Category: Sunday

While the traditional media have been under tremendous pressure to shape up or ship out, social media and civil society organisations have continued to enjoy unparalleled freedom in fouling the national well of trust and sowing discord among the people. Yet, the wasteland some civil society organisations have created should justify some firm and consistent regulation. The social media is anarchical; and it will take some exemplary regulations to rein them in. Civil society organisations, on the other hand, can still be safely regulated to some extent because they are registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). Two CSOs illustrate the informational crisis and public perception dilemma Nigeria is contending with.

The 2023 polls have exposed the quandary Nigeria has found itself in its effort to curb the maladies perpetrated by partisan CSOs. The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) founded in 2007, and the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) also founded a year later in 2008, have since last year been unable disguise their partisanship, whether political, religious or ethnic. Fecund at producing press statements, but often unreflective and undiscriminating in their opinions, they have immersed themselves in every controversy imaginable with magisterial finality, and have left no one in doubt where their preferences lie, and have spoken on television and disseminated their views through newspapers with vexing openness. Since they continue to receive significant hearing from the media, they have not felt compelled to summon the restraint and caution needed to imbue their operations with credibility.

In the last polls, the Abuja-based HURIWA and the Onitsha-based Intersociety have been unabashedly pro-Labour Party (LP). They clearly refused to limit themselves to isolating issues and principles violated by all political parties and the electoral body, INEC, for mention, discussion and castigation. Instead, their press statements had deployed fiery and damaging phrases and words to demarket the All Progressives Congress (APC) and rhapsodise the LP. If both CSOs continue to give free rein to their partisan preferences, and subscribe to wild and sweeping but illogical generalisations, it won’t be long before they constitute themselves into the main opposition to the ruling party.

In its response to the February and March polls, HURIWA for instance betrayed its partisanship by coveting the senate presidency for the Southeast and denouncing any northern bid for it. Even if the logic of their position is acceptable, it is not clear that they argued their cause temperately and maturely. “Our suggestion is that the Senate president should be given to the Southeast,” the HURIWA press statement began undisguisedly quoting Emmanuel Onwubiko. “The reason is that the Southeast constitutes one of the legs of Nigeria’s major ethnic groups.” But just in case anyone liked to suggest that the CSO was partisan, as indeed its statement presupposed, it quickly threw in this caveat: “First and foremost we want to state that we are an organisation that is not partisan…Good governance means we are supposed to have institutions that function optimally and benefit the citizens of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Hence, we need a solidly grounded Senate President and a Speaker in order for those individuals to offer what they call checks and balances to the head of the executive arm of government. We want to warn that the next National Assembly shouldn’t be the kind of National Assembly that we now have.” The statement may lack precision and may even be contradictory, but it left no one in doubt what factors coloured their affections.

Even before the polls, in those giddy days when they remorselessly pitched for LP, HURIWA had announced why they deprecated the APC’s Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket. The organisation’s spokesman said with explosive rage: “Before the elections, we warned that allowing a party that has the same faith ticket to produce a President and a vice was going to be devastating for the country.” They did not say and have still not proved the devastation they predicted. It was, therefore, easy for the organisation to weigh in after the polls on what it described as the Yoruba-Igbo ethnic clash in Lagos. It concluded without any substantiation that the Igbo were ‘massively’ attacked in Lagos for ‘overwhelmingly’ supporting the LP presidential and governorship candidates. Perhaps this was the devastation the organisation implausibly referenced. But other states, including in the Southeast, had a far higher casualty rate than Lagos. Why were those states not in focus? This dilemma did not, however, stop HURIWA from threateningly concluding to write “a very powerful letter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague demanding visa ban on enemies of free press and democracy.” How did the issue of free or repressed press conflate with the ‘devastating attacks’?

Intersociety was even more hysterical. Despite the relatively peaceful polls in Lagos and the very low casualty figure – just one confirmed dead – the CSO evoked images of the Rwandan genocide and warned that Lagos was descending into a ‘genocidal enclave’ on account of the statements of APC spokesmen. The organisation even delved into the tangential issue of the LP presidential candidate’s ordeal at the hands of United Kingdom immigration officials at Heathrow Airport, deploring the British authorities for ‘criminalising and assaulting’ him. The statement was revelatory of Intersociety being anything but a civil society organisation. Agitated and frantically active during and after the polls, Intersociety denounced the government for raising ‘false treason alarm’ against Peter Obi and his running mate in the last presidential poll, and predisposing them to what it hyperbolically described as ‘harassment, jihadist assassination plots, and cyber attacks’. Then it recklessly and slanderously listed 50 vice chancellors/professors and 34 others whom it believed rigged the election in favour of the APC. Intersociety of course exculpated a few professors from the Southeast, but raised huge defamatory campaign against the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Olukayode Ariwoola, for allegedly fraternising with the APC, and insisting that ‘state jihadism and radical Islamism’ were responsible for ‘INEC brutally rigging the election’.

Neither HURIWA nor Intersociety, despite their avalanche of press statements given prominence in the media, is really a civil society organisation. They have become partisan and covert arms of the LP and Obi/Datti campaign organisation. As their statements and activities in the last few months illustrate, they are undoubtedly ethnic and religious tools deployed for nefarious purposes. Now that the elections are over, and supposing that they can be tamed to fulfill the purposes for which they were registered, it is expected that they will reorient themselves, temper their hysteria, and caution their generalisations and apocalyptic delusions. If they will not, it will not be out of place if the authorities can nudge them in the right direction using constructive legal corollaries.

JUST when Nigerians thought they had figured out President Muhammadu Buhari, they immediately discovered to their dismay that he is far more mysterious and unpredictable than they can possibly decipher with any tool available to them. Banking on what seemed his long-running and consistent opposition to the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo had urged the president to abort the electoral process midway into the presidential election. And also believing that all the president needed to annul the APC presidential victory were well-aimed threats of apocalypse, the Labour Party (LP) presidential running mate Datti Baba-Ahmed attempted to terrify and blackmail both the president and Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Olukayode Ariwoola not to dare crown the winner. But President Buhari mystified them all by shrugging off all the threats; and he will keep mystifying everyone to the very end, perhaps far beyond the commodious surroundings of Daura, Niger Republic, and Kaduna, his avowed retirement homes.

It is not hard to see why nearly everyone, but a few cognoscenti, misread the president. He has a curious sense of humour that is at once sardonic and bucolic, a subtle and sometimes mischievous laughter aimed from his belly against those who deem themselves his betters, and mordant wit delivered at cocktails, like his last Sallah outing in Abuja, with savage delight and simplicity. In his Sallah remarks, he delivered his now famous apology about those he had hurt in his nearly eight years of leadership. Why, he hurt everybody nearly every month and year of his presidency as a result of his controversial and ill-digested policies and measures, his critics snorted. Few attempted to situate that apology within his essential identity as a jocose provincial, and against the background of his wry and coruscating humour. How, his cynical detractors mused, could a stoic and evidently laconic leader accustomed to Spartan living and indifferent to hardship and punishment apologise for anything?

Look at the famous apology textually. “There is no doubt I hurt some people, and I wish you will pardon me; and those that think that I have hurt them so much, please pardon me,” he was quoted to have said moments after returning home from the Abuja Eid grounds where he had joined other residents for the Sallah prayers. In the Southwest, an outgoing leader is unlikely to offer any apologies, regardless of the unfavourable impressions his leadership might have created. In fact, he is likely to cap his valedictory with the 1969 Frank Sinatra classic, My Way, a song composed by Jacques Revaux with lyrics by Gilles Thibaut and Claude François. Though first performed in 1967 by Claude François and was re-written by Paul Anka for Sinatra, it remains an evergreen to which outgoing leaders, both great and small, are besotted.

Regale yourself with the first stanza of the song:

And now, the end is near,

And so I face the final curtain.

My friends, I’ll say it clear;

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain.

I’ve lived a life that’s full –

I’ve travelled each and every highway.

And more, much more than this,

I did it my way.

In some places, perhaps including where President Buhari hails from, an apology is sometimes the final curtain routine rarely offered with any meaningful conviction. He may on the surface feel squeamish about leaving office, but he is at bottom glad and relieved to go. He feels nostalgic about Daura and his farm, and he has an innate longing for Niger Republic, a longing he ventilated through many creative and sometimes flagrant excesses during his presidency. And in the same way Ibadan (now Lagos) captivated the Yoruba, Port Harcourt the Ijaw, Enugu the Igbo, Maiduguri the Kanuri and allied tribes, and Jos the Middle Belters, Kaduna is the affectionate, more personal and cosmopolitan city of northern intelligentsia and retired military generals. President Buhari will cavort between Daura, Kaduna and, only to a little and perhaps hypothetical extent, an indeterminate town in Niger Republic. His sentiments may cause him to apologise over some of his ‘hurtful’ policies, but given his antecedents, he is unlikely to mean the apology literally. He is not only stoical, and as a military general views apologies as a sign of weakness and an admission of fallibility and poor judgement, he is also by training defiant and unflinching in the face of abuse, criticisms and danger. There is of course the little inconvenience of not being too conversant with how a modern economy runs, and he may have fatally trusted ignorant and half-baked advisers on a number of financial and business policies, but considering the fact that he was weaned on the religious principle that only God is perfect, he would by his reticence and defiance dare anyone to demand a real apology.

Were many people, and perhaps a whole nation as his critics surmised, hurt by his policies? Why, of course, yes; millions and millions. Consider the manner he barked up the wrong tree with his naira swap policy and doubled down on the expensive and destabilising cattle grazing measure, both of which spawned social monsters and significant suffering and death across the nation. And also look at his vacillations within and outside the APC, and his quintessential approach to the rule of law as a subsumption of national interest. Then peruse his economic policies, such as relates to agriculture and extensive border closures, and note why many Nigerians suffered agonising pains as a result of too many misplaced policies. But contradistinctively, it must also be said for him that he did many things right too: rails, roads, bridges, and free and fair polls, regardless of social media perceptions. So, on the surface, there were costly mistakes to attract apologies. Yet, the apology he gave during the last Sallah celebrations was more perfunctory than real.

Beyond the sanctity and propriety of the president’s apology was his diagnosis of how the last presidential poll was won and lost. Here, he was unerring. The opposition has tried to frame their loss in terms of electoral malfeasance perpetrated by both the electoral umpire, INEC, and the ruling party. But they are making heavy weather of their explanations in the same atrocious way they have tragically and mendaciously tried to label the October 2020 Lekki Tollgate protest suppression as a massacre. They have not read the judicial panel report, and have also refused to apply logic in deciphering the last presidential poll outcome. But the president was succinct in his appraisal of the poll. Said he: “Now, their over-confidence is creating more problems for the opposition than anyone else. They are finding it hard to convince those who supported them from outside why they are unable to beat us (APC). A combination of overconfidence, complacency and bad tactical moves made them lose, plain and clear. This has created more problems in their camp. Why did they fail to remove us?… An important reason I congratulate Asiwaju on winning is because the opposition got support and false hope from outside and went on to create the impression that they would win, that they would defeat us.  How more wrong could anyone be?”

It would indeed be incredible for any analyst with modest competence to argue that either the LP or the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won the poll. How could they, after dividing themselves into four debilitated groups, hope to unseat a ruling party that went into the election more or less united? The president suggested that the opposition was plagued with disunity and overconfidence. Yes, the opposition was fragmented into four parts, but their disunity, this column had suggested, was due to supernatural factors beyond them, not overconfidence. It was as clear as daylight to any casual observer that if they went into the presidential poll disunited, they would be beaten. Yet, they spurned unity and scorned one another. Nigerians are curious to know why since the poll outcome, the president has been enthusiastic and discursive on the APC victory. Was it the enormous obstacles he erected in the path of the eventual winner of the poll, which were meant to portray the presidency as neutral and to burnish the president’s image as a fair-minded leader? Or was it because Asiwaju Tinubu, the man who twice rallied to his cause and in his view possesses the capacity to govern, won? Whatever it is, President Buhari’s general diagnosis of why the opposition lost is incontrovertible, and his relief and enthusiasm at his party’s victory are palpable, justifiable, and unmistakable. He will leave office next month, as he says; and despite any apology he might offer and to whatever intent, he will be relieved, satisfied, and deeply and enormously fulfilled that democracy, if not brilliant leadership, had afforded him two terms and an apotheosis his reign as military head of state could never hope to give.