THE opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) continues to cast furtive, incestuous glances at the so-called captive voters of the core North in order to define and shape its internal politics, particularly relating to the presidential nomination. Like the assumptive ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the PDP does not explain why those captive voters would not split their votes among competing parties. However, based on that controversial assumption, the PDP has prevaricated over the issue of zoning, but will eventually throw the contest open. Regional socio-cultural and political groups such as the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) and the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) speak, act and play their politics as if the PDP is synonymous with the North, as if the region is homogenous, as if the region also practices one faith – Islam. They never speak of any core North, for that would detract from their conclusions and weaken their arguments and presumptions.

In April when the party screened its aspirants, there were some 17 of them, predictably fewer than those on the much more frenzied platform of the APC. Many of the contenders hail from the South, which had for more than a year contended for the ticket to be zoned to their region. But by sheer coincidence, the South has been unable to produce an outstanding aspirant worthy of the ticket, deep, even-tempered, well-spoken and meriting support from huge swathes of the North and South. In contrast, the North has flaunted aspirants easier on the political and cultural senses. The South has history and logic in its favour; but the North has exigency and practicality on its side. This dilemma has created much dissonance in the party and prompted northern leaders to be reckless in their assertions, and the South to be offended by the unreasonableness of fellow northern party members.

Every passing day, it looks increasingly likely that the ticket will go North, as unfair and brazenly unjust as that may be. This supposition is reinforced by the spade work being done by the North’s regional socio-cultural groupings, particularly their emphasis on their region’s huge voting strength, a significant percentage of which will not be deterred by any consideration of fairness or unfairness in order to vote within or outside the PDP. There are of course a few aspirants from the South who are much better and have demonstrated more competence than any aspirant in the North; but aspirants like ex-governor Peter Obi, Pius Anyim and Sam Ohuabunwa have the distinct disadvantage of coming from the Southeast, a region which the North has formed the stupefying consensus to disrobe in the next presidential polls for a number of reasons, some harking back to the civil war and pre-war eras. There is also the added disadvantage of the Southeast’s and South-South’s low voter turnout.

For the 2023 presidential poll, the safe bet is for the ticket to go North, obviously undeservedly, but doubtless more pragmatically. Should that happen, the party will find itself contending with two harsh repercussions. The party is already worried about the low voting population of the two southern geopolitical zones of Southeast and South-South. Denied the ticket, turnout in the zone will be far smaller than envisaged. What then would become of the chief reason for denying the South the ticket, if the North’s so-called substantial turnout would not compensate for the South’s depressed voter population? The South has also threatened to bolt from the party should the ticket go North. But the steeds are truly fastened to the stable doors. The region has the more colourful aspirants: charismatic and loquacious like River State’s Nyesom Wike, dour but proven like Mr Obi, technocratic and deep like the pharmacist Mr Ohuabunwa, colorful and rambunctious like ex-Ekiti governor Ayo Faoyse, and dashing and eloquent like the Ovation Magazine publisher Dele Momodu. But it is one of the few contestants from the North that will take the diadem.

Theoretically, any of the five aspirants from the North, including the North Central, could take the ticket, not because they outclass their southern compatriots, but because northern socio-cultural groupings as well as the party’s leaders from the North have formed the opinion that only a northern candidate stands the chance of winning the presidential poll next year. They do not emphasise the quality of the aspirant/candidate; instead they focus on his ethnic and religious background. Sadly, as offensive as their arguments may be, not to say the benighted premises of those arguments, they are right to switch attention to a region and aspirants who stand any chance of winning. Of the five, only three can lay claim: Sokoto governor Aminu Tambuwal for his smart leadership of the House of Representatives when he was speaker, Bauchi’s Bala Mohammed for his outspokenness, not to say insularity in the defence of the Fulani worldwide, and ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar who does not need any introduction. Ex-senate president Bukola Saraki, from Kwara State, straddles the divide between North and South, and gets a look-in only as a possible dark horse or fail-safe option.

Shadowy figures in the APC have done their best to limit the chances of their frontrunner, ex-Lagos governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu, but have met with little success. The only shadowy figures with a say in the PDP are generally either inactive in the party or are not even members anymore. In any case, unlike the APC, the influential individuals dictating the direction for PDP are not even shadowy; they are well known. They will do their utmost to deny the former vice president the ticket; but it is not clear how they can succeed. He has name recognition, has deep pocket, is fearless, and a little charismatic but doubtless controversial. He prides himself on being a unifier than a pacifier like President Buhari. He is right. He has recounted with gusto his achievements in managing the nation’s economy as vice president, far better, it seems, than current vice president Yemi Osinbajo. Again, comparatively he is right. Then he talks of his plans being ‘sound’, his ideology being ‘solid and stable’, and his connection to Nigerians being ‘enduring’. No one has tested his claims in the real sense, nor has he provided proof of his idolatrous panegyrics.

Not only does he seem incapable of matching even the first three aspirants in the APC, there is little to suggest that Mr Tambuwal, Dr Saraki and banker Mohammed Hayatu-Deen can’t lay similar claims to equal policy fecundity and experience. He has spoken little of his record as a flighty politician who behaves like a bird of passage, flirting with party tickets as the spirit seizes him. He is a natural PDP politician, but he has remorselessly jumped ship and frolicked with other parties when the exigencies arose. He is naturally practical, even pragmatic; but to describe his casual and flimsy eclecticism as stable and sound ideology is gross exaggeration. He is dogged and committed to his own cause, a reason explaining his five attempts at winning the presidency. Maybe that constitutes the character he insinuates he possesses in abundance, a combination of his mental and moral qualities unique to his person. But if character is defined in the transcendental sense embodied by great men and women in history, it is hard to see his utter lack of dependability and poor vision as qualifying him as a man of character.

His appalling weaknesses notwithstanding, he is still the man to beat in the PDP. He can be beaten on all the scores he has set for himself, but his opponents lack the know-how to take him down. Indeed, it will take his party a lot to deny him the ticket, for no one else who gets the ticket can match his fortitude or money. If, as projected, he finally gets the ticket, the first time ever on the PDP platform, it will take his jousting with a united, sensible and less manipulative APC to get him truly whipped and unhorsed. APC will struggle to win the election if they get their primary right, if they manage to extricate the nomination process from the vice-like grip of shadowy cabals and manipulators. PDP, as currently constituted and led, and even with the best nominee in the world, will struggle much harder to achieve half the mark.

 

Frantic APC second-guesses PDP

THERE is sadly no end to manipulations in the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). After the dissolved caretaker committee imbibed the vice and practised it for 18 months, the party has kept the apparition well fed. The manipulations began with the extension of the mandate of the caretaker committee, pirouetted through a number of other extensions, and ended with a foiled plan to enthrone a predetermined presidential primary outcome. Now, the party is intensifying the manipulations by plotting to foist a northern candidate on the party after failing to railroad the Goodluck Jonathan candidature through the party via an improbable consensus. Senate president Ahmad Lawan is in one corner being pressured into the presidential race. It is not known whether he will succumb. Jigawa State governor Mohammed Badaru Abubakar has also entered the race, and so too will a few more northerners, after a few alluring months of conceding the position to southerners. It is all part of the unfathomable plot by shadowy APC leaders the party and electorate earlier thought they knew.

Even though the party has not officially spoken, officials have rationalised the entry into the presidential race of some northern politicians. According to them, it portends danger for the ruling party to put all its eggs in one basket, seeing that the PDP has appeared to throw its presidential ticket open. If the race in the PDP is dominated by northern aspirants, with the distinct possibility that a northerner would be picked as standard-bearer, the APC manipulators argue that it could be disastrous for their party to be wrong-footed by the opposition. The opposition, not to say northern opinion moulders and regional groups, has begun to market the controversial logic that the core North consistently casts the most and winning votes in any election. If that is so, chorused the anxious APC manipulators, it would be suicidal for the APC not to also field a northern presidential candidate in line with the PDP logic.

The APC manipulators ignore two salient arguments. Firstly, where on earth did that galling fallacy emanate? There was never a time, and not in any of the country’s four republics, that either the North or the South could muster enough votes to win the presidential poll by itself. President Muhammadu Buhari himself, as candidate three times, probably embraced that fallacy by trying to go it alone when he vied for the presidency and failed. He succeeded at his fourth attempt only because he looked South, and in particular because he looked to the right South. Just looking South, he discovered to his consternation, was not even enough. The PDP, for its own selfish calculations, is selling a boondoggle, and a gullible APC appears ready to bite the bait. Secondly, when some sources in the APC leadership spoke wistfully about the PDP game plan of fielding a northerner for the presidential contest, the question must be asked what the APC truly believes, or whether the ruling party is indeed vacuous. If the PDP no longer possesses a sense of fairness and equity, should APC also be destitute of logic and fair play? After eight years of a president of northern extraction, should commonsense and virtue not dictate to the APC to believe and fight for what is right rather than what is expedient?

In all this, the problem is actually the president’s laissez faire approach to politics. He is the party’s leader. Whether he likes it or not, he exemplifies the party’s philosophy and worldview. He may lack the depth and substance to embody these virtues, but constitutionally, he personifies all that the party stands for and believes. Though he has received all presidential aspirants and encouraged them to forge ahead, which is perhaps the sensible thing to do, it is still no excuse not to chart a direction, the right direction, for the party in their effort to retain the presidential stool. It is okay for the president to be civil to all contestants, indeed it is imperative; but it becomes a problem when his party deliberately promotes a panoply of unfairness. It would be problematic for the president to try to ‘rig’ support for any aspirant at this stage of the contest, as he wisely reasoned and voiced out a few months ago, but his refusal and perhaps reluctance to coax his party into the right, politically inclusive path, especially knowing how testy the country has become in the past few years and how precariously it appears to be floundering around the precipice, is irremissible.

Notwithstanding his neutrality in the contest, the president is wrong to be aloof when a fractious Nigeria seems to be hurtling down the slippery slope of intolerance and exclusion. Zoning will doubtless become an issue in the coming presidential election, and since the PDP will likely pick a northern candidate, the president will in the campaigns have to speak to that issue. Better he should begin to speak to it now, shape the narrative, and determine its dynamics when he can still seize the initiative. The country is broken and divided; it needs healing. That healing will not come, and the brokenness will be exacerbated, if zoning is jettisoned. Political rhetoric has become inflamed, with southerners threatening doomsday should rotation be discarded, and northerners swearing they would keep power at any cost.

The APC has a signal responsibility, being the party in office, to temper the ongoing fierce discourses as well as redirect the country to the path of inclusion and sanity. If the president is unable to appreciate that the responsibility to manage the chaos rests with him, then the ruling party is more impotent than first imagined. The president and his party may try to evade being definitive on these controversial issues, but they will face them in the campaigns. They must hope it will not be too late.

 

RCCG’s Freudian slip

IT began incongruously in March as the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) Directorate for Politics and Governance, a unit designed for purposes described by critics as at worst amorphous and at best to help the presidential aspiration of Yemi Osinbajo, an RCCG pastor, Professor of Law and current vice president. Stung by allegations that the church was errantly walking into the murky waters of politics, the church struggled to rationalise the incursion as political altruism. The Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) rushed to the aid of the quibbling RCCG by owning up to the idea. But neither was successful.

Alas, to prove critics right, and to expose the church as politically naïve, the head of RCCG’s political directorate, Timothy Olaniyan, a pastor, sold the candidacy of Prof Osinbajo during the inaugural conference of a political movement called the New Era of Nigeria (NEN). Pastor Osinbajo – he described the VP as a pastor – is not just a pastor, he is also a child of God. Even though a few days later he tried to walk back his statement adopting and marketing Prof. Osinbajo to the electorate, his Freudian slip had done substantial damage. How the RCCG and PFN do not realise the harm their open, amateurish and discriminatory excursion into politics is causing is hard to explain.

IN approximately one month, the two leading political parties will know who will fly their flags at the next presidential election. So far, however, it is burdensome trying to manage the process of determining how to zone the presidency between North and South, and then finally selecting one out of their many qualified aspirants to fly their flags. The job is clearly not an easy one for both parties. By last weekend, more than 30 aspirants had crowded the two parties to voice their interest in the plum, imperial job of ruling Nigeria. The number may be disconcerting, but the consolation is that little by little, more educated and talented people are showing interest in the job. Whether their parties, which have put laborious mechanisms in place to screen presidential aspirants, can attest to the leadership character of the aspirants is a different thing altogether. But even after the candidates are picked, the parties will still have a hard time selling their standard-bearers to voters wearied by decades of leadership incompetence.

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which for no special reason other than incumbency is the frontrunner, boasts of more than a dozen aspirants, clearly incommensurate with the 40 million membership size it purports to have registered last year. The main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), still apoplectic from its two last defeats, has nearly 20 aspirants, thus matching its previous boast of being the largest political party in Africa. By the end of May or early June, both parties will have put their aspirants, save one each, to the sword based on sundry reasons. The manner of the slaughter and the scale of the massacre will determine whether the disaffection arising from the selection processes would prove damaging and consequential to the ambitions of both parties. Having both produced a slew of unprincipled leaders and aspirants over the years, the culmination of the selection processes will create and invigorate an osmotic environment manifesting in a current of bitter and migrating rejects, and an array of eager dupes and saboteurs who would stay behind to wreak havoc on their parties for spurning their messianic offers.

For obvious reasons, it is apposite to consider the APC first, not only for being the party to beat despite its puny show of competence, but because it has produced more consequential aspirants. The one dozen or so APC aspirants are a motley crew of inscrutable politicians whose interests in the presidency, judging from their poor or modest showing as governors or senators, is hard to deconstruct. Of the dozen and probably more aspirants who will declare before deadlines lapse, one region demands closer examination, while two politicians are worthy of any proper attention. Reviled as the party may be, it still possesses some modicum of common sense. It recognises that after eight years of President Muhammadu Buhari, it would be scandalous to openly romanticise northern aspiration to the throne. They may waffle a lot about zoning, but in the end they know that by the sheer mechanics of how they have alloted party offices they seem to have made zoning the presidency not only ineluctable, but also southern-ward. More decipherable, it seems they are looking in the direction of the Southwest; but whether enthusiastically or reluctantly, no one can tell at the moment.

The wink on the party’s face has, therefore, proliferated aspirants from the Southwest, including ex-Lagos State governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, senator and ex-governor Ibikunle Amosun, and Governor Kayode Fayemi who last week served notice of his declaration in a few days. Aspirants from the South-South and Southeast, including the pampered ex-Rivers governor Rotimi Amaechi and the theatrical Labour minister Chris Ngige, are having to move mountains to convince anyone of the seriousness of their aspirations or the likelihood of being selected. Of the four Southwest aspirants, Sen Amosun and Dr Fayemi are unlikely to go the distance. They will pant for breath even in the sprints. The race then seems to be between Asiwaju Tinubu and Prof Osinbajo. If the design among shadowy forces within the party is not to populate the contest with Southwest aspirants to drain support from the ex-Lagos governor, then the contest can be safely narrowed down to the two. Here, Prof Osinbajo is less likely to breast the tape. After first running the race as if he was already a candidate fighting against the PDP pick, he has sensibly redirected his efforts into fishing for delegates. After all, it is evident not all delegates have been bought or sold.

In his fishing trips, and at every stop, the eminent professor has run on his record as a loyal subordinate to the president, from whom, due to delegation of duties, he has learnt the intricacies of governance and gained experience. It is not clear whether he knew how implausible he sounded every time he made such claims, but the records he alluded to rang hollow and even apocalyptic to his teeming supporters. They brush aside his highfalutin vice presidential claims, preferring instead to focus on his academic and professorial qualifications, and more believably his mesmerising eloquence which they noisily contrast with the stolid and laborious phrases and elocutions of his opponents. The more the professor speaks of the value and virtue of his joint leadership with President Buhari, the more his dismayed and sceptical supporters shift attention to his eloquent forays into polemic and explosion of his opponents’ casuistries. Being sensible and intellectually deep, the vice president knows that eloquence without substance, which his instinct tells him sums up his profundities, is meaningless. But being impatient and alarmed, his supporters know that it is catastrophic and delusional for any aspirant to leash himself with a controversial and scorned president. There will be no meeting point between followers and leader, for each is convinced that the other is grossly mistaken.

Prof Osinbajo is unlikely to win the ticket, of course not in the unequivocal sense in which Sen Amosun and Dr Fayemi will lose their deposit, for their aim in contesting the party’s ticket is shrouded in mystery. The vice president wants to win, and even thinks he can win, despite not having built a political structure, as politics in this clime demands. It would be tragic should he believe that President Buhari had done well, necessitating his willingness to attach himself to his illusory records. But he is too timid to distance himself from the president, and has even begun to man up in his rhetoric, walking back many of his assumptions including how he became vice president. Mercifully the contest for the ticket will last only four weeks or so. Should it last longer, there is no telling what other stories and accounts the eminent professor would repudiate. His Pentecostal fervor as a function of his political ambition has not abated; and despite clashing with the doctrinal messianism of Tunde Bakare, pastor of the Citadel Global Church, pulling God into the race on behalf of ‘a man for such a time as this’ will be the natural order of things in his increasingly less obtrusive religionisation of the 2023 race.

Sen Amosun and Dr Fayemi probably have two purposes for vying for the ticket: either to use the aspiration as a future bargaining tool after they might have lost, or to take advantage of the dark horse phenomenon replete with Nigerian politics. Recall how Timipre Sylva became governor, and how Goodluck Jonathan himself became governor and president in quick and bedazzling succession. But Prof Osinbajo has the support of shadowy northern characters close to the corridors of power. They know he can’t win, not even by default, and they know for sure that should he win, it would amount to simply gifting the presidency to the PDP. Despite their hallucinations, the professor’s northern backers know that the northern (that is, the core North) voter less hamstrung by the niceties of education and enlightened self-interest has a morbid fear of pastors, particularly their southern Pentecostal cousins. Should he get the ticket, they know that the dark hint of religion already polluting the race will break out into open, undisguised, and unashamed warfare.

The APC itself is in a quandary. Despite the aloofness of the president, who believes whether the party wins or loses will not significantly affect him, most of its leaders wish to retain the presidency in the party. They do not have powerful northern contestants for their ticket like the PDP. They will, therefore, want to put their best southern foot forward. In their closets, they have already precluded any pastor as candidate, and would in fact gloat should they get a Muslim- Muslim ticket into the bargain. They will not rig the votes for the professor, and will not stake a higher bargain for dark horses so-called. In the end, they will be deliberate, watch the PDP’s every move, no matter how surreptitious, and despite their frenzied politicking and disputatious manners, will be averse to pulling anybody’s chestnuts out of the fire. Soon, in fact, party leaders will realise that the decision on their standard-bearer had been taken months ago, notwithstanding the valiant efforts of their former caretaker chairman to alter the outcomes.

That perhaps leaves Asiwaju Tinubu for consideration. Despite himself and his best efforts, he is and remains controversial. More than any individual, he worked hardest to cobble together the persons and forces that coalesced into the APC, and performed valiantly to put the party and particularly President Buhari in office. For a single south-westerner to pack such political muscle appeared humbling, if not unsettling and humiliating, to the president and those who think oligarchical like him. As soon as the crown settled around the president’s ears, he and his close aides produced a series of measures to cage the former Lagos governor. They were partially successful. But their effort to raise a new set of Southwest political titans failed to take heed of the gradualist approach to mentoring, toughening and maturing political leaders. Aware that their reelection was in jeopardy in 2019, they exhumed him again from pasture and made him the face of the campaign. Immediately they won, as Asiwaju Tinubu and his supporters half expected, he was again promptly consigned to the cold. Party leaders, beginning with the defunct caretaker committee, are indescribably mortified to begin to sense that they can’t win the presidency in 2023 without him, either as the standard-bearer or lead campaigner.

But while he was put out to pasture, Asiwaju Tinubu continued nurturing his contacts and servicing his political network. This nature is intrinsic to his politics. He gives much, expects little, and had offered political and pro-democracy services for decades even before running for the presidency crossed his mind. But to win the ticket he will have to stare down the opposition within the party leadership, starting with the president whom he must either pacify or cleverly bypass. The caretaker committee did their best, in league with Aso Villa cabals, to undo him and neutralise his political influence and stature. They were unsuccessful, just as the president whose antipathy to him waxed alternately hot and cold also achieved mixed results. The main reason they are loth to give him the ticket he believes he has worked hard for and richly deserves is because they see him as a man who has a mind of his own. They are uncomfortable with a president who would not be dictated to, for the Nigerian presidency, as past presidents and heads of state as well as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo have demonstrated, is fit only for the pliant.

Joined by a large section of the public, party leaders emphasise Asiwaju Tinubu’s weaknesses and humble background than his accomplishments and competence. He is criminalised for his humble birth, denounced for counterintuitively deploying the Chinese model of mentoring next generation of leaders that focuses on competence rather than loyalty, and dismissed as a certificate forger despite his alma mater’s incontrovertible attestation. In the 2015 poll, he was the main target despite not being the candidate, and in 2019 he was pilloried for helping his party win a second term despite being resoundingly ostracised by his party. Now they fear him for having a remarkable administrative record in Lagos, for being strong-willed, for being capable of producing the next generation of leaders, and for being able to grasp complex social, economic and political issues. Deploying the illogical postulations of ex-military heads of state who fix the arbitrary age limit of 60 for the next president, the former governor is waved away as too old at 70. His strengths and skills are downplayed, and his weaknesses accentuated and valorised. Yet, the PDP knows that the only aspirant they fear to face as candidate is Asiwaju Tinubu. It is unclear whether the president or his party, the APC, knows this.

Before him, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was demonised as independent-minded and strong-willed, not to say power-hungry and dictatorial. France’s Charles de Gaulle was also scorned as being too obsessed with power when he advocated a new constitution shortly after World War II. Deng Xiaoping, who laid the foundation for modern China, was purged from leadership sometime between 1967 and 1969 during the Cultural Revolution, reinstated by Zhou Enlai four years later, purged again in 1976, and restored by Hua Guofeng in 1977 until he finally took the reins of power a few years later. Men with ideas may have their weaknesses, but woe betide a nation that misses their value and dispenses with their services. The APC lacks depth, perspective and vision, and Aso Villa is incapable of thinking nationally and globally as well as rationally. Had they been perceptive and selfless, the contest going on in the party would have been a formality. In searching for a candidate, neither the party nor the presidency has paid attention to the enormous problems besetting the country, or try to determine who is best placed, is a visionary, and is politically astute and enterprising enough to grapple with them. That candidate must have won the trust of a large section of the country, and must show himself as a committed democrat and detribalised leader.

It is unusual that the Southwest, long lionised for its learning, has been at the forefront of the relentless attacks on the former Lagos governor. If all four south-westerners go into the primary, their region will either dissipate its chances of producing the candidate or gift an undeserving outsider the ticket. The problem is not whether an aspirant has betrayed another; the problem is the evidence of a shocking lack of character and political savvy among the Southwest aspirants compounded by a complicit presidency and party leadership. Should the party be unable to manage the primary contest well, and should Aso Villa become entrapped in the thicket of ethnic and religious considerations, they will be setting themselves up for electoral disaster next year. In 1993, Nigeria was fortunate to produce an electoral outcome that demystified religion and ethnicity. But ex-heads of state presuming to think for Nigeria today and postulating the future could not in their days in power see the virtue of upholding a truly nationalistic electoral outcome. Now, egged on by the Southwest’s incredibly awkward thinkers and critics, they are demonising same faith ticket in the midst of the worst existential crisis the country has ever faced, a crisis which in the face of mounting poverty, lawlessness and disorder, may very well consume everybody.

WHEN ex-president Goodluck Jonathan last Friday received supporters urging him to run for president in 2023, the media reported him as being tentative about the prospect. Where they got their tentativeness is unclear. Though he declared that he was still consulting, and that the process, whatever that process is, is ongoing, it was abundantly clear that up to that point he had made up his mind to run. Whether the All Progressives Congress (APC) coaxing him to enter the race is ready for him is a different thing altogether. Typical of the exuberant caution of Dr Jonathan, he wants full assurance he will get the nomination. That assurance will not come, given the calibre of those also eyeing the same nomination. There will be no consensus, and even the indirect primary the party is adopting in electing a standard-bearer cannot be casually executed.

What remains for Dr Jonathan to fully enter the race is whether he can get enough assurance. Last year, caretaker committee members of the APC sold themselves the boondoggle of drafting the former president into the race. In their presumption, they were convinced that should the North, as monolithically conceived in their imagination, be compelled to relinquish power in 2023, it would be ideal to find a man constitutionally barred from seeking reelection in 2027. Dr Jonathan, they suppose, fits the bill. Ambitious, immoral, conspiratorial, and indifferent to the calamity they had predisposed the country to by their incompetence and lack of vision, the interim APC leaders led by their former caretaker chairman, Mai Mala Buni, embarked on exploratory discussions with the ex-president at his home in Bayelsa State and met him at his ingratiating best. What began as a casual exercise in political chicanery soon blossomed into full-scale conspiracy to leash the presidency to the apron strings of the North.

Dr Jonathan is sold on the idea of retaking the presidency after having chalked six uneventful and ruthful years occupying the office. He is not consulting, and there is no ongoing process; he is only waiting for the green light from those in and outside the corridors of power who inspired the conspiracy and have promised him the office, and are pulling all stops to sell the idea of getting the North to make the self-seeking sacrifice of letting go of the presidency for a little while. It is not that they liked the former president, or thought highly of his leadership skills, despite their blandishments, or believe that in the unlikely event of his return, he would reset the country he and his unworthy successors had damaged almost beyond belief. They simply visualise him as a simple and willing tool in their noxious and self-serving power game.

Consider Dr Jonathan’s response to his supporters who thronged his office in Abuja on Friday, and see whether there was anything subtle or philosophical about it. They had assailed him with their simplistic interpretation of the consumer price index, and had accompanied their analysis with an apology couched deprecatingly against the ruling party, yes, the same APC they accused of destroying the country. Finally they encouraged him to enter the race. But he can only enter the race on the APC platform, for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had taken the measure of him and found him to be wanting on all scores. The APC leaders, caretaker and elected alike, many now believe, may have inveigled the presidency to go along with the conspiracy, for there is a lot of vacuity in the corridors of power.

Aware of this conspiracy, eager to submit to the lure of office, and desirous of returning to the monarchical Nigerian presidency of his infatuation, Dr Jonathan made a few facetious remarks and ended up betraying his ultimate intentions. Said he: “Yes, you are calling me to come and declare for the next election. I cannot tell you I’m declaring; the political process is ongoing. Just watch out. But the key role you (youths) must play is to pray that Nigeria gets somebody that carries the young people along and somebody that can also work very hard to see that some of the problems we see are dealt with by the government, and I believe that collectively we will work together.” Clearly, the somebody he asked his supporters to pray for is of course his humble self. And when he declared summarily that ‘we will work together’, it signposted not only what he had in the dark recesses of his mind but also his readiness to be involved. It will be defamatory to conclude that he has no programme or fresh ideas to run the country, but like many other aspiring leaders who pay researchers and policy wonks to cobble together a workable paper by which to govern, he will easily mask his lack of preparedness, or more ominously his idiosyncratic lack of conviction about anything, with meaningless spade work.

Dr Jonathan holds a PhD, and it is assumed he can think. He may not have the character to prevent himself from being led by the nose, but he at least knows when he is being used. He is going along with the Governor Buni-inspired plot because should they deliver on their promise to return him to the State House, it would salve the wound he sustained when he was rejected ignominiously in 2015, in the same manner his successor hankered after the presidency just to obliterate the shame of the 1985 coup. Neither he nor his successor has fundamental programmes or plans to remake the country, and both are daydreamers with no capacity to fathom or shape the rubric of their dreams. Reassuringly for both, the plot to return the former president to the office from which he was disgraced seven years ago has nothing to do with programmes or plans, with competence or character, or with substance or any fealty to party or country.

It took about 18 months to get the scheming caretaker committee of the APC to midwife a reluctant convention; no one knows how former governor Abdullahi Adamu, the 75-year-old new party chairman foisted on the party through a disingenuous consensus, would fare. Like his predecessors, he will be at the beck and call of the presidency; but since the presidency is amorphous, reflecting the interest and worldview of whomever in the cabal has the upper hand at any time, Mr Adamu’s brief will be an inconsistent portraiture of the push and pull that have undermined the Buhari presidency and unnerved the country as a whole. In one of his self-deprecating remarks when asked whom he would back as his successor, President Buhari blithely said that he would play his cards close to his chest lest political vultures gather to destroy his choice. Take that remark with a pinch of salt. It wasn’t until the last four weeks of the race for the APC chairmanship that the president was sold on the candidacy of Mr Adamu. The jury is still out on whom the president will back for the presidency. He is opened to deft and Machiavellian persuasion.

The factors that will influence the president’s support are much more nuanced. Given his political trajectory, especially how vulnerable and exposed he became after his former chief of staff Abba Kyari died, and how often vacillating, sometimes simplistic and alarmingly insular his administration’s policies are, Nigerians should not expect any substantialness to the ideas that would shape his choice. The choice would be whimsical, probably coloured by ethnic and religious factors, and definitely not liberal, philosophical or inspiring. The APC caretaker committee and governors ceded to the president the right to produce the party’s chairman on March 26, and his choice was not elevating; but they will not cede the right to nominate the party’s presidential standard-bearer to him this time. There is nothing to suggest they will make the right choice, but they will at least retain that right.

In sanctioning the ongoing manipulations in the party to produce their nominee, the APC appears to take for granted that since they are the dominant party, all 40m-strong hypothetically, winning the next presidential poll is as good as their candidate. They are grossly mistaken. The PDP is still a potent rival, waiting in the wings to cause a lot of havoc. Disaffection, as the PDP itself proved in 2014-2015, has a corrosive effect on a party’s chances. The presidency may also have a blank mind, which they interpret to be open and democratic, towards the whole process, but there is no excuse for not infusing noble foundations and considerations into how the next presidential candidate is produced, and who that candidate is. If, as some say, everything is pointing to the fact that the North is unprepared to relinquish power, it is without precedent and shorn of morality and nobility. In 2007, neither the outgoing president Olusegun Obasanjo nor the then ruling party needed to consult anyone regarding power rotation given the delicate nature of Nigerian unity and politics. If it is taking so much persuasion to get the APC to behave rationally, it is an indication that the party is plotting to qualify that surrender with a one-term president, and also a blot on the reputation of the president that he has neither tried to shape the ideas that would guide that choice, nor insist on a wholesome, democratic process.

The mere thought of visualising Dr Jonathan’s return to the presidency in 2023, as the self-centred Mr Buni and his accomplices in Aso Villa had contemplated to everyone’s chagrin, portrays APC leaders and the presidency as unpatriotic. The former president was rejected at the polls in 2015 for the obvious reasons of incompetence, despite his administration’s self-gratifying recalibration of the economy, indecisiveness, corruption, lethargy, and divisiveness. That his successor has been less inspiring, to put it mildly, does not legitimise that objectionable period and the six retrogressive years that prompted the battle cry of ‘anyone but Jonathan’. Money was plentiful in the Jonathan years, and the domestic and global environments were more clement than today. Now, Nigeria is effectively in debt peonage, to which the Buhari administration has no answer but to seek more loans, and the country is in the throes of collapse buffeted by insecurity and chaos on all fronts. Dr Jonathan’s response to less complex national problems was uninspiring, slow and befuddling. He will perform even more catastrophically in the event of a return to the presidency.

Overall, the Jonathan draft will blow up in the party’s face. It will not gain traction. The assurance he wants will not come, not from a party chary of making grosser mistakes than it had already made, and not from a president whose vacillations have thrown the party into a quandary, a president whose mind is wearied by national problems and the manipulations and scheming around him. Dr Jonathan was scorned for his superficiality and lack of firmness; the mere thought by him of returning to the office he humiliated with inadequate leadership years ago shows that the poor impression many have of him is probably an overestimation. Worse, it is shocking that having taken the throne as elected PDP president, a fact that does not seem to stir or trouble his conscience, it is even more troubling and nauseous that APC leaders in the party and Aso Villa do not feel a sense of outrage that they are propping a former PDP president to become APC president.

NSA, el-Rufai and anti-banditry war

ON the same Thursday he was quoted as rebuking the Kaduna State governor, Nasir el-Rufai, for being too voluble and divulging classified security information, the National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno, rebutted the story, claimed he was misquoted, and went on to describe the governor as exemplary. The news a day later was not simply the remark the NSA was quoted as making nor the rebuttal hours later after its import had sunk in; the story was how words easily develop unintended consequences or are frequently and easily misconstrued. The remark and the rebuttal generated a furious kerfuffle, but it is remarkable how the mainstream media either missed the real story of the day or downplayed it.

Start with the rebuttal issued by the Head, Strategic Communication, Office of the National Security Adviser, Zakari Usman. According to him, “The reports quoted the National Security Adviser Maj. General Babagana Monguno (Retd) out of context. The NSA did not at anytime during the briefing criticise and accuse Governor Nasir El Rufai of divulging classified information as reported. These reports are verifiably false, sensational and misleading. For the avoidance of doubt, the NSA was not referring to Governor Nasir el-Rufai in his comment on the protection of sensitive operational information. The NSA while responding to a question had observed that it portends a danger to security operations if indeed it was true that security agents are in the habit of revealing unauthorised sensitive operational details as alleged…”

It is true that Gen Monguno never accused the Kaduna governor of ‘divulging security information’, a crime the media inexplicably suggested by their headlines but declined to include in their stories. Perhaps compromising (security information) would have served more appropriately in place of divulging. Only the headline writers could explain why they took such lexical and journalistic liberty. Sensational? Misleading? Verifiably false? Well, these are swollen words deployed to capture the malfeasance of the headline writers. However, they were not too far from capturing the idea expressed by the NSA when, together with the Defence minister, Bashir Magashi, and Inspector General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, he briefed the media on the more than three hours meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) headed by President Buhari.

So what did Gen Monguno say? Hear him as he responded to a question that Thursday: “Governor Nasir el-Rufai spoke about the security agencies, saying we know who they (bandits) are, where they are. Again, that is the danger. When you start talking too much, you give away a lot. Now, even if they say we know where they are, that in itself is already a problem. Because once you say it, whether it is true or false, the person who has your people in captivity will move to another location. It’s just as simple as that. So, sometimes it is best to just keep silent; mum is the word.” His impression of the volubility of the governor is unmistakable, as expressed in ‘talking too much’. But does ‘giving away a lot’ amount to divulgement? Perhaps a dictionary might be of some help. Divulge is defined as “make known to the public information that was previously known only to a few people or that was meant to be kept a secret.” That, alas, was what the governor did.

But the problem, it seems, is contained in the Nigerian impression of the word which is taken as meaning something someone does deliberately. There are thousands of English words in Nigeria, like indictment, for instance, which have acquired far more vigorous and pugnacious meaning than the dictionary intends. Mallam el-Rufai obviously talked too much, and still does, often nineteen to the dozen, but he did not mean to knowingly disclose sensitive information capable of compromising security operations, especially being an apostle of blitzkrieg, collateral damage be damned. It is just as well, however, that Gen Monguno walked back his sarcasm. On the subject of insecurity, the public will likely be on the side of Mallam el-Rufai. In their view, the governor would not talk too much if security officers had done their work. And if he talked too much, and the bandits shifted base, security agents should not be so flat-footed that they cannot find the bandits’ new base.

It is distressing trying to rationalise the federal government’s paralysis in the face of the Plateau and Benue killings last weekend. About 130 people died from the twin invasions, probably perpetrated by bandits, herdsmen and other ethnic militias. The killings served as a context for the Northern Elders Forum’s call on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign. The call is justified, even legal; but it may not be expedient. This was not the first time the exasperated leaders of the Forum, speaking through its spokesman, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, would be asking the president to resign. Dr Baba-Ahmed had repeatedly voiced the concerns of the Forum, concluding that the president had displayed no initiative in combating the massive breakdown of law and order in many parts of the country, particularly the North. The train attacks of recent months, the last of which turned bloody last month, not to say wholesale abductions of Nigerians carried out by bandits in the Northwest and other freelance criminal elements in Southern Nigeria, underscored the justness of the call despite the presidency repeatedly taking umbrage.

Still, Dr Baba-Ahmed explained why the Forum had to repeat its call to the president to step aside. Said he: “The administration of President Muhammadu Buhari does not appear to have answers to the challenges of security to which we are exposed. We cannot continue to live and die under the dictates of killers, kidnappers, rapists and sundry criminal groups that have deprived us of our rights to live in peace and security. Our constitution has provisions for leaders to voluntarily step down if they are challenged by personal reasons or they prove incapable of leading. It is now time for President Buhari to seriously consider that option since his leadership has proven spectacularly incapable of providing security over Nigerians. Our forum is aware of the weight of this advice and it is also aware that we cannot continue to live under these conditions until 2023 when President Buhari’s term ends. Killers and other criminals appear to have sensed a paralysing vacuum at the highest levels of leadership and they grow more confident and acquire more competence in subverting the state and our security. Nigerians have shed enough tears and blood without appropriate response from those with responsibilities to protect us.”

The Buhari presidency is nearly seven years old. Within that time, it had failed to demonstrate competence in managing conflicts of all kinds, whether they are interethnic, religious, or even political. The gains in the battle against insurgents in the Northeast have seemed to come from internal schisms within insurgent groups, between Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP). The Nigerian military, however, suggests the gains result from their pressures on the insurgents. Whatever the reasons, such gains have not been replicated against the bandits in the Northwest, leading to speculations of official complicity propped up by ethnic affiliations or significant security collaborations. The NEF does not concern itself with what the reasons are for governmental failing. To the group, it is sufficient that the Buhari presidency has seemed incapable of responding to the killings in various parts of the country, including in the Southeast where chaos seems to be simmering.

NEF is not the sole representative of northern opinion on any issue, let alone on the Buhari presidency. What is more, southerners also sometimes find it hard to distinguish between Dr Baba-Ahmed’s personal opinions, though he takes care to identify them as such, and the Forum’s considered and endorsed opinions. Often, however, his views have seldom deviated from the Forum’s, and have in fact mostly lent credence to the body’s generally progressive perspectives on national issues. Asking President Buhari to resign, as sensible and justified as that is, may not be representative of the North. The call should be taken as symbolic, to underscore the group’s pained impression of the president’s failings and declining effectiveness. The call, above all, is an indication of the Forum’s frustrations with the presidency’s flatfootedness, indeed a final indication of their despair that the Buhari government can be redeemed. After years of failing to respond appropriately to crises, preferring to propound excuses upon excuses, and justifications after justifications, the presidency had finally, it seems to the Forum, shown clearly that it had no further idea what to do to stanch the flow of blood all over Nigeria. The Forum appears scared that the country could in fact be tipping over to the abyss. Other groups also nurse such fear.

Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether President Buhari’s resignation can obviate the impending apocalypse. He is not the only problem with a truly and obviously dysfunctional presidency; the problem is more accurately located in the ideas and machinations of a cavalcade of gross opportunists who seized control of the nerve centre of the presidency in 2015 but knew little what to do with the immense monarchical powers they inherited by default. The president may embody the problem, and may also be a significant contributor and amplifier of the decay and paralysis in government, but the problem is in fact far more transcendent, structural and foundational than NEF or many aggrieved Nigerians seem to suggest. Briefly speaking, the problem is outside the framework of the presidency’s architectural composition, and is located within the country’s religious and ethnic milieu. In addition, until a significant restructuring of the country is undertaken, with substantial power devolved to the country’s constituent parts, running the country along the jaded unity which the country’s many presidents have heedlessly espoused for decades will always end in fiasco. Indeed, had the president founded his government on sound philosophical, ethical and inclusive principles, contending with and resolving banditry and insurgency, in the unlikely event they arose, would be far easier than the heavy weather he has made of it.

In 2015, the country drove a soft bargain to secure the services of a president they genuinely thought had not transmogrified as his detractors warned. Since winning the poll, however, he had embarked on proving his haters right. Contrary to the suggestions of NEF, the country will have to manage him till next year. Having spent almost seven years belaboured by the president’s strange political and administrative orthodoxies, Nigerians can afford to have him for a few more months, as precarious as those ominous months might be. President Buhari will of course ignore NEF’s call, as one of his spokesmen signposted last week; but should he heed them, he would not depart with his vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, the less emboldened, less resolute and more uninitiated politician from the South. The country remembers the political complications President Umaru Yar’Adua’s death in 2010 caused Nigeria; no one is prepared for that sort of thing anymore, not even by Doctrine of Necessity or, in 1960s parlance, acts of omission. Instead of calling for the president’s resignation, NEF should pressure him to do what is right, even if he would not listen.

Census 2023 reckless

The National Council of State on Thursday decided, among other things, to okay a national census for April 2023 after the general election. Before then, explained the National Population Commission (NPC) director-general, Nasir Isa-Kwara, a pilot census would be conducted in June this year. The last census was conducted in 2006, suggesting that the country had been relying on projections for national planning. Preaching to the converted, Mr Isa-Kwara adumbrated reasons a census was indispensable to planning. He was theoretically right.

But for the Council of State to suggest a census for April 2023, immediately after what is certain to be a contentious election, must be really bold, optimistic and reckless. There has been no census that was not controversial, and rather than be used for planning, a noble aim that is nevertheless often defeated by the shenanigans that accompany it, it had been deployed for political purposes, to shore up ethnic exceptionalism and electoral advantage. Census needs to be conducted periodically; but if at the best of times that could not be done without bitterness and acrimony, why is the Council fishing in troubled waters, especially at a time of dire national financial predicament, unmanageable insecurity and collapsing economy?

Firstly, the sting needs to be taken out of the census before it can be conducted successfully without rancour. To accomplish that goal, it is necessary to remake the country in such a way that politics, resource allocation and elections would not be about dominance, ethnic or religious. Given how badly the economy has tanked, and the people deeply impoverished, of what use was the disputed 2006 census to a profligate and clueless political leadership? Nigerians had remonstrated with the Buhari presidency, in light of the goodwill that accompanied it into office, to boldly redo the country. Instead, it stuck fanatically to the disused and futile template that has coaxed the country to the precipice. One prediction can be ventured: the census, if it holds, would be wasteful and end in controversy.

 

Osinbajo, Bakare and other 2023 tales

Nobody knows when Vice President Yemi Osinbajo first thought of contesting the 2023 presidential election, whether the idea came from him independently or it was planted in him. But months ago, despite every attempt to dissuade him from going ahead with the project, including deploying moral, political and religious arguments, it was always clear that he would bite the bullet as well as chew the cud on it and cap it with a toast. His fervency on a subject that is at the best of times difficult and complex for even the most nonchalant of fellows was not infectious; it was bewildering. He knew his ambition would pit him against his mentor and former boss, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the ruling party’s national leader and former governor of Lagos State; and he also knew that many people would raise eyebrows, regardless of whether he sees him as mentor or not. Moral questions would be asked, and possibly too, religious questions, considering that the eminent professor is also a pastor. It must reflect either courage or lack of circumspection on his part to so blithely dispel his misgivings and forge ahead with his plans. Surely he must have some misgivings about his ambition despite putting his hand to the plough.

Even when Prof. Osinbajo acted for the president for months on end, few thought he would develop the ambition to succeed his boss. He has, probably because he sees himself, in the words of his political assistant Babafemi Ojudu when explaining his volte face, that his association with Asiwaju Tinubu was mutually beneficial, a political and social symbiosis from which primeval well both giant brains took life-sustaining drink. It is difficult to find other plausible explanations. The vice president is egged on by a few well-connected persons and many others who resent the former Lagos governor. Now, the die is cast, and the presidential primary will in a matter of weeks decide whether his ambition will gain traction or not. It is also not known whether he has weighed the consequences of failing to clinch the nomination, or whether any other thought besides winning the nomination had crossed his mind.

At the other end of the spectrum, another pastor, Tunde Bakare, claims to have received prophetic message that he would be Nigeria’s 16th president/head of state. Prof. Osinbajo’s ambition stands on one visible leg; that of Pastor Bakare stands on no visible leg at all. However, like another pastor, Kris Okotie of the Household of God Church who ran for president a whopping four times, both Prof. Osinbajo and Pastor Bakare may in fact believe they are standing on invisible celestial legs unobvious to the human eye and comprehension. Neither of the two gentlemen has a political structure; if nominated, they will hope to rely on the ruling party structure, the kind that propelled ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) into his 1999 win. If it worked in 1999, could it work again in 2023? It is unlikely; but that is where the ecclesiastical convictions of the two pastors come in. Both men incredibly appear assured of victory, in the same way Pastor Okotie asserted with all vehement dubiety that God had ordered him to contest the presidency on the four occasions he vied and failed.

Nigerians are not only curious, they are also sceptical. They are unsure of the humbug about God asking anyone to contest, as the serial failures of those who attributed their secular longings to God’s mandate have proved. Nigerians instead find it disconcerting that these pastors, having not paid their political dues but merely relied on their eloquence, seek to insinuate their ambitions to God, belittling Him with a capacity and willingness to reward slothfulness. Politicians plant, water, and then hope God or nature, depending on their beliefs, would give the increase. Nigeria’s ecclesiastical politicians evade planting, skip watering, and are conjuring increases in the same way prosperity doctrine has been perverted within the iniquitous world system. Set against the background of recent church involvement in politics, complete with indescribable theological justifications, the pastors wait for promotion to the presidency. Prof. Osinbajo’s membership of the APC is of course taken for granted. On the other hand, few knew about Pastor Bakare’s membership of the ruling party. As one of Nigeria’s prominent pastors, and seeing how engaged he is in ecclesiastical duties at the highest level, not many Nigerians expect that he would combine his calling with partisan politics.

Despite his enthusiasm and the zeal that heralded his declaration of interest, Prof. Osinbajo’s presidential ambition will be hamstrung by many obstacles and considerations. His expectations that certain forces within the party would cobble a consensus in his favour and give him the nomination on a platter will remain a chimera. Not only will there not be a consensus in producing the party’s presidential candidate, notwithstanding the galling example of the party’s chairmanship election outcome last month, party politics is far more intricate and interwoven than the vice president imagines. Pastor Bakare’s ‘Project 16’ presidential bid is even far more illusory and is hinged only on expectations of God’s intervention and imposition. Yet, he has not convinced anyone that God is as indulgent as he, a pastor, pronounces on politics with Old Testament exegetical liberty. In short, neither of the two gentlemen has done enough, prepared enough, or outthought every other person enough to get the nomination, let alone win the votes of Nigerians scarified by the lethal intrusion of religion into politics. They have had to contend with the proselytizing zeal of the incumbent, not to say his disruptive and contaminative messianism, and have had it up to their gills. From now on and for the foreseeable future, they will yearn for a confirmed secularist and liberal, not another zealot.

ANAMBRA State governor Charles Soludo will not allow a dull moment for Anambrarians and the rest of Nigeria in the months and years ahead. Right from the starting block at his inauguration as governor last month, with first-rate drama enacted by two feuding ladies who pulled wigs and slapped faces, Prof. Soludo’s government is set to keep everybody guessing, tip-toeing, agitated, and possibly puzzled. The feuding ladies, Bianca Ojukwu and former first lady Ebelechukwu Obiano, virtually overshadowed the inauguration. In the days after the inauguration, more ink was spent analysing the fight than examining the quality of the inaugural speech. Drama easily trumped substance.

Much is expected of Prof. Soludo. He came highly recommended, and Mr Obiano, with all his faults and the drama of his hated wife, pulled out all the stops to gift his state a quality mind. The professor, an acknowledged first-rate economist, was at a time also Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor. He is, therefore, expected to rethink the economic paradigm of the state, as he has promised, and rebuild the state’s infrastructure, as he appears poised to do. The state is widely believed to be fortunate to have him. But he must make conscious effort to remain focused and creative. He apologised for the distractions caused by the feuding ladies, one of whom he has incredibly appointed into a committee to interface with militants wreaking havoc on the state and the region. But there cannot be many more apologies if he is not to become bogged down in routine and ephemerality.

Prof Soludo will no doubt have to contend with restiveness in the Southeast. But it is a regional crisis whose effects would ripple through Anambra State and his administration, and possibly distract and undermine him. The crisis began with the agitations of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB), but lately intensified through the militant aspirations of the Nnamdi Kanu-led Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a breakaway faction of MASSOB. While IPOB has captured the popular imagination of youths in the region, including Anambra, MASSOB has become largely somnolent. It is IPOB that Prof. Soludo will have to grapple with in the years ahead. IPOB had invented the regional pressure tool of sit-at-home order to compel the federal government to release the incarcerated Mr Kanu who was controversially forced back to Nigeria last year through rendition, but Abuja has rebuffed the tool and aggressively nurtured federal intransigence.

How to tackle the IPOB crisis without being distracted or without frittering away Anambra’s resources will be uppermost in the mind of the governor. Appointing a 15-man Truth, Justice and Peace Committee headed by former Nigeria’s Human Rights Commission chairman, Chidi Odinkalu, to find a way out of the crisis is one thing – of course a necessary step in order to free space and time for development – however, getting results and managing expectations will not be easy, especially regarding a crisis that transcends Anambra and the Southeast, and courses perniciously to the federal level. The committee will have to determine how their work will positively impact Anambra as well as find a way to make their findings cost-effective when it comes to implementation. These objectives will not be easy to achieve. But, looking at the bright side, reporters will be fully engaged, as the governor gives them fresh bone to chew every week. The committee is loaded with public figures who make news effortlessly, hard-hitting and tough talking men and women of candour.

But going by the terms of reference for the Truth and Justice committee, Prof Soludo may be biting more than he can chew. He can easily get distracted. According to the governor, “The purpose of the Committee on Truth, Justice, and Peace is to seek a restorative justice approach for truth-telling or real facts, for the healing of the victims of the violence. Accounting for responsibility and accountability of the actors, conditional mercy for the repentant perpetrators, restitution for certain losses and rehabilitation of the perpetrators, for the overall aim of restoration of peace and justice as well as the promotion of development in the state, and the region/Nigeria.”

The terms of reference for the committee, the governor added, “…are to identify the remote and immediate causes of the agitations, restiveness, violence, and armed struggle in the South East since 1999; document victims/circumstances of death, brutality and incarceration, identify stakeholders and groups who have played critical roles in the agitations and conflicts, their roles, capabilities and demands; addressing any other issue(s) that may be germane to unravelling the extent of the crisis and charting the roadmap for the future and make recommendations for sustainable peace and security in Anambra State/Southeast.”

Prof Soludo has begun to think regionally. He needs to be cautious. While the IPOB crisis is a regional problem, it is not clear how he or Anambra alone, regardless of the influence and credibility of panel members, can mitigate the crisis and engender peace. Days after he assumed office, he deployed economic logic and administrative fiat to combat and placate IPOB’s sit-at-home order. It had little effect. There is little to suggest that the Truth and Justice committee will achieve the lofty goals set for it or the state. However, if he can manage expectations, avoid the distractions the panel might engender, control spending over peace schemes of doubtful utility, he may yet get water out of the rock. He is wise to enter into discussions with IPOB, but considering that the separatist group’s anger is directed primarily at the federal government, it is not certain what the state, or the region he is trying to inspire and represent, can do or how effective negotiations can be. Governance in the Southeast has been greatly compromised by incompetent leaders and decadent followers. If Prof. Soludo can’t persuade IPOB and other militant groups in the state and region to sheathe their swords, his optimism may also be weakened and possible extinguished. But he can at least try.

When Prof. Soludo was inaugurated, this column thought aloud that should he do well in four years, and possibly eight, he could be the region’s answer to credible presidential aspiration. It is unlikely the eminent professor was influenced by such hazardous postulations. Indeed, it is likely the professor is self-motivated, and had secretly longed for a governorship opportunity to serve as stepping stone to the ultimate national prize. So far, however, his steps are unsteady. He would need to tame his regional assumptions and expectations. He is first and foremost Anambra governor. He should keep that in mind for a little while longer than his customary impatience and experimentations beckon him. He must recognise that his brilliance and eloquence require steady and logical policy and administrative steps to anchor firmly. The region will be his later only when he has proved himself in his state, and the state proves unable to accommodate his large and growing stature. If he tries to walk or run, as he is planning to do, before he can crawl, he will be prone to mistakes.

One mistake he has made, a consequential one for that matter, is the appointment into the committee of the slapping guru, Bianca Ojukwu, as the Truth and Justice Committee secretary. Appointing her at all into the committee was an unforced error; making her the secretary is unforgivable. Prof Soludo is well travelled. He can’t pretend not to know the ethics upon which governance in Western societies is anchored, an orientation that has set them enviably apart from the rest of the world. It would be presumptuous of him to think that Nigeria, nay the Igbo, can and should tolerate abhorrent practices. The Southeast seemed to have celebrated Mrs Ojukwu slapping Mrs Obiano because the latter conducted herself repugnantly before the Igbo and particularly Anambrarians. Mrs Obiano might have provoked Mrs Ojukwu, but for the latter to engage in violence speaks not only to her objectionable mindset, it also reduced her esteem as a woman, mother, former ambassador, Christian (nominal or otherwise), and social and cultural standing. If she did not know better, the Southeast ought to. And if the region is inured to that abomination, surely Prof Soludo, by his education, breeding and exposure should be astute enough to distance himself from her. Mrs Obiano provocation is inexcusable; but Mrs Ojukwu’s response is unpardonable.

The high-powered Truth and Justice Committee apes other such panels elsewhere in the world. There is nothing original about it. Even the Nigerian version of the South African model of the same kind of committee ended up a damp squib. It is not certain that that of Anambra would fare better. The circumstances are different, and the dynamics are also different. However, Prof Soludo’s brain trust should have been more imaginative in dealing with the matter. Together with the governor, their policies and the personalities entrusted with the responsibility of implementing solutions should be a notch higher in competence than the depressing Nigerian average. The governor should, however, be encouraged to dream big, and to take unorthodox steps in resolving some of the long-lasting crises and dilemmas undermining development and governance in his state. But how far he can go when the country’s security services can’t even uncover and checkmate the Southeast’s so-called unknown gunmen or halt the serial betrayal of Nigeria by non-state actors working in league with highly placed politicians and appointees in bandit and Boko Haram territories is not certain.

 

Gov Ortom and PDP’s zoning nightmare

GOVERNOR Samuel Ortom of Benue State was scared out of his wits last week when newspapers attempted to place almost wholly on him the burden of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) shambolic handling of its presidential zoning formula. The party inspired that formula in their years in office, but has lately grown tired of it. They nurse a secret wish to discard it entirely, insisting with strange epiphany that merit should be the sole determinant of who runs for and takes the presidency. When they first broached the merit argument last year, they were mercilessly lampooned by newspaper columnists and satirists. That piece of quaint sophistry has since then defiantly and perversely transformed into a party philosophy. Party panjandrums dare anyone to affront logic and philosophy by arguing against merit, intellect and competence.

But party leaders lack the courage to peremptorily enthrone the merit argument on both the beleaguered party and a skeptical nation. They have, therefore, mischievously produced the Ortom red herring, knowing full well that the Benue governor, a veritable battering ram against Fulani hegemony, retains the credibility and integrity to sell an unpopular argument. Mr Ortom himself is not sure he is not being dressed in borrowed robes. He is in his elements when he politicks against hegemony, and time and time again has nimbly outthought the presidency in the matter of who should enjoy precedence between farmers and pastoralists. He has also matched the presidency’s partisan grumblings with resilient Benue-woven hysteria that has whipped up sympathy for the indigenous ethnic groups of his state. But asking him, in his first major national foray on behalf of the PDP, to take on an unpopular task is, to a tiring fighter, self-immolation.

When newspapers last Wednesday emblazoned their front pages with the story that the 37-man zoning committee he, Mr Ortom, chaired had resolved to recommend the jettisoning of the zoning formula contained in the party’s constitution, the governor became instantly flustered. He had spent the better part of his two terms fighting hegemony and oligarchy, not only as a lone state warrior but also as a prominent and vociferous member of the Middle Belt Forum (MBF). In alliance with other southern groups, such as the Southern and Middle Belt Leaders Forum (SMBLF), Mr Ortom’s Middle Belt groups had also championed rotational presidency. But whether it was disingenuous of PDP leaders to give the unpopular assignment to a Middle Belt champion and spokesman is not clear. What is clear, however, is that by the middle of last week, the Benue governor was wrestling with his conscience; and so far his conscience has fared very badly.

The speculative story in the papers last week was that the Ortom panel had recommended opening up the presidential space, not that the PDP had jettisoned zoning. Mr Ortom, unhappily, became the centre of discussion. He had to promptly come out to clarify the story by engaging in his own peculiar disingenuousness. After quibbling a little, he proceeded to transfer the responsibility for discarding zoning and placating the concomitant guilt of doing so to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of his party. As he argued, the ultimate responsibility for deciding whether to stick to zoning or discard it rests with the party. His committee, he asserted, had made, and could only make, recommendations; nothing more. The party, he summed up, would take the final decision – almost as if that was sufficient to expiate the presumed ‘sin’ of the committee in recommending opening up the race to all comers. Mr Ortom is undoubtedly shaken. But in fact he said nothing in his rebuttal to suggest his panel did not recommend and justify jettisoning of zoning. He will hope in the months ahead that the zoning decision attributed to his panel does not return to hunt him.

This column sympathises with PDP leaders for being caught between a rock and a hard place. They have no southern aspirant of sizable political heft. Not the voluble and irreverent Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike; not Peter Obi, a former Anambra State governor whose image has neither receded nor advanced a jot since leaving office; and not Ayo Fayose, a former Ekiti State governor more regarded for his comical politics than anything else. By sheer coincidence, northern presidential aspirants have seemed to attract more significant attention, regardless of their controversial worldviews. Governor Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State is unapologetically irredentist and an apostle of open borders in favour of the Fulani; former senate president Bukola Saraki suffers from identity crisis, unsure whether to claim the South or the North; Governor Aminu Tambuwal has seemed to diminish in stature since leaving the House of Representatives as Speaker; and former vice president Atiku Abubakar has as a matter of fact ossified with every election cycle.

Mr Ortom was simply caught in the middle of two unpleasant alternatives. The party may be largely bankrolled by southerners, but it is more substantially influenced by northerners. Having never really possessed a conscience to fight for what is inconveniently right against what is enticingly wrong, as its 16 years in office showed, the PDP now appears ready to eschew the little sense of logic and fairness its forebears imbued it. It’s a nightmare promoting the presidential aspiration of controversial northern politicians. For them to make any headway along the thorny path they have set their compass, they will have to hope that the less cohesive, more flawed and fiercely quarrelsome All Progressives Congress (APC), their main opponent in the 2023 race, implode in their primaries as they seem destined.

IT took all of about 18 months of fancy politicking to come to the simple conclusion to affirm the conservative and controversial Abdullahi Adamu, a senator and former Nasarawa State governor, as the new All Progressives Congress (APC) chairman. He takes the rein of office from the frantic and scheming Mai Mala Buni, current Yobe State governor. The PDP had mocked the APC for being unable to organise a simple convention. When the ruling party finally did two Saturdays ago, and discovered that there was really nothing extraordinary about a convention, it adopted the nefarious tactics honed by the PDP of coaxing a consensus out of the party’s fearful aspirants. APC leaders, including otherwise sound and seemingly progressive governors, irrationally ceded to President Muhammadu Buhari their rights to elect a truly progressive chairman. Uninvited, the president would still have made a power grab; but invited, and smelling cowardice and fear in the erstwhile leadership of the party, he moved in for the kill and gave them the indescribable Mr Adamu.

Whether the former Nasarawa governor will be a better party administrator than Mr Buni remains to be seen; but as the convention theatrics showed two Saturdays ago, the irrepressible former party chairman Adams Oshiomhole is better loved, and it seems, more missed. Mr Oshiomhole, a former Edo State governor, is at any rate more progressive than his two successors. The foisting – perish the talk of consensus – of Mr Adamu on a struggling and contentious party wracked by many policy failings on virtually all national fronts is a puzzle. It is true that the president is not a progressive, not by a mile, and his ideological barometer is in fact cracked, but to back Mr Adamu and risk his stature as president and party leader for a cause that is uncertain and even less noble is truly bewildering. That a party which boasts about the robustness of its members and leaders, not to say ideology, wilted so easily before the president’s cajolery calls to question the foundation of the party and the nature of party organisation in Nigeria.

Well, for the foreseeable future, the APC must contend with Mr Adamu, regardless of his antecedents and fractured political perspectives. He will supervise the coming party primaries, and if he finds the stamina and inspiration to ape Mr Oshiomhole’s pragmatism, will decide the fate of so many governorship and presidential aspirants. The aspirants can’t afford to antagonise him or even show a hint of radicalism. If they do not grovel before him, perhaps because it is beneath them, they will at least fawn over his wisecracks and fulminations and indemnify him against any abuse and misuse he might extend to them. They will do anything but scowl in his presence, not even if their facial muscles become taut with grief and displeasure. The president sold them a pig in a poke; they must shell out money and buy the imitation jewellery without a wince or resentment.

A month ago, said Mr Adamu at his investiture, he did not know he would be APC chairman. This revelatory piece of honest admission indicates that he is coming into office without a real and workable programme and vision for the party. His promotion surprised him as well as mystifies the party. Nigerian governors and presidents in the past few decades were accustomed to taking office without any clue what they planned to do with the office. Their fatuous hope was to be ennobled by the office. The president can, therefore, be forgiven for enthroning Mr Adamu. He is bringing nothing to the office, and by extrapolation, to the party. Perhaps in the view of the president, the new chairman will be neutral, and thus fair to all. But Mr Adamu holds very strong, often irredentist, and sometimes parochial and extremist views. If he has dropped those views and has, like a few in the cabinet, become repentant, it remains for him to indicate his metamorphosis in the weeks ahead.

All things point to the fact that the ethically and ideologically challenged chairman of the party will have a hard time convincing party aspirants and members as well as the country as a whole that he can be trusted to be fair and neutral. He will pleasantly surprise everyone should he display the neutrality and conviction many Nigerians look forward to in a party chairman. He has also spoken of the ‘marching orders’ given him and his team to win the next general election by a healthy and incontestable margin. How he hopes to do this without remaking the APC to be stylistically and ideologically different in a few weeks from the main challenger, the PDP, is hard to tell. In the end, Mr Adamu and his team may rely on the PDP consuming itself with its inimitable bungling and the crass and untethered ambition of its quarrelsome aspirants and leaders. Reassuringly to the ruling party, the PDP has said and done nothing to give hope to APC haters that it would give the ruling party a great and dignified fight.

When the APC affirmed its new National Working Committee (NWC) members, it impliedly gave up the idea of being qualitatively different from the PDP. In the years ahead, there will be little or no difference between the parties in ideology, political platform, administrative style, and something as mundane as membership recruitment. Regrettably, neither the APC nor the PDP will set the pace for other parties to follow. As their leaders have shown by freely and whimsically defecting across party borders and cavorting between party offices, it will become increasingly difficult to determine the reasons to embrace or denounce the parties. The APC boasts huge membership, far more populous than most African countries, but the PDP made a similar boast in its years in office. The APC claims policy and programme successes; so too did the PDP. The APC also organised a policy conference shortly after its convention, but without a clear ideology and impassioned leaders who can help implement their ideas, it is difficult to determine how they will pivot into new or great grounds.

Weeks from now, the campaigns will begin. The PDP takes solace in the fact that it has no fresh failings to attract ridicule, having been out of office for nearly eight years. The APC does not enjoy such insulation. The ruling party’s candidates will face the ordeal of not having a great legacy to serve as the fulcrum of their campaign pitching. Should they distance themselves from the Buhari presidency, they could become isolated; and should they leash themselves to the presidency, they could be guilty of the failings of the Buhari presidency by association. Damned if they do; and damned if they don’t. Without a clear policy on restricting the influx of foreigners into Nigeria, particularly from the country’s northern borders, without a workable population policy to manage the pressures on resources and land, and without concrete domestic programmes and ambitions to lift Nigeria from the doldrums, the APC has not demonstrated the imagination and inventiveness for which it was voted. It will take much more than the cosmetic changes that occurred on March 26 at the party’s leadership level to create the turnaround many frustrated Nigerians anticipated years ago.

 

Train attacks indicate underlying malaise

LAST Friday, Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai suggested that Boko Haram militants working in league with local bandits were responsible for last Monday night’s deadly train attack. The federal government is a little slow in revealing the identity of the attackers, considering this was not the first time. The governor has, however, been outspoken about terrorist attacks that have turned his state into the epicenter of banditry and terrorism in the Northwest, in the same way Borno State became the epicenter of the Boko Haram revolt in the Northeast. He is right to be distraught about the instability the attacks have unleashed, but whether his strident language mitigates the problem or distracts from the solution is another thing. Eight people were reported dead in the attack while fewer than 30 people were injured, and an undetermined number missing or abducted for ransom. Unbeknown to the government, the North is in full revolt as a result of the incompetent management of the region’s affairs.

The attacks have unfortunately brought out the continuing dissonance in the style and content of the All Progressives Congress (APC) government. Transport minister Rotimi Amaechi, perhaps feeling responsible for the gory incident, lashed out at his colleagues for declining approval for measures and equipment required to prevent train attacks in Nigeria. His burden is understandable. Train infrastructural renewal is one of the signal achievements of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, and Mr Amaechi is at the centre of it. That progress is now evidently under threat. Meanwhile, a careful but detailed leak was orchestrated last week by shadowy figures indicating that the Transport ministry itself grossly mishandled the request for train protection, and perhaps violated certain procurement principles. Mr Amaechi will probably now get what he wanted, but it will not compensate for the catastrophic failures that have blighted and muddled decision-making under this administration.

The federal government dithers over fighting insecurity, of which last Monday’s train attack was just one small aspect. There have been allegations of official conspiracy to downplay the lawlessness of bandits and their accomplices, and there have also been accusations that security forces pull their punches, probably for operational reasons. However, whether what the country is witnessing is conspiracy or complicity, the attacks and killings and abductions have led to all manner of suggestions as to how to deal with banditry and terrorism in the Northwest. Mallam el-Rufai wants indiscriminate bombing of bandit enclaves to exterminate the vermin, insisting that the government knows the attackers’ bases and phone numbers, including listening in on their conversations. In short, everything the government needs to take out the bandits is available to the government, Mallam el-Rufai insists.

Though the governor has moderated his carpet bombing suggestion, he has escalated his response to include warning the government that Kaduna could recruit mercenaries to fight the bandits and their accomplices who have made living and working in Kaduna a nightmare. It is of course impracticable, but everything points to the fact that the governor now cares, though he was not always so dispassionate about banditry going on in the state for years, which many Kaduna indigenes have classified as ethnic cleansing. The attacks may have intensified in the past few weeks, but before then whole communities had been erased with the state government initially rationalising them as revenge killings. The attacks have now gone high-profile, including the invasion of the city’s airport, thus eliciting diverse analyses and responses.

Given the audacity of the train attacks and the scale of the violence and death that accompanied them, the federal and state governments may now be on the same page, at least officially and openly. Whether this unity of understanding and response will lead to a solution is yet to be seen. The military will scale up their response, Mr Amaechi will get his surveillance equipment, and the bandits may be in for a hard time in the weeks ahead. But Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the popular Kaduna-based Islamic cleric, has always argued that there can be no military solution to the problem. He has not precluded taking the battle to the bandits in their enclaves, but he insists that the problem is largely socio-economic. Those who disagree with his perspective suggest that the problem is nothing but brutal ethnic cleansing underpinned by kidnapping for ransom. While this may not be the Kaduna State perspective, Mallam el-Rufai continues to insist that no kobo would be paid as ransom for kidnapped victims in order to cut off the ‘fuel’ supply for banditry.

In the hysteria, the solution may become considerably muddled up. There is probably a mix of everything, including sheer banditry to make money for pleasure, ethnic cleansing, and perhaps low-scale civil war between the Hausa and Fulani. Had the government disentangled the problem when it began years ago, it would probably not have morphed into the dangerous, well-armed monster it has become. The bandits can be defeated if the political will is mustered. But firstly, the government must quit quibbling over the definition of what is wrong, regardless of the colour of the problem and the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the perpetrators of violence. This federal administration has struggled to deliver an acceptable definition. There is no way to defend bandits who sack communities and occupy them in the name of cattle grazing or living space.

Secondly, by refusing to moderate and mediate early enough the conflicts between Hausa farming communities and Fulani pastoralists, the federal government enabled the problem to metastisise. In fact, at the beginning of the crisis, the federal government was sympathetic to the pastoralists and had engaged in all kind of legal and cultural ruses to defend and encourage them against farmers. Now the combatants have dug their heels in and have become immovable and implacable. To move them by war and force may in fact not be sufficient to smother the rage that has spilled over to attacking travelling elites in the North. The government may have to be ingenious and holistic in developing a potpourri of solutions that will be both inclusive and placatory of both farmers and pastoralists. If the government can finally eschew its discriminatory attitude towards farming communities and moderate its propensity to renew and legitimise anachronistic grazing route practices, it may yet produce the neutrality and balance required to promote peace and development. The train attacks are mere manifestations of deeper, underlying problems; hopefully the government will take cognisance of these manifestations and produce the solutions Kano State and others had clamoured for.

 

Gov Buni’s boast

FORMER APC caretaker chairman and Governor of Yobe State, Mai Mala Buni, seems to think that after scoring his APC caretaker team 70 percent success in its assignment the party he handed over to the new chairman, Abdullahi Adamu, is cohesive and better placed to fight the next polls. It is not known what his enthusiasm is founded on, but setting aside the arbitrary score he assigned himself and team, he acknowledged last Wednesday that the party had not reached its desired destination.

He, however, ought to have spoken about his extreme reluctance to hold the convention in the first place, the internal bickering his political machinations and quest for higher office triggered, and the utter loss of faith his leadership induced in his fellow governors. They plotted a coup against his leadership, but he was reprieved by the president, and the convention he insinuated could not be organised in more than a year was done in less than two weeks. The relationship between him and his colleagues may have been damaged irretrievably.

Contrary to his boast, Mr Buni has not left a better party. He leaves a desperate party that must now find ways of picking up the pieces of the chinaware smashed by his antics, a desperate party that has ethically and ideologically become indistinguishable from the PDP. Even the chairman clumsily enthroned after him, thanks to the president, is alarmingly more controversial and vacuously ideological than he is. Mr Buni was known in the party to plot outcomes, but often failed; the more insular Mr Adamu is thought to be less liberal. It is anybody’s guess what the party would look like after him.

ASSAILED on every side by punishing economic and political crises, the All Progressives Congress (APC) may view 2023 as an ordeal it has no choice but to endure while its leaders move laboriously towards appointment with destiny. Will the party win the presidency a third time and keep the throne, thereby feeling invincible and even immortal? Or will it be shoved out of office, humiliated and despised, and because its core is as brittle as lead, face the ultimate fate of death? The party faces two agonising dilemmas as it trundles along to 2023: firstly, their president, Muhammadu Buhari, is doubtless anxious to complete his second term and leave office, mission accomplished, but overwhelmed by the national crises confronting his presidency; and secondly, the party itself will be wondering just how much of the president’s legacy will be a liability to its standard-bearers as they campaign to keep offices they cannot convince themselves they’ve done justice to.

Getting to 2023 at all, not to say in one piece, is, to the APC, a traumatising ordeal they must confront. They have fought one another bitterly, schemed to outdo internal competitors, outpaced and outmanoeuvred their friends and enemies in equal measure, and nervously and ineffectively managed the economy, the polity and the society. For a party so preoccupied with nonessentials, its leaders so narcissistic, and its members a motley assembly of uncommitted foot soldiers chronically unable and unwilling to take a bullet for their party, the next few tumultuous months will test their feeble resolve to the limit. APC leaders and followers have watched with dismay over the years as the economy tanked and became more and more unresponsive to all the esoteric pills they noisily conjured. Crude oil continues to be stolen with vengeance, by some estimates, as high as more than a trillion and half naira annually; inflation spirals out of control; the refineries gobble billions without so much as budging a little, not to talk of even twitching for almost eight years; and while some roads, bridges and railways have been constructed, a plus for the ruling party, the society has become less secure, with Nigerians unsafe in their homes as they are on the highways.

The APC truly faces an unending and monumental ordeal. The party will need to begin campaigning in the months ahead; but each day, they get worse news on the performance of the economy, miscarriage of social policies, and party leaders are too paralysed to reengineer the country’s ossified political structure. They will desire a respite, any temporary relief or even reprieve that could buoy their expectations as leaders and give hope to the angry voters they know are mocking them behind their backs, voters they would face the ordeal of persuading a third time to give the party a chance at delivering their hypothetical change.

But if the party is gobsmacked, the president is probably much more bewildered. If his private reflections can be assumed, the President Buhari probably feels and appears even more nervous. He knows that the buck, all the bucks without exception, stops at his desk. He may be accustomed to deflecting criticism and blaming his detractors or predecessors for the rot he met and every other policy mishaps that has laid the country waste, but it is unlikely he has convinced himself or anyone else that he is not to blame for the disaster. The country is unnervingly complex, and it requires a complex but methodical and deep mind to decipher and rearrange. His countrymen have their opinion of him, but it is unclear what he thinks of his capacity, whether he believes he has what the country requires for a lasting fix.

The ordeal the party faces is exemplified by the sombre fact that it has not quite made a success of governance, contrary to its giddy expectation when it took office in 2015. Indeed, its long seven years story is characterised at best by ad hocism, and at worst by outright failure. It was in the midst of this chaos that it planned its convention, subordinated it to all kinds of machinations induced by its caretaker chairman, Mai Mala Buni, and had had to retrieve the party from him after many counterplots, including a coup that ended disastrously. Rather than allow healthy competition in electing its officers, the party again plotted a contentious consensus list. Party leaders were afraid, like the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) before them, that an open contest for the various national offices would damage the party, if not fracture it. By yesterday, few things were certain in and about the party. One of the few things certain was that no one knew how the consensus list would fare. If the list carried the day, the party, like the PDP did last October, would have passed up the chance to inspire Nigeria into a new democratic era. If the list comes to grief either wholly or partially, the party would have successfully reiterated how inexpertly and controversially the ruling party is led. Here the president cannot be absolved of responsibility.

If the APC made heavy weather of organising its convention, not to say badly running the economy and emasculating it in a debt trap, what would they make of its presidential and governorship primaries? Charismatic former party chairman Adams Oshiomhole came to grief on the governorship Golgotha before the 2019 polls, where he made countless and implacable enemies during party primaries. But partly because a new presidential standard-bearer did not have to emerge in 2019, despite the uninspiring governance offered by the incumbent, the demons that excoriated his chairmanship were few. The scheming Mr Buni, on the other hand, will not superintend the presidential primary; but whoever does, whether a consensus or duly elected chairman, will have nightmares. The APC mismanaged the country, but in selecting their next standard-bearer, getting a hard working and knowledgeable man to fly their flag is the least of their concerns. They want a weakling who can be manipulated; or if strong, a candidate who, like the current occupant of the highest office, finds governance beyond his ken.

The ruling party will probably have a passable convention. Disaffection will be managed and smothered, and the radicals in the party put in their place or officially given a wide berth. Like the caretaker officers and past elected officers, all the new officers, perhaps bar a few, will be thoroughly beholden to President Buhari. After all, even the radicals who plotted the daring and unprecedented coup against the Buni-led caretakers but failed were inspired by the president’s frustrations with Mr Buni’s pussyfooting. What is more, once the president denounced the coup, you could hear a pin drop in the party. It is characteristic of the party’s top leaders, governors and lawmakers to defer to the president. After the convention, and regardless of the outcome, the president will keep on dictating to the party, as he dictates to the country. Everyone, party members and outsiders alike, has become enthralled by the president’s body language and lip signals. It will not matter whether he is sometimes right or often wrong; what is important is that they will listen to him with rapt attention, and take his dictations with gravity and sobriety.

But 2023 can’t come soon enough for the party. Every month, they live in dread of what other policy mishap would come from Aso Villa, and what security outrage the country would be forced to groan under. Their candidates in the next elections, whether at state or national level, will have to campaign as APC standard-bearers and identify with their mothballed party platform. To distance themselves from the programmes and so-called achievements of their president and governors would be an admission of failure. And yet, with cabalistic officials like Abubakar Malami dedicated to subverting the rule of law and the principles of natural justice, identifying with the party could be counterproductive. Caught between and betwixt, the party’s candidates will look for extraordinarily ingenious ways of walking a tightrope. The problem is that the tightrope is strung way too high up a precipitous mountain. This is of course a figure of speech. However, missing a step would not just be dangerous, it could in fact be cataclysmic. It is always a tough act performing after a virtuoso had brought the house down. Well, it is even far tougher to take the stage after a leader who has pitched brothers against brothers.

 

The many tragedies of Electoral Act 2022

TOO many controversies continue to swirl around the Electoral Act 2022. Passed by the National Assembly on January 25 and transmitted to the president a few days later, it was finally signed into law in late February after earlier rejections, the most recent of which was in November. The last hiccup it witnessed concerned the provision relating to modes of primaries for political parties. The legislature had ordered political parties to restrict themselves to the use of direct primary in producing candidates for elective offices. That provision was eventually rescinded in favour of all three modes, to wit, direct, indirect, and consensus. The rescission made sense, but not before the controversy the initial order generated turned ugly and nasty, and not before the now intransigent legislature introduced another controversial provision barring political appointees from voting or being voted for in party conventions and congresses for the election or nomination of candidates except they first resign 30 days before the events– the so-called Section 84 (12).

Responding to the NASS decision not to amend the disputed provision contrary to the impression they gave the president before he assented the bill, the seething Justice minister Abubakar Malami, who is widely thought to be behind the president’s initial refusal to assent the bill, of course for private and political reasons, promised to litigate the matter. He did not indicate how he would do it, or whether he would opt for other means of redressing the problem. Eventually, of all the options Mr Malami promised to exploit to get the rescission of Sec. 84 (12), he settled for something quite extraordinary and magical. He tried to put some distance between himself and the litigation of the Electoral Act provision, but the disguise was flimsy and surreal. An unknown member of the Action Alliance party in Abia State, Nduka Edede, took the matter to court, joined the Justice minister as defendant, and in a matter of days got the Federal High Court Umuahia to not only throw out the contentious provision, but to also order the thrilled defendant, Mr Malami, to expunge the provision. Gloating and unable to appreciate the contradiction of being asked to expunge the beleaguered provision, Mr Malami announced that the judgement would immediately be gazetted to reflect the relevant expunction.

But after much hue and cry, the hasty plan to gazette the judgement slowed down considerably. The judge in the case, Evelyn Anyadike, had also become an enchantress, with many Nigerians flummoxed by her understanding and handling of the law. Both the judge and the litigant are, however, unlikely to be fazed. Mr Malami is too steeped in the serial subversion of the law since 2015 to care what anybody thinks about his motives or competence. Without Sec. 84 (12) of the Electoral Act 2022, Mr Malami would always find an excuse to desecrate both the law and democracy. He has acquired the leeway to enact all sorts of legal, judicial and political monstrosities, a compulsion triggered in him when the presidency began ‘tampering’ with the judiciary. Today, after the usurpation of the judiciary was complete, few, except practitioners, remember there was ever a golden age of the judiciary when philosophers, mathematicians/logicians, wordsmiths and principled men and women trod the judicial hearth. Today, puzzling court decisions have come from Imo, Rivers, Cross River, and Bayelsa among others, dethroning and enthroning governors with scant regard for the electorate.

The NASS may have stood up to President Buhari this time, perhaps attempting to redeem their image of constantly groveling before the executive branch, but it is doubtful whether they can hold the candle to the Second Republic national parliament which displayed more sense and independence than NASS has done since 1999. Though it seems NASS is engaged in a personal feud with Mr Malami and some other scheming political appointees, at least, for once, they have dared to stand firm and must be applauded, assuming this is not a one-off. As for the judiciary, given how some judges have held the law in contempt without any recourse to the illustrious history of the judiciary, the problem seems to rest squarely with the abused process of appointing judges. Until they get it right in that area, and stop appointing judges based on family pedigree as well as on political, religious and ethnic considerations, not to say the abominable quota that sidelines brilliant judges, more judicial travesties should be expected, ultimately endangering democracy and the society.

 

Subsidies: governing by stealth

IT is not obvious that the federal government realises the political and economic implication of the subsidy removal Finance minister Zainab Ahmed said was quietly done not too long ago. But having achieved that measure by stealth, nay ambush, the minister exults that a follow-up subsidy removal in the fuel supply sector was in the offing. The government would also accomplish that in phases, she said gleefully, of course with little said about the cost and implications. “We are cleaning up our subsidies,” she began enthusiastically. “We had a setback; we were to remove fuel subsidy by July this year, but there was a lot of pushback from the polity. We have elections coming and because of the hardship that companies and citizens went through during the COVID-19 pandemic, we just felt that the time was not right, so we pulled back on that.”

The country will never know how convinced the government was about the subsidy removal policy entirely. Was the abandonment of the policy in respect of fuel due to coming elections or hardship, for which unfortunately they had no palliatives? In any case, she continues, “…we have been able to quietly implement subsidy removal in the electricity sector, and as we speak, we don’t have subsidies in the electricity sector. We did that incrementally over time by carefully adjusting the prices at some levels while holding the lower levels down…Hopefully, the parliament will agree with us and we are able to continue with our plan for subsidy (removal) otherwise the way things are going we will not be able to predict where the deficit will be as a result of the fluctuation in the global market.”

Whether the parliament agrees with the government or not – and it is hard to see them doing that anytime this year – it is significant that the government has embraced stealth as public policy, not minding how detrimental it is to a highly pauperised populace. Wages have stagnated, violence has multiplied, corruption has become endemic and intractable, and most people have lost faith in government. There is nothing the Finance minister has said about the government’s subsidy removal measures that elicits public trust in a government which rhapsodises stealth and ambush as public policy anchors. Had elections truly reflected public mood, and the electorate able to discern and appreciate public policies, no ruling party would be as daring and surreptitious as the minister had glamourised.

By their silences, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor Godwin Emefiele now number among the notable contenders for the presidency in 2023. No one knows how the idea of a second Jonathan run for the presidency germinated in the fertile and feverish minds of All Progressives Congress (APC) chieftains, nor why his antecedent as a former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) president failed to discomfit his secret promoters. But since last year, his name has hung precariously over the 2023 contest, and with the passage of time the idea of him running for the presidency a second time has seemed mortifyingly less an anathema. If the conspirators in the APC have their way, Dr Jonathan will be back in serious contention less than eight years after his controversial first term was terminated by a decisive APC victory in 2015. But it is significant that he has said nothing about a second run for the presidency, preferring to leave the speculations about his intentions in the hands of fawning aides and vicious opponents.

Should Dr Jonathan wish to throw his hat into the ring, he would shock only a few. Not so Mr Emefiele. Appointed in 2014 by the same Dr Jonathan after his spectacular falling out with the former CBN governor and later Emir of Kano Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Mr Emefiele was thought to be too sedate, perhaps also too technocratic, and fairly too reticent to wish to engage in any form of politicking. How he has found himself in the thick of speculations about the 2023 presidential contest is a mystery. Like Dr Jonathan, he has also been silent about the rumours. But since the publication of his ‘Communist’ Manifesto weeks ago to opprobrious review, not to say the series of follow-up advertisements lauding his technocratic proficiency and administrative sagacity, Nigerians have begun to take his interest in the presidency a little more seriously but apprehensively than his managerial style at the CBN foreshadowed. The manifesto is of course bilgewater, but those who know Mr Emefiele say it takes far less to convince him to take fateful leaps into any void.

Both Dr Jonathan and Mr Emefiele must now contend with the limited time left for them to announce and explicate their interests, or play down the rumours of their interests as the unflattering and unsolicited escapades of some of their friends and enemies working in league. Those promoting their presidential bids bank on the fact that the two gentlemen are from the South-South, a region they believe would not alarm northern powerbrokers as much as the Southeast. But with the publication of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) timetable for the next general election, which restricts any elbow room for primaries to between April and June to produce candidates, it is clear that Dr Jonathan and Mr Emefiele will have to come out of the closet. They had hoped to keep their ambitions hidden for as long as powerbrokers would need to cobble a consensus for them, but now they must feel pressured to finally take a stand. The coronation they expected from the APC chieftains and influence peddlers around them will not come soon enough, especially considering that the ruling party is itself facing the battle of its life to keep the party one in the face of fractious members, scheming caretakers, and a phlegmatic president.

More than one year after the APC should have conducted its convention, it is still dithering, and would have continued pussyfooting had the National Assembly and eventually the president not okayed the Electoral Act. Seizing upon that law, the INEC also quickly published a timetable for the next polls, a tight schedule that leaves precious little time for the APC to indulge its machinations. It must not only conduct a rancour-free convention, the party’s new working committee must also kick-start its primaries only weeks after. They must in effect win medals as gymnasts without having had the opportunity of imagining themselves as gymnasts or training as gymnasts. They will, therefore, have little time to think of crowning either Dr Jonathan or Mr Emefiele as consensus candidates using a mode of primary made doubly difficult, if not impossible, by the Electoral Act. The party is in the process of testing its consensus method on the convention, with no guarantees whatsoever. Some two weeks ago, they incredulously and unabashedly ceded the ultimate right to midwife the consensus boondoggle to the president, but the president has remained cagey, unwilling to offer the visionary leadership the party needs at this time and get his hands dirty from pushing or foisting an agenda that could turn out to be unpopular or capable of stoking rebellion.

It is remarkable that Dr Jonathan and Mr Emefiele have neither denounced nor controverted the rumour of running for the presidency. The former president is a dyed-in-the-wool PDP politician. The former ruling party is his natural turf. When he is not a gradualist, he is an unrepentant conservative naturally exasperated by the superior airs of progressives and radicals. There are suggestions that he is being drafted into the race by the APC caretaker committee chairman and Yobe State governor Mai Mala Buni who hopes to pair with the former president to contest the presidency. The governor has poured scorn on the idea, and the former president has kept undignified silence; but there is enough published on all media platforms to lend credence to the rumours.

On the other hand, the only politics Mr Emefiele has played all his life is subordinating his person and character to any and every form of indignity to retain his position in the apex bank. Running for the presidency, even when it is clear that many party chieftains desire safe and deradicalised candidates as their president, demands talents completely different from what the CBN governor is used to. No matter how much surrender he has in him, exampled by how much of his dignity he has capitulated to powerbrokers sustaining him as CBN governor, Mr Emefiele is unable to play politics as Nigerians know it: he can’t speak it, he can’t scheme it, and he can’t fight it. His talents are completely unsuited to the amenities of Nigerian politics, a fact not lost on his devious and faceless promoters.

No one can suggest reasons for President Muhammadu Buhari playing his cards close to his chest over both the party’s chairmanship position and presidential candidate. He has told everyone who wants to contest to go ahead; but he has publicly announced that he is not minded to reveal his preferences. When it was suggested that he had sided with the candidacy of former Nasarawa State governor Abdullahi Adamu for the party chairmanship, his spokesman denounced the speculation, insisting that the president had no preference. But the president did not deny he was instrumental to the inclusion of Mr Adamu’s name on the list of aspirants, nor the fact that he has become a convert to the consensus mode of primary. The president played a significant, if not decisive, role in the dethronement of Adams Oshiomhole as party chairman in 2020. Why he left Mr Buni to play ducks and drakes with the emotions of the APC for more than one year after his initial tenure was over is hard to tell. Overall, and contrary to his summations, should the ruling party make a hash of its convention and primaries, the president cannot escape censure.

Most party chieftains and members uncharacteristically defer to the president’s leadership, and have serially accommodated many of his preferences, including those that war against common sense, law and logic. This kind of deference, which also hobbled the PDP in its days in power, is idiosyncratic of Nigerian politics. It doesn’t make sense, and is to be deplored for sure; but for now, there is little anyone can do to mitigate that abhorrent culture of subservience. It is left to a farsighted president to seize upon that deference to enthrone justice, fair play and a party culture able to operate without the inimical interference of any president, no matter how powerful, or any private or group interest, no matter how conspiratorial and well-connected. President Buhari’s aloofness enabled the subversion of his party by a cavalcade of schemers and primordial interests, many of them so shortsighted and so insular that the country is aghast at how easily they suborn the law and religion to bastardise the party and the system in general. That aloofness enabled Mr Buni to engage all manner of plots under the president’s nose, and the reticent Mr Emefiele or his dashing promoters to undermine and subordinate the management of the nation’s economy to careless and reckless politicking.

In three weeks, the APC will be rid of Mr Buni and his dire opportunism. However, it is not clear in what shape he would leave the party, or how badly bruised and damaged the party would be after his exit. A little later, Dr Jonathan’s subterranean interest in the presidency will also collapse, and he will then find his voice and snigger at the thought of ever being linked with the APC, he a confirmed PDP politician. A little later too, Mr Emefiele’s risible run for the presidency will collapse like a pack of cards. It will not be clear whether his promoters had juiced enough out of him, but everyone will self-deprecatingly wonder why they ever ascribed any seriousness to a disingenuous campaign headed to nowhere. To drag Dr Jonathan into the race under any guise is to hand over the party back to the PDP. As inattentive as President Buhari might be, even he would be scandalised by that thought. If it is true that the former president had ever hinted the president of his interest to contest in 2023 on the APC platform, it is impossible not to imagine that so truculent a man as President Buhari would not hiss at his predecessor’s temerity and lack of judgement. But why the president has not called Mr Emefiele to order to unambiguously debunk the rumours surrounding his ambition can certainly not be due to the president’s laissez-faireism; it must be due to his mystifying sense of humour.

On the whole, Dr Jonathan can’t lead the country again. When he did it the first time, he seemed overwhelmed by everything around him, unsure of himself. He has a good heart, which he demonstrated when his successor won the 2015 election, but beyond that, the grit, depth and dispassion needed to propel Nigeria to greatness elude him. He has made no effort to contemplate his failings, and when his party suffered defeat twice in a row, he made even littler effort to offer the party any kind of leadership, not to say succour. Instead, when he thought he was taken for granted, as in the last Bayelsa governorship poll for instance, he sulked very badly and remained disconsolate. Returning him to office at a time of furious change and decline, especially when he has not demonstrated capacity to grapple with new and complex challenges, will be like throwing in a novice swimmer at the deep end of a pool. Mr Emefiele’s Manifesto does not show his capacity to preside over Nigeria, especially considering how poignantly it glossed over his failings as CBN governor. He cannot acquire in the presidential office the character he seems only capable of romanticising out of power; for as he very well knows, or must be educated if he feigns ignorance, no one can give what he doesn’t have.

 

APC, PDP: Between urgency and desperation

IT is four months since the PDP conducted its convention. It did it with aplomb, leaving the APC green with envy. However, since that promising start, the party has struggled to chart a determined and ideological way forward. So far, it has neither addressed its failings nor refined its misshapen party philosophy, nor has it purged its ranks of deadwoods or sanitised its operations. The same grasping, untruthful and cantankerous braggarts are still holding firmly to the commanding heights of the party. But the APC is in far worse condition. Its top echelons are brimming with scheming and ambitious politicians whom neither the president nor any other official appears capable of restraining. Its worldview is cracked; but much worse, it has little administrative capacity to rival the fickler PDP.

Now, with INEC releasing its timetable for the 2023 polls, the two infantile parties must grow up quickly. Starting almost from now, the parties are expected to conclude their primaries and prep themselves for elections. The PDP had a head start, but it was unable to capitalise on that advantage. The perennial laggard, the APC, will have to suspend their insane power grab in order to be able to pull off a fairly rancour-free convention, and then make a frenetic dash for the primaries. Despite controlling the three arms of government, yes, including largely the judiciary, its officers still entertain at the back of their minds that some renegade jurist could rub the party’s nose in the litigious mud party members may provoke. As everyone knows, the ruling party has been running a gauntlet of litigations since 2020, a major crisis it has been unable to rid itself of.

Sadly for both parties, they are both embroiled in so much mess that neither has a distinct advantage over the other. There are remorseless braggarts in PDP; the APC has its equal share of shameless and scheming brats spoilt rotten by a sense of religious and ethnic entitlement. The PDP is in a fix about who should fly its major flags in the coming polls; the APC has become apoplectic about the standard-bearers party chieftains want ostracised. The PDP is incapable of wisdom, resigning itself to droppings that litter side roads; the APC effortlessly and remorselessly eschews wisdom from all its activities. These two sides of the same coin will battle for the hearts and minds of Nigerians in the months ahead, unsure how the country would respond to their choices.

In Emmanuel Macron, France embraced, as it were, its own Third Force in 2017. Theoretically, Third Force is an idealistic and welcome option for a society needing to transcend the mediocrity of its ruling elite. But there is no consensus on how it would work in Nigeria, or whether without a fundamental structural change a Third Force would not amount to just tilting at windmills. In any case, Nigeria’s putative Third Force is ensnared by the same urgency and desperation befuddling Nigerian politics and politicians. They can’t get themselves organised, let alone animated, early enough to overcome the time, legal and administrative strictures imposed by INEC’s timetable. So, for now, the public will have to manage the APC and PDP and hope that between them they will not burn Nigeria to the ground before the deus ex machina arrives, if he ever does.