For the old order, it was end time.
For the new, it was Advent.
On all accounts, however, a momentous era: fervent love, scalding hate, explosive religious passion, ethnic baiting and partisan distemper; as both the doomed order and the sprouting one went for broke.
Goodluck Jonathan and his ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) were sinking fast. But Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Party (APC) opposition alliance were on the bounce.
FeBuhari, an upbeat coinage by retired Gen. Buhari’s supporters, set the internet on virtual fire as it went viral on social media. Translated in Yoruba, it means “Love Buhari”. But it was also a golden pun on February, when the presidential election was originally fixed, for February 14: the lovers’ day of St. Valentine. The Buhari cyber battalion had conjured sheer election-time magic: their candidate was Nigerians’ electoral Val on February 14!
But when the election got postponed to March 28?
The postponement was the power heroics of Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd), then President Goodluck Jonathan’s National Security Adviser (NSA). At Chatham House London, on January 22, Dasuki claimed the electoral umpire was not ready. That charge was not completely untrue, as not a few found it difficult collecting their permanent voter cards (PVC). However, it was odd that charge came from a security apparatchik. He then suggested a postponement.
That postponement plot would thicken on February 5 at home, at an Abuja meeting of the National Council of State (NCS). The reason there morphed from alleged Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) non-preparedness to some imperative to rout Boko Haram and properly secure the election. Though NCS advised the polls should go ahead, the Federal Government announced a six-week postponement till March 28.
It was clear the Jonathan camp was stalling the Buhari momentum. Indeed, Dr. Frederick Fasehun, factional Odu’a People’s Congress (OPC) leader, one of the president’s supporters in Yorubaland, would later confess the postponement was contrived to buy time.
Still, did that faze the Buhari army? Well, the momentum lost some steam. Then, flared conspiracy and counter-conspiracy theories, from both sides of the partisan isle. But thereafter, another electioneering war cry rang out: March 4 Buhari!
The Jonathan camp might have been wrong-footed and scared stiff. But it didn’t exactly roll over to be slaughtered. It pulled a few tricks of its own. PDP’s highly explosive and divisive electioneering tactics reached a fevered pitch; and attained desperate heights.
Indeed, Dasuki’s rash show at Chatham House was the first joker. And imposing the six-week postponement was the ultimate election-time impunity and power play.
President Jonathan himself was taking no chances. His dangerous sorties into Christian sanctuaries, particularly in the South and the Christian part of the Middle Belt, had a stark message, implicit if not explicit: a Christian like you is about to be unhorsed. Would you, children of God, just sit by and let that happen?
On ethnic baiting, the presidential camp was no less active: South East vs. South West, South-South vs. Far North, majority vs. minority; and brazen demonization of Attahiru Jega and his INEC.
In this segment of the theatre, Edwin Clark, the self-appointed presidential godfather, was very pitchy over Jega’s alleged compromise, calling for Jega’s immediate sack and pushing for the abolition of the card reader, a technology that would later make a definitive difference at the polls.
No less strident were the presidential and PDP trio of Femi Fani-Kayode (later self-rechristened Olufemi Olukayode), Jonathan’s chief presidential campaign spokesperson, Olisa Metuh, PDP national publicity secretary and Doyin Okupe, the unrepentant and ever-charging, ever-growling and ever-rippling presidential bull dog. Media demonization was the winning strategy: from Buhari’s contrived certificate scandal, to controversial TV documentaries on top APC chiefs.
Ekiti’s Ayo Fayose also weighed in with his morbid adverts, and childish tantrums; predicting death for the APC candidate, on the strength of some tenuous trend; and for which he owed no one any apologies. Of course, Herself the Dame and presidential spouse, Patience Jonathan, was lobbing her own crude bazookas, in ethnic insults and incendiary threats, at perceived ethnic opponents. But rather than help her husband, these impassioned attacks ultimately destroyed his bid at a presidential encore.
For once, Nigeria became a charged camp boiling with intense ethnic loathing and allied combustible passion. No place was this more shocking than in the South West, where the people had always thought faith was a private affair, and always stayed that way, particularly in politics. Yet, in the same South West, afoot was an explosive theatre of Christian-Muslim antipathy. That threatened to fissure faith relations that had been consolidated for eons. Besides, the sitting president launched no less than three sorties to Lagos, reportedly to rain dollars, in a desperate bid to corral South West votes.
Yet, as the PDP escalated their campaign of threat and abuse, with a faction of OPC even invading Lagos streets, demonising Jega and visiting violence on the people, Buhari evinced the picture of a cold, unhurried but sure-footed juggernaut whose time had come; complete with the evident panic in the opposition camp.
The retired general carried with him a bit of Lincoln’s mystique as ramrod, he literally sauntered through the stumps. The great Abraham Lincoln was a veteran at presidential and other election losses before he eventually won; only to become the most memorable, if not the greatest American president, that ever was.
Buhari had run thrice: 2003, 2007 and 2011, all the three times coming short, despite sweeping the vote of the proverbial northern streets. But his northern street value was as much a source of strength as it was an albatross, for that gave his blackmailing opponents ample ammo to portray him as a northern irredentist and putative Islamist, bent on Islamising “the Christian South”, to use the London Economist’s favourite but misleading cliché.
The Jonathan camp belted out a hysteria of Islamization and northernization, should Buhari win. Their efforts could well have gathered some traction but for Buhari’s South West makeover by the Bola Tinubu political machine, thanks to the North-South West political realignment that birthed the APC merger.
The Buhari spruce came with specific humanising images like the general high-fiving a boy who appeared to be his grandson; and donning a tuxedo in which he really looked dashing and modern, among others.
But his final and irreversible bounce came with the pick, as running mate, of Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, a brilliant and well-respected professor-at-law and Pentecostal pastor, whose image was as clean and squeaky as Buhari’s, after a presidential primary adjudged far more open and transparent than the PDP coronation of one candidate, after just printing one presidential nomination form!
The Osinbajo masterstroke killed two big birds with a lethal stone: if Buhari was just an intolerable Islamist, why would he pick a Pentecostal pastor for running mate? That destroyed the Jonathan Christian vs. Muslim campaign, with the Pentecostal churches, the hub of that explosive push, split right down the middle.
Then the sight of a squeaky pair, swearing to war against corruption, was a sharp rebuke to the Jonathan perceived body language of hugging sleaze. Worse: Vice President Namadi Sambo, Jonathan’s running mate, was dour and added no sparkle to a ticket generally perceived as dull and uninspiring.
At the end of it all, Jonathan got licked and the PDP hegemony became history — the first time a Nigerian sitting president would be electorally unhorsed. But Jonathan’s beatification came, ironically at that tragic hour, showing an epiphany of what his presidency should have been.
His concession speech, both in content and rendition, would appear the best Jonathan ever gave. And the concession, the first right thing he did, in an election his camp ran largely baiting base , primordial instincts, when they should have appealed to decency and reason.
A post-victory Buhari, on the other hand, is clearly now far off the high momentum of his historic win. His first sound bite: “I’m for everybody and I’m for nobody” is only symptomatic of a child-like naivety that has led to costly distractions in the APC controlled two-chamber federal parliament. It could well be the making of a split administration: with the executive clear on its mission but the parliament, no thanks to personal interests of leading APC hierarchs there, neither here nor there.
Will the Buhari Presidency be as memorable as Lincoln’s? That is not easy to project, though the inauguration of an all-star cabinet seems to spark some excitement, even if not a few contend the cabinet should have come much earlier. Other critics also insist the administration is a bit tardy in showcasing its economic direction, therefore keeping foreign investors and even local entrepreneurs guessing. So, it is early days yet, to project on Buhari’s probable place in history.
But one thing is clear: Buhari’s historic win, when the Nigerian ruling class across the board appeared at the end of their tether, is an epochal event.
That is why he is The Nation Person of the Year 2015.
