Category: Tatalo Alamu

The population bomb you were writing about is what will eventually expose our internal adequacies to the whole world. As a people we are not prepared. We only pay lip service to the concept of population and its management.

For a people who do not have a near accurate population data we are not in a position to plan not to talk of implementing policies that would take care of our inevitably booming population. Schools are inadequate to prepare the vast number of children who require good education as a passport to escaping naked and vicious poverty in the land. Where these schools are available, the curricular is not what is required in the age of biometric algorithm and an increasingly knowledge economy. Even if the excess labour is diverted to agriculture, modern agriculture is no more labour intensive. What then happens to these people who are half baked or not even baked at all. They become irrelevant to society. They are ready recruits into the swelling army of discontented and a sure ignition coil for the coming unplanned and rudderless revolution. May God save us. This is a great topic, but you did not publish the article you said you wrote 6years ago. You have added 419 to your malady. Last line. Your mad boy, Okon will soon meet his Waterloo. His mumu will surely end.

• Babatunde Jose, Lagos.

Whilst we are still on the subject of national contradictions, it is meet to report that we have received two powerful interventions on the subject of demographic shift and its apocalyptic potentials for unprepared nations. We are publishing the two this morning to reflect the mood of anxiety in certain influential circles in the nation.

Tatalo,

I cannot recall reading The Rise of the Gainfully Unemployed six or seven years ago. It however remains topically relevant in the light of our prevailing predicament. PMB’s second tenure already has its job cut out for it. How he tackles it will determine on which side of history he wants to be. One thing he must bear in mind is the immortal words of Charles de Gaulle which says that the graveyards are full of indispensable leaders. He must immediately hit the ground running to deal a deadly blow on the “jegudujera” demons that have been sucking the nation’s life-blood. The sad reality is that time is not on his side. His promised “tough decisions” must therefore begin with immediate effect not minding whose ox  is gored. I wish him Godspeed.

• Venerable Tayo Adebayo, Idi-Ayunre, Ibadan.

Once again, this column draws attention to a ticking time-bomb in Nigeria: the absolute and exponential demographic shift in favour of young people in this country. When Shakespeare famously noted that youth is a stuff that will not endure, he probably had Nigerian youths in mind. But it is obvious that the nation will hear from them before they are consigned to the rubbish heap of evaporated generations.

Please close your eyes, take a deep breath and imagine you are returning to your ancestral homestead after a twenty-year internal deportation. Your parents had long passed and you are like a flaneur indulging in posthumous gallivanting. At the village square, you are likely to be confronted by a horde of youths staring you down in sullen and insolent disregard. You are on your own for all they care.

Nothing has changed in the village square in twenty years. It is a bucolic museum frozen for humanity. The only thing that has changed is the human presence. The youths were not there before. They were not born. But why were they there in such numbers? It was not the annual egungun festival which was always a site of orgiastic communion where future matrimonial deals are sealed. That one had long lost its shine and allure to the political economy of rural decline.

They are there because new egunguns have taken over the country, awon irunmole and ajegudujera. Let us leave it at that. The masquerade without a mask is the father of the masquerade that wears a mask, as somebody famously noted in The Bulletin from the Land of Living Ghosts. Ever since the man called Malthus, the discipline of Economics has always preoccupied itself with how nations must grow their economy before they grow their population. When populations expand well ahead of economic growth and development, that is a recipe for social and political disaster.

That is the point we have reached in the nation and it is responsible for some of the most horrendous crimes against humanity that the world has seen in recent times. Ritual cleansing, kidnapping, garroting, hordes of armed militias spreading murder and mayhem, political assassinations all reminiscent of organized society gone haywire have become the order of the day.

The pamphlet titled A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift, the great British satirist, advocates the selling off of children of the Irish poor to the British rich for food as a grim response to population explosions which disturb and distort the eco-balance of society. There are tremulous echoes of this in the rise of extreme rightwing violence in the west, the hordes of African refugees perishing in the desert and high seas and of course the criminal neglect of their people by many African rulers.

But serious nations and their notable economists have always concentrated on how to achieve the maximum wellbeing of the maximum number of people irrespective of ideology or religious beliefs. This is what unites the Nordic countries with Finland, UAE, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, USA and Canada. Nigeria is yet to ennoble its own philosophers and economists of national growth and development in social harmony. Meanwhile, the time bomb ticks on relentlessly.

Dear readers, when what you are about to read was first published in this column about six years ago, it was like a light-hearted joke. But it has since become a grim and horrific reality. Nigerian youths have since then become even more gainfully unemployed by lending their might and muscle to kidnapping, contract killing, arson, vote-rigging, ballot-snatching, raping and armed robbery.

Before the fireworks, let us begin with some lollypop. This column salutes members of the Anonymous Authors Association (AAA) who have enriched and deepened the discourse on this page. They are the unsung heroes of this intellectual gymnasium and snooper applauds the cult-like devotion of some of them.  Your columnist listens in to all the commentaries on this column. Nothing escapes our attention even when the meta-commentaries suddenly swing at each other and bitter confrontation ensues.  Hunters often turn on themselves. That is the original curse of the profession.

Snooper has learnt a lot from these readers who often supply a fresh and unusual perspective to issues. The true knowledge seeker must learn to humble self before the incredible knowledge machine that is the contemporary human mind. The more you know, the more you know that you don’t know. Column-writing in the post-modern world, with what Hayek has called the dispersal of knowledge, has become an interactive affair in which the commentary is incomplete without its meta-commentary and the writer is incomplete without the alter-writer.

This phenomenon is perhaps due to the rise of counter-hegemonic knowledge. The explosion in knowledge and the democratization of modes of learning have made the job of hawkers of knowledge very difficult. Gone are the days of infallible leaders of men who treat fellow citizens as ignorant and feckless children. Gone are the days of writers as oracular supermen dispensing nuggets of wisdom to lesser beings from their Olympian fountain.

Even in journalism, the authoritarian monologic discourse is being replaced by a demotic and dialogic culture of talking back.  The single voice of authority is displaced by many voices who talk back and talk to each other. In human affairs, the struggle against tyranny often commences with the refusal of the baby to be baby-fed. Once again, snooper commends those who have contributed to the multi-voice pluralism of this column. At least it can be said for them that they are gainfully employed.

Whichever way you look at it, it is however the rise of the gainfully unemployed that is the greatest bane of contemporary Nigeria. At the last count, there at least four distinct groups of the gainfully unemployed who are actively involved in bringing the nation to heel. Although each may have its nucleus in a particular section of the country, they are indeed pan-Nigerian groupings with membership that cuts across religion, region and ethnic lines.

Belonging to the first group of the gainfully unemployed are some old politicians who have passed their professional sell-by dates. Ordinarily, they ought to have morphed into great statesmen whose profound wisdom and wise counsel ought to serve as panaceas for national woes. But in the evolutionary fiasco of post-colonial Africa, they have metamorphosed into political grubs who are guided by only the demands of their stomach.

In the circumstances, they lapse into political and religious deviancy in the hope of regaining lost relevance through carefully orchestrated tribal and religious hysteria. In the past few weeks, these gainfully un employed old men from all corners of the country could be seen and heard causing trouble and generally raising the political temperature of the nation with wild and inflammable pronouncements. At this rate, they don’t seem to mind if the nation collapses on their head.

The second group consists of religious leaders who ought to have transformed into metaphysical gurus and spiritual patriarchs of the nation. But they have taken to fanning the embers of religious hatred. They speak to an elite polarization of religion in the nation for selfish purposes. The most potent form of gainful unemployment is spiritual indolence.  With the Boko Haram scourge in the north and the creep-ing hysteria in the south, the parasites of religious passion seem to be having a field day. Our religious fathers have taken to political and economic deviancy.

The third group boasts of those who by virtue of their exposure and standing in the society ought to know better but who have chosen to develop in other directions. As Norman Mailer once famously observed, one can either develop vertically or horizontally. In the humid tropics things decompose and decay very easily. In other to shore up their relevance in the perpetual battle of state formations for the allocation of resources, they resort to stoking up the fire of separatism, secession and other more severe forms of severance.

The fourth group consists of the truly gainfully unemployed. It is from this class of unemployed rabble that this piece takes its title. They are the ticking bomb.  It is the realm of absolute no-hopers. Just take a look at the accompanying picture of the train from Lagos. It is an apocalyptic snapshot; a peep into impending disaster.  Like human ants, the youths of this nation cling to every available space on the outer keel of the train. In any civilized society, the picture would have been enough to spark civil unrest.

It is obvious that these desperate denizens of urban ghettoes are not the commuting workers that the train was meant for in the first instance.  The irony of it all was that the partial resuscitation of the rail line was a great tribute to responsive governance. The great Nigerian railway network finally succumbed to corruption and mismanagement. But in putting a smile on the faces of workers commuting to Lagos from the outmost suburbs of  the city, the government merely succeeded in showcasing an even more potentially devastating social menace.

The rise of this brazen underclass is the greatest threat to contemporary Nigeria. The new joy riders we see clinging to the roof of a moving train are not coming from work, but they are coming from ‘work”. In an attempt to stay afloat, social outcasts and urban renegades will resort to any sort of self-help or self-employment , ranging from petty thieving, purse-cutting, kidnapping to outright murder.

Although these troubled youths are akin to joy riders in the purely technical sense of the word, there is nothing joyful about their life or mission for that matter. The balloon of pompous bluff bursts even before the pin probe. It is a measure of their low self-esteem and lack of a sense of self-worth that they take immediate offence at prying eyes wondering what they are doing at the roof of a moving train. This week, they beat a professional photographer trying to take their picture to a pulp.

It is obvious that a country with this kind of youth unemployment is bound to implode sooner than later. There is a nexus between youth unemployment and the crippling crises facing the nation. These desperate unemployed youths serve as the foot soldiers and cannon fodder to political deviants who deploy them for political violence against opponents. They serve as suicide bombers to jihadists and other religious deviants. They serve as raw recruits for separatist groups and economic saboteurs.

The situation is likely to worsen. The demographic graph continues to show a balance of number in favour of the youths. Seventy percent of the current Nigerian population are young people. Many of these people even after they have gone to the university and other tertiary institutions still find it impossible to secure regular employment. An idle brain is indeed the devil’s workshop.

Yet rather than coming up with well-reasoned and powerfully integrated economic credos that will lift more of our people out of the unemployment trough such as has been done from Brazil to India, our economists have continued to mouth shopworn shibboleths from the Bretton Woods institutions as if the world is one huge undifferentiated society and as if what worked in the west must work in Africa. Economy came before economics, but this time around it is the tyranny of economics over economy.

It will be foolish to imagine that the staggering inequity and the galloping inequality between the filthy rich and the desperately poor such as we have in the country will not result in some social upheaval eventually. The signs are already there in the Boko Haram insurgency which is, among other things, essentially a class warfare disguised as religious inquisition. They are also discernible in the various social  and political commotions currently going on in many parts of the nation. Youth is not only a stuff that will not endure, as Shakespeare famously noted, youth is also a stuff that will not endure itself to be wantonly wasted.

While we still have the time think in some peace, it may be useful to contemplate one scary possibility. One of the reasons why the victorious Khmer Rouge of Cambodia drove out the entire city population of the nation was because they felt that city dwellers had an unfair class advantage over rural folks. That singular act resulted in the death of a third of the population. God forbids a revolution in Nigeria in which gainfully unemployed suburban scum return to the metropolis. That will be holocaust itself.

• First published in August 2012

Reflections on Nigeria’s democratic transition

Twenty years after the inauguration of democratic rule and the Fourth Republic, it is important to take an audit of civil/democratic rule in Nigeria to see how far we have come or how fast we are departing from accepted and acceptable international norms. This is particularly so in the aftermath of an election that has stretched the ethnic, cultural, religious and demographic fabric of the nation to its elastic limits.

The joke about INEC’s alleged incompetence has become legendary. Yet not even the most brutal and unsympathetic of critics could fail to notice the stress and strain on the face of its highest officialdom. Five nights after the state elections and while the mysterious men and women still showed up late at night on television counting and collating figures, a friend phoned in to insist that the counting would probably go on until the next elections four years away. In the event, we have ended up with a series of inconclusive elections that has left the polity seething with tension and distrust.

In the light of the violence, the ethnic and social discord and the open confrontation along religious fault lines that characterized the elections, there are many who have concluded that once again, the democratic process has unravelled in Nigeria and that the earlier we began all over again, the better for the nation and all of us.

On the other hand, there are others who are of the opinion that no matter how badly we wobble and fumble, the democratic process has an internal self-correcting mechanism which allows us to learn and profit from our errors and mistakes. There is therefore no need to throw the baby away with the bath water.

Democracy is not about satisfying the yearnings of the aggressively vocal few over the often more rational desire of the silent majority. Democracy is about finding the aggregate median among many contending notions of how to move the nation forward in a way and manner that conduce to national unity and cohesiveness. Nigerians are very poor and sour losers indeed.

Those who were bemoaning the emphatic nature of President Mohammadu Buhari’s victory only two weeks ago have started jubilating after the PDP punched a hole in the heart of APC’s regional hegemony in the north and the old west. As far as they are concerned, what favoured them was the authentic and unedited result and the other a massively rigged concoction. But for the grace of God, there goes your local intolerant tyrant.

In twenty years of civil rule, the only constant factor that has guaranteed the survival of democracy in Nigeria is the absence of military intervention. Keeping the military in check is the greatest achievement of the Fourth Republic. After toying with the destiny of the nation for several decades, it has dawned on the military that its role is not to rule but to subordinate itself to civil rule as a powerful anchor of stability and national cohesiveness.

But since old habits die hard indeed, the Nigerian military often behaves erratically sometimes acting with Prussian hubris as an army with a nation rather than the army of a nation. There can be no doubt that its highest echelon often chafe at what they consider to be the vacillation and weak resolve of civil rule obviously longing for the epoch when their word was the incontrovertible law.

There is evidence of procedural insubordination and unauthorized statements emanating from its organizational redoubt.  Often, the comportment of some of its officers before civil authorities leaves much to be desired. But by and large and despite stiff temptation, the military has kept to its word and has refrained from acting in a way and manner that would have gravely imperilled civil rule.

If the military truce with the nation is holding, the elite consensus which undergirds democratic transition and transformation in many societies has long disappeared. In what may initially appear a paradoxical and oxymoronic formulation, democracy may well be a mirage if it is not underwritten by elite consensus. In virtually all modern nation-states, political and economic breakthroughs are often preceded by elite consensus about the destiny of the nation.

This is when the elite sit down to map the way forward for the nation. Irrespective of their political ideologies and worldviews, the political elite are often compelled by historical circumstances to find ways and means to spring the nation from the vicious trap of self-inflicted traumas and existential dilemmas.

In three different political epochs, elite consensus has been instrumental to the political destiny of the nation. In the run up to independence, the various conferences in London allowed Nigeria’s regional leaders to come up with an acceptable federalist formula to run the nascent nation. In the process, they were compelled to moderate and modulate their hard line stance about the way forward.

Consequently, an Awolowo was persuaded to drop his notions of a classical and Utopian federalism for a more workable version adaptable to Nigeria’s peculiar condition. A pan-African intellectual and unrepentant unitarist like Zik was nudged towards a federal arrangement for the emergent regions, while a feudal scion like Ahmadu Bello was encouraged to drop his con-federal vision of the new nation for a more federal arrangement in which the centre was strengthened and reinforced at the expense of a regional stronghold.

It was this elite consensus that led to the most visionary and productive phase of governance in Nigeria. It was to end with declaration of emergency in the old west and the subsequent military take-over of 1966.

The run up to civil rule in 1979 was preceded by the Rotimi Williams Constitutional Conference which recommended a switch from the Westminster type of parliamentary rule to the American type Executive presidency. Although the conference produced a minority report by the Marxist duo of Segun Osoba and Bala Usman, the overarching elite consensus that powered its majority report was to determine the trajectory of the Second Republic.

The Fourth Republic was predicated on the Obasanjo Settlement of 1998. After the mysterious deaths of both General Sani Abacha and MKO Abiola, the harried and hard-pressed military hierarchs came under national and international pressure to find an acceptable solution to the political stalemate that had lingered for five years.

It would have been impossible to move the nation forward without the elite consensus which ceded power to the south to compensate for the unjust detention and death of the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. Twenty one year after, it is obvious that both the Obasanjo Settlement and the elite consensus which produced it have gone up in flames. Obasanjo himself has since transformed into a principal adversary of the state.

The nation has never been more divided. There is so much elite rancour in the air that you get a sense that something is about to give. It has produced an election in which two solid ethnic and religious blocs in the nation (the core north and the South East /South South) stare down at each other in sullen confrontation with the third (the South West) acting in grudging arbitration.

The state of the parties tells us about the state of the post-colonial state as well as the nation itself. Of the three parties that started the journey twenty years ago, only the PDP remains standing. But it has become a poor and pathetic shadow of its former self; a slumberous and disoriented bear with a thousand wounds. Until recent political developments, particularly the namby-pamby desultoriness of the ruling APC gave it a new lease of life, the dominant party of the old military/civilian oligarchy was a subject of open speculation about its imminent death.

The other legacy parties of the Fourth Republic, the AD and APP, cannot be said to be in full existence. Having survived internal mutations and reconfigurations, both parties now linger on in luminous limbo, with either often called to service by political merchants whenever there is a political tie to be broken or a stalemate to be financed.

This is where state power and its impact on party formation can be very crucial or even critical for elite consensus in post-colonial Africa. Whereas it was possible in the early years of the Fourth Republic for state power to be brought to bear on party formation and its many contradictions particularly by a military autocrat in civvies, that option is no longer available as the situation has become too amorphous and unwieldy.

In the infamous 2003 elections, General Obasanjo, in order to maintain his notion of national cohesion, brought state power to bear on party formation with decisive gusto. Already weakened and badly enfeebled by Obasanjo’s relentless massaging and caressing, the two opposition parties succumbed to a major political drubbing. By the time the rubble cleared, the AD had been forcibly dislodged from its famous Yoruba redoubt while the APP had been wiped out.

Sixteen years and four presidential elections after, it is proving impossible for General Buhari to bring the parties to heel, and this is not for want of trying. By political temperament and professional inclination, both Obasanjo and Buhari remain dyed in the wool military autocrats. But whereas Obasanjo was dealing with only two parties, Buhari has on his hand over eighty recalcitrant parties and more dangerous dissidents.

The result has been a curious bifurcation of authority and legitimacy. While Buhari’s charisma and hypnotic sway over the northern masses has ensured that they gave him overwhelming victory, the increasing sophistication of the voters and their rebellious resolve to exact punitive retribution on their tormentors even where they belong to Buhari’s party has led to a significant erosion of APC’s commanding influence in areas hitherto regarded as its stronghold.

If Mallam Ganduje eventually falls in Kano as widely predicted, it would mean that the same Kano electorate that gave overwhelming victory to General Buhari two weeks earlier has returned to punish his party for the insalubrious conduct of its flag bearer. In Oyo state, the electorate has punished Abiola Ajimobi twice in as many weeks leaving contrary forces to seize the jugular of the old West.

The times are a-changing indeed and in this turbulent era, the name of the old lion of Ibadan politics, Adelabu Adegoke, aka Penkelemesi, could no longer work magic for his grandson. As this column predicted a long time ago on Segun Mimiko’s secession, the idea of a political homogeneity and common cause for the old west will continue to recede into the political antiquity of romantic delusions.

Mimiko himself, as the column noted then, would have reached the limits of his political possibility. Meanwhile, the Sisyphean efforts to recapture Ibadan have commenced even as the ground is threatening to give way near the ancestral homestead. The dominant political tendency in the old West will soon learn that it is impossible to fight a modern war with ancient weapons. It all reminds one of the great French hero, Marshal Foch, who famously proclaimed that although his flanks may be collapsing, he was nevertheless advancing.

So, where does all this leave us and the nation? In a lurch, we suppose.  But it is a splendid and very pleasant lurch indeed.  The portents from the streets and the turbulence from below indicate that the political class is fast losing the initiative. The old order is dying but the new is unable to come alive. Meanwhile the streets are filled with the political corpses of ancient tyrants. In Ilorin, the jamma are jubilating over the fall of the Saraki dynasty.

In Akwa Ibom and Imo they are celebrating the fall of Godswill Akpabio and Rochas Anayo Okorocha. In Ibadan and Abeokuta, there are abusive ditties commemorating the political end of Ajimobi and Ibikunle Amosu. In Ogbomosho, they are abusing Alao-Akala on the streets. In Kano, the rumour is that the state house has been abandoned to red cap chiefs—an ominous signal of fiery republicanism. The almajiris who dethroned the old order are waiting in the wings.

As we have said in this column, history moves forward but not in a linear progression. There are cunning detours and devious diversions. Nigeria is in the grip of a long revolution. A long revolution is itself a paradoxical and oxymoronic formulation, full of countervailing and countermanding possibilities. The battles you think have been fought and won simply erupt all over again. The tyrants you think you have seen off suddenly reappear in fresh battle formations.

Meanwhile as the political elites roil in utter confusion, elite consensus recedes into remote historical antiquity leaving the nation completely at the mercy of fissiparous forces. Central authority is threatened as state power proves utterly impotent in reining in the centrifugal forces threatening to impale party formation.

Bogged down by an organic crisis of the state, their authority and legitimacy virtually destroyed by open rebellion and bitter confrontation, the two major parties are in a complete shambles and a gross caricature of what real parties should be. They are unable to assert themselves against powerful individuals who have cocked a snook at them too many times. Neither have they been able to re-impose their central authority on collective membership.

If party authority is not re-imposed in the ruling APC in a matter of weeks, if the attempts to emasculate the party from within are not immediately reversed, if erring members are not sanctioned or expelled as a salutary warning to others, Nigeria is likely to drift into a no-party political autocracy in a matter of months.

If and when that happens, the party is likely to fragment into its old components loosely held together by federal largesse. This is when the legacy parties will discover that you cannot step into the same river twice and neither can a nation whose demographic variables continue to change in favour of disillusioned youth remain the same for long.

As it is normal with a nation groomed in political brinkmanship, a nation that takes a perverted pleasure in looking down the abyss before recoiling in horror, Nigeria appears once again to be limping away from tragedy. Nobody can be sure whether the local mutants of the national demons will not return next week as the people return to the polls. At this moment, there is some respite.

Yet the telltale signs of self-inflicted wounds are here with us. Low turnout at the polls which affects overall legitimacy, pockets of violence, reports of technical disenfranchisement and a mournful premonition abroad that the worst is not over. In the event, a post-election fatigue seems to have descended on the entire nation. There is an eerie calm everywhere.

This must be one of the strangest and most surreal electoral aftermath since liberal democracy berthed in Africa. While there is not much open jubilation at the outcome, weeping and gnashing of teeth has taken place mainly behind the curtains. The victors are too enervated and drained while the losers are too dazed and dumbfounded. It must all be due to the raw tension of the preceding weeks.

There must be a word that clinically captures this combination of genuine relief and dazed disbelief. Whatever it is, the nation appears to be summoning its inner reserves of resilience once again. Abubukar Atiku might have refused to play a Goodluck Jonathan by putting a call through to the acknowledged winner of the presidential slugfest. This is not likely to raise the political temperature.

Professor Ben Nwabueze, Constitutional Law titan, may think that he has detected a fatal legal loophole in the fact that the declaration of General Buhari as winner does not address the issue of geographical spread as mandated by the constitution. But this is also not likely to deter Buhari’s presidential progress. In the legal history of Nigeria, a presidential tribunal has never been an avenue for legal one-upmanship.

History moves forward but with detours, digressions and diversions. Its contradictory momentum is filled with splendid ironies which ought to sober up political neophytes. What you think you see is not what is actually on sight. While many believe that the victory of President Buhari is a consecration of tyranny and autocracy, there are others who see the toppling of many local tyrants, particularly the much reviled Bukola Saraki, and the humbling of Nigeria’s Jurassic military caste, as the commencement of a tectonic shift in Nigerian politics. And it is all taking place within the same electoral cycle.

To each society its own unique trajectory. Venezuela is not likely to happen here and neither are we on the road to Caracas. The international community, listening in on the internal political currents and the balance of forces, appears to have weighed in on the side of President Buhari, cruelly dashing the hope of Nigeria’s influence peddlers who had hoped to enlist it to oust the Nigerian president. Unlike Maduro who has lost grip of Chavez’s iron lock on vital sections of the Venezuelan society, Buhari remains very much in control of the vital levers of power as well as the northern masses.

What amazes and amuses at the same time is how significant sections of the Nigerian political class can continue to ignore fundamental lessons of history and politics while hoping to avoid its heavy retribution. A few weeks back in this column, we drew attention to a boxing axiom which has since been expanded into the realm of politics. In order to dethrone a reigning heavyweight champion, the challenger must not only beat him, he must beat him up. The champ must be badly beat, as they say in American inner city lingo.

Atiku Abubakar never came close to beating not to talk of beating up Mohammadu Buhari.  As a matter of fact, it was the former army general who gave the former Customs’ boss a resounding shellacking, improving his tally in the east while pounding his regional compatriot to submission even in his ethnic redoubt of the North East.

Buhari’s dominance of northern Nigerian politics approximates to a political lockdown. It is a classic instance of a charismatic disruption of the normal channels of politics and it is bound to affect the colour and complexion of politics in Nigeria for as long as it subsists. Charismatic leadership thrives on emotion and affective bonding. It has no truck with reason or rationality. It is a huge fireball of passion consuming everything in its path.

It is this point that eludes many southern political figures who often try to reduce presidential contests in Nigeria to logic-chopping and fine debating skills or the quality of political programme for that matter. As we noted in this column this past week, a nation that keeps no passable record of death and birth as well as other vital state documentations cannot hope to conduct free and fair elections. There are simply too many uncaptured and undocumented Nigerians roaming about.

In the circumstances, as long as he maintains his hypnotic sway over the adoring and adulating Northern multitude, General Buhari does not have to engage anybody in debate or explain his party programme. He is not even obliged to remember their names or the correct positions they are vying for. We said it in this column a long time ago that Buhari’s core supporters are not interested in fine grammar or elite speechifying.

The attenuation of politics and the devaluation of the sacred ethos of modern democracy that this antidemocratic populism portends are better left to the imagination. But since they are an accurate reflection of the stage the subject-object dialectic has reached in a particular section of the nation, it cannot be wished away by empty posturing on the platform of ethnic revanchism or infantile radicalism.

Given the circumstances and the current configuration of the nation, a thousand elections will not change the situation. Only arduous negotiations and substantial elite trade off can produce effective changes in the long and short run. Those who have invested considerable capital in vulgar abuse and emotional blackmail of their compatriots, closet reactionaries parading as ethnic champions on collapsed cultural platforms, may seek to audit Politics 101 for adult political delinquents.

In the history of human evolution, no group has ever been known to throw away political advantages so that others will be happy. It is a foolish and forlorn hope. They tend to hold out until revolutionary convulsions make it untenable to do so or evolutionary distemper makes the cost prohibitive.

General Mohammadu Buhari stands at the threshold of history. So far, the retired general remains the only contemporary political personage with the authority and personal following who can nudge the north and his people in the proper historical and political direction. What he does or does not do in the next four years will shape the political destiny of the nation, particularly the core north, for some time to come.

Yet nagging fears persist that he is a dyed in the wool conservative and rabid sectionalist who may only be interested in perpetuating the status quo and his region’s stranglehold on the rest of the nation. On this score alone, his first term has already been adjudged by many as a terrible disappointment.

Perhaps acutely aware of how widespread the feeling of disappointment is, Buhari has himself said in his acceptance speech that this time around, he intends to run a more inclusive government. General Buhari has the innate discipline and strength of character to step up his game and become the pan-Nigerian statesman that the nation sorely requires at this critical conjuncture of its existence.

Whichever direction his innate disposition pushes him, whichever road he chooses to travel, there can be no doubt that for the tall gangling man from Daura this is the culmination of a personal odyssey, the pinnacle of a pilgrim’s political progress. No other contemporary Nigerian leader has journeyed this far in the annals of democratic transition.

For a man who started out as an eager and energetic autocrat, this must be one of history’s great turning points. Buhari has even bested General Obasanjo, his former commander in chief turned implacable political adversary. Like Obasanjo, Buhari has ruled Nigeria as a military despot and as a civilian president. But Buhari holds the record for having contested the presidential slot for a record four times before fate smiled on him.

In getting to this pinnacle, Buhari has outpaced and outlasted better fancied and better groomed  warhorses such as the politically more sophisticated former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida; the apolitical, more militarily dominant and explosively taciturn General Theophilus Danjuma; the disciplined, brilliant and ultra-nationalist General Tunde Idiagbon and of course Buhari’s former secondary school classmate, the gifted, strategically astute and more cosmopolitan General Shehu Yar’Adua.

There is something ultimately mysterious if not confounding about special favours. The heavens       choose who to bestow them upon often without rhyme or reason. Despite all the obstacles placed on his path and despite the limitations imposed by his own character defects, Buhari has arrived at the top of the political pile through good fortunes and sheer force of personality.

Mr President should now reciprocate the goodwill and good fortunes with his own goodwill and generosity of spirit to his fellow compatriots. He has not been famous for an abundance of either. But this is the precise moment of history he can afford to shame many traducers who accuse him of meanness of spirit and lack of communal goodwill by overcoming crippling limitations of character.

For starters, he should avoid pursuing a policy of vendetta against perceived political adversaries. This is not the time to rake up old wounds and malignant infractions. He should also reach out to those who see him an implacable political foe and those who have been put off by his inhospitable coldness of demeanour.  This does not amount to condoning past crimes or current criminalities. The modern Nigerian presidency should be for everybody and against nobody.

General Mohammadu Buhari has already made history. Whether he will allow subsequent history to unmake him depends very much on the choices he makes in the coming years. A generous old man can procure a bride for his beloved son. But he cannot supervise the consummation of the marriage.