“It is not easy to lose an election as a president. You will think the whole world is against you”. That was ex-president, Goodluck Jonathan, lamenting his loss of the 2015 election to Muhammadu Buhari during last week’s first Raymond Dokpesi Annual Diamond Lecture.
Again because most of our past leaders and the current group in the National Assembly don’t appreciate the heuristic value of a politician let alone knowing why they are in government, I think we must start by paying glowing tribute to politicians to whom we owe our survival a an organized society and often saddled with onerous responsibility of keeping man who most of the time is insane under control. Being a politician itself can be a nightmare if not on account of ephemerality of power, but by the very nature of politics with its stigma of unscrupulousness and venality that often rob many politicians of statesmen status.
Clausewitz concept of politics as a continuation of war by other means does not mean politicians have to be crooked or a ‘barrel of snakes’. It could also mean knowledge discussion. This is why politics remains the exclusive preserve of the deep and the patriot and the noblest profession. If we accept there is still humanity in the world, what else can be nobler than serving humanity, taking nobility as a quality of the mind? Unfortunately, President Jonathan, along other leaders since the fall of the first republic never aspired to become inspiring politicians or even understood why they were in government.
Apparently, Jonathan who seems to have forgotten how he secured power and how he frittered it away had no business in government. And this explains why a man who had won the 2011 election, not on the record of PDP’s eight years of massive looting of Nigerian treachery, but as a shoeless boy from Otuoke got into office and literarily ceded power to Anyim Pius Anyim, and four women, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Stella Oduah, Diezani Alison-Madueke and Patience Jonathan, his wife. In the absence of governance, PDP elders and their misguided children ravaged the land through fraudulent fuel subsidy scam, privatization and monetisation policies consciously designed to defraud Nigeria.
And finally as Boko Haram sacked the whole of Borno and threatened Abuja seat of power, PDP vultures shared $2b loan meant for military hardware and welfare of fighting soldiers. With defeat staring Jonathan in the face, he assaulted the sensibility of Nigerians by allegedly sharing of money in palaces, churches, mosques and among urban immigrant groups.
Nigerians rallied round Buhari because of his anticorruption credentials especially after promising to end insurgency and restructure the country along the line of competitive federalism that guarantees sustainable development.
Buhari like Jonathan was also to delegate power to his ‘loyal gatekeepers’, many of who were in his cabinet to serve other tendencies without sharing his pan-Nigeria visions if he truly had any. It took his election for Miyetti Allah to threaten violence on federating states that oppose open- grazing especially in the Middle Belt states starting with Benue where 73 subsistence farmers were massacred.
Obasanjo’s warning that “we are on the precipice and dangerously reaching a tipping point where it may no longer be possible to hold danger at bay because government treated herder/farmers crisis with cuddling glove instead of hammer allowing it to develop into banditry, kidnapping, armed robbery and killings all over the country” was ignored.
Although the identities of those involved in violent attack on Nigerians were not hidden as Governors Aminu Masari of Katsina, Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna, Bala Mohammed of Bauchi who at different periods negotiated and paid them ransom to stop killing of Nigerians, they were identified as ‘foreign Fulani herdsmen from Niger, Cameroon and other parts of west Africa.’
Sheik Gumi who wants them rehabilitated and compensated for waging war against Nigerians describes them as “disgruntled Fulani herdsmen”. Finally, the World Terrorist Index labels them as ‘the world fourth most deadly terrorist group”.
Instead of holding the criminal accountable, ‘Operation Safe Corridor’, an initiative for the de-radicalization and rehabilitation of ex-Boko Haram members and their reintegration back into society, was inaugurated. The killings shifted to north western states of Sokoto, Zanfara, Katsina and Kaduna where 222 persons were killed with 774 others kidnapped between May and July 2021.
Bishop Hassan Kukah received no answer to the question: “Why should rehabilitating those that declared war against Nigerians, murdered thousands of citizens, destroyed infrastructure and rendered entire families permanently displaced and dislocated than victims in IDP camps”?
Borno Governor Babagana Zulum’s observation that –“No one will find it easy that those killers of his or her children and other loved ones including our courageous soldiers and volunteers who have lost colleagues” are integrated without paying or atoning for their sins was ignored. In fact his recommendation of ‘immediate prosecution of the insurgents in accordance with the Terrorism Act and devolution of the powers of the minister of justice and attorney-general of the federation to state attorneys-general in order to facilitate the prosecution process,” was ignored.
Leading member of Buhari’s ‘loyal gatekeepers’ had other sinister objectives including exporting the northern tragedy to the south and they were up in arms against the establishment of Amotekun security outfit designed by states in the Southwest to flush terrorists out of their reserved forests.
Just as PDP and its warlords behaved like army of occupation interested only in spoils of war, APC under Buhari repositioned itself as an instrument for rehabilitation of stateless Fulani herdsmen from across the West Africa region.
Just before Buhari left office in 2023, 32 of his Katsina’s 34 LGAs were under routine attack by bandits. That the National Association of Nigerian Students, Katsina branch held a press conference last Saturday in their state capital thanking President Tinubu for bringing peace and relief to their state is enough agony for Buhari’s betrayal of Nigeria and his Katsina people.
However, in the run-up to the 2023 election, leading lights among Fulani politicians realized it was in the enlightened self-interest of Fulani to ensure survival of the nation, hence their support for Tinubu who, in power, has been trying to walk the tight rope by dancing around economic issues as against confronting our political problems.
Let us start from the South-south where the leaders believe they are fighting war of distributive injustice having lost the battle for derivation-based revenue sharing formula at the onset of the fourth republic. It is the president alone who knows how to resolve economic problem with illegal connection of pipelines and illegal refineries (that can only be carried out by trained Amnesty graduates) being uncovered weekly from the backyard of governors, lawmakers and LGA chairmen.
How do we assuage the raw feelings of marginalized Biafrans and their promoters who with their control of commerce undermine the economy through importation of substandard products that throw local manufacturers out of business and thus rendering thousands of workers jobless?
I am not also sure demand and supply variable is relevant in the ongoing war over illegal mining between retired Generals and politicians in the northwest including Taraba where about 20,000 youths, age 18-20 that should be in school are said to be active participants.
The least expensive way forward many have argued is returning to where the rain started to beat us by doing away with arbitrarily-created states and LGAs or converting the six geopolitical zones into power blocks to harness resources of their respective areas for development as was the case in the first republic.
Again the only conspiracy against this cost-effective resolution of our crisis of nation-building has been the Nigerian elite who Awo predicted back in the forties, cannot guarantee justice for Nigerians on account of their greed.
The history of our constitutional development since 1954 validated Awolowo’s thesis. Apart from the 1957 pro-Nigeria constitution, every other one has been self-serving. The 1963 constitution was over sharing of power between Zik and Balewa. The decree 34 of 1966 was for Igbo to get their unitary constitution through the back door. The 1979 constitution that concentrated power at the centre was to legitimize North’s 1950 demand for Nigeria they could control. Others including Abdul Salami’s 1999 ‘decree 24’ were to sustain the status-quo.
Every billion spent on constitutional amendments since 1999 only took us into a deeper hole. And just imagine for a minute if only our National Assembly members are patriotic enough to do what is JUST for all Nigerians, as Awo the last man standing at the London conference in 1957 put it, we would have returned to ‘the Path of Nigeria Freedom” never taken.
It is hoped that President Tinubu, unlike his predecessors, understands that our greatest challenge today is the dearth of noble men who understand that ‘politics is not a civil war but a process of bargaining and accommodation on the basis of agreed rules and procedures between cultural groups that have agreed to live together harmoniously’.
