AFTER holding its breath for more than a year, the All Progressives Congress (APC) finally exhaled last week when the party’s caretakers grudgingly consented to a convention. The caretakers, with the improbable acronym of CECPC (Caretaker/Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee), attempted a last-minute rigmarole to defeat or postpone the convention, but the plot imploded in their faces. The convention was to have been organised six months after they were inaugurated in June 2020. But one postponement after another saw the caretakers expanding their mandate sans frontieres, and their tenure ad infinitum. All the political pirouette came to a crushing end last week after one dizzying week of feverish plots to buy time and sate party members’ yearnings with zonal congresses. Through the Progressive Governors’ Forum, the party put a stop to the dithering and machinations and, in league with the president, forced a March 26 date for the convention.

There have been speculations as to why the Mai Mala Buni-led caretaker committee was unenthusiastic about the convention. Some say that many state chapters are still embroiled in crisis, despite months of what party leaders described as painstaking reconciliation sessions. There were also some mischievous suggestions that the caretakers themselves, in clear manifestation of conflict of interest, harboured political aspirations for which they were determined to sacrifice every principle known to man. And, finally, it was also believed that the caretakers made it their obsession to put mechanisms in place in the party, complete with irreversible faits accomplis, to preclude certain presidential aspirants from actualising their goals. Whatever their reasons, and no matter how far they have gone in consummating their goals, they must now subject themselves to the will of the party and ensure the convention holds as advertised. President Muhammadu Buhari had coaxed them to hold the convention in February, but they ensured by acts of omission that the plan miscarried.

Last week also, the APC zoned party offices and seemed indirectly to have gone a step further than its rival, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to zone the presidency. But the devil is in the detail, for a few party leaders, including the Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai, have continued to waffle over the issue, insisting that zoning the presidency was not a done deal, and preferring to still leave the matter precariously open. The media, which immediately disseminated the news that the APC had zoned the presidency to the South, has not been as cautious as some APC leaders in drawing conclusions nor as reticent as presidency officials who have kept sealed lips about the president’s preferences. Indeed members of the two parties have begun to build scenarios around the 2023 presidential poll. They have zeroed in on which of the zones in the South appears best placed to win the party’s candidacy, while a few PDP leaders have imprudently suggested that the opposition party could not be hamstrung by the permutations and political dynamics in the ruling party.

Sooner or later, both parties will have to make unequivocal statements about where they expect to pick their presidential candidates, whether from the South as many have read into the APC game plan or left open to all-comers as the PDP has agonisingly conceded. It seems for now that the APC may suffer fewer pangs than the PDP in making that delicate choice. President Buhari is from the North, and the APC will find it exceedingly difficult to justify that region’s retention of the presidency. Many party leaders from the North are of course not averse to retaining the presidency, but they will have a herculean task arguing for it and justifying it. Going by the furious attempt to delay the convention, few doubt that most APC leaders are destitute of principles. What the party has going for it is that, given its present power configurations, justifying a southern candidacy is enormously easier than angling for a northern standard-bearer. By sheer coincidence, northern presidential aspirants in the APC have smothered their ambitions in order to escape public and humiliating censure. This has left the field wide open to strong presidential contenders from the South.

The PDP has different demons to contend with. Somehow they have been consistently wrong-footed in the past eight years or so since they were humiliated out of the presidency. The APC’s performance has not been stellar, but even in the ruling party’s shortcomings and failings, they have creatively reframed the narrative in such a way as to render their weaknesses in entrancing colours than the PDP has painted its achievements in gloomy colours. Worsening the PDP nightmare is the fact that just as they could not manage their successes for 16 years, frittering away early triumphs and advantages, and romping between the sheets in saturnalian delight, they have been even more woeful in coming to terms with their political tragedies, especially the ignominious defeat of 2015. Also compounding their woes is the vexatious and insurmountable fact that the South is to them a barren landscape in finding presidential material. Even if they surmount the curse of political geography, it is hard to see them overcoming the excesses of the few aspirants from the South.

Does this make the 2023 presidential poll a foregone conclusion? Hardly. The APC is gifted with self-destructive impulse that unnerves its supporters and fascinates its officials and leaders. They are plotters extraordinaire, compulsive intriguers, and unconvinced ideologues who resent order, control and systematic thinking. Experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, except when properly restrained, they will as soon bewitch themselves with self-defeating legal adventures as engage in bloody jostles for meaningless agenda. It took them more than one year and a half to organise a common convention after an inexpert insurrection against their long-suffering chairman; there is no telling what other complications and odiousness they cannot inveigle their party leaders into committing. Their stamina always looked tenuous, and their resolve fragile, but what appears more alarming about them, that is, apart from their fratricidal longings, is their secret yearning for collective suicide. After repeatedly threatening to drown themselves in their seven turbulent years of leading and sometimes mastering Nigeria since 2015, who can tell whether one of these days they will not yield to their natural instinct?

PDP leaders face a huge dilemma in the coming presidential poll. They will keep casting furtive glances at the APC, like a jealous housewife. What they will see will depend on their acuity in reading signals and decoding ciphers, for even APC apparatchiks make heavy weather of reading their inscrutable self. For outsiders to read them well, particularly a jealous outsider, he will require double the adeptness of APC members. But since APC leaders have now exhaled and crossed the Rubicon, and seemed to have got the zoning enigma right – that is if they leave well enough alone – they will try to make themselves unbeatable in 2023. They will, however, first need a chairman, whom they are poised to elect either indirectly or by consensus. And if they get that mystery solved and the chairman does not become a pawn in the hands of party schemers, why, the PDP will be forced to play second fiddle not only in the next poll but for much longer.

But there is a huge question mark. There are indications that some of the leading figures in the party dread a strong candidate to carry their banner to the poll. Yet they want to win the presidency by having their cake and eating it. They can’t have it both ways. The president probably played a strong role in cajoling the party’s caretakers to fix the convention for March 26. He will need greater resolve to secure his legacy. Chief Obasanjo showed more character in office than President Buhari has done so far, and yet the former president was unable to influence the election of a worthy successor, leading to both the spectacular collapse of his party in 2015 and the obliteration of his legacy. President Buhari will need all the advice and help he can get to influence the election of a worthy successor, first as his party’s candidate and then as president. Pulling off this magic will considerably task him to produce the ingenuity many Nigerians are skeptical he possesses. But if he manages, despite himself, to do what is right he will have guaranteed the future of his party and the security and consolidation of his legacy.

Ukraine upsets calculations

NO one was left in doubt what the outcome of a war between Russia and Ukraine would be. The Russians, not to talk of their expansionist president Vladimir Putin who is nostalgic about the days of empire, will make short work of it. Arguments have been raised about the motives of the war and at what point Mr Putin would feel pacified. There are also suggestions that the war was motivated by the enormous economic resources in Ukraine, the strategic importance of the country to Russia, the creeping expansionism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the United State’s desire to resuscitate the Cold War and sabotage Russo-European economic and diplomatic relations, etc.

While these factors may be important, other factors explain Mr Putin’s angry determination to restore Russia’s influence in the world. If Russia takes Ukraine, it will inevitably share borders with Poland and a few other NATO member countries. So it is really not about border contiguousness, or the existential threat constituted by NATO. Russia, despite its huge size, simply wants more living space, like China, a goal that is akin to Adolf Hitler’s ill-fated Lebensraum. The Russians may not be able to occupy Ukraine in perpetuity, but they want it a weak and dependant satellite. Its independence and political virtues seemed to mock their awkward democracy and the goal of recreating the Warsaw Pact.

France and German live next door to each other even though they’ve been rivals for centuries. Russia and Ukraine could get along despite their differences and values; but Mr Putin is from a different era, and his knowledge of history is so benighted and circumscribed that he believes he can sustain his country’s misadventure in Ukraine for decades. He cannot; nor will his presidency last forever. He may be a military strategist and a passionate ‘Czarist’, but it is clear he still needs extra lessons in statesmanship to recognise that might has its limitations. Carving a sphere of influence like the US has done in the Americas is indefensible. The US Monroe Doctrine is an arrogant and reprehensible policy; it should not be used by Russia to justify intimidating weaker nations, as it seems prepared to do to Finland, Norway and probably Sweden, some of which were driven by fear of Russia into NATO arms. The lesson in all this is that every nation should simply get strong and be able to deter the big powers, for as far as the powers are concerned, and as Hitler demonstrated in 1939, one conquest is never enough.

 

2023: The age factor again

WEEKS after former military heads of state Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar spoke glowingly of allowing and enabling youths to take the presidency, of course democratically, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo has added his voice to the same campaign. This column took issue with the former military leaders when they seemed unintendedly to inaugurate the Minna School of Politics by arguing in favour of age as a factor in leadership. As world history indicates clearly, age has not been a factor in great leadership: young and old leaders have demonstrated exemplary leadership skills or displayed gross incompetence despite their age. But regardless of arguments discountenancing age as a factor in sound leadership, the idea that Nigeria is in dire straits because old and lethargic people are ruling Nigeria continues to gain currency.

Chief Obasanjo suggested at the Murtala Mohammed Foundation annual lecture last week that his generation should step aside for the younger generation. If someone like him still desired to contest the presidency or governorship, then something was wrong, he exclaimed. “We need to have an intergenerational collaboration,” he began cautiously, as if all he wanted was collaboration. “Fayemi (Ekiti State governor) said he was in primary school when Murtala and Obasanjo were there (in the State House). So, if people of the Murtala/Obasanjo era are competing with you as governor, then, something is wrong. The Murtala/Obasanjo group should be stepping aside. Whatever experience and knowledge we have, we should be able to give it to you and you should be able to give it to those coming after you…”

The Minna-based generals spoke of youth as a factor in the presidency; Chief Obasanjo spoke of generational shift. A lot of imprecision obfuscates the references to youth and generation in the discourses of the former leaders. This obfuscation has trickled down the age ladder and now permeates discourses among younger politicians who want a celestial fiat to remove the elders ahead of them. They believe that their chances would be brightened with such flagrant display of political eugenics. The Minna generals, however, qualify their suggestions by restricting their presidential choices to politicians not older than 60 years. They are not incommoded by the arbitrariness of that age.

Chief Obasanjo is famous for imprecision. He indulged it again when he spoke about his generation vacating the turf for the ‘generation coming behind’. What ‘next generation’ means in the context of his suggestion is hard to say. He is about 84, though he is not sure. Who then qualifies for those coming behind him when, demographically, a generation is understood to be on average about 25 years? Perhaps a 60-year-old politician? That brings his suggestion closer to that of the Minna generals who advocate for a president not older than 60 years. The obsession with age, perhaps triggered by the Nigerian experience, however, impedes a better understanding of what makes for great leadership, at least the kind of leadership capable of rescuing Nigeria from unremitting retrogression. They may not confess it, but none of the three generals who ruled Nigeria in the idealistic age of their dreams – Obasanjo at 39; Babangida at 44, and Abubakar at 56 – offered the country the kind of leadership they now enthusiastically recommend.

The three ex-heads of state were unprepared for leadership when they took office; yes, including Chief Obasanjo at his election in 1999. Myriads of religious and ethnic factors complicate Nigerian politics, predisposing them to elect safe but incompetent leaders. How to reverse that trend should engage the newfound pundits advocating generational shift. By putting undue emphasis on age, however, they give the impression that other factors are inconsequential or secondary. Chief Obasanjo spent eight years in office without producing or preparing the ideal generation he fancies, not to talk of laying the right structural foundation for the growth and stability of the country. Gen Babangida also spent about eight years in office destroying what was left of the legacies of his predecessors and British colonialists. And after him was the deluge.

Nothing precludes youths and coming generations from contesting the presidency. The constitution ensures that. But to hope for a day when political elders would voluntarily vacate the presidential space for the youths would be like chasing a chimera. It is unlikely to happen. That hope, however, plants the seed of rebellion in the minds of the so-called next generation who could begin to see every elder as a nuisance, and smooth-talking and charismatic ‘youths’ as the answer everyone must embrace.

NIGERIANS have ex-military heads of state Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar to thank for reviving the School of Politics popular in tertiary institutions. In the 1970s and 80s, some Nigerian universities boasted about their Schools of History, Schools of Politics, and Schools of Economics, for instance, such as the University of Ibadan and Ahmadu Bello University. Scholarly works of course accompanied the labels. It is perhaps nothing more than coincidence, but by echoing each other from the same neighbourhood in Minna, Niger State, the two ex-military leaders’ recommendation on the age factor as a prerequisite for the 2023 presidency gives the impression of a Minna School of Politics. Neither Minna nor the Hilltop residences of both leaders qualified for the label, but it is significant that of all the factors that should guide the election of the next president, age seems to preoccupy the minds of the two leaders.

Was it the issue of public mood so conspiratorially spoken of by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in zoning or not zoning the presidency for 2023 that guided Generals Babangida and Abubakar in settling so definitively on age as a leading factor in determining who should aspire and win the presidency? Neither retired generals gave any indication that their view was not guided by their private assessment of the convoluted elections ahead of Nigeria. The point is that they both believe that age is crucial for the next presidential poll, and that the age in question should not exceed anyone in his sixties. Might 69 years be okay then? And what is the difference between 69 and 70? Both Arise Television and Daily Trust Television that interviewed Gen Babangida in 2021 and January this year respectively did not take the former leader to task on the age question. Gen Abubakar on the other hand merely spoke on camera when an aspirant for the presidency, owner of Kaftan TV, Prince Adewale Adebayo, sought his prayers and support. No elucidation of the age factor was also forthcoming from the former head of state.

According to the general, “Indeed, Nigeria needs the younger generation to take over from us the older generation. Like you rightly said, the world is going digital and I believe the younger generation is more exposed internationally in ICT than the older generation. I am happy that you are thinking of moving the country forward, and I believe with your ideologies and your youthful and vibrant ambition I think Nigeria is on the right part and wish Nigeria will be great. Nigeria with a population of over a 200million certainly is a great country and such leadership will go a long way to make it a greater place…You can count on our support always trying to do the right thing.” The social media may have dramatised and simplified the qualifications for the presidency, not only in Nigeria but all over the world, yet it is no excuse for a former head of state to elevate the so-called public mood to the level of policy or science. Leadership, particularly sound leadership, is too complicated to be trivialised or surrendered to indeterminate and capricious public mood.

Last August and again this January, Gen Babangida reiterated the age factor as the major critical component in electing the Nigerian president. He was consistent. “I have started visualising a good Nigerian leader,” he told Arise Tv last August. “That is, a person, who travels across the country and has a friend virtually everywhere he travels to and he knows at least one person that he can communicate with. That is a person, who is very verse in economics and is also a good politician, who should be able to talk to Nigerians and so on. I have seen one, or two or three of such persons already in his sixties.” Then last month he also explicated his view on age during an interview with the Daily Trust TV. Said he: “Any person who fits in within these criteria, then he is the right person as long as he is a Nigerian: he is a politician, he is not old like I am, he is very conversant with the country, he communicates, and he is a very good communicator. He should be able to communicate because a president should be able to walk into a group of people and talk to them on issues concerning Nigeria; not all the time, but most of the time. He must have somebody he knows in every part of the country. It is not a tall order.”

The communication bit was the only difference between the two retired generals, partly, it seems, because Gen Babangida, when he was in power, loved to hear himself speak. Gen Abubakar had no patience with fine speeches. He was practical, direct and less given to humbug. Had Gen Babangida, however, qualified his ‘communicator’ recommendation to include the issue of substance, ethics and breadth of discourse, his suggestion might have been redeemed a little. In his years in power, he doubtless proved himself a communicator, not of stupendous gift to be sure, but a passable one that at least entranced an indulgent and uncritical country. He did not match his communication skills with substance, as he has again shown in the two interviews in reference, but he got away with murder so to speak by taking the country on a merry-go-round and a wild-goose chase that eventually miscarried badly and predisposed the country to ruin.

Between them, the two former heads of state spent about nine years in the presidency, albeit unelected. They ought to have known enough by practical experience and study, assuming they had the time and the patience for both or either, to author a book or occasional disquisition as the country’s mood and tumultuous events demand, on leadership. But it takes much rigour, farsightedness and deep study to apply oneself to a task that is nothing but ‘tall order’, to borrow Gen Babangida’s words in the Daily Trust interview. Nigerians should be drinking from the primeval springs of wisdom of both officers who had the distinguished honour of leading the country as military officers and contributing to its stability and peace as civilians. Their fixation with age, of all the factors conducing to leadership, let alone great leadership, is hard to explain or justify. Perhaps their memoires should still be expected. And it is hoped that the memoires would be original and educative, in fact classical.

Given the amorphousness of the so-called public mood so inelegantly referenced by the PDP in determining where and perhaps who the next president would be, it is not clear what role religion will play in determining the next president. Former leaders, including Generals Babangida and Abubakar, have been fairly reticent on the subject. They would be scalded should they attempt to tackle it dispassionately, honestly and futuristically. Yet, the issue cannot be avoided. If it does not come into play as a factor in who takes the party ticket and wins the presidency, it will be relevant for who becomes running mate and just how adept he is at mining non-secular and often jaundiced feelings. Yet for most of the developed world, as this column argued some weeks ago, neither age nor religion has been a significant factor in the emergence of their leaders – not in China nor in Russia, and not in France nor in Singapore, and certainly not in the days of empires replete with either warrior-kings or philosopher-kings. But whether on social media or outside of it, expect in the months ahead animated discussions on the age and religion of the next president. The oppressive and loathsome burden of poverty will not dissuade the electorate from emphasising, embracing, explaining and justifying the incomprehensible.

There are insinuations that last Sunday’s Lagos meeting of governors, ex-governors and other stakeholders, including businessmen, across the various sectors might have been inspired by the same totem of public mood. That mood, deciphered and perhaps deconstructed outside the public glare by the stakeholders, was probably meant to serve the purpose of selling a particular 2023 agenda. They hope to create a critical mass of believers in the agenda which would eventually be sold to the nation as an altruistic plan to save the nation from doom. But there is nothing altruistic about the agenda, not even the generational shift they hope to midwife. Though they have the two aforesaid generals as silent inspiration, and the social media as malleable tool, the agenda is unlikely to fruit. The so-called stakeholders have kept sealed lips over what transpired at the meeting, but those quivering lips will not stay sealed for long.

Both the APC and PDP have their shortcomings, and their leaderships have been scheming and sometimes cultic. But they at least do not operate in the strictest sense of a camorra. Before the primaries are held sometime in the third quarter, many groups, army generals and other nondescript stakeholders will attempt to foist their 2023 agenda on the nation. Whether they will succeed will depend on how susceptible to propaganda and fearmongering the people have become due to decades of oppression and impoverishment. Age and religion will just be two discredited tools out of a plethora of disingenuous measures designed to obstruct Nigeria’s march forward.

ASUU can’t take cognisance of anything

THE Academic Staff Union of Universities is warming up for another strike. The union is inflamed by the federal government’s persistence in dishonouring agreements since 2009 or implementing them piecemeal and casually. Partially responding to their agitations two Tuesdays ago, President Muhammadu Buhari had appealed to the lecturers to ‘be cognisant’ of the fiscal pressures the government was contending with. The lecturers did not of course retort that they were also facing intolerable financial pressures of their own, but they have simply gone on with their plans. Labour minister Chris Ngige, whose sardonic wit sometimes drives unions up the wall, has continued to quibble. Without often meaning it, his supercilious manners offend even while entertaining. If the Education ministry officials can’t pacify their home, well, why would Dr Ngige kill himself to do it for them?

Why the real problem afflicting education and other areas of national life escapes the administration is hard to understand. The competition for scarce resources will continue, for the country is not baking as much cake as should be enough to go round. Defence will ask for more funds, and when the country or the safety of the elite is threatened, more money will be voted. Health, Agriculture, Works, Transport and other sectors will also keep demanding more. Then of course youths and their empowerment programmes, not to talk of other sundry intervention programmes, have insatiable appetites. Loans have reached their limits, and debt servicing, Naira value and other fiscal issues all demand urgent and nightmarish attention. These are some of the fiscal pressures the president want ASUU to be cognisant of. ASUU is neither deaf nor blind. Its members will calmly hear the president, take cognisance of the problems he referenced, and simply continue to table their demands.

It is not only the government that is on the horns of a dilemma, ASUU and other famished sectors are also facing dire challenges of their own. If the government can’t fully understand why the country has been frazzled by unending crises, how can it develop a comprehensive and workable solution? That is where the problem lies, not ASUU or the competing sectors. Government’s sermonising will make no difference whatsoever. As one union or sector is pacified, another angry and dissatisfied sector rears its head. How long will the government continue deploying fire brigade measures to deal with worsening existential crises? Two weeks ago, someone said Nigeria lost about $4bn to oil thieves in less than a year; the government itself weary of vacillating over oil subsidy groaned that high oil prices might drive fuel subsidy cost to over N3.5trn for the next 17 or 18 months; numbed by the tireless bloodletting in his state, Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai has asked for a military Theatre Command; then of course nowhere in the country is safe from kidnapping, ritual killing and highway robbery, while banditry/terrorism and insurgency are laying the society waste in much of the North.

These problems have their internal logic, their leitmotif. All the Buhari administration needed to do in 2015 when some of these problems began to morph was to develop a comprehensive understanding of the crises. He had the instruments of government and a devoted and willing crop of experts to help him. Unfortunately, he started on a wrong foot, exacerbating the problem, ignoring the budding problems until they became cancerous, and blaming others, including secessionists, Libyan collapse, world economic downturn as a result of Covid-19, and of course, the previous government. Valuable time was lost. It is not ASUU that should take cognisance of anything, as sentimentally suggestive of patriotism as that may sound. The problem is the administration itself, for failing to appreciate the dynamics of the crises, complicating them by half-baked and misdirected solutions, refusing to conceptualise a reengineered society, and ignoring the urgency of enthroning new political and economic paradigms, a.k.a, restructuring, to tackle the dysfunction.

The country’s present structure cannot take 200m people to safety and peace, not to talk of the desired development. The reigning structure is retrogressive, expensive, burdensome, feeble and unworkable. This is not just pessimism. Even if the administration is incapable of conceiving a deep and complex understanding of the issues at play, it at least has the opportunity to develop a commonsensical approach to governance. In the circumstance, there has been neither depth nor common sense displayed. What exists and reigns is utter paralysis, an ignoble refusal to acknowledge the failings of the system, a pathological fear of change, and an abysmal lack of anticipation of the future. They can’t manage and fund the police, but they insist on smothering it to death. They see secessionist agitations as regional and hegemonic threats, when it is no more than an existential challenge calling for paradigm change. For primordial reasons, they took so long in combating herdsmen atrocities, until it morphed into low intensity civil war in the Northwest. And now they are prevaricating over consensus candidates, slipshod Electoral Act amendment, zoning of the presidency, and imbuement of political parties with wrong ethics and values that atrociously deny justice, fairness and equity.

It is perhaps too late for the Buhari administration to do anything radical and lasting. It will paper over the cracks until it hands over the baton, just like it has announced it would do on fuel subsidy. The only redemptive exercise it still has some control over is to ensure that the ruling party behaves nobly, fairly and justly. But even this has seemed to weigh it down. And in a season where the PDP has rationalised unfairness and political greed in its politics towards 2023, it is remarkable that the administration does not appreciate how close the country is to the precipice. Having stayed and cavorted too long in crises and infamy without collapsing, the country has become indifferent to danger and disintegration.

In 2022, nearly all the events that will shape next year’s polls will be imbued life or death. If Nigeria is draped in pessimism this year, it will take a miracle to consecrate next year with optimism. Unfortunately, few Nigerians are optimistic about 2022. Having muddled through the past six years and more, sometimes deploying strong-arm methods to pacify the country, federal and state governments are confident that the reasons for optimism far outweigh the reasons for pessimism. This difference in perspective is not unusual. Car drivers are naturally more sanguine about excess speed than passengers, despite precipitous slopes, craters, sharp corners, and thick and sometimes impenetrable fogs. But the events of 2022 are loaded, treacherous and building up into a crisis, and there has not been a corresponding demonstration of capacity and ingenuity by the government to manage the sanguinary events twisting the country out of shape and turning the people into angry, impatient and violent citizens.

No region is spared, and the North is the worst hit. The 12-year-old Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency in the Northeast remains unmanageable, as it drains resources, bleeds communities, weakens and disorients state governments, pauperises the youth, and has in the past few years metastasizes into cancerous banditry fuelled by small armies sometimes running into thousands in each camp. Poverty is directly blamed for the catastrophe. But while poverty may be the immediate trigger, other factors such as elite irresponsibility and the politicisation of religion have also contributed significantly to the social distortions that have bred the alienated young publics of the north-eastern states and inspired the civil war between farmers and herders, between Hausa and Fulani, in the Northwest. Other than military responses, nothing significantly mitigating is being done to reshape and reset the region. Climate change is still wreaking havoc in the Sahelian belt, but the federal government waits for international consensus to ameliorate the problem. Nothing is being done to control population explosion in both the Northeast and Northwest, with the elite sometimes gloating over the political advantages it confers. The result is that the North is engulfed in flames which no one, not even the government, is certain would be put out in time for the 2023 polls.

Down south, the Southeast is sitting on a powder keg, with many unresolved existential issues tenuously restrained by federal might. The region is blamed for bad and sometimes incestuous politics that produced the alienation it is currently contending with. While this may not be far from the truth, there is little doubt that alienation exists, and it needs to be managed. It will take wholesale restructuring of the country to eliminate many of the factors predisposing the country to crises. There is little imaginativeness from the federal government in drawing a nexus between the crises ravaging Nigeria and its structural deformities. This distortion has engendered opportunistic freedom fighters like Nnamdi Kanu determined to upend the country. Rather than examine the reasons for the ongoing destabilisation of the Southeast, the federal government has opted for military action and halfhearted dialogue. The rebellion has been temporarily smothered, but the excessive focus on the rebel leaders is unlikely to deliver a permanent peace, let alone enthusiastic participation in Poll 2023. The alienation is also compounded by the Southeast elite’s incompetence in fighting marginalisation. They hope for a national consensus to produce an Igbo president when no Igbo politician has produced the acceptable and inclusive national politics needed to take the presidency.

It is not surprising that the extreme contentiousness of Southwest politics leads them to interpret their political and economic fortunes under the Muhammadu Buhari presidency as mediocre and injurious to their wellbeing. The reason is embedded in who is doing the talking and the argument, and their clever ability to disguise their private interests as public interest. The zone has produced the vice president, headship of the House of Representatives, powerful cabinet positions, and notable infrastructural projects far in excess of what they got under the previous Goodluck Jonathan administration. Yet, a vocal few campaigned for and nostalgically spoke about the Jonathan presidency when he lost the presidency. But the region as a whole, as distinct from those clever few, has also managed to conflate its principled campaign for healthy federalism and the general principles of democracy with the private, largely pecuniary interests of the activist few. A thin and barely perceptible divide consequently exists, producing a climate of anger and distrust suffused with bad politics capable of injuring 2023 polls.

It took the Buhari presidency’s extreme primordial politics to generate the open rebellion Sunday Adeyemo, a.k.a Sunday Igboho, implausibly personified. He didn’t have the personality to lead the cause, nor the intellect to elucidate its structure, but he had the charisma to birth and drive it for a brief, obscene moment. That rebellion, it became clear, manifested through the Southwest’s existing political fault lines. However, the fault lines will not be cured before next year’s elections. Mr Igboho’s proverbs-strewn rebellion might have been halted, and his excitedness quenched, but the Southwest will still be in tumult through 2022. The region is dominated by the disunited All Progressives Congress (APC), but like a voyeur it still manages to cast furtive glances at the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The Southwest also served as the exemplification for the EndSARS revolt in 2020 because it hosts a lethal and unique agglomeration of civil society activists and angry, unemployed and frustrated youths. Sometimes this latter group, which has turned the social media into a battering ram against every fancied grievance, and is swearing there would be no polls until restructuring is done, coalesces around the anti-establishment faction of Southwest politics. Just as there is disquiet in the Northwest and Northeast, there is also dreadful unease in the Southwest and Southeast.

The general unease, it is clear, is merging seamlessly with deep estrangement over Nigeria’s poor and struggling economy ravaged by debts, intolerably huge debt service payments, high unemployment, poor investment in social services, abysmally poor wages, and unacceptably high level of insecurity. There will be no magic between January and June to raise wages, increase employment, and stamp out insecurity. To, therefore, propose the removal of the so-called petrol subsidy not later than June this year will introduce into the tinderbox which Nigerian politics has become factors that may be difficult to manage. As the EndSARS revolt illustrated, the social media has become a lethal weapon in the hands of youths and disaffected people and politicians to promote sometimes indefinable but mostly idealistic philosophies and policies. The social media, as sometimes deployed, has become disruptive, destructive, iconoclastic, and unruly. It makes consensus difficult to reach, and the most astute and enterprising government to govern with the self-assurance of previous decades. The social media-led EndSARS campaigns for instance managed to goad a vast number of Nigerians into revolt with concocted stories about death figures and gory photographs of purported scenes of violence and bloodshed. Social media judgement is not always the best, and its conclusions and rationalisations are often naïve and unfeasible, but it will nevertheless attempt to sway the votes in 2023 if it convinces itself this year not to campaign against the poll.

But what will even create the most disquiet this year is the politics of the ruling and opposition parties as they compete for public goodwill and support, fight over defectors, enunciate the principles for which they are willing to die or ‘kill’, and battle internal conflagrations. The PDP has managed its elective convention very well, showing just how well consensus politics works. But it is not clear whether consensus can be sustained in their search for a presidential standard-bearer. Few are optimistic that without shifting their gaze south, they can make any inroad in the presidential contest. Their tragedy is that they don’t have a sellable southern aspirant, assuming many of their northern aspirants decide on self-immolation. Until it bares its fangs, the APC’s presidential gaze seems set south. But party hierarchs appear determined both in their February convention and presidential primary to entangle their processes in unfathomable schemes and plots. They are yet to disentangle themselves from the convention it has taken them nearly two years to conduct, instead of six months from the sacking of the former party executives. To launch recklessly into presidential and governorship primaries with their present mindset will expose them to the most cataclysmic intraparty jousting ever. How far can their brinkmanship take them in an unstable country and era?

In the end, if the economy does not undo the country, interparty or intraparty chicaneries might; and if these two factors don’t cause substantial chaos, the mayhem in all parts of the federation, against which the federal government has proved increasingly desperate and inept, may very well make Poll 2023 a bridge too far. The percentage of Nigerians uninterested in elections without fundamental and structural political and economic changes may not be known; however, a silent majority may wish to get the system trudging along, and the elections conducted. Determining who will master the impending uncertainty will depend on whose arguments resonate more with the wary and fearful public; that is if youth unrest, insecurity, and the social media are somehow unable to complicate or subvert the coming year.

 

Sen Kashim Shettima’s piquant metaphors

Former governor of Borno State, Senator Kashim Shettima, is noted for his sharp wit and candour. Intelligent, fearless, eloquent and relentless in the pursuit of ideas and policies he believes in, he once again demonstrated these traits when he addressed the Tinubu Support Groups conference in Abuja last Monday. He is a longtime friend and ally of former Lagos State governor, national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC), and now presidential aspirant, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Chairing that conference was, therefore, not a surprise. But what he had to say, not to say the way he phrased his thoughts, was even more captivating and provocative. His thoughts and language are peerless. While his political ideas are not too well known, enough is known to underscore his progressivism, political inclusivity and his seamless drive for fairness and justice. What in fact the public has not paid attention to is his matchless use of literary devices in his speeches.

This writer has not investigated the closeness between Sen Tinubu and Sen Shettima, but whatever reasons explain their friendship and alliance, outside of course their political affinity, must relate to what the Bible describes as ‘deep calling to deep’. Other than Lagos and Borno, it is not clear how many other states have had the brilliant successions the two states have engendered. Both states have master plans, and their successive governors have been assiduous, generally faithful to the plans within the limits of what law and order would permit, and development-oriented. There is indeed no telling what the two states could achieve in terms of development had Lagos not been burdened by relentless internal migration and Borno by unyielding insurgency.

But this piece is not about the politics of Sen Shettima or even the presidential aspiration of Asiwaju Tinubu. It is essentially about the literary flourish of Sen Shettima, the veritable connoisseur of wit and sarcasm. During his tenure, and on one occasion when he commissioned some projects in Maiduguri or its environs, he spoke off the cuff at a dinner in honour of his guests, probably including the same Asiwaju Tinubu. In his remarks, a part of which dripped with sarcasm, he jauntily described his overbearing and insufferable predecessor, Ali Modu Sheriff, as ‘Alhaji Allah’. Curious and entranced by the then Governor Shettima’s sarcastic remark, and struck by what literary depths he had to plumb to ferret out that exquisite expression, this writer called a reporter in Maiduguri to ask for the context of the governor’s dismissive remarks. It must be the gilded house Mr Sheriff built behind the Government House in Maidguri, responded the reporter. The house, he added, menaces and almost overshadows the seat of government. No one who has studied Senator Sheriff’s political peregrinations will fail to be impressed by his successor’s quaint characterisation of the serial defector and political pugilist.

If anyone thought Sen Shettima’s coruscating wit and nose for satire were an aberration, his remarks last Monday in Abuja during the support group conference should be an eye-opener. Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State is arguably the most pugnacious and irreverent of all Fourth Republic governors, but Sen Shettima does not play second fiddle to anyone in wit and sarcasm. He proved it by his captivating remarks selling Asiwaju’s presidential aspiration in Abuja on Monday. Said he: “In 2015, some aspirants with very huge war chests were itching to clinch the ticket of the APC, but like the Rock of Gibraltar, Asiwaju and his progressive team stood solidly behind the candidacy of President Buhari. My simple question, distinguished ladies and gentlemen is, where were the new members of what I call ‘the Buhari’s Church of Latter-day Saints’; where were they?  We knew where their political loyalty lay in that particular convention when Buhari emerged as the presidential candidate of the APC. Where were they?”

Church of Latter-day Saints? It takes a well-read man to make that allusion, an urbane politician whose mind is not occluded by sham religiosity and debilitating conservatism, a lawmaker who is self-confident and unwavering. He was of course referring to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise called LDS Church or Mormon Church, but the operative word is ‘latter-day’, which is meant to reference new converts. He was of course not inviting his audience to a consideration of the rubric of that church. It was well known in 2015 that many of those who were to later hijack the Buhari presidency scoffed at their candidate’s chances, believing that after three failures, a fourth failure was assured. Sen Shettima reminds his audience that one man believed, and made the difference – Asiwaju Tinubu.

Reassuringly, the eminent senator from Borno will play a significant role in the coming campaigns, and thus the entertainment the public will receive will continue steadily. He is in fact unequivocal in determining early in the day whom to support. Responding to the whoopla over Asiwaju Tinubu’s age and health as factors in the race, he had heartily responded that: “The mark of true leadership isn’t the ability to lift a bag of cement. It’s the mental effort to think rationally of solutions designed to redeem one’s people and territorial jurisdiction.” His political analyses are not run-of-the-mill, and his responses, even when they are not festooned with sarcasm and metaphors, are nevertheless delicious. In the months ahead, Sen Shettima will not only tickle the midriff of the electorate, he will excite their cortices as well. He is idiosyncratically equipped to go beyond the ordinary in responding to political stimuli and the silly ratiocinations of political sceptics who deplore sound reasoning and historical experience.

Their arguments about who owns the oil in the Niger Delta region may not qualify as the controversy of the year, but they typify the continuing frustrations faced by Niger Deltans and the unending nonchalance of Nigerian rulers. More than sixty years after oil was discovered in the troubled region, the country is still unable to find the right formula by which the oil could be mined without jeopardising the interests of the region. The combatants in the controversy are ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and former Information minister Edwin Clark, the former as irritable and imperious as they come, and the latter impatient and iconoclastic. Responding to Chief Clark’s dismissive characterisation of the former president as spiteful because he insists Nigeria, not Niger Delta, owns the oil in the region, the former president takes the legalistic view that until the constitution is amended or the federation dissolved, mineral resources found anywhere in Nigeria belongs to the whole country, not the location where it is found. He quotes Section 140 of the 1963 Constitution referenced by Chief Clark as proof to justify his position. Chief Obasanjo is right to assert that Nigerian constitutions, including the current one, appropriated mineral resources to the country, regardless of the distortionary activities of states like Zamfara in gold mining.

Chief Obasanjo, sadly, does not stop at proving his case legally and constitutionally, nor empathising with the blighted region for the decades of despoliation that rendered the Niger Delta generally unlivable in the midst of plenty. Apart from needlessly and mendaciously burnishing his achievements and credentials as a nationalist, military head of state and later elected president, not to say his years as a military commander during the civil war, the former president also unscientifically argues that had federal forces lost the civil war, the Niger Delta would have lost all claims to the oil in their region, with Biafra taking everything. How he comes to that dismaying conclusion is hard to tell. It has taken decades, and at horrifying costs, to concede the little Nigeria allocates for the development of the Niger Delta. Nothing suggests that had Biafra won the war, similar or bigger concessions would not have been made to the oil region in the many decades after the war.

Chief Clark on the other hand takes the ethical approach to the whole saga, a perspective misconstrued by Chief Obasanjo probably because of some of the errors contained in the former Information minister’s open rebuke. As far as dates, figures, percentages, and other facts are concerned, Chief Obasanjo has the upper hand, and Chief Clark will have to sharpen his records well in order to contest the arguments of those who hide behind the exactitudes of the constitution to perpetrate injustice and unfairness. Nigeria has been unfair to the Niger Delta because the constitution partly enables such unfairness. It is, however, in the power of the country’s political authorities, as years of negotiations suggest in discussions to revise the derivation formula upward, to ensure that the Niger Delta is not disadvantaged in the mindless and greedy expropriation of the region’s mineral resources. Chief Clark may not have articulated his points well, surrendering in some instances to sheer emotionalism, but the Niger Delta is right to fume against pollution and skewed allocation of mining licences. The region has borne, and is still bearing, a disproportionate and stifling cost of Nigeria’s oil mining.

It is remarkable that about three years as military head of state and eight years as elected president did not afford Chief Obasanjo the opportunity to closely reassess Nigeria’s national question. In debunking Chief Clark’s ‘parochial’ approach to oil ownership, he lionises those who fought to keep Nigeria one without any consideration of the issues over which the war was fought, except to insinuate that the Niger Delta was getting the best deal under the present arrangement. He speaks of how his presidency was fair to the oil region, almost as if he was their main champion, and as if no one could do better. Even the Odi, Bayelsa State, massacre carried out only months after he assumed office in 1999 has receded into distant, expiatory memory. He extols his own character with his customary pharisaical doublespeak, describing himself as God-fearing and respectful, and all but insisting he has no guile, since he is not ‘hypocritical, inconsistent, and unstatesmanlike’. And forgetting how he had repeatedly excoriated President Muhammadu Buhari in letter after letter, he accuses Chief Clark of using ‘uncouth and offensive’ language in his open letter.

The critical question is whether the Niger Delta has felt well treated by Nigeria in the mining of oil in the region. The answer is of course no. Could the situation be ameliorated? The Niger Delta answers yes, citing their campaign to raise derivation to 25 percent. Chief Obasanjo, on the other hand, sidesteps that question and does not provide any extraordinary insight into how the oil region could have been better treated in a country wholly and foolishly dependent on oil receipts. If eleven years in office didn’t lead the former president into original thoughts on how to politically rearrange the country, his feelings occluded by inordinate sense of entitlement and self-glorification, they should have at least led him to produce original ideas on how to enthrone a fair economic arrangement for the country, assuming he has the capacity to disambiguate those two complex and intertwined issues. After he concluded that Biafra would have given the Niger Delta a much worse deal than Nigeria is giving the region, Chief Obasanjo virtually shut the door on the oil region, in much the same way, but less hostilely, the Buhari presidency has treated the Niger Delta. There won’t be change now or in the near future, and when men of caliber like Chief Clark leave the scene, it will be even much worse for the region which will be deprived of notable champions. Discovering oil in the Bauchi Basin will not lead to any attenuation of the hostile and predatory treatment inflicted on the Niger Delta.

Both Chief Obasanjo and Chief Clark raised pertinent issues about the mining of gold in Zamfara, particularly the offensive manner it was exhibited right under the nose of a quiescent and lethargic federal government. For strange reasons, little is likely to be done to correct the Zamfara anomaly. There are many other economic anomalies in the country; but as long as the oil in the Niger Delta continues to flow, and the price remains fairly stable or is worth the effort, and fossil fuel is still in demand, the Niger Delta will continue to hold the short end of the stick. They will look on wistfully as some parts of the country are turned into mimic Dubais, and they will complain in vain about the pollution and degradation they have been sentenced to. As Chief Obasanjo cynically infers, the region must swallow its pride and reconcile itself with the dynamics of the oil industry and thank God it is not much worse for them.

CDS Irabor and insecurity

Until Nigeria gets its definitions and concepts exactly right, they will always be confused about the scope and magnitude of their objectives in fighting insecurity. There is no doubting the commitment of men and women in the security services who have been put in charge of dealing with the country’s security challenges. The problem, however, is determining exactly what is expected of them, and how far they can go. For instance, speaking at the decoration of newly promoted military officers in Abuja last Thursday, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Lucky Irabor, gave an omnibus charge to the men of the services in their battle against insecurity. Said he: “You need to escalate your level of commitment, your level of efficiency and effectiveness because if 2021 is challenging, I like to assure you that 2022 will be more challenging and that is the reason I like to call on you to please brace up because you must at all cost take away every form of insecurity in our land.”

He is right to anticipate increasing challenges this year, following on the heels of the unquantifiable challenges of 2021, and he is also right to demand higher degree of efficiency and commitment from the promoted officers. But to expect them to ‘take away every form of insecurity in our land’, perhaps simply by the force of arms, is not only expansive, it is clearly unrealistic and unattainable. The military could not execute that order even if they had the power. The reason is the quantum of factors that constitute insecurity in the country, factors that include social, cultural, religious, political and economic. Not only is it a mistake to saddle the military with the task of combating sundry crimes like kidnapping and armed robbery, it is a bigger misdirection of effort to deploy them in tackling crimes such as kidnapping and even cultism as they have sometimes been tasked with.

Gen. Irabor can expect so much from his men, and in addition charge them to be effective and efficient, but it is inconceivable that they can stamp out insecurity in its every form. It dissipates the military, weakens them professionally, overstretches them in deployment, and dampens their morale when they are unable to successfully execute orders they are not trained and even equipped to deal with. That they carry heavier firepower than any other security and law enforcement agency wields is no reason to deploy them in tasks that clearly distract their professional training.

 

Speaker Gbajabiamila embraces reality

If anybody is in doubt what the National Assembly will do with the Electoral Act Amendment Bill when lawmakers resume from recess in January, they only need to read between the lines and decipher House of Representatives Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamilla’s interactions with the press in Lagos last Thursday. The Speaker was at his constituency last week to commission some projects when reporters asked him about the fate of the troubled bill, particularly concerning the direct primary provision that has seemed to endanger that highly publicised piece of legislation. Though he did not have the final say, he said cautiously, the legislature might expunge the direct primary provision from the amendment in order to get it represented to the president for assent.

Few Nigerians have been vociferously in favour of the needless amendment compelling all political parties to use the direct primary mode in nominating their standard-bearers. Most of Nigeria’s enlightened opinion leaders were reluctant to embrace a piece of legislation that seemed to take sides in the episodic dispute between governors and lawmakers over who controls their parties. Those who supported the amendment never bothered to ask what would happen if on a hypothetical tomorrow direct primary became the bogeyman for lawmakers and a useful tool in the hands of governors to whip the lawmakers. Would they again amend the constitution? Thankfully, civil society organisations are cautious about the amendment and, after the president withheld assent, have quickly asked the legislature to do away with it in order not to endanger the whole amendment believed to be crucial to the next set of elections.

On Friday, the Senate President, Ahmed Lawan, weighed in and did not substantially differ from Hon Gbajabiamila. Considering the way the legislative leaders handled the inflamed passion that followed the president’s refusal to assent the bill, it was clear they never gave thought to overriding the presidential veto. It was not just their natural affinity to genuflect before the executive that led them to smother the debates and adjourn sittings; they had probably reconsidered their dispute with the governors as unworthy of the gravity lent to that piece of legislation, and perhaps the fact that not too many Nigerians seemed enchanted by the superfluous amendment anyway. When the country finally heard from Sen Lawan, his views on direct primary was as conciliatory as those of Hon Gbajabiamila. For both gentlemen, that piece of troublesome legislation is not worth jeopardising the cosy relationship they had built and sustained with the executive over the years.

That Nigeria’s typically censorious civil societies and so many other opinion moulders could disregard the provision of direct primary in the bill must be an indication that few wished what should normally and customarily be a party affair to be elevated into a national affair. Before NASS reconvenes this month, passions will have cooled considerably. Legislative leaders have seen reason; lawmakers will also come round eventually. There is no contrivance by which the direct primary provision could be resuscitated, nor can anything be done to stop the depletion of the ranks of its proponents in the legislature. The mode of nominating candidates is strictly a party affair, just like other modes, including indirect primary and consensus. It is pointless entering into a debate on which mode is the best. Each party knows it owes the electorate accountability; wishing to find favour in the next polls, they will deploy the best and most acceptable and rewarding mode of primary for their party. And if against all odds they nominate unpopular standard-bearers, regardless of the mode of primary deployed, they will fall on their swords.

It is reassuring that legislative leaders can read the pulse of the country. Voters want lawmakers to desist from micromanaging political parties; it is not their business. Hon Gbajabiamila has been forthright in claiming responsibility for inspiring the idea of legislating direct primary, and is sensible enough to know when to throw in the towel. Even though in his interactions with the media last week he still managed to confuse the rejection of legislatively imposing a mode of primary on all parties with his arguments about the beauty and unassailability of direct primary, he probably now understands that no one is quarreling with direct primary, or any other type of primary for that matter. What everyone is saying, disregarding populists who ascribe all kinds of motives to those who oppose the legislation, is that how political parties nominate their candidates should be left to the parties.

About two weeks before he finally declined assent to the Electoral Act amendment bill transmitted to him in November, President Muhammadu Buhari had, in the words of his aides, consulted widely. The bill became controversial partly because some governors and lawmakers framed the amendment as a superiority and even ideological contest between the governors and the National Assembly. The framing was so effective that after the president declined assent, many lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives were infuriated. There was consequently wild talk of overriding the president’s veto. Barely hours after the lawmakers felt rebuffed, the agitations quietened down considerably, with the expectation that after the legislature resumed from recess in January, options as how to proceed in the matter would be discussed. Worse, the media have also framed the president’s veto as a triumph for the governors and repudiation for the lawmakers.

There were two major amendments contemplated to the Electoral Act. One was the highly controversial provision that seeks to impose direct primary mode for nominating candidates on all the political parties, irrespective of what their individual constitutions say. The other was the electronic transmission of election results. But the national controversy effectively sidestepped the issue of electronic relay of results, though it is no less contentious, and focused more obsessively on the issue of direct primaries. It is presumed that as the president returns the amendment to the National Assembly, they will tweak it to make it more agreeable, while retaining the provision of electronic relay of results. If that is done, perhaps the president will find no other reason to withhold assent.

The president’s letter to the National Assembly explaining why he withheld assent to the bill hinged his refusal on three broad factors. As he put it, perhaps a little syntactically convoluted, “The conduct of elections for the nomination of party candidates as solely via direct primaries as envisaged by the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021 has serious adverse, legal, financial and economic and security consequences, which cannot be accommodated at the moment considering our nation’s peculiarity.” Well, everyone got the idea. Whatever the reasons, the final outcome is that the president is uninterested in getting embroiled in the fight between the governors and the legislators, regardless of how the end result is interpreted. The media say Justice minister Abubakar Malami and the governors have won, and the presumed winners have sounded exultant. Given their irritation and the abrasive manner they expressed their displeasure, the legislature also thinks the lawmakers have lost.

In his reasons for declining assent, the president cited legal, constitutional and security reasons. He aped Mr Malami’s advice. This may be why sections of the media declared Mr Malami and the governors as winners of the controversy. The media may have spoken tongue-in-cheek in their assessment of who won, but both the president and Mr Malami have for once done the right thing. One side to the controversy was bound to win; both the legislature and the governors could not conceivably win, not even if the president disingenuously plotted that ethereal outcome. Some analysts have suggested that the direct primary provision was included in the amendment as a Trojan horse to foreclose the concomitant passage of the electronic relay of result amendment. There will always be many speculations, and a thousand and one conspiracies as to the real intention of the president. It could even be argued that by declining assent he knowingly voted with the governors. But however it is considered, the reasons he gave for declining assent are really incontestable.

A full two weeks before the president decided what to do with the bill transmitted to him, this column, on December 5, had looked at the options he faced and what might be the consequences should he decide one way or the other. The piece, excerpted below, proved prescient. Here it is:

“There is animated talk about the legislature overriding the president’s veto and passing the amendment into law. Should the legislature opt for this peremptory action, they will not have offended the provisions of the constitution. But given their nature, and how long and steadily they had subordinated themselves to the presidency, it is unfathomable that they would feel somewhat reckless and adventurous. They are angry with how the governors conducted themselves during the last congresses, and have sought for opportunity, no matter how small, to put those proud and imperious state executives in their place; but to override the president’s veto is a different ball game. It would be uncharacteristic, nay, it would be revolutionary. But this class of lawmakers hates revolutions. In fact they loathe treason. And to them revolution is indistinguishable from treason.

“But it is possible theoretically that the president might withhold assent. It will not be because he thinks clearly about the futuristic implication of the amendment, but because of whether he likes or dislikes those who stand to gain from the amendment in the short or long run. The presidency’s general political calculations are often characteristically bizarre and inscrutable, and it is no use trying to make sense of them. Should he withhold assent, the legislators are unlikely to angrily confront him and override his veto. They do not have that precedent. Instead they will dutifully visit him in his office, explain their discomforts with his action, excoriate the governors all over again, taking care to drape them in the devil’s cape, and remind him that the beauty and demands of democracy impel everyone to side with direct primary. The lawmakers must, however, hope that the governors, who have also tried to outdo the legislature in groveling before the president, do not visit Aso Villa hard on their heels. Should that happen, and given the dilatoriness of the presidency, the final decision will be a toss-up.

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“If the president feels sufficiently unnerved by the governors, and is also chary of inciting the lawmakers into unaccustomed disrespect of his office, he will try one of his trademark disingenuous compromises. The president is characteristically monarchical, but in recent months, he has ameliorated his peacock intransigence. He will, therefore, call for a truce, get the governors and the lawmakers to find common ground, find excuses to return the amendment to the legislature for some extra tweaking, and then, with a shout of eureka, get a version worthy of his assent but which neither pleases the hare nor placates the hounds. The controversy and lobbying are intense, but as far as the president is concerned, it is a storm in a tea cup. He really does not need both sides; they both need him, for he retains sufficient predatory power to frighten them into reluctant acquiescence. If he growls at them, especially deploying the subtle threat of anti-corruption war, they will recoil into their shells or quake in their boots.

“But as humiliating as it may seem, should the president defy the governors and go along with the legislators, he will very likely get his way with little or no repercussion. He is not seeking third term, and can in fact not seek it, and he has no signature and futuristic bill waiting for their support through constitutional amendment. If he lends them a listening ear, it is simply to massage their brittle ego and keep them happy. If he chooses not to lend them a listening ear, there is little they can do to punish him. He is too lofty in his perch for them to inflict their usual insouciance. They are sometimes frustrated by his detachment and perhaps acute lack of depth, but since they themselves lack vision, almost to a man, they will feel less inclined to importune him on the esoteric issues of a great country in a great continent in a competitive world. The lawmakers may even quibble with the president over the fine details of the amendment, but the governors will simply try to paint a horrifying picture of the lawmakers and the unconvincing consequences of direct primary.

“Neither the presidency, nor the governors, nor yet the legislature is likely to look at the amendment within the grander context of who should determine what mode of primary to use in nominating candidates for party and state and national offices. Neither of the three is capable of the selflessness and grandeur the final choice requires. Once they identify a problem today, especially a problem that rubs them up the wrong way, they angrily excise it. Having spent decades bureaucratising political parties in Nigeria, starting with the meddlesome two-party structure legislated during the Ibrahim Babangida military dictatorship, Nigerian governments have tended to see the political parties as extension of the civil service. Otherwise, why on earth would an APC-controlled National Assembly impose a primary mode on all parties in the country? What business do they have doing that? The issue of course is not what mode of primary is the best. That is nonsense: the modes all have their advantages and disadvantages. The main issue is what mode of primary a political party, or indeed a state chapter, wants. Once that is decided, then that is it. If a party does not show fidelity to its own rules, then that lack of discipline can be litigated. But to legislate and impose one mode of primary on everyone, regardless of its advantages, is irrational and meddlesome. Imposing a mode of primary, as the National Assembly has discourteously done to put proud governors’ noses out of joint, is a disrespectful way to fight one’s enemies.”

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have cleverly deferred a consideration of the subject to January, after the Christmas break and recess. Passions had been inflamed, and members were getting unruly. It was impossible for the legislative leadership to halt the viscous flow of bile should the matter continue to be debated, especially seeing that many key stakeholders in the country were urging the legislature into a rebellion they were completely unused to. This column will hazard a guess: the direct primary provision is unlikely to be resurrected. It is dead. It will now take uncommon resolve and forward thinking to salvage whatever is left of the entire amendment, particularly the electronic relay of results. The PDP thinks the APC is at bottom unwilling to entertain even that surviving amendment, and that the ruling party might yet find ingenious ways to procrastinate until the entire amendment collapses under its own weight. No one is sure. The one thing that is, however, sure is that notwithstanding the humongous N305bn INEC said it would need to hold the next set of elections, the Buhari presidency is interested in conducting the coming polls and handing over. His party may be blanketed by crisis, and the country itself may be experiencing grave insecurity, and the entire national leadership may also remain deeply ethically flawed, but he wants the polls to hold and he will do his best to give an election.

PDP continues to bait APC

As the All Progressives Congress (APC) continues to make and break promises to the country and its members, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) finds comfort and its voice in railing against the ruling party’s chaotic party administration and inept leadership of the country. The APC has for years been unable to decipher the country’s insecurity code, with each year, nay month, accentuating banditry and insurgency activities. The ruling party has also made heavy weather of organising its elective convention, which has been postponed about thrice, and its membership drive and congresses. Having ruled for more than six years, the APC has also complicated the country’s economic distress, and managed it so chaotically that the entire country is anxious and agitated. And finally, and worse, the party has no social agenda, and its political agenda, assuming it exists in clearly defined format, has been subverted by the executive branch and bastardised by the legislative branch.

It is, therefore, no surprise that the PDP seems buoyed up by its conviction that even if it is capable of doing little to win the next general election, the APC appears to be doing much more and so valiantly to lose it. The opposition’s logic can hardly be faulted. Unable to find an answer to insurgency and banditry, a failure ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo attributed to President Muhammadu Buhari’s lack of depth and general limitations, the ruling party has floundered from one dangerous and incompetent panacea to another. And unsure what to do to vivify the limping economy it inherited in 2015, the party has crippled it, raided pension funds, compelled the Central Bank of Nigeria to print money for the central government, and borrowed from abroad with embarrassing vivaciousness. It is against this background – this unending administrative stasis – that the PDP feels sure that it can do so much better. The opposition believes that with the people pauperised by the APC government’s policies, and unsafe anywhere on the highways and their homes, they will be disposed to drastic change. It remains to be seen whether the president and his party can, in the remaining months of their stay in office, midwife the change for the better which the executive, legislature and party continue to promise.

But what gives the PDP most hope that change is afoot, and that in 2023 they will win and form the next government, is the anticipated implosion in the ruling party. The APC was supposed to organise their convention last year after illegally sacking the Adams Oshiomhole-led National executives; not only has it been unable to do that, it has virtually given itself an open-ended deadline to conduct the exercise. After much ridicule by the opposition and Nigerians, the party has finally set an unconvincing February 2022 date to hold its convention. Neither the members of the party nor its leaders are convinced that the date is feasible or sacrosanct. However they hope to fumble and wobble their way into holding the convention in about two months. The PDP had deployed the method of consensus for its own convention, and they seem sure that whatever method the APC uses will end either in deadlock or catastrophe. How to prove the opposition wrong will be uppermost in the minds of APC leaders.

So far, the PDP is preying on the incompetence of the APC, hoping to win the next polls by default through the ruling party first losing it. It is not certain that such methods would yield the desired outcome, but the PDP seems bent on trying. Had they the gumption to reform themselves and come to terms with their own abysmal failures in 16 years in office, and combine radical internal and organisational reforms with taking advantage of the incorrigible failings of the APC, their chances might be considerably enhanced. But they are used to gambling as much as the APC is used to brinkmanship. The APC will not do much better than it has done ruling the country aimlessly, and the PDP will not so much as take a glance at its woeful past failures. In the months ahead, and particularly in 2023, it will be up to the country to pick between the sentimental gambling of the one and the foolish daring of the other.