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Tag: Muhammadu Buhari

  • As Buhari assumes office in the worst of times

    As Buhari assumes office in the worst of times

    President Goodluck Jonathan should be leaving office in a blaze of glory, as they say, buoyed by the immense though undeserving goodwill he garnered from conceding defeat to Muhammadu Buhari, his opponent in the last presidential election. But from all indications, he will be leaving in five days time in a blaze of infamy. The economy is prostrate, with more than half of the country’s 36 states unable to pay public workers their wages, and the federal government itself using its big muscles to borrow to pay its own workers. Boko Haram, the terror group Dr Jonathan had hired mercenaries to fight, is staging a big comeback, perhaps inspired by the never-say-die philosophy of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), and the president and his expiring government are at their wit’s end to respond both to old and new terror challenges.

    There are a hundred and one challenges grave enough to arrest the wandering attention of Dr Jonathan, but he has chosen to illustrate and reiterate the fact that until he hands over on the last constitutional day permitted, he remains the president. To underscore this bland and mundane fact, he has seized upon his knack for the extravagant to sack and replace some of his ministers and aides. Shortly after he lost reelection, and citing disloyalty, he sacked his police chief, Suleiman Abba, a few weeks before leaving office. Then, supposedly bowing to the will of a group of protesting workers, he also sacked Saratu Umar from the top post of the Nigerian Investment and Promotions Commission (NIPC) barely two weeks to handover. He perhaps felt it demonstrated his presidential resolve, his stamina for the long haul, his courage in the face of public queries and even opposition. In addition to a number of appointments, contracts largesse, and some other shake-up here and there, Dr Jonathan has managed to complicate a few things for the incoming Buhari government.

    President-elect Buhari therefore faces a grave crisis of expectations immediately he assumes office on Friday, a crisis that could easily translate into a crisis of confidence if he does not hit the ground running with the boldness, brilliance and courage the public hoped he possessed when they voted for him on March 28. But with the country left gasping for breath by Dr Jonathan, not to talk of his deliberate and unwise muddying of the bureaucratic environment by the sacking and appointment of aides and ministers, the president-elect will have to decide whether to embark on the time-consuming job of carefully disentangling Dr Jonathan’s needless complications or cutting the Gordian Knot. To find his way through the thicket, assuming he prefers the first option, the president-elect will need to assemble the best team ever put together by any Nigerian leader. The men are available; but will he find and recruit them, even if they punctuate their brilliance with independent-mindedness?

    If the president-elect chooses the second option, which is sometimes not as drastic or offensive as it sounds, he will evoke images of his military background, step hugely and brusquely on toes, and, as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested in Abuja last week, move briskly to create a mighty and unforgettable impression. Whichever option he picks, the president-elect will have his hands full taking care of the ponderable mess Dr Jonathan’s government will be leaving behind, whether in the economy as a whole, or in the oil industry in particular. Sixteen years of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) government have left an almost indelible mess; it will take a lot to clear them up. In the face of an impatient, impoverished and suffering populace, President-elect Buhari’s methods, timing, policies, style and views on salient national issues will come under harsh scrutiny. The public and other arms of government will test his resolve, and in particular his newfound democratic credentials and convictions, some of which he has exhibited with so much public aplomb.

    The president-elect will, however, remember a few important points as he assumes office in this demonstrably worst of times. He will remember the almost divine trajectory and dizzyingly short time his party the All Progressives Congress (APC) took to win office, and what needs to be done to sustain it in power. He will remember how gingerly his amalgamated party was cobbled together, and the delicate mechanics of keeping peace among its competing, sometimes desperate tendencies and often unyielding personalities. He will bear in mind that unlike the PDP that governed Nigeria over many fat years, his cobbled party is expected to preside over probably many lean years. He will also recognise that the PDP had no governing and ennobling philosophy. If the APC, which is just two years old, is to make a difference, it must enunciate a sharpened and holistic governing philosophy, one capable of transforming Nigeria from continental opprobrium into an ideational and continental leader. APC leaders must also design a new paradigm for running their party devoid of the group and caucus conflicts that undid the PDP.

    To do all these and perhaps more, President-elect Buhari will need depth, courage and a sublime ability to navigate the ethnic, religious and political maze Nigeria has been transformed into by past governments, military and elected; not the good luck that served his predecessor well for a short time and harmed the country so deeply and so badly.

  • Restructuring or sour grape?

    Restructuring or sour grape?

    Two different but related events prompted this piece.

    One was Willie Obiano, the Anambra governor’s widely reported visit to President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari.

    Forget voting, forget parties, forget everything, the governor pleaded, but don’t forget to gift Ndigbo appointments!

    Is it then what it is all about — after voting, parties, vile electioneering, hate messages, even killings and maiming on e-day — just appointments, whoever wins?  Geez!

    The other was the April 20 call for Nigeria’s restructuring, by a body that calls itself the Lower Niger Congress (LNC).

    Declared LNC: South East and South-South want Nigeria restructured, pronto; and its 75 million denizens would soon declare, by democratic referendum, whether they still want to be part of Nigeria, and under what terms!

    It isn’t clear if LNG wants restructuring for real; or was just moaning attention-grabbing moans, driven by bitter election loss!

    Still, it’s a worrying déjà vu. Pre-Abacha times, both South East and South-South were the 1st Republic Eastern Region — and post-1st Republic (1960-1966), the old East Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu and his secessionist braves re-christened Republic of Biafra, sparking the tragic Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970).

    Might the Civil War still be raging in another guise?

    To be sure, LNC spokesperson, Tony Nnadi, at the body’s press briefing in Lagos, rippled with sour grape and bad faith.  He claimed Gen. Buhari’s victory was a “conspiracy” between the North and the South West, against the old East.

    Even if that were true — and it certainly is not — he conveniently forgot that everyone, including the South East and South-South, had a chance to be part of that “conspiracy”, but decided to spurn it.  So, it is voodoo logic: to exercise your constitutional right to differ, lose out in the electoral sweepstakes but turn round to wail about “conspiracy”!

    Both South East and South-South backed the wrong horse, no democratic crime!  But they must live with their choice, sans any dishonourable bleating.

    Besides, how is the 2015 “conspiracy” different from its 2011 cousin, when Southern Nigeria, with the Middle Belt, ganged up against the core North?

    Ironically back then, this same Buhari was the “victim”, this same Goodluck Jonathan was the “victor” and this same Attahiru Jega was the electoral chief!  If roles are now reversed, is it not legit democratic change?

    LNC Chairman, Fred Agbeyegbe’s contribution, adds more interesting perspectives to the debate.

    For one, Elder Agbeyegbe has earned his stripes, over the years, as a champion of minority rights and unfazed advocate of a politically restructured Nigeria; from its present central parasite to a federal productive hub, fired by ethnic nationalities creating — and spending — own wealth.

    For another, despite the whoop of victory and moan of defeat, nothing has negated Mr. Agbeyegbe’s stand.

    Still, Mr. Agbeyegbe’s rhetoric is all too familiar.    Hear him: “…We, the ethnic nationalities, minorities, owners of the resources, victims [italics mine] of and for whose sake the Nigerian brand of democracy was wrought, are aware that their [foreign powers’] commercial interests in a peaceful Nigeria, overrides any pretended interest in democracy.”

    That was Fred Agbeyegbe, reacting to Goodluck Jonathan’s loss in 2015.

    But flip back to 2012, when Annkio Briggs, Niger Delta environmental campaigner, had this take, during the Occupy Nigeria national strike and protests against a hike in fuel pump prices. “If Jonathan, a Niger Delta son is not good enough to govern Nigeria, the oil in his Niger Delta is not good enough for Nigeria,” she said in a communiqué she signed on 15 January 2012 [exactly  42 years  to the day the Civil War officially ended!], on behalf of a body she called Niger Delta Occupy Niger Delta Resources, (NDONDR).

    But she still wasn’t done: “We call on Niger Delta peoples, for the sake of our future, to look to our nearest neighbours, the Igbo, for immediate and strong alliance to enable the Niger Delta nations and the Igbo nation to face the obvious change that will come to Nigeria, in strength, justice, brotherhood and truth.”

    Now what is this — a call for “democratic” secession?  That would go a tad too far.  But certainly, some democratic gang-up — which played out in the 2015 elections, as the old East made its emphatic choice.  Does its loss then cancel out the majority’s win — and the “majority gang-up” morally inferior to the “minority gang-up”, thus earning the losers the moral right to threaten the winners?

    And don’t forget: the original Annkio Briggs’s threat came because the rest of Nigeria had the temerity to tell a Niger Delta president, now backed by his newfound majestic minority, to up his act!

    Indeed, link up the LNC sour-grape and Madam Briggs’s bile, with the Niger Delta former militants’ virtual oath to war, should Jonathan lose, and you see a familiar, if contemptible, pattern of emotive threats.

    Some comfort, though: before the polls, it was a threat to war-war.  Now, after, it is a threat to jaw-jaw.  We thank God for small mercies!

    Still, if LNC and allied lobby were to be less emotive and more clinical, the disastrous Jonathan tenure was the umpteenth proof that Nigeria would unravel, without restructuring into a productive federation.

    Jonathan, as president, came from a minority bloc.  Yet, in his near-six years in office, he didn’t radically restructure to underscore economic equity, and structurally cement minority rights.  All he did was play age-old majority game of president as patronage King-Kong!

    Then LNC was blissfully quiet — vicarious power must have been sweet!  Old man Edwin Clark even played, to the annoying hilt, the power godfather!  Now, Jonathan is out in the cold and these folk suddenly re-found their federating voices!  Seriously?

    But just as Jonathan has delivered under-development to his region as lollies for vicarious power, Olusegun Obasanjo too delivered under-development to his native South West, in his eight-year presidency.

    The North?  It is the very epitome of political power as potent tool for arrested development!  If you doubt, just check the havoc Boko Haram has caused the region.  Could that devilish group have recruited and brainwashed northern youth, if past dispensations headed by northerners had given the mass northern poor some hope to live for?

    Gen. Buhari, no doubt, towers with moral integrity.  That, with his sound mandate, will combine to forge a formidable tool for the arduous tasks ahead, in post-Jonathan Nigeria.  But even this is no magic wand, as he, with his winning coalition, must know!

    Restructuring is imperative — to both unleash regional talent and genius; and eliminate wanton waste at the irresponsible and unresponsive centre.  Yeah, Buhari’s vaunted integrity would help clean up the system.  But even that prospect is still not good enough.  This deep rot calls for a fresh and radical paradigm — restructuring!

    That is why the likes of LNC, that continue to munch sour grapes over elections won and lost, should further push their advocacy to fix the fundamental problem of Nigeria’s federal power — but not as infantile threats.

    That fixed, Governor Obiano and his people can vote whoever they want in their enclave, without giving a damn (apologies to Jonathan) about whoever gets what at Abuja!

  • Last weeks of the Jonathan presidency

    Last weeks of the Jonathan presidency

    President Goodluck Jonathan may have easily conceded defeat to APC’s Muhammadu Buhari, but he is definitely still hurting from the ignominious loss he suffered in the last polls, particularly how almost irretrievably he led his party to a humiliating defenestration. Even before he cast his own ballot, he wore a cadaverous look on his face, as if he felt and exuded defeat. He had been interviewed in Otuoke where he was to vote eventually, and while responding to a question on live television, he was absentmindedly chewing on something. He was unpresidential on that occasion; but it was more a reflection of how bad he felt and how sunken he was in spirit before the ballots were cast.

    Had former Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Suleiman Abba, been a perceptive law enforcement officer, he would have known that for the next few weeks before handover, Dr Jonathan would act desperately like a scorched snake, eager to strike at anyone he thought contributed to his defeat, or anyone he thought ridiculed him. Mr Abba is a luckless police officer, the first victim of Dr Jonathan’s last malignant attacks. Since his appointment some nine months ago, he had not shown either guile or perceptiveness in carrying out his responsibilities as the nation’s top police officer. Because he lacked character, and knowing he still had a few years to go before retirement, he began to run with the hare and hunt with the hound. He was consequently spewed out of the president’s mouth.

    Dr Jonathan will do more spewing should anyone bait his anger. That he conceded defeat to Gen Buhari and acted, in the exaggerated estimation of many of his countrymen, as a statesman does not mean he had suddenly acquired the intellectual and philosophical depth required to place his loss in the right perspective, nor to look to the future with the calm maturity necessary to rehabilitate him in the eyes of the world. More and more, the presidency will look deserted in the weeks ahead, and the president himself will flash wan smiles at anyone, human or animal, who saunters into the presidential precincts. His hair will grey faster of course, and when he is alone he will fall into such abject lugubriousness commonly associated with men on death row that few would bear to look in his face.

    In retrospect, Dr Jonathan was right to suggest single term of seven years for the president. That way the president will have his cake and eat it; and when he is done gorging on the cake and wine after seven perhaps notorious and uneventful years, he will still leave with his head held high and his dignity unaffected by the scandals he had fomented. But Nigerians can’t say because the effect of his defeat is apocalyptic, the country must adopt that unwholesome and unsanitary one-term scheme. Dr Jonathan failed the country, and is leaving it humiliated and more divided than it had ever been. Let him in the next few weeks before the change of baton also partake of the pain and agony of the psychological defeat he has brought upon the country.

  • Soft landing for top officials?

    There are indications the incoming government of President-Elect Muhammadu Buhari might be willing to consider a soft landing for a few top government officials to help smoothen the transition process. All Gen Buhari has told the public is that Dr Jonathan has nothing to fear from him. Whether that meant he would not be probed for alleged wrongdoings is left to anyone’s interpretation. It is also speculated that the so-called soft landing could be extended to some other top officials of the Jonathan presidency and those who perpetrated violence and murdered opponents during the last elections. The public will wait until the Buhari government makes a categorical statement on the matter.

    But the public must anticipate the Buhari government and let officials know that in case they think of extending any soft landing to any other top official of the Jonathan presidency, that act would meet with public displeasure. There is no way a President Buhari would not inquire into many acts of the previous government, especially when it becomes quite inevitable. If what is unearthed is mindboggling, the decision to do something about it is unlikely to rest with the government. Public pressure will be the deciding factor, for after all, sovereignty resides with the people.

  • Buhari’s victory has shamed doomsayers, says Gowon

    Buhari’s victory has shamed doomsayers, says Gowon

    Former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon has said the peaceful conduct of the March 28 presidential election won by President-elect Muhammadu Buhari has shamed doomsayers that Nigeria will break up in 2015.

    “No one will ever repeat that wild and arrogant prediction that Nigeria will go under; those doomsayers have been shamed and Nigeria will grow from strength to strength,” Gowon told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), in Jos.

    Recalling the prediction that the country would disintegrate in 2015, Gowon said those, who made the prediction did not reckon with Nigeria’s ability to solve its problems.

    He said: “The nation has always had the mechanism to tackle its concerns and this election and its peaceful outcome have proved that a united and focused nation will always survive and move toward greatness.”

    The former Head of State expressed happiness that the polls were adjudged free and fair by local and international observers, and hailed the patience and resilience of the voters, who defied the rain and the sun to vote.

    “During the elections, I visited polling units in Asokoro, Karu, Nyanya, Maitama and Wuse; the people came early and in many cases waited for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officials, who came late. I was touched by such commitment.

    “I was also touched by the good spirit and camaraderie among the voters, as they waited to vote; I was happy that they were very friendly and did not allow their political differences to tamper with the fact that they all had one destiny,” he said.

    Gowon hailed INEC officials, especially the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members, for insisting on doing the right thing, and urged Nigerians to keep that spirit so that democratic governance would come of age.

    He praised President Goodluck Jonathan for calling to congratulate the winner, and described the step as a “very soothing balm that ended fears and anxieties.”

    “The President’s congratulation saved Nigeria from violence. That good wish was very timely and saved Nigeria’s democracy.

    “There is no doubt that it set the tone for peace because the situation would have been otherwise if he had remained silent and allowed his supporters to interpret that silence their own way.

    “It is something that has never happened in Africa, and definitely not in Nigeria, so we must respect that spirit and challenge other politicians to emulate it,” he said.

    Gowon advised Buhari to listen to Nigerians and do their bidding.

    “Nigerians wanted a change, so Buhari must offer that change. They complained of corruption, insecurity and a slow economy. The incoming President must address these issues,” he said.

    Wishing Buhari divine wisdom, Gowon challenged him to strive to do better than his predecessor so that Nigerians would see and feel the difference.

  • ‘Let peace reign’

    A group of scholars at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, has hailed the victory of Muhammadu Buhari, describing it as a divine revolution signalling hope for the nation and its citizens.

    They urged scholars to regard the Buhari/Osinbajo victory as theirs since Osinbajo is from an academic background.

    “We are sure the Vice-President-elect is a wise choice and worthy ambassador of the university community,” the scholars added.

    A statement by the Coordinator, Prof. Adamu Ahmad and Secretary, Malam Waziri Isa Gwantu urged ex-Niger Delta militant, Mujaheed Dokubo-Asari, to work for peace instead of making inflammatory statements.

    They criticised Dokubo-Asari for accusing the North and Southwest of grouping against the Southsouth, saying one “could also accuse people like him, Edwin Clark, Godsday Orubebe, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke of grouping against their North and Southwest brothers”.

  • CAN congratulates Buhari

    The Secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Lagos State chapter, Dr. Israel Akinadewo, has congratulated President-elect Muhammadu Buhari on his victory in the March 28 election.

    Akinadewo, who is also the Baba Aladura, prelate and the head of Motailatu Church Cherubim & Seraphim Worldwide, said Buhari, being the candidate of the party of the masses, the All Progressives Congress (APC), would deliver the dividends of democracy.

    The cleric, who greeted Nigerians for witnessing Easter, said President Goodluck Jonathan should be hailed for being a gallant loser and for showing maturity in defeat.

    He said: “CAN greets Nigerians on the celebration of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

    “Christians are enjoined to imbibe the virtue of our saviour Jesus Christ, as exemplified by him at the point of death, on the cross of Calvary, when he prayed for his accusers and asked for forgiveness on their behalf.

    “Nigerians should be selfless in their service to God and mankind. They should be honest in their activities, be faithful to God, eschew violence and be their brother’s keepers.

    “President Jonathan and President-elect Buhari should be praised for their statesmanship and maturity before, during and after the election. I pray that God will give the incoming president the wisdom to lead the nation to an enviable height.

  • Buhari to meet Igbo leaders

    •President-elect to campaign for APC candidates

    President-elect Muhammadu Buhari will, today, hold a town hall meeting with stakeholders and Igbo leaders in Owerri, the Imo State capital.

    The visit, it was learnt, was to drum up support for the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidates in the Southeast.

    Governor Rochas Okorocha, in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Media, Mr. Sam Onwuemeodo, said the President-elect would be given a warm reception at the Heroes’ Square, where he will address the people.

    The governor, who held a thank-you rally to appreciate the people for their support, noted that they contributed to Buhari’s victory.

    He urged the people to turn up en masse to receive the President-elect, irrespective of their political affiliations, adding: “In the new emerging order, everybody will be carried along and people will not be discriminated against because of their political leanings.”

  • Muhammadu Buhari’s democratic rebirth

    Muhammadu Buhari’s democratic rebirth

    Pulling Nigerians together at a time of intensifying regional, religious and ethnic friction will be a daunting task for President-elect  Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, writes William Wallis in the Financial Times.

    Nigerians with a grounding in British history have found their analogy for General Muhammadu Buhari’s epic struggle to regain power in the legend of Robert the Bruce.

    Before inflicting a humiliating defeat on the British at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the Scottish king drew courage from a spider, grappling to spin its web across the roof of a cave. The spider only succeeded after three attempts, inspiring the maxim: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, again.”

    Buhari, who is among a clutch of former generals who rose to prominence in the turbulent aftermath of Independence in 1960, first came to power in a coup in 1983. Professing himself a born-again democrat, he made three previous attempts to win it back at the ballot box, each time gaining only about half the votes he needed.

    His resounding victory last week, in the face of bounteous skulduggery, is an object lesson in perseverance and arguably one of the most significant political events on the continent since the 1994 election in South Africa brought an end to white minority rule. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, an incumbent president has been unseated by the electorate, along with the party that has governed (and often misgoverned) Nigeria since military rule ended in 1999.

    For the first time also, a sitting Nigerian President accepted with humility that he was obliged to go. Elated by the positive implications for the country’s fledgling democracy, Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president, said last week that if he were to live another life, he would choose to be a Nigerian a second time. The country, he said, had surmounted many crises since Independence. “Some people in Africa believe an incumbent government cannot be removed by the will of the people,” he added. “We have done it.”

    Obasanjo, with whom the incoming president has not always seen eye to eye, said he believed Buhari was “intelligent enough” to move Africa’s most-populous state forward. “He is a man who lives a modest life and I believe he will manage the affairs of Nigeria by and large the way he manages his own affairs.”

    Although last week’s events are unique, there is also a sense of deja vu about the general’s march to power, 30 years after he first took it in a coup. In 1983, as now, Africa’s leading oil producer was in the throes of an oil shock. A collapse in state revenues revealed how bloated government had become. Austerity beckoned, and Buhari imposed it with a “war on indiscipline” in the 20 months before he was overthrown by rival officers.

    That period, when hundreds were locked up on the mildest suspicion of fraud, earned him an image of uncompromising ruthlessness that still unsettles many. But it also earned him admirers, who believe he was overthrown by corrupt elements of his own regime just as his policies began to yield results. “If I had had another two years in office then Nigeria might be a different place today,” he says. His ousting led to a prolonged period of detention after which he divorced his first wife Safinatu, with whom he has five children.

    His second wife, Aisha, with whom he also has five children, is now the First Lady-in-waiting. The statuesque beauty of one of his daughters proved to be an electoral asset; when a photograph of her went viral, one social media commentator observed that “anyone who can produce her can produce the change we need.”

    In 2011, when Buhari last tried and failed to win power at the polls, change did not seem so attractive. Each of his previous campaigns came at a time when oil prices — on which Nigeria still depends for about 70 per cent of state revenues — were either recovering or close to their peak. His ascetic reputation was a bit of a damp squib when the country was enjoying an oil boom.

    Curbing the excesses of the political class — the centrepiece of the lean, 72-year-old’s campaign — has a more urgent ring now the oil price has fallen. So has his pledge to tackle the spread of Boko Haram terrorists in the North.

    Buhari is something of a throwback, one of a group of generals and coup plotters from yester-year who have remained influential ever since. Their concern, when they joined the army as young men in the 1960s, was to find a way for the predominately Muslim North to catch up with the much more developed and mostly Christian south. That quandary persists today.

    Born in the northern state of Katsina, in the dusty brush of the Sahel, Buhari now sits atop a complex coalition that helped win him support in the South, where in the last election, he garnered almost none. He has softened and developed a twinkling sense of humour, as transpired in a recent interview I ran out of paper. “Not ideal for a journalist,” he quipped.

    Despite the broad alliance he has built, pulling Nigerians together at a time of intensifying regional, religious and ethnic friction will be a daunting task. Some southern Christians, conscious of how pockets of their region have modernised and taken off in recent years, remain uneasy that the presidency is shifting back north.

    “This is a major northern revival which will take a while for the others to wake up and recognise,” says a contemporary of Buhari’s who served in several governments. “When they do they are going to feel very uncomfortable. Much will depend on how he exercises power and how sensitive he is to national unity.”

                                                                                                    •Culled from Financial Times

  • Buhari’s delicate victory

    Buhari’s delicate victory

    Even before one ballot was cast in the March 28 presidential and legislative elections, few could resist the temptation to see the election as a referendum on the Goodluck Jonathan government rather than an endorsement of Muhammadu Buhari, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate. Gen Buhari is undoubtedly qualified to rule, and he brings into the presidency rare qualities seldom found in Nigerian rulers, to wit, discipline, honesty, reliability and determination. But Dr Jonathan’s weaknesses were even more striking and electorally damaging than the general’s strengths were electorally productive and praiseworthy. Though the APC candidate trumped his PDP opponent by a robust two million plus votes, the winning party must judge the strength of the foundations upon which its March 28 victory is built if it is to finalise the design and construction of the former opposition party, achieve success, and build a lasting legacy.

    As comprehensive as the party’s victory in the North may appear, and as solid as that victory may seem in the North-Central and in the Southwest, APC’s electoral performance, which will most probably be replicated in Saturday’s state polls, may be more tentative than the party may want to believe. While its victory is unprecedented, making it the first time in Nigeria a ruling party was defeated by the opposition at the national level, it is not clear the party’s success is due mainly to the strength of its manifesto or to the voters’ love for the party. The opposition party’s victory is of course not attenuated by fears of future disappointment; but given the scale of the rot left by Dr Jonathan and his team, and the drastic remedies the winner will need to administer very deeply and quickly, the infatuation between the voters and the APC could very quickly turn into frustration or, worse, repudiation.

    If the APC is able to measure the structure and amperage of the victory it secured over the PDP last Tuesday, it will put things in the right perspective. It will easily recognise that the talents and industry it required to defeat the PDP and Dr Jonathan are somewhat fundamentally different from the qualifications and attributes it needs to manage its success and govern well. There is nothing in their short pedigree, having come all of two years, nor in the rapid and drastic manner they secured victory, to suggest they do not have the men to lift the party above the common level, or the tactics and strategies to cobble together a great and successful cabinet.

    The party appears to know already the priorities of the electorate. First is the economy, which decline is indicated by revenue shortfalls and states unable to pay salaries or execute major projects. Second is insecurity, also depicted by the humiliating help Nigeria is receiving from neighbouring countries and mercenaries to fight Boko Haram. On Friday, the Chadian army chief publicly mourned the near absence of Nigerian troops on the frontlines. Third is the abducted Chibok schoolgirls whose rescue and return the country craves badly. And fourth, on the aesthetic level, is the need to build the support pillars of Nigerian politics and democracy, a task the PDP forsook for 16 years.

    The APC made history last week by winning the March 28 polls, and changing the face of the incoming National Assembly; it stands on the threshold of a much bigger history if it manages against all predictions to assemble a competent multicultural and multidimensional cabinet to right the wrongs of decades past. It will need the disciplined commitment of the president-elect himself, the energy and vision of men like Bola Ahmed Tinubu, guardians of the constitution and civil rights like the incoming vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo, and the maturity of party elders like John Oyegun and Ogbonnaya Onu. Atiku Abubakar will have a say, though he had often showed a willingness to run with the hare and hunt with the hound; and so, too, will former president Olusegun Obasanjo, notwithstanding his imperiousness and messianism.

    Though he is a man of few words, yet even in his quietude, Gen Buhari has given the impression he is loth to inquire into the financial and probably also political madness that unhinged the country and predisposed it to disequilibrium. However, he really has little choice but to probe the past, for the scale of the madness must be investigated and requited if similar malfeasances are not to be repeated. There was hardly any election in much of the Southeast and South-South last month; even if the APC will not head for the tribunal, it must document what went wrong, and in the case of criminal acts, such as were orchestrated in Rivers State before and during the presidential poll, those indicted must without fail be brought to justice. Dr Jonathan appears to have got some soft landing; but everyone knows he opened the country’s financial tap and let loose a gale of subversion of the people’s will through unrestrained inducement. Surely, the money came from somewhere. The country needs to know, if not immediately, then sometime in the near future, how and why institutional controls failed so woefully. If perpetrators are not called to account now, nature itself will withhold its goodwill. The blood of the innocent must be avenged in Rivers State and elsewhere.

    The nature and dynamics of the APC victory is in many ways instructive of the present and the future. The Yoruba political organisation, Afenifere, actively campaigned for Dr Jonathan on the dubiety that voting for APC was an endorsement of the enslavement of the Yoruba by the North. But both the results of the 2011 and March 28, 2015 polls showed clearly that the nature and dynamics of Nigeria’s electoral politics had changed considerably. No zone, let alone a cabal, can win elections without an active alliance with some other zones. Dr Jonathan realised this in 2011 but strangely failed to nurture and sustain the alliance that brought him to power. Gen Buhari failed in 2011 because he embraced the old politics of dominance, but succeeded last month partly because he embraced the new politics of accommodation. If its victory is not to be a fluke, the APC must recognise and nurture these new dynamics. Despite the shape of its electoral performance, especially its near zero impact on the Southeast, it must not fail to bring into the cabinet great minds from that protesting or absentminded region, men and women like Charles Soludo, Pat Utomi and Victoria Ezekwesili. There is no room for the bitter, malicious and acrimonious politics of the past, the kind still risibly and anachronistically subscribed to by Afenifere.

    Above all, the APC must assign itself the legacy responsibility of laying a solid foundation for democracy, the best in Africa. The PDP failed disastrously to carry out this responsibility. Now is the time for real democratic and structural change. To this end, APC must reform the system fundamentally and build and defend national institutions, including the security services bastardised by Dr Jonathan. It must also ensure that subsequent elections improve on the use of technology as well as neutralise violence in politics. The party won a historic election; after April 11, it must now settle down to its historic duty.