Category: Olakunle Abimbola

In Nigerian political history, 1993, 2007 and 2023 would bear contrasting electoral tales: model and rotten.

1993 (12 June 1993 presidential election) and 2023 (25 February 2023 presidential election) would be model elections, though sore losers of both, 30 years apart, would wail otherwise in supreme and gangling delusion.

2007 (21 April 2007 presidential election), on the other hand, was well and truly a rotten exercise — maybe the most rotten ever; surely the most outrageous since 1999.  

Yet its author and finisher, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, in defence of that macabre heist, sounded as a well and true democracy heretic: were Christ Jesus to conduct elections in Nigeria, he piped, Nigerians would still balk!  What double heresy!

For the records: in 2003 and 2007, President Obasanjo conducted the worst polls since 1999 — the one to game a second term, the other to impose a successor.  Both ended in tears — though Obasanjo was too delusional to realize it back then.

The aftermath of 2003 marked, for personal glory, Obasanjo’s comprehensive demolition of PDP, the Army Arrangement alliance (apologies to Fela) the departing military handed him in 1999.  

The 2007 aftermath put the final nail on any previous claim Obasanjo might have had as a democrat.  Everything climaxed with the PDP loss of power in 2015.

But the Obasanjo odyssey would appear to flow from the inglorious role he played in the post-election annulment Interim National Government (ING) of 1993.  

Thirty years after, the old man and the headless herd PDP and LP desperadoes are goading to discredit the Bola Tinubu mandate of February 25 have learnt nothing from the June 12 debacle.

Perhaps it’s time to play back that June 12 tragedy; and the odyssey of the different players thirty years on: Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (IBB), Obasanjo, the late Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’Adua, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

For starters, a great and telling irony: among this lot, everyone that tried to kill June 12 has come to grief.  Only Tinubu, that fought to revalidate it, has relived MKO Abiola’s “Hope ’93″, with his own “Renewed Hope ’23″ that triumphed on February 25.

Just to put the records straight: Peter Obi and his noisome bozos played no part in that epochal battle — except of course the South East infamy of Okwesilieze Nwodo, then governor of Enugu State, who swore he would go on exile should MKO be inaugurated President, from an election Abiola clearly won.

Nwodo’s threat nicely dovetails into another bluster by Chief Bode George — ironically an Obi zealot — who also swore he would go on exile should Tinubu become president.  May 29 waits, with bated breath, for old man George to walk his talk!

Suffice it to say Obi and his headless herd know no history.  Yet, they will do well to pay attention to the tragedy of the 1993 herd bent on subverting MKO’s mandate, but ended up blighting their names and staining their innocent offspring.

By rashly annulling the June 12 election, IBB did what no one had done before, as the Yoruba would say.  He was therefore fated to dire consequences no one had faced.

IBB that tried a Peronist transmutation from military to civilian rulership, even after eight wayward power years, beat a hasty retreat a day before his self-pronounced exit.  The power chamber had become too hot for the one “not only in office but in power”!

He went down taking the cocky political military with him — base power hustlers that gave their otherwise noble profession a bad name.  

But Babangida’s drop was the military’s rise.  They regained their service soul — though not before the murderous havoc of the stark Sani Abacha.  The result is 24 unbroken years of democracy.

What is more?  Allah, in His infinite mercy, has kept IBB alive — long enough to see President Muhammadu Buhari restore MKO’s honour as elected president, though posthumously. So long for the sheer futility of destiny arrest!

The late Gen. Yar’Adua was hardly the originator of the ING idea.  Obasanjo fitted more into that bill.  But by buying into the ING to subvert Abiola’s free mandate, he made a solid pact with avoidable self-ruin.  

Yar’Adua led the People’s Front (PF) faction of the triumphant Social Democratic Party (SDP).  PF agreed to trade off MKO’s mandate for the ING, to the chagrin of the rival People’s Solidarity Party (PSP) faction, that rallied for the mandate.

Yar’Adua’s trouble began when, with Obasanjo, he was roped into an alleged coup attempt by the Abacha dictatorship.  Yar’Adua and Obasanjo were sentenced to long jail terms, from which Yar’Adua never came out alive.

Obasanjo was luckier.  He came from jail to make the choice of the Army Arrangement alliance for president, to placate the Yoruba for the June 12 hurt, while MKO would be martyred, while waiting to consummate his mandate.

Still as president, all Obasanjo did was to wilfully self-devalue.  He organized the two most rotten elections (2003 and 2007) since the dawn of this 4th Republic.  His ogling of an illegal third term, as elected president, blew up in his face; yanking off the halo of a “democrat” soldier — what an oxymoron! — that, in 1979, voluntarily left power.

His suborning of state governments and Business Nigeria to “donate” to his Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) project made him a clear study in transparent corruption, despite his pretentious huff-and-puff to fight that cancer.

Also like IBB, God has kept him alive to witness the dismal collapse of his twin-plot against MKO: the same day PMB restored MKO’s June 12 honour, that same day Obasanjo’s May 29 “Democracy Day” imposition got tossed into the bin, replaced by June 12.  A dead MKO lives more in the people’s heart than a living Obasanjo!

Atiku, by his link to Yar’Adua’s PF and their June 12 perfidy, has fared hardly better. From a wannabe and also-ran for the 1993 SDP ticket, he has since then run from pillar to post for that elusive diadem: 2007, 2019 and 2023.

In his latest epic failure of February 25, he not only crashed, his insensitive power lust almost wiped out PDP in much of the South.  It was after that shock therapy that he ganged up with Obi, his Siamese twin in rank opportunism, to seek comic annulment, ala 1993, of an election already won and lost!

Even if Obi is a history vacuum, might Atiku too be down with chronic forgetfulness?

Among the lot, only Tinubu has emerged triumphant from the 1993 debacle — and that is because he broke ranks with his PF comrades to push justice and absolute justice for MKO; and embraced exile in a no-retreat-no-surrender war against Abacha.

Later as governor, he would build Lagos from its post-federal capital rot into a national treasure that some non-Yoruba now ogle to the point of insanity — until that cold reality check of March 18, and the resultant shrieks, wailing and bitter gnashing of teeth, from across the Niger!

Enjoy your democratic delusion: if you think Tinubu that pulled all the stops to defend MKO’s mandate of 1993, would defend his own of 2023 any less! 

But between treason and subversive call for election annulment, there is but a thin line.  The comics goading the placard-carrying herd to treason are making a grim choice. The dire consequences of that choice would be no less grim.

When ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo endorsed LP’s Peter Obi in his January letter (see ‘Obi and Obasanjo’s kiss of death’: Ripples, 17 January 2023), he saw a looming personal dread: Asiwaju Bola Tinubu succeeding President Muhammadu Buhari. 

He knew such would burst his public service bubble, exposing stark private capture.  That, by the way, doubles as dark metaphor for the PDP years.

In his Obi “kiss”, the retired Army General tried to suck in the youth, blissfully ignorant of their history, even as recent as 1999.  Playing emergency godfather to emergency youth champion is sweet, foxy game, worth a rib-clutching hyena laugh!

Pray, how can history-challenged youths checkmate an old fox, trying to game them, for personal fears?  

Well, not a few youths — from the election results — were suckered into thinking they were fighting own fights.  Yet, that hasn’t stopped Obasanjo living his worst nightmare!

Obasanjo loves to crow he is the sweetest thing that ever happened to Nigeria.  That drives his graceless and condescending attitude toward his successors.

Yet, there are little or no monuments of his love — in Nigerian streets: in terms of collective infrastructural assets — beyond the personal trophies and tinsel warehoused in the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL) — first in Africa!

PMB is the first ruthless burst of this empty bubble: not with malice to anyone, but by simply re-defining public service sans private gaming.

The past eight years, of strides in agriculture, infrastructure and food security, have exposed the policy nudity of the Obasanjo years, with their vacuous “reforms”.

But that’s even on the verifiable and the tangible: roads, bridges, rail, airports, sea ports, etc — generally posting much more from far much less, a stark contrast to the Obasanjo and PDP years of criminally much less from much more revenue.

On the not-so-tangible front of democracy, sane polls and allied matters, the Owu, Abeokuta chief has even found his presidency — and person — much worsted.  

For every court fawner bearing Obasanjo’s third-term push, PMB — as demonized as he has been — has reiterated his irrevocable commitment to his term limit. 

For Obasanjo’s ”do-or-die election” roar, the regnant retort from PMB is free and fair polls, backed by matching IT, though the sore losers of February 25 try to bad-mouth that glowing threshold.

Yet, contrasted to the former president, PMB is so taciturn he seldom — if ever — sings his own praise, often keeping mum even when some rascals hang brazen lies on his neck.

Long story cut short: a taciturn Buhari has been far more productive — and impactful — for Nigeria than a loud Obasanjo, despite PMB’s end-of-tenure Naira re-design monumental blunder.  Obasanjo knows this — and it drives him ga-ga!

Tinubu, on the other hand, is double nemesis — as president-elect; and as Lagos governor when Obasanjo was president (1999-2007).

As governor, Tinubu trumped and thrashed Obasanjo on innovative policies, states’ rights in a federal set-up and adherence to rule of law.

Under Tinubu Lagos renewed while Nigeria decayed, though there were no shortage of Obasanjo “reforms”.  Tinubu’s glittering records in Lagos fetched him the presidency. Obasanjo’s awful Abuja records earned Atiku Abubakar rich defeat.

More than anyone, Obasanjo knows that should a President Tinubu live up to his billing, and take the hard-earned PMB-era achievements to dizzying new heights, not even the OOPL could launder the emptiness of the Obasanjo/PDP years.

Which is why perhaps the old man hit the panic button, when it was clear Tinubu had nicked it, and was earnestly urging PMB to cancel results!

But why would PMB play IBB, who after conducting the epochal June 12, 1993 election, self-ruined by cancelling it all?  Perhaps because PMB is straight as IBB was skewed!  Besides, why would honest PMB allow dissemblers to goad him to perdition?

Still, if the old fox who, in his own words, is perched at the “departure lounge” acted in blind panic, why should Nigerian youths, just gaining the arrival lounge, act in blind ire?   Why are they, as hyper-educated as they are, happy pawns in elders’ proxy wars, when they ought to have voted in own future interests?  

Take Obi, the Obedients’ — read, the youths’ — adopted candidate.  Perhaps the only thing you can “verify” about Obi is his Igbo nativity.  Aside from his unity with Obasanjo in holy hypocrisy, all else — youth champion, religious crusader and ethnic messiah — is election-season fakery to game votes.

Now, you can’t crucify Obi for vacuum-cleaning the Ndigbo vote.  Tinubu garnered the Yoruba vote, as Atiku and Kwankwaso gulped northern votes.  

But you must worry at the clannishness of Obi’s Igbo votes.  The Igbo should worry, even more: rabid tribal voting hardly builds pan-Nigeria bridges for a future Igbo president.

Besides, the Anambra Saint that mortgaged state money for family business without blinking, could become an Abuja Pope that sinks the national trove into clannish trade — with his Igbo and Christian footstool to power bearing collateral blame and guilt!

These are serious character flaws these youths should have pondered, if really they craved a new order.  Besides, weaponizing faith for votes — as Obi did — ought to have triggered an alarm, if these youths know their country’s history and truly cherish their future.

But alas!  Emotive youths craved a willy-nilly messiah, open sesame! It always ends in grief, as the election results have shown — never mind Obi’s comic self-delusion that he “won”.  Why, Obi even wept over an election he manifestly lost!

Still pray, when has mono-ethnic voting ever gifted anyone the Nigerian Presidency?

How this brainless roar is playing out in cosmopolitan Lagos is well and truly eerie — with neo-Okonkwo (remember the Achebe tragic hero of Things Fall Apart?) Igbo youths, even more hare-brained and tactless than the original, bawling “take Lagos!” — whatever that means — and the riled Yoruba primed for a no-retreat-no-surrender on March 18!  Yet, all these youths are just pawns!

One of the “youths” wanting to “take Lagos!” is a dangerous cultural schizophrenic, pumped full of bile.  He rails against up-country Yoruba gains in cosmopolitan Lagos.  But he goads the Igbo — for subversive vote — they could get an inordinate share! 

The other, from reportage on his private life, has nothing close to a settled life, though a crowing adult.  But he must “take over” Lagos because he’s a youth!  What comics!

After the election is won and lost, second-term Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu would be left to manage the mess and mend the reckless cross-ethnic fissure.  

Perhaps in fours years, if the Tinubu Presidency hits its full promise, these youths would look back and realize how closely they brought Lagos to peril; and how, even more, they had imperilled their future.  

They went after the wrong enemy: Tinubu and his successors, who built — and are still building — Lagos, to secure these youths’ future.

Saved by the bell — no, not the ruling APC whose candidate, President-elect Bola Tinubu still won; though relative to his cross-country appeal, he underperformed.

But the “youth”.  Had LP’s Peter Obi, their adopted candidate won, young Nigerians would have been gifted a poisoned chalice of clannish and religious voting, fated to further blight their lives, rip their peace and punch their progress.  

Nothing wrecks countries more than clannish voting and sectarian goading.  Still, both drove and primed Obi’s run.  

By his deafness to the echoes of North-South power shift, PDP’s Alhaji Atiku Abubakar lived the “northern” candidate he craved.  

The PDP that started as a pan-Nigeria party won only in Atiku’s native North East. Yes, it posted strong showing in the North West.  But elsewhere, it was all but guillotined. 

Still, in Atiku’s personal tragedy and PDP’s “re-northernization” is a redeeming glory: the dwindling spectre of PDP regaining national power, after the criminal, equal-opportunity heist and graft of 1999 to 2015.

Besides, in the gripping tension of the elections, many Nigerians walked stark naked.  

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo wanted President Muhammadu Buhari (whose office, by the way, he routinely insults) to summarily cancel election results, just because Obi, his preferred candidate, was losing.

As president, Obasanjo infamously tore up — in full public view — the result sheet for the Owu-Egba stool, just because his adopted candidate was losing. It was the same do-or-die mindset that birthed his do-or-die charge, that produced the worst election of this era — the 2007 election — when Obasanjo exited power.

Then on TV, you witnessed a band of IT nihilists, doing their comical best to discredit the polls.  On Channels TV came a panel of respectable-looking Nigerians, lamenting INEC’s failure to realtime project results.

You would have taught they were dissecting Obasanjo’s do-or-die polls of 2007 — the way they froze all else to wail over the malfunction of BVAS (generally false, by the way) on polling day!  But it was all artful propaganda to mourn the loss of their preferred candidate.

More on the cliffhanging presidential election of February 25 would come next week.  Now, the destination is Lagos and its gubernatorial, state legislative poll of March 11.

In the impassioned build-up to March 11, a piece of history is apposite — particularly to the social media-nimble youth, blissfully ignorant of their history.

Generally, Lagos had been blessed with fair leadership, from its first-ever governor, Gen. Mobolaji Johnson (of blessed memory).  

With the late Alhaji Lateef Jakande (first-ever elected governor) and Tinubu (first governor from 1999) building on that sound foundation, one could easily presume a constant — that an auto-pilot Lagos would soar in any hands, even in a rookie’s.

But all that nearly changed from 1992.  Ironically, the Jakande and Tinubu political “armies” (Tinubu, under Dapo Sarumi’s PRIMROSE movement, both in the Lagos defunct Social Democratic Party, SDP) feuded to the death, leaving Sir Michael Otedola, of the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC), to gross the governorship.

Both the Ase — roughly Yoruba for diktat (Jakande’s traditional Lagos progressives) and PRIMROSE (the upwardly mobile professionals-in-politics, set to uproot the Jakande establishment) cooperated in the legislative elections, which SDP swept.

But in the governorship, the Ase taught the rookie PRIMROSE some nimble tricks in realpolitik.  They made a deal with NRC, shutting out their own candidate, Yomi Edu, who the Ase alleged had won the SDP ticket by a sleight of hand.

The gain was NRC’s Sir Michael’s — a philanthropist and retired oil company executive with immense community value.  In his native Epe, his reputation was golden, for he awarded indigent students yearly scholarships, eons before his governorship run.

But alas!  Sir Michael had no solid plan to govern Lagos, though his popular campaign jingle was “That Lagos May Excel” — ironically believable by his glittering profile.

Long story cut short: Lagos started decaying and sinking under his watch, for the first time in the state’s history.  

Gen. Olagunsoye Oyinlola, the military administrator Gen. Sani Abacha posted to Lagos, after burying IBB’s still-birth 3rd Republic in November 1993, fared hardly better, with his “no bitumen” woes — his apologia for failing to halt the Lagos urban decay.

It took Gen. Mohammed Buba Marwa (now NDLEA chairman) to steady the ship and arrest the slide, pending the 1999 coming of Governor Tinubu, who launched a yeoman’s effort to gift Lagos another life.  

His successors, since 2007, have since kept the pace.  The result: Lagos, from the dregs of 1999, is now the toast and envy of all in 2023.

But why this rather long historical recap? Just to warn against that fatal presumption, which drives Lagos youth inanities, in the run-up to the March 11 election: that just about anyone can run Lagos.  Not true.

Jide Adediran aka Jandor, the PDP candidate, was ex-APC that entered the fray with a nativist growl: Lagos for Lagosians — ugly ancestral ripple that plagues a cosmopolitan Lagos pond!  But it’s all blind opportunism. 

Vivour-Rhodes, the LP man but ex-PDP, is an even more divisive two-faced Janus.  Chinedu, one of his native names, drives non-native triumphalism and belligerence.  Gbadebo, the other, evokes native bile, fury and thunder.  By his surname, he is a scion of a grand Saro Lagos family. Yet, his crude identity politics sparks so much atavism.

These two are the unfazed face of Lagos-youths-in-politics, who in their shallow group think, often mock old age.  Yet, both are already steeped in crude identity politics and crass deceit — both products of Lagos PDP’s rigged narratives for desperate power.

The good thing though is that Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in four years, has beamed nothing but charity across ethnic and faith lines.  He has developed a winning reputation for mild manners and even-handedness, attracting no rabid antipathy.

His achievements, in four years, are a study in tenacity and focus. If he completes the Lagos rail Red Line before May 29 — after the Blue Line already inaugurated — he would have become the first sub-national government in Nigerian history to deliver such hard infrastructure in four years.  

Besides, he is on the cusp of 4th Mainland Bridge, another transformative project.  In general you feel Lagos is in safe hands, in sync with the progressive charter of 1999.  

So, the chirping Jandor and Rhodes-Vivour might just cancel out each other, while the governor gallops to a second term.

Still, the Tinubu Lagos order arrives that historical juncture the Jakande order reached in 1991: fierce challenge from the younger generation.  It’s a turn of history no one can change.

But while PRIMROSE leveraged an allure of something new, as new professionals-in-politics, the current youth charge smacks of young atavists lobbing grenades for the soul of the past, in their frenetic social media battleground.

That should worry these youths, more than anyone, far beyond Saturday’s election.

Every election has its unique dynamics, never the same with the previous one.  

But the media that should track and dutifully guide voters on these changes have remained more or less static, many times chasing inanities, while the real issues beg for attention.

By its lax tracking, the Nigerian media systemically under-develops Nigerian democracy, though it huffs and puffs as its loud guardian: the all-mighty fourth estate, that could do and undo!

This scandalous abandonment of sacred duty has made elections that should ordinarily be clear cut, in stark choices, to become needlessly blurred.  

That condemns the voter to poor choice, often fired by gushing emotions.  But the same fourth estate that sets up this debacle is the first to bawl and whine that things aren’t going well — and this dire judgment, most times, suffused with raw passion instead of clinical reason.

The Nigerian media appears resigned to the easy way out: empty thundering in pursuit of showy advocacy, instead of quiet, lonely and rigorous thinking to proffer hard solutions.

By the way the February 25 presidential election is panning out with quite some stunning upsets.  

In Lagos, Peter Obi and his Labour Party (LP) triumphed, thanks to many precincts with heavy Igbo population; laced with some “youths”, emotive at the best of times, fated to racing to hasty conclusions without thinking hard and through.

That led to some maniacal triumphalism along stark ethnic lines.  

Still, if you must bury PDP — and that was what LP votes did in Lagos for Abubakar Atiku and his party — must you replace it with Obi who, running on LP platform, was fakery through and through?

That brings the discourse back to the media and lax tracking.

Candidate Muhammadu Buhari won in 2015 exuding integrity, when the PDP years had been nothing but rot and maggots; and Olusegun Obasanjo’s party had pawned our collective heirloom to a wild and greedy few, even if PMB was his gruff old self.

But his transparent honesty and bewitching simplicity stepped in to save his endangered co-elite, giving them a rare chance to reboot and find a new path.  

By his government’s far better programme conception and far more verifiable project implementation, spread to every part of the country, he tried his best to yet save his stiff-necked power elite.

But how did his political adversaries take this offer of “new life”?  

The South East dominant power elite, who lost out in the 2015 sweepstakes, weaponized their plum loss to rile their masses into blind “Fulani” hate — with swashbuckling ethnic arrogance and condescension to boot!  

That ironically came to plague Obi in his bold run, with his generally poor showing in the North, at least from available results so far.  He did well though in the some Christian-dominated areas of southern Kaduna.

Baba Ayo Adebanjo and his tendencies, leading a plank of the fractious Yoruba progressives phalanx, exploited Awolowo-era Yoruba-North antipathy to bake Bola Tinubu in dry hate, among his own folks.  His crime?  Paving the way for PMB, the alleged latest face of blind Fulani hegemony!

But as Fulani hate gave IPOB the vim to bury the Igbo in self-assured destruction in wanton Igbo-on-Igbo violence, Yorubaland barely dodged the bullet in the Yoruba Nation campaign, which threw up some virtual dregs, pontificating to the cream, all fired by ethnic rage.

Baba Adebanjo, for continued relevance, continues to thrust his relationship with the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo as willy-nilly, must-earn tribute.  

But running from pillar to post in three presidential elections — 2015: Jonathan, 2019: Atiku, 2023: Obi — Baba hangs in there.  Unlike the old Titans, he simply lacks the grace to concede to the Olympians, as the graceful change of guards went in Greek mythology.

Instead of the media to faithfully report all these excitements but put them in clear perspectives to guide the reader, many segments just jumped into the fray, amplifying the din.

In that dreadful screech, strides the taciturn PMB made, in renascent agriculture and transformative infrastructure, were blissful ignorance to an electorate gorged silly on the bogey of PMB as the latest Fulani gargoyle in town!

Which is why an Obi would emerge from the blue and remake himself “youth champion” (even if he didn’t articulate any logical way to put his beloved “youths” out of their misery); or a flat Atiku peddling old fumbling of the PDP era (that catapulted Nigeria into these current challenges) as fresh magic cures.

Still, imagine if the media had put the PMB 2015 win in correct perspectives?  Imagine if they had followed that up with the lesson of the 2019 win, which a foreign newspaper even explained to an endorsement of and reward for trust-worthiness?

Imagine tracking and dutifully linking renewed infrastructure as boon for personal economies, and going ahead to do factual stories to elicit these new realities — not as propaganda for anyone but as sacred duty to correctly inform the population?

After doing all of these, also imagine the media clinically x-raying PMB government’s power policies (the critical area of infrastructure which PMB has not really done well, beyond improvements in some elite segment of the power market) and suggesting reasonable and realistic ways forward?

By doing all that, well before the election season, without prejudice to partisan preferences, the voter would have known the progress (or retrogress) between 2015 and now — again as sacred, fact-led, surveillance duty, not captive to any partisan pandering.

Wouldn’t the voter then have been well informed to make rational choices, and not fall victim to election-season shamans, who after scamming the electorate with sweet nothings, leave them in the lurch and set them on another bout of wailing and near-hopelessness in the next four years?

From the earliest days of Lagos Weekly Record and Lagos Standard (that pair bossed the Lagos newspaper scene from 1900 and 1920), to Herbert Macaulay’s Lagos Daily News (founded 1925) that took no prisoners in its continuous agitation and Zik’s thundering West African Pilot (launched in 1937), adversarial journalism has become, for many Nigerian newspapers, the unfazed gold standard.

While that stood Nigeria well during the colonial times and the best-forgotten military era, it’s hardly a winning model for a democracy trying to find its feet, without prejudice to the media’s sacred duty to call to account the ruling order.

It’s time to evolve into developmental journalism.  It is never mutually exclusive to critical journalism.  Rather, both can reinforce each other, if the media master their craft.

Twelve days to a crucial vote, a three-pronged pitch drives a four-pronged race. Aside, the Naira and fuel meltdown hoists a thick fog of doomsday — as it often happens in the run-up to any general election.

In 2019, it was the elite hysteria over the suspension of CJN Walter Onnoghen, who later was convicted by the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) over asset declaration rap. 

But for an establishment that always shields its own, and decided to end matters there and not push criminal proceedings, the ex-CJN could well have stared down jail terms — if the courts had confirmed the “guilty” verdict of the CCT!

This year, with the biting Naira and fuel, it’s a more horrific bedlam, with both elite and masses baying for blood; and the media too having a ball.  The snag is everyone bawls but no one listens.

Still, this Armageddon would pass.  This present fog of doomsday would clear.  The elections would be lost and won.  Folks would return to their normal life cycles.

But why is it that at crucial electoral junctures the voter is plagued by jitters?  That would appear the stiffest challenge so far to Nigeria’s renewed democracy, hitting  a record 24 years at a stretch.  That trend should worry every democrat.

But back to the major thesis: three-pronged pitch in a four-pronged horse race!

First, the horse race, with four major candidates: two with established nationwide networks, one an Internet champion, the other, a local champion.

Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) candidate, is rather strong — formidable even — in his domestic front and catchment areas.  As a former Kano governor, he showed immense policy brilliance.  

His Kwankwassiya red caps are also an attestation to his gift of mobilization — that rare ability to cut a distinct image for himself, independent of the party collective; and even that rarer talent to move his doting followers across party lines, as he criss-crosses parties for best personal deals.

But outside the North or northerners spread all across the country, Kwankwaso has little appeal.  Nevertheless, in terms of numbers, he might be stronger than what folks give him credit for.

On that, he is the direct opposite of Labour Party’s Peter Obi.  Thanks to Obi’s social media hyper-activism, he looms large though he appears much thinner on the ground. 

Indeed, Obi is a relay of contradictions.  As Seun Kuti, the Afro-Beat Prince has rightly argued, Obi is a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist.  Yet, he runs on LP, a socialist platform.  

Obi is a veteran of the rot he now hates — the Chichidodo that abhors faeces, yet savours maggots! He’s Immaculate Gregory, yet he is buried under Panama papers!  Nevertheless, he hopes against hope that folks, outside his Obidient adorers, would be blind to that glaring flaw — fond hope! 

From these massive contradictions, Obi has woven even a more massive Nirvana — some paradise in which Holy Peter is the supreme shaman, who just has to bark “open sesame” and all the entrenched problems would vanish!

In fairness, that “holy nothing” is not far from his “winning” formula as Anambra governor.  No prime infrastructure to vault his state higher, but subversive public savings pushing private business, but sold as immense public good!  That he left no fitting landmarks after eight years is fair rebuke, which nevertheless he hopes voters wouldn’t notice.   

Sure Obi, like Kwankwaso, should harvest thick votes from his domestic zone, and maybe among the Igbo population in cosmopolitan Lagos.  But he might just find the Presidency a bridge too far — despite his fanciful polls that put him ahead of others.

Atiku Abubakar, the PDP candidate, is running in a strange milieu, which has condemned all the top runners to pointing to past feats — no thanks to the pin-point messaging of Bola Tinubu, the APC candidate and his running mate, Kashim Shettima.

Against Tinubu’s exploits in Lagos and Shettima’s great strides in war-torn Borno, all poor Atiku has to point to are the PDP years of wasted opportunities and wildly fiddled votes!

Luckless Atiku!  Though he was for all of their presidential second term a mere “spare tyre” that his principal Olusegun Obasanjo would rather throw off if it wasn’t law-tied, Atiku had had, on the hustings, to glamourize their less-than-stellar records; and defend Obasanjo’s empty sanctimony.

Atiku’s pitch is also not helped by his own rather executive recklessness as Vice President — pawning, allegedly to cronies, prime national assets for virtual peanuts, all in the name of “privatization”.  But beyond VP Atiku as the direct implementing agent, privatization and commercialization were prime policies of the Obasanjo Presidency.

So, Atiku’s messaging has fallen rather flat.  First, PDP has no glorious past to reference.  Second, Atiku is so Teflon he seldom evinces any strength on any issue.  

To spoil it all, he started his campaign on vile nativism: northern votes for he, the northerner.  That drove, to the edge, the-Presidency-must-come-to-the-South lobby.  

That, with how Atiku won the PDP ticket, has given Rivers Governor Nyesom Wike and his G-5 the oomph to give Atiku and the national PDP a virtual fight to the very death.

Where the Atiku candidacy bristles — and rather darkly too — is in the deep, rich bogey of an alleged northern conspiracy, to which not a few have situated the Naira and fuel shortage crisis, as latest “proof”.

Before this crisis — a clear unforced error (to borrow that tennis phrase) by the sitting APC Federal Government — Tinubu, by his winning messaging;  bolstered by cross-country, cross-ethnic witnesses to his progressive politics and his unassailable Lagos records, was clearly the campaign to beat.

PMB himself — glossed over by the excitable many — was running a very smart Tinubu campaign.  

While partisans holler the president hasn’t been too visible on the Tinubu campaign circuit, PMB has visited two key APC states, Lagos and Kano, to showcase the “wonders” of the state governments run by his party.  Isn’t all politics local?  

He has also followed that up with a project launch and campaign tour, Tinubu himself in tow, in his native Katsina.  The other day too, PMB was in Sokoto for Tinubu.

Still, the Naira-fuel hoopla would go down as one of the worst blunders of the Buhari era — to which the message-sparse opposition has latched for rogue redemption!

The ever-opportunistic Obi found a late voice after a long, loud quiet: folks, bear with CBN!  Many alleged he lost his voice because some banks in which he had interest were feeding fat on the chaos!  Talk of the Chichidodo again!

The ever-scheming Atiku blew hot and cold but finally talked himself into a hole: CBN must not shift the swap deadline despite the pains!  Scrambling from a crusader for good into the cloak of villainy?

Tinubu, ever so bold and nimble, forced a disclaimer.  That put his party (and APC government) under pressure, charmed the opposition into forced errors and tried to hurl the hurting public to his side.

On February 25, the electorate have quite a choice!  But better to calmly navigate a rough present that offers future hope, than emotively blunder into a past of solid ruin.

On two critical fronts, a palace power play just hit the current electioneering.  Its hysteria and Armageddon tales are palpable — and just as well.  

It’s 18 days to a crucial election!

Cash and fuel!  It’s a double whammy that couldn’t have come at a worse time!  No wonder political gladiators grimly position themselves to profit from the debacle.

Hardly a crime!  Don’t folks say all is fair in war?  

Still, such profiteering — and the more cynical, the bigger the illicit prize — could well separate those with solid policies and messaging, from hustlers milking current angst to scam the electorate.  All is fair in war!

Cold comfort, though: those merrily scammed have four years — at least — to rue their manic folly; four years, at least, to gnash their teeth!  

But back to the twin-debacle: cash and fuel.

Godwin Emefiele, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, has been the clear face of villainy in the currency swap blow-out.  He has been the butt of triumphal roasting in a section of the media.

Now, is he fair devil nailed on the cross?  Or just another poor Christ of CBN: a mere scapegoat for hidden banking Barabas and scammers?  Time will tell.

But beyond sundry hysteria, some facts shoot up.  Banks and their managers, always unfazed poster children of crooked citizenship in times of cash shocks and jolts, are taking their rightful places in infamy.

Even as automated teller machines (ATMs) thirst for cash, to sate the need of a cash-starved public, bundles of mint-fresh new Naira notes fly at parties in a sickening cascade of merry sprays.  

Why?  One Kaduna-based bandit released a video which promptly went viral, jeering: what the public couldn’t get, he had a surfeit of!  But that outlaw could well be bluffing.

Two women, one an actor; another, a social media “serial entrepreneur”, have been nabbed for swap racketeering.  One was caught in a video throwing wads of the new Naira notes at dancers at a party and stomping on some notes herself in wild dancing.  The other was advertising the sale — at illicit premium — on her social media handle. 

Where on earth did these folks get the scarce cash?  Sabotage!

“Some banks are inefficient and only concerned about themselves,” President Muhammadu Buhari grimly rued, while hosting APC governors, who had rushed to Aso Rock to figure out how the Naira swap crunch could be stemmed. “Even if a year is added, problems associated with selfishness and greed won’t go away.”

True.  Still, that won’t stop folks from blasting PMB for the mess.  That’s a tough leadership call, which drives the opposition’s bid to profit by it all at the polls.

Still, that sabotage couldn’t have be so masterfully executed without CBN’s clear guilt in supply shortage.  

Just as Emiefele indicted the banks for racketeering with bundles of cash while he was at the House of Representatives, Nasir El-Rufai, the Kaduna governor, has also accused the CBN of mopping up N2 trillion in old notes, printed N300 billion as replacement, and allowed soulless racketeering to thrive on the N1.7 trillion shortfall!

If CBN had as much as printed N1 trillion in new notes, el-Rufai reasoned, the swap would have been less painful, as the shortage is less severe.

But before you dismiss it all as yet another harsh call from Mallam Stern Governor, link his take to PMB’s own disclosure that before he authorized the currency tinkering, the CBN assured him that no new note would be printed abroad — clearly to preserve scarce forex.

Might the shortage of new Naira notes then have resulted from lack of capacity from the local mint and security printing company?  Might that have explained El-Rufai’s claim that CBN made available N300 billion to replace N2 trillion?  

To get to the root of the crisis, this line of questioning is worth vigorously pursuing.  While it’s legit for CBN to want to mop up excess cash to stem inflation, pushing out N300 billion to replace N2 trillion would appear a tack too acute.

But again, let’s get all the facts before coming to definitive judgment.  Suffice it to say it’s pretty grim out there and the president’s seven-day permission to fix the mess may well prove a bridge too far.  The government must move much faster.  Act now!

Now, fuel.  Unlike cash where you have a villain to tear at, the alleged saboteurs on the fuel front are faceless powers and principalities inside NNPC Ltd and in Aso Rock!

Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the APC presidential candidate, first dropped the bombshell on the hustings in Abeokuta, Ogun State.  

A day or two after, Governor El-Rufai — an unfazed straight shooter, if ever there was one — came out to definitively own the statement: some fellows, who lost out in the intra-APC presidential ticket sweepstakes, are allegedly hiding behind the president to incite the people against their party, and trying to shred the party’s prime ticket! 

Riposting to Information and Culture Minister, Alhaji Lai Mohammed’s initial denial that such pernicious ghosts never existed, the governor doubled down; insisting even the minister knew the person(s) being accused: a few fifth columnists — not the President; never the Federal Government — but embedded saboteurs well and fairly docked!

Meanwhile, the fuel crisis has taken a frightful soul of its own, biting harder and harder.  Though the President just set up an emergency committee to crack the monstrous nut, the NNPCL — sole importers of petroleum products — maintains its stock story of sufficient fuel.  If so, why the acute scarcity, driving cut-throat pump pricing?

Again vile sabotage, as Tinubu alleged in Abeokuta?  And why now — especially by an APC government that for seven years has, to be fair, managed the fuel crisis better than the preceding PDP government?

Why now when local refining is nearer than any other time since the dawn of SAP in 1986, with Dangote and other local modular refineries very close to berthing?  

Why would any government throw away its ace, at the virtual eve of a crucial election?

Tinubu has applied shock therapy to whip his APC back into line — and the ensuing thunder of reverberations has shown its clear impact.

Atiku Abubakar?  Now he hails.  Then he nails. But why, on the balance, do you have a feeling he hankers after milking electoral fortune from this mass misery? 

Peter Obi has told Nigerians to bear with the present pains in expectation of future gains, after what appeared a long, studious quiet from his camp.

On the whole, this cash/fuel mess is a costly distraction that should never have been.  It favours the opposition which strategy— for want of any worthwhile messaging — is to milk public pains for electoral gains.  

But it also hurts — very deeply — Tinubu’s pin-point messaging thus far: past achievements signposting future capacity and capability; where Tinubu and running mate, Kashim Shettima, post rather formidable records as Lagos and Borno governors.

That’s why PMB must stem this needless palace intrigue.  His party’s fortune in the  election — nay, his government’s legacy — rests on it.