less indulgent towards government powers in order to protect the weak. In 2015, the Muhammadu Buhari administration arrested the showy and loquacious Mr Kanu for demanding freedom for Biafra, an amorphous and hypothetical country with controversially ambitious boundaries. The administration detested self-determination, arguing that the boundaries of Nigeria and its unity had become inviolate and ironclad. It made no effort to understand the reasons for the agitations, nor did it attempt any effort to placate or even cleverly weaken or subvert the secessionist demands.

But the courts remain courts, and in 2017, Mr Kanu was admitted to bail. He, however, jumped bail when soldiers invaded his home. Fast forward to 2021, he was extraordinarily renditioned from Kenya to Nigeria, thereby abridging legal process and violating domestic and international laws. The Court of Appeal last month seemed to agree and he was discharged and ordered released. Then began a welter of legal interpretations to determine whether his discharge amounted to acquittal or not. The federal government has finally gone to the Supreme Court. What is important here is not whether the Court of Appeal erred in law or not, but whether the administration could not have handled the sensitive matter differently. From all indications, and judging from statements made by administration officials and even the president himself, the government was unduly emotional, awkward and imperious in handling the separatist demands from the Southeast.

The same emotionalism was to lather the self-determination agitations from the Southwest anchored by Mr Igboho a few years after Mr Kanu was first arrested. The Southwest case was even more interesting. It began with the rampage of herdsmen killing and maiming on farmlands and remote settlements. Months after months, the federal government demonstrated the most appalling degree of impotence any government anywhere could exhibit. Fearing that the Southwest could become a killing field like the Middle Belt, where herdsmen embarked on and still sustain unchecked killing sprees, Mr Igboho appropriated the angst of the region and took it upon himself to rid the Yoruba heartland of herdsmen, armed or not. Naturally, it was not long before the campaign took on ethnic colouration that pitched locals against every nomad and itinerant Fulani. Soon, it was a matter of time before the campaign against herdsmen morphed into a campaign for self-determination, sucking in critical members of the Southwest elite already apprehensive of some hidden Fulanisation agenda.

Here again, the federal government demonstrated sheer incompetence. They summed up that Mr Igboho exemplified the struggle against herdsmen and the nascent self-determination campaign by the Southwest. They also reasoned that once he is taken out of circulation, either by death or arrest and incarceration, the campaigns would collapse. Though the Southwest had their reservations against Mr Igboho and his autocratic and amateurish style, they were nevertheless incensed by the clumsy effort to murder the activist in a night raid marked by indiscriminate shooting. Before the raid, sensing the awful dimension the Southwest struggle was heading, the region’s political leaders met publicly and denounced the Igboho secessionist campaign. The unusual denunciation was a bold and risky business, but it worked. All that was left was for the federal government to cash in on that breather and mount a coordinated campaign against herdsmen and other international criminals soaking the countryside and farms in blood.

Instead, flush with the success of the rendition of Mr Kanu from Kenya, the administration mounted a campaign to force Mr Igboho back to Nigeria from Benin Republic where he had fled for refuge. He was on his way to Germany. That effort, luckily for the federal government, met with little success. Had Mr Igboho been extraordinarily renditioned to Nigeria, the administration would be battling two unpopular cases in the court, cases that have tended to paint the administration as sectarian, ethnically motivated, and obsessed with hegemonic agenda. The courts have tried to maintain impartiality by judging the Kanu case mostly on its legal merit. Consequently, the administration is having egg on its face. Had they also tried to manage an Igboho case alongside the Kanu case, it is unlikely they would not be more embarrassed.

Mr Kanu would have been castrated had the administration made diplomatic and legal efforts to extradite him from either Kenya or Britain. But they were tired of his campaigns, his incitement, his hate speech, and the freedom with which he seemed to indulge his bellicosity. They, however, failed to recognise that his campaign did not have the legitimacy it appeared to have at first view. They then compounded their error by also tarring Mr Igboho with the same brush, and tried neutralising him using the same terror tactics unsuccessfully applied against the Southeast activist. But neither Mr Kanu nor Mr Igboho was as popular as their campaigns indicated. The administration may be spared the burden of also prosecuting Mr Igboho in Nigerian courts, but it will have to continue to contend with that of Mr Kanu for a while. It is hard to see them winning, for domestic and international laws recognise self-determination agitations. There were reasons for the agitations; the administration should have more sensibly tackled the campaigns from the demand side (reasons for the agitations) rather than from the supply side (government’s instruments of coercion), a misnomer and orientation that hark back to the dysfunctional paradigms of colonial rule.

Approximately three categories of voters will always be involved in campaigns and elections. One group will oppose the entire election, another will be indifferent to the elections, and may not even vote, and the third will be happily partisan. The first fears that if the national question of any country has not been resolved, it will be fruitless patching up a house of cards doomed to collapse. A significant number of people in the Southwest, where the noise of restructuring is loudest, hold this view. So, too, in perhaps unorthodox ways, do self-determination groups like the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) in the Southeast.

The second group has endured decades of frustration such that most of them now simply don’t care what happens next: if the country survives as one, good; if it doesn’t, too bad. A sizable number of Nigerians from all walks belong in this category, and they transcend ethnic, religious and class distinctions. A third group has either taken sides or is in the process of identifying with a political party. Majority of Nigerians belong here. Readers and analysts must acknowledge these realities in examining the subject of elections and campaigns. While the first and second groups are free to hold their views, they must also be realistic enough to know that despite their preferences, the country will go on, perhaps for the next few decades, as one, not because some egotistic politicians and hegemonic ethnic and religious groups want it so, but because historical forces are simply sometimes too inexorable to be affected by processes or wishes until they assume a critical mass.

Great statesmen recognise the utter puniness of human beings and their limitations in affecting the course of history other than as pawns themselves on the divine chessboard. Former Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck rued this eternal limitation when he reflected on the morbid picture defeat etched on the face of Napoleon III after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and groaned that “A statesman… must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through history (events), then leap up and grasp the hem of His garment.” From all indications, the 2023 polls will hold, a president will emerge, and for all anyone cares, the presidency will rotate South, and then North after many years. This inexorable process may be galling, but it will happen. Neither this columnist nor anyone else is in a position to determine definitively that without restructuring or referendum, for instance, it would be useless to go to the polls. History has shown, to the pain of the judicious, that the emergence of great leaders and the occurrence of revolutionary realignment of nations are exceptions to the rule. A far greater number of leaders globally will continue to be third-rate, most countries will remain insignificant and rent with discord and acrimony, and most people (and voters) will gravitate towards the wrong issues and the wrong leaders.

The debate as to how to rearrange or dismember Nigeria will continue to rage, especially with the election of incompetent leaders and megalomaniacs. The debate will also involve asking whether the current political system can indeed produce a competent, imaginative and bold leader who will remake Nigeria from what it is to a better version. It is not certain that the people deserve such bold leaders, or possess the ability and courage to elect him when he appears. But perhaps it is not impossible to find such a man. He will be flawed, for he will not be an angel, and will probably have an appearance that is not charming either to ethnic champions or to religious potentates. But if against all odds he finds his way into office, Nigeria, as decadent as it is, spoiled by reigning powers and principalities, may yet heave a great sigh of relief.

The problem bedeviling Nigeria is truly monumental. Put aside the past for a brief moment and examine the N20.5 trillion 2023 budget. It allocates N6.3trn for debt servicing, will borrow N8.8trn to finance the budget, and among other things allocates N3.6trn for fuel subsidy. President Muhammadu Buhari meanwhile appeals to the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to sheathe their strike sword and return to classes, boasting that he had allocated N470bn to revitalise tertiary institutions, but warning that the government had little else to allocate to the schools. However, the Presidency gets an allocation of N133bn and the National Assembly N169bn. It is not just the abominable prioritisation that rankles, it is the sheer inability of the administration to conceive greatness and fund that ambition with coherent and consistent budgeting. Contradictions like these encourage pessimists to anticipate Nigeria’s collapse. The terribly opaque 2023 budget will of course be entirely reworked by the next administration, assuming the country puts someone who knows figures and economics in office, someone who is driven himself, someone who has ambition to get Nigeria to aim for the skies.

These are the reasons questions about the parties and their candidates will be asked. Mistakes must not be made. The PDP, for instance, is obviously not ready to retake office. It has not remedied its folly of 16 years, nor purged its ranks to reset its paradigm, nor yet asked itself the right questions about the competence of its candidate, about fairness of its methods and processes, and about Nigeria’s existential question. As the Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike said last month, the PDP candidate, ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar, is unreliable, unprincipled and almost wholly destitute of leadership character. The PDP candidate, facts show, has spent nearly all his life flip-flopping on issues and policies, breaking truce, giving his word and breaking it with exasperating indifference, and actually does not believe in anything noble, inspiring and beneficial. Worse, the PDP has not answered the question of why power should go back to the North after residing in that region for about eight years. And if power should remain in the North, would it ever rotate South again?

Some youths running on the adrenalin of revolutionary thinking are romanticising a Peter Obi presidency as the deus ex machine for ailing Nigeria. Produced by consensus on the platform of the famished Labour Party, Mr Obi has by a strange chemistry of political occurrences not needed to prove anything other than his suspect frugality and his unproven rhetoric. Though far less competent than the former Kano State governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), it is one of the cruel ironies of Nigeria that the LP candidate is much spoken of in Nigeria’s political circles than the more enigmatic Kanawa politician and leader. Like Alhaji Atiku, Mr Obi has no record of economic and policy achievements to boast of, no contribution to Nigeria’s democratic struggle, no enduring or seismic impact on public policy, no bridges built to either the Southwest or North or to any other ethnic group for that matter, and no reforms to boast of despite being a student of philosophy. But the fact is that the Buhari administration has managed for about eight years to complicate and worsen the Nigerian condition such that no one of modest contributions or qualification or experience can hope to ameliorate.

It is a tragedy of the Fourth Republic that APC candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in asking for votes to mend the hedges broken by the exclusionary policies of the current administration, has had to struggle against the entrenched bureaucrats of his party to stay relevant for eight years, struggle and take the presidential ticket when it should naturally be his by acclamation, and must also now fight against the tide as some party apparatchiks snap at his heels as the campaigns begin. The APC had initially given indication, after the PDP primary, that a northern candidate would be suitable as their standard-bearer, an indication that exposed the many fractious tendencies within the party. In the end, reason prevailed. If the country is to be saved, both North and South must show a commitment to give and take.

President Muhammadu Buhari has not given indication that both before and after the ruling party’s primary he understands the interplay of forces and the political dynamics that shape national unity. As the PDP battles to regain its composure and smother the quest for fragmentation, and while the sprinting LP tries to sustain its stamina over the long distance till the grand electoral opera of February opens, perhaps President Buhari’s close advisers will admonish him to put his foot down in the party. APC leaders may not demonstrate absolute commitment to the party’s cause, but the president has sat on the fence long enough to feel the strain and pressure of trying to please everybody. His records have not been the best, and the party must contend with fending off the negative effects of his policies which are certain to become campaign issues, but he can at last leave no one in doubt what he wants. The question is knowing what he really wants?

Church and 2023 poll endorsements

After a whirlwind of denouncing the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential ticket for being of the same faith in a multi-religious society, the church has finally moderated its stance by advising Christians to vote their conscience and the competence of the candidates. Whatever led to this moderation must be commended. By their antecedents, particularly in reference to the culture perpetrated by the Early Church, the modern church had an obligation to operate in wisdom. For a few dizzying months, particularly following the primary of the ruling party that produced same-faith ticket, the church campaigned against any ticket they said violated the fundamental principles of fairness and equity among Nigeria’s religions. But finally, after the flurry of denunciations, wisdom has appeared to prevail. That wisdom is enshrined in the time-honoured ecclesiastical principle that the church could never safely engage in political endorsements, partly because their members are spread across all existing political parties.

After his candidacy was endorsed, Labour Party’s Peter Obi had embarked on a tour of churches to subtly seek their endorsements. He never openly asked for endorsement, but in their responses or prefatory remarks, church leaders had enthusiastically embraced him, being the only Christian of some heft in the race. Some church leaders even went the extra length of pouring curses on anyone who planned to vote same-faith ticket, suggesting sometimes openly that Mr Obi was the man to vote for. Other church leaders shockingly became openly partisan, attending campaign rallies and praying for Mr Obi. Then of course Christian associations, particularly the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), also railed against same-faith ticket which they decried as insensitive. The associations looked at what a candidate wore on his wrist – his faith – to determine whom to support, and in a clever way too his ethnic background. They did not look at the content of the candidate’s character or crucially too his competence.

The campaign against the entirely fortuitous same-faith ticket of the ruling party was more strident in the Southwest and the Middle Belt. In the past two decades or so, the Southwest, which had given the impression it was closer than any other region in Nigeria to a civic culture, and that its secularist worldview was neither happenstance nor ephemeral, has begun to wobble very badly in the direction of religious and political sectarianism. In some states governed by the defunct Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) led by Obafemi Awolowo, the Southwest had produced same-faith tickets and won elections handsomely. But before the advancing and polluting army of non-secularists rampaging over Nigeria, the region forswore its advancement and civilisation and began to wilt. Many analysts, including this writer, had asserted vigorously that the campaign against same-faith ticket was not going to last, either in the church or in the wider society. It has not. Indeed, it is being reversed nobly and aggressively. For decades, the Southwest had set the pace in religious, cultural and political tolerance. It is perhaps already making up its mind that it is reluctant to surrender that rich status, and certainly not because of President Buhari’s exclusionary and sectarian politics. It would be too high a price to pay to abandon a rich and enduring civilisation.

Consequently, the region has examined the APC same-faith ticket and has become convinced that it was not a religious ploy to dominate. They are placated that it is a mere electoral tool. After that conviction, it is now left in the hands of the individual to determine whom to vote for, not along religious lines, but along the lines of competence, capacity and character. If Mr Obi is to appeal to the Southwest and Christians, he will have to search for new issues and tools to drive his charm offensive. The church too has definitively corrected what threatened to be a dogma months ago. The PFN’s Bishop Francis Wale Oke probably spoke the mind of many Christians last week when he declared during the first service of his church’s New Ministerial Year that fairness and competence should be the main determining factors in voting a candidate.

He had said: “If a Muslim can solve Nigeria’s problem, I will vote for him so far he will treat Muslims and Christians as equal stakeholders in Nigeria, and he will not favor one religion above another. For me, if a Hausa man emerges, okay, if it is Fulani man, good, if it is Igbo, Kanuri, Edo, Ibibio, or Yoruba man, okay, provided he stands for justice, equity, fairness, and one Nigeria. He must also be a man that can deal with the problem of Nigeria decisively…Vote for whoever has the capacity to turn around Nigeria; use your votes to change the fortune of the nation to give Nigerians the nation we want. Let’s decide and go beyond religious sentiment, ethnicity, and party so that Nigeria can get to its destination.” It is reassuring that the church has stepped back from the precipice of partisanship. It didn’t work during the administration of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan when he sought re-election, though some attribute the subsequent confusion, religious calcification, and politics of exclusion of the Muhammadu Buhari administration to the failure to get the former president back into office.

Perhaps too, Christian leaders have suddenly realised the discomfiting fact that Mr Obi is unlikely to win. The youth frenzy he had hoped to capitalise on and the religious army he had hoped to galvanise behind his candidacy have failed to materialise. Voting for him substantially, some fear, might deadlock the election and in the event of a runoff gift the presidency to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar. In terms of secularism and competence, Alhaji Atiku, the church knows, is unable to hold the candle to the APC candidate. Even Mr Obi who cleverly sells himself as the Christian candidate is less competent than Alhaji Atiku. The church might squirm over the candidates’ religion, but there is no question they have eventually discovered which side their bread is buttered. Happily, the church will now substantially eschew religious sentiments in voting for the candidate who will courageously, fairly and imaginatively deal with Nigeria’s multifarious problems. It will not vote as a block. And it will not need to endorse anyone. Now, it can in fact be said that to a significant extent, religion is unlikely to colour Choice 2023 on the scale initially feared, despite John Cardinal Onaiyekan last Wednesday exposing his voting preference in a subtle but probably futile attempt to influence the church’s votes.

It will take a few more weeks, perhaps two to three, before the 2023 election campaigns really gain momentum. The All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are still enmeshed in the balancing act of constituting their presidential campaign councils. If disharmony still lurks in their councils, they will summon all the diplomatic tact necessary to paper over the cracks. They will, however, meet with varying degrees of success. But once underway, they should be able to match and outpace the feisty Labour Party (LP) crowd, though majority of voters will not bother about rallies, let alone road walk. The LP is a small party with a dreamy and pertinacious presidential candidate, Peter Obi. Because he embodies and now revivifies a party that was initially doomed to anonymity, his presidential campaign council will neither be prone to serious disharmony nor complicated. Take Mr Obi out of the party, and the LP dreadnought will sink under the weight of its insignificance and vacuity. Somehow, the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) has begun to recede from the political space and the electorate’s consciousness. If its leaders do nothing to reawaken it from slumber, it will fade altogether.

The leading contenders for the diadem still remain the APC and the PDP. Since May and June when they had their primaries, party leaders and candidates, including voters, have engaged in feverish calculations over the possible outcomes of the coming polls. They are right to analyse the geopolitical colourations of the voters and try to assign weights to the zones. They are also right to second-guess the country on what the prevailing moods are, whether they favour the same-faith ticket of the APC or embrace the Fulani North ticket of the PDP. Indeed, they cast furtive and anxious glances at the menacing strength and chances of the LP, but they are unlikely to be considerably fazed by Mr Obi’s doggedness, at least not until the battle is truly and irrevocably joined. However, all the parties who imagined they stood a chance of making a strong showing at the presidential poll or even winning it when the spadework started earlier in the year may have begun to reassess everything anew.

PDP devotees are unsure how their party’s chairmanship controversy would be resolved, but however it is resolved will definitely impact their presidential bid. Iyorchia Ayu, their beleaguered chairman, will be consulting party leaders to determine his next move. He is loth to relinquish his position, and the candidate, Atiku Abubakar, is especially fond of Dr Ayu, the indispensable tool for his coronation as standard-bearer. But the southern wing of the party led by the intransigent Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike advocates for rotation in favour of a chairman from the South, preferably the Southwest. The southern wing’s campaign resonates with many party members and leaders, though some have already reconciled themselves to the status quo. If Alhaji Atiku is merely playing hardball, and is in fact willing to let go of Dr Ayu, the party will hope that significant damage had not already been done to the party fabric by the needless controversy. Mr Wike himself, as the soul of the internal opposition in the party, will also have to determine that he had not taken his rebellion too far to the point of no return. If reconciliation is done and a southern chairman emerges, it will remain for the Wike crowd to do some introspection on whether after all is said and done Alhaji Atiku can ever be trusted again. The governor had dismissed him as unreliable and divisive; would his concession, should it happen, not be interpreted as Machiavellian?

As the campaigns rev to life, LP’s Mr Obi has opportunistically scheduled repeated interactions with Mr Wike and his camp. But the Rivers governor is more astute and calculating than his volubility or irreverence suggests. Given his politics and assertiveness, it is not clear what his instincts tell him. Can he flourish in the midst of Mr Obi’s crowd to whom even the LP candidate is a captive? The aspirations of the LP supporters are decidedly not ideological; they are coloured by impatience, brusqueness, intimidation, and perhaps other ignoble interests. Students of leadership, not to talk of students of politics and history, are privately dismayed by the predilections of the crowd around Mr Obi, not to say the candidate’s own amorphousness and controversial idealism. Mr Wike has been unable to reach realistic accommodation with APC leaders and candidate, despite a few rounds of negotiations, and despite sharing many tendencies with Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It would be surprising to see him in bed with Mr Obi with whom he is truly and inherently dissimilar.

The APC also boasts of some rough edges. Their presidential primary and the victory of Asiwaju Tinubu were textbook perfect. Both the organisation and outcome of the primary came against the run of play. Few expected them to have it so spectacular; but they did. However, constituting their campaign council has been fraught with arguments, secret memos and misunderstanding partly caused by remnants among the party leadership whose egos had been bruised. Worse, the party’s campaign will have to walk the tightrope of gauging just how gingerly to distance itself from the controversial records of the Muhammadu Buhari administration and at the same time profit from the undeniable achievements of the same administration. Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi will run against the Buhari record, and their campaign will resonate with a chafing and disgruntled public. Asiwaju Tinubu cannot, and should not, lest he should alienate the sizable Buhari supporters who have remained grateful to him for single-mindedly promoting and supporting their idol in 2015 and 2019. The APC, notwithstanding its same-faith ticket, will acknowledge the work it needs to do in promoting political and religious inclusivity, but emphasise, project and appropriate the phenomenal work done in infrastructural and agricultural renewal.

Apart from the geopolitical dynamics expected to influence the outcome of the February poll, which at the moment favours the APC, focus will rest heavily on how believable the candidates are in respect of their campaign promises and how convinced voters are that their leadership, if they take the reins of power, would be transformational. Alhaji Atiku is largely conservative and has shown no demonstrable depth in managing large political entities or in envisioning the great society. As for having the courage of his convictions, Mr Wike says the former vice president cannot be trusted. His flip-flop over the open and disgraceful murder of Deborah Samuel in Sokoto State in May indicate how amoebic his principles and values have become in his desperate bid to preside over Nigeria.

Mr Obi has been more fortunate in believability, and has even begun to think he can win. He projects honesty and sacrifice as the twin credo of his politics. For his supporters who put their privations in Nigeria down to dishonest and corrupt leaders, this Obi trait appears to be all they want and need. The LP candidate has shown little fidelity to statistics, which he shoots at the public while inebriated by the glibness of his rhetoric. His two terms as a state governor, he continues to emphasise, were noticeable not for economic or industrial transformation of Anambra but for frugality. He proposes to preside over 200m Nigerians but has not propounded any significant economic ideas and models capable of transforming Nigeria. How he hopes to persuade the public to vote for him when he has not managed to persuade himself about what he believes or hopes to do is a mystery. He is satisfied that his supporters are not a questioning lot, and that they have only a vague notion that once an honest person takes office, somehow the jigsaw would fall into place. He also seems satisfied that his supporters do not demand substance from him; and when he makes his inevitable statistical slips, they either ignore his failings or downplay his fallacies.

But in the end, the votes will be determined geopolitically, particularly by the silent majority who have neither adapted to the religious rhetoric inundating parts of the country nor succumbed to the extravagant rallies and fierce statements made by some of the candidates. Of the three leading contenders, Nigeria’s power brokers, who herd votes, will determine whether to risk supporting Alhaji Atiku and inadvertently endorse the alienation that is certain to lead to schisms in the polity as a result of putting another Fulani man in office. Even the Christian brethren who have wailed against the same-faith ticket and gravitated towards Mr Obi will wonder whether they would not inadvertently put Alhaji Atiku in office. (After all, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has done little to mitigate the egregious parochialism of the Buhari administration). They will have to decide whether to follow the self-centred agenda of Babachir David Lawal or Hon Yakubu Dogara, or the histrionics of Prophet Isa El-Buba, all of whom have dangerously whipped up emotions over the APC ticket. (See Box).

The campaigns have just begun, but the suspicion is that the country’s power brokers and their captive electorate fear that the PDP ticket would invariably promote alienation and ultimately destabilisation, while the LP ticket, with its feisty support base among some youths across the nation as well as Southeast voters, might in the final analysis engender and reprise the kind of conflict that led the country to a maelstrom decades ago. They may have reservations about the APC ticket, and even feel or suspect that the ruling party’s candidate may be too strong-willed to be malleable, but they may see him as the safest bet for the future. The weeks ahead will determine whether they are right and whether they can truly hold their captive voters in leash long enough to do their bidding.

Dogara, Babachir Lawal and The Crusades

Once it became clear that the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu would not be picking a northern Christian running mate, former House of Representatives speaker, Yakubu Dogara, and former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal, immediately flew off the handle. They have since formed a pact to cause their party as much distress as possible. At first, they began by trying to forestall the choice, but failed. Then they tried to get it reversed when a Muslim placeholder held out that possibility. Again they failed. After the choice seemed to have become cast in granite, they still held out some little hope that somehow, along the line, a miraculous reversal could materialise. But their political barometer malfunctioned. Any political watcher of moderate gift should have suspected that the APC standard-bearer had no choice, for reasons already discussed here and elsewhere, but to go to the presidential election with that kind of ticket.

Both Hon Dogara and Mr Babachir are APC members. Once they failed to prevent the choice of same-faith ticket, it was expected that they would reconcile themselves to their party’s choice. Their recalcitrance implies that they will continue to dare their party until something gives. Since the ticket can’t and won’t be altered, the only thing that will give is for the duo to embark on a fishing trip to other parties or be forced to leave the party. The party won’t allow them to do damage from within. There are already reports that they might be looking in the direction of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the resurgent Labour Party. But the PDP standard-bearer is the vacillating Muslim northerner, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president, almost the perfect antithesis to their vaunted crusades against religious domination and intimidation. It would be difficult for them to embrace the object and personification of their pet animosity. Reports of their flirtations with the PDP may thus be exaggerated. Labour Party’s standard-bearer, Peter Obi, a former two-term Anambra State governor, is their only other bet.

Hon Dogara and Mr Babachir have assigned themselves the responsibility of hoisting what they claim is the Christian banner in the North, and have whipped up negative emotions over the APC’s presidential ticket, and threatened Armageddon to boot. But the more their party appears to ignore them, the more incensed they have become. Unfortunately for them the party is even more determined to ignore them, knowing full well, all things considered, that both men have little electoral value, only name recognition. The dissenters also recognise their limitations and have sensibly but futilely hidden behind the banner of the Christian North to pummel their party. In meetings after meetings, and from one church to another, sometimes aided by the renascent politician and Christian activist and politician, Mr Obi, both Hon Dogara and Mr Babachir have tried to rouse Christians in the North into fury and rebellion. There is of course no doctrinal basis for the war they are fighting, nor political logic to the rebellion against their party, but it seems their only chance to remain relevant. Increasingly, however, they seem to be fading from view. Their hysteria, it turns out, has had minimal effect, notwithstanding the boost ubiquitous social media platforms hostile to the ruling party have given their campaign.

The 2023 campaigns began a few days ago. But contrary to the expectations of the combative duo, the sentiment against the APC’s same-faith ticket has become tamer and tamer, driven in part by the fact that few states in the country are really conflicted about the issue. The Southwest is secular and have laboured to see same-faith ticket as an issue. Instead, the region has focused on other areas of the campaigns and the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates. The Southeast is too focused on Mr Obi’s unexampled run, including his efforts to court disaffected PDP dissenters, to be agitated about the religious complexion of party tickets. The South-South, on the other hand, has been fixated on the political soap opera written and enacted by Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike against the PDP to bother about the APC ticket. The Northwest sees the ticket as a win-win, and both the North Central and Northeast have been more bemused by the hoopla over the ticket than angry. They seem vaguely aware that both the former speaker and SGF are fighting for themselves, not for Christians as they pretend to be doing.

Mr Babachir, for instance, is a self-confessed Christian and champion of the faith. But that is as far as his Christianity goes. Given his bitter and acerbic denunciations in the past few weeks, it is at least consoling that he is in fact not an agnostic. He could easily have been worse. For a self-confessed champion of the church, there is, however, nothing in his private and public life, not now and not in the past, that resembles anything close to the Christian standards he professes to be fighting for. He is indifferent to the virtues of patience, love, kindness, and forbearance, among others, and has badmouthed Christian bishops for seeking clarifications from APC standard-bearer. Hon Dogara, on the other hand, has been less strident but no less vehement. It is striking that the two gentlemen have not seemed discomfited using wholly secular and intemperate tools to prosecute non-secular objectives. In the weeks ahead, their campaign will likely taper off. Christian apprehension about the politicisation of religion in Nigeria, particularly the subterranean attempts by one religion to secure advantage over others or even dominate the public sector, is real. But there is no consensus as to how to achieve a level playing field, and it is doubtful whether the crusading duo’s methods are realistic or effective.