As military rule mercifully recedes into remote and distant memory in Nigeria, it is profoundly ironic that the democratic process continues to manifest some of the ungainly features of repressive autocracies. For example, there is the continuing militarization of the polity and the weaponization of politics itself to the point that it has become a game of political warlords. This much was evident in the last days of the last regime. Only a balance of terror and the watchful eyes of the international community prevented Nigeria from tipping over into the abyss.
But so soon thereafter, we are at it again as it is customary for a country with a legendary reputation for permanently camping at the edge of the abyss and for flirting with suicide. Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me, as George Orwell famously noted. Politics in Nigeria is a game of multiple treachery and multivalent betrayal. Yet it is only those who consider politics however dangerous hair-raising as a mere game that would fail to see the delinquent seizure of the machinery of the senate by some rogue senators in all its dangerous and destabilizing import.
Once again, something new comes out of Nigeria. This one goes beyond the established norm of political normlessness. As we shall see, it strikes a deadly blow at the change mantra of the current regime. It casts the senate in dissident dissonance and disharmony with the executive and possibly with the judicial arm. It sets the stage for a crippling administrative disorder and possible disintegration. A hybrid senate leadership is a hybridized monster which is unknown in the history of modern democracy and one with a capacity to destroy even its own. It is a peculiar mess, a typically Nigerian peculiar mess at that.
Having said that, it is important for those who have invested intellectual, strategic, political, economic and even ethnic capital in the project of change and the possibility of national redemption not to despair or throw up their arms in frustration. Democratic change cannot and does not occur overnight. It is always easier for forces of reaction to regroup and reassemble at short notice because they know the economic price of everybody but the political value of nothing.
It is too early in the day to consign the Buhari administration to the trashcan of history. Nigerians, both mighty and low, must learn the virtue of patience. A people without any demonstrative capacity for collective revolutionary initiative must also not add the vice of impatience to their baggage. This is not the time to further inflame passions. It is not the time for wild speculations and unrestrained tirades. Without sacrificing party supremacy, APC must engage its dissident members. Bukola Saraki is a wasp perched on the most delicate part of the human anatomy.
It has been a typically Nigerian coup, full of intrigues, double dealing, double crossing and ambush within ambush reminiscent of the exploits of Nigeria’s aging coup maestros. There is also a hint of self-coup, or what the Latin Americans call Autogolpe. An Autogolpe is a conscious coup against one’s self. But this one is probably unconscious. When Mohammadu Buhari tersely but awkwardly noted that “a constitutional process has somewhat occurred”, we say with the retired general that it is actually a constitutional autogolpe that has somewhat occurred.
The Nigerian president must now be helped out of the awful mess he has partly created. But he will need to change tack. He must avoid the Ben Bella Syndrome. Ahmed Ben Bella was a great hero of the Algerian war of independence against the French. It was a nasty and cruel contention whose echoes reverberate till date. When Ben Bella finally assumed office, he had become so physically, psychologically and emotionally drained that he could only spend time trifling with extant structures until his colleagues put him out of his miseries.
There are extenuating circumstances for the presidential faux pas. As a born again democrat who has deliberately and strenuously purged himself of the autocratic mind-set of his military career, Buhari is anxious to be seen as a man who values consensus, a man is willing to marry messianism with the multiplicity of contrary views, and a man not willing to be seen as disrupting the seamless web of governmental harmony among the executive, the judiciary and the legislature.
This can only work in advanced climes where people have learnt from bitter experience to live for the greater good of the greater society. But in a society teeming with political sharks and vultures, it is a manual for political martyrdom. It is up to the retired general to find a golden mean between the obsessive and obtrusive meddlesomeness of his military predecessor in civilian office and the hardy and alert proactiveness necessary to do the job at hard. The Nigerian presidency is not a habitat for secular saints.
In Latin America after they had almost killed themselves off due to incessant and tempestuous coups, the generals decided on a simple method of eliminating the perennial bloodfest. Whenever a coup is in the offing, they would do a simple troops’ audit and since God marches on the side of the greater battalion, the general with the highest number of battalions on his side carried the day.
On Tuesday, Bukola Saraki did a troops’ audit. But as a veteran power pragmatist who knows that there is no party as such but alliances of inconvenience, he simply called for help from battle hardened adversarial combatants itching for a pound of flesh. The old warriors of reaction and ethnic revanchists still nursing the wounds of their ouster from the federal Toll Gate simply rallied.
It is a foul and unethical thing to do reeking of betrayal and perfidy, but it reveals the monumental hollowness that lies at the heart of the current democratic process in Nigeria. There is no party as such only amalgams of mutually contradictory and violently incompatible tendencies that have refused or are probably incapable of congealing and coalescing into an organic whole. It is a dialectical mirror image of Nigeria itself. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam. It is a symptom in search of a disease and the nearest diagnosis we can come up with is democratic warlordism.
In the event, the defeated and disorganized PDP showed greater cohesion and dynamic mobility than the ruling party. They have claimed that they were also benefitting from the phenomenon of Tambuwalism, which is akin to an invasion of enemy territory even before the commencement of proper hostilities. It is rumoured that the veteran Tambuwal himself also played a stirring role in this one. It is in the nature of cut-throat politics, and there are no permanent allies but present interests.
The APC has received its baptism of fire. It should now go back to the drawing board. It should immediately put in place a rigorous mechanism for party conflict resolution through the three Cs: conciliation, compromise and consensus. It is obvious that the party has suffered grievously due to lack of internal cohesion and as a result of excessive vanity and obsession with the spoils of office.
When all else fails, it is only the presidency that can wield the big stick. The failure of the president to wade in much earlier and to do so in a decisive manner when he was eventually roused to act has resulted in a political black eye for the party. It is a curious irony that Buhari would seem to be encouraging political warlordism in his own party when the electoral revolt that swept him to power is a stinging disavowal of the same phenomenon in the larger Nigerian polity. The Nigerian senate is the surviving stronghold of our last political Shoguns.
Having acquired teeth and muscle, this senatorial Shogunate is going to try President Buhari’s will and iron resolve to reform and sanitize the Nigerian polity to the snapping point in the next few months. It is going to be a battle royale the likes of which has never been witnessed in these climes. If the president wilts and withers away, it is all but guaranteed that his presidency will end as a colossal failure, unable to make a dent in the monumental rot that has stifled the nation. As we have previously advised, it is going to be a game of will and wits and the president will need all his political savvy and street wisdom.
A lot is going to depend on his party and its principal partners. A few columns back, we had commended the tragic fate of the inchoate and incongruous alliance which ended authoritarian misrule in Kenya to the APC. Going forward to a fresh election, the party disintegrated into its political components and ethnic particularities. The result was a brief civil war which shook Kenya to its foundation and from which the country is yet to properly recover.
It is not a question of whether one likes President Buhari or not. The Change Project which the retired general has courageously spearheaded in collusion with many patriotic Nigerians and which has resonated spectacularly with our compatriots both at home and abroad is the last chance to redeem this country and put it on the path of rectitude and righteousness. If it fails, it is going to be goodbye to Nigeria as we know it.
