WHEN the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, announced the selection of ex-governor Kashim Shettima as running mate, and said he did it with pride, it all but settled misgivings as to whether he had carefully thought through his action of offering Nigeria a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket. It is not clear why the APC postponed the presentation of the former Borno State governor to the public, but it obviously has nothing to do with any quest to revisit the selection, or buyer’s remorse. In 2023, the Tinubu/Shettima ticket will be presenting itself for consideration as men fit to run the country, men in whose hands Nigerians hope their existential crises would be resolved, politicians who envision a country transcending its parochial limitations and aspiring to a greatness as competitive as, if not superior to, the Asian Tigers and the United Arab Emirate (UAE).
In the same 2023, the electorate will be called upon to accept the same-faith ticket, or after President Buhari’s eight years in office, opt for another Muslim northerner, ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar, or half-heartedly embrace the Peter Obi candidacy, notwithstanding its many warts. But if the strident attacks against the APC ticket are any indication, it seems that the country subconsciously fears that the Atiku ticket is plagued by too many ills, and the Obi ticket by too many doubts. But here is the conundrum: the APC ticket could not be otherwise, despite the hysteria of the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Babachir David Lawal, if it is to stand a great chance, indeed any chance, of winning the presidential poll. In explaining his choice of Mr Shettima, Asiwaju Tinubu spoke of taking bold decisions reminiscent of great leaders. There is no doubt that his antecedents, more than those of his contemporaries, indicate he has the nerves of steel to take visionary but unpopular decisions. It is left for this generation to determine whether for their own sake and the future of their unborn children they will embrace him and the ticket he has audaciously flung at their bewildered faces.
Asiwaju Tinubu has bitten the bullet. Judging from his antecedents and the reasons he picked Mr Shettima, he will gladly do it again. He bluffs a lot, and his bluffs as governor, Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) leader, and chief inspirer of the formation of the APC have proved uncannily prescient. He has reasoned Nigeria’s existential dilemma to be one that needs bold, definitive and pragmatic solutions to untangle, in the process showing how obviously contemptuous of the vice of timidity he has become. If he has not gone too far up the mountaintop, it is possible that eventually Nigerians will believe him when he bellows from that peak that he has seen the Promised Land. His extempore speeches may lack grace and cadence, his jokes sometimes misplaced and misread, and the permanent grin on his face (as evidenced by most of his public photographs) appearing to exude defiance and arrogance, but there is no doubt that he knows what he is doing, what he wants, and remains probably the most far-sighted politician of his generation. It riles his opponent to no end that a man of such humble birth, which they have turned into a birther controversy, could be so endowed.
Nigeria’s political and religious opinion moulders now face the humbling and difficult task of determining whether to reject Asiwaju Tinubu because of the complexion, not the substance, of his ticket, in favour of Alhaji Atiku or Mr Obi. Having settled the fact that Mr Shettima is the APC candidate’s winning formula in the circumstance, regardless of the militating religious factor, the opinion moulders and leaders will have to examine Alhaji Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and determine whether he approximates their ambivalent ideals. Mr Obi of the Labour Party may have overtaken the PDP in social media popularity, but in reality, the PDP remains a solid and unassailable second in the ranking. He was a gritty and controversial vice president, and he attracts technocrats to himself, and has in fact nurtured a few. What is more, he also produces great position papers; but there are doubts he has the capacity to internalise the papers. Above all, his supporters will have to determine whether it would not amount to cutting one’s nose to spite one’s face to enthrone another northerner, a Fulani and Muslim, after eight years of President Buhari.
Unable to surmount the Atiku dilemma, many vociferous southern opinion leaders with affinity to the EndSARS movement have romanticised and embraced the Obi ticket. He is Nigerian after all, they said, to justify why some of them from the Southwest would cross the Niger River in search of a champion, one who is Christian. And he is young, frugal and oratorically persuasive to boot. Many of the statistics he assails the public with have of course been questioned, and Southeast governors who know him well and the uninspiring governorship he offered Anambra, a state he left virtually the same way he met it, have wondered whether the armchair opinion leaders railing on social media and in the churches really know the man. But to many of his distant supporters, knowing him is secondary to the more salient and satisfying goal of punishing a Muslim-Muslim ticket. That their bawling against Muslim-Muslim ticket provokes a significant section of the electorate and insinuates an insidious discrimination against opposing religions matter little to them.
Other than the legacy of the Buhari administration, three other major factors will probably be relevant in helping the electorate determine which among the three parties making waves to embrace in 2023. The hoopla over the APC same-faith ticket will die down after a while, and more sober considerations will come into play. Firstly, the Southwest will have to determine whether the eight years of crass religionisation of federal administration by the Buhari administration is enough to cause a tectonic shift in their secular worldview. More than any ethnic group in Nigeria, the Yoruba are the most secular, as their history and antecedents show. It is impossible to repudiate this identity simply because of the complexion, not the substance, of the APC ticket without correspondingly losing their great cultural and spiritual moorings. Such loss, should it happen, will reduce them to the national mean which they have sneered at and fought for decades. Proceeding along that labyrinth is like being sucked into the red gullet of crises and mediocrity whose consequence, even to their race, cannot be accurately gauged, let alone controlled once unbound. It would also mean that finally, non-secular Nigeria had successfully fought and bested the cultural lighthouse and political lodestar of the Southwest.
Secondly, it is not clear why the church has worked itself into a dilemma in their approach to the Nigerian conundrum, why they equate the APC ticket to an evil and subterranean plot to Islamise the country, despite the glaring secularist proclivities of Asiwaju Tinubu and Mr Shettima in the two states they governed. The evangelicals made a mess of Christian doctrine in the United States and embraced the incompetence and dissoluteness of the Trump presidency as if the defence of the church lies in the hands of man rather than Jesus Christ. In Nigeria, the experience between 2015 and now suggests that a vice president’s religion is inconsequential to the Nigerian presidency, especially with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo clearly unable to mitigate the drastic sectarian turn of the presidency of which he is number two. The church should not bow to any man or party man to defend it or feel secure. To therefore equate a party’s ticket with evil simply because a Christian is not on it is doctrinally presumptuous, openly partisan and indefensibly contemptuous of the diversities in the church. It is a slippery slope for the church to abandon their neutrality and main assignment to the lost, whether Jew or Greek, animist or Buddhist.
Thirdly, Nigeria is not insulated from the global collapse of leadership standard. Social media bears a huge part of the blame, and as Britain under Boris Johnson and Russia under Vladimir Putin are demonstrating, emotions, nationalism, and poor judgement by political leaders without the character indispensable for presiding over multiethnic and multi-religious nations have provoked needless crises and wars, all leading ultimately to state collapse. Sectarianism and predatory clannishness, not to say authoritarianism, undid Somalia, retarded Egypt, balkanised Libya, rendered much of West Africa retrogressively nostalgic of coups, and generally blighted the continent. Nigerian social media campaigners are urging the electorate to repudiate ethnicity, with subtle hints of what ethnicity they have in mind, while others are giving disingenuous hints of revolution whose end is unfathomable. Well, in the First Republic, ethnicity polluted the election, and the country got off to a bad start. Now, it is religion, and most people are not even aware how dangerously complicit they have become.
The campaigns are, however, still a long way off. Hopefully, in the intervening months, Nigerians will step back from the brink, downplay religion which they excuse on the grounds of the condemnable sectarian predilections of the Buhari administration, remain impassive to oratorical and statistical fecundity falsely and glibly marshalled, and judge each party’s ticket on the basis of the character of the candidates, on their antecedents, and on their visions. Surely, that exercise can’t be too arduous, considering how clearly incomparable the three tickets are.
Buhari’s unsettling eagerness to go
FOR most presidents anywhere in the world, constitutional term limit is a hindrance to their work and vision. Either the term limit is too short for their ‘world-changing’ visions or the powers and privileges of office are too tempting. But in the case of President Muhammadu Buhari, he can’t wait to go. He had achieved two terms as elected president, and that achievement is deeply satisfying. Barely a year or so after winning a second term, he had seemed already contented as a leader, and could hardly wait for the next three years to come and go quickly. When a few people suggested there was a conspiracy to get him tenure elongation, this column had sworn that any conspiracy, if it really existed on the scale some observers had insinuated, would amount to nothing in the face of the president’s determination to go. He may not always be a man of his word, susceptible as many people now know him to be to egregious modifications of promises, colourful prejudicies and even alternative truths, but on the issue of third term or the kind of tenure elongation ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo gave vent to in 2006/2007, President Buhari was unalterably opposed.
He was and still remains pristine and genuine on the subject of respecting term limits. He is unlikely to quibble over it. His basic instinct, though sometimes overwrought, rejects anything politically complicated and devious; and as everybody knows, the issue of third term or elongated tenure is truly complicated. It addles wits and tasks the strongest and bravest of men to their limit. It is a credit to the president that right from the outset, third term never crossed his mind, not even when, as presidential spokesman Garba Shehu recently insinuated, tenure elongation conspirators shuffled their pampered feet around him. Analysts may suspect why he seems dead set against third term, including reasons connected with his health and the overweening dependence on other people’s brains to navigate complex policies and ideas, but in the end the country may have to accept his reasons for respecting term limit. As he put it last Monday when he received APC governors, legislators and political leaders who visited him on Sallah Day, “I am eager to go. I can tell you it has been tough. I am grateful to God that people appreciate the personal sacrifices we have been making. By this time next year, I would have made the most out of the two terms, and the remaining months I will do my best.”
The president really never contemplated third term. He is more anxious to complete his second term than seek for an extension of dubious benefit, as he confessed last month in Rwanda when he sneered at his predecessor whose unconstitutional machinations ensured he ‘didn’t end well’. But in those Sallah remarks are indicants of worrisome and hardly altruistic reasons for his eagerness to end his tenure and return to Daura, his home town. When he suggests that the job of president is tough, it implies that many factors, including his age, health and education probably circumscribe his capacity to handle the job with the kind of aplomb that should make it either easy or at least exciting and challenging to accomplish. Even his plaintive declaration that he would do his best in his remaining 11 months was suffused with hesitation. There was no conviction in his promise to ‘make the most out of his two terms’ or ‘to do his best’. In sum, his Sallah remarks indicate someone who has virtually given up. This is where the danger lies.
The next 10 to 11 months are fraught with a lot of dangers and difficulties. Apart from the elections and the bad-tempered campaigns preceding them, the economy is in a tailspin, while hunger, anger and violence are rife and festering. Banditry is laying much of the country waste, and ISWAP/Boko Haram terrorism has caused massive dislocations in the North. No part of the country is safe from kidnappers, cultists and highway robbers. The Ukraine-Russia war has worsened everything, depleted national savings, pummeled exchange rate, and caused inflation rate to soar through the roof. Yes, these issues are tough for the most consummate of presidents to tackle, let alone one just marking time, but the times call for the president to go beyond doing his best to positively believing in himself and confessing his capacity to solve the problems and resolve the crises. The next few months, even to the most optimistic, can quickly turn nasty and revolutionary, as Sri Lanka has shown and developed economies exhibit as they fray at the edges. With no enduring structures or constitutional and institutional ramparts, not to say workable policies to address the crises, situations can quickly deteriorate.
The president’s Sallah comments to the visiting governors are certainly not good enough. They do not inspire confidence that Nigeria would survive the testy times ahead. This is where the ruling party and party leaders must step in. The APC must rally round the president to help him, for mercifully the situation has not spiralled out of control. Perhaps the president still misses the late Abba Kyari, his former chief of staff, while the cabals around him, which had for long retained a menacing vice-grip on his presidency, have overreached themselves and have become less potent than in earlier years. APC stakeholders must gently coax the president to take far-reaching decisions on the economy, ASUU strike, epileptic power supply and irrational billing, anti-terrorism war which can be ended swiftly if the political will exists, and other crises which are still amenable to control and amelioration. The past few months have witnessed a lot of governmental lethargy and desultory policies. If the country is to transcend these perilous times and hold elections as scheduled, the presidency and the ruling party must reestablish control and give a sense of direction and purpose. The president’s comments do not give confidence that his administration plans to do that. But it can be done if in his final stretch he yields to better, deeper and more inclusive instinct to stabilise and propel the country into the right orbit.