The APC as the ruling party has developed a rather curious sense of comedy. It is in a way futuristic and steps ahead of the country over which it rules. From the utterances of its chief priests and prime pontiffs, it has already held the next presidential elections a clear two years ahead of 2027. It has even declared the results well in advance. In that futuristic comedy, it has declared incumbent president Mr. Bola Tinubu as the winner. The crowd has already gathered at Eagle Square for a grand inauguration. For the APC, the president has already been reelected for a second term.
From the length and breadth of the country, partisan hawks and jesters have been busy in the last fortnight with gloating over a foregone Tinubu re-election. National and State party executives led the pack in declaring Tinubu the sole candidate of the party for 2027. Major party faithful all around the country have followed suit. Strategically, they have carefully arranged themselves around geopolitical zones mostly in order of demographic gravity. The more populous zones like the North West have naturally led the pack.
The futuristic electoral tsunami has been fuelled by the recent and ongoing deluge of mass defections from other parties into the APC. Those defecting in droves need the reassurance of an assured foregone victory in order to jostle for vantage positions in their new party. These defections have helped fuel the illusion that Nigeria is about to degenerate into a one party state. In the euphoria f the moment, the Nigerian state presided over by Mr. Tinubu has forgotten that political parties constitute the building block of a viable multi party democracy. It ought ot be in the best interest of an enlightened government that the party system remains vibrant and viable. But in this place, the false impression of politics as warfare has tended to blind the APC and its leadership into a conquest mode.
The myth of a foregone Tinubu succession victory is the second chapter in the APC’s carefully choreographed 2027 strategy. The first was to hoodwink the entire nation into ignoring the myriad social and economic crises of the moment and shift focus to the contest for 2027 presidential election. The gsmbit has largely succeeded. Every politicians is now fixated on the 2027 race. The political elite including the opposition have largely fallen for this deception. Instead of keeping Tinubu and the APC with strict accountability for the mandate given them in 2023, nearly everyone is busy speculating about the outcome of the 2027 presidential election. What happened to the epidemic of hunger all over the land? Why is no serious solution being sought to the resurgence of the Boko Haram scourge? Why are our myriad graduating kids not finding work? Why has every hospital become more of a morgue? Silence. Even more silence at state and national levels.
It is as if there will be no life before 2027. The masses are not amused. But what they are seeing is both shocking and bemusing. Yet it is real in digitsl colour. People who contested to make our lives better just two years ago have abandoned us mid stream to be swallowed by the ogres of want and poverty.
It is also as though the presidency is the only consequential political office in the land. Even state governors in rival parties who have been sitting around doing little or nothing these many months are busy threatening their electoral grassroots that they are about to join the APC. This is happening even in the most unlikely places.
The other day when President Tinubu went visiting with Governor Soludo of Anambra state, he was rewarded with a promise that Anambra has endorsed him for re-election in 2027. This is coming from a governor in a state where Labour Party’s Peter Obi does not need to campaign to win the majority vote. In tandem, Tinubu’s Works Minister, Dave Umahi, has cajoled Governor Alex Otti and Peter Obi on the need for the South East political elite to join the national Marionette chorus on the Tinubu mass endorsement.
Purely from a narrow APC perspective then, the 2027 presidential election contest is looking more like an impending referendum. It promises to be a referendum first on Tinubu’s overall job approval rating as president of Nigeria. Nigerians would be called out to approve or disapprove of his leadership record on a scale that measures him against previous Nigerian leaders. It does not matter that the man’s basic qualification for the job remains cloudy. It does not matter that no one recalls any memeorable speech he has made as president. It does not even matter that he has initiated no clearly articulated policy on anything. Let alone come across as enlightened, informed or conversant with any aspect of national life. Yes, the man is an astute politician, adept at power mongering and playing. Is that what the impending referendum will be all about?
It may be a referendum on the economy in which Nigerians are invited by INEC to approve or disapprove of Tinubu’s handling of the economy. Matters like the dying exchange rate, the tanking purchasing power of the Naira, the raging inflation, the sky high food prices may feature as referendum items. On the scale of social service, Nigerians would be invited by the APC and INEC to approve or disapprove of the disappearing healthcare system, the declining educational system, the roofless classrooms, the universities turned cult covens and ritual murder centres and cybercrime hubs. The Tinubu /APC referendum will invite us all to endorse a nation in darkness. Not to talk of the intractable insecurity as evidenced by the return of Boko Haram, the spread of ISWAP and the increasing helplessness of our military. A formidable military force that took only two years to end the Nigerian civil war has spent over 12 years without containing a roving band of hungry gunmen and zealots!
Fortunately, Nigeria is far from a one-party democracy in spite of its tattered party system. The seasonal migration into the APC does not confer on the APC the status of a monopoly of partisanship. Nor does the overall population of the APC in any way confer on the party a demographic majority of Nigeria’s voting population. On the contrary, the main body of Nigerians who detest the APC and its policies far overwhelm the party’s noisy chest beating. Nor can the mass migration into the APC confer on Mr. Tinubu the charisma and esteem which he hardly possesses. The man is merely tolerated as a systemic throwup, not loved by even his immediate home base. Leadership endorsement through a referendum-like election is only possible when the leader commands a groundswell of popular approval and personal electricity. I cannot see it anywhere in Tinubu’s Nigeria.
This is not to under estimate the capacity of Mr. Tinubu and his ethnocentric minions to manipulate the political process and blackmail the political elite into making the next election look like an intra -party referendum. Mr. Tinubu is reputed to sit on a nearly limitless trove of cash resources both from prior undertakings and deals and from the current incumbency. His capacity to deploy these resources to political effect has never been in doubt. And for as long as money and what it can buy remains the determining factor in Nigerian politics, it would be childish to write off Mr. Tinubu.
More seriously, Tinubu has so far demonstrated a huge appetite for authoritarian flirtations. He rules more like an emperor than an elected president in a republican democracy. He holds his key ministers to no known standards of accountability. He has repeatedly failed to restrain members of his family from acting like royalty. From his Lagos days till the present, he brooks little dissent. He humours and rewards loyalists to his personal cause.
Under Tinubu, authoritarian streaks have emerged. Journalists are being arrested and detained randomly. Known opponents of government and outspoken critics are routinely invited for interrogation by the police, the DSS and the EFCC. Mr. Pat Utomi has been sued by the DSS for the laughable crime of sitting in his bedroom to declare the formation of a shadow government under a presidential system, not a Westminster parliamentary system. Something that should have qualified for an after dinner laughing session is being weaponized by the state to serve an authoritarian end.
The illusion in the APC that the entire party could be cornered into a loud ovation for a sole Tinubu candidate for the 2027 ticket is straight from the playbooks of classic African dictators. The more one listens to the spokespersons of the APC, they echo the rhetoric of Mobutu, Nguema, Eyadema, Biya , Mugabe and even a bit of Kagame. It is all too familiar in a continent replete with sit tight dictators.
Perhaps the more urgent task facing the APC is that of transforming into a modern political party under a more enlightened leadership. A political party led by the Ghanduje’s of this world belong in the museum of African politics and would always be an insult to the forward-looking outlook of Nigeria’s vibrant population.