Tag: Yemi Osinbajo

A wind with magical portents is blowing across the Nigerian landscape. With the announcement of  Yemi Osinbajo, a notable professor of Constitutional Law,  as the running mate of General Mohammadu Buhari in the forthcoming presidential election, the battle to redeem or redefine Nigeria seems to be joined  at the electoral level in a way it has not been in a long time. There is a great rousing of the Nigerian multitude.

For close comparison, we may have to go all the way back to the federal elections of 1964. In that electoral slugfest, what was known as APGA, an unstable and fraught coalition between the old Action Group and the NCNC, battled it out with NNA, an alliance of convenience between Chief S.L Akintola’s NNDP and the ruling NPC.

The elections ended in a constitutional stalemate with the President, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, initially refusing to call on the federal coalition to form a new government. It was the opinion of the revered Zik that the elections had been so badly compromised through rigging and other forms of electoral malpractices that it didn’t make sense to declare anybody a winner. After some tense negotiations and parleying, Azikiwe relented and Balewa was persuaded to form a broad-based government of national unity. But the background crisis lingered on and eventually led to a truncation of democracy with grave consequences for Nigeria.

But why go back to fifty years ago when there have been other federal elections, in 1979, 1983, 1993, 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011? The point is that there is something very predictable about military-organized elections.  In terms of high drama and sheer unpredictability, military-ordained elections cannot begin to compare with pre-military era elections.  In 1979 and 1983, Chief Awolowo’s party stood no chance against the pan-military cartel known as NPN.

The 1993 presidential election did not elicit much passion among the populace until it was annulled. The two parties, famously dismissed as government parastatals by Chief Anthony Enahoro, were seen as products of “army arrangement” totally lacking in emotional and organic connection to the people.  In 1999, AD, the restricted and narrowly based party of Awolowo’s  ideological heirs, even in alliance with APP stood no chance against the military inspired political monopoly known as PDP.  The elections of 2003 and 2007, under General Obasanjo’s watch, were in reality military exercises conducted under electoral camouflage.

But nothing lasts forever, and change is the only thing constant in human evolution. Not even the most tightly controlled and artificially regulated military contraptions can withstand the vicissitudes of time.  It was only after the election of 2011, as a result of a series of strategic errors and lapse of concentration, that the pan-Nigerian glue that binds the dominant party has come unstuck with its military knuckle unraveling. Events are prising apart the vice-grip of the ruling coalition on Nigeria. But even then the PDP would have shambled ahead but for the emergence of the APC.

This is why whether we like them or not, or whether we are grateful to them or not, we must give kudos to the brains behind the formation of the APC.  The APC is a triumph of will and political engineering over national adversities.  Like all ersatz coalitions, it may be lacking in ideological solidity, but what it lacks in political gravitas is more than made up for in the sheer grit and determination, the ferocious focus on the ball, of its principal partners.

This is the first time in the post-military history of Nigeria that such a broad-based opposition coalition has been successfully cobbled together to challenge the status quo. Only those who have in themselves the spirit of pan-Nigerian possibilities and the ability to be at home in any corner of Nigeria’s expansive but fractious space could have come up with such a coalition. It is in the nature of human societies to set up their most politically talented children for execution.  Being at the frontiers of political consciousness, visionaries see what others cannot see. Like genius in other fields, it can be profoundly disruptive of the normal order.

This is why the next two months will be very interesting indeed.  Already, panic and hysteria have invaded the hallowed and complacent sanctuary of power and debased status quo. We are beginning to hear some strange noise. A rogue presidential mastiff has even compared the reigning king to Jesus with the ancient Bethlehemite worsted in comparison. Stranger rituals are been enacted on a daily basis in the name of democracy.  In Ekiti, the majority lawmakers have been banished by the minority lawmakers and the federal authorities do not appear unduly perturbed. There is a biblical denouement about all this which portends the end of these times.

Just as they were fifty years ago in 1964, the Yoruba people are also central to the current crisis in a way no historical pundit could have foretold. The current platform for change is powered by a core alliance between the current dominant political tendency among the Yoruba and nascent forces of change in the old north. Sixty years ago such an alliance was not only unthinkable but would have been tantamount to political heresy. This is not to talk of 1983, 1993 and 1999. It is sheer magical realism in the political theatre. History moves in very strange ways and those who are fixated on old battle formations often remind one of Don Quixote charging at some imaginary windmill while the world has moved on.

But just as it was the case fifty years ago in 1964, the Yoruba political elite are hopelessly split down the middle this time around too while the overwhelming majority of the Yoruba populace are clamouring for change.  When this disjuncture between elite and popular aspirations prevails, the Yoruba political mob tries to wrest control precipitating a situation of revolutionary anarchy which quickly infects even the most backward and compliant sectors of the nation.

Like every other multitude and even more so in a federated hell of collapsing federal will, the predominantly urbanized Yoruba people feel the hurt more acutely. Food is in short supply. The roads are impassable. The native herbalists have fled and modern drugs are in dire shortage. The home has  become an abode of hopelessness and a heightened awareness of insecurity  drives everyone to fear , panic and mutual loathing.

Since the political mob or the masses lack the clarity of thought needed for an emancipatory political project or the knowledge regimen critical to transformative politics violence and industrial bloodletting become the order of the day.  For the entire society, political and social hallucination sets in. There are reported and repeated sightings of a putative messiah who will come and redeem the people. This vision of apocalyptic redemption is the outlandish fantasy of a famished people.

Sometimes, the avenging messiah is sighted rumbling through the skies flashing the inevitable victory sign.  Magical realism without which a distraught and disorientated people can perish takes the place of political reality. Voodoo healers and other assorted miracle workers take over the polity, bypassing regular and traditional structures of politics.

Like all conquered people trapped between the alienating necessities of western political modernity and the hobbled templates of traditional governance, the Yoruba people as we have seen often  resolve the contradictions in favour of political magic. It is the creative resolution of pressing contradictions at the level of ancient symbolism. Curiously enough, it was in Ile-Ife, the iconic founding metropolis of the unified Yoruba race, that this drama of political shamanism was enacted recently. It is to this that we must now turn.