SOMEHOW, it has become trendy for top political aspirants to coax their supporters into underwriting the purchase of nomination and expression of interest forms for the 2019 polls. It is the latest subterfuge in town, an indication of the political decline and ethical crisis sending Nigeria’s pampered political elite into a swoon. They were barely through with their indiscriminate defections from one party to another, contemptuous of ideological affinity or how well those parties were run; now by initiating this drama, they suppose themselves adept at fooling everybody. President Muhammadu Buhari and ex-vice president Atiku Abubakar typify this latest display of needless and uniquely Nigerian subterfuge.
Nigerians are, however, unlikely to be fooled. They know that those milling around the political elite, and applauding their achievements and false sense of importance, were in fact put up to the deception of buying forms. But since the aspirants to high office seem to enjoy the melodrama of nomination forms being bought for them by supposedly selfless and passionate followers, the country has played along shyly, it seems, but nevertheless unquestioningly. The joke is however on the aspirants. The President claimed to have taken a bank loan to buy himself a nomination form in the 2015 election. He gave no indication how he repaid the loan. It would probably feel awkward, he reflected, for a president who has had more than three years in office to take another bank loan to buy nomination and expression of interest forms. So a different device had to be procured. And what better stratagem than a public display of popular and selfless, if not fanatical, support. It is sheer political drama.
The former vice president was even more mawkish. Probably relieved and overjoyed that his men had matched the president’s, the tearful Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) aspirant publicly welcomed the show of affection by supporters who procured the forms for him as a love offering. Since the president and former vice president set those unfortunate examples, a few governorship aspirants and other aspirants to legislative offices have also mined that sentimental hogwash to convince a wary public that the widespread support they claimed, evidenced by the purchase of nomination forms by excited supporters, should not be belittled. It is possible that all the aspirants who have had forms bought for them so far are popular; but since no one can tell what artful devices they would not mind deploying in their political struggles, the public would prefer not to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Alhaji Abubakar is widely believed to be at peace with the wealth he has made, and has never once apologised for it, nor pretended to be averse to luxuriating in it. Even those who have tried to make him feel guilty about his wealth have met with short shrift. He should be commended for his forthrightness, regardless of whether anyone finds it offensive or not. But President Buhari has all his life apologised on behalf of the wealthy while not being incommoded by, nor averse to, their excessive generosity. Parsimonious, contemptuous of wealth at least on the surface, and censorious about its origins, it is perplexing indeed that he has sometimes put himself at the receiving end of people’s generosities. If Alhaji Abubakar saw nothing amiss in his supporters’ donations, seeing that he himself is no stranger to both generosity and sacrifice, no one should blame him for not denouncing prohibitive nomination fees.
On the other hand, not only is President Buhari alarmed by wealth, a strange feeling not assuaged by reason or economics, he is head of a government that is in a position to set standards for reasonable behaviour in setting nomination fees. To suggest that a high fee of N45m would discourage frivolous aspiration is absolute buncombe. The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) cannot claim that managing some 100 aspirants, if it came to that, would befuddle its famed administrative ability, especially with the scathing and sometimes sardonic Adams Oshiomhole in the saddle. It is clear that as far as the president and Nigeria’s leading elite see it, anyone who wants to run for the presidency should put his money where his mouth is.
What is even far more worrisome is that if the elite could not manage the ethical nuance of prohibitive nomination fees and the damaging effect of poor intra- and interparty relationships in a poorly regulated electoral environment, how can they ever be trusted with something much higher, say, leadership? In 2009, a former American ambassador to Nigeria, Princeton Lyman, remarked at a colloquium organised in the United States in honour of Chinua Achebe that Nigeria’s elite were both incapable of managing the wealth of Nigeria and were tentative about its future. The ambassador is widely and repeatedly quoted for warning that Nigeria was running itself into a cul-de-sac, even total irrelevance. His warnings then and now retain enough urgency and potency, but they have been largely ignored.
Among other poignant observations, Ambassador Lyman had advocated: “…Among much of the elite today, I have the feeling that there is a belief that Nigeria is too big to fail, too important to be ignored, and that Nigerians can go on ignoring some of the most fundamental challenges they have, many of which we have talked about: disgraceful lack of infrastructure, the growing problems of unemployment, the failure to deal with the underlying problems in the Niger-Delta, the failure to consolidate democracy and somehow feel will remain important to everybody because of all those reasons that are strategically important. And I am not sure that that is helpful.”
He continued: “So if you look ahead ten years, is Nigeria really going to be that relevant as a major oil producer, or just another of the many oil producers, while the world moves on to alternative sources of energy and other sources of supply. And what about its influence, its contributions to the continent? As our representative from the parliament talked about, there is a great history of those contributions. But that is history. Is Nigeria really playing a major role today in the crisis in Niger Republic on its border, or in Guinea, or in Darfur, or after many promises, making any contributions to Somalia? The answer is no, Nigeria is today NOT making a major impact, on its region, or on the African Union, or on the big problems of Africa that it was making before. What about its economic influence?”
After about 19 years of imperfect democracy, Nigeria is still not any nearer peaceful polling, or even the observance of the rule of law, or sane, consistent and coherent economic policies, indeed public policy as a whole, or the enactment and execution of patriotic and nationalistic measures that bind the country together, defuse tension, reduce hate and suspicion, and harness the country’s huge potentials for development in a restructured polity. Instead, divisions have widened, with much of the country unsure whether the president is not himself, by his strange appointments, deliberately widening the rifts into an insurmountable chasm. It used to be thought that some of the presidency’s self-imposed problems like the intransigent National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) boss, and the replacement of a southerner director general of the Department of State Service (DSS) with a northerner were unforced errors. Now, it is believed in many circles that the many ills plaguing the Buhari presidency are probably orchestrated, a product of design rather than incompetence.
Even the rather simple matter of restructuring, as the recent unproductive arguments between Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and former vice president Abubakar indicated, has been dichotomously upgraded into an incomprehensible logjam where fiscal federalism is differentiated from geographical restructuring. Nigeria’s elite can’t get more inscrutable. To worsen the quagmire, at the rate the Buhari presidency insatiably gorges on foreign loans to rebuild broken infrastructure, Nigeria may find itself entangled in another debt trap not many years after it managed to exit one. The simple truth is that Nigeria’s elite is truly and unquestionably irresponsible, gross, short-sighted and ignorant. The Buhari presidency should not fool itself to think it is different or that it has come on a rescue mission. It is merely a variant of its predecessors. It may not be as grasping as those who came before it, even though that conclusion is controversial, but it is probably as unenlightened and perhaps more sanctimonious.
Ambassador Lyman is right to suggest that Nigeria is pushing itself into irrelevance. If its domestic policies do not fully reflect this thesis, it is simply because its foreign policies strikingly tower above everything else in amateurishness and mendacity. As the ambassador says, Nigeria keeps referring to itself in grand statements and labels but without doing anything to present itself as a “good model for democracy or a good model for governance.” As he put it more than nine years ago, which conclusion is sadly still true today, “What does it mean that one in five Africans is Nigerian? It does not mean anything to a Namibian or a South African. It is a kind of conceit. What makes it important is what is happening to the people of Nigeria. Are their talents being tapped? Are they becoming an economic force? Is all that potential being used? And the answer is ‘Not really.’ ”
There will still be more defections as politicians dizzyingly crisscross political parties, more brazen subterfuges about nomination forms, huger disrespect for the rule of law or make it subordinate to vaguely and puerilely defined national security interest, greater misuse of state power particularly by the uncontrollable secret service, and an obscene misconception of the presidency as an archaic or even atavistic monarchy. It is a horrifying regression to the past, exemplified by disingenuous purchase of nomination forms and cynical manipulation of appointments. In 1940, Britain needed the miracle at Dunkirk to keep its World War II hopes alive; more than at any time in its chequered history, Nigeria needs a bigger miracle to keep breathing. Yet the power elite do not even realise how precarious the situation had become.