WHEN the management of the University of Ibadan International School shut down their college over the decision by some parents in the school to compel Muslim students to wear hijab, they gave two reasons for their prompt response. One was that the forceful parents bypassed due process that enjoined them to peacefully persuade the system, particularly the Parents/Teachers Association (PTA), to accommodate their demands. That was apparently not done. Second was that the forceful parents simply embarked on self-help by disruptively going to the school with hijabs and distributing the extras to willing Muslim students. To avoid further disruptions, the school was shut. And after a meeting of the relevant bodies in the school, a decision was taken to stick to prevailing dress code. Apart from the dissenters, those who took the decision comprised both Christian and Muslim parents who expressed their desire to avoid any religious undertones and overtones in a private school they reminded everyone must be kept away from religious politics.
The hijab controversy is fairly widespread, with sadly the formerly pacesetting and liberal Southwest becoming today the main theatre of heated discord. Lagos State, anxious to avoid anything suggestive of religion under any guise in public schools, had for years resisted the campaign by some Muslim parents to enforce the wearing of hijab. The activist parents, also careful to avoid self-help, took the matter to court where they received favourable judgements in both the High Court and Court of Appeal. The matter is before the Supreme Court. But before the apex court could rule, the state jumped the gun and authorised the wearing of what they described as smart hijab. In some qualified ways, it is victory for the parents and a loss for government.
A few things are wrong with the approach adopted by the affected parents over the UI school crisis. First, whether Nigerians believe or not, their country is susceptible to ethnic and religious suspicions and violence. More and more states are falling under the spell of religious intolerance, with a distinct possibility that the problem could one day spiral out of control into a conflagration. Given the destructive role religious suspicion and intolerance have played in some parts of Nigeria and other parts of the world in the past one or two decades, many had thought that Nigerian parents would sensibly come together to find the best ways of insulating their country from any form of religious upheaval. Whether in the Middle East or some states in Nigeria’s North, whole communities have become perennially disposed to religious violence and even segregation. Nobody who has witnessed religious violence in Nigeria or Lebanon can wish for a replay at his backdoor. But, sadly, some Nigerians, not to say many parents, do not seem to think that conscious and extra steps should be taken to foster harmony among Nigeria’s impressionable young.
Secondly, as the UI case has shown, where on earth did Nigerians learn to force their way on others when they lose an argument? Unlike public schools, parents can easily take the option of withdrawing their children from private schools whose dress codes war against their preferences, whether social, cultural or religious. The aforesaid parents should have taken that option at the UI school. In the alternative, they should have intensified their lobby to get the school to amend their dress code. Failing that, they had an obligation to comply with extant school rules. Or what kind of lessons would cantankerous parents be teaching their children: to flout any rule or regulation they don’t agree with, impose themselves on the collective simply because they think they are right or justified?
The UI International School can stick to its guns for reasons that are uncontroversial. Lagos State is unfortunately helpless. After yielding in what they think is a little matter, there is no telling where this fateful step will take them. Next port of call may be the primary schools, and after that, only God knows where else. The Southwest, where these dress codes controversies are raging, used to be the bastion of liberalism in Nigeria, with some states boasting same-faith elected leaders in Government Houses. That reputation is all but in tatters, no thanks to those who insist on instituting differentiation among the region’s young children. It is doubtful whether paradise can be regained. Given the contemporary history of the world and the evils that convulse it, it is shocking that no lessons have been learnt, and no desire to build a secular and modern society untrammelled by intolerance and bigotry. Curses are like chickens, they will come home to roost sometime in the future. When they do, as they will inevitably, this generation of Nigerians should be held culpable for failing to see the future, and for more atrociously failing to recognise that it is not everything that is lawful that is expedient.
No one doubts any longer that the National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, was hauled in by the Department of State Service (DSS) for interrogation over the recent primaries of the ruling party. He was interrogated for about eight hours; some say nine. He was also probably cajoled to resign, though he is thought to have resisted the effort. It is perhaps true that the secret service alleged that a petition was written against him, but Mr Oshiomhole was said to have been unable to confirm any petition. Some four governors — two from the Southwest, one from the North-Central, and another from the Southeast — were said to have engineered the plot and the phantom petition to unhorse the APC chairman. The various reports on the goings-on in the ruling party, particularly the fierce battle for the control of the party, not its soul — for that is a little more nuanced, more subtle, more intellectual — suggest that the combatants expect to fight to the death, if the sometimes aloof President Muhammadu Buhari would indulge their suicidal craving.
By yesterday, nearly everyone in Nigeria knew that the ruling party was locked in mortal, reason-defying combat. No one knows how they would fight when the dispute centres on the soul of the party, its ideological, ethical and moral convictions. But as far as the body of the party is concerned, its amorphous and peripheral appearance so to say, it is obvious that a bitter, take-no-prisoner fight is going on. Officials of the party, including the party’s spokesman, Lanre Isa-Onilu, and Strategic Communications director of the Buhari 2019 Campaign Organisation, Festus Keyamo, downplay the combat, describing it sanguinely as a routine crisis consistent with the position and prominence of ruling parties everywhere. They are probably not honest in their admissions, but they will stick to that line of argument for the foreseeable future. More, nearly all concerned in the APC seem to think that the party will eventually settle the schism and pacify the losers. Few Nigerians share their optimism.
Unfortunately for the party, and right from the outset, the party had never seemed cohesive enough to operate like a disciplined organisation. There were too many power centres struggling to coalesce around the party’s tenuously progressive ideology, many of them contradistinctively conservative, and some others demonstrating nothing more than the lukewarm pragmatism that is often confused with progressivism. Yet others, like all the four governors in the eye of the storm, are simply political opportunists as destitute of ideology as they are of a commonsensical approach to politics. The Ekiti State governor Kayode Fayemi last week denounced any attempt to link him with the plot to unseat Mr Oshiomhole, despite joining two other Southwest governors last Sunday to see the president for undisclosed reasons. Many Nigerians are likely to believe him.
Ondo and Ogun State governors, Rotimi Akeredolu and Ibikunle Amosun respectively, are however uninterested in dissociating themselves from the plot against their party’s chairman. Mr Amosun nurses an injury and a grudge that no balm can soothe, except the party’s concession to his succession plans. The equally imperial and consistently individualistic Mr Akeredolu breathes rebellion with the fiery ardour of the Young Turks, but with none of their ennobling ideas and politics. He, Mr Amosun, and others like them have framed the struggle in the APC in the fuzzy nihilism of the Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello and the colossal narcissism of the Imo governor Rochas Okorocha. Having left the party to splinter so badly for more than three years, it is not certain that President Buhari will be able to mollify the grief of the losers or smother their unquenchable anger.
The schism in the party had been long in coming. It has now reached full maturity. The president may not have the conciliatory touch of a diplomat and negotiator, having shown himself to be implacable in defending his views and impatient with his opponents’ foibles and indulgences, but this will not deter him from attempting to forge party unity and get the members to file into a single column going into the next elections. He will make concessions, offer burnt and peace offerings, and coax and cajole with all the presidential fervour and wit he can muster, but it is unlikely everyone will be satisfied for too long. Positions have hardened over the short three years the party has been in office that it is inconceivable to party apparatchiks that a third position exists outside of victory and defeat. Party leaders themselves have become accustomed to either winning or losing that they have forgotten what it is to reach accommodation with dissenters.
All the reports about Mr Oshiomhole’s interrogation suggest that the DSS has once again started to dabble in politics under the pretext of probing bribery and corruption. The country is not fooled about the service’s motives. Under the previous director-general sacked during the National Assembly imbroglio in August, the service dabbled crassly in partisan and extraneous affairs until they overreached themselves. It is shocking that their interpretation of the service’s powers has become so liberal and expansive that they are unperturbed by public perception of them as errand boys of vested, rather than national, interests. All the reports of the Oshiomhole interrogation also describe the president as being surprised by the involvement of the DSS in a political party misunderstanding, and angry that he was not apprised of the situation before it degenerated so badly to the unprecedented level of interrogation. The reports should not be doubted.
It is true that the president does not know many things happening around him, perhaps because his close aides have spawned an almost impenetrable cocoon around him. But despite deep public scepticism, few Nigerians believe that he is so completely in the dark that even dark hints from the press escape him. Worse, they now have little faith in his anger, which they think is mostly contrived for the consumption of the media, since that anger seldom leads to the rectification of bureaucratic and administrative infractions by his aides. He knew his former DSS director-general Lawal Daura was imperious, uncontrollable, and subversive of constitutional provisions, but he left him in office, hardly with any censure, until his vice president, as acting president, dispensed with the services of the chief spook. The president has still not got over that dismissal.
During a visit to Benue State in the heat of herdsmen attacks and massacres, the president was also alerted to the insubordination of his police chief, Ibrahim Idris, but he seemed more bemused than angry, with neither the bemusement nor anger producing disciplinary measures of even the mildest severity against the offender. The truth about the Buhari presidency is so disturbing that it is obvious many countervailing power centres have spread their tentacles over national affairs in an inconsistent, sometimes unethical, but often strangulating and counterproductive ways. One of those power centres, seizing upon the low amperage of the president’s anger, not to say his detachment and inattentiveness, is probably behind the interrogation of Mr Oshiomhole. This has led to a serious existential crisis for the party, a crisis worsened by the fact that the president’s almost fanatical attachment to old relationships makes it difficult for him to bring the powers and moral grandeur of the presidency to bear in resolving conflicts, especially the bitter war within the ruling party.
The president now clearly faces a zero-sum situation. To resolve the war in his party, he will need to support one of the combatants. But to support one side is to lose the other side. He will attempt to straddle, but that effort will likely blow up in his face. Mr Oshiomhole can of course, as it is his custom, be persuaded to argue for both sides with equal plausibility and fervency, but left to him, he is a man of fierce conviction, possessing a fairer sense of rightness and wrongness than his opponents. He is shocked by the scale of the opposition to his attempt to redirect the failing ruling party, a situation neither his years as a governor nor his extensive time as a union leader has prepared him for. He is full of spunk, but he also lives in a glass house. The fear is not that he would wilt under the barrage of investigations triggered by his enemies within the party; the worry is whether he can hold up long enough to watch his position triumph.
But in forcing the hand of Mr Oshiomhole, the party, or at any rate, the president, will be painfully aware just how delicate it is to cause a great upheaval within the party barely four months to the next elections. The 2019 general election is not the APC’s to lose. It is open and can be won by any of the two leading parties, regardless of the rhetoric of APC chieftains. Indeed, it can be surmised that forcing Mr Oshiomhole out, which would please the opposition to no end, would more likely bring disaster upon the party than enthrone peace and foster victory. None of the governors inspiring the revolt in the party is as much an electoral asset to the party or to the president as Mr Oshiomhole and the tendency he represents. Mr Amosun’s preferred candidate, Abiodun Akinlade, will not give APC victory in Ogun; and Mr Okorocha’s son-in-law candidate, Uche Nwosu, will spell doom for the party. If Ondo would vote APC, it will not be because Mr Akeredolu has been spectacular or exemplary as a governor. And Kogi loathes Mr Bello so passionately that his mere presence in the party is a huge and unbearable liability. President Buhari indeed has an unenviable task uniting his fractious and fragmented party.
The APC may not like to hear this, but they seem to be doing everything in their power to lose the next elections. They have counteracted the few great things they have done to rebuild the country’s broken infrastructure, and they have given an indication of their poor reputation by failing to run an inclusive and cohesive presidency and party. For a country eager to move forward and anxious to stave off disaster, the electorate would be sailing near the wind and imperilling their future to offer the party the presidency and a preponderance of State Houses in 2019. There is no proof that after the next polls, a victorious APC would suddenly begin to run a great government, inspire a great democracy, eliminate the militarisation of the polity which they have carelessly and arrogantly enthroned, envision a great future for the country, and dream great dreams for the continent and black people everywhere. Nothing indicates they have the capacity, despite their significant achievements.
Now, it is their lot and misfortune that they have added to their many headaches the problem of fighting themselves in the open — naked and shameless — and needlessly courting disaster, subverting the constitution, dragging into their squalid mess weak and spineless institutions of state, and behaving as if the country owes them a living. If they cannot realise that their best bet is to close ranks barely four months to D-day, sacrifice the interests of a few to save the many, unite behind their chairman with all his warts, and prepare to fight the next elections valiantly and boldly — if they can’t seem to reason these things out — then they do not deserve anybody’s support. Surely they are not so amnesiac as not to remember that when President Buhari assumed office in 2015 and the cabal castrated the tendency now represented by Mr Oshiomhole, the victors could neither run the party with any semblance of competence and vision it sorely needed nor imbue it with the ideology and charisma the electorate needed to fire their imagination.
ASUU’s lonely walk to educational renaissance
EVEN though it seemed opportunistic for the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to synchronise their strike with the fickle organised labour, they were right to once again draw attention to the decay afflicting tertiary education in Nigeria. The trigger for the current ASUU strike is the government’s delay in implementing the 2017 memorandum of understanding reached between the union and government. When that MoU was reached last year, this column warned of the insincerity of the government and drew union attention to the fact that the whole exercise would end in futility. The union was unavoidably too optimistic to countenance other possibilities, let alone one that would dampen their zeal and break their hearts.
It was clear that right from 2009, the federal government was never truly persuaded about the deplorable state of education in Nigeria. It did not matter whether Presidents Umaru Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan were university-educated; after all, it is not everyone who went to a university and has travelled the world that knows the indispensable value of education. Now, the Education minister, Adamu Adamu, has mouthed the heresy of suggesting that ex-president Yar’Adua made bogus pledges to ASUU because the economy boomed at the time. Those pledges then and now, says the minister, cannot be fulfilled.
Forget about the economics of what budgetary percentages to allocate to education, after all, the government cares little about creating a revolution in healthcare too. And forget whether with the proper will government can do better than it is doing at the moment. Indeed, forget whether ASUU timed its strike well or not, or whether the strike would not in fact compound the decay in university education. What is more important, as this column has repeatedly pointed out, is the content of the government’s education vision. Has anyone asked President Muhammadu Buhari, for instance, what he wants to do with education in Nigeria, given the march of research in other parts of the world? Would his interviewers have the courage to pin him down beyond his easy syllogism that suggests that abatement of corruption would inescapably free more funds for education? Are they not imagining a new national carrier? Are they not building military universities?
Buhari and Adamu
Funding education is not primarily about money, or less corruption, or more oil boom. It is about vision. Once the vision is present and concrete, matching funds will follow to build great centres of learning, conceive travels to outer space, produce great engineering feats, discover the unlimited expanse of research and medical cures, acquire more perfect understanding of the workings of the human body and nature, and reach for vistas no one thought reachable. Ask Alexander the Great what it means to build great libraries. But Nigeria has leaders whose minds are darkened by ignorance and so diminished by their impoverished circumstances that they cannot reach for the stars. Why would they not think ASUU reached agreements with governments that no one could hope to implement? Have these so-called leaders inspected a few campuses to see the state of education and how great violence is being done to the minds of Nigeria’s young?
However, ASUU will achieve nothing from this strike, and parents are too indulgent to question and pressure their governments. Until the country comes together to find those who can think great things, and put them in office, the situation in education will remain hopeless.
LESS than 24 hours after Tibor P. Nagy, the United States assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, took to Twitter to condemn the bloody army crackdown on protesting members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (MIN), the Nigerian Army also took to Twitter to mock the hypocrisy of those who condemn the army for using deadly force to disperse the Shia protesters on Abuja streets. Mr Nagy had said: “Very concerned by the deadly clashes between Nigerian security forces and IMN members. We call on both sides to exercise restraint, and we urge the Government of Nigeria to conduct a thorough investigation and hold accountable those responsible for violating Nigerian law.”
Irritated by the US statement, and miffed by a similar denunciation by Amnesty International (AI) condemning the violence and calling on the Nigerian authorities to hold the army accountable, the Nigerian Army also posted on its official Twitter account a video in which President Donald Trump on Thursday warned that American troops would fire at migrants who threw rocks at US soldiers deployed along the Mexican border to prevent illegal entries into the US. In the video containing the US president’s statement, Mr Trump had said: “We’re not going to put up with that (migrants massing towards the US border). They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them [troops] consider [a rock] a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexican military and police, I say consider it a rifle.” Even though Mr Trump backed down on Friday, saying in an interview that American troops would have no reason to fire at anybody, the Nigerian Army had already seized upon his statement to justify the killing of Shiite protesters.
Last Friday, army spokesman, John Agim, defended the Twitter posts, saying: “The video was posted in reaction to the Amnesty International report accusing the army of using weapons against pacifist [Shia] protesters. Not only did they use stones but they were carrying petrol bombs, machetes and knives, so yes, we consider them as being armed. We intervened only because the IMN members are trying to harm our people, they are always meeting us at security checkpoints and trying to provoke us, they even burned a police vehicle.” Though the army has taken down the post after a firestorm of protests on social media, the harm was already done. The army acknowledges using deadly force against the protesters, but insisted that about four or six Shia members were killed. IMN spokesmen, however, insist that more than 40 of their members were killed in cold blood during the protests that lasted a few days.
It is hard to say why the Nigerian Army seized upon Mr Trump’s retrogressive statements to draw a parallel between the Nigerian protest and the US migrant problem, not to say understand why they justify the killing of scores of protesters. The US was facing what Mr Trump described as the perils of migrants, many of them from Honduras and other parts of Latin America; on the other hand, Nigeria was facing protests from its own citizens, all of them Shiites. Rather than acknowledge its awkwardness in tackling the Shiite problem, with much of that problem self-inflicted, the army has tried to find excuse to clamp down on the group. Neither the army nor the police, nor even the government itself, has managed to put together a coherent policy to handle protests, peaceful or not. In fact, increasingly, the army has seemed to be the first line of defence in tackling protests in many parts of Nigeria. More and more, in effect, Nigeria is being militarised, and civil and military rule are becoming indistinguishable. This plain fact is lost on the Muhammadu Buhari presidency and desperate and frightened Nigerians, as the army steadily encroaches into police and law enforcement duties uninvited.
Unfortunately for the Nigerian Army, they are the first in Africa to openly indicate that they were inspired by Mr Trump’s highly execrable methods of governance. Even though he is contemptuous of Nigeria and nearly all of Africa, the US president is not averse to being regarded as a role model. He has welcomed the return of far-right and populist governments in Europe and elsewhere, and is eager to offer a hand of fellowship to such governments, as he recently did to the newly elected Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. Mr Trump’s style is instinctively iconoclastic, short-sighted, incoherent and deeply deprecatory. It is, however, fetching him great results, socially, economically and politically. He is not under pressure at all to re-examine both his style and policies, and is even less minded to abjure his divisive and irreverent methods. But not only does Mr Trump fail to emblematise the core principles of American strength and future, irrespective of his short-run successes, he may injure America’s long-term interests in ways that are incalculable and in dimensions that are unimaginable.
For Nigeria to be inspired by what is clearly an American aberration is an indication of both the vacuity of the Buhari presidency and the absence of a clearly defined, long-term national security interest. The Buhari presidency has so far taken on soft targets like the Shiites, partly because they are loathed by their neighbours in Zaria, where in 2015 the army killed about 347 protesting Shiites, and are feared by many Nigerians who uncritically equate them with Boko Haram. It is a miracle that going by their Trumpian inspiration the presidency has not yet taken on the press as villainously as the US president is doing. But they’ll probably get there if voters permit in 2019. It is even clearer that Nigeria has unwisely embraced President Trump’s inflammatory style because the country lacks both national ambition and identity. If the US was willing to shoot hapless migrants, how does that encourage the Nigerian Army to shoot its citizens?
There are countries in Europe that could serve as inspiring examples to the Nigerian military, especially given how difficult it has been for them to wriggle a little free from their sullied image connected with extra-judicial killings, lawlessness and brutality. If the army ignores the right examples in favour of the wrong examples, it is because the government has been unable to define an ambition for the country. With the right political structure and a leadership possessing depth and vision, Nigeria could better any country in the world’s best regions. Unfortunately, there is little imagination in leadership, and it is not surprising that the army now embraces the wrong examples and even wronger values. They are unable to properly decipher the national issues they confront, and are consequently incapacitated from aspiring to higher goals and values. With a government chronically debilitated by lack of foresight and selfish goals, Nigeria will continue to make a fool of itself globally. Already, the leading global media outfits which published the Nigerian Army’s embrace of the Trump logic were too bewildered to hide their disappointment. Anyone who read those reports on Saturday would sense how the foreign media had taken the measure of Nigeria and dismissed her as incompetent.
The army did not shoot four or six Shiite members, as they said. Amnesty International and Shiites themselves counted more than two or three dozen dead on Abuja streets. It was a massacre perpetrated before the whole world. The government’s approach to protests, as they have demonstrated in the past, is bloody, archaic and retrogressive. It is clear they can’t seem to divorce themselves from the military style of governance, nor are they able to esteem human life as they should as an elected government. Since 1999, despite being elected into office, Nigerian presidents have continually indicated that they are capable of much worse atrocities. Sufficiently provoked, they will always spill blood and defend it on the grounds of national interest. They have no conception of Nigeria, no vision of which heights to aspire to, and no uplifting examples to attempt to better or even best. There are no statesmen around anymore, and no empire builders whose knowledge of great empires inspire them to build a society far more organised than many European countries.
Given the pathetic manner the army has defended their horrifying show of force in the past one or two years in some states, it is hard to see any president enunciating great reforms capable of turning them into a truly national army. It will not happen, not with the present structure, and not with the present crop of leaders. If care is not taken, the country may be too far gone to be snatched from the jaws of mediocrity and villainy. For if the heads of the security and law enforcement agencies as well as the presidency cannot even grasp the elementary fact that they are not overlords but servants of the people, and that in their work they must be guided by the fact that every life matters, how on earth can they grasp the far bigger and much nobler need to, in the age of Trump, act, talk, think and perform better than an aberrational American president who is clearly in need of rehabilitation and re-schooling? The only consolation is that no matter how long it takes, those who perpetrated the recent killings in the name of the state will still be held accountable, if not tomorrow, then on the day after tomorrow. After all, as Friedrich Von Logau said, “Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.”
ASSAILED on all sides by governors and politicians who felt shortchanged by the All Progressives Congress (APC) primaries of the last few weeks, party chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, has finally lost his patience and dared his detractors. He is not used to calling people names, despite his sometimes uncontrollable resort to vitriol and terrible putdowns, but having endured name-calling from Governors Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun), Rochas Okorocha (Imo) and Abdulaziz Yari, he eventually exploded on Friday by describing two of the governors as emperors and one as a political embarrassment he was unwilling to assist in building a political dynasty. With these fiery words, the APC and its chairman seemed to have shut the door on the governors whose adamantine resolve to enthrone successors has now come to grief.
The turmoil in the APC will continue for a little while, until it is absolutely certain that the three governors cannot have their way in amending the party’s list submitted to the electoral umpire, INEC. The governors had attempted to get the president to intervene, and the president did in fact take a few hesitant steps. But in the end, whether out of wise counsel or sound logic, the president sensibly retraced his steps and kept his peace. For now, he seems to have deferred to the party. Sensing the president’s new resolve, the uppity Mr Oshiomhole has dug his heels in, called the bluff of the three governors, and given indication that on the matter of the primaries, except the courts intervene, the party has reached a denouement.
Neither Mr Oshiomhole nor the APC has behaved unimpeachably. In fact, the party chairman’s abrasiveness and inelegant choice of words against his opponents and critics may have complicated the crisis and pushed the offended governors to the brink. The party itself had taken almost four years to start running as a political party, even as the president inexplicably kept a mystifying aloofness that opened up the party to too many competing and rapacious interests. But in the end, the party found a unionist, apparently both by nature and by training, to superintend the affairs of the orphaned and nearly dismembered party.
If the president quickly surrendered to reality, it was probably because he saw the futility of meddling in situations his languid approach to politics appears ill-equipped to handle, and in affairs his idiosyncratic disposition to giving orders does not fit in with. In addition, the president loves to leave things to resolve themselves, as he almost did to the country until a great outcry greeted his aloofness. Apart from these, the president also probably realised that substantially, Mr Oshiomhole was more right about his depiction of the party dilemmas than the complaining governors were less wrong about their assertions and unwholesome ambitions. Overall, both the president and party chairman think that none of the governors would dare fight the party beyond their gaseous talk of revolt and defection.
Messrs Amosun and Okorocha have been given hemlock to drink. They will sip the poison with perfect equanimity. They cannot have a Plan B that would take them out of the party; it is too late for such a move. And they cannot but campaign for their party’s candidates, for to do otherwise is to expose themselves foolishly to the possible victory of another party’s candidate. Worse, they cannot even surreptitiously campaign for other candidates or reach backdoor accommodation with them, for their party will watch their every move, and they too will be taking obscene risks. Their collective fate, it appears, is sealed, and they will loath Mr Oshiomhole because of this for a very long time.
Many APC members may not like their party’s chairman, and many in the party may find his style hard to endure, but if the party had not risked chaos to free itself to begin operating like a political party, they would have taken their grouses and bitterness to the elections and beyond. Now, they will most likely go to the next polls fairly united. They do not have in their midst those who like to fight to the death, those who would rather the prize went to the enemy without than to the opposition within, and those destitute of all moral and political restraints. The opposition to Mr Oshiomhole, which seemed to have gathered steam a week or two ago, has all but collapsed. And while he has probably not learnt his lessons from all the discords, his chairmanship position seems to have been reinforced, and his hand considerably strengthened.
Yes, they will go to the next polls fairly united, but do they have the ideological platform and beguiling agenda to lure the electorate away from the enticing and seductive opposition? It will take a few weeks into the campaigns before anyone can hazard a guess. If they win in 2019, they will probably run a better party than the PDP did in its 16 years in office. But if they lose, there will be enough blame to share, enough heads to decapitate, and enough fights to engender. For now, the pugnacious Mr Oshiomhole can keep all he has forcibly taken from the hands of those he derogatorily referred to as emperors and dynasty builders, assured that as long as he keeps his tongue bridled and his party winning, he may yet have a great political future far surpassing his size, laboured oratory and analytical skill.
FORMER Lagos State governor and Power, Works and Housing minister, Babatunde Fashola, on Thursday gave a disturbing insight into how his mind, and perhaps that of many others like him, is working on the next presidential election. “Do you know that power is rotating to the South-West after the completion of Buhari’s tenure if you vote for him in 2019?” he queried in almost conspiratorial tone, speaking in Yoruba during a special town hall meeting in Ibadan. “A vote for Buhari in 2019, means a return of power to the South-West in 2023. I am sure you will vote wisely.” His opinion on how the Southwest should vote in 2019 is popular with a significant portion of the Southwest political elite. Undoubtedly, that view will very likely influence the decisions of some voters in the region. But whether it will be significant enough to positively affect the outcome of the election remains to be seen.
Mr Fashola is not the only one imbuing the elections of 2019, especially the presidential poll, with regional, cultural and ethnic colours. The Southeast political elite, despite their initial frictions and misgivings on the appropriateness of putting Peter Obi, a former Anambra State governor, on the Atiku Abubakar ticket, are also calculating that it may be profitable to get their son elected as vice president in 2019, and hopefully get the presidency rotated to their region either in 2023 or 2027. Mr Obi is not the popular choice of the region’s highly opinionated and sometimes querulous elites, particularly the governors, but inch by inch, they are becoming converted to Mr Obi’s candidacy and its future possibilities. If anyone or group is averse to those calculations, they are likely to be in the minority, or at least unable to pack such force as to cause either a negative groundswell or a rational dissent.
The presidential calculations by the Southwest and Southeast are neither unusual nor egregious. Given the temper, colour and structure of Nigerian politics, such calculations are in fact absolutely normal and will continue to dominate the political scene in the foreseeable future. In fact in 2007, after the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency expired, those calculations involving rotation and regional access to the presidency were embraced by the three northern geopolitical zones to produce the next president of northern extraction. Rotation or zoning is not constitutional, nor even a sensible contrivance, but because of the bitter competition for power in Nigeria and how those struggles have concomitantly destabilised the polity, the contrivance was deemed so politically expedient that it became ossified in Nigerian politics.
The northern part of Nigeria is less finicky and demanding about rotating the presidency between its three geopolitical zones. The southern part is however fastidious about sticking to rotation between its three geopolitical zones, hence the calculations by the Southeast for either 2023 or 2027, and the furore raised by Mr Fashola in advocating the return of the presidency to the Southwest in 2023. But whether it concerns the amorphous and conservative North or the gregarious and fairly radical South, it is difficult to defend the rotational boondoggle. The existential crisis faced by Nigeria is so intense, so portentous and so unpredictable in its consequences that the country’s political elite must be so overly optimistic as to endorse the kind of presidential election considerations alluded to by the Power and Works minister.
In all the calculations as they relate to the geopolitical zones, and as they relate to President Muhammadu Buhari, to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Alhaji Atiku, to Mr Obi, and to the candidate who takes the diadem in 2023, scant attention has been paid to the unmitigated pace at which the country is unravelling. That lack of attention is demonstrated on two abysmal fronts. First, the problem of Nigeria is less about which region or zone the president comes from as it is about the wobbly and untenable structure of the country itself. Why the country’s gaze is taken off this deep and underlying problem and is instead directed at which part of the country should produce the president is hard to understand. It does seem as if the country’s irresponsible political elite and their supporters, many of them parochial ethnic champions themselves, are more preoccupied with gratifying their primordial tastes and short-sighted needs than worrying about the country’s tenuous future.
In 1999, Chief Obasanjo was not what Nigeria needed. In 2007, the late Umaru Yar’Adua was hopelessly inadequate and badly hobbled by disease. In 2011, Goodluck Jonathan was too overwhelmed by the responsibility of office and the novelty and fortuitousness of winning office to be of any use to himself or the country. And in 2015, the country conspired to present voters with a Hobson’s choice that sent everyone scurrying remorsefully into President Buhari’s insular corner. At every turn since the inauguration of the Fourth Republic, Nigerians have made the wrong choice, and unrepentantly and stubbornly embraced the wrong arguments. There has been no leader who understood the past, not to talk of seeing into the future. For instance, Chief Obasanjo took the country puzzlingly out of a debt trap because he neither understood the economics of debt nor the urgency and multiplier effects of development policies. President Buhari is now engaged in frenzied borrowing, and rhapsodising the same arguments that lured the country into the initial trap.
The second front is even more galling. The Southwest, Mr Fashola, the Southeast, Mr Obi, and the president himself and his supporters have so strangely concentrated on the dynamics and sometimes mechanics of how a presidential election should be won that they fail woefully to focus on who should win it, regardless of background, regional dynamics and religious considerations. In 1999, Olu Falae seemed to possess the capacity and eloquence to lead a modern country in an increasingly complex and globalised world. Nigerians instead gave the crown to Chief Obasanjo wholly on sentimental grounds, his only qualifications being his military background and undeserving stint as a military head of state. Unable to learn from the past, in 2015, the crown was again given to President Buhari, his only qualifications being his military background and an undeserving stint as a military head of state.
Yet, no country develops without a polity founded on solid structures and leaders possessing the appropriate economic and political ideas. Nigeria will neither develop nor be at peace, until that right leader takes office, someone who knows what it means to forge a national identity, someone who can envision the future, someone who is inured to ethnic politics and not hobbled by religious considerations, someone who loves the arts and is fascinated by science and technology, someone who can dream great dreams, someone who knows what justice is all about, not someone hoping to exploit and subordinate the rule of law, someone with the right instincts, with a sound and encompassing grasp of how the Asian Tigers broke through the development ceiling, and how the industrialised West found the future and embraced it.
It was, therefore, shocking that Mr Fashola advocated the conversion of the Southwest to the President Buhari column mostly because the region could gain the presidency again in 2023. The Southwest can of course stake a claim for 2023, and they have the constitutional right to do so regardless of what the Southeast thinks. But President Buhari is unlikely to go out of his way to help anybody’s cause, nor can he, even if he wants to. He finds it difficult to generate the broad vision of a great, multicultural country, and cannot be persuaded to endorse anyone who has the idiosyncratic chutzpah, depth, vision and independence of a great leader, the exact kind Nigeria now needs to achieve a breakthrough. It is also disturbing that despite all their education, and despite encountering enough lessons from the past, including the failed presidency of Dr Jonathan, the Southeast has been converted to endorsing the unproductive election dynamics of rotation.
Nigerians will go to the polls early next year to elect their representatives, among them a president. The choice for the presidency will unfortunately and tragically be limited to the two leading parties, the APC and PDP. Foreign research and financial institutions are, out of deep frustrations with President Buhari, lining up to endorse Alhaji Atiku. They are not queasy about the former vice president’s ways as many Nigerians are. They regard him as fairly modern, less fanatical about anything, more cosmopolitan, more business-minded, possessing greater capacity, and capable of running an inclusive government. There is logic to their conclusions. But many Nigerians fear that the former vice president is incapable of running an ethical presidency, and could reverse the gains of the anti-graft war of the past three years. How Nigerians will finally make up their minds is not certain. But they will worry both silently and aloud whether they could endure four more years of President Buhari, since he is unlikely to do better than he has done, or whether his challenger, constrained by his ethical challenges, will not end up a spectacular failure.
However they make up their minds, it is important that Nigerians do themselves a favour of not being stymied by any considerations of 2023, as the Southwest and Southeast seem determined to be. Whether President Buhari wins or the PDP’s Alhaji Atiku wins, it should not discourage a bright and visionary politician from any region — North, Southwest, Southeast and South-South — from throwing his hat into the ring in 2023. After all, the constitution permits the contest. Anyone who has studied history and read about great leaders and their ascension to power knows well enough that human history is so volatile that the impossible often becomes possible, sometimes effortlessly, and 10 years can in fact be frozen into one year. Mr Fashola has the right to campaign for President Buhari on the government’s infrastructural renewal record between 2015 and now, or any other record for that matter, assuming that is enough for re-election, but no one should listen to him when he talks about the regional and chronological dynamics of a presidential election he knows very little about.
WEEKS before his surety was to face the judicial axe at the resumption of his trial for treasonable felony, Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), suddenly reappeared in public overseas, putting the lie to rumours that he had been killed in a military invasion of his father’s palace. Mr Kanu had been admitted to bail, but had been too undisciplined to keep to the terms of his bail. His supporters and admirers had hoped that if he was not dead, he would at least wait until his case was heard, and his lawyers wrong-foot the prosecution whose forces had taken forceful and pre-emptive steps to silence the voluble pro-Biafra campaigner. Alas, Mr Kanu never leaves bad enough alone.
Some reports suggest that Mr Kanu visited Jerusalem’s Western wall for prayers a few days ago, and his supporters and IPOB activists corroborate his reappearance and Jerusalem visit. An Israeli envoy, however, denied his presence in Israel. Some other reports also suggest that the British Government was last week about to issue him temporary travel papers, implying that he is well and alive, and still raising Cain. IPOB foot soldiers enthuse that the reappearance of Mr Kanu energises the pro-Biafra cause, and they are now more than ever eager to forgive his weaknesses and imperiousness so blatantly apparent to outsiders. Mr Kanu himself has spoken thunder and blather, laced with his usual expletives and threats. He is back to his usual self, he claimed, and would bring hell to Nigeria.
It is useless educating his followers. They are bewitched, and even the best exorcist would find it tough separating them from their delusions, delusions fed by the anarchical ideas and demagoguery of Mr Kanu. The tragedy of the whole story is not about the initial disappearance of Mr Kanu, or the pointless invasion of his father’s palace, or even his reappearance and bilious propaganda. What is truly tragic about Mr Kanu and the sizeable following he has garnered for the pro-Biafra cause is how a great cause for the reintegration of the Igbo into the Nigerian setting is being needlessly bastardised by an exuberant young man.
Historians agree that there has been no closure to the Nigerian civil war, nor have the remote and immediate causes of the war been adequately addressed. Not only have the Igbo been consequently further alienated, the causes of the war have reincarnated in one form or another and expanded in scope and magnitude and even metastasised to the point of destabilising the entire country. The Igbo alienation has intensified under the Buhari presidency, and the rest of the country is in such a lather that hardly any highway or cranny is safe today, as the Kaduna mayhem is showing in ghastly technicolour. The reasons for these problems are not being addressed, and the government itself has incompetently viewed the problems from the rose-coloured prism of law and order. It is doubly tragic that the genuine complaints by the Igbo should therefore inspire the wrong champion, Mr Kanu, whose charlatanry appears to know no bounds. Placing a great and good cause in the hands of an unworthy champion is a disaster.
Igbo elders have been ambivalent about the pro-Biafra cause, especially because the champion that is forcing himself on them is worrisomely iconoclastic. Meanwhile, Igbo youths, many of them indoctrinated by the sufferings of the times, fiercely romanticise the Biafra agenda. If nothing is done to tackle the Nigerian question, activists like Mr Kanu will continue to exploit the country’s existential contradictions to foment rebellion. Notwithstanding how the elections go in 2019, no one can tell how terrible the situation will get, or how divided Igboland will become in the months ahead as the misdirected IPOB leader indulges in truancy and errantry.
A LEADING chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) recently justified the acrimonious battles for nominations and positions in the ruling party on the grounds that such a behaviour was expected of a ruling party. The same intense battles have been witnessed in the struggle to secure the party’s tickets for various elective positions. In this election cycle, the struggles have not been as intense in the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as they were when the party grandiosely but inefficiently ran Nigeria between 1999 and 2015. On the surface, and given the antecedents of both parties in office, not to say the predictable behaviour of politicians jostling for offices, for power and for plum jobs, it admittedly sounds logical that fiercer battles will naturally be waged in the ruling party than in the opposition party. Convinced that nothing really tectonic was shifting in the APC in terms of political behaviour, in fact absolutely nothing unusual, the leading lights of the party have asked distraught members fearing the worst for their party to simply endure the battles and acquit themselves like strongmen.
The logic in question is superficial, but it retains enough potency to persuade Nigerians and the combatants in both leading parties to endure the impossible, especially in this season of primaries. The battles may be fierce in the APC, but the PDP is also not inoculated against the rabid and deathly fights for tickets, influence, dominance and succession. Serving lawmakers seek a return to their various legislative seats, aspiring lawmakers seek a first-time entry, and outgoing governors, dreading the humiliating solitude that often accompanies life after office, seek permanent relevance, perhaps even solace, in the senate. (No governor ever contemplates confining himself to the dreary and lowly chamber of the House of Representatives). It is thus not surprising that the jostling for tickets on the APC platform has preoccupied the media and dominated the front pages of leading newspapers for weeks.
It makes sense, therefore, to limit observations about the ticket battles to the APC, the archetypal political party demonstrating the ferocity of the wars and the inanity of the aforesaid logic. Zamfara State APC, unable to reconcile its warring groups, is in danger of disqualifying itself from the 2019 races. Except it can find judges to rule against the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and compel the acceptance of the list of standard-bearers presented by the state APC in violation of electoral timelines, the opposition PDP will likely take the state lock, stock, and barrel in 2019. Despite satisfying the electoral timelines instituted by INEC, most other APC states have had to wade through hell to find a unifying list to submit. Some APC governors, having tyrannised their states and whimsically drawn up a self-serving list of standard-bearers, have found themselves at daggers drawn with their party’s National Working Committee (NWC).
Last Thursday was the deadline for the submission of the lists. In one clumsy form or the other, the APC met the deadline. But it had had to shuffle its list so invasively that it is doubtful whether party leaders can tell accurately who is on the list or not. In drawing up the list, they have had to contend with various positions and arguments ranging from the fiat of the NWC to the amelioration of the party’s appeal committee, to the intense lobby and threats of some governors and party chieftains, and then on to the inscrutable, if not entirely discreditable, last minute shuffle by shadowy figures and chieftains. By yesterday, few knew who among the controversial aspirants had made it to the final list submitted to INEC. Party leaders in Ogun were left flabbergasted by the endless shuffles, with the governor, as powerful as he is in the party and influential with the president, appearing to lose out. He barely held on to his own ticket and managed to drag in a few factional acolytes. The Ondo State governor, all spruced up with dainty legal accoutrements, has engaged in all-out war with a few aspirants. No one is sure whether his enemies, particularly Senator Ajayi Boroffice, made it to the final list, considering that Like Sen Sani, he also got the party’s initial nod.
Kaduna State Governor Nasir el-Rufai exemplifies the worst of the nomination battles raging within the APC. In fact, he vividly illustrates the unseen war between the official intransigence of the party and the radicalism of some of the aspirants. In Kaduna, Senator Shehu Sani, who has reportedly finally defected from the party, was a thorn in the flesh to Mr el-Rufai, as Sen Boroffice is a pain in the neck to Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo State. Neither governor was opposed to the senatorial iconoclasts pricking their bloated balloons because of ideological or policy differences. The war is almost entirely about egos, with the controversial governors dead set against the nomination of the senators in question. The party’s NWC recognises the triviality of the struggles, the inanities of the opposition, and the pettiness and tyranny being elevated into an art in many of the APC states.
Consequently, using its screening committees, the party bravely at first paved the way for their gifted senators, some of whom were prevailed upon not to defect to the opposition, to take the nominations. But the equally more cantankerous and suicidal governors were determined to take brinkmanship to its highest level and were bent on pushing out those not amenable to their dictation. But regardless of the efforts of the NWC and their bold and initial resoluteness, no one could tell last Thursday whether the party had had its way or the governors had browbeaten the party, or whether the radicalism of some of the aspirants had trumped the intransigence of the governors.
When the details of the lists submitted to INEC surface eventually, the public will know who has triumphed, and in particular what the future holds for the APC. Would governors, some of them clearly disfavoured by the public but exercising full tyrannical powers, continue to pull the strings in the party and decide which direction it goes, even if that direction leads to complete ruin? Or would party leaders, particularly the NWC, find the courage and leeway to run the affairs of the party sensibly, fairly and pragmatically? The party still has a little room to substitute names on the list at the appropriate time. Will it, knowing what is right and just, seize the chance to make final amends? It is too early to tell. What is clear, however, is that the party’s chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, is treading gingerly on thin ice. He is pulled in different directions all at once. There is a suspicion that he knows what is right, but there is a greater suspicion that he does not quite possess the kind of courage needed to curb the obnoxiousness of some of the APC governors.
Overall, the bitter and poisonous struggles for nominations in the two leading parties indicate that Nigerian democracy, not to say the cost of running it, is in tatters. Until the right structural framework for running Nigeria can be found, these intense and bitter struggles for power and influence will continue unabated, to the point of threatening the stability and unity of the country. The country’s political structure needs to change, and with it must come the reduction in the cost of operating democracy. There is simply no way, no matter how frugal or saintly the president is, that Nigeria can be run efficiently based on its present structure. It is a wobbly and dysfunctional organ. From about three regions on the 1950s, and later four in the 1960s, all with only three or four administrative organs, Nigeria is now operating 36 states, all with their costly and replicative administrative organs. The 19 northern states, for instance, had just one Northern Nigeria cabinet before the 1966 coup d’état. In its place now are costly, inefficient and unnecessarily replicative cabinets, which unavoidably impact negatively on the infrastructure of the states and welfare of the workers.
Indeed, compare the parliament of the First Republic with the current National Assembly. Even though the First Republic parliament was in desperate need of fine-tuning in those days, the current legislature is not only hopelessly big and burdensome, it is needlessly expensive and inefficient. In just three years, between 2016 and 2018, the country allocated nearly N400bn to the National Assembly. It is senseless and reckless. The states will continue to be unable to pay salaries of workers, not to talk of paying a living wage, and roads, bridges, schools and hospitals will remain derelict. Patriots must shout from the rooftops that the current structure is untenable, even if no kobo is embezzled by elected leaders. The population is exploding, resources are shrinking, and global technological innovations, which Nigeria appears inured to, are bound to complicate the country’s problem, especially in the face of retrogressive and unimaginative leaders too fearful of the risk of balkanisation to see into and grapple with the future.
There is no reason to have a 36-state structure, no reason to have a huge and expensive legislature, no reason to run bloated bureaucracies, and absolutely no reason to run a virtually unitary federal government, if not even a pseudo-military government. Changes are taking place all around Nigeria, but the country does not have leaders who can recognise and respond to the changes. Even within Nigeria, drastic changes are also taking place, and many violent indicators of the country’s dysfunctional status are daily popping up; but the country’s leaders see the problems as simply one of law and order. Will the next elections correct these anomalies? It is doubtful. But Nigerians must hope that even if the elections will not introduce corrections, they should at least not worsen or make inevitable the looming disaster.
IT is hard to explain why the federal government is not embarrassed by the controversy swirling around the Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Usman Yusuf, a professor of medicine. The government is unreasonably sustaining him in office to the irritation of most Nigerians. Last Thursday, about eight months after his first suspension in June 2017 was unbelievably overruled by President Muhammadu Buhari, he has again been suspended, this time by the agency’s governing council. When he was suspended last year, it was alleged that he misappropriated about N900m. He at first defied the suspension order, but after investigations by a panel comprising senior Health ministry officials, men of the Department of State Service (DSS), and officials of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC), Prof Yusuf stayed away from the agency until his reinstatement in February 2018.
But the controversies have refused to go away. Citing an avalanche of petitions against the professor and an investigation conducted in-house, the NHIS Governing Council led by Enyantu Ifenne has again placed the NHIS boss on suspension. He was not recalled by the Health ministry in February, but by the president, despite ongoing probes by both EFCC and ICPC. When he was recalled, the presidency made no reference to the Health minister, Isaac Adewole, also a professor of medicine, except to copy him the reinstatement letter. And when he was first suspended, Prof Yusuf reserved expletives for the minister, insisting that he was answerable only to the presidency. It is not clear how he would take this new suspension or how the presidency would react. But already, there are signs he would love to remain defiant and insubordinate, with the presidency in February insinuating that the NHIS boss suffered biases at the hands of his detractors.
In announcing last Thursday’s suspension, Dr Ifenne said: “Let those who hide under cover of the Presidency to protect corruption know that Nigerians are keenly watching. I am convinced that if President Buhari is fully briefed about a tenth of Yusuf’s atrocities, he would throw him out! The truth, like health, has no colour, no tribe and no religion and no social class. The council stands by its decision.” The presidency will now have to determine whether to defy both the Health ministry and the NHIS Governing Council in favour of an official who has shown no regard for his supervisors and colleagues.
It was atrocious and insensitive in the first instance to recall Prof Yusuf in February, when the allegations against him were still being investigated by the EFCC and ICPC. Believing that he had high-level support, Prof Yusuf neither mended his ways nor found the humility to work with the Health ministry, as counselled by the presidency. Now, he has attracted the fury of the board of the agency. The presidency has defied many things in the past three years, including common sense, and has shown little or no inclination to appropriately weigh negative public opinion. It will, however, be interesting to find out how they will handle this unfortunate little matter concerning an official who has proved without a shadow of doubt that he is not worth defending, let alone risking the credibility of an entire presidency.
DESPITE their grandstanding, the All Progressives Congress (APC) had hoped that their standard-bearer, President Muhammadu Buhari, would not have to face ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar in next year’s presidential election. They probably realised that their candidate was not in an unassailable position as he was in 2015 when he faced the terrible buffeting by former president Goodluck Jonathan. They also probably realised that Alhaji Atiku, three years younger than his 75-year-old opponent, could not be said to be in as precarious a position as he was in 2011 on the Action Congress (AC) platform or 2014 when he was ignominiously swept out of the race by the stoic former military head of state.
But after almost half of the more than 3200 Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) delegates brushed aside their private doubts to nominate the former vice president as the man to anchor their race to Aso Villa in 2019, it became clear that both the opposition and the ruling parties had in advance electrified the campaign trail for the Nigerian presidency. The APC may see Alhaji Atiku as deeply flawed and an easier target than any other PDP aspirant to shoot down, they, however, secretly fear his other qualities, wondering whether those other fine points about him do not, in the estimation of the electorate, far outweigh his weaknesses. Even more alarming to the APC is the fact that they also fear whether their own candidate’s weaknesses, many of which are currently and constantly in full public glare, do not far outweigh his vaunted personal assets.
It is premature to suggest the outcome of the battle next year when it has not fully been joined yet. The increasingly officious and legalistic electoral umpire, INEC, has insisted that the battle could not be joined until next month. But hard-nosed and inscrutable analysts as well as edgy politicians from across the unsettled political divide are busy making prefatory statements about how the battle would shape out and, in some cases, how the slaughter would go. The PDP delegates who gathered at their convention in Port Harcourt last week opted for the former vice president partly because they saw in their new champion the capacity to offer the incumbent a credible, brutal and probably victorious challenge. He had been the product of many political battles, some of them across enemy lines, and others internecine, and they think he proudly and intimidatingly wears his battle scars. They remember him as a fighter who does not shirk a battle, is not afraid to lose, takes the fight to the enemy’s door, loves to fight over and over again, and hardly blinks first, as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo loathes to recall.
The delegates are thought to have been induced to vote Alhaji Atiku, but in a battle that will define their party for the next four years or more, perhaps even a decade or more, it is not quite clear whether inducement alone could explain the political behaviour of the delegates when they voted overwhelmingly for their standard-bearer. If the APC delegates who casually affirmed the candidacy of their champion at the same time in Abuja are not dismissed as morons or faulted for their usual casuistry, and are assumed to be sensible about their choice regardless of any other influences or considerations, it may be far-fetched to write off their fellow Nigerians in the PDP as empty-headed buffoons. The PDP delegates probably recognised the qualities in aspirants Aminu Tambuwal, Bukola Saraki and Rabiu Kwankwaso, three of the other contestants who faced Alhaji Atiku, but their instincts told them, more than money persuaded them, that if they stood any chance of unseating the gritty President Buhari, the only man who could do it was the former vice president. It is difficult to fault them.
But whether the hopes of those who made Alhaji Atiku their standard-bearer will be realised next year or not is a different thing altogether. They have done little about reforming their party, and have done much less in purging their ranks of those who brought them to a sorry pass. They have not refined their political philosophy, including their arcane and destructive conservatism, and have appeared to ignore the malformed structure of their party that exposed them to the egregious blunders that cost them the presidency in 2015. As recent as some two years ago, not to say even weeks before their Port Harcourt convention, their anomalous structure embarrassingly exposed them once again to the unhealthy and anarchic influence of Governors Nyesom Wike and Ayo Fayose, two boisterous and irreverent PDP politicians determined to hijack the soul of the party when they themselves hardly possessed a soul. It would aid their fight, and Alhaji Atiku’s war whoops, if the PDP were to lend a cohesive and energised structure to the goal of reclaiming Aso Villa.
Co-incidentally too, the PDP does not even have the accomplished men and women warriors able on their own to command political divisions into battle and into victory. Their chairman, Uche Secondus, as calm and sensible as he appears, has been unable so far to inspire and galvanise the troops to dare enemy bayonets. No one among the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) or National Executive Committee (NEC) is a shining light of ideas or valour. Consequently, Alhaji Atiku, himself hobbled by the excessive weight of years of unscrupulousness, will have the onerous duty of raising and kitting an army, and throwing them into battle against the hardened and irascible APC troops whose glimpse of the national largesse is still fresh and intoxicating. The PDP standard-bearer has some indomitable retired generals at his corner, and they gave a good account of themselves during the convention, helping him to quilt a vague coalition together and to tilt the scale against the neophytes that fought him for the candidacy, but he will struggle to harness their apparently bitter opposition to President Buhari into a coherent and enthralling philosophy attractive to the electorate. There are many more imponderables the former vice president will contend with, and he will need all his years and experience in politics to overcome them.
The APC may refuse to acknowledge it, but Alhaji Atiku is their worst nightmare. They openly proclaim him easy to beat, despise him as corrupt, unprincipled and a serial political adulterer, announce him as a persona non grata in the United States because of money laundering issues, and a person without scruples of any kind. But at bottom, much more than any of the other lightweights that ran against him in the convention, he is the one they fear the most, the only one who despite his handicaps is capable of beating their man. They know that he is cosmopolitan, has friends across the country, has a large heart, is more detribalised than the APC candidate himself, has a better grasp of the economy, is gifted at hunting and mentoring young talents, and exercises control over anything entrusted to his care.
But while APC leaders press their advantage against Alhaji Atiku using the challenger’s weaknesses, of which there are sadly many, they will wonder just how many of their own candidate’s exposed flanks would be exploited by both the PDP and its candidate. President Buhari is almost the direct opposite of Alhaji Atiku. He is president, but he has neither ruled nor spoken as one. He keeps a grudge, is too judgemental, outsources the powers of the presidency, has a fairly outdated understanding of the economy, politics, judiciary and even the constitution, is unable to run an expansive presidency that accommodates diversity, is unconverted to the arts, and does not give the impression that he possesses the strength and vigour, not to talk of the modern ideas, the country desperately wants to see in its president. The PDP will in fact flog these points until the APC is thoroughly skewered. But trust the APC to repay the PDP candidate the same compliment. The battle will be bloody, bruising, bitter and relentless. Neither will give any quarter, neither will call a ceasefire before the enemy is routed. It will in fact be a miracle if the temper of the campaign can be managed without fracturing the polity irreparably.
President Buhari has an advantage going into the campaigns. He has the power of incumbency, and not being a confirmed and natural democrat, he will not be reluctant to use incumbency beyond what the constitution or even the laws of the land envisage. He has cult-like following, particularly among the dispossessed in the North, and he will leave no one in doubt, egged on by his less scrupulous inner circle, that he is prepared to use everything at his disposal to retain the presidency. The ruling party itself will emphasise the point that four more years of President Buhari, notwithstanding its accompanying stasis, may not be nearly as intolerable as perhaps eight more years of Alhaji Atiku, regardless of his whisper suggesting that he will spend only four years if elected. The geopolitical dynamics of Nigerian elections may not on the surface favour President Buhari, but he was able to harness it in 2015, and will not see why he cannot repeat the feat in 2019.
But if President Buhari is vulnerable today, it is because he unwisely boxed himself in. The debate over restructuring and state police will cast a pall over the campaigns. He and his party had the chance to move steadily to defang that argument, but he unbelievably reframed the debate as an unpatriotic and disingenuous plot to balkanise the country. The country’s structure is absolutely untenable; it will not deliver the glorious and stable future Nigerians seek and urgently need. It is therefore impossible to explain why he and his party failed to grasp these issue, especially the danger the country is exposed to by its structural imbalance. His party empanelled a few party leaders to study the problem, and they came out with a report. It was not far-reaching enough; but it would have been a fairly good start. Instead the president has done nothing with the report. The challenger will naturally seize upon the controversy to question the president’s vision and bona fides. Worse, the controversy may further depress the Southwest vote that barely went his way in 2015, assuming they can resolve the dilemma of seeming to sacrifice their number two position in favour of the Southeast. He swept the Middle Belt vote in 2015, but his waffling over the atrocious herdsmen attacks will create problems for him in that region. He never thought it fit to seduce the Southeast and South-South; these could also prove very truncating.
Worse, not being a politician in the noble and effervescent sense, he unwisely ostracised the country’s power elite, presuming that reaching accommodation with them meant a humiliating condescension. Had he understood politics well as an art that is not as complex and puzzling as it seems, he would have kept former leaders like ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo almost permanently inoculated against fighting the presidency, and kept other retired generals and former military heads of state at least on speaking and cordial terms. It is called politics. Unfortunately, in four years, President Buhari has instigated more people against himself than he had with him in 2015. He will now labour to convince voters that they stand to lose more by voting Alhaji Atiku than gain less by voting the APC. He will need to remind them that four more years of him would be more tolerable than four or eight more years of Alhaji Atiku. And that in any case, his sainthood, as controversial and misleading as it may seem, is more preferable to the former vice president’s uncertain and opaque self-acquittal. If he can take their gaze away from his inaction on education and health, both of which are in very bad shape under him, if he can get them to ogle his infrastructural renewal, and if he can stoke their fear of returning the country, as his aides put it colourfully, to the PDP’s corrupt and inglorious past, he may yet be able to put the PDP on the defensive.
Chief Obasanjo has finally but surprisingly endorsed Alhaji Atiku after virtually swearing against him a few weeks ago and fostering a negative impression of him as a corrupt politician and businessman, and disloyal subordinate. His volte face may be one more indication of the frustrations felt by the country’s wrong-footed and sometimes insensitive power elite. The former president had last January optimistically campaigned to raise a massive coalition against President Buhari, the new object of his animosity, but that coalition had neither seemed concrete enough nor possessing men and women of grit and charisma. He belatedly realised that while the country might entertain his views and even respect them when they tally with their aspirations, no one was willing to have him direct the change they desired. They remember his choices for the presidency in 1979, 2007, and even 2015, and have learnt to question his judgement and suspect his motives. In frustration and in desperation, he has returned to his vomit by embracing the PDP’s presidential candidate, thus showing that he hates President Buhari more than he distrusts Alhaji Atiku. His embrace of Candidate Buhari meant something in 2015 as it helped to damage the then incumbent Dr Jonathan; he hopes to accomplish the same damage against President Buhari in 2019.
In a way, Chief Obasanjo, like most former military heads of state who took power through a coup d’état, is an opportunist. In 2014 he saw which way the cat jumped before casting his lot with Candidate Buhari. It is not certain, however, that before endorsing Alhaji Atiku, he did not read many foreign intelligence journals, including the respected Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), which appear to have rejected the president. The journals all see the president as unpopular at home as he has become abroad. In making his choice, Chief Obasanjo has simply swum with the tide rather than against it. It would be spectacular indeed if President Buhari could thrash all of them: the disaffected in the country who have ballooned in number, foreign periodicals prognosticating gloom, foreign leaders who are secretly alarmed at the situation in Nigeria and its undisciplined, retrogressive leaders, and religious elite chafing under the president’s indifference and intransigence.
Yet, no matter what anybody thinks now, including leaders of the APC and the PDP, and despite the matching failings and weaknesses of the two parties and their candidates, no can tell the direction of the 2019 polls. Though Alhaji Atiku looks less likely to lose than President Buhari seems more likely to win, it is premature for anyone to claim certainty about the poll’s outcome. The battle is just about to be joined. The country will hear out the candidates, weigh their plans, analyse who has the better plans for the future and can see into that future, and have the boldness and knowledge to deliver the change that will open the country up for rapid development and stability. In January, shorn of the acerbity and ethnic and religious prejudices wasting the country and poisoning relationships, it should be possible to guess the winner. Meanwhile, the country must celebrate the fact that President Buhari now has an opponent worthy of the name, and the APC an enemy likeminded, an enemy uninterested in leaving an opponent half-dead, literally and idiomatically.
GOVERNOR Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State found comfort before the state’s governorship primary election in describing the unprecedented challenge to his second term bid as orchestrated by a group of conspirators who paid scant attention to his capacity or accomplishments. It seemed also sensible, given his peculiar political circumstances, that he embraced scaremongering to warn his party of impending electoral defeat should his aspiration for a second term be truncated by party elders. His supporters, despite their fewness, valiantly reiterated his arguments through social media belligerence considered hysterical and apocalyptic by many analysts. Even the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which should quietly wish Mr Ambode’s All Progressives Congress (APC) to make false and costly moves, were darkly warning of electoral forebodings should the governor be repudiated in the Lagos governorship primary election. Indeed, it suited many watchers of the Lagos political scene to remove their focus from the governor in explaining the endorsement crisis he faced before that fateful Tuesday direct primary election.
Unfortunately for his supporters and other observers who never really fancied the APC for a number of reasons, Mr Ambode lost the election by a staggering margin, indicating quite dizzyingly the scale of repudiation suffered by the governor and the terrible undercurrents he had stirred against himself. The rejection was not only total, notwithstanding his enormous work in such a short time, it was a rejection the party was unapologetically eager and exuberant to make him suffer. Gradually, even those who at first argued that Mr Ambode’s rejection was stage-managed by godfathers are, on proper and deeper interrogation of the governor’s style and administration, grudgingly beginning to reconcile themselves with the fact that the APC simply repaid the governor in his own coin. His alienation of the party was reportedly total; their own alienation of him was no less absolute. It is inconceivable anywhere that an elected official, whether under presidentialism or parliamentarianism, could lose the confidence of his party and still sit pretty atop it.
So far, Mr Ambode and his sympathisers have not proffered explanations why he mishandled his relationship with his party. He has not joined many others in castigating the APC or ridiculing its importance as an electoral vehicle for its officials. But, as party leaders and rank and file in Lagos have argued, the governor’s body language, not to say policies, indicated quite clearly the severity of his contempt for the party, almost as if he had another vehicle by which he hoped to actualise his goals in subsequent elections. A few weeks to the primary, it shocked many Lagosians, including those sympathetic to him and those properly described as neutrals, that the governor neither had a fail-safe option nor set great store by any option whatsoever. The brinkmanship was total and mindboggling. But perhaps the governor’s calculations were much simpler than the complex political and electoral ratiocinations Nigerians were conversant with.
It is not unlikely that the governor, having worked assiduously in the first two years or so to build roads and bridges and a number of other telling and impactful projects, felt that these projects were enough to force the hands of party elders and rank and file in the contest for relevance and dominance. Lagosians were likely to be dazed by his record, he probably surmised, and the party would be fearful to repudiate him without attracting opprobrium. In his fateful and ultimately defining world press conference last Sunday, he in fact alluded to that fatal logic in dark silhouettes. However, with each passing day, as more facts snake out from Alausa, the seat of Lagos power, and as more Lagos officials openly defy and mock the governor’s injured feelings, many people are shocked by the deep loathing he educed in about three years in office. Indeed, it has turned out that those who at first interceded on his behalf did so because they feared some kind of electoral backlash. Now, in the face of more revelations and total defiance, that fear has virtually receded into nothingness. Lagos, it is increasingly certain, will move on, undoubtedly shaken by the obscenity of what has happened, but no less grounded and assured in their hopes for the future. After all, what was shaken is their complacency, not their élan, nor their confident ability to keep producing a slew of competent builders.
There was at first some attempt to reduce Mr Ambode’s rejection to a contest between the governor and a supposedly venal ruling party. It was argued that his successful effort to curb waste and plunder masterminded by his party infuriated the party elders and turned officials against him. The primary election, the argument goes, was payback time. This is a misreading of the situation. The party rank and file were not opposed to the great projects; they were instead opposed to being excluded and, in some instances, replaced, as the waste management operations indicated. They were not opposed to the governor’s individualism, as corrosive as it appeared to them, but they resented the concomitant aloofness that saw him erect a gulf between him and them. By all means let him savour his caviar with all the politeness privilege can give, but let him not pour contempt on their own bush meat or ice fish. In any case, the party rank and file that took Mr Ambode to Golgotha on Tuesday were so determined to crush him that it was impossible for any force to stop them, not even their revered leaders. And except it can be proved that they are not entitled to their views or are not Lagosians, then it must be conceded to them to justifiably feel the pains they stomached for years.
Some commentators and the PDP also implausibly argued that the rejection of Mr Ambode was at the irrational and selfish instance of godfathers. It is perhaps possible for one man to evoke crazy emotions in thousands of party supporters, but to whip millions into a frenzy against a governor visibly judged to be working will require more than the gift of Rasputin or the telekinetic wizardry of a political hypnotist. The fact on the ground in Lagos is that the APC was incensed at the governor, and party elders, long accustomed to the wisdom of sailing with the wind rather than against the wind, listened to their followers and championed their cause. The governor on the other hand attempted to sail against the wind and shipwrecked; party leaders instead sailed with the wind and are safely berthed. It may suit the politics and interests of some people in Lagos, particularly the PDP, to frame the Ambode debacle in terms of his struggle with party leaders, but as the chastened governor must have now learnt about leadership, it requires guile, humility, character and brilliance to find the proper balance between the yearnings of party members, despite the indeterminateness of their aspirations, and the more nuanced and esoteric ambition of the larger society.
In 2015, the PDP lost Lagos by less than 200,000 votes. At that time, they were strong and the campaign of prising Lagos loose from the grips of godfathers resonated with many young rebels. In 2018, they are sticking to the same campaign, and will obviously keep at it till the 2019 elections. As they did then, they will also continue to frame the implacable hold of the APC and the progressives on Lagos as in fact the hold, not of a party, but that of a man; and they will continue to frame that hold as evil, an evil that positions Lagosians for urgent liberation. Jimi Agbaje has again received the ticket of the PDP, as he did for the 2015 poll. But the party he will be leading into battle in 2019 is considerably weakened by defections and by dispiritedness at the national level. Their equating APC control of Lagos with orchestrated evil or slavery is in many ways also a difficult proposition to sustain. The state has profited from a disciplined control for many years, and as the lessons of the Arab Spring have shown, not to say the nostalgic regionalism that many now advocate in Nigeria, development and progress can sometimes be endangered by the casual approach to politics being suggested by the opposition vexed by the deposition of Mr Ambode. Moreover, as many Asian countries are showing positively, and as many Nigerian states are demonstrating negatively, there are many other approaches to development and politics.
Until the politics of the primary election in Lagos exploded, many Lagosians were ignorant of Mr Ambode’s troubles with his party. Indeed, until he yielded to desperation and addressed that needless world press conference where his unbridled acerbity was demonstrated in bad light, few knew he was capable of the gloomy temper he showed. He not only misspoke, he slandered, threatened his party, and gave indication he was willing to join hands with any person to pull the whole house down. No one was sure what came over him. It was certainly not just desperation. He knew there were a number of people out there who always described Lagos as being enslaved; and he probably fancied himself as the champion of their cause, their liberator. A little later, however, as stories began to filter out, it became clear that Mr Ambode had not run the most open, inclusive and considerate administration. This was why his deputy openly repudiated him, most of his commissioners abandoned him, and the civil service, almost to the last man, turned against him. It was not about graft; it was about misplaced and unpopular policies like the land use charge, near total abandonment of his predecessor’s impactful projects, poor human relations with his colleagues and others, deep character flaws, and lack of charisma.
Furthermore, it was not until Mr Ambode’s total rejection that it became known that the governor had also lost the confidence of most of Lagos’ traditional, leadership and political elite. Only a few of them attempted half-heartedly to intercede on his behalf, that is even if the rebellious rank and file were willing to listen. What inspired the misdiagnosis of the Ambode debacle was the suddenness of his rejection, not whether evil was inherent in the APC stranglehold. If the PDP were to take Lagos today, contrary to what its leaders say, it will make political sense for them to also inspire an implacable hold on the state, a hold likely to be inspired by, say, a Bode George, or any other panjandrum they might canonise.
In the light of the debacle, could APC still win Lagos in 2019, especially when some individuals are inspiring coalitions against the ruling party and its leaders in the state? The elections are some four or five months away. Forming coalitions takes time and, to some extent, money, as ex-president Olsuegun Obasanjo has just found out. To energise coalitions, even when they are successfully formed, would require that no subterranean hints of religious and ethnic agenda underpinned them. That would be difficult to pull through in Nigeria, unfortunately. In addition, the PDP which tried to put together a coalition of ethnicities in 2015 will find it more difficult this time to deploy the same tactics, especially in view of its weakened state and lack of focus. It had Aso Villa backing in 2015, and much money, and yet failed. It is unlikely to be availed the same capital in the next poll. The battle for Lagos will consequently remain a two-horse race, with little or no room for a third force. Despite Mr Ambode’s unsettling hints, the APC has not lost the moral argument. If they can energise their base for a substantial turnout, they should be able to weather the social media campaign that riles them, keep Lagos as a bastion of progressivism, warts and all, and retain their hold on office for another four years.
