The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • APC and the Chibok factor

    APC and the Chibok factor

    It is hard to imagine whether in any polity a president can win re-election fairly and transparently with a baggage like the Chibok abductions, no, not even in Africa. By the time the presidential election is held in February, the 219 Chibok schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Borno State will be about 10 months in captivity. It is a major political issue, perhaps more significant than even the collapsing economy. Why the All Progressives Congress does not use it as a major campaign issue may be due to their reluctance to, as they say, politicise security matters. But the crime cannot be wished away, and it is not politicisation to remind the country that the Jonathan government is incompetent in handling it.

    The APC must remind the country that no president or government should be rewarded for mishandling a tragedy of that magnitude. The girls are our daughters, and their parents have remained disconsolate. Indeed, far beyond the mere tragic act of Boko Haram seizing the girls and damaging them, is the unforgivable fact that the president neither visited the crime scene nor empathised with the parents, the state and the Nigerian people. He has no reason to ask for their votes; and those of us whose votes he asks for should deny him. It is nothing personal. It has nothing to do with him as an Ijaw man, a Niger Delta man, a Christian, or a learned zoologist. The image and dignity of Nigeria are at stake, and the APC must utilise the abductions to the hilt.

  • Dynamics of APC, PDP presidential campaigns

    Dynamics of APC, PDP presidential campaigns

    Barely one week into their presidential campaigns, the leading contenders for the presidency, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), have given indications of the perspectives of their candidates and parties, as well as, strangely, the deep and fundamental intangibles of their worldview as they relate to the concepts of leadership, vision and philosophy, either real or abstract. It is not certain that the limited time available for campaigning is enough to make the PDP persuade Nigeria’s distraught, cynical and skeptical electorate to re-elect President Goodluck Jonathan, to overlook the many problems he has been unable to grapple with in a coherent, consistent and courageous manner, and to sympathise with his emotive responses to allegations of illiberal approach to politics and shocking lack of intuitive appreciation of the elementary challenges facing the country he has ruled for more than five years.

    Nor is it also certain that the limited campaign time will permit Muhammadu Buhari, the APC presidential candidate, room to sell his candidature and virtues, and also to dispel the many criticisms validly leveled against his less than two years in power as military head of state in the early 1980s. Many of those criticisms, in spite of the long intervening years — nearly all of 30 years — still retain their potency and validity. There are doubts he has really transformed from a rigid, abrasive, ruthless and imperceptive ruler he once was. He is accused of jadedness, sectarianism, tribalism, lack of rigour or intellectual depth, and an unforgivable lack of empathy. His opponents will try to put him on the defensive and make the time very short for him to prove his bona fides.

    Indeed, the dynamics of both campaigns will be influenced by the considerations above, some of them extraneous, others misplaced and specious, and yet others simply deliberately mischievous. The more adept of the two campaigns will, however, utilise the limited time fairly effectively, if not to completely prove their competence to present the next president, at least to make their candidate the lesser of two evils. Given the constricted choices the country faces, the electorate will have to choose one way or the other, for choose they must. So far, as a matter of fact, both campaigns have emitted sublime signals, some of them quite portentous, of what their parties are, who their candidates are at bottom, how limited their vistas are, and what they mean to Nigeria. It is not quite clear whether a consideration of these intangibles, these so-called sublime signals, will influence the direction of voting, for the voters are themselves quite limited in horizon and are sentimental. But these signals will doubtless determine the direction, health and sustainability of the country in the medium to long run.

    Take the kick-off of the Jonathan re-election campaign in Lagos for instance. It was symptomatic of the partisan malaise that has turned the PDP into a fearsome behemoth with no internal moral core and absolutely no regard for other political parties and democratic fundamentals. The kick-off also showed in disturbingly bold relief Dr Jonathan’s intellectual weakness, questionable historicism and perverse logic, limited worldview, malignant extemporaneousness, sweeping and unpardonable generalisations and conclusions. “Those of my age and above are finished; we are gone,” moaned the president puzzlingly. “That is why I am addressing those of you that are voting for the first time. We believe it is you that will take us to the moon. My generation has failed, we couldn’t take Nigeria to the moon.”

    The problem is not just that this questionable reading and understanding of history and contemporary events expose the president’s inadequacies, especially his lack of logical reasoning, but that they indicate a far more disturbing manifestation of the low quality of leadership in Nigeria, a lack of mastery of the existential and geopolitical threats facing the country, and an infatuation with boyish utopia.

    The highlights of the president’s Lagos campaign, especially his tendentious rationalisation of his failing counterinsurgency war, his justification of his slow anti-corruption campaign, his defence of inept arms procurement methods, and his shocking inurement to his self-incriminating statements over MEND’s 2010 Abuja bombing, shocked and perplexed the thinking members of his audience, some of whom exclaimed in gasps behind him on the dais. Nonetheless, some of the facts mentioned by the president were incontestable, such as the neglect suffered by the military over the decades. But his suppositions, his inferences, and his conclusions were astonishingly unpresidential, not to say inimical to the growth, stability and good fortunes of the country. There is nothing he said in his Lagos campaign that entitles him to victory, or gives indication he had the subtlety and philosophical depth needed to rule a complex country in the 21st century. When he was right, which was seldom, he did not cut the figure of a president, or present the facade of a noble or of a philosophical-king. And when he was wrong, which was often, such as when he guilefully and gleefully promoted sectarianism and ethnic divisions, he did not surprise.

    Dr Jonathan, alas, displayed none of the composure associated with the high office of the presidency. In the Lagos campaign, as he sadly did elsewhere in recent times, he quiveringly and emotionally fulminated against his opponents, endorsed the anti-democratic tendencies of state security agencies, preoccupied himself and his presidency with elemental things, and propounded none of the salient and uplifting ideas a complex society like Nigeria should embrace. None whatsoever. In the Lagos campaign, he tried to defend himself as much as possible, though he made a hash of it. And almost as an afterthought, he tried to sell a policy or two, but was unable to persuade either by logic or by force of his personality. The past few decades have been ideationally barren for Nigeria. Under Dr Jonathan, the sterility has grown incomparably. Four more years of him would not regenerate the country, as his campaign seeks to convince the electorate, or reposition it in line with the modernising ideas and infinitely changing complexities of the 21st century.

    Conversely, the dynamics of the APC campaign exhibit a different hue. The opposition party, poised as it seems on the edge of victory, has about three weeks or four to prove the capacity of its presidential candidate and his advertised transformation into a modern, if unaccustomed, democrat and liberal. In Lagos, a hysterical Dr Jonathan said that that transformation was not possible, and a vote for Gen Buhari would ineluctably return Nigeria to the dark days of atavistic prosecution of the anti-corruption war, where suspects were crated and jailed without regard to the law. But compared to Dr Jonathan’s campaign volubility, Gen Buhari, not the most eloquent of men, has always spoken laconically, often with a terseness that belies his political and leadership experience and hunger for office. His gaffes and indiscretions are thus few and far between. Beyond seemingly partitioning the campaign between himself and his running mate, Yemi Osinbajo, a law professor, to achieve maximum impact, the general’s taciturnity and the silent and subterranean jostling for power and influence in the APC appear to cause dreadful unease in campaign and political circles.

    Unlike the PDP whose power structure had earlier been defined and shaped, perhaps disapprovingly, under the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, with occasional eruptions between governors and the presidency, the APC has the onerous and compelling burden of campaigning for the highest office in the land at the same time as embarking on a difficult journey of self-discovery, self-definition, and self-actualisation. The ongoing internal jostling may have no significant effect on the party’s electoral chances if well managed, but in more ways than party apparatchiks think, the future of the party and its performance as a ruling party, should it attain the highest office, could be considerably stymied by that burden.

    A faint trichotomy is thus visible in the APC. On one hand is the powerful and inspiring arm of the party responsible for the formation of the APC, an amalgam of parties many but that powerful and inspiring few at first believed impossible. On the other hand is the northern caucus desperate to regain the presidency, a desperation fuelled by the incontestably poor performance of the Jonathan government. And on the third hand is a coalition of forces made up principally of governors and other party leaders determined to gain the upper hand in the power struggle, an upper hand they hinge on what they describe as the political altruism of checkmating any domination within the party. The battle for supremacy in the PDP was brutally and peremptorily settled by Chief Obasanjo. It will take a little while for that battle to be settled in the APC, whether they win the presidency or not.

    Though the APC is doing its best to conceal that jostling, a perceptive observer will notice the fault lines, as faint and imperceptible as they may appear. But what cannot be hidden is that if care is not taken, and irrespective of whether the party wins the presidency or not, the internal struggle may be won by an arm of the party that does not have the passion, drive, depth and conviction that inspired its formation. On the surface, there may be nothing wrong with having many tendencies within a party, as some developed democracies have shown. But for a party still in formation, and one which seems close to winning the presidency on the strength of the appalling incompetence and failures of the ruling party, it would indeed be cynical for the jostling within the APC to be settled in favour of an arm more desirous of dominating and moulding it into a typical party, almost indistinguishable from the PDP, than imbuing it with the kind of substance and character both the party and country need to survive and flourish.

    But perhaps this observation is an exaggeration. Perhaps the internal struggles in the APC are rather inconsequential. If that is so, the party is lucky. However, all indications show that there is a mild tremor within the party, even if that tremor may not hamstring both its campaign and battle to win February’s presidential poll. What is clear overall is that both the PDP and its candidate, Dr Jonathan, are “spent and finished,” a Freudian slip the president himself made in Lagos at his campaign kick-off. The dynamics of the PDP campaign are such that the party seems fated to lose the elections because of the president’s off-putting personality and general incapacity. The dynamics of the APC campaign, on the other hand, are such that the party seems poised to outperform its expectations in spite of Gen Buhari’s inability to generate excitement by his speech and campaign style, and the dredging up of many of his past objectionable statements and policies by the ruling party.

  • 2015: Can ‘paradise’ be regained?

    2015: Can ‘paradise’ be regained?

    Given Nigeria’s precipitous and barbarous descent into near anarchy and mediocrity, especially from the 1980s onward, it is difficult and painful to remember that Nigeria was not always the social and political pariah it has become in the eyes of the world. The military regimes of the 80s and 90s hastened that descent, and the democratic governments of the late 90s up to the present virtually sealed Nigeria’s unwholesome reputation. Sadly for children born in the 90s, many of whom are now in university, and are hence potential opinion moulders in the near and distant future, they have known no other cultures than the one engendered by the Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan governments. Older Nigerians have had a glimpse of ‘paradise’ so-called, and have lived under the tantalising hope of creating real paradise in Nigeria or re-creating the imperfect paradise of their youthful longing, but the new generation whose distorted values have exacerbated the social chaos and economic distress the country is contending with has had no inkling of paradise, real or make-believe.

    As Nigeria prepares for the 2015 polls, it is time the sensible among the electorate pondered Nigeria’s past and present in order to make the right choice. For far too long, sentiments had influenced decisions and choices, producing men like Chief Obasanjo who have contributed nothing significant to the country’s civilisation, and others like Dr Jonathan who have produced perhaps the most elaborate schemes for the mediocritisation and ruination of the country. Chief Obasanjo probably has a little fire in his belly for Nigeria’s greatness; the problem however is that he lacked the discipline and the intellectual and visionary capacity to bring it about. Being an extreme narcissist, he was also quite incapable of detaching himself and his vile private goals from the great and noble objectives of a powerful nation.

    On the other hand, Dr Jonathan is immeasurably worse. He pretends to transcend tribe and claims to be impervious to religious bigotry. But he has been unable to overcome the parochialism of his youth, a fact so evident even in his Niger Delta redoubt where he has surrendered to the irredentism of his Ijaw brothers to the detriment of other ethnic groups, and has in addition blithely acquired the sectarian extremism of the Middle Ages, pitting Christians against Muslims. For a country long accustomed to groaning under poor leadership and bad policies, it is now also being made to suffocate under deliberately concocted social, economic and political schisms. In about 30 years, a period productively utilised by other nations in Southeast Asia to plot their way out of underdevelopment, Nigeria has under seven megalomaniacal rulers plunged into poverty and near chaos, held together only by the thinnest of threads.

    Looking at Nigeria today and the mess its rulers have made of it, who could have imagined that the same country produced the likes of Thomas Adeoye Lambo, a world-renowned scholar and psychiatrist, and Teslim Olawale Elias, famous scholar and internationally reputed jurist of the first rank? I limit myself to these two examples for reason of space. The 50s, 60s and 70s were a time of great promise for Nigeria, a time of can-do spirit, a time when the world seemed to be at our feet, inviting us to dare and to conquer. Even the civil war years could not fully dampen this new age of optimism, irrespective of whether the misunderstanding and mistakes that prompted and promoted the war were fully resolved or not. Sports grew in substance and frills, producing its stars and local heroes; and education received a boost even in the midst of the very profound social buoyancy and élan that hallmarked the careers of great musical impresarios.

    Professors Lambo and Elias bestrode the national scene like colossi. They gave the impression their scholastic achievements were products of little efforts. In reality, however, their fame was the result of intense intellectual applications and exertions. We took it for granted that we would always produced such men of importance, and that in fact we could produced many more with a little bit more flexibility and resources. While Prof Lambo was the first Western-trained African in neuropsychiatry, and rose in 1975 to become the Deputy Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Justice Elias was the first African jurist to become the president of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague, and five years later was appointed to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. In fact at a time, Justice Elias was Nigeria’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice as well as professor of law and Dean Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, while never letting up in writing great law books, lecturing in far flung places like India, and drafting the constitutions of some countries.

    Sometime in 1995, in an interview with a magazine I worked for, Prof Lambo moaned about the appallingly low quality of leadership stymieing Nigeria’s development. He argued that given their predilections, it was obvious that most of them were mentally unwell. He then suggested it was necessary to subject anyone aspiring to leadership position to mental health checks. Even though that was never done, and indeed cannot be done, it was clear that he knew what he was talking about, having pioneered the study of psychiatry in Nigeria and displayed uncommon initiative and brilliance in marrying native psychiatry with Western practice, or what he called methodological syncretism. In fact, his study of traditional psychiatry yielded a huge trove of information that became integrated into the practice of psychiatry worldwide. For instance, he was first to draw attention to the vast superiority of the psychotherapeutic sessions of African traditional healers, as well as their unquantifiable pharmacopoeia of herbal and psychotropic drugs. So comprehensive were his discoveries that he became a regular face in world psychiatric lecturing circuits.

    The intimidating achievements of Profs Lambo and Elias, their humongous scholastic works, their effortless internationalism, their unfathomable pioneering works, and the huge respect and honour they garnered for Nigeria were indications of a period in Nigerian life and history that gave hope of a greater future for learning, politics, leadership and social and economic development. It felt good to be a Nigerian, and the world looked in our direction at a time when racism was still a stirring and provocative issue. Nigerian leaders themselves never really managed to appreciate the priceless talents the two professors put at their disposal, given the depressing fact that both the Aguiyi Ironsi regime and the Murtala/Obasanjo junta relieved Justice Elias of his post. But overall, the world recognised the abundant talents Nigerians possessed, and were willing to take advantage of them.

    Two main factors combined to destroy the hope Prof Lambo and Justice Elias represented for Nigeria. The first is the destruction of the Nigerian economy by, essentially, the military; and the second is the absolute lack of vision and intelligence by the same rulers. These two factors are still with us, and have in fact worsened under Dr Jonathan. He may have a PhD, but he has neither ruled like one who has that coveted degree, nor behaved even minimally like someone exposed to the cut and thrust of academic atmosphere, and the liberalism and accommodation a typical university environment affords its denizens. In the past two decades or so, the world has had pure contempt for Nigeria. Today, that contempt has risen virulently and obnoxiously to the level of shock and pity.

    Recall that after Dr Jonathan and his government mishandled the Chibok schoolgirls abduction, a few Western powers led by the United States offered a helping hand. Well, they have all left in frustration, deeply shocked by what they found, according to them, of a country completely rudderless, and leadership so inept. The world can’t seem to reconcile itself to its knowledge of our past and the decay of our present. Nor can those of us who glimpsed that peculiarly Nigerian potential for greatness. No one, no foreigner, and no member of the future generations will forgive us if we make the blunder of reinstating Dr Jonathan and his henchmen of greedy, proud and insular aides and supporters. Worse, there is no proof that given the way the military, Department of State Service (DSS) and other national institutions are being subverted and destroyed, that we would have the opportunity of remedying our folly sometime in the future if we repeat the blunder.

  • Okonjo-Iweala’s characteristic understatement

    Okonjo-Iweala’s characteristic understatement

    For those determined to vote for President Goodluck Jonathan a second time, let them take counsel from the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy (CME), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, whose continuing and characteristic understatements and underestimation of the harm being done to the Nigerian economy have become quite stifling. She speaks of ‘some challenges’ to the 2014 budget, and seeks to reassure the public that the problems confronting the economy are not such as should frighten or alarm the people. Oil production has slumped by a mere 180,000bpd, she says, and price of oil has slumped to less than $60 per barrel from a June peak of $114 per barrel, all juxtaposed against a 2015 budget benchmark price of $77 per barrel.

    But when she adds that by October, it was obvious that budget target revenue had fallen short by about a  trillion naira, and capital budget for the third quarter of 2014 could not be cash-backed to the tune of about N100bn, we were looking up the barrel of a looming disaster. Principally, the minister blames production shut-in consequent upon pipeline vandalism for the revenue shortfall, a vandalism Dr Jonathan has spectacularly been unable to tackle because he entrusted misfits with the task of pipeline protection. Arguing that oil price may never rise to $100 per barrel, the minister says the government will embark on a number of policy initiatives to diversify revenue.

    It is clear to everybody, except Jonathan diehards, that the Dr Jonathan government is incompetent to handle the economic disaster that is unfolding upon Nigeria. Many states are unable to pay salaries as and when due, and are even owing more than a month or two; the judiciary is also finding it difficult to pay salaries at month’s end; the federal government is also experiencing difficulty paying all its staff at once; and many companies are shutting down amidst contradictory and harsh fiscal and monetary policies. In spite of the government’s half-baked Sure-P programme, unemployment is galloping ahead as a welter of criminal activities, including kidnapping, insurgency and armed robbery, overwhelms the country.

    It does not require a soothsayer to recognise that should Dr Jonathan be re-elected, his government would in response to the mounting economic problems unleash a poisonous cocktail of hasty, panicky and half-baked policies upon the country. The policies would be harsh, even cruel, wide-ranging and, in view of the obvious fact that the economic problems were either engendered by the government or mishandled by the government, inadequate and misdirected. Dr Jonathan has spent the last six years or so of his government misdirecting the country and refusing to anticipate problems; another term in office would not suddenly lead him to a burst of fresh, insightful and appropriate policies. Consider, for instance, how barely one year into his presidency, the number of fuel (PMS) importers rose to about 140 in 2011 from a tolerable 19 in 2008, and subsidy payment also rose to about N2.5 trillion as at December 2011 from a budget figure of about N245bn. The mad looting, in the midst of other unaccounted spending totalling some $10bn or $12bn, has still not been fully explained at the end of Dr Jonathan’s first term.

    Apart from Dr Okonjo-Iweala’s overused World Bank orthodoxies, most of them jaded and misplaced, the Ministry of Petroleum has become both a law unto itself and a defiant cesspit of regulatory opaqueness, while pipelines protection has been callously and recklessly ceded to warlords and militants. In combination, these people and factors ensure that the national economy is not amenable to planning, laws and logic. Nothing will change should Dr Jonathan be re-elected. The president is himself tired, even overwhelmed, and his Finance minister absolutely fagged out after nearly six years in the economic saddle propounding much of the same panaceas day in and day out. Every patriot must be alarmed that a hint of their return is even being contemplated.

  • PDP, APC and abusive election

    PDP, APC and abusive election

    “Never was ability so much below mediocrity so well rewarded, not, not even when Caligula’s horse was made a consul,” said John Randolph on Richard Rush in the early days of the United States Congress. He could very well have been talking about President Goodluck Jonathan. But since the All Progressives Congress (APC) has sworn not to focus on the person of Dr Jonathan, though his person could not be divorced from his modest accomplishments, we may be deprived of great invectives directed against the president. Indeed, insults have from time immemorial been an integral part of politics, and memorable putdowns have served to excite, engage and humour the electorate. As an influence on voting pattern, however, their utility is doubtful. Nonetheless, in 2015, Nigeria seems nostalgically to be returning to the virulent past, a past that never really left us.

    In more than four statements in the past three weeks, the APC has wisely decided its presidential campaign will centre on issues instead of abuse, on facts rather than fiction, and on perspectives rather than persons. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on the other hand has cleverly impressed it on everyone, including party leaders and unwary voters, that its campaign will focus almost exclusively on vitriolic abuse. The reason is clear: on the exigent issues of the day, the PDP is at its wit’s end, unable to offer explanations for its failures and incapable of envisioning a glorious future. The ruling party will therefore do its damnedest to restrict the campaign to abuse and its focus to persons. If the APC is smart, it will recognise it is unlikely to match the PDP in abuse, and must therefore do its level best to stick to issues, where it will be able to prove with little or no effort how woefully the ruling party had performed, and how inept it had become in remedying the grave issues of the day and the mortal dangers of the near future.

    It is often hard to detach abuse from politics, especially because it constitutes an irresistible part of the dialectics of political campaign. But never in the history of Nigeria has any government proved so derelict of achievements as the President Goodluck Jonathan government, consequent upon which it seems unrepentantly set on avoiding campaigning on records. Indeed, it has already kick-started the campaign of abuse, and is pursuing it unabashedly and with all ferocity. In the past two weeks, two top officials of the PDP have dredged the sewers of abuse so openly it is unmistakable what their objectives are. National chairman of the PDP, Adamu Muazu, drew the first blood when, through his assistant, he described the APC candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, as idiosyncratically combative and anti-democratic, traits he concluded would be introduced into APC governance should the opposition party win the presidential election in 2015. It was scaremongering at its worst, but strictly speaking, since it was not libellous, Alhaji Muazu felt confident to make his opinion public.

    If Alhaji Muazu’s misplaced description of Gen Buhari as a warlord was not bad enough, the ruling party’s national secretary, Prof Adewale Oladipo, descended a notch lower by describing the APC presidential candidate as semiliterate, a reference to the fact that he has no university degree. Dr Jonathan on the other hand had a PhD, said the PDP official, irrespective of what he had done, or is capable of doing, with it. The 2015 presidential poll, Prof Oladipo gloated, “is going to be between darkness and light, it is going to be between a cosmopolitan, highly focused PhD holder and a semiliterate jackboot.” The problem with invectives is that they don’t have to bear any semblance to truth or reality. If not, there is hardly any Nigerian who does not know that Gen Buhari exudes gravitas as opposed to Dr Jonathan’s boyish simplicity, honesty as opposed to the president’s manifest and offensive untruths, forthrightness as opposed to the president’s prevarications, energy as opposed to the president’s lassitude, and cultured outlook as opposed to the president’s provocative provincialism.

    Even if we cavil at the PDP’s style of campaign, the party seems to have little or no alternative. There are no spectacular roads rebuilt on a significant scale to flaunt, and no rail network of high-speed trains to boast of. The PDP government has established more universities, but that is not what Nigeria needs, for the government is unable to maintain the existing ones. The hospitals are a little better than consulting clinics, and whole communities and long stretches of roads are unsafe. Kidnappers run riot, abducted schoolgirls are raped and killed, and schoolboys are massacred at will. The government has become so impotent that it seems there is no government in law and in fact.

    To avoid emphasis on these embarrassing facts, the PDP will focus attention on the persons of the APC leadership and candidates. If they are tired of focusing on Gen Buhari, and cannot focus on his running mate, Prof Yemi Osinbajo, they will seize some of the party’s national leaders, especially Bola Ahmed Tinubu, their favourite customer, to denigrate. In short, no matter what anyone says, and no matter what the APC does, the PDP will stubbornly remain glued to a campaign of calumny because of its tantalising opportunities. That is its lifeline; that is its last straw to clutch at. That is the engine of its presidential campaign; that in fact is the culmination of its 2015 campaign. It can do no other thing.

    The electorate will be left to judge in the final analysis who has run the most effective campaign between the PDP and APC, and which is the most persuasive, campaign of issues or campaign of abuse. The voters will be left to judge whether describing Gen Buhari as semiliterate resonates as powerfully as portraying the impotence of Dr Jonathan in rescuing the 219 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram; or whether labelling the general a warlord is not a compliment in the face of Dr Jonathan’s proven failure in taking the battle to the rampaging Boko Haram, a terror group that has caused so much catastrophe in the country and schism, disquiet and restiveness in the Nigerian military.

  • Leadership recruitment: APC needs to proceed cautiously

    Leadership recruitment: APC needs to proceed cautiously

    A few months back, many Nigerians, including this columnist and even All Progressives Congress (APC) leaders, probably never imagined that the main opposition party would rise to its present stature, let alone stand at the door of forming the next government. But here they are, a few weeks to the general elections, poised to assume the presidency, and riding on the crest of popular disaffection with the jaded and exhausted ruling party. In consequence, they must begin to face many obligations, some summoning them to extremely high dose of discipline, imaginativeness, organisation and character. How they respond to these obligations will determine how successful they become.

    They already recognise the huge task of formulating a party ideology out of their variegated backgrounds and disparate worldviews, but this is a task, among many other tasks, they seem to have postponed to sometime in the future. But there is one responsibility they can neither ignore nor postpone: the task of fine-tuning their leadership recruitment processes. This is what will define them and help them chart a responsible and successful path into the future. So far, they have approached the matter rather desultorily and offhandedly, an approach that has cost them a lot in terms of prestige and credibility.

    An example is the rather carefree way they welcomed Femi Fani-Kayode, Ali Modu-Sheriff and Dino Melaye into their fold. Mr Melaye is still with them, and is continuing to play a somewhat prominent role in the party. Mr Fani-Kayode was barely two weeks with them, after defecting spectacularly from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), when he began to rub elbows with APC leaders and accompany them to high-profile meetings. Mr Fani-Kayode is doubtless eloquent and aggressively eager to defend and advance the interest of his friends; but he is also famously eccentric, polemical, abusive, unreliable and almost wholly without leadership character.

    It will be recalled that he insinuated himself into the confidence of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, reviling and denigrating him until he got a job with that government, and then kept quiet. It required little effort, after a while, for him to reject his PDP friends and praise his way into the APC, where it seemed a man of his combative talent and piquant disposition was needed to serve as a battering ram against the PDP. In the end, it also required very little effort for him to pick a quarrel with the APC leaders, whom he accused of sectarian insensitivity, abuse them thoroughly and denounce them as unprepared for national leadership. Mr Fani-Kayode is now back to his vomit.

    Like Mr Fani-Kayode, Mr Melaye is cantankerous, intrepid, willing to risk everything, and a gifted rabble-rouser. He was swiftly welcomed into the APC fold, where he also began to rub elbows with party leaders, offering to lead many of their escapades designed to irritate, frustrate and suffocate the PDP and its leaders. He is a stump maverick and soapbox virtuoso; but he is also a quintessential eccentric who is just a hair’s breadth away from accomplished thuggishness. He campaigns for probity and character, but at bottom those virtues mean nothing to him, going by his behaviour during the last APC primaries in his home state of Kogi. Because of him, a full revolt is underway against the APC in Kogi West.

    Reflecting its problematic leadership recruitment style and policy, the APC has faced serious leadership challenges, and has barely managed to suppress the rage of its Young Turks, virtually all of them a part of the party’s leadership at state and national levels. The party must urgently mature. It must fine-tune its party ideology, establish parameters for recruiting young politicians and defectors into its leadership cadre, and define rigidly the qualifications and character such leaders must possess. If the party is to minimise discontent and run a tight-knit organisation, it must ensure that defectors and other party faithful are no longer automatically inducted into leadership cadre simply because they possess oratorical gifts, eagerness to fight the enemy, and loyalty, much of it skin deep.

  • Kenya’s retrogressive anti-terror law

    Buffeted by relentless Al Shabab terrorist attacks, Kenya has passed a controversial anti-terror law permitting the incarceration of terror suspects for up to one year instead of the previous 90 days limit. The law also increases sentences and gives the authorities more powers to tap phones, while journalists could be jailed for three years if their reports “undermine investigations or security operations relating to terrorism,” or if they publish images of “terror victims” without permission from the police. It will be recalled that President Goodluck Jonathan’s initial state of emergency declaration contained a few of such deplorable anti-freedom and anti-media provisions.

    But what is even more controversial about the retrogressive Kenyan law is not the severity and unreasonableness of the law, but the government’s response to criticisms by the United States. The US, said Kenya, had worse provisions in its own anti-terror law, while Kenya had checks and balances. Kenyan opposition parties and the media do not believe the new anti-terror law is reasonable. They think it is execrable, dehumanising and targeted at creating a political hegemony and police state. Kenya is after all notorious for its police repression.

    It is shocking that rather than address the concerns of democrats and human rights activists, Kenya boasts only of the fact that US anti-terror campaign record is worse. It is unfortunately true that the US is forfeiting its moral leadership of the world by its unscrupulous anti-terror war and unrestrained police repression of blacks; but it is sadder that Kenya cannot seem to appreciate that rather than compare itself with a bad case., it owes its people the responsibility of creating social and political systems that should be the envy of all. That it is a developing African country does not mean it should be a laggard in good laws, or compare itself only with worst cases. The quality of leadership in black Africa is appallingly poor; Kenya should not make it even poorer.

  • 2015: APC’ll probably win, if…

    2015: APC’ll probably win, if…

    Elections have their metaphysical contents and attributes which enable pundits and analysts to smartly predict their outcomes as well as decipher their transcendental messages. When an election is about to enthrone a new leader, a sense of anticipation and euphoria is palpable; and when an election is about to dethrone a leader, a sense of gloom equally hangs portentously in the air, unmistakably, cruelly, relentlessly and imperiously. The 2015 elections are less than eight momentous weeks away, but even before then, in the past one week or more, they have begun to tell their stories, indicating just how ruthlessly they are capable of modulating political destinies and fortunes and rewriting the entire social, cultural and economic algorithms of Nigerian life to create a new society.

    It is anticipated the changes will be truly fundamental, even tectonic. They will guarantee wide-ranging deconstruction and reconstruction of political parties, individuals, religions and all aspects of freedoms, democracy and national institutions. In any case, the changes seem now inevitable, perhaps fortuitously, if not auspiciously, mediated by the All Progressives Congress (APC). It is impossible to predict that at its formation in February 2013, the APC was capable of triggering, not to say midwifing, the whole range of changes being witnessed today, changes that are affecting the structure and, more importantly, the values of Nigerian politics. Barely two years down the line, the country in fact seems on the verge of major shifts in the business of politics and governance.

    Before the APC national convention of December 10-11, few thought the process of electing the party’s standard-bearer could be concluded peacefully and almost flawlessly, in view of the calibre of the contestants and their unyielding ambitions; or that the party could emerge from its internal election with a huge momentum going into next year’s general elections and with the transformed image of a well-organised party and a government-in-waiting. By some incredible and unexpected mix of  factors, the APC has emerged as a mature party, and its candidate, Gen Muhammadu Buhari, a solid contender for the presidency capable of beating the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan. Suddenly, after he emerged as the candidate, Gen Buhari’s stature seemed to grow, expanding in refinement and carriage. His faults have not disappeared, certainly not his taciturnity, nor his policy weaknesses, nor his abrasiveness, nor his past policies and decisions, many of them quite reprehensible. But strangely his faults no longer seemed to matter.

    What seemed to matter, what seemed to loom ever larger, was that the internal processes of the party during its convention had ennobled the candidate and transformed him curiously into a statesman and able leader whose age had become an asset rather than a liability. Placed side by side the scientific campaign of Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso, the surprising energy of former Vice President Abubakar Atiku and the effervescence of Governor Rochas Okorocha, Gen Buhari’s languidness became an asset, evoking the quiet detachment of royalty and the superior air of monarchy. And placed side by side the suffocating paralysis of the Jonathan presidency, not to say his overarching impotence in the face of insurgency in the Northeast and the creeping economic crisis to which he seems to have no answer, Buhari’s hard visage and implacable discipline give refreshing indication of the can-do spirit needed by a wearied country. Nearly two weeks after his election, the positive transformation of candidate Buhari is yet to abate.

    Analysts had also feared that if the APC mismanaged the selection of Gen Buhari’s running mate, it could spell doom for a ticket they had tentatively designated as a winner. And for a crazy few days after the party’s convention, it seemed the APC was fated to choke on the selection of a running mate. That the party did not choke, and even surprised the people and itself by surviving the complex process of selecting a suitable running mate, gave the impression that fate had a hand both in the selection of Gen Buhari’s running mate and the continuing denudation of Dr Jonathan’s capacity to govern. It seemed that fate itself was tired of the sheer magnitude of indiscipline and incompetence under which Nigeria was decaying, and was determined to instigate a great and radical change. Nothing the Jonathan government said or did against the opposition mattered anymore; and no step taken by the opposition party, nor any election and selection it did, was misplaced. Indeed the two faces of fate began to manifest: its relentless ability to promote; and its cruel ability to demote — the former enjoyed by the APC, and the latter suffered by Dr Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    It will take some time before the dynamics of the great changes being experienced today can be explained. Three times Gen Buhari offered himself to lead the country, and three times he was rejected. Throughout the contests, public perception of his character and competence ossified. Indeed, it seemed to get worse even as his electoral performance paradoxically improved. He wasn’t seen as less sectional, less bigoted, less vengeful and vindictive, nor less intellectually superficial — until his party’s convention in Lagos, when by a supernatural sleight of hand, the oft-rejected politician began to warm the cockles of people’s hearts, his spectacular Lagos victory even eliciting euphoric celebration in unexpected quarters.

    As if fate had not dealt the country its most puzzling hand yet, try explaining the emergence of Yemi Osinbajo, a professor of law and former Lagos State attorney general and commissioner, as Gen Buhari’s running mate, or the fact that he seemed to be an acquired taste, his attributes and suitability for the position of running mate beginning to glow immediately after he was selected. He was not top on the list of those penciled down for the position, and few thought he had the electoral weight required to catalyse the doughty general’s apparently controversial appeal. But soon after his selection, everyone began to recognise and praise the countervailing attributes of his credentials. His legal mind, democratic antecedents and solid international exposure complement Gen Buhari’s harsh antecedents and damaging insularity, analysts crooned. And his Southwest background, with the possibility of attracting block votes, say others excitedly, enhances the northern appeal of the general without deepening the exclusion many feared the South-South and Southeast would feel if neither was included on the APC presidential ticket.

    After the APC convention, Nigerians began to experience the strange feeling that Gen Buhari could win the poll this time around. This strange and puzzling feeling made the contest for the running mate position much keener than it should have been. Almost overnight, the planks upon which the ruling PDP had built Dr Jonathan’s re-election chances began to collapse. The Jonathan presidency had suggested that Gen Buhari was a northern irredentist, and his ambition a reflection of the North’s retrogressive and oligarchic tendencies. But his emergence at the Lagos convention from a party some felt was distinctly Yoruba or Southwest put paid to that snide aside. It became meaningless talking of ethnic divisions without explaining why the entire Northwest, Northeast and Southwest rejoiced at the general’s convention victory, or explaining why he was elected with a nationwide landslide.

    The PDP also built its campaign on labelling the APC Islamic and the general a bigot. But the selection of Prof Osinbajo, a scholar, top pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), and liberal south-westerner effectively destroyed that plank and silenced the PDP. The ruling party will not be able to deploy the ethnic card; now the religion card has also been taken from it. It must now run on its records; but the records are paltry and unusable. Just eight weeks or so to the general elections, the PDP has discovered it has no fearsome weapons to deploy and no records to clutch at. Its diatribe against Buhari, in the face of the enormous liability of Dr Jonathan’s own fallibility and puny records, will be completely ineffective. Neither the acerbic Pastor Bosun Emmanuel of the RCCG, who produced a scathingly inappropriate video against the APC, nor Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, President of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), who has left no one in doubt where his sympathies lie, will be able to rouse sectarian animosity against the APC ticket without offending the largest Pentecostal church in Nigeria. This indeed are troubling times for the Jonathan campaign. On the eve of a major battle, campaign aides have discovered they have deployed with the wrong weapons and are tactically outmanouevred.

    Perhaps the greatest strength of the APC, which will conduce to its victory in the February polls, is its ability to reach consensus after healthy but sometimes very boisterous debates. Nigerians and the PDP had expected the APC to fracture before and after its conventions, for as they said the party was an agglomeration of strange bedfellows. And for a while it looked like the party would factionalise, especially after its tense convention to elect its chairman in June. That convention led to the exit of Tom Ikimi, a former Foreign Affairs minister and erstwhile party chairman in the short-lived Third Republic, and the angry defection of former Borno governor, Ali Modu Sherrif.

    The party is probably surprised itself that it is still going strong, and is even poised to win the great prize. The APC and its progenitors were described and ridiculed as lacking in internal democracy. But in its Lagos convention, it conducted perhaps the most democratic election for a standard-bearer ever. More, in spite of the tense atmosphere and angry exchange, it selected a running mate in fairly contentious circumstances without destroying its unity. In fact in both cases, it managed to elect and select with great aplomb. It is quietly and engagingly discovering how to balance arguments and interests among its powerful constituent groups, how to manage the influence of its leaders who came to the party with different party cultures and huge stocks of authority, and how to create a level playing field and a sound and almost unbreakable internal democratic process. This ability will probably lead it to victory in the next polls.

    The governors are thought to be all-powerful, but as the election of the party chairman showed, they can be checkmated without destroying their ability to restrain future excesses by other interest groups within the party. The candidate himself, in spite of his idiosyncrasies and antecedents, is learning how to build a consensus, as was shown in the selection of his running mate. The party’s leaders are also imbibing the cultures of moderation and give-and-take, and appreciating the necessity of counterbalancing one another’s influence and power. For instance, the selection of the running mate pitted many of the party’s leaders against one another, with some Southwest leaders including Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Bisi Akande on one side, and the governors and some of the party leaders on the other side. In the end, the hard bargaining, negotiations, disappointments and triumphs led to the stock and measure of Prof Osinbajo rising as a compromise candidate for the coveted position.

    Rather than focus on the quarrels and problems encountered in electing and selecting its candidates, the party should start to learn that these disagreements strengthen the party, ennoble it, help its leaders to put their best foot forward, and prepare it for the give-and-take necessary to become a successful ruling party, unlike the PDP which has been moulded into an intolerant oaf by former president Olusegun Obasanjo. APC leaders must refuse to dwell on their disappointments, notwithstanding the colourful media reports of how they lost and chafed, if they are to derive the advantages of the salutary manner contests for positions and values are done within its own ranks. They must recognise that fortuitously they are discovering that their party is unlikely to ever be dominated by any group or person: not the president, should they win the poll, nor the lawmakers, nor the seemingly but temporarily influential governors, nor any of its powerful leaders. There will only be temporary dominance of one group or the other now and again. There will never be permanent dominance, for the party is now too large and too nationally important to be dominated by one group or the other for a long stretch.

    Party leaders may be starting to learn that every position, idea and policy must be contested using superior arguments and brilliant, democratic manoeuvring. This is their best chance discovery, a discovery that is bound to serve them very well now and in the future, a discovery they will do well to reconcile themselves to. For the old ways of their component parties are gone for good, and the new ways of doing things must be accommodated; for nature itself is fatefully seeming to prepare them for true leadership, and gifting them the internal processes they will require to govern the country successfully, intelligently and democratically from next year.

  • 2015: finally, the battle is joined

    2015: finally, the battle is joined

    The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had no reason to contrive the mournful convention it had in Abuja last week on the same day the All Progressives Congress (APC) held its feisty and evocative political festival to elect a standard-bearer. If the ruling party elected to have a quiet and uneventful gathering, it was not because it was naturally and virtuously quiet, nor because it thought the mood of the country and the tempo of 2015 politics demanded it. It was perhaps a manifestation of its insecurity, or the insecurity of its leaders, of its inability to appreciate the principles and practice of democracy notwithstanding its preachments to the contrary, and of its cancerous indolence in envisioning a great democratic, political and philosophical future for Nigeria. It will take a lot of research to understand why the PDP needed to stifle all efforts to present President Goodluck Jonathan a virile opposition in last Wednesday’s presidential primary, when it was abundantly clear that even with 100 opponents, the president would still have won handily.

    Contrastingly, the APC had the quintessential presidential primary Nigerians dream of, in which no one steps down or is cajoled to do so, one destined to become a watershed in Nigeria’s factious and turbulent politics. Henceforth, no party, big or small, will artificially concoct a primary. They will let the process acquire a momentum of its own; they will let the festival run on its own steam replete with variety shows; they will let party faithful converge in an atmosphere of periodic conviviality, their host cities adorned with the panoply of music, flowers, banners, buntings and flags — indeed, matchless entertainment. Remarkably, the APC last week showed how primaries should be organised. But whether it thought its way into it or was coaxed into it by its rebellious Young Turks is difficult to say at the moment. But perhaps it achieved this distinction by the very nature of its founding, anchored as it was on the ashes of about four mercurial political parties; because to have anything other than a transparent primary would have sounded the party’s death knell.

    To be sure, the APC presidential primary did not go like clockwork, but it was unprecedented, matched in methodology, if not substance, only by the Lagos governorship primary of the week before. Both primaries were indications that whether by accident or by design, Nigerians were quite capable of political behaviour that matches world standard. There were initial misgivings the APC presidential aspirants would tear themselves to pieces on account of their ambitions and irreconcilability. Surprisingly, the contestants behaved most nobly and admirably. Neither they nor their supporters vowed thunder or spoke it, again quite unlike the PDP Lagos governorship primary of two days earlier where Musiliu Obanikoro and Jimmy Agbaje, the two leading contenders, spoke daggers and used them. And when the APC primary results were announced, with Muhammadu Buhari a clear winner, the atmosphere of brotherhood was unmistakable, even with a considerably chastened Abubakar Atiku enveloped in detachment and despair.

    The speeches both before the balloting and after a winner emerged were not of the highest standard, but future contestants can be trusted to learn a thing or two from this year’s APC primary and probably perform much better next time. Contestant Rochas Okorocha, the Imo State governor, is the orator among the five, a man of florid imagination and phrasal fecundity, but he did not appeal imaginatively to the sacred longings of the delegates. Notwithstanding, he was a delight. Former Vice President Atiku speaks very well, untrammeled by short and long pauses, but he too did not reach the height of renown where he seems forever poised. But his brief remarks after he lost were very well delivered, unaffected by the gloom he felt and the humbling effect of coming third. Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso was the revelation of the primary. As this columnist noted last week, had he started the race much earlier, he would probably have caused an upset, for he ran the most sophisticated race. He speaks well, but is often distracted by the undue attention he pays to what he has to say.

    We may never know what Sam Nda Isaiah is capable of. His prefatory remarks showed a man overwhelmed by the intimidating pomp of the moment, and not being a naturally gifted speaker, he seemed to flounder badly, perhaps exhausted by the sheer intensity and convolution of a competition he was participating in for the first time. The contestant that surprised everyone most was the laconic former head of state and retired army general, Buhari. This is his fourth time of running for president, but this is his first time of really participating in a solid and demanding primary. His patience was probably tested badly, and he sometimes looked like he was being made to participate in a needless and humiliating contest. But his opening remarks were appropriately short and pungent, and his acceptance speech to wearied delegates harassed by more than 24 hours of intense jostling was also inspiringly but guardedly succinct.

    Altogether, the APC primary points to better days ahead for the party and the country. The party will go from the primary on a high, bolstered by the virtuoso performance they gave Nigerians last week, a performance underscored by the many dignitaries and governors who participated in the show, a performance that is bound to make the country give a second thought to the party’s claims to moral and ideological superiority. Coming on the same day the PDP concocted a regrettable and artificial show in Abuja, the conduct of the APC primary is bound to elicit salutary electoral responses from Nigerians. If the party manages to handle the choice of Gen Buhari’s running mate well (See Box), and given the incontestable fact that Dr Jonathan is right now at his most vulnerable, the APC would probably win the presidency irrespective of earlier projections by detractors inspired by the prejudice of a large section of the media.

    For the second time in a few years, Dr Jonathan will be squaring off for a fight with the expressionless Gen Buhari. It will be a titanic struggle, the final for both men. More, it will be a struggle that will define and shape Nigeria. It will be a contest between a straight talker and a waffler, a patriot and an opportunist, a man of steel and a man of lead, a general with distinctly Bismarckian and ambitious worldview and a civilian with unmistakably restrictive and insular perspective, the former ennobled by his patriotic glow, and the latter sullied by his provincialism. But since the capacity and capability of Dr Jonathan are very well known, none of which inspires admiration or respect, the greater onus is on Gen Buhari to prove that his party did not make a mistake electing him their champion in the coming war, that his can-do spirit and hunger for order and progress far outweigh his past foibles, impetuousness, suspect democratic credentials, and lack of policy and administrative depth.

    The PDP will make herculean efforts to centre the campaign on issues of religion, ethnicity and unsubstantiated and exaggerated achievements. The PDP had clothed the APC in religious garb, and labeled its leaders desperate power grabbers and autocrats. But having had the good fortune of a successful presidential primary, the APC will work hard to focus attention on the president’s uncoordinated and amateurish approach to governance, weaknesses, hesitations, the Chibok schoolgirls disaster, economic downturn, social decay, poor national image, unending insurgency, and a host of other clear evidence of poor performance, poor judgement and overall poor leadership tending towards apocalypse. Dr Jonathan is unlikely to dispel grave and sobering doubts about his competence between now and February.

  • APC, running mate and options for 2015

    APC, running mate and options for 2015

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) is about to discover that deciding on Gen Muhammadu Buhari’s running mate is much tougher than electing their standard-bearer. It is not simply because that choice, once it is made, has the potential to make or mar the ticket, it is because navigating the treacherous courses of Nigeria’s competing groups and issues has become almost an impossible task. Asked a few days before the primary whether he countenanced picking a Muslim as his running mate, Gen Buhari prevaricated. He said he preferred to defer to his party, and then went on to anchor his hesitations on historical facts confirming that Nigerians previously voted for same faith candidates and running mates. He was, however, indicating that his party was battling to make up its mind, and that one or two of the leading contenders for the running mate position are Muslims.

    The incredibly successful conduct of the APC presidential primary, and in particular the election of Gen Buhari, places a huge burden on the party to make the right choice, one that would add value to the principles and philosophy of the party, and one that would inspire and fire the country to put a definitive end to PDP’s reign in 2015. That choice must not diminish the ticket or vitiate its battle preparedness. Two hard choices stare the APC in the face. First is whether to produce a running mate from the Southwest or elsewhere. And the second is whether to gamble on a Muslim-Muslim ticket.

    The choice the party makes, in its daringness and appropriateness, will be a reflection of how desperate it wants to dethrone the PDP. Once that choice is made, it will be irreversible. If it is the right choice the dynamics of electioneering will trigger a momentum that will ferry the party into the presidency. But if it is the wrong choice, the same cruel dynamics will put the party on the defensive and wreck its chances, perhaps for a long time. No person, indeed no analyst, can claim to have the answer or see into the future. However, propelled by a primary election high, it seems much more sensible for the APC to avoid rashness and overconfidence in order to sustain the momentum, and also to ensure that the issues that will shape the February poll will not be polluted by Dr Jonathan’s desperate government.

    First, the Southwest and its leaders may reason that having inspired the formation of APC, and having as it were led it so creatively, though under the weight of accusation by anachronistic members of the Yoruba political elite that the region was being sold cheaply to the Hausa/Fulani oligarchy, they may want to ensure a south-westerner on the ticket. Given the nature of Nigerian politics, especially the enormous powers wielded by the presidency over the ruling party, it is understandable why APC leaders from the Southwest would want someone from the zone on the ticket. The problem with that reasoning however is that the impression will be created that their exertions were induced by considerations other than philosophical, and that other powerful concessions bigger and more potent than a running mate cannot be secured. They will be saying that they were not inspired by great democratic principles and nobler motives required to redirect and nurture Nigerian politics and democracy along the civilising lines which contentious Yoruba leaders led by Ayo Adebanjo and others in Afenifere have failed to understand. Unknown to many, Nigerian politics is being restructured fundamentally away from the bigotries and antagonisms of the past. That process, masterminded by the APC, must not be aborted.

    Second, because Dr Jonathan is at his most vulnerable does not mean he is already dead meat. The APC must therefore weigh the risk of presenting a Muslim-Muslim ticket. Given how badly Dr Jonathan and his supporters have muddied Nigeria’s political waters and fouled it with ethnic and religious prejudices, the APC will find it difficult convincing itself it is prepared to sail near the wind with a Muslim-Muslim ticket. It is of course nonsensical to religionise party tickets, as if same faith tickets would ineluctably promote one religion over the other. But the APC must be capable of reading the signs of the times, and of making choices that show its perceptiveness and acuity of mind. It must be able to anticipate Dr Jonathan’s campaign tactics and not hand it ready ammunition.

    In 2011, Gen Buhari had his best chance of winning the presidency, if only he would reach accommodation with the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). He incredulously made the wrong call. Now, it is not just Gen Buhari’s best chance to win, it is in fact the best chance for his party to win. They must not make the wrong choice. Apart from choosing the right running mate, the party must take over the general’s campaign, steer it away from the insularity that hallmarked his 2011 campaign, mould him as much as they can into a modern leader with believable democratic credentials and founder’s mentality, and into a politician who envisions great things, has the capacity to relate creatively with the National Assembly, and is capable of taking the people to a height that exists only in their constructive imagination. Whatever they do, APC leaders must recognise that their first task is to win and save Nigeria from apocalypse. Nothing must interfere with those noble goals of saving democracy and rebuilding this shattered and dispirited country.