In the February 25th Election, the IReV combined results from all the 3Units, scanned and transferred to INEC. This entailed addition and compilation at the Polling Unit before forwarding, giving rise to errors and or manipulations as evident from the cancellations and overwriting. Of course the figures forwarded were very different from the Polling Unit counting.
But yesterday, before 6pm, it was possible to have the Polling Unit figures and the IReV. This time, each Polling Unit was transferred separately. And, voila, the P.U figures agreed with the IReV. What remains is the final stage, INEC figures. All the brickbats could have been avoided if INEC had done, in the National Elections of Feb 25, what they did yesterday. The Umpire would not have been besieged.
THE hitches and glitches that accompanied the 2023 polls have been accentuated by the presidential and governorship elections in Lagos won, lost and met by the All Progressives Congress (APC) with mixed feelings and signals. Worse happened elsewhere, but social media fury catalysed by south-eastern political voyeurs and religious fanatics gave the impression that the whole elections were imperfect and irredeemably flawed. The country is unlikely to make the mistake of cancelling or annulling the elections, as some people advocate, for the crises it would trigger would be unmanageable, far beyond the romantic catharsis insinuated into such undertaking. The world, despite their initial misgivings accentuated by social media fantasies, has since congratulated the winners and moved on. They see the elections as concluded, notwithstanding some imperfections. Nothing will change the outcome of both the February 25 and March 18 polls except minimal judicial interventions.
Both the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party (LP) standard-bearers in the February poll are loth to accept the result, especially given the way their scalps were filleted by the APC and their reputations openly sullied. Both candidates are also conflicted about the National Assembly results, and are even more hesitant about the state elections; but their victorious governors and lawmakers in the February and March polls are resolute in keeping the birds in hand. Messrs Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi know they didn’t win the presidential poll, and could not have won, given the implacable divisions in their ranks; this is why they hedge their legal challenges with calls for poll cancellation. They wish to be declared winner, but failing that, they would not mind annulment or an interim contraption. They have thus embarked on street activism despite knowing that neither the legislature nor the executive could do anything about the poll results, for the matter is now exclusively in the hands of the courts.
Since neither the former vice president nor the former Anambra governor is ignorant of the constitutional stipulations concerning defective elections, it is now clear that what both gentlemen want, especially instigated by powerful shadowy figures such as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, is interim government. How they hope to manage the composition and structure of an interim administration, and by whom, is impossible to fathom. President Muhammadu Buhari may have his failings, some of them interwoven with his difficult, sometimes narrow and controversial worldview, but he is dead set against any tenure elongation or involvement in the murky waters of interim government. He may not be as self-conceited as, say, Chief Obasanjo, but he is smart enough to know that once he embarked on that slippery road, no one, not even the malevolent former president, could tell where that treacherous path would lead to.
Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi carelessly and casually suggest interim government; but even they may not be prepared for its consequences. Surely those who won the presidential poll and took a majority of the state polls would not be of one mind with the proponents of annulment. The PDP and LP candidates remind everyone of the case adjudicated by the Israeli king, Solomon, who ordered the bisection of a baby in order to discover its real mother. The disturbing reality emerging after the elections is that neither Alhaji Atiku nor Mr Obi is really a democrat. They are not averse to extra-constitutional arrangements to mollify the shame they felt being defeated in an election they stood no chance of winning as a result of their political miscalculations. Both contestants as well as the many powerful individuals and baleful religious leaders in the background unused to having a strong president in office will continue to campaign, malign, sponsor propaganda against the polls, and engage in street protests in order to lessen the chance of a peaceful transfer of power in May.
President Buhari will not buckle. Nor will heaven. The inauguration will come and go without any incident. Those who have the gift of reading the signs of the times know this. The PDP and LP candidates and their political menagerie of instigators will continue to threaten fire and doom, but their wishes will be delusional. The social media, long deployed as a feral beast to harass and to heckle, will continue to lunge at everyone; but in the end, nothing will come out of their attacks. The military will not contemplate any action, for they are not fools. If they didn’t get away with the Ibrahim Babangida interim government contraption, and barely avoided another civil war in the 1990s, why would they repeat the folly? After all, they still teach history in military academies. Protesters egged on by bribes will also soon tire out, for no patron, regardless of his wealth, will be able to afford the unending flow of slush money needed to pacify drifters. The continuing effort by politicians and their media hacks to discredit the polls will soon peter out into fatuous and ineffective effusions.
Apart from inviting his co-contestants to join hands with him in pacifying the country and helping to sustain democracy and the rule of law, the president-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, can do little else. He will expect President Buhari to remain firm in the face of subterranean buffetings and political machinations. He will also expect Nigerians who detest both the unconstitutional manoeuvres and the influence peddling of northern and southern cabals to resist the plot by unprincipled and desperate PDP and LP candidates to scuttle democracy. But once inauguration is held, the new president will enunciate policies and ideas to heal and unite the country, knowing full well that the journey ahead would be long and hard. His immediate concerns will be the recalibration of the economy and the restoration of peace and security all over the country. Given the way he campaigned, and the way he has spoken after his victory, he will not embark on political vendetta, nor design policies and programmes to exclude one group or another.
But some of his biggest healing challenges will revolve around the irritating residues of presidential and governorship politics. He successfully built a tensile coalition involving the Northwest, Northeast, North-Central and Southwest, with smatterings of support from the South-South and a token from the Southeast; yet he may underestimate the potential damage the PDP and LP may have exposed the country to in whipping up regional, ethnic and religious sentiments during the campaigns. Alhaji Atiku, for instance, attempted to exploit ethnic sentiment in the old political North. Fortunately, it was less successful than feared. The APC secured a majority of votes in the old North. However, looking at the difference between the presidential and governorship polls, it is evident that ethnic politics still played a significant and stultifying role. Mr Obi did the most damage, and he did it remorselessly. Not only did he lather his presidential bid in the Southeast with ethnic colouration, perhaps believing that he stood no chance otherwise, he exported that crass narrowness to the Southwest and every pocket where the Igbo people congregate and do business. He was unabashed and relentless. It was, therefore, not surprising that his brand of ethnic politics came full obnoxious circle as well as played out to the hilt in Lagos during the governorship poll.
Much worse, and in an unprecedented manner, Mr Obi cashed in on the smouldering religious discontent all over Nigeria and gave it unparalleled energy. In the past, religious sentiment was exploited subtly and nervously in politics; but the LP candidate simply threw caution to the wind and made an open and obscene show of pitching for church votes. He traversed churches, indifferent to what Muslims thought or felt; and though he did not possess any doctrinal fidelity to the gospel, and may in fact be impliedly either atheistic or syncretic at bottom, he launched into the most consuming and ferocious farming of church votes ever. In so doing, he took the church down with him into the murky and sacrilegious waters of politics. If contrition is still possible, it will take a lot of efforts and time by church leaders to regain the trust and confidence of beleaguered worshippers long accustomed to the moral and judgemental infallibility of priests.
How a President Tinubu will heal these ethnic and religious divides remains to be seen, especially because his haters appear to be implacably opposed to his strong and confident personality, and especially as the peculiarity of his Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket also appeared to be the trigger for such hatred. He will hope that the graciousness, if not suavity, with which he related with and disarmed the Lagos chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), thus making them trust him implicitly, will be replicated at the national level. Should he prove capable of doing that, the religious divide may be obscured or obliterated. Going by his antecedents, he seems capable of doing just that. But what will not be as easy is erasing the fault lines religious politics has inspired and entrenched in the Southwest where they were least visible and inconsequential for centuries. Even more precariously, President Tinubu will make heavy weather of attenuating the ethnic fault lines Mr Obi’s unorthodox and desperate politics has calcified in Lagos and, ominously, in the Southwest. (See Box). Except he can, together with national lawmakers, find a constitutional formula that harks back to the federalism of the early 1950s, the scar the battle for Lagos has etched in the psyche of many people may be difficult to remove. At the core of that dissonance in Lagos and the Southeast are the cultural ossifications of the Yoruba and the Igbo. Those ossifications are not inspiring, nor do they conduce to healing, peace and stability. In the absence of a cultural formula to mediate that conflict, and as the society modernises and complexifies, it will get increasingly difficult to engender the trust and friendship needed to maintain peace in highly competitive milieus.
2023 poll: The battle of Lagos
AFTER winning the March 18 governorship poll in Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu declared that there was no victor and no vanquished. It was in an inaccurate and perfunctory depiction that does not mirror the reality of contemporary Lagos. The fact is that someone was vanquished, and someone was a victor. Even more, the resentment that flowed from the poll will linger for far longer than anyone dared to think. The resentment was caused by the fact that the victorious and defeated camps were nearly neatly divided in two: on the one hand is Mr Sanwo-Olu, his party the All Progressives Congress (APC), and the Yoruba who rallied behind the banner of reclaiming the state from ‘invaders’; and on the other hand are the Labour Party (LP), its governorship candidate Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, and the Igbo who rallied behind him. The division is of course oversimplified, for there are some Yoruba who voted LP, and Igbo who voted APC.
But analysts have suggested that the acrimony and ethnic bigotry that accompanied the 2023 Lagos governorship poll was a throwback to the story of Lagos and the Western Region in 1951, when the Yoruba and Igbo also squared up for the regional diadem. Then, as now, the outcome was predictable, despite tons of painful, inciting and provocative rhetoric which pitched the Yoruba against the Igbo. If a constitutional solution that transcends Lagos and the Southwest is not found to mediate ethnic and religious politics in Nigeria, the crisis Lagos exhibited in unsightly colours in the 2023 elections will repeat itself and even get exacerbated. The Igbo have settled in large numbers and prospered in Lagos; it is unlikely they will not persist in their demand for more political inclusion. It is also unlikely that given the way the Igbo circle the wagons and vote en bloc – often against the dominant faction – that the Yoruba will not be alarmed that plans are afoot to dispossess them of their economic navel. So, it is not just the resentment between the two ethnic groups that will linger, their cultural worldview and political attitude to Lagos, and indeed the Southwest, will also harden. Sermonising and political counseling will not change these dispositions in any fundamental way.
One of the reasons that led to hardening of ethnic dispositions in Lagos is the environment in which the governorship poll was held. Lagosians have tried to isolate and insulate themselves from the wider Yoruba politics, insisting that they would not be swamped by the rest of Yorubaland. The Yoruba have of course ignored the protest and have insisted that the larger Lagos State, not to be confused with the former Lagos colony, was Western Region, which they have an obligation to defend and to integrate. Had they not done so over the decades, they insisted, the state, not just the colony, would have been overrun by the more business inclined and aggressive Igbo. It was, therefore, not difficult to situate the ambition of Mr Rhodes-Vivour within the context of the competing and existential struggle between the Igbo and the Yoruba. He did not help matters by his disinterest in Yoruba language and culture, dispositions worsened by the insular manner the Igbo rallied behind him, owned his ambition, and loudly and garishly proclaimed that ambition as inviolable. They then argued that within Nigeria’s constitutional stricture, not to say the cosmopolitan nature of Lagos, anyone, including the Igbo and the half-Igbo Mr Rhodes-Vivour, could aspire to any office.
If the Lagos quandary blindsided the constitution, and the document had no answer to the fears and apprehensions of the Yoruba, nor the desires and aspirations for inclusiveness of the Igbo, the social media was even less helpful. Incendiary rhetoric swpt the internet and amplified hate speech and disharmony to such a point that civil unrest or bloody skirmishes were not too far-fetched. Leading Igbo and Yoruba rhetoricians unabashedly promoted discord, while few rational analyses and discussions took place. The constitution did not anticipate that only a few states in the country would prosper so extraordinarily, thus triggering episodic influx of migrants, nor did it constrain week-old migrants from registering to vote in prosperous Lagos and other large cities. Lagos then became a victim of its success. More damningly, few people paused to wonder why, despite the pacesetting and unprecedented infrastructural development in Lagos, anyone would want to vote out Mr Sanwo-Olu or denounce the template inspired by president-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Worse, Mr Rhodes-Vivour was inexperienced, and had neither a governing or ideological template, nor the temperament and judgement needed to manage the fifth largest economy in Africa. To support his ambition as a few Afenifere leaders and the sullen Bode George and most Igbo did was nothing but suicidal.
What emerged from the last governorship poll was a determination by the Yoruba to be deliberately biased in favour of Lagos and their kin. Perhaps if Mr Rhodes-Vivour had played his politics well, distanced himself from ethnic extremists, demonstrated managerial or at least ideational competence, and refused to ride on the coattail of the equally ethnically divisive LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi, he would have been seen as credible. The mantra ‘Lagos for Lagos’ will get more diminished, and the larger Yoruba, having been sensitised to what they interpret as Igbo invasion, will loom much larger over the state going forward. The Southwest sees other regions protecting their own, and resisting incursions to dilute their heritage; they will feel more maternally inclined to protecting Lagos and resisting the diffusion and weakening which unregulated multiculturalism and untrammeled migration promote. Few multiethnic or multiracial countries are spared these enervating contradictions and conflicts: Belgium, Canada, United States, Switzerland, India, Russia, China, etc. The problem is widespread. It is thus futile pretending that such sentiments and rigidity are unique to Nigeria, or that multiculturalism, democracy and cosmopolitanism will extirpate primordial sentiments and attachments. It is urgent for Nigeria’s political leaders to develop a constitutional arrangement to arrest the drift towards chaos. The country escaped this fate by whiskers in the last polls. It may not be so lucky next time.
“My political strength is in my sincere relationship with my friends across Nigeria. We have been friends for decades. You can’t use over 40 years of your life to pretend, … I did not wake up one day to say that I want to lead Nigeria. I was on queue too for decades, the queue of friendship, the queue of perseverance, the queue of track records, the queue of capacity, capability and patriotism.” – Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the President Elect of Nigeria. “Nigeria’s politics is just so fascinating. I was here for the last election and I will finish with this election. I am indeed impressed with Nigeria’s democratic journey … Yes, there have been some setbacks but overall, I see this as positive and Nigerians should be proud.” – United Kingdom High Commissioner to Nigeria, Her Excellency Catriona Liang.
It is heartwarming to read and hear congratulatory messages coming from across the globe directed to the President Elect and the Nigerian government, some tinge with titbits of critiquing the electoral process. In all, even the one from the United States of America (USA) government, there was none that was overtly or covertly canvassing the throwing away of the baby with the bathwater, to wit: cancelling the election outrightly. Surmising it in unison, they all point to the fact that Nigeria must improve the process going forward. Most significantly of the endorsement, the one that was seemingly unbiased and represented objective perception was the one given by the outgoing United Kingdom High Commissioner to Nigeria, Her Excellency Catriona Liang. In her farewell visit to the Senate President, Senator Ahmad Lawan, she saliently and succinctly stated: “Nigeria’s politics is just so fascinating. I was here for the last election and I will finish with this election. I am indeed impressed with Nigeria’s democratic journey … Yes, there have been some setbacks but overall, I see this as positive and Nigerians should be proud.”
Erstwhile President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua came in as president and immediately attested that the poll that produced him as the de facto man in the saddle, was greatly flawed and he initiated a reform straightway! Will Tinubu tilt the scale in such a way that future polls will be much more credible that invariably will make most stakeholders perceive the outcome as fair and square? It is obviously known that whatever degree of fairness and openness exhibited and exemplified by the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), there would be irreconcilable issues that the courts will still attend to. This is allowed for in democracy; and it is a path of honour that true democrats will resort to rather than agitating and angling for violence.
Presidential Poll: Posers!
Youth speaking with their votes: Did the President Elect hear very well, and will he heed to their heart-cry for a proactive, productive, progressive and prosperous country that will avail opportunities for the teeming youths without necessarily having to be highly connected to a governor, senator, legislator, minister, or any top politician at the state or federal level? In the President Elect acceptance speech, he succinctly stated inter alia: “Now, to you, the young people of this country, I hear you loud and clear. I understand your pains, your yearnings for good governance, a functional economy and a safe nation that protects you and your future.” It is equally good for the incoming government to expeditiously utilize the transition period between now and 29th May 2023 to initiate interfacing with the diverse youth groups in a bid to address their anglings and agitations whilst being allowed to voice their frustration as expression not vocalized can turn to depression. One beauty of democracy is that it does allow the minority to have their say whilst the majority will have their way. Howbeit, a leader, who considers himself as the father of the huge house called Nigeria, will not just sit and side with the majority but, in going forward, seek to hear the angst of the minority against the system that has resorted to the “japa” syndrome. I was lecturing one of them who has japa to a country in Europe on the need to kowtow my political leaning, and she retorted by saying that she would love to see the quality of life in that country in Nigeria, but alas the old politicians have failed them. To her, and many of them, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People Democratic Party (PDP) are the same. In essence, this explained the raison d’etre of many of them routing for the Labour Party (LP) forgetting that the candidate of LP, former Governor Peter Obi was part of the old brigade junketing from All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) to PDP and now to LP, all in a bid to jostle for visibility or better positioning. Definitely, a proactive and progressive youth reorientation should be inculcated into governance without delay whilst issues raised by the bulging youth population are swiftly addressed strategically within the nick of time. It is instructive for the ruling party, and specifically the President Elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to note that one thing that would have taken the wind out of the sail in the presidential poll was the inability of the teeming youths to carry their crusade penetrating the northern part of the country just like it garnered momentum in the southern part. This was a replica of the infamous #EndSars saga! Hence, better to make hay whilst the sun shines! The bulging youthful population (with about 70% of the population under the age of 30), with their energies and enthusiasm could be properly harnessed for optimal national development otherwise the teeming youths could become the devil’s workshop as nearly 20% of them are unemployed or unengaged (statista.com, 2021).
Religious connotation and confrontation in the run off to the presidential poll? The ruling party, though not ruing for going the route of the much controversial Muslim-Muslim ticket that majorly pitched the majority of the Christians against the joint ticket of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Senator Kashim Shettima, will need to bounce back in going forward in governance that the party is not skewed towards Islam, and in fact, has no surreptitious Islamic agenda as some purveyors within the fold have intimated the flock. This angst was partly responsible for the outcome of the poll in Lagos, Federal Capital Territory and Plateau. Yours sincerely belonged to diverse Christian platforms that open support for Tinubu was anathema to the ears of many. It is interesting and intriguing that such supporters were not spared fire and brimstone especially taking cognizance of the apparent incompetence cum negligence of the incumbent administration in checkmating and crippling demeaning damages done to the flock of Christ in states like Kaduna, Plateau, Benue, Taraba, etc. It was amazing that Benue State was narrowly won by APC in the presidential polls against bookmakers’ postulation. The feat was largely attributed to the political prodigy and personae of the duo of Chief George Akume, a long-time ally of Asiwaju Tinubu, and the influential gubernatorial candidate of the party in the state, Rev. Father Hyacinth Iormem Alia. The question is: how will the new government blunt the supposedly sharp edge of religious scheming and schism polluting and polarizing our politics and politicking within Nigeria’s context? This is a seemingly herculean task that the incoming President and his team have to quickly contend with in the spirit of national true reconciliation before Nigeria turns to another Lebanon! The initial appointments into positions in both the executive and legislature will prove naysayers wrong or otherwise. Followers are watching keenly.
Regional raison d’etre and rationalization in the choice of who to govern or lead is one danger of our nascent democracy. This was clearly palpable in the last presidential poll with distinguishing depiction in the southeastern region of Nigeria. Is the trend not damningly deplorable to the development of our democracy? What are the “lessons learnt” and how will this be diffused nationally in future polls? It is worth interrogating the votes garnered by the Labour Party (LP) in the southeastern states to not only decipher their credibility but the acclaimed voting pattern of the Igbos in that part of the country. Same should be done for Lagos and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). It was obvious that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the PDP won Osun in the southwest; and in Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa in the southsouth. Equally, Asiwaju Tinubu won outside his southwest base in the northeast, northwest, northcentral; one state in the southsouth (Rivers) with none in the south east. In the same vein, Atiku did not win any state in the south east, the traditional stronghold of the main opposition party, the People Democratic Party (PDP). All said and done, with Tinubu losing Lagos, his de facto fiefdom; his Campaign Director General, Governor Lalong losing Plateau; President Buhari losing Katsina; the Chairman of his party, Senator Adamu losing Nasarawa; and key helmsmen of APC (Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Yobe, Kebbi. Gombe) losing their states to the PDP and NNPP – the latter in Kano. It was only erstwhile Governor Peter Obi that swept all the stakes in the states of the southeast (Enugu, Anambra, Abia, Imo and Ebonyi) leaving none for any other party with exceptional and eccentric huge margins in all the states. Most analysts concur ethnicity amplified in the outcome of the poll in this region and hence the need for the people of the southeast to politically retreat, rethink and restrategize in future polls if anyone from that region will attain the presidency of this country soon. It is amusing that a major socio-cultural organization of the Igbo extraction is vehemently clamouring for a Senate President from the zone in the incoming government forgetting that in politics, the figures at the polls are flaunted at crucial decision-making points especially relating to appointments. However, on the altar of equity, unification and magnanimity, the presidency of Bola Ahmed Tinubu may yield to such an overture from the region where the sun rises.
Lessons Learnt: Going Forward!
In an excellent analysis by the erstwhile Chairman of INEC, Professor Mahmud Jega, he overtly opined: “The top four candidates in this election got 37%, 29%, 25% and 6% respectively. This compares closely with 1979 when Shagari got 34%, Awo got 29%, Zik got 16%, Aminu Kano got 10.28 and Waziri Ibrahim got 10%”. In this columnist’s opinion, this poll of 2023 was the most contested election in Nigeria’s chequered history taking into cognizance the deployment of technology which was not the case in 1979 or subsequent elections. Moreover, the proportion of people who had not been voting in earlier elections was seemingly on the upward rise in this particular election partly due to youth awakening and expressed angst of some people against their faith. In essence, their votes were sent as messages to the party in power. Finally, when all chips are down, Asiwaju Tinubu won, not because of regional or religious reasoning but rather as a result of decades of dedicated bridge building as simply and squarely stated in his own words: “My political strength is in my sincere relationship with my friends across Nigeria. We have been friends for decades. You can’t use over 40 years of your life to pretend, … I did not wake up one day to say that I want to lead Nigeria. I was on queue too for decades, the queue of friendship, the queue of perseverance, the queue of track records, the queue of capacity, capability and patriotism.” This statement of Tinubu was ironically in sync with the stand and stake of Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, former Head of State, whose military junta annulled the June 12 election purportedly won by Chief MKO Abiola. Aftermath of the 2023 presidential poll, he posited: “Failure of Peter Obi in the last election is a failure of religious politics in Nigeria. No one should deceive you again. Failure of Atiku is a failure of regional politics in Nigeria. No one deserves your vote because he’s from your region. With Tinubu, Nigerians chose Nigeria.”
In surmising, INEC, as unbiased and objective umpire, should ensure all i’s are dotted whilst all t’s are crossed in the over 176,000 polling units of the country to ensure fair and credible gubernatorial and house of assembly elections in all the states. There should be better logistics in place than the presidential and national assembly polls. The security agents should enhance their performance more than they did on 25th of February 2023. INEC staff – whether adhoc or permanent – should be above board with no incidence of colluding to alter the people’s will in any constituency or state. This should be sacrosanct! Moreover, the system of counting and collating should be transparently done with appropriate party agents and INEC officials endorsing as stipulated in the Electoral Act. This time around, INEC needs, with the humongous amount at her disposal, to fortify her ICT equipment and personnel against internet cyber-criminals. The regulating agency may need to hire such highly skilled personnel from other climes possessing proven credentials to checkmate hacking of servers. Finally, in almost every presidential election from 1979 to 2023, there have been incidents of the unwarranted “band-wagon effect” of voters angling toward the party that won the presidency or daring intention to cause upset in a state in subsequent gubernatorial and house of assembly elections to the chagrin of the party that won the presidential election, often filliping ethnic or religious card. To this end, this columnist is proposing a system where all the five elections namely: presidential, senatorial, house of representatives, gubernatorial and house of assembly are held on the same day. The arrangement could be such that presidential and national assembly elections will be on one side whilst the gubernatorial and house of assembly elections will be on the other side within the same polling unit. Going forward, this will kill the nauseating band-wagon effect syndrome making some politicians reap where they have not sown. Imagine, this occurred, for instance in Lagos, the gubernatorial election would have been won with huge margin by the incumbent Governor Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu considering opinion polls before the presidential poll. Hence, the need to review and respond to this in future elections as a way of enhancing the electoral process. Nothing is cast in stone in ensuring we get it right!
John Ekundayo, Ph.D. – Harvard-Certified Leadership Strategist, and also a Development Consultant, can be reached via +2348030598267 (WhatsApp only) and drjmoekundayo@hotmail.com
And lastly, ‘Obimedia’ should stop their unpatriotic attempt to undermine the integrity of an election many honest Nigerians including President Buhari believe may turn out to be one of the most credible elections since 1999, won ‘round and square’ by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. This was an election where President Buhari lost his state, the President-elect, his Lagos stronghold and the ruling party losing half of the 22 states it controlled in the run up to the election – Tunde Oluwajuyitan in: ‘Why Obi cannot impose governor on Lagos’, The Nation -Thursday, 16 March, 2023.
I was privileged to have been both student and later, staff of the University of Ife, Ile – Ife, when Olawale Gladstone Emmanuel Rotimi Esq, best known as Ola Rotimi (13 April 1938 – 18 August 2000), one of Nigeria’s leading playwrights, and theatre directors dominated, and popularised, theatre in the Source (i e Ile – Ife).
In one of his plays, the Tortoise, a slow, ugly and absolutely crafty character, was seen preparing to go on a journey and was asked if he must. If you must, when will you return, they asked.” Without the slightest shame, he retorted: “Not until I am disgraced”.
As Lasisi Olagunju once put it, “the Tortoise is that character who fights on both sides, plunging the world around him into needless wars and anguish. Seeing himself as a charmer who cannot fail, he was without any moderation in consumption or in his assumptions.”
He did not care a hoot.
The Tortoise story is analogous to that of Nigeria’s CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, especially in his, presumably, last war on Nigerians, that is, his hairbrained currency re- design and swap policy which, as usual, has spectacularly failed, turning millions of Nigerians to worse than beggars, where they were not dying in banks, queueing to get paid as little as N5000.
However, concerning the ‘currency confiscation’ policy, it is President Mohammadu Buhari I pity the most.
Readers of this column, especially during his first two years in office, would remember how much I eulogised him. Even though I later reconsidered my position, I now earnestly wish he had left office, even a single day, before Emefiele, and his co- conspirators, inflicted this currency deluge on Nigerians.
Who exactly did Garba Shehu think he was deceiving when he issued his meaningless story about the President not directing Emefiele and Malami to flout the Supreme Court judgment? Nigerians know that President Buhari is not heard of hearing but can we also say that he never one day saw, even on television, the thousands of Nigerians milling round empty ATMS, from morning till evening, in those bank branches that still managed to remain open? He was not even bothered that those children of perdition, those God forsaken Boko Haram elements could have decided to vent their own anger on these hapless Nigerians, many of who hadn’t eaten for days as his government has socialised anger and anguish all over the country.
If President Buhari could give a national broadcast to vary the Supreme Court decision, what stopped him from quietly directing his arrogant and intransigent officials to comply with the decision of the highest court of the land?
As I wrote earlier, I sincerely wish, for purposes of historical reckoning, that he had finished his tenure a day earlier than the Emefiele mala fide because, truth be told, President Buhari was in the process of regaining something of his old aura amongst Nigerians. But as things now stand, generalised hunger, anger and utter delusion have wiped off all that sentiment.
Talk of his huge infrastructural achievements now and Nigerians are more likely to point to the unprecedented national debt, mention the railways, in particular, and you are likely to find many tell you they dare not risk their lives etc.
Nigerians have just seen, in action, the most inefficient duo of an Attorney – General and CBN governor ever.
Only last week the defence in the P/ID 11B dollar arbitration case in London, raised serious issues of incompetence against the Attorney- General just as It will now take a new Attorney – General, properly so called, to let Nigerians know what and what have been sold, and for how much, of the humongous EFCC’s legal seizures.
The least said about the longest serving, absolutely incompetent CBN Governor the better. Having been serving his real bosses much better than he serves Nigeria, they were even prepared to make him President over us so he could cook more of his failed programmes, an example being his much publicised ‘rice pyramids’ which evaporated as soon as his presidential dream collapsed.
Under him, the CBN had multi – dollar exchange rates which benefitted importers of toothpicks more than industrialists as well as facilitated round tripping.
Not even the World Bank or the IMF could rein him in.
For instance, the International Monetary Fund’s Staff Concluding Statement on the 2022 Article IV Mission to Nigeria read as follows:”The mission reiterated its past recommendations to move towards a unified and market-clearing exchange rate by dismantling the various exchange rate windows at the CBN, accompanied by clarity on exchange rate policy and supportive fiscal and monetary policies. In the medium term, the CBN should step back from its role as main FX intermediator, limiting interventions to smoothing market volatility.” It also urged the apex bank to allow deposit money banks determine FX buy-sell rates, in collaboration with the apex bank, which earlier this year announced a plan to stop selling forex to banks.
Both institutions further
warned that an unsteady exchange rate regime is one of the numerous factors fueling devaluation, hindering much-needed capital inflow, encouraging outflows and constraining private sector investment in Nigeria. They noted that an end to his crooked forex policy would help increase revenues, thus solving a major Nigerian fiscal challenge.
But all these meant nothing to our highly political CBN governor whose friends,
benefitting from the hopelessly skewed forex policy, din’t want it to end, thus leaving a country struggling for forex inflow, selling the limited amount it has at dubious rates.
But Mr emefiele has become so powerful he took a lawyer to argue his case that he could stay on his job as CBN Governor and still contest the presidential election.
You would think Nigeria is a banana Republic.
Indeed as at the time the two leading world financial institutions were advising him, he was acquiring over a hundred cars for his chimeric presidential election campaign.
As in the case of the A-G, the incoming administration must make it a point of duty to let Nigerians know who exactly Emefiele really is.
For now, he has received his comeuppance, having been thrown under the bus from his presumed olympian heights.
Indeed, if he knows what is good for him, he should simply go and resign, and give public service a wide berth.
A germane question now that Emefiele’s Naira redesign has collapsed like a pack of cards.
Although President Muhammadu Buhari, like Pontius Pilate, on March 13 finally tried to absolve his government of complicity in the continued disobedience of the Supreme Court on the controversial Naira redesign, by two principal officials of his administration, some issues linger. One, there is still cash shortage, whether old or new notes. Two, and more important is the question of who pays for all the discomfort, dislocations, deaths, etc. that the Naira redesign has caused since it began about two months ago? Before the March 13 statement from the presidency distancing the Federal Government from the recalcitrant attitude of Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and Abubakar Malami, the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, to the judgment, Nigerians had been calling on the president to say a word, to end the impasse created by the judgment that the old N200, N500 and N1000 notes remain legal tender until December 31, 2023. Neither the CBN nor the Federal Government was forthcoming with any, and there was confusion all over the place, as some traders refused to accept the old N500 and N1000 notes.
Ordinarily, the Supreme Court’s pronouncement should have been the final word on the issue. That Nigerians, particularly those in the urban centres, were still expecting a word from the president after the apex court’s pronouncement shows that they still have some military hangover in their system. Or could it be the result of the Federal Government’s habitual disobedience of court orders without consequence that made the people to think that the president is the law?
It is instructive that the government had remained insensitive to the pains that Nigerians had been compelled to live with since the fraudulent policy took off. This was a policy that has led to loss of lives, directly and indirectly. Many people with money in banks could not access it for emergency medical needs. Many parents could not find cash to feed their children or give them transport fares to school, among others.
A sensitive administration would not have been comfortable seeing scenes of frustrated people in the media for the long period that the government kept mum on this murderous policy. Twice did the Supreme Court provide avenue for soft-landing on the matter for the government, and twice did the government snub it. The first time was on February 8 when the court said the three highest denominations should remain legal tender, pending the determination of the substantive suit. President Buhari countermanded that on February 16, when he said only the old N200 should co-exist with the lower denominations until April 10. The second time was the March 3 judgment which said all the old N200, N500 and N1000 notes remain legal tender till December 31, 2023. The court said due process was not followed in bringing about the policy. For a whole week, both the Federal Government and the apex bank kept mute on the judgment in spite of cries of agony from hapless Nigerians. Even when the president said he identified with the people’s pains, it did not translate to much.
I think we have got to the stage where our legal experts must reexamine the CBN Act vis-a-vis the powers of the CBN governor. Of course I am aware of the need to insulate the apex bank from political interventions that could hamper its efficiency, the fact is; Emefiele has taught us that power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. We should not open our eyes and arm one man with a law that is capable of doing the kind of havoc that Emefiele wreaked on not just the economy but the entire sectors of our nation, including our moral fabric, after waking up from the wrong side of his bed.
I came to this conclusion because of the arguments that some of the people I would consider knowledgeable enough in law pushed forward while Nigerians were groaning under Emefiele’s senseless Naira redesign, to wit; that no court in the land could inquire into whatever Emefiele or any CBN governor for that matter does or does not do because certain sections of the CBN Act forbid such. I doubt if people in their right senses would ever give enormous powers (like the one being touted that our CBN governors have) that courts in the country, including the Supreme Court, cannot check, to one single individual.
This is not the first time that a CBN governor has gone overboard, at least in the eyes of the layman. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi in his capacity as the apex bank’s governor gave out millions as donations during his tenure without appropriation, a thing that many of us merely frowned at but did nothing to know if truly Sanusi could do such under the CBN Act. It is such little impunities that eventually became the mighty ocean under Emefiele who took the impunity to even more ridiculous depths. That was why even as Nigerians were in serious pains, with some people collapsing under the weight of his cashless policy in banks and on the streets, none of these could trigger any compassion in him to have mercy on fellow Nigerians. Rather, we saw the man visiting Aso Rock on several occasions to feed them with whatever he fed them with and usually came out smiling (sometimes laughing) while Nigerians groaned.
A corollary to this is the argument that Nigeria cannot sanction CBN governors because certain international bodies could punish the country for doing that, or something. I don’t understand what this is supposed to mean. While it is true that no nation is an island, the fact also remains that we cannot be completely helpless even when our nation is under the siege of one man who appeared intoxicated with some of these claims and powers that they say he has; real or perceived.
Again, whether this is true or not, I do not think Nigeria should be a slave to such laws or conventions. I remember that even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in the thick of our suffering that the cash redesign policy was not properly executed and that the time given for it was too short. In their own clime, such would not have been possible because people do not just wake up with such policies and give impossible deadline for their execution.
So, now that Emefiele’s attempt to squeeze bread out of stone has failed, in other countries, (including the countries of the international bodies that they say would sanction Nigeria if we fired him), the man would have been a former CBN governor by now. As a matter of fact, if he even managed to hang on despite public protests, the moment the presidency said last week Monday that it was not the one that told him to disobey the Supreme Court, he would not have waited a minute longer before turning in his resignation letter.
Indeed, elsewhere, presidents and prime ministers had lost their jobs over failed policies like Emefiele’s. We may not have got there yet; but the irreducible minimum should be for Emefiele and Malami, if they had any modicum of shame, to resign now. As a matter of fact, some people are saying that Emefiele cannot be sacked first because he was doing the bidding of some powerful elements in the sitting room of power. Second because, sacking him would also mean Malami quitting for not giving the right advice to the government. And the government cannot afford that.
But, if we gloss over this matter as we are won’t to do, then we should expect another CBN governor to do worse than Emefiele has done. It would mean Emefiele had only scourged us with whips, another CBN governor could come tomorrow and scourge us with scorpions. I never could imagine a situation where a man would wake up and tell me that I cannot have access to my hard-earned money and that would linger for months. Even in the military era, we would have fought such a thing vehemently. Here we are, under what is supposed to be a democratic government and such a thing happened in the guise of someone exercising some inexplicable powers from the pit of hell, and all we could do was bemoan our plight.
Even when the Supreme Court delivered judgment that we should continue spending both the old and new notes, some Nigerian traders said they were still waiting for presidential proclamation. Meaning the president is above the law? What illiteracy and idiocy? I thought people went to school to be educated. I say this with due respect because this was common in the cities. I was told people in some rural areas, even in Yorubaland continued to spend their old notes because they had not even seen the new ones, not to talk of knowing what they look like. That was pragmatism at its best, rather than do like their urban counterparts whose goods were perishing while awaiting the president’s directive, despite the apex court’s judgment. I think we as a people have gone into deep slumber. Even collective labour woke up almost late in the day, despite the harsh effects of the policy on its numerous members. May be too that we just decided to remain calm in the face of the needless provocation because we saw the hands of people who had hoped to use the policy to trigger unrest in the country so they could impose their dream state of emergency. As a matter of fact, this, for me, is the only acceptable excuse for our complacency about the policy.
Still, we must do something about those who made us go through the hell that we went through. The economy has reportedly lost about N20trn to the experimentation. Worse still, with both old and new notes still elusive, one can only hope the government has not created another problem that it cannot solve till its exit in May, a situation where we would continue to buy Naira as we do forex. People cannot play yo-yo with our lives without consequences for them. If the government that employed them would do nothing, those of us who suffered from their actions should explore the law to seek redress. Jiti Ogunye has suggested class action, for example. We should also encourage governors who have threatened to sue both Emefiele and Malami for contempt to go ahead. At least let us begin from somewhere. Such business as usual is the reason we have remained a POTENTIALLY great nation since 1960.
President-elect Bola Tinubu has smartly sidestepped the growing call for a Government of National Unity (GNU) by declaring that he would assemble a cabinet of excellence that transcends that option. His mandate is pan-Nigerian, and the voting spread unassailable and impressive. The All Progressives Congress (APC) won the presidential poll and foreclosed any need for coalition. The party should rule and bear the consequences of its actions. Nigeria has enough skilled manpower in all parts of the country and across all faiths for him and his party to draw upon. They should have no problem getting the right people to populate the cabinet, men and women who will not look at the president’s face before disagreeing with him, if necessary, or embracing his point of view, if the situation demands. Of the four leading candidates who contested the presidential poll, he stands out as a democrat and leader. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso comes next in capacity, but fourth in the votes. The other two, the wearied Atiku Abubakar and the sermonising Peter Obi, despite what propaganda said about them during the campaigns, are simply unratable.
Former Ekiti State governor Ayo Fayose lent his voice to the call for a GNU. He means well, and has spoken boisterously and laudatorily about the president-elect; but he is mistaken to infer that the ill-informed manner losers in the election and their supporters have questioned the poll and tried to delegitimise it called for the equivalence of a coalition. In one of the interviews he granted after the presidential poll, Mr Fayose also surmised that Mr Obi represented a force in Nigerian politics which Asiwaju Tinubu must grapple with. He may need to explain himself further. But the facts of the last poll, regardless of the voting figures, do not show that the Labour Party (LP) candidate represents a force, let alone a tectonic shift, in Nigerian politics. Mr Obi’s politics was an opportunistic acknowledgement and exploitation of religious anger and youth frustration. Both factors will yield to farsighted and inclusive governance.
It is a little early to set an agenda for the Tinubu administration; this will be done sometime in May. What should engage the president-elect are the immediate post-Buhari issues and politics he will have to contend with in the opening months of his government, of course in addition to the riveting stories about the formation of his general and kitchen cabinets. If his antecedents as governor and notable mentor are anything to go by, he can be trusted to assemble and lead a team of gifted and courageous people capable of responding adroitly to the country’s urgent existential, and more acutely economic, challenges. But grappling with the issues the departing President Buhari will leave in his wake will not be easy, especially when they touch on farmers/herdsmen clashes, and the projection and entrenchment of ethnic and religious privileges. These issues could leave the president-elect preoccupied, if not breathless. In the closing moments of his administration, for instance, President Buhari gave the economy a sucker punch with his naira swap policy, contemplates removing subsidy on petroleum products, fixed what is potentially a contentious census exercise close to inauguration day, and has now signed into law a raft of about 15 constitutional alterations ranging from the mundane to the highly impactful. These measures and constitutional changes will doubtless affect the next administration, if not even steal some of the president-elect’s thunder.
Reassuringly, however, both the president and the legislature, which is now besotted to quoting and amending the constitution, have been unable to conceive deep and urgent changes needed to reshape the polity in fundamental ways. Some of these changes have been projected into the national scene as byproducts of the failings and weaknesses of the Buhari administration. Two such failings, out of scores, deserve mention. First is the organisation and running of the APC, a party riven by subterranean dissensions and animosities. The APC was fortunate to have Asiwaju Tinubu in 2015 and 2019 to mastermind the victories of the party against a behemoth, and he has masterminded his own victory in the February poll. He of course did not secure victory singlehandedly, and needed both the involvement and resources of so many others to deliver favourable outcomes. But having one man at the core of such ambitions is not a sustainable model. The president-elect will first and foremost have to inspire the remaking of the APC, along carefully selected global models, if the ruling party is to flourish, and by implication make Nigeria a model for the continent, if not the world.
After the Buhari era, APC leaders will face the arduous task of making their party more ideological, better and tightly organised and run, and an example to other parties in Nigeria in terms of policy formulation and development of administrative templates. The party has enough brilliant men and women across the country ready to help develop the kind of party needed to transcend ad hocism and operate in such a manner that it no longer becomes interchangeable or coterminous with other parties, vulnerable to capricious defections and mutinies. None of the legacy parties of the APC, nor the Alliance for Democracy (AD), nor the Action Congress (AC), nor yet the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) was that party. The APC is even worse, a sometimes deluded and self-destructive amalgam seemingly dedicated to destroying its offspring and ceding its responsibilities and its sense exclusively to the president. Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group came nearest to the global standard of what a political party should look like: highly organised, brilliantly run, properly financed, and mass-oriented. The APC may comprise some ideological conservatives from the North, but the party has enough critical mass of progressives to reshape its structure and orientation, deliver on its programmes, and imbue it with a healthy and irreversible dose of permanence, strength and durability.
If the party can manage to reengineer, transform and renew itself, the president-elect will find it much easier to inspire generational and paradigm shifts in leadership recruitment. It is crucial that the party deliver on this in the first four years. By education, history, institution-building and experience, Western democracies have made a fair success of leadership recruitment, ensuring that novices and incompetents seldom had a shot at national leadership. The United States is dotted with think tanks, while its federalist constitution, itself a product of philosophical minds, mentors and projects great leaders at critical junctures as well as limit and circumscribe inept leaders. Nigerian federalism is a disgraceful potpourri of unitary incomprehensibilities vulnerable to abuse and manipulation, and generally incapable of producing and projecting great leaders.
France has its enarques (École nationale d’administration or ENA), from whose ranks President Emmanuel Macron emerged. Its entrance examinations are incredibly difficult and rigorous. Nigeria’s National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), on the other hand, has sometimes become a dumping ground for sanctioned bureaucrats and security agents. Russia under the communists managed to structure a leadership recruitment system that worked fairly well. President Vladimir Putin has destroyed it. On its own, Britain’s parliamentary system sometimes successfully serves as a winnowing fork to sift competent leaders from the incompetent. But it has not always succeeded, as their recent history has shown. But the most successful has been China, which, since Deng Xiaoping, has produced the brightest and the best over the past few decades. Neither Alhaji Atiku nor Mr Obi, nor even President Buhari himself, not to talk of Lagos State’s LP candidate, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, could ever rise to any kind of prominence in those systems.
The APC must, therefore, take urgent steps within their party or constitutionally to reconfigure the country’s leadership recruitment process. The age of gambling must come to an end, when anyone with money or zeal, or grudge and opportunism, can aspire disruptively to the presidency or governorship without being purified by the system’s leadership furnace or shaped on the country’s leadership anvil. If created, that system will serve not only the ruling party, but also the entire country. There must be standards below which no state or the nation must fall. APC can inspire that change, first within its own ranks, and then at the national level, all in the first four years. The Tinubu presidency may wish to stand out in forging the most vibrant economy in Africa out of Nigeria, considering his passion for free market economy and his zeal for excellence in all fields. Indeed, far more than his co-contenders in the presidential race, and more than any other contemporary African leader, he seems prepared to remake the Nigerian economy as farsightedly as he laid the foundation for the modernisation and growth of the Lagos economy. The governors who supported him in the North and elsewhere did not do so simply because they liked his face or needed his help; they embraced and supported his ambition because they were infected by his can-do spirit, and because they instinctively sized up the Lagos template and had a metaphysical grasp of a leader who thought far ahead of his time and appeared prepared to lead the nation unencumbered by petty animosities and jealousies. Together they will do something with Nigeria and restore its pride. But they must pay attention to politics, particularly growing the next generation of leaders anchored on the right principles, values, philosophies and character.
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Buhari on Emefiele and Supreme Court
It took all of 10 days and the threat to file contempt charges for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Godwin Emefiele, to obey and give effect to the Supreme Court ruling on the validity of the old N500 and N1,000 notes. That obedience strangely came moments after the presidency issued a statement absolving President Muhammadu Buhari of disobeying court orders. For reasons no one has fully explained, the two actions were synchronised. The problem of naira scarcity has of course not been significantly ameliorated, for the damage the naira redesign policy has inflicted on the economy in particular has been enormous; but at least on the surface a semblance of obedience to court order has occurred. Before they finally complied with the court order on Monday, neither the presidency nor Mr Emefiele felt the need to apologise for the anguish and disruptions the policy brought upon the country. Instead, they continued to justify their policy and methods as well as rationalise their pertinacity.
Ten days were, however, not all it finally took for the presidency and Mr Emefiele to do right by Nigeria; it took more than a month, starting with the February 8 apex court interim order reinstating the validity of the old notes, to get the matter partially resolved. At its second sitting on the same subject on February 22, the Court indicated that in line with its February 8 order, the old naira’s validity subsisted. These were two opportunities for the CBN and the presidency to retrace their steps and align with national aspirations on the naira swap. But perhaps for political reasons, some of which were argued by leading political personalities and even governors, the government remained inflexible. Everyone agreed that theoretically the policy was a good one, and if properly implemented could help resolve some economic disjointness. But not only was it hastily and inexpertly conceived, it was also poorly and maliciously timed, and the naira amateurishly redesigned. And, worse, it was incompetently executed. Everything about the naira swap, as the Supreme Court finally ruled on March 3, made a mockery of the quantum of expertise available to Nigeria.
To all intents and purposes, the naira swap policy is dead. It will be buried when the next administration is inaugurated. The naira was not redesigned; it was ‘recoloured’. The policy paid no attention to Nigeria’s economic indicators; it was nothing but a policy conjuration, almost like magic. The next administration will of course do something about the naira, but no one is sure what those changes would be. The present ‘redesigned’ naira, not to talk of the naira swap implementation, is humiliating to Nigeria and its global ambition and ranking.
With the buck-passing between the presidency and CBN, Nigerians may never fully get the picture of whose bright idea it was to come up with that policy at the time it was enunciated. In public, the CBN owned up to the idea, and the presidency admitted it signed on to it – in that order. But the devil is in the detail, especially given the fact that as military head of state in 1984, President Buhari implemented a similar and much direr policy. The policy should never lead to the death of any Nigerian: in 1984 and now, deaths were recorded, and banks burnt, all for a simple policy that officials with a modicum of talent and intelligence could implement easily.
The presidency tried to sound plausible last Monday when it washed its hands off the 10-day lag between the apex court judgement and the government’s obedience. The CBN has not attempted to explain why it dithered, but almost as if startled by a ghost, the presidency insisted that both the CBN and Attorney General of the Federation (AGF) Abubakar Malami did not need to be prodded by executive orders to give effect to court judgements. Sounding sanctimonious and even trying to burnish its rule of law credential, the administration boasted that it had always obeyed court judgements. Neither historical nor contemporary facts validate the administration’s boast. The fact is that the administration’s rule of law record has been patchy and uninspiring. It is now fated to leave office in controversial judicial and legal circumstances, just as it kick-started its reign.
The Buhari presidency may be on its way out, but many Nigerians will contextualise its clumsy attempt to absolve itself of disobedience to court orders on the president’s idiosyncratic habit of dodging responsibilities when situations become testy and policies become chaotic and controversial. They recall how the president dodged responsibility when APC governors proved unable to carry out a neat coup against former interim party chairman, Mai Mala Buni. They will also remember the insouciance with which he conducted himself when current party chairman Abdullahi Adamu could not expertly and unanimously confer the presidential ticket upon a consensus aspirant, Senate President Ahmad Lawan. It was clear that neither the governors who plotted the exit of Mr Buni nor Mr Adamu who tried to foist Sen. Lawan on the party was in a position to resist the president and avoid taking the fall when the plans miscarried. Mr Emefiele knew he could not win. Unhappily for him, he also knew he could not avoid being put to the sword when, not if, the naira swap policy failed. That the president moved on blithely was expected. That presidential insouciance came from practice and experience; just like his victims, by habit and weakness of character, went like lambs to the slaughter.
Census snafu
Even before it was rescheduled, the national census earlier fixed for March 29 was bound to test the competence and readiness of the National Population Commission (NPC) to the hilt. The last census was conducted in 2006, and the 2023 exercise will be the fifth since independence. None of the previous exercises had been devoid of controversy, and few planners really set great store by them. As the 2023 elections are showing, with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) helping to sanitise insanely high voting figures, many analysts are beginning to suspect that Nigeria’s population figures were always sexed up.
It is not clear why the Muhammadu Buhari administration is dead set on conducting a census weeks to the expiration of his administration, especially seeing that censuses in Nigeria have always been controversial. What is, however, certain is that the May exercise will not also be devoid of controversy, nor will planners swear by its infallibility. Until the country is restructured in line with the highest ideals of federalism, where states and local governments generate and spend their own revenue, census will always be controversial. Operating a central purse, and running Nigeria as a unitary government will make any and every census nugatory.
No one can stop Rivers State governor Nyesom Wike from gloating over the defeat of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar in the February 25 poll. The two politicians have had a running battle since the former vice president upstaged the governor during the party’s primary last May. The Rivers governor and a section of the opposition party had insisted on the PDP respecting the informal zoning arrangement guiding the nomination of the party’s presidential ticket. The deal was not respected. Worse, instead of shuffling executive positions within the party, in this instance the chairmanship, to compensate the Southern chapter for the loss of the presidential ticket, party leaders, particularly Alhaji Atiku, deferred the reshuffle till after the party must have won the February poll. In reaction, the party fractured irretrievably, while party leaders mocked the Rivers governor and dared him to do his worst. The PDP then lost the poll, leading to Mr Wike gloating on March 6, the day PDP leaders organised a protest rally to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) office in Abuja.
Incensed and chastened by the peculiar manner in which Mr Wike expressed his delight at the frustrations of the PDP leadership, Alhaji Atiku called the sanity of the governor to question and dismissed him as irrational and feckless for abandoning his fellow ‘rebel’ governors in the Group of Five (G-5). But addressing his supporters after the PDP protest, Mr Wike had said, “As they were protesting, I just sat down and took a 40-year-old whiskey. I called some of my friends and opened the 40-year-old whiskey as they were protesting.” Unable to stomach Mr Wike’s insolence and the indignity of being described as a bad loser, Alhaji Atiku’s communications adviser exploded in fury: “The protest that was led by Waziri Atiku Abubakar on Monday, March 6, 2023 was against the stealing of the mandate of the Nigerian people, which in itself was a noble cause.”
The adviser, Phrank Shaibu, added: “At this point, I would love to commend the nearly 300,000 Nigerians who have signed the petition for Wike’s visa sanction. This is a step in the right direction. This is a man who in every election he has ever been involved in has been characterised by rigging and violence so much so that under his watch, the media tagged his state, ‘Rivers of Blood’.” Mr Wike’s gloating was probably anchored on the fact that as a lawyer, he knew that the objective of the protest was unachievable. He knew that Alhaji Atiku’s call for poll cancellation and fresh elections would be impossible to actualise. It cost billions to conduct the February 25 presidential and National Assembly polls. No elected lawmaker would back such reckless advocacy. And no government would appropriate fresh funds for an election that was conducted in largely peaceful atmosphere and which ended with variegated outcomes that benefited all the parties, including the undeserving. More importantly, neither the government nor INEC could on their own cancel the poll. The law is clear on that. Mr Wike knew all that, noted the finality of the poll, and exulted over the outcome. He will continue to gloat.
After weeks of futile campaign for the cancellation of the poll, not to say two days of feeble protests in Abuja, the PDP has retired to the courts where it first sensibly made recourse. The real battle will start and end in the courts, not on the streets, nor in flimsy barricades. Here again, Mr Wike is set to gloat. He knows that given the manner the PDP was badly fractured into at least four parts during the February 25 poll, it was impossible for any one part to triumph over the fairly united and single-minded All Progressives Congress (APC), the party in office. It is of course impossible to prove mathematically that had the four parts united to flush out the APC from office they would have succeeded. But united, their chances would have been far above average, and given the contradictions exhibited by the departing Muhammadu Buhari presidency, those chances would have received catalyst. Clearly, Mr Wike knows all this. Sadly, too, Alhaji Atiku senses the hopelessness of his cause, hence his resort to street advocacy and legal options. Neither, in the end, is likely to yield fruit.
This may be the main reason the Atiku camp is backing the imposition of visa sanction on both INEC officials and Mr Wike: INEC men for organizing a shambolic election, and Mr Wike for using strong-arm and underhand measures to ‘thwart’ the will of the electorate. Here, also, Alhaji Atiku will come to grief. The Western countries the PDP and Labour Party advocates are pressuring to extend visa ban know through diplomatic communications and cables that the elections were on the whole free, fair and credible. They have said as much in their responses to the February poll, even though their few misgivings have been twisted out of context and proportion. No visa ban is likely to be imposed on anyone, regardless of the number of people who signed the petition. Those countries are not as frivolous, sentimental and irrational as the petitioners hope. It is shocking that ex-vice president Atiku lends his diminishing and litigious weight to a futile campaign.
But perhaps Alhaji Atiku’s main dilemma is how to save face from a loss that flowed from his miscalculations and political awkwardness. He was unable to heal the fractures in his party before the polls, and he also backed the unpopular naira swap policy in the hope that it would favour his bid for the presidency. Everything failed him, his magic touch having departed him in what is evidently his last race. There will be no recovery. And for now, Mr Wike, to Alhaji Atiku’s immeasurable exasperation, is laughing last and best.
Obasanjo’s last hurrah and miscalculation
ONCE, his letters nearly carried the force of law; now after the last hurrah eulogising LP candidate, Peter Obi, and midway into the election calling for the abortion of the electoral process in February, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo may no longer be able to write letters that will command attention nationwide. He overdid it, after many years of unnerving his successors. He had done his best to intervene in the last presidential poll by supporting one of the candidates. His reasons were less surefooted than was characteristic of him when he launched at his victims, whether ex-president Goodluck Jonathan or Muhammadu Buhari. But whether he knew why he did what he did or not, he was at liberty to support whomsoever he liked. He chose Mr Obi, citing not the candidate’s competence but the suggestion that it was the turn of the Southeast to produce a president. Well, even if it was the turn of the Southeast, why Mr Obi? Chief Obasanjo simply muttered an unintelligible answer.
The former president had years ago angrily shredded his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) membership card, citing irreconcilable differences with party leaders and their predilections. He promised to maintain benevolent neutrality, becoming a statesman par excellence. He didn’t quite summon the discipline to keep to that neutrality, as different party behemoths lobbied for his support or counsel. Thus in 2015 he supported then candidate Buhari, who went on to win. Few scathing letters later and after a spectacular falling out, he withdrew that support and in 2019 gave it inexplicably to his hated former vice president, Alhaji Atiku, with whom he had once fought like Kilkenny cats. Many commentators and critics were stupefied and wondered what on earth led to that seismic shift. Chief Obasanjo was, however, not one to take responsibility for his flip-flops: he had given his approbation; whoever did not like it could go to court.
Last January, he played his joker and wasted his capital by betting on the unlikely candidacy of the flighty and sophistic Mr Obi, and lost. Compounding the error, he called for cancellation of the election, and was excoriated by nearly everyone, including, to his horror, many of his fellow civil war commanders, including Generals Alani Akinrinade, Godwin Alabi-Isama, and Olu Bajowa. He was even described as a hater of the Yoruba. He has since kept his peace, probably shocked by the din. His last letter lacked nobility and coherence; any letter he chooses to write in future after the dreadful miscalculation of February may meet a worse fate. He will think twice before he ventures near the sun again with waxen feathers.
For the past six weeks, Nigerians have been at the receiving end of a policy miscarriage which has turned their live into a miserable hell. This unhappy continent has played host to wicked and malignant rulers before. But experimenting with human lives in an induced financial meltdown just to see how many people will survive will rank as the most sordid instance of sadistic governance in postcolonial Africa.
The toll has so far been prohibitive. Scores of our compatriots have already fallen. Many have been economically damaged for life. The young and ambitious have been ruined overnight. The formerly buoyant and enterprising have had their businesses ruined forever. Old and vulnerable people, many of who have served the country meritoriously, have been sent to the departure lounges to await their terminal exit in heartrending circumstances.
As we survey the apocalyptic mess, it is obvious that nothing in the playbook of human malignity could have prepared Nigerians for the tragedy that has overtaken them. What began as an out of the box radical remedy for curbing corruption and the criminal inducement of voters has now snowballed into an economic catastrophe and arguably the worst fiscal policy blunder in the history of the country.
At the end of it all, it is obvious that neither objective has been achieved. If anything, corruption and kidnapping have managed to survive. Monetization of the voting process has only assumed a more creative and innovative form. Post-election distemper continues to foul the atmosphere and mitigate the prospects of a peaceful and orderly regime change even though given the perfidious nature of our political class, one is dead sure that a lot of under the table wheeling and dealing is afoot.
It is the economic front that we must worry most about. Without economic growth there can be no political development worth its salt. The economy has already stalled. There is evidence of massive contraction as a result of the strangulation of cash which is the lifeline of the formal and informal economy.
With the CBN unable or unwilling to inject cash into the system, we will be lucky if this Khmer Rouge demonetization does not lead to an economic catastrophe which will imperil the entire nation. Even for a most resilient and sturdy people, there is always a tipping point when everything comes to a shuddering halt. Godwin Emefiele and his confederates who are finagling the Exchequer may then discover that they are merely gaming a ruined casino.
There is a clear case for an inquest here, a hint of economic pogrom against the good people of Nigeria. But that should come when it should come. For now, given Nigeria’s legendary capacity for dramatic recovery, we must hope for the best.
Rather than getting angry, we should be asking questions about the nature of governance in postcolonial Nigeria and how we got to this sorry pass. We must learn to convert our trauma into clarity and profit from our perpetual pains. How is it that some functionaries of the Nigerian state appear more powerful than the institutions of the state? What type of government do we have which wears the gloves and veneer of democracy but hits with the bare knuckles of brutal despotism?
General Buhari may mean well in his fight against corruption and financial inducement in politics. But his gung-ho approach, his innate sense of feudal entitlement, paternalistic and fundamentally authoritarian disposition predispose him to a self-righteous self-indulgence when the need for a strategic retreat arises or when a yawning gap opens in policy credibility which mandates the need for a reset or recalibration of method and methodology.
One can then ask the urgent question. Where does he derive his power to vary the ruling of the Supreme Court from? This was precisely what he did in his national broadcast after the Supreme Court had ordered that the status quo should be maintained during the currency swap. And having been slapped down by the apex court, why has it taken the government almost two weeks of glum and stony silence to proclaim that the CBN governor knew what to do?
Having flagrantly breached the ruling of the Supreme Court, the honest and decent thing was for the president of the nation to return to the people to express his remorse and regret that what he did had no basis in the groundnorm of the nation. These are all constitutional infractions which ought to have attracted the stiffest sanction from an alert and patriotic legislative arm of governance. But that will be the day in Nigeria.
In the case of Godwin Emefiele, it is clear that he enjoys a symbiotic relationship of malfeasance with the executive. Having been given a public pat on the back by the president for a breach of the CBN Act which stipulates that no central bank governor must wade into partisan politics without first resigning his appointment, it is only natural for the Central Bank Governor to see himself as above the law. In retrospect, the currency redesign policy was an act of political vendetta which has miscarried.
We must now return to the original question. What nature of governance is this which enjoys the pains of the citizens and which is obdurate in its pursuit of an economic policy which elicits nothing but trauma among the people? The last sighs of the Ottoman presidency in Nigeria, or an African version of oriental despotism? Or is it simply a misguided paternalism gone haywire?
Let us be guided. Paternalism, a mode of governance which restricts the freedom and responsibilities of the ruled to prevent them from falling into childlike delinquency, is not an entirely deplorable system. It may well be an attribute of kind and humane governance in some earlier epoch.
The ruler, or paternalistic figure, groomed with native rigour and strenuously trained to acquire the skills, nous and competencies of traditional governance, views everybody as his dependent and as children in the infancy of moral and mental civilization that should be guided or rail-guarded to prevent them from going off the track of rectitude and righteousness.
To be sure, there are numerous adult delinquents and enemy nationals in contemporary Nigeria who need to be guided aright. How else does one justify the millions of ongoing attempts to hack into INEC computer base and compromise the integrity of elections so consequential that the destiny of the nation hangs in the balance?
Yet the vision of human society which treats full-blooded citizens as children to be chastised with whips and koboko belongs to earlier stages of civilization when society was less complicated and human personality itself less evolved. It was bound to complicate things in an inchoate but complexly structured, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation.
This paternalistic vision of the Nigerian society leavened by an authoritarian military temperament has been the bane of General Buhari’s advent in governance both as a military and civilian ruler of Nigeria. It has led to frantic assaults on the notion of personal freedom, the doctrine of the separation of the spheres of authority and the rule of law itself. The tragedy is that our retired military panjandrums are neither schooled in traditional governance nor have they acquired the skills of modern governance.
In his first coming as a military autocrat, General Buhari did not need any prompting from the late Dele Giwa, his bemused and astonished interviewer, before informing him that he was going to tamper with the whole notion of press freedom. And he did. By the time he was ousted, Nigeria witnessed a spate of summary executions of drug traffickers and the incarceration of journalists who had run afoul of the infamous Decree 4.
Yet what must intrigue the dispassionate student of Nigeria’s post-independence history is the fact that this paternalistic mind-set and authoritarian cast of temperament is not restricted to Mohammadu Buhari. It runs through the uppermost echelons of the nation’s post-independence military formation, which suggests a general sociological conditioning rather than the psychological and cultural framing of particular officers. The mix may vary in particular individuals, but is there all the same.
In 2009 apparently bewildered by Barack Obama’s stunning and audacious victory, General Obasanjo in a congratulatory message to the US president-elect noted rather cryptically that the problem was not whether a society deserves freedom but in knowing how much freedom can be granted at a particular period.
Fourteen years after, the good old retired general is still busy weighing and calibrating how much freedom can be granted to Nigerians through which latest lackey he has found most suitable to be proclaimed president from his imperial throne. It is a selection process which began forty four years earlier in 1979 when Obasanjo imposed Alhaji Shehu Shagari on the nation with disastrous consequencies.
In 1966 after gathering all the levers of power to himself following the mutiny of the majors, General Aguiyi-Ironsi connived with ethnic cohorts to impose a stringent unitary decree on the nation which abolished all the gains of federalism in one stroke. Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, Ironsi’s friend and colleague, who mildly objected was dismissed as an Action Grouper by Ironsi.
But Ironsi’s victory and the attempt to turn the nation into a unitary garrison lasted for only a few months as he himself was swept off the scene in a savage counter coup which returned the nation to the status quo by annulling Ironsi’s unitary decree. This was to pave way for General Gowon’s formal restructuring of the country into a twelve-state federation in May 1967, a few days to the formal commencement of the civil war.
Almost sixty years on, this malignant and misbegotten paternalism compounded by an authoritarian military mindset survives at the heart of governance in Nigeria and is the root cause of the political disquiet and structural disequilibrium. It has held the nation in a strangulating gridlock which has made political liberalization impossible and accelerated economic development impracticable.
Luckily for the nation, there is a gradual movement away from this political and economic stasis. It has been made possible by nascent forces of emancipation, often colliding and countermanding in the extreme, powered by altered demographics, particularly the electoral empowerment of youth, and driven by a fiery implosion of reactionary and retrogressive altars.
What a rich mine contemporary Nigeria would be for the sociologists and political scientists who keep an open mind rather than hidebound ideologues who impose their learned schema on recalcitrant reality while waiting for things to conform to their preconceived notions! There is not much in the text books to teach us about what is unfolding in Nigeria.
There is time for everything and nothing can remain the same forever. When development is blocked off in one direction, it unlocks the door of possibility in other directions often with the aid of mutually antagonistic forces. The currency redesign fiasco, the fuel subsidy scams, the needless agony inflicted on the people, are the last gasps of an expiring order as a new political consciousness takes root in the nation. Sometimes you need overwhelmingly negative forces to effect the negation of a negation.
Elections in Nigeria often reminds one of a Roman coliseum of primed gladiators dueling unto death and inflicting horrendous injuries on each other. Sometimes the umpire himself became part of the collateral damage. At a later day boxing briefing, the minatory and menacing George Foreman hinted darkly that he hoped that the referee did not get in his way once the bell rang for the commencement of hostilities because his intention was to clear the ring of all nuisance with his sledgehammer dispatches.
Poor Mamood Yakubu!! It is obvious that the calm and sedate INEC boss has got in some people’s way in the past few weeks. And the blows have been raining fast and furious. Setting the tone and template of fistic engagement was none other than the former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo.
Without any remorse or statesmanlike rectitude, the Owu-born bruiser tore into the INEC boss with a morbid relish while hinting darkly of lost opportunities to redeem an already besmirched reputation and integrity deficit. Since Obasanjo has access to state secrets, it would be foolish to take him on as far as this one is concerned.
But the cake for scholarly scurrility belongs to a chap who has done time digging into Mamood’s past. In a piece dripping with venom and vitriol, the vexed author cast aspersions on Mamood’s scholarship and academic pedigree despite being impressively schooled and formally credentialed. True brilliance does not inhere in ability to regurgitate facts and the capacity for rote learning. To justify this assertion, the writer, went on to dismiss the professor’s scholarly output as being scanty, flimsy and superficial.
You would have thought it was time to say thank you and goodbye to this troublesome fellow but he was only warming up at this point. Our man, obviously a master in the art of psychological destabilization, went for where it would hurt most by casting aspersions on Mamood’s nationality. For a man who has conducted two national elections and had been privy to security briefings at the summit of statecraft, this is as dangerous and as destabilizing as it can get.
But this fellow is obviously not for turning. As proof, he insists that the father of the INEC boss was a Cameroonian itinerant who had migrated to Nigeria like many others in 1953 at the behest of the late Sardauna. The Frenchified texture of the name Mamood is a glaring proof of Francophone extraction, his traducer concluded.
Yours sincerely has nothing but sympathy for Professor Yakubu. He has comported and conducted himself in office with dignified restraint and urbane equanimity. But when mud is thrown this hard, some of it is bound to stick. The elections so far conducted by Yakubu are far from being unblemished. But they pass the elementary test of integrity and honesty of intentions.
The forces bent on compromising the integrity of the elections, human and technological, are immense and formidable. About a month ago, this column, based on international security information available, had warned Yakubu and his team that they must be one step ahead of hackers and enemy nationals who had acquired the latest and most sophisticated wares capable of inflicting a technological nightmare on the electoral process.
INEC has become the graveyard of professorial integrity. In recent times, only Attahiru Jega appeared to have left without his reputation being torn to shreds. In a fractious, multi-ethnic nation bristling with bitterly contentious elite formations and where elite consensus has gone up in smoke, it is bound to get worse, unless the incoming administration finds a way to sanitize and depoliticize these important offices.
If it is not too late Mamood Yakubu should find the strength and energy to dust up his books and scholarly papers. He has been away from the classroom for too long, almost two decades. This is how hegemonic power formations, thinking that they are strategically positioning their favoured scions to take up critical administrative slots, end up shortchanging their heirs, morally, intellectually and spiritually.
