Tag: tinubu

In the months to come, the recently berthed political coalition assembled to unseat President Tinubu will continue to make newspaper headlines. Their strategies are simple and two-pronged. One, they will seize upon the hunger and hardship among a section of the populace to define and dismiss the administration’s economic policies as ineffective and probably counterproductive. Two, they will focus on the president and his idiosyncrasies in order to cast him as unreliable, incompetent, controversial and untrustworthy. Given the abysmal level of education in the country, especially the general inability to understand economic policies, the coalition’s campaign will garner traction in the short run. The previous administration borrowed heavily to sustain a national system and lifestyle that had become untenable; the present administration has resisted the temptation to focus on the short run, preferring instead to focus on the painful medium to long run. Consequently, the political narrative regarding 2027 will be shaped more successfully  in the short term by the coalition, regardless of their individual and collective lack of credibility.

The coalition may lack credibility, cohesion and direction, but like typical predators, their eyes are fixed, not on the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) per se, but on President Tinubu. They are obsessed with him, they fear him and his mystical capacity, they know they can’t match his tactical knowhow in politics, but they know that once they successfully discredit him, their job is done. For them, it is not about ideology or reform, or even about economic development in the real and general sense of the word. It is all about office, the office of the president. It is, therefore, the goal of capturing the presidency that is binding the coalition leaders together; and they know that one person, rather than a political structure, stands in their way. So far, the administration has countered the coalition’s nascent campaign by hoisting their economic achievements for all to see. But in the absence of a before-and-after analysis for the public to appreciate how close to disaster they were pre-2023, whatever those economic achievements are will seem tame in the face of hunger and inflation. To match the coalition’s agenda and discredit it, the administration will also have to turn the floodlights on the persons of the coalition leaders. Luckily for the administration, the coalition drivers are vulnerable.

It is not hard to understand why coalition leaders like Atiku Abubakar, Nasir el-Rufai, Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi, David Mark, Rauf Aregbesola are bitter against the president. Nor is it hard to see why the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) leg of the APC feels alienated. Nor, in line with the constant iteration of the northern narrative of power and office, is it hard to understand why the core North is incensed. Across all political parties, these individuals and groups and regions are united in their common detestation of President Tinubu. They give the impression that once the president can be dethroned, the country would breathe easier. However, observers must have noticed already that the coalition leaders and their chorus men seldom take issue with the Tinubu administration’s economic and social and even political policies. They know they won’t and indeed can’t change a thing beyond making cosmetic changes should they win the presidency. The policies are irreversible. They won’t reinstate fuel subsidy, they won’t enthrone lower electricity tariffs, they won’t abandon naira flotation policy, and they won’t roll back the plethora of oil industry, education, health, and agriculture policies. In their campaigns, they will mince words in discussing those policies and promising modifications. Nothing more. They will privately feel fortunate that the Tinubu administration has done the heavy lifting.

But despite all this, dangerous undercurrents exist, and a powerful political undertow is pulling the country in a direction likely to be too combustible to manage. Take the example of the coalition leaders, men and women who deprecate the style and policies of the president but can still reconcile their principles with straddling other parties. Up till yesterday, former vice president Abubakar was yet to resign from the PDP. Peter Obi was even more audacious about boastfully retaining his membership of the Labour Party (LP) while asserting his dalliance with the coalition now berthed in the African Democratic Congress (ADC). Most of the other coalition leaders imperturbably engage in running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. It tells everyone that the country is dealing with a pack of irrepressible and unscrupulous political leaders unconstrained by ethics or political rules. On the one hand, they ask the country to distrust the current administration, but on the other they dispense with and despise all legal, ethical and constitutional guardrails.

There is nothing wrong with cobbling a coalition to unseat any administration, for the APC also forged a merger to unseat the last administration. But none of the chest-thumping and self-asserting coalition leaders had a great political or democratic pedigree or was ever associated with inspiring managerial and administrative acumen. As ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s vice president, Alhaji Atiku’s record was abysmal, leading his boss to dismiss him in a withering testimonial. Mr Obi’s governorship was a perfect example of tedium, what with his adoption of stone-age economics to undergird his public finance policy. He recently told the media how he left a carefully choreographed amount of N12bn and $50m each in three banks for his successor in Anambra. He said nothing about the debts he left, or the needs to which those funds should have been productively and timeously committed. Mr Aregbesola, former Osun State governor, had no clue how a modern society or economy should run. He left his state psychologically battered and dispirited. By all means, let a political coalition emerge to give the sitting administration a run for its money. But had Alhaji Atiku stood the chance of securing the PDP presidential nomination, and Mallam el-Rufai secured a place in the administration, and Mr Aregbesola been forgiven and accommodated in the Tinubu government, etc, there would be no coalition.

Read Also: Tinubu’s legal, regulatory reforms offer strong foundation for energy investment – Lokpobiri

Last week, Zainab Buba Galadima, an APC member and daughter of one of Nigeria’s well-known political gadflies, Buba Galadima, gave an interview in which she predicted a storm coming from the North as a result of the prevailing economic hardship. And just in case anyone thought the storm could be contained in the North, she warned that no part of the country would be spared. At various times in the interview, she sounded practical, and at other times, she sounded idealistic. She was neither progressive nor ideological, and she didn’t need to be. But she did not give the impression she understood economics enough to rationally contextualise the country’s economic challenges. She displayed nothing more than streetwise appreciation of the country’s existential problems, with President Tinubu as the bogeyman. There is, therefore, clearly a gross miscomprehension of the economic damage bequeathed by the last administration, and an even poorer miscomprehension of the drastic and painful economic policies needed to extricate the country from the jaws of disaster. It is these misconceptions, not to say significant alienation, that the administration must find ingenious ways to address.

President Tinubu is not infallible, and his aides and ministers must not suggest that rebuilding the infrastructure of the country would answer and pacify the bitterness and resentment some Nigerians and politicians feel towards him. Given the untenable political structure of the country, it is only natural that the unhealthy obsession with him should continue. Sadly, however, most of those who analyse the country’s crisis fail to see that one of the major reasons Nigeria is listing like a stricken ship is its misshapen political structure, a structure most regional and exclusionary leaders still hope to sustain and palliate. Worse, too, given the fierce rhetoric of Nigerian politicians and leaders, it is clear that no lessons have been learnt from other countries that have imploded, whether Sudan, Somalia, DRC, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, etc. Those who think Nigeria is too big to fail miss the point badly. The Soviet Union failed, Yugoslavia failed, and the world is dotted with empires and great kingdoms that failed thereby unleashing seismic shifts in regional and continental politics, some of it costing millions of lives.

But it is not only political leaders that behave irresponsibly, as Kenya’s youth protests are showing. Even the generally unmoored younger generation may be carelessly and foolishly triggering forces whose dynamics they may not be able to control or shape in the months and years ahead. On matters as deceptively simple as votes being made to count, many politicians and youths have threatened Armageddon. It is great for votes to count, but Vladimir Putin was validly elected for the first time in 2000 and he is still in office; and so too was Adolf Hitler in 1932. National issues are far more complex than they seem. Instead of the unhealthy obsession with a sitting president, or repudiation of the informal principle of power rotation when a person, people or region is disfavoured, it is time to rethink Nigeria away from the violent and exclusionary rhetoric of jaded politicians and stranded political leaders.