FORMER Lagos State governor and Power, Works and Housing minister, Babatunde Fashola, on Thursday gave a disturbing insight into how his mind, and perhaps that of many others like him, is working on the next presidential election. “Do you know that power is rotating to the South-West after the completion of Buhari’s tenure if you vote for him in 2019?” he queried in almost conspiratorial tone, speaking in Yoruba during a special town hall meeting in Ibadan. “A vote for Buhari in 2019, means a return of power to the South-West in 2023. I am sure you will vote wisely.” His opinion on how the Southwest should vote in 2019 is popular with a significant portion of the Southwest political elite. Undoubtedly, that view will very likely influence the decisions of some voters in the region. But whether it will be significant enough to positively affect the outcome of the election remains to be seen.
Mr Fashola is not the only one imbuing the elections of 2019, especially the presidential poll, with regional, cultural and ethnic colours. The Southeast political elite, despite their initial frictions and misgivings on the appropriateness of putting Peter Obi, a former Anambra State governor, on the Atiku Abubakar ticket, are also calculating that it may be profitable to get their son elected as vice president in 2019, and hopefully get the presidency rotated to their region either in 2023 or 2027. Mr Obi is not the popular choice of the region’s highly opinionated and sometimes querulous elites, particularly the governors, but inch by inch, they are becoming converted to Mr Obi’s candidacy and its future possibilities. If anyone or group is averse to those calculations, they are likely to be in the minority, or at least unable to pack such force as to cause either a negative groundswell or a rational dissent.
The presidential calculations by the Southwest and Southeast are neither unusual nor egregious. Given the temper, colour and structure of Nigerian politics, such calculations are in fact absolutely normal and will continue to dominate the political scene in the foreseeable future. In fact in 2007, after the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency expired, those calculations involving rotation and regional access to the presidency were embraced by the three northern geopolitical zones to produce the next president of northern extraction. Rotation or zoning is not constitutional, nor even a sensible contrivance, but because of the bitter competition for power in Nigeria and how those struggles have concomitantly destabilised the polity, the contrivance was deemed so politically expedient that it became ossified in Nigerian politics.
The northern part of Nigeria is less finicky and demanding about rotating the presidency between its three geopolitical zones. The southern part is however fastidious about sticking to rotation between its three geopolitical zones, hence the calculations by the Southeast for either 2023 or 2027, and the furore raised by Mr Fashola in advocating the return of the presidency to the Southwest in 2023. But whether it concerns the amorphous and conservative North or the gregarious and fairly radical South, it is difficult to defend the rotational boondoggle. The existential crisis faced by Nigeria is so intense, so portentous and so unpredictable in its consequences that the country’s political elite must be so overly optimistic as to endorse the kind of presidential election considerations alluded to by the Power and Works minister.
In all the calculations as they relate to the geopolitical zones, and as they relate to President Muhammadu Buhari, to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate Alhaji Atiku, to Mr Obi, and to the candidate who takes the diadem in 2023, scant attention has been paid to the unmitigated pace at which the country is unravelling. That lack of attention is demonstrated on two abysmal fronts. First, the problem of Nigeria is less about which region or zone the president comes from as it is about the wobbly and untenable structure of the country itself. Why the country’s gaze is taken off this deep and underlying problem and is instead directed at which part of the country should produce the president is hard to understand. It does seem as if the country’s irresponsible political elite and their supporters, many of them parochial ethnic champions themselves, are more preoccupied with gratifying their primordial tastes and short-sighted needs than worrying about the country’s tenuous future.
In 1999, Chief Obasanjo was not what Nigeria needed. In 2007, the late Umaru Yar’Adua was hopelessly inadequate and badly hobbled by disease. In 2011, Goodluck Jonathan was too overwhelmed by the responsibility of office and the novelty and fortuitousness of winning office to be of any use to himself or the country. And in 2015, the country conspired to present voters with a Hobson’s choice that sent everyone scurrying remorsefully into President Buhari’s insular corner. At every turn since the inauguration of the Fourth Republic, Nigerians have made the wrong choice, and unrepentantly and stubbornly embraced the wrong arguments. There has been no leader who understood the past, not to talk of seeing into the future. For instance, Chief Obasanjo took the country puzzlingly out of a debt trap because he neither understood the economics of debt nor the urgency and multiplier effects of development policies. President Buhari is now engaged in frenzied borrowing, and rhapsodising the same arguments that lured the country into the initial trap.
The second front is even more galling. The Southwest, Mr Fashola, the Southeast, Mr Obi, and the president himself and his supporters have so strangely concentrated on the dynamics and sometimes mechanics of how a presidential election should be won that they fail woefully to focus on who should win it, regardless of background, regional dynamics and religious considerations. In 1999, Olu Falae seemed to possess the capacity and eloquence to lead a modern country in an increasingly complex and globalised world. Nigerians instead gave the crown to Chief Obasanjo wholly on sentimental grounds, his only qualifications being his military background and undeserving stint as a military head of state. Unable to learn from the past, in 2015, the crown was again given to President Buhari, his only qualifications being his military background and an undeserving stint as a military head of state.
Yet, no country develops without a polity founded on solid structures and leaders possessing the appropriate economic and political ideas. Nigeria will neither develop nor be at peace, until that right leader takes office, someone who knows what it means to forge a national identity, someone who can envision the future, someone who is inured to ethnic politics and not hobbled by religious considerations, someone who loves the arts and is fascinated by science and technology, someone who can dream great dreams, someone who knows what justice is all about, not someone hoping to exploit and subordinate the rule of law, someone with the right instincts, with a sound and encompassing grasp of how the Asian Tigers broke through the development ceiling, and how the industrialised West found the future and embraced it.
It was, therefore, shocking that Mr Fashola advocated the conversion of the Southwest to the President Buhari column mostly because the region could gain the presidency again in 2023. The Southwest can of course stake a claim for 2023, and they have the constitutional right to do so regardless of what the Southeast thinks. But President Buhari is unlikely to go out of his way to help anybody’s cause, nor can he, even if he wants to. He finds it difficult to generate the broad vision of a great, multicultural country, and cannot be persuaded to endorse anyone who has the idiosyncratic chutzpah, depth, vision and independence of a great leader, the exact kind Nigeria now needs to achieve a breakthrough. It is also disturbing that despite all their education, and despite encountering enough lessons from the past, including the failed presidency of Dr Jonathan, the Southeast has been converted to endorsing the unproductive election dynamics of rotation.
Nigerians will go to the polls early next year to elect their representatives, among them a president. The choice for the presidency will unfortunately and tragically be limited to the two leading parties, the APC and PDP. Foreign research and financial institutions are, out of deep frustrations with President Buhari, lining up to endorse Alhaji Atiku. They are not queasy about the former vice president’s ways as many Nigerians are. They regard him as fairly modern, less fanatical about anything, more cosmopolitan, more business-minded, possessing greater capacity, and capable of running an inclusive government. There is logic to their conclusions. But many Nigerians fear that the former vice president is incapable of running an ethical presidency, and could reverse the gains of the anti-graft war of the past three years. How Nigerians will finally make up their minds is not certain. But they will worry both silently and aloud whether they could endure four more years of President Buhari, since he is unlikely to do better than he has done, or whether his challenger, constrained by his ethical challenges, will not end up a spectacular failure.
However they make up their minds, it is important that Nigerians do themselves a favour of not being stymied by any considerations of 2023, as the Southwest and Southeast seem determined to be. Whether President Buhari wins or the PDP’s Alhaji Atiku wins, it should not discourage a bright and visionary politician from any region — North, Southwest, Southeast and South-South — from throwing his hat into the ring in 2023. After all, the constitution permits the contest. Anyone who has studied history and read about great leaders and their ascension to power knows well enough that human history is so volatile that the impossible often becomes possible, sometimes effortlessly, and 10 years can in fact be frozen into one year. Mr Fashola has the right to campaign for President Buhari on the government’s infrastructural renewal record between 2015 and now, or any other record for that matter, assuming that is enough for re-election, but no one should listen to him when he talks about the regional and chronological dynamics of a presidential election he knows very little about.
