Bandit attacks, which bear all the hallmarks of terrorism, have become ubiquitous in the Northwest; insurgency in the Northeast has not really abated in line with President Muhammadu Buhari’s publicly expressed optimism; kidnapping for ransom has been catalysed by state governments’ dithering and policy inertia; herdsmen militias, many of them foreign in origin, have turned Nigerian farmlands into killing fields; and military institutions have become targets. Almost the entire northern part of Nigeria has become a vast war zone where the displaced bury their dead before fleeing, government’s finances are devoted to assuaging lawlessness through incoherent security operations and law enforcement, and few policy initiatives have proved either sensible or workable. Two Thursdays ago, the much wearied President Buhari surveyed these gloomy scenes and declared, through the National Security Adviser (NSA), Babagana Monguno, that the situation was improving and he would not, in any case, leave office a failure.

The president’s optimism is controversial. Thirty-two of the 34 local government areas in Katsina State are besieged by bandits, says a distraught Katsina State House of Assembly member. The Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), the military’s elite training institution, was attacked last week by bandits and two officers were murdered while a third was abducted. Hundreds of schoolchildren as well as residents are frequently abducted and billions extorted from their relations as state governments boldly insist that non-negotiation with terrorists is a brilliant policy. No day passes without an abduction, a death, an attack, sacking of a farmland, or herdsmen rampage. The horror is increasing, the attackers’ effrontery is mystifying, and the bureaucratic stasis is enervating. It is not clear how these manifestations amount to an improvement or how success and failure should be defined; but to the ordinary Nigerian, particularly the northerner, both the administration and the country have become overwhelmed.

Little was done at the outset of the Fourth Republic in 1999 to anticipate and prevent this nightmarish siege – which has taken all of about 20 years or less to manifest – threatening to dismember the country. How to lift the siege must now occupy everyone’s thoughts, including federal and state governments living in denial. The civil society cannot absolve itself of blame for allowing a few to jeopardize the wellbeing and future of so many, but the inspirers and leaders of the current republic must take a larger share of the blame. And they are many. Ex-military head of state Abdulsalami Abubakar wrote the Fourth Republic constitution without input from the public, without debate or assent, and impudently held elections without the elected and their electors knowing what they were signing up for – a pig in a poke. At that point, however, the situation was not irredeemable. But the first beneficiary of that election and ghostly constitution, ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, had the opportunity to redeem the situation. Instead, through a third term agenda, he sought to profit from the constitution’s failings, and failing that, he even mischievously foisted on the country a successor hobbled by illness, Umaru Yar’Adua. Once the country was sucked into that vortex of horror, it was a question of time before abuse multiplied and more indignities were hurled upon the country, to the point that today, democracy is both threatened and even receding, yielding its virtues to the stranglehold of fascism.

Before the 2015 elections, this column threw in its lot with the Buhari candidature, believing that despite his personal weaknesses and failings, he couldn’t possibly be as indifferent to national greatness as his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. The column, it turned out, was too optimistic. From Chief Obasanjo to Umaru Yar’Adua, and from Dr Jonathan to President Buhari, it was clear none among them had applied himself to a study of Nigerian history in order to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of the country’s constituent nationalities, particularly the great kingdoms and empires that were incomprehensibly glued together by colonialists to form Nigeria. Had any of them equipped himself with such knowledge and mixed it with his own personal study of the factors that grow kingdoms and empires, not only would Nigeria be far different from what it is, the highly defective Fourth Republic Constitution would have been redone, the country’s political and economic structures would have been remodeled, and a brilliant and lasting formula would have been found to mediate ethnic and religious relations among Nigeria’s disparate and sometimes competing nationalities. Nigeria’s three past presidents of the Fourth Republic failed to exert themselves in those directions; President Buhari has also remained disinterested. Not only is he uninterested in grasping the dynamics of the constitution or appreciating its weaknesses, he has also shunned a study of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities that would have enabled him to understand their political organization and level of civilization as well as why at the onset of colonialism they were wilting.

If today the administration is fixated on inflicting Water Resources Bill and RUGA on all ethnic nationalities, including restoring grazing reserves that were neither published in gazettes nor provided for in the constitution, and if it instinctively defends foreign herdsmen militias, it is because of its narrow understanding of what Nigeria means. If the administration is unable to advance the rule of law, and has unwisely subordinated the rule of law to national security interest with all its ambiguities, it is because no study of the history of Nigeria, nor it seems the history of any great country or empire, was undertaken. Populated by aides whose education is skewed, and who fantasize about distant religions and cultures, it is unlikely that the administration’s horizon would be wider and deeper than it is. They will not understand the Southwest’s unquenchable passion for democratic principles and the rule of law, the Southeast’s fierce republicanism and iconoclasm, and the Middle Belt’s unbending and enthusiastic resistance to any kind of imposition. The administration has acted as if it is ruling at the behest of strangers, and officials have seemed frantic in demolishing the constitution as if they know they have a limited time.

There is no likelihood in the next few months before the expiration of President Buhari’s second term that any sound conception of Nigeria would be reached, let alone a solution to the ongoing crisis found. What is at the bottom of the national distress overwhelming the administration is not just socio-economic factors or unsuccessful and inadequate military and law enforcement strategies. The problem is far deeper than that. For an administration more inclined to embracing misplaced values, officials are likely to conceive and apply the wrong panaceas instead of recognising that the problem is actually the constitution. Rather than imaginatively and courageously suggest workable ethnic and religious formulae to govern relations and mediate crises, administration officials will be paralysed by the feeble attempt to engraft a unitary system upon a so-called federal system. They will resist state police though it could mitigate the rampant banditry and abductions skewering the country. They will never understand why the Middle Belt resists their anti-federal impositions or insult the administration. They will be enraged by and will display contempt for the Southeast’s and Southwest’s self-determination ambitions, and hunt their champions.

Read Also: Crisis: PDP toes familiar path ahead of 2023

Until the administration develops a deeper and broader understanding of the issues that imperil the country – but that possibility is predictably very slim – there will be no chance that peace can be found, let alone sustained. In short, expect crisis as the country plods toward 2023, as the administration concerns itself with treating the symptoms of the crisis rather than the fundamental causes. The leading political parties have been boisterously incompetent, argumentative and fractious. They will drag the judiciary into the cesspit of chaos until it is polluted beyond what the administration has done by disembowelling it. The legislature places premium on cooperation with the executive than on checking its excesses and vetting its policies. They will be oblivious of, if not complicit in, attracting instability to the body politic. At the beginning of colonialism, Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities were spread out in kingdoms and empires at different stages of civilization or decay. Since then, and through many disruptive constitutions, they have been equalised and welded into alloys that react to crisis differently. If Nigeria is to work, national leaders must first understand who the constituent nationalities are, where they are coming from, and what their worldviews are. The administration has alarmingly and catastrophically viewed them as one entity, a presumption even the colonial administration was reluctant to give full rein.

Nigeria may in effect remain unstable. The administration is not moving towards solving the insurgency, as it claims, nor has it neutralised the factors that promote and energise banditry. It hopes that bandits will tire themselves out eventually as a result of both pressure from security forces and reduced ransom payments. It also has no idea what national political structure would work, nor how the country’s centrifugal forces can be tempered or harnessed into a stable and enduring equilibrium. As the administration’s intemperate exchange with Benue governor, Samuel Ortom, showed all of last week, and even weeks before, there has been no serious attempt to see the other side of the argument to the herdsmen rampage. Presidential spokesmen have cottoned on to Aso Villa’s disquieting perception of national unity by engaging in acerbic and abusive discourse with opponents of the president, including and especially Mr Ortom. Showing no appreciation of the multiplicity of voices and perceptions that nurture and sustain democracy, government agencies like the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) will also continue to engage in bellicose and corrosive dialogue with entities under their regulatory oversight.

Few Nigerians believe there will be any change of orientation in the months ahead. Abducted Nigerians will be ransomed and released, but new victims will be seized. The security agencies will achieve some progress, but relapses will obliterate gains. Nothing but cosmetic changes should be expected, considering the worrisome quality of policy conceptions. And because the fundamental disposition of the administration is at variance with the fundamental needs of the country, the obnoxious stalemate that has characterized the polity will stultify national progress and make the country vulnerable to apocalyptic end games.

PDP borrows a withered leaf from APC

When the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) decided on August 10 to move their national elective convention forward to October in order to procure a win-win solution in the acrimonious fight for the soul of the party, members thought that Rivers State governor and chief antagonist Nyesom Wike would bury the hatchet he had deployed against the national chairman, Uche Secondus. The convention was originally slated for December 2021, and Mr Secondus was constitutionally entitled to contest for a second term. The compromise not only halved the four months left in his first term, it also barred him and other National Working Committee (NWC) members from the race in December. The compromise lasted for only a few days, for it was clear that Mr Wike had on August 8 hedged his bets in case he did not get his wish to overthrow the chairman. He had activated a Plan B.

The fiery and relentless Mr Wike is always capable of mercurial political and bureaucratic twists. Unsurprisingly, his supporters simply hissed, dispensed with the PDP’s pusillanimity, and borrowed the withered leaf with which the rival and ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) famously and unprecedentedly overthrew their energetic chairman, Adams Oshiomhole. The problem, however, is that the APC enjoyed the connivance of President Muhammadu Buhari in their putsch against their chairman. The PDP, on the other hand, has been an orphan since they lost the 2015 presidential election. To borrow the APC leaf without an almighty figure to validate their lawlessness would, therefore, require extraordinary ingenuity. But Mr Wike believes he is up to the task. It remains to be seen.

So far, however, the Wike putsch has met with staunch resistance. Like the APC, the Rivers State’s supporters of the governor inveigled party executives of Ward 5, Ikuru Town, Andoni local government area of Rivers State to suspend their member and national chairman, Mr Secondus, two days before the Abuja compromise meeting. It is not clear whether Mr Secondus knew of the plot simmering against him back in his ward, especially how the plot was a carbon copy of the chicanery that unhorsed Mr Oshiomhole. But, like Mr Oshiomhole, the PDP chairman did nothing to judicially arrest Ward 5’s disingenuous intentions, assuming he could find a judge in Rivers State to give him justice. The country will never know now. Finally, using the APC playbook, Mr Wike and his supporters went to court and got an injunction against Mr Secondus to bar him from parading himself as the chairman of the PDP. Once that was done, the Abuja compromise was rendered nugatory and the chairman himself all but buried except he can get the Appeal Court to quickly remedy the violence against his office. Instead, as Nigerian politicians are wont, Mr Secondus went ‘forum shopping’ in a far away Kebbi High Court for reliefs from a court of concurrent jurisdiction, a stalemate the PDP bigwigs have found the excitable impetus to disregard on the grounds of a judicial precedent settled by the Supreme Court.

The PDP is moving on blithely with the incapacitated Yemi Akinwonmi, the party’s Deputy National Chairman (South), and next in command. There was a brief tussle for the acting chairmanship with a pretender form the North, Suleiman Nazif, but the agitated party was in no mood for histrionics of any kind. Yet, Mr Akinwonmi is too fragile to carry on the onerous task of shepherding the wounded PDP through its difficult legal and political crises. Though he is mentally alert and strong-willed, he will nevertheless need a power behind the throne to help him in the saddle. Harried and shunned by the party’s panjandrums, Mr Secondus may be consigned to history if he cannot get the Court of Appeal to rescue him, or get influential Abuja politicians and officials to do what they do best – lean on the judiciary to get a desired outcome. Otherwise, the PDP, egged on by the now considerably tame former vice president Abubakar Atiku, will go on to organize their convention, as they have reiterated, and ready their forces for the 2023 Armageddon ahead of them. They know that if they lose the presidency again, it would be hard for them to survive as a party. And with the voyeuristic Mr Wike ogling the APC’s lewd political orgies, there is no telling who else in the opposition party is not waiting in the wings to violate the PDP’s chastity.