Tag: Trump

By his enthusiastic endorsement and approval of the contemptuous and derogatory language with which President Donald Trump couched his recent threat to intervene militarily in Nigeria to check alleged ‘Christian genocide, ‘ Mr Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, obviously believes that the American leader’s tirade was targeted solely at the President Bola Tinubu administration. And the new factional National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Kabiru Turaki, who recently unabashedly invited Trump to undertake a Messianic role of salvaging democracy in the country, which he perceived to be under threat, also sees the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the sole target of external umbrage at the challenges of insecurity in Nigeria.

Unfortunately, this is a gross misreading of the import of President Trump’s threat to unilaterally violate the country’s sovereignty in an all-out onslaught against Islamic terrorists. Indeed, the reactions of Obi, Turaki and other opponents of the Tinubu administration to Trump’s warning reinforce once again one of the reasons for the latter’s undisguised loathing for the African political elite as a whole. Some attribute Trump’s attitude toward Africa generally to a racist, supremacist outlook. That may not be entirely true. In reality, countries earn respect rather than seek that it be conferred on them gratuitously. Given the abundant resources with which she is endowed, should the African continent be in the pathetic situation of abject underdevelopment, economic misery and political retardation in which she finds herself today? Can we blame outsiders who treat her with condescension and utter derision in the global community?

Most African countries run what the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo described with characteristic brutal frankness as ‘street beggar economies’. Thus, despite being perhaps the most blessed portion of the globe in terms of mineral and natural resources as well as arable land and clement climate, the vast majority of the peoples of Africa are immersed in dehumanising poverty while their societies are plagued by debilitating and dysfunctional inequality that pits a microscopic, obscenely wealthy elite against the rest of the downtrodden populace. President Trump may have been misled by mischievous lobby groups with surreptitious agendas into mischaracterising the nature of violence and insecurity in Nigeria. But his warning is an indictment not just of the incumbent administration but of the political class as a whole.

It is unlikely that the American leader will be impressed by a political elite which supinely accedes to the insulting denigration of their country by outsiders or one which solicits external political saviours to fix their country over six and a half decades after independence. The insurgency, which has laid large swathes of northern Nigeria in particular prostates and metastasised to encompass banditry, herders-farmers bloodletting, religious extremism, incessant communal savagery, among others, has lasted over a decade and a half. The assorted non-state actors pitched against the Nigerian State have, over this period, acquired greater proficiency, access to increasingly more sophisticated arms, enhanced operational flexibility and dexterity, while the efficacy of the undoubtedly valiant Nigerian armed forces is impeded by debilitating elite factionalism, a pervasive culture of corruption and structural defects of a polity that undermine and sabotage national security.

Thus, political actors across factional partisan divides and political parties, who have been in power at one time or the other at different levels of government, are responsible for the current existential fragility of the Nigerian State, including the deteriorating insecurity that elicited Trump’s combustible response. It would thus be naivety of the extreme kind for elements of the opposition to gloat over the threat from Trump, thinking that it is only the ruling party and President Tinubu that are on the defensive. No, Trump’s action indicts the political class as a whole. It is a wake up call for the political class to get its act together and face more seriously the challenge and responsibility of running the affairs of a sovereign polity in an ever increasingly complex, fragile and unpredictable global order or disorder?

In an emergent world in which the canons of international diplomacy and conventional standards of international behaviour are being turned upside down, particularly in the ‘Trumpian’ era, political elites face the real possibility of losing control of their territories to aggressive outsiders if they prove to be inept as well as lacking in vision and patriotic fervour. It is only a reasonably competent ruling elite committed to the continuous and steady development and progress of their polities that can actualise the latent potentials of countries, gain the fervent support of their people and earn desired respect in the global community.

The language employed by Trump in his communication with Nigeria shows a mindset that will readily violate the sovereignty of another country, especially when the latter is perceived as weak and vulnerable. We can see the impunity with which the Trump administration has been launching attacks on vessels allegedly carrying drug peddling syndicates from Venezuela, killing scores of people in what international law experts describe as extrajudicial executions with scant regard for legal due process. Yet, we can see the deference with which Trump treats Vladimir Putin’s Russia or even Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. The state of a country’s military preparedness, especially the possession of nuclear capability, is clearly a key determinant of how nations are perceived and treated in global relations.

But military strength is also largely dependent on economic viability, and where the degree of corruption, for instance, among a country’s political elite is of a magnitude that undermines military efficacy, the political elite as a whole – both the ruling elite and the opposition – are on the ruinous path of communal class suicide. When the opposition seeks to destabilise and bring down an elected administration through surreptitiously inviting military intervention, for instance, simply because it is dissatisfied with the outcome of elections, then it undermines the possibilities of its ever ascending to power in future through the ballot box. In the same vein, it is not in the long run interest of ruling parties to deliberately seek to sabotage, undermine and render the opposition impotent and ineffective. That was the path chosen by the PDP during the imperial Chief Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, and it is partly responsible for the dismal fate that has befallen the former ruling behemoth today.

Right-wing ideologues of the Donald Trump mould are resurgent across the West today, and this tendency blames mass migration of people from the crisis and poverty-ridden parts of the world into their more prosperous countries as partly responsible for the deep-seated socio-economic contradictions of capitalism. Hence, the unprecedented aggression and fervour with which the Trump administration has been tackling what it perceives as the menace of immigration in the US. This is likely to be the pattern in several other advanced countries, including Britain and France, as far-right ideologies gain political ascendancy. As bad governance persists in Africa, particularly with the intransigence of sit-tight leaders for life and the resurgence of military coups, there will be increased clamour in the West for external interventions to promote a modicum of good governance on the continent and thus address at source the root of the mass exodus from Africa that has become a major problem in the advanced capitalist world.

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There are those who believe that, if there is no fundamental change of course by Africa’s ruling elite, we may be on the path of a full-blown recolonisation of the continent, and there is no guarantee that the majority of Africans will be opposed to any such tragic historic reversals on the continent. It will not be surprising if many of those who belong to the hard-headed realist school of power in the West believe that badly governed African countries, which are cesspits of poverty, violence and varying degrees of state failure, have become liabilities to the world. Their societies are plagued by mass hunger, disease, poverty and joblessness even when they are situated atop some of the most precious mineral and natural resources on earth. Those who belong to this school of thought may well believe that external intervention to provide good governance in Africa may be in the interest of the vast majority of Africans and even humanity as a whole. It is time for Africa to stop being a liability to the world.

To decisively address the country’s security situation, President Tinubu has announced a raft of measures to improve the country’s security architecture, one of which is to accelerate the process of actualising state police. It is unfortunate that Trump’s threat of military intervention to combat religious terrorists and the inexplicable spike in attacks on schools and churches in some parts of the North have come at a time when the administration’s economic reforms have begun to yield concrete dividends. It will be naive and shortsighted for the opposition to welcome anything that will derail the reforms, destabilise the polity and threaten democracy. That will only play into the hands of anti-democratic elements, with the entire political class, not just the incumbent administration, being the ultimate losers.

President Trump’s threat must thus be seen as a timely wake up call to the political class. It is time to forge a greater elite consensus around a new commitment to the tenets of democracy, the rule of law and a higher level of governance that promotes prosperity and progress. The menace of rampant corruption, waste and misuse of public resources that compound the problem of poverty, deepen inequality, undermine national security and have become an existential threat for the nation must be more fundamentally tackled across political parties and tendencies.

A significant proportion of Nigeria‘s political class, particularly opposition elements still bitter at the outcome of the 2023 presidential elections and vehemently hostile to the President Bola Tinubu administration, obviously perceive US President Donald Trump’s recent threats of military intervention in Nigeria to dislodge Islamic terrorists allegedly engaged in genocide against Christians as a rebuke only of the incumbent government. Thus, with the major opposition political parties – Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP), New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP)- in various degrees of disarray and the emergent African Democratic Congress (ADC), still largely inchoate, they relish external military intervention as threatened by Trump as a better option to confronting the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2027 presidential elections that they appear grossly ill-prepared for.

Some of the opposition elements and their supporters, including leading columnists in the media, were openly exultant at rumours of a recent foiled coup attempt against the APC administration, as many of them had desperately advocated military intervention after Tinubu’s electoral victory in 2023, with the security agencies inexplicably doing absolutely nothing to check such clearly treasonable acts. They forget that while external military intervention or internal military insurrection could destabilise the polity or derail the incumbent administration, neither option offers a pathway for leading opposition leaders to achieve their aspiration to preside over the affairs of Nigeria as they so intensely desire.

Indeed, it is unlikely that the country can survive either eventuality as a cohesive entity, and the attendant most likely disintegration of Nigeria would result in the possibly irreversible demolition of democracy and the consequent obliteration of the political elite and the larger ruling class. As the contending factions of the PDP battled for control of the party’s Wadata Plaza headquarters in Abuja this week, the factional National Chairman elected at the contentious Ibadan elective Convention, Alhaji Kabiru Turaki, made a desperate call on President Trump to intervene to save democracy in Nigeria, which he claimed is under threat. In his words, “I want to call on President Trump…What is at stake is not just genocide against Christians; he should come and save democracy in Nigeria. Democracy is under threat. I am calling on all other developed nations, all advanced democracies, come and save Nigeria, come and save democracy.”

By that pathetic outburst, Turaki, a former Minister of Special Duties, demonstrated alarming political naivety as well as deficient appreciation of the nuances of international relations and diplomacy. Such appeals to Trump to help save democracy in Nigeria would only reinforce whatever Messianic complex he harbours, strengthens his perception of his country as the policeman of the world, as well as deepen his unhidden contempt for the black race which he treats as an inferior species both within the US and in Africa, whose countries he once described as “shit hole” entities. Turaki is clearly incompetent to lead a national political party in a large, complex polity like Nigeria.

Although some elements within the PDP try to frame the narrative of its protracted internal crisis in terms of an attempt by the ruling APC to destabilize opposition parties, the truth is that the wounds from which the former ruling party is bleeding almost terminally were self-inflicted especially due to its insensitivity to the geopolitical power dynamics of the country after the emergence of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar as the party’s presidential candidate in the 2023 general elections. Now, Atiku has left the PDP with his supporters for the ADC in his perennial quest for a platform to contest in the next cycle of elections. There were two court injunctions obtained in the Federal High Court, Abuja, prohibiting the PDP from going ahead with its Ibadan convention until it had fulfilled certain conditions for a national convention to hold in accordance with its own constitution. The governor Seyi Makinde-led faction of the party went ahead to organise the convention on the basis of another ruling from a High Court in Ibadan, which held that the exercise could hold.

The experienced and astute former governor of Kwara State and President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki, foresaw that the outcome of any such convention in the prevailing circumstances would possess doubtful legality and dubious legitimacy. His advice that the convention be put on hold and an interim National Executive Committee representative of all factions and tendencies in the party be constituted to run its affairs pending the resolution of all contentious issues, so that a legal, proper and inclusive convention could be organised, was ignored. Now the convention has held and resulted in suspensions and counter suspensions of leading lights in the party and a violent factional confrontation in a bid to seize control of the national Secretariat, with the facility now totally shut down and barred to all factions by the security agencies. How then is the ruling APC to be blamed for all this?

On his part, the presidential candidate of the LP in the election, Mr Peter Obi, has characteristically, reflexively endorsed President Trump’s description of Nigeria as a “now disgraced country” when the latter gave his threat of military incursion to uproot Islamic terrorists from Nigeria. In a statement posted on his verified X (formerly Twitter) account, Obi submitted that “A few weeks ago, when President Trump described our country as “now disgraced,” many were outraged. Yet, how can we dispute it when, within a single week, 25 people were kidnapped, and one of our generals, along with other officers, was killed? Today, we witnessed another troubling terror attack in Kwara State. Rather than uniting in this critical moment, we are consumed by internal wrangling, party squabbles and distractions”.

It is unfortunate that a person who sought to be President of Nigeria and still has plans to contest for the country’s apex position in future can so glibly identify with such ferocious disparagement and derogation of the polity he seeks to rule by outsiders. Nigeria is a vast, complex country plagued by problems rooted in its ethno-regional, cultural and religious plurality, inherited historical challenges and flawed structural configuration that fuel rampant violence and insecurity, among others. Her protracted economic crisis, characterised partly by pervasive poverty and dysfunctional inequality, is compounded by problems of elite corruption, ineptness and lack of vision from which Obi cannot extricate himself. But these challenges cannot be a basis for an aspiring national leader to concur sheepishly with the external denigration of his country as “now disgraced”.

In truth, there is no human community without its share of challenges, which vary in intensity and variety over time. Patriotic leaders of countries strive to play up the strengths of their societies without denying their weaknesses or being complicit in the degrading and abusive labelling of such countries by others. Despite its perceived substantial decline in many areas, America remains the greatest power on earth today economically, militarily and technologically. But she still battles serious political, economic, social and cultural challenges for which no one describes her as “now disgraced”. Despite her hundreds of years head start over Nigeria in the practice of liberal democracy, America faced a legitimacy crisis over the outcome of the 2020 presidential election that saw hundreds of stalwarts of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021, destroying property, attacking and injuring 140 security and legislative officers, killing five other persons and seeking to destroy the very foundations of the country’s democracy.

A global audience watching the horrific scenes across the world considered the insurrection utterly disgraceful for a country that had been a light of liberal democracy and liberty for over 200 years. But American leaders, irrespective of their political or ideological leanings, would never acquiesce to the description of their country in such insulting terms. Despite her phenomenal military machine, America withdrew in defeat and humiliation from a militarily puny Vietnam, had her elite soldiers killed and their bodies displayed on the streets of Somalia under Bill Clinton and fled in defeat from Afghanistan under Joe Biden, leaving considerable valuable equipment behind. The extremist Taliban Muslim extremists that America intervened in Afghanistan to dislodge from power remain in firm control of the country.

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According to Sandy Hook Promise, in an online resource on pervasive gun violence in America, which is described as an epidemic, “Each day 12 children die from gun violence in America. Another 32 are shot and injured. Guns are a leading cause of death among American children and teens. In a 2022 study, firearms were the leading cause of death for children and teens (ages 1-17). Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, more than 390,000 students in the U.S. have experienced gun violence at school. According to the Gun Violence Archive, 2024 saw more than 1,400 children and teens (aged 0-27) die by firearms, and more than 3,700 were injured. These figures are only a tip of the iceberg of the gun violence epidemic in America. Does that make her a “now disgraced” country? America’s leadership elite across party lines would disagree.

Another plank of Peter Obi’s endorsement of Trump’s description of Nigeria as “now disgraced” is what he describes as the Tinubu administration’s deliberate fuelling of crises across major opposition parties to weaken the democratic space. According to him, “The current government seems more intent on weakening parties than strengthening our democracy, seeking to fragment the PDP, SDP and others…In democratic nations, opposition is respected, elections reflect the will of the people, and governance involves carrying everyone along for peace and prosperity”. In the first place, Obi provides not a scintilla of evidence, empirical or logical, that the ruling party is responsible for the crises in his LP and other opposition parties.

If respect for the opposition were an accepted canon for gauging the health of democracies, Trump is certainly not the exemplar in this regard. In a departure from the norm in American politics, the American President has been incendiary, unsparing and ferocious in his excoriation of the Democratic Party opposition. This week, he caused uproar when he stated online that a group of Democratic Party legislators who told soldiers not to carry out illegal orders should be prosecuted for sedition and shot. The former Director of the FBI who conducted an extensive investigation of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election in aid of Trump, James Comey, is currently on trial in what the President’s critics see as a political vendetta and persecution.

Peter Obi states that when there was a crisis in his former party, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the late President Umaru Yar’Adua directed INEC under Professor Maurice Iwu to play by the rules and ensure the stability of the party, since an effective opposition was critical to democracy. He cites no source to substantiate this story. As we noted last week, at least three opposition governors dumped their parties for the PDP during Yar’Adua’s tenure, and the late President was personally on hand in Owerri to receive governor Ihedi Ohakim from the Progressive People Alliance (PPA) to the then ruling PDP. In any case, why did Obi dump APGA for the PDP immediately at the end of his tenure as governor of Anambra State, despite his pledge to the late Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu that he would never dump the essentially regional Igbo party?