Nigerians hope that in a matter of days their lives would return to normal: enough cash to spend as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) impoundment of their money ends with the elections, and some sort of revivification of their businesses beaten to stupor by the Muhammadu Buhari administration hoping to catch vote buyers in action. If normality does not return now, it will return a little later, at least not later than the state elections. Whether they like it or not, the pigheaded policy of illegally confiscating people’s money in the mistaken belief of furthering certain macroeconomic goals will expire naturally under the weight of its own contradictions. The Supreme Court may be waffling already about who plans to make a scapegoat out of them in the case between the states and the federal government over the CBN’s misguided monetary policy, and are taking their time in adjudicating the matter, but eventually the matter will come to a head, with winners and losers emerging.
There are not many economists who think both the administration and its servile apex bank governor have acted sensibly in the cash crunch they engineered against their friends and foes alike. Nor are there many politicians who are not bewildered by the administration’s timing of the controversial naira swap policy, considering its potential to hurt the electoral chances of the party in power. But economists and politicians have now concluded that the administration suffers from tunnel vision, and are appalled that it puts undue premium on short-term goals to the detriment of long-term benefits, even unmindful of the terrifying consequences of shooting itself in the foot in order to take a nervous aim at the ears of their phantom enemies. Without a shred of doubt, the madness of the past few dizzying weeks will soon end, perhaps even petering out into fatuity. The CBN’s Godwin Emefiele will, not too long from now, be shoved out of office, if not by his enemies who would win the election he has fought so hard unconstitutionally to undermine, then by his friends who would be too petrified to cuddle a viper under their robes.
Before yesterday’s presidential poll, Nigerians had banked on the Supreme Court to give them a reprieve from the Buhari administration’s siege on their bank accounts. After much footwork, it is taking some four sittings for the court to make up its mind. How that mind will be made up can only be clearly understood on Wednesday. But the litigants, not to say the apprehensive public, are no longer sure if their expectations will be met. They point at how the apex court had allegedly muddled up some recent and fairly straightforward cases exemplified by the Yobe State senatorial case involving Senate President Ahmed Lawan and Bashir Machina, and fear that law and jurisprudence in Nigeria had become a mystery too recondite for anyone but the gods to decipher. When this columnist suggested last week that the administration would drag the naira swap suit to a point close to the presidential poll to make the court’s decision nugatory, even he was incredulous. Surely, neither the administration nor the court would descend to those abysmal depths. It turned out that losing height and depth and dignity was the least of their concerns.
Whatever remedies the Supreme Court is still capable of providing have come a little too late to affect the presidential election. Together with the campaigns of the churches and the fuel imbroglio, the damage to Nigeria’s body politic has been incalculable. Indeed, influencing the presidential poll was the target of the conspirators who plotted the insensitive and anarchic naira swap policy. But as it turned out, though reprieve did not come before the fateful February 25 poll, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidates who were the immediate and direct targets of the policy have been badly bruised but not completely battered, judging from the dispiriting early poll returns. At any rate, their longer, incumbent feathers were not any more singed than the shorter feathers of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidates whose assigns were caught pants down ferrying laundered money to sway yesterday’s votes. No Nigerian was left in doubt that the naira swap policy was a conspiracy; it was not an economic policy, let alone monetary policy. After weeks of intense polemical exchange, one in which the opposition drove itself to distraction by flip-flopping on the objective of contriving a cash crunch, the ruling party’s presidential candidate managed to stave off the danger of being seen as the embodiment of a bad, mismanaged and dangerous policy. However, the naira swap policy, in all likelihood, may have impeded the presidential vote.
Many Nigerians expected the Supreme Court to decide one way or the other last week, enough time, in the utopian estimation of the public, to ease the naira crisis and placate angry voters. But the court walked a tightrope. As one of the justices, Inyang Okoro, leading a seven-member panel of justices, said, “We want to make it very clear that we are going to hear this matter today because we don’t want a situation where the judiciary will be made a scapegoat. With the way this matter is going, they are looking for a scapegoat and we refuse to be that scapegoat. We are going to hear everything and take our decision. If you have a contempt proceeding, we will also hear it today.” By the time the apex court finally decides on Wednesday, the sting may have been taken out of the naira swap policy, and the view of the court will have become superfluous. The country will also have produced a new president, and whatever he says or insinuates about the naira will be the real policy to look forward to. President Buhari will begin to pale in importance, especially having unwisely inspired or acquiesced to a disruptive policy weeks to the presidential election, while Mr Emefiele’s influence will also begin to wane considerably.
The winner of the presidential poll will, however, have to contend with much more than the injurious naira swap policy and other long-running existential problems, be it insecurity or the economy. He will of course face existing problems and urgently try to resolve them. But if his presidency is to amount to anything, he will also have to do two major things in order to guarantee the country’s future and stability. One, before his first term is over, he must champion a constitutional review, substantial enough to modify the structure of the country and the way politics is played and the economy run. Two, and still closely leashed to constitutional changes, he must inspire a nuanced review of leadership recruitment process; for clearly, the American presidential system has proved grossly limited in electing tried and tested persons into leadership positions in Nigeria. Indeed, on the average, no president since 1979 has been spectacular.
The early results of the Lagos poll demonstrate how poignantly the future is catching up with Nigeria while the country is simply unprepared for the changes. For Lagos, as other states will soon experience, ethnic loyalty and lack of surefootedness of the youth are becoming the leitmotif of Nigerian politics. Ethnicity constituted a dangerous undertow of politics in the First Republic, ultimately leading the country to civil war fought mainly by youths. Sadly, there was no closure to that war, and no lessons were really learnt. The war cried for a reappraisal of Nigerian politics, but none was done except to pretend that there was no victor and no vanquished. And when a constitutional palliative was cobbled in 1979, it was to embark on wholesale repudiation of the parliamentary system in favour of the presidential system, almost like love on the rebound, when emotions and pains were still raw and fresh. One of the framers of the Second Republic constitution only recently admitted that the framers were unwise to have adopted the presidential system. The fact is that the leadership recruitment process implied by the presidential system is defective. It may serve the United States well as a country which seized foreign lands and wrote whatever it pleased on that blank cheque, but it is inadequate for a country where attachment to land is deeply cultural and metaphysical.
It has been evident since the Second Republic that the country needs a political structure that takes cognisance of the people’s spiritual attachment to their living space. If Germany fought World War II for living space, it is tragic that Nigeria’s political leaders are unable to draw the right lessons from that distant war and have tended to assume that an adopted constitution can propel the country forward and even heal its fissiparous tendencies. Lagos is beginning to show deep, underlying cracks. These cracks will widen dangerously from now onwards except the constitution is revised. The Nigerian civil war did not pretend to paper over the cracks, and euphoric political leaders were too grateful to move on from the bloodletting of the past years. There were elements of such fissiparousness in the 1950s in Lagos, but independence, controversial elections, and the civil war made the country put new wine into old wineskin. The cracks are now re-emerging in all its ugly details, far deadlier than in the 1960s, and this time redolent with the poisonous catalyst of religion. If the APC wins the presidency, Nigeria may have time to find a cure for its festering maladies, assuming they are minded to embrace change. Should any other party win the presidency, and regardless of the best intentions of Nigerians, the contradictions will ripen into a gangrenous sore. Healing will be difficult.
Notwithstanding whatever part of the divide a Nigerian belongs, it is impossible for the PDP to conceive the changes needed to stabilise and catalyse the country. The party is not configured to engage that sort of forward-looking ideal. Its conservative, if not reactionary, presidential candidate is poorly placed to envision that desired future. He will govern with the staid conservatism the party exemplified in its 16 years in office, and resist any attempt to embark on fundamental changes. Neither he nor the men around him will imagine a glorious future, not to talk of taking the bold steps needed to birth it. As far as theory goes, it is also possible for the Labour Party (LP) to win, especially given its showing in Lagos, Edo and some other states. But it will not be able to govern, will implode sooner rather than later, and by propaganda and youthful idealism and incompetence predispose the country to far worse instability than it hopes to resolve. The electoral body, INEC, and other political theoreticians have also suggested that a run-off is possible. Should that occur, PDP and LP will of course fuse and stand a great chance of producing a coalition government than the APC. But even this fusion will not stave off disaster.
To drive progress, the APC may at the moment be ideally placed both to govern and to promote the kind of consensus needed to birth radical and stabilising changes. There are no guarantees, of course, but the party will probably summon the boldness required to find a political formula to keep Nigeria stable and prosperous, even as geopolitical and cultural differences are respected and maintained. Those who can see into the future know and fear that portents of disaster lie ahead as the country grapples with its national question. The misguided and misdirected EndSARS anger as well as the maliciously timed naira swap policy have combined to destabilise Lagos and opened it up for all sorts of opportunistic forays. If February 25 election does not deliver a clear mandate to a winner in this most unfathomable political season, the malaise will spread to engulf the nation as ethnic nationalities repudiate multiculturalism in favour of irredentism.
Gov Wike cleverer than imagined
Days before the presidential election, bitter commentators, some of them members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leadership, derided Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike for lacking the courage to reveal whom the group of five disaffected but largely irresolute PDP governors (G-5) would support. He had for months reportedly threatened to make the announcement, but each time postponed the act, insisting that he and his fellow governors were hoping they could reach some understanding with the party’s leadership, particularly Candidate Atiku Abubakar. In turn, after failing to mollify the G-5’s rage, the PDP had dared them to do their worst. Refusing to take the bait, Mr Wike still made no announcement and revealed precious little. It was his tactic of keeping both the public riveted on his politics, and the PDP leadership on tenterhooks. Clever politician, he kept studied silence almost throughout.
Finally, finding no elbow room left, and with the elections only days away, and with an announcement becoming unavoidable, Mr Wike declared victory in his own idiosyncratic way and moved on. He had made the announcement of whom to support, he said icily, and wondered why no one seemed to have the nuanced ears to listen. Nonsense, said the PDP leadership and sceptical members of the public, the governor simply lacked the courage of his convictions. What the governor said next was spectacular and novel. He did not owe the generality any explanation or announcement, he growled. He only owed the people of Rivers, to whom he had passed the relevant information regarding the presidential candidate to vote for. Reminded that he had promised to make an announcement involving the G-5, not just himself alone, he simply ignored that minutiae, and repeated himself that he had reached the target audience. It was clear the G-5 could not be herded in one direction, and the tentative unity that had kept them together had frayed, perhaps irretrievably. Soon after he spoke definitively on the announcement he claimed to have made to his people in Rivers, stories soon filtered out that he was in fact pro-APC presidential candidate.
In the days ahead, it will be judged just how much that subterranean support is worth. After waiting for 25 minutes to be accredited at his polling unit yesterday, it was reported that the accreditation (BVAS) machine failed him, and he could not vote. It is not clear entirely why the matter could not be rectified, or if it was rectified later. But it cannot be denied that the colourful Rivers politician is much cleverer than first imagined. Some term him a ‘lovable rascal’; and others see him as a dogged and brilliant politician. In his heart of hearts, he will wonder what lies ahead; for out of office, he may not be able to exercise the kind of stranglehold he has maintained on the PDP to which he is at the moment estranged at the national level. Will they move against him in the future? Or will they wait for him to atrophy like the flamboyant former Ekiti State governor Ayo Fayose has decayed beneath the withering actions of his bungling successors in the party?
Mr Wike is more perceptive than most people credit him, and he will fight tooth and nail to get the Rivers PDP candidate elected as governor in March. If the PDP presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku, is not elected, Mr Wike will bounce back faster than anyone expects. But if PDP wins the centre, the Rivers governor will again return to the trenches, for he is loth to grovel before anyone, not least the inconsistent and sometimes capricious Alhaji Atiku.
