False campaign claims have two major objectives: (a) to derail the target from a set agenda, by putting the target on the defensive and (b) to take advantage of the likelihood that fewer of those who heard or read the false claims would hear or read about the rebuttal. Nevertheless, there are certain false campaign claims that should not be made, because they are patently false and, therefore, morally wrong. If you knowingly make false statements with the intent to deceive, then you are a liar.

In the ongoing presidential campaign in Nigeria, there are many false claims, especially on social media. Some of them are trivial. Some are unbelievable.Yet others trivialize important issues by falsifying the truth in order to present the target of the false statement in bad light. A favourite topic for exaggerations and false claims is the economy.

To be sure, it is universal practice in any democracy to use the economy as a campaign theme, especially as the basis for change of government. Opposition parties are always eager to blame the government in power for any downturn in the economy. It is the economy, stupid, as American politicians would say. That’s why the economy was on the front burner as Americans went to the polls yesterday during their customary midterm elections. It is, therefore, standard practice for opposition parties in Nigeria to blame the present APC government for the overall downturn in the economy.

It is, however, not true that inflation and rising costs of living in Nigeria were caused solely by the Buhari administration. It is also not true that these economic problems are unique to Nigeria. Yet opposition parties, notably, the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party, have been making these claims on the campaign trail, deceiving a large segment of the electorate which may not be in command of the facts or is willing to be deceived.

The truth is that inflation and rising costs are universal economic problems from which no nation on earth is absolved. For example, only last week, The Bank of England warned that the United Kingdom is facing its longest recession since records began. The economic downturn will extend into the future, the Bank noted. By the same token, the UK inflation rate is now in double digits, the highest in at least 12 months.

The European Union in general has not fared any better. Overall, the inflation rate of the European Union is in double digits. There are even countries in the Union, such as Hungary, Lithuania, and Estonia, where the inflation rate is over 20%. Even the G20 is not exempt from inflation, with Turkey posting the highest rate of 85.51%!

Similarly in the United States, the inflation rate has been rising steadily from a low rate of 0.1% in May 2020 to the current 8.2%. In order to prevent inflation from spiraling out of control, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates as many as six times this year alone, the latest one by 0.75% just last week.

Two major drivers of inflation and rising interest rates across the globe are the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. The pandemic led to lockdowns, job layoffs, and shortages of various consumer goods due to factory shutdown. By the time the global ngeconomy was getting out of the pandemic recession, a surge in consumer spending ensued, leading to a hike in prices. Yet, supply failed to keep up with demand. To complicate matters, lockdowns persisted in China, where most consumer goods are produced.

The pandemic was followed closely by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The effects of the Russian invasion on supply lines led to a rise in oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and food prices. Shortages of Russian oil and Ukraine grains spurned a global decline in supply, resulting in inflation and rising costs.

Against the above backdrop, Nigeria’s inflation rate of 20.5% is neither unique nor strange. For those who care to know, Ghana’s inflation rate has been rising continuously for sixteen months in a row, culminating recently at 37.2%.

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This is not to excuse the Nigerian government from blame in certain areas of the economy. Hitherto unchecked pipeline vandalism has accentuated the petroleum supply crisis at home, while terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping have limited agricultural activities, leading to limited or poor harvests. When endemic corruption is mapped onto these economic problems, the state had to go borrowing to survive. Without a doubt, the present administration has not done enough to curb these problems, the reported gains in fighting corruption notwithstanding.

Nor has the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, been up to the billing in offering proper advice to the President, leading to a disjuncture between monetary and financial policies. Amidst these shortcomings, Emefiele’s CBN engaged in unprecedented development finance with little or no result to show for the huge sums of money released for sponsored projects, such as the anchor borrowers programme. Confronted with too much money outside the banking system, Emefiele decided on a mopping operation, by redesigning the Naira in the face of rising inflation and dollar scarcity. Apart from leading to a steep rise in the exchange rate, it further widened the gulf between monetary and financial policies as recently discussed by Sam Omatseye (see Mefi’s beauty, The Nation, November 7, 2022).

However, no matter how much blame is laid on the Buhari administration for the economic problems, it is illogical to argue that the APC presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, cannot chart a new course of action on the economy, simply because he is in the same party with the President. True, the party’s progressive agenda is binding on successive candidates, anyone who has read Tinubu’s manifesto would know that his implementation strategy is different.

In his manifesto, the section on the economy begins with a bold statement, which foreshadows his approach: “The structural model upon which our national economy has always been based needs major reform. Our economy is unhelpfully designed to export raw material and import increasingly expensive finished products” (page 11). This reform will call for reviews of federal budgetary methodology (p14); national industrial plan (p14); exchange rate management (p19); mortgage and consumer credit reform (p.24); and much more. A thorough review of the manifesto will follow soon.

Violence is universal and destructive but varies in form and intensity from society to society. At its worst, it involves swift and intense force and may be exerted by natural or human actors. For example, thunder, storm, or volcano can destroy the immediate ecology and cause serious injury or death to the population. Their intensity has been heightened by climate change as recently demonstrated by heavy floods all over the country. Similarly, various destructive agents—terrorists; herdsmen; bandits; armed robbers; kidnappers; cultists; political thugs; security agents; and randy men, who rape their female victims—cause varying degrees of harm to their victims.

By the same token, the unjust or unwarranted exercise of power by a brutal regime can exert violence on the people as Nigeria witnessed during the Abacha dictatorship. In the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are witnessing the convergence of symbolic and physical violence in which one (physical) is being used to achieve and enhance the other (symbolic). The Russian leader’s ultimate goal is to exercise territorial control over the space occupied by Ukraine.

While natural agents of physical violence, employ the force of nature, human agents of physical violence often employ weapons to harm others in order to get them to surrender their property, themselves, or even their lives. Nigeria has been reeling from the insecurity caused by various human agents of physical violence. Within the last ten or so years, millions have been injured, killed, or displaced and property worth trillions of Naira have been destroyed.

In its milder form, violence may not involve the use of physical weapons but may still inflict harm in some other ways. This is symbolic violence as defined by French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. It involves the use of power or a powerful tool, such as a dominant language or tacit state policy and social mechanisms to impose an ideology and control over a given society often to the point that the population takes their new condition as natural.

Yet, like physical violence, symbolic violence can be very harmful. Political corruption, verbal violence, misinformation, and the imposition of a dominant language are tools for symbolic violence. For example, political corruption allows those who have access to national resources to appropriate such resources and use them to control others, while limiting the people’s access to appropriate political goods. In Nigeria, for example, it is estimated that more money has been stolen from the state’s treasury than has been spent on necessary political goods. Recent revelations by the EFCC and discussions about fuel subsidy and pipeline vandalism are showing that more state resources might have been stolen than reported.

Fake news, falsehoods, and other kinds of verbal or pictorial violence are used to perpetuate the negative perception of their targets. For example, in the ongoing presidential campaign season, supporters of Peter Obi, the candidate of the Labour Party, otherwise known as Obidients, are known to perpetuate false information about opponents of their principal. They often engage in outright verbal violence, involving derogatory and abusive language. They are known to misinform the public about the activities of the targets of their abuse, by distorting their actions and statements and doctoring videos in which such targets appeared.

As a universal phenomenon, violence is not unique to Nigeria. However, there are three peculiarities about violence in the country. One, there are far too many agents of violence. Two, these agents spur violence more or less concurrently, leading to a high rate of insecurity in the country. Three, sadly, there is neither a coordinated effort to curb violence nor a discernible plan to address its underlying causes. The result is a high rate of insecurity with all its consequences on personal safety and the economy.

True, Nigeria witnessed the most extreme type of violence in the form of a civil war; nevertheless, at no time in the country’s history have the various agents of violence combined to perpetuate the present scale of violence.

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Of particular significance is the impact of these atrocities on food security as production dropped significantly in the affected areas. Reduced production of cash crops has also affected the nation’s export earnings. These developments do not bode well for a country in which agricultural export is being touted as an alternative to oil export.

Yet, no respite is in sight for these atrocities, although some of them appear to be in remission. Worse still, the government has not even begun to address the underlying causes of violence in the country. There are basically social, economic, and political causes. The social causes include ethnic and religious differences as well as illiteracy and its consequences. These social differences generate tension when social inequalities and injustice are mapped onto them.

The economic causes range from poverty and unemployment to poor governance and a mismanaged economy. Clearly, there is a correlation between a mismanaged economy and rising unemployment just as there is a correlation between rising unemployment and poverty levels.  Unemployed and poor youths are often ready recruits into violent groups.

Politicians are largely responsible for the political causes of violence, by breeding armed thugs and violent supporters. In Rivers State alone every election cycle since 2015 has been turned into a battle in which people are killed and property damaged as rival teams of thugs go at each other.

Clearly, the passivity of the present administration, the non-prosecution of offenders, and the lack of a coherent strategy of containment of violence have generated anxiety about the 2023 general elections. It is therefore incumbent on the incoming administration to embark on a comprehensive plan to contain violence from various sources.

Such a plan should begin with enduring measures to address the underlying causes of violence. All stakeholders must be involved, from schools to college campuses; from market women to businessmen; from traditional rulers to religious leaders; from security agents to judicial officers; from political office holders to public servants; from professional groups to civil society organisations; and so on.

Above all, the government must take steps to address the major causes of social inequality and poverty in Nigeria by creating opportunities for communities to realise their potential. Perhaps, no better measure could be employed to create such opportunities than the restructuring of the country. If well-planned, restructuring should allow for power devolution, fiscal federalism, and the creation of state police. The goal should be the development of more enduring and sustainable solutions, rather than ad hoc solutions, such as poverty alleviation measures.

It is becoming clearer and clearer that Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party is not only desperate to be President but he also has little or no intention to be President of Nigeria as a whole. Rather, he wants to be President of the part of the country he comes from, namely, the North and he wants to represent and work for the ethnic group to which he belongs, namely, Hausa-Fulani. Observers had noted this aspect of Atiku’s politics all along but had shrugged it off until last Saturday, when Atiku showed his true ethno-regional colours.

Listen to Atiku, ironically after touting his role as a pan-Nigerian unifier: “What the average Northerner needs is somebody who’s from the north who also understands that part of the country and has been able to build bridges across the country. This is what the Northerner needs, he doesn’t need a Yoruba or Igbo candidate, I stand before you as a Pan-Nigerian of northern origin.”

He then goes on to state his ultimate desire: “to see Northern Nigeria fulfill her potential in the not-so-distant future. We must build consensus on one goal: Northern Nigeria must have its prosperity restored. It must re-emerge as a vibrant, prosperous, and self-reliant economy, operating in a peaceful, secure, and disciplined environment. Anything other than this goal cannot be an option.” So, the goal of developing the South is not an option. Nor is the goal of developing Nigeria as an indivisible whole.

Atiku’s ethno-regional chauvinism began to show early during the present presidential election cycle, beginning with the PDP presidential primary in May. Before the party primaries, all Southern Governors across party lines met in Asaba and agreed that the presidency should rotate to the South in 2023. However, Atiku lobbied for a level playing field, leading to open competition for all PDP aspirants. Rivers State Governor, Nyesome Wike, was still billed to win until Atiku worked with his Northern cohort in the party hierarchy to prevail on Sokoto Governor, Aminu Tambuwal, to step down and instruct his delegates to vote Atiku. Once he emerged as the candidate, Atiku reneged on his promise that Iyorcha Ayu, the party’s Chairman, should resign, because he is also from the North.

In the final analysis, Atiku flouted two rules embedded in the PDP constitution: First, he flouted the party’s constitutional requirement for the rotation of the presidency between the North and the South. Second, he failed to respect the party’s rule that the presidential candidate and the party’s chairman should not come from the same region-if one came from the North, the other should come from the South. Even members of his party have repeatedly decried the Northernisation of their party under Atiku. If these actions don’t demonstrate Atiku’s disdain for the South, it is unclear what else would.

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However, Atiku’s problems are beyond ethno-regional chauvinism. He is a man who does not keep his word and cannot manage political maneuvers effectively. For example, Wike has repeatedly pointed out that Atiku told him in person that if he (Atiku) emerged as the candidate, Ayu must resign. Atiku has so far reneged on that promise.

His handling of simple political processes is also indicative of his inability to govern effectively. Here is a man who set up a committee for the selection of a running mate for him. True, the committee’s recommendation is for him to accept or reject. However, in doing so, he needs the buy-in of the committee (or at least of its chairman), particularly since as many as 14 of 17 members of the committee recommended a particular candidate that Atiku eventually rejected. He also should have had a chat with the person recommended by the committee before the final announcement of his choice.

This lack of tact on Atiku’s part is indicative of his inability to manage political maneuvers. It is also a reflection of his governance inexperience. Come to think of it, Atiku lacks executive political experience. True, he was elected Governor of Adamawa State in 1999, he was not even sworn in before he was made a running mate to former President Olusegun Obasanjo. He may have been a career Customs Officer and a businessman, although of questionable capital base; but he was never a ward or Local Government chairman or Governor of a state.

Atiku also does not appear to be reliable. It was widely reported that he promised the same position to two different people: He told his audience in Enugu that he would be the stepping stone to Igbo presidency in 2027, if he won the presidency in 2023. A few days later, he reportedly offered the same position to an Ikwerre man, namely, Wike. What is more, such a promise is beyond his powers as the choice of a presidential candidate rests with party members or delegates, depending on the mode of primary election.

Nevertheless, the promise reveals Atiku’s campaign tactic. His strategy is to tell different audiences what he thinks they want to hear rather than what he plans to do as President. This is where the contrast between him and the other candidates shows glaringly. For example, where Atiku used North or Northerner as the leitmotif for his speech at the Arewa Forum, Tinubu took pains to outline what he would do for the country, using Nigeria as the recurrent theme in his speech. He addressed, among others, security, the economy, corruption, restructuring, and state police. Without branding himself as a unifier, like Atiku did, Tinubu emphasised the need to maintain the unity of the country, by forging necessary consensus across different arms of government and various groups and divergent segments of society.

To be sure, Atiku has received a lot of flack for his ethno-regional biases. But this is not the first time that Atiku would tread the path of division or otherwise offend our sensibilities. He did so to President Obasanjo, who thought he had a faithful ally as Vice-President. He has done so to his party, from which he ran away twice. Today, Atiku has all but alienated the party’s traditional base.

Is this the man we need as President?