IN a replay of the cataclysmic events of 2014, many months before the epochal 2015 elections that saw power changed hands between the incumbent Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government and the daring challenger All Progressives Congress (APC), the next few months before the 2019 polls will witness many vainglorious predictions and desperate politics that defy the laws of physics and politics. Some days ago, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research arm of The Economist magazine, and Global Research Unit, an arm of HSBC, one of the world’s leading financial and banking services organisations, both predicted that 2019 was going to be a portentous year for Nigeria. More directly, the EIU, which is never shy of paddling in political pools, predicted that the APC would lose the presidential poll by a wafer-thin margin. The HSBC on the other hand merely warned that a second term for President Muhammadu Buhari, whose approval ratings it claimed had fallen to an all-time low, would complicate Nigeria’s economic outlook and also slow its growth.
Predictably, presidential aides have been as peevish as ever in responding to the two soothsayers. While not joining issues directly with the EIU, aides nonetheless asserted that the president’s record of achievements would ensure victory for the APC in 2019. And as for the gloomy HSBC report, aides growled cantankerously, no one should set great store by it because it was compromised by the organisation’s unscrupulous private and financial interests. President Buhari never once admitted that the late Gen Sani Abacha looted Nigeria blind, but his aides, in responding to the HSBC report, denounced the global organisation for helping the late dictator to launder stolen Nigerian money. They insisted that the organisation had no moral right to publish what they described as a tainted and compromised report.
The EIU was undoubtedly provocative. In its report released two Tuesdays ago, the London-based magazine summarised the woes that would probably befall the APC. “Intra-party politics would be chaotic ahead of the poll and we ultimately expect the incumbent to lose power,” it said ominously. “The 2019 elections will be a close contest between the ruling APC and the PDP. We expect the PDP presidential candidate to win, but for the next administration to flounder against the same problems as the incumbent one. The next government is likely to be led by the PDP, the main opposition, potentially in a coalition with smaller parties, but instability will remain an insoluble challenge.”
The HSBC also came to virtually the same conclusion without framing it in political terms. It said the following in a dismissive report entitled “Nigeria, papering over the cracks”: “The president’s approval ratings sit near all-time lows, (and) largely reflect the impact of Nigeria’s painful recession in 2016-17 and the sustained economic hardship that has accompanied his presidency, including rapidly rising joblessness, and poverty. A second term for Mr. Buhari raises the risk of limited economic progress and further fiscal deterioration, prolonging the stagnation of his first term, particularly if there is no move towards completing reform of the exchange rate system or fiscal adjustments that diversify government revenues away from oil.”
Both the EIU and HSBC have substantial grounds to come to dire conclusions about Nigeria’s 2019 polls. In terms of the sheer economics and econometrics of their arguments, they seem logical and unimpeachable. More, they have a track record of being right on some critical issues and at major moments. But they can also sometimes get it wrong, as all economists and political pundits know when they try to predict human behaviour. With the exception of some diehard APC stalwarts and sympathisers, Nigerians know that President Buhari and the APC were more prepared to take office than to govern. For instance, it took the president more than six months to put a cabinet in place, and key macroeconomic issues requiring urgent and knowledgeable interventions were left severely alone, perhaps to do autocorrect.
In addition, nearly everyone knows that the Buhari presidency’s policy initiatives have been quite awkward, often misplaced, and sometimes poorly targeted. The government has made many key interventions for which they have been applauded, but the poverty level has increased alarmingly and, as the EIU said, joblessness has also ballooned. When the government was consistent, sometimes on the wrong issues, it was not coherent; and vice versa. In fact, some of the government’s policy interventions have accentuated an already bad and festering economic situation. If the Buhari presidency’s handling of economic issues is fraught with a lot of missteps and amateurishness, its approach to politics has been even more overly retrogressive and lacking in sophistication. On the futuristic matter of laying a solid foundation for democracy, something both the presidencies of Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan contemptuously forswore, the Buhari presidency has been spectacularly neglectful, perhaps faring even much worse than its predecessors. And while ex-presidents Obasanjo and Jonathan sustained a strained and vacillating relationship with the rule of law, President Buhari has treated it with disdain.
However, the APC, after the initial two or more years of demonstrating clumsiness in intraparty politics, it has seemed to change tack and organise itself more like a political party. It has not reached the level of discipline required to help it forge a winning platform, and has not even given any indication that it possesses the philosophical and ideological grounding upon which to produce a winning electoral formula and impose discipline and cohesion, it has nevertheless made some progress in terms of speaking with one voice, regardless of the fratricidal struggles between the party hierarchs and the more obstreperous and dictatorial governors. The EIU thinks the party may be unable to close ranks before 2019, but it is really difficult to build any proposition on this subjective summation. They could in fact close ranks and, notwithstanding the defections from the ruling party witnessed in the past few weeks, forge a tentative unity sufficient enough to give them a slim victory that contradicts the prediction in favour of the PDP.
So, when both the EIU and HSBC predicted President Buhari’s loss in 2019 and the regaining of the presidency by the PDP in coalition, it is not clear whether they were not reflecting their wish rather than what they really think based on the facts available to them. President Buhari, despite his vaunted claims of integrity, honesty and counterinsurgency record, has suffered low approval ratings both domestically and internationally. He is probably viewed internationally as a breath of fresh air in a corrupt and polluted environment, but they fear that his ideas are jaded, archaic and parochial. He has sadly not made impression on his international hosts and guests on the same engaging level as, say, the late Burkinabe leader, Thomas Sankara, or even the fallen Libyan strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, or, still citing fairly recent examples, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa. As the United States president Donald Trump was quoted to have said, there was nothing in President Buhari’s person or ideas or manners that excited anyone.
It had to be then that many international bodies yearn somewhat for someone who could excite them, even if he made a few mistakes. They are not interested in what he has done right, of which there are of course many, to be fair to President Buhari, but in what he has done nobly and endearingly wrong. The EIU and HSBC, like some other international bodies and probably foreign governments, wish for a change from a dour and gritty president to a more ideological and effervescent leader. Do the conclusions of these global institutions resonate with Nigerians? Yes, to some extent. But do Nigerians think the EIU and HSBC are right in their conclusions? Perhaps they wish the global organisations are right; but fundamentally, they suspect it is too early to come to those conclusions.
The APC may be fractured, but it is mending. On the other hand, the PDP, the beneficiary of the defections from the APC, may be enjoying some boom now, but it is not altogether certain that the boom would last, or in the end be salutary. Much worse, there is nothing in the PDP renaissance that indicates that the party would hammer out a concise and resounding ideological platform capable of winning the next polls. And until the party holds its convention, produces a brilliant and charismatic candidate able to do battle with the APC’s President Buhari, and get the party united behind that candidate, it may be unduly early to gift them victory, whether slim or fat. Without a peaceful and progressive convention, and without a great candidate, it is mystifying that the EIU and HSBC seemed to think that the APC was knackered, and the PDP resurgent.
The APC itself may bank on the elections it is currently sweeping at local and state levels as indicators of where the next presidential poll would head. They are wrong. At the federal level, President Buhari will probably be the main issue, apart from his government’s mismanagement of the economy. Contrary to what he thinks, his security appointments have chafed their sense of patriotism, and his sanctimonious airs have been grating. He is seen as disdainful of democracy and contemptuous of the rule of law. He bared his fangs while he still needed the people’s revalidation, and has ruled more like an autocrat than a democrat. The electorate will, therefore, think twice before endorsing him for a second term. But as they prepare to endorse or not endorse him and his party, and as he sticks to his disagreeable conservatism that eschews the fundamental rearrangement of the political structure which has brought so many woes upon the country, they will cast wary glances in the direction of the PDP hoping that that nebulous party would somehow get its act together, forge a great governing ideology, even if it is archconservative, and produce a winner. Yet, just as nothing has shown quite clearly that the APC would lose, nothing also has shown openly that the PDP would win. Clearly, both EIU and HSBC jumped the gun in their conclusions.