Category: Sunday

These are very fraught and interesting times indeed. It is a very precarious moment in the history of the nation. Nigerians need to reflect deeply  about the fate of the country, particularly about the ironies, contradictions and paradoxes that mark their constant encounter with history and the unending struggle to create a livable nation out of the chaotic amalgam handed down to them by their former colonial masters.

To do this in the column this morning, we have decided to enlist the thoughts of some outstanding philosophers. From different angles, their penetrating illuminations will beam on different aspects of the Nigerian conundrum.

  Perhaps it has to do with the month of February itself. In the tropics, February is a complex and contradictory month. It is the month of progress and retrogression alike. It is the month of renewal and regeneration when the tropical world bids goodbye to the hot and sultry dry season to welcome the first rains of the year. The farmers get to work. There is hope and optimism in the air. But things can still go terribly awry, particularly if there is a miscalculation of the climatological designs of the elements.

  The month of February occupies a storied place in the post-independence history of the nation. It was the month when a Nigerian military leader was assassinated in broad daylight on the streets of Lagos. Were he to be alive, the mercurial and tempestuous Murtala Mohammed would have been eighty five this year.

On February 13th 1976, he was cut down in a hail of bullets at the age of thirty eight. The officer who captured the assassin told this writer of how he brought him down to Bonny Camp tied up with his belt as makeshift handcuff.

 During the melee, the then Major General Alani Akinrinade, having conferred with Lieutenant General Theophilus Danjuma, strolled into an adjoining room filled with officers in order to find a radio set to counter Colonel Dimka’s incoherent and inebriated broadcast. The officers all stood up to attention. But they were all part of the plot. 

 Let us now fast forward the plot. Eight Februaries ago, Major General Mohammadu Buhari was riding the crest of public opinion as the messiah the nation had been waiting for. At this point, the general from Daura could do no wrong. Nigeria had taken a bad mauling from corruption, insecurity and wanton inefficiency. The tall, abstemious and astringently incorruptible former infantry officer was widely seen as the man with the magic wand to do the needful.

  Despite some sharp disavowals and strident condemnation of what was perceived as his bigotry, his sectionalism and predilection for languid abdication of responsibility at critical moments, nothing could dent or sully his reputation among his teeming compatriots for fairness, fearlessness and abiding patriotism.  He was considered a man far more sinned against than sinning.

 There was widespread nostalgia for his first coming when he stood ramrod against the bastions of corruption and state debauchery. He wore his steely patriotism on his sleeves and as part of his epaulettes. If only he had been allowed to do the needful by his corrupt and politically tainted military contemporaries, Nigeria would have been a better place for everybody. Unhappy indeed is the land in perpetual search of heroes.

   Eight years and two presidential terms later in this momentous month of February and as the general from Daura prepares to hand over to his successor in arguably the most consequential election in Nigeria’s history, the public mood has turned sour and sullied. All the accolades and ululations have disappeared.

  In their place there is a country-wide bitterness and recrimination. Even in places where the general was deified and considered a secular saint, he has been subject to rowdy humiliation or sullen disapproval. It appears as if the northern militias no longer hearken to their old magus. As they say in this part of the world, dem mumu don do.

   There is something very nasty and even psychotic about the Nigerian political mob, particularly when it finally turns against a public figure. There is no reason or restraint to the wild animus. No hostages are taken and no quarters are given. The achievements, however minor or miniscule, count for nothing. The mood is frankly and frantically regicidal. Having shot himself in the foot, how the president hopes to conduct free, fair and generally acceptable elections in these murky circumstances remains a mystery.

  It will be speculated that what finally did in and unhorsed the former infantry officer are his careless and carefree attitude to public plight as seen in the lingering fuel crisis and his obsession with economic corruption even while stoking the fire of political corruption. By a remarkable political irony, the two Supreme Court arbitrations this past week underscore and signpost the president’s plight and predilection.

   The first, and by a stretch the more infamous, is a tribute to judicial infamy and political nepotism. It will rank as a calculated assault and unconscionable damage to Nigeria’s political evolution. In reinstating the candidacy of the senate president and by resorting to empty legal technicalities such as the fuzzy and woozy distinction between originating summons and writ of summons to do so, the apex court flunked a chance to pronounce on a matter so fundamental to Nigeria’s burgeoning democracy.

   If the political parties had been functioning properly, the ranking echelons ought to have prevailed on the senate president not to pursue the case to the apex court, particularly after appearing to have relented. It gives the impression that Senator Ahmed Lawan is still needed for some unfinished hatchet job. More seriously, it puts the Supreme Court on the spot, doing further damage to its already besmirched reputation.  Ruling classes must realize that they cannot win all the time.

  The second judgment on Wednesday which aligned itself with the public mood by restraining the federal authorities from pursuing the punitive and draconian deadline for the exchange of old currencies for new ones, restored much hope and credibility to the apex court. Whatever the political motivation of the distinguished jurists, this is why it will always be unfair and unjust to dismiss the apex court in its entirety. The apex court is also full of countervailing tendencies.

  But such is the foul mood of the public that not many are ready to cut the Supreme Court any slack over this. A hardened cynic cautioned this writer. “Whoever told you that the two interventions did not emanate from the same official quarters? Look my friend, the Supreme Court is not supreme when the supreme interest of the ruling class is concerned. The reefs are dancing to the beat of the same underwater musician”, he crowed.

  And so the nation has found itself between Scylla and Charybdis or between the rock and the hard place; between the lure of cautious optimism and the hard evidence that buttresses unyielding despondency. Meanwhile the entire polity is on edge. The political mob out there has taken the power game a notch higher in the decibel of destruction. If the powers that be fail to read the signals correctly, it is only a question of time before anarchy reaches out to the temple of authority.

  In his sober moments and in his heart of heart, President Buhari must be ruing the day he decided to rule Nigeria once again as a civilian Caesar. The Nigerian Power Consortium made sure he lost his youth, his energy, vitality and remnant political idealism in the elusive quest before throwing the laurel at him like a morsel of meat before a whippersnapper. By now, he would have come to the belated realization that this current Nigeria is not the same that he once ruled about forty years earlier.     

 Forty years after his first coming, Nigerians are poorer, more embittered, more embattled and more fractious. The public temper is far more brittle. The National Question has never been more sharply posed than at this perilous moment. Having been mugged for over forty years by a succession of military and civilian autocrats, Nigerians have reached the edge of the chasm and are in no mood for any anodyne nonsense or sweet talk.

  The ongoing currency change debacle would have been unthinkable under General Buhari as a military ruler of Nigeria. He would have browbeaten and steamrolled his way through. This was because at that point in time all the remnant state institutions remained in awe of the regnant military establishment.

 There would have been no room for a wayward and politically incontinent CBN governor. The Supreme Court would have been in strict compliance. Ouster clauses or ousting clutches would have made sure that the Apex court did the needful and did not do the needless. As a consequence of this near-perfect military dictatorship, General Buhari, a few months into his tenure as a military ruler, was able to effect a  currency swap without inflicting needless and protracted pains on the populace.

  But that was then, and it had to be then too. The late Dele Giwa once told of how Buhari’s deputy, General Tunde Idiagbon, personally drove him through the streets of Lagos in the dead of the night without being able to unburden what was troubling his soul.

  Idiagbon was the epitome of the patriotic and incorruptible officer of immaculate integrity unlike the corrupt mafia that now inhabits Aso Rock under a civilianized Buhari. Like all other Nigerians, Dele Giwa woke up to find out that the old currency was no more.

   It is now time to bring in our great philosophers. According to Heraclitus, the great philosopher of perpetual flux in human affairs, you cannot step into the same river twice. This was the puzzle this writer pressed on General Buhari at the beginning of his tenure as a civilian ruler of Nigeria. If he had thought otherwise, the events of the last eight years and the sober reality of unpleasant events converging should be enough to convince him of the absolute truth of this philosophical gem.

  No human society remains the same for long. Historical developments and unfolding contradictions in human affairs make sure of that. By all accounts, General Buhari in his military heydays was a fine and outstanding officer indeed. But the set of skills and competencies required to run a military formation is quite different from what is required to rule a modern, multi-ethnic and fractious nation. The latter requires greater tact, diplomacy and greater analytical, political and emotional intelligence.

  We can now bring on our last philosopher.  Karl Marx is unarguably one of the greatest thinkers of modern civilization. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is a sustained piece of brilliant polemical ruminations full of biting irony, whipping wit and endlessly inventive invectives. Expanding on Hegel’s observations, Marx concluded that although history repeats itself, the first time it is as a tragedy while the second time is as a farce.

  In the first tragic occurrence, Napoleon Bonaparte, a successful military officer, aborted the French Revolution by imposing a personal dictatorship on the fledgling republic. This was after much toil, tears and heroism on the part of the ordinary French populace. Almost fifty years after, Louis, Napoleon’s nephew, aborted fledgling democratic institutions in France in a coup d’état that borrowed its tropes from his uncle’s heroic derring-do. This was what Marx considered a tragic farce.

   Many modern readers miss the rich ironies of Marx’s lancing thrust. It was not just that Louis Napoleon was a shameless parody of his more illustrious uncle. This was how Napoleon himself would have appeared to the world at that point, a regressive caricature of his former self, if he had bothered to show up. In other words, there is time for everything under the sun.

  When everything has ended in another narrow reprieve for the nation or something quite tragic, we may yet have General Buhari to thank for deepening our knowledge of historical self-parody. For now, it is the eighth and last February of Buhari’s second coming.

The crisis of party formation in post-military Nigerian politics has reached its apogee.  It assumed nation-wide prominence with the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election and the death of General Ibrahim Babangida’s Third Republic in vitro. That was when leading party people sold the victory of their party in exchange for filthy lucre and position. But if the truth must be told, the roots go deeper to the Second Republic and the original military intervention.

   As it is to be expected, this crisis is more fundamental than its surface manifestations, an integral part of a wider system failure. Unless the problem is tackled from the roots, no amount of fire brigade approach, ad hoc tinkering at the level of facile and unserious constitutional reforms and the extra-constitutional hallucinations being entertained in some quarters can restore democratic health to the nation.

   In functioning democracies, parties are the vehicles through which members launch their political aspirations or fight to impose a set of governance ideals on the polity. But in circumstances where the party is bedeviled by a crisis of identity, or where individual or group aspirations become solidified to the point of irreconcilable differences, the party may be headed for the scrap yard.

 As the electoral D-Day inches nearer, the leading parties have intensified their vote-garnering drive. This is just as it should be. The inter-party brickbats and personal spats among the leading candidates are reaching a crescendo. There is a reason for this. This is the first election in the post-military epoch in which there is no substantial elite consensus and in which the political class are as bitterly divided as they are badly polarized. The nation itself appears to have reached a political and economic dead end.

But it is the internal rancour and struggle for control and supremacy within the major parties that should be of interest. At this point, what you see is not what you see. There are fifth columnists everywhere, bent on internal sabotage and implacable in their avowed mission to cause maximum damage to their parties before the real election takes place.

   Politics has become a Travelling Theatre, with improvisations, revues and satirical sketches on a daily basis. The war within the parties is fiercer and more urgent than the war outside. Labour does not appear to be working as widely speculated.

There is a loss of momentum and grip somewhere and it shows in the forlorn and furtively bemused expression on the face of its helmsmen. While recalcitrant PDP governors, otherwise known as the G-5, continue to pelt and pester Atiku Abubakar, it is from the east that the weapons of mass destruction are talking louder than the weapons of mass persuasion.

    However, it is the ruling party that hosts the biggest contradictions and the most dramatic developments. This past week, the rambunctious but usually perceptive Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir el-Rufai, ruffled not a few northern feathers by calling out some of his colleagues in the ruling coalition, particularly the shadowy and influential deep state camarilla that surrounds General Mohammadu Buhari.

  In a widely circulated interview, the Kaduna State Governor accused the ranking echelons of his own party of plotting to torpedo the possible victory of the party’s flag bearer in the forthcoming presidential election.

  Not done, El-Rufai went as far as revealing the basis of their unyielding animosity towards the former Lagos State Governor. According to him, they have refused to come to terms with the resounding walloping they got from Tinubu in the last presidential primary despite all the intrigues and Machiavellian machinations. As proof of the current conspiracies, El-Rufai cited the crippling shortages of petroleum products and the currency redesign debacle.

  The federal government’s response was swift. At a press briefing after the scheduled executive council meeting last Wednesday, Lai Mohammed let it be known that his principal was not interested in supporting a particular candidate but in ensuring free and fair elections which he hopes will be his lasting legacy to the nation. After the Daura-born general’s unconvincing, desultory and lacklustre appearances on the party’s presidential campaign, the cat was finally out of the bag.

   Readers of this column will recall that after Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu’s dramatic victory at the party’s tension-soaked primary at the Eagle’s Square in Abuja, we had cautioned that it was not a done deal, at least not yet.

  It was not the Moor’s last sigh, as we put it then. This kind of crushing victory was bound to spawn a vicious counter-rally in the long run from the ethnic supremacists lurking around, particularly if the victor succumbs to hubris and premature triumphalism and if the fundamentalist hawks in the party remain unappeased and unappeasable.

As a public commentator crowed on Thursday morning, the presidential contest is now between the ANC and the CPC, the two major legacy parties that formed the APC. Before our very eyes, the APC is once again in danger of fracturing into its component parts.

 We must give it to Nasir el-Rufai and his gubernatorial colleagues who made Tinubu’s victory possible in the first instance, against the run of play and against the will of the honchos and henchmen of reaction and retrogression in the party. Once again, El-Rufai is playing the role of a lone visionary to a beleaguered and befuddled northern feudal hegemony. Many are accusing him of cynicism, of rank opportunism and of running with the hare while hunting with the hounds.

   Whatever they may call it, the objective reality suggests that the Kaduna State Governor is seeing the danger farther ahead than many of his power-obsessed cohorts. Call it enlightened self-interest at its most rarefied and bedeviling.

 It is clear that in the absence of a reforming messiah thrown up from among its midst, the next best thing for the north is a sympathetic undertaker who will manage its traumatic, willy-nilly transition to modernity with the kind of kindness and courtesy that Bola Tinubu has shown to its leading lights.

   As it is, the current power configurations encrusted in a feudal veto is unsustainable. It will lead to a historic bloodbath and the mutual ruination of all the contending classes. This is the kind of messianic role many expected of General Buhari which has now been sensationally fluffed. Unfortunately, you cannot give what you don’t have.

  But historical failures can still be mitigated, that is if you find yourself in a hole and stop digging. The power cohorts around General Buhari appear to be digging and digging in furiously. By attempting to ditch Tinubu and by consequence the extant power arrangement between the north and the broad south at this perilous point, President Buhari may be committing the greatest strategic blunder of his military and political career.

  There is plenty of room for a walk-back. The press briefing ought to have been more nuanced and the language of disavowal more diplomatically couched. Supporting the candidate of your party is not antipodal or antithetical to conducting a free and fair election. Both positions can be comfortably and honorably held without raising an ethnic or regional ruckus, unless the general knows something that many of us don’t.

   Unfortunately, the rumpus within the ruling party is reigniting the bitter memories of the June 12 debacle and Abiola’s tragic death. Despite Abiola’s outlandish wealth, his vast connections, his religious affiliation, his north-friendly outlook and the fact that he won a free and fair election, the Egba business mogul was still denied the opportunity to claim and enjoy his mandate by a military cabal fronting for a minority caste bent on ruling Nigeria in perpetuity either directly or by proxy.

  The Abiola palaver led to a bloody commotion which questioned the validity of Nigeria’s survival and continued existence as a corporate entity. Here is why. If a man as rich, distinguished and well-connected as the late billionaire business mogul could not aspire to rule Nigeria, what hope is there for millions of less fortunate compatriots from even more seriously disadvantaged background?

   It was an ethical and political conundrum which posed the National Question in a way it has never been posed before. Thirty years later, like the proverbial dunce that is incapable of learning the lessons of history, we are treading on dangerous and slippery grounds once again. But since no two historical conjunctures are completely alike, here are the reasons why this one is particularly fraught.

   Unlike MKO Abiola who was a neophyte and fresh state recruit to politics, Tinubu is a master grass roots political practitioner with a formidable capacity for horizontal and vertical mobilization. If many of his compatriots believe that he has worked very hard to earn the presidency, denying him the much coveted prize at this point by foul means would be a very dangerous game to play indeed.

  Let no one weep for the nation at this point. It is the old fundamentally faulty system that has returned to haunt us in all its gross ineptitude. Our inability since the First Republic to grow genuine, authentic and organic political parties except as special purpose vehicles for state capture or as articulated personnel carriers for political ambush has come back to demand its full wages. We may have Tinubu’s political genius to thank for this.

  Our military overlords bear full responsibility. The only mitigating circumstance for this grave infraction against the greatest conurbation of black souls anywhere in the world may be that they meant well but acted within the limits and limitations of their vision or lack of it.

In 1979, barely recovered from the trauma of civil war, they cast their net far and wide for a broad based, pan-Nigerian coalition of elites that would insulate the nation against the ruinous fissiparous tendencies that led to the civil war. The National Party of Nigeria (NPN) kept the country together, but looted its resources dry. Anarchy and popular chaos loomed. The military stepped in to head off a bloody revolution.

   Twenty years after in 1999, the surviving military hierarchs were still at their old game of cobbling together a broad based pan-Nigerian coalition of elite with the mandate of holding the nation together without any consideration for accelerated growth and development which is actually what keeps a modern nation together. This was after Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha had both taken the country to the political and economic cleaners for thirteen years.

  In the event, the old formula produced similar results. The Peoples’ Democratic Party, (PDP) kept the nation together for sixteen years through a vast network of patronage and elite clientele. But the country remained in the political and economic doldrums. Despite widespread clamour, no attempt was made to reform the system except self-serving “constitutional conferences” which came to naught.

 It was obvious that the bubble was about to burst. The criminal pillage of national patrimony and the obscene display of unmerited wealth opened up the government to sundry anti-state and non-state actors who appeared bent on bringing the nation to heel. It exposed the fatal vulnerabilities of an imperious but not so imperial state. After sixteen years of gross misrule and economic brigandage, both the nation and the ruling party had reached the end of the tether.

  This was the situation that threw up the APC, an unstable coalition of disparate and contrary forces. Unfortunately, the APC has not passed muster either. The less said about its own eight year tenure at this point the better.

  Once again, the nation has found itself in an epic quandary. If the extant rump of the selectorate is thinking of another quick fix, they had better perish the thought. The forces in contention have grown beyond them. 2023 may feel like but it is not quite 1993. Peeping at the political horoscope, it is obvious that this time around, not only the living but even the dead will stir in protest. Alertness is the price for emancipation. Those who vote must never again be supplanted by those who veto.