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Chidi Amuta

  • Mr. President, mind the gaps – By Chidi Amuta

    Mr. President, mind the gaps – By Chidi Amuta

    Between an inaugural speech full of quotable nuggets and his reflex actions in just one week of presidential power, Mr. Bola Tinubu may have sketched the footprints of his presidency.

    A casual off script remark on the removal of fuel subsidy (‘Fuel subsidy is gone!’) has set off a labour skirmish that could degenerate into labour unrest and popular protest. The incendiary aftermaths of that remark were instantly self evident. Fuel queues resurfaced all over the country. Petrol was widely hoarded across board. Prices of gasoline jumped 300-400%. Other price spirals may be in the offing. Many questions immediately began asking and answering themselves. Why insert a far reaching policy measure with implications for many ordinary lives as a casual aside right on inauguration ground? Why make an imperial pronouncement on such a matter when no government has been formed? Which government officials will handle the aftermath of such a serious decision let alone institute the palliative measures that should cushion people from an abrupt removal of petroleum subsidy? While street side speculations rage on these concerns, the new president has gone ahead to inspire further consternations in other areas of national life. Are we heading for an era of government by shock therapy?

    The president’s approach on the communication of his decision on the fuel subsidy matter in particular is a breach of the informal code of power in the presidential system. As a rule, a president must not be a bearer of ‘bad news’. He should ordinarily have a battery of officials who hint at the bad news, announce it to the public and possibly carry the burden of deniability. It is only when the government has considered the worst and best options on the bad news that the president could weigh in with the ‘good news’ of palliatives or phasing of the subsidy withdrawal for instance. Now without any government in place, without a National Assembly to mediate and without ministers to lead negotiations with labour and interest groups, the president will have to go face to face with angry unionists to negotiate the subsidy removal. That strategy could from the outset diminish the aura of the presidency as an institution and the gravity of the president as the highest priest of the deity of government.

    In quick succession, the president has appeared at a briefing session with the Governor of the Central Bank alongside his wife with the Vice President in attendance. As soon as that photo showed up on the social media, Nigerians expressed concern as to whether this was going to be the pattern going forward. Would the Vice President be sidelined? Would Mrs Tinubu be an active part of the executive business of government? What is going on?

    In far away Lagos, one of the president’s daughters has changed her designation from “Iya loja of Lagos” to “Iya loja of Nigeria” as well as informally created and ascribed to herself the nonsensical office of “First Daughter of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” on social media at least. Here again, many Nigerians are trying to get used to what might be signals of a fledgling personality cult and family oligarchy.

    Beyond these initial excusable procedural slip ups, it is refreshing, however, that President Bola Tinubu has indicated, quite early, an awareness of the enormous burden of his exalted office. In his inaugural address, he indicates a clear historic awareness of the burden of apex power in a country like ours: “Our burdens may make us bend at times, but they shall never break us…” Implicit in that courageous assertion is an underlying faith in the resilience of the Nigerian ideal. : “as long as this world exists, Nigeria shall exist”. There is therefore a sense in which Tinubu’s direct reach for power ‘Emilokan’ resonates with a sense of personal preparedness for the ultimate responsibility and historic burden of power. That at least is reassuring.

    However, the routine issues of presidential learning steps will not diminish the heavy burdens that confront the Tinubu presidency. First, Mr. Tinubu has to deal with the issues of his general legitimacy and credibility. The legitimacy of his presidency is still tied to the general reservations among the public about the integrity of the election that gave birth to his ascendancy. As a measure of the popularity of his mandate, a popular vote score of less than 36% in a presidential election has not quite convinced many Nigerians that Mr. Tinubu is as yet their president. There are segments of the populace that continue to hope that the proceedings at the election tribunal and the various courts could reverse the declaration of Mr. Tinubu as president. While it remains unlikely that any such outcome will materialize, the reservations remain deep seated and could deny the new president of the support of a significant segment of the populace. The peculiarities of the Nigerian political and judicial ecosystem make it unlikely that Mr. Tinubu’s incumbency could be upturned.

    Yet, Mr.Tinubu and his handlers must accord priority to an active engineering of his legitimacy in the post tribunal period. It is good that both in his inaugural address and afterwards, Mr. Tinubu has himself relentlessly harped on the broad national nature of his mandate. He has even extended a hand of fellowship to both Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party respectively. But this remakns valid as a manner of political speak.

    What is even more worrisome is that there is as yet an absence of an elite consensus on the Tinubu presidency. There is broad elite consensus on the issues that were at stake in the election that brought him to power, but on him as the carrier of that consensus. But Up to this point, the national elite remains fractured along ethnic, geo-political and general interest lines about this presidency. There are too many reservations about Mr. Tinubu as a person and the entire electoral process that produced his presidency across the spectrum of our national elite.

    Some feel that Mr. Tinubu’s resume contains too many inconsistencies , dark spots, unresolved scandals and murky controversies for him to carry the moral and political weight of our national leadership. There are segments of the elite that tend to see him as a product of an unfair and emergent Yoruba domination of the political space after a Fulani hegemonic prevalence. Such people point to Obasanjo’s eight years in office and Osinbajo’s eight years a deputy to Mr. Buhari.Even within his ruling APC party, there are clear divisions between those who supported Tinubu’s emergence at the presidential convention and an elite corps of party people who preferred differently. Throughout the campaign season, this faction of the party elite either avoided Tinubu’s campaigns or quietly distanced themselves from his prospects.

    The more religiously inclined segments of the elite point at his Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket and see the outlines of simmering sectarian pre-eminence. Taken together, we are dealing with a presidency that could be assaulted from all sides by a lingering elite disapproval unless it actively and consciously addresses the matter of forging an elite consensus. And to have all this factionalism in a nation that is already badly divided increases the burden of power at the apex of our national leadership.

    Beyond the headache of our fractious elite, Mr. Tinubu could be haunted by the specter of his immediate predecessor. For this moment in time, the Buhari legacy is undeniably a burden around Tinubu’s neck. It is more importantly a nightmare in our collective memory as a nation. It may be politically convenient for Tinubu to reiterate his allegiance to continue with Mr. Buhari’s tradition.

    The president is tied to the Buhari umbilical cord by their common party heritage. In an ordinary situation, a party that has just been re-elected into power should have little or no problem continuing with its programmes and policies. After all, an electoral victory means a popular endorsement of the programmes and policies of a winning party. But it remains doubtful whether the majority of Nigerians could have in all sanity reelected a party to subjected them to an eight year nightmare.

    If it is in the area of infrastructure development, there may be no arguments about the necessity for Tinubu to vote for better federal highways and railroads. But of course Mr. Tinubu knows all too well that the Buhari legacy is dripping with infamy in virtually every area. It impoverished most Nigerians, creating a sea of abject poverty. It made the nation unsafe and dangerous, leaving too many orphans widows and widowers. It gave a free pass to all manner of crooks and mega corrupt officials. It devastated the economy and created enclaves of a dark economy that made the nation accumulate humongous debts beyond imagination. There is therefore no way in which Mr. Tinubu could possibly emulate or continue with these disgraceful legacies.
    The choice that confronts the new president in this regard is self evident. While it is politically convenient to pay lip service to party policy and programme continuity, Mr. Tinubu will sooner than later have to drop anything resembling Buhari like hot coal. He has already disowned the Naira re-design calamity.

    For the new president, there are ways out of what looks like a bind alley. An elite consensus can be engineered through a conscious effort to institute an enlightened governance. The starting point is perhaps in the quality of persons that Mr. Tinubu selects to run his administration. For political leaders after an election, the choice is usually a tricky one: to run with a cabinet of politicians or one of technocrats and intellectuals. In most recent Nigerian instances, the tendency has been to populate the cabinet with politicians. After all, they are the ones who worked to secure political victory at the polls. But the experience with governments run mostly by politicians is that they achieve little in terms of governance and national leadership. Such governments tend to end up producing conflicting political successes but fail disastrously on governance.

    On the contrary, governments run mostly by technocrats and intellectuals succeed better in terms of policy and governance. In our recent past, President Obasanjo achieved better results in his second term when he inundated his cabinet with technocrats and intellectuals than in his first term when he had mostly politicians. Under the military, easily the most successful regime in terms of governance, innovation, institution building and originality was the regime of Ibrahim Babangida whose cabinet and advisory committees were run by intellectuals, technocrats and seasoned bureaucrats.

    For Tinubu, this hour is auspicious for him to have the right mix of technocrats and some politicians. One hopes that he does not succumb to the menacing temptation to fill his cabinet with the hawkish politicians and political jobbers now hovering around him. If he is to be faithful to his legacy in Lagos state, he should dominate his government with highly accomplished Nigerian technocrats and intellectuals from across the world and the nation. That remains the heart of his Lagos achievement which is what brought him this far. This is one of the best ways to engineer a legitimacy that would neutralize his personal background shortcomings and help blur his political liabilities. It would also give him the national clout that he desperately needs.
    As everyone who visits metropolitan London for the first time knows, the best advice that every wise commuter on the London Underground knows by reflex is a simple one: “Mind the Gap!” It saves lives and enhances the joy of the ride.

    In the business of presidential power as well, Mr. Tinubu will do well to mind the present yawning gaps that threaten his path to a significant presidency.

  • Beyond the radiance at the square – By Chidi Amuta

    Beyond the radiance at the square – By Chidi Amuta

    The bare concrete parade ground of Eagle Square will tomorrow be animated by the symbolism of state ritual. Like most structures in Abuja’s homeless architecture, Eagle Square was originally designed by soldiers in power as a tribute to the legacy of parade grounds, a venue for rehearsing their trade. It has now become a favourite open air theatre for political drama of a democratic variety.

    In the periodic rituals of party conventions and changes of governments after elections, Eagle Square has found a new meaning and a conferred symbolism. Endings and beginnings of dispensations and administrations are now staged here every four years. With the passage of time and the gradual consolidation of Nigeria’s quirky democracy, Eagle Square parades and succession rituals are fast assuming the status of resonant festivities of state survival. In the process, a hitherto useless concrete open air afterthought by Julius Berger has become a place where elected leaders go to hand over power to their successors. As symbolisms go, Eagle Square is now in competition with the equally meaningless assemblage of concrete slabs called the Abuja Gate. There is another one: the lifeless concrete floor where our presidents go on Armed Forces Remembrance Memorial Day to lay wreaths at the grave of the Unknown Soldier!

    Old and new statesmen, dignitaries of all hues, emissaries from the courts of kings and helmsmen from far and near will gather there tomorrow to see Buhari go and Tinubu come. An impressive display of Nigeria’s permanent sense of ceremony will see soldiers march in countless formations. The air force may risk sending up pilots into the air to fly in formation. Assorted dance troupes from all corners of the country will showcase our rich variety and diversity. It all comes down to one thing: the use of ceremony to consolidate the legitimacy of democratic leadership succession and a display a sense of order.

    Gradually, by the sheer force of repetition, we are seeing the cultivation of a tradition of orderly power succession. People contest elections and either win or lose somehow. Those who win prepare to assume power. Those who may not have won but feel entitled to a victory song are asked to ’go to court’!. The courts take their time to do whatever they wish with the instruments at their disposal.
    It does not matter how imperfect the electoral contests are or the quality of leadership that emerges in each season, the order of state and society as well as the continuity of the nation are sustained in an emerging tradition of rites of state passage.

    As part of the banality of seasonal shifting of state furniture, the outgoing president shows the new man of power round the office and residence of the presidency. The incoming First Family measures new drapes and arranges to write off the palatial furniture in the Villa. The incoming president and the outgoing one agree a transition arrangement. The new president learns how to be president by moving to Defense House where he gets used to the rituals of daily presidential routine. The months of transition allow the new president time to choose a team out of the multitude of lobbyists and hustlers swarming around him. The rituals and routines of power succession are part and parcel of the orderliness that distinguishes a working democracy from the disorderly power grabs of anarchic successions.

    Above all this, however, the ceremonies that will take place at Eagle Square tomorrow must be understood for what they are. They are rituals in the service of order. Order is in turn the surest guarantee of the survival of the state without which all our strivings as a society could evaporate in the swirl of anarchy and a descent into a state of nature. As A. Kaplan puts it in his new book, The Tragic Mind, “It is the panoply and mystique of power and hierarchy that reinforces order.”

    Events like the recent coronation of the British king or the inauguration of the US President every four years are not pointless hollow rituals. They are instead part of the consolidation of the tradition of order and continuity without which a society is swept away in the vortex of disorder and casual pedestrianism. The British writer Tony Tanner puts it more pointedly, “Authority requires awe from which emerges legitimacy.”

    Yet our ceremony must go beyond the ossified conservative variety that we witnessed with either the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II or the coronation of her son as King Charles III. While museum type adherence to tradition serves to maintain and sustain extant monarchical traditions, a republican democracy still needs the ceremony and pomp of statehood for a different set of reasons. A republican democracy such as ours forged from an amalgam of disparate national traditions needs the ceremonies of an artificial unified nationhood for many reasons. Our citizens need to look forward to periodic ceremonies of leadership renewal. People need to get used to certain fixed rituals as emblems of nationhood. We need the ceremonial reaffirmations of the bonds of community. We need a consolidation of the symbols and rituals of oneness so that national unity becomes second nature.

    Through the military parades and displays of strength, we are reassured that the sovereign is in tact and strong enough to protect us all from dangerous compatriots and hostile adversaries. Watching the march pasts, the parade of armed services emblems, the tidy uniformity of steps and formations of service personnel, the awe of state overwhelms the onlooker. On sober reflection, it dawns on you that the ceremonies of statehood are a consummation of the idiocy of the nation state as an artificial construct. They dress it up to appear powerful, frightful and coherent. But in reality , it is all make belief!

    Nonetheless, as a celebration of order, the ceremonies of state reassure the citizenry that leadership is in tact and alive to its responsibilities. Order is disrupted when leadership is doubtful and sovereignty is shaky. Anarchy is not necessarily the absence or total collapse of responsible leadership. It also includes woeful governance, a fundamental departure from civilized codes of organizing society. Disrepair or disequilibrium in the state of affairs in a nation marks a departure from order. When the normal order of things is replaced by pervasive abnormality, disorder becomes the new normal.

    The origins of such disorder date back to ancient times. Greek tragedy is our readiest showcase. When in Sophoclean tragedy the king goes astray, the polity and society are unhinged. Anarchy ensues. Epidemics and curses rage unhindered. The angry gods are only assuaged and ordered is restored when the old reign ends and a new order is emplaced. A new order ensues when the monarchy is restored. The restoration of order is celebrated through ceremony, dance and displays.

    Tomorrow’s ceremony of succession is perhaps not quite like any other one in recent times. But the outlines are familiar and resonate with classical models. In today’s Nigeria, order as a feature of our national life is on recess. Very few Nigerians can bear witness to normalcy as we once knew it in the last eight years. As we speak, our nation dangles on a precipice between treacherous survival and a perilous anarchy.

    The place we once called home is not quite like what we all used to know. Fear lurks in every street corner and every highway. Our urban neighbourhoods have become the abodes of violent gangs and dangerous cults. Our rural areas are swarming with militias of no nomenclature. Our tertiary institutions established for learning the secrets that have transformed other nations into abodes of sweetness are now hotbeds of cybercrimes and dark bloody rituals. The faiths that ought to prepare our people for salvation through brotherhood and fellowship on earth have been invoked by devilish power mongers to divide us along all known lines.

    Mr. Buhari as president for eight years may have given of his best to the nation as he now repeatedly insists. But the results on the ground speak of a yawning gap between what was promised and what has been delivered. Maybe the odds were against his best efforts. Maybe some numbers just failed to add up. It is even possible that he and his crew hardly knew the landscape well enough. In order to change a given reality, you must master it in order to dominate it let alone bend it to the popular will. We expected. We waited. And we hoped. We remained patient along the way. But at this hour of exit and renewal, there is no sweetness here or anywhere in the vicinity.

    As we await the parades and fireworks tomorrow, this tragic and depressing reality is the fierce urgency of this hour. This dark sack cloth is the backdrop for the elaborate ceremonies that will regale dignitaries and guests tomorrow. But the essence of tomorrow’s inauguration must not be lost in the symbolism of the moment of ceremony.

    Therefore, beyond the pomp and displays that will happen in Abuja tomorrow, both our leaders and citizens must see beyond the glitz of the day. We expect to hear in the words of the presidential inaugural address definite take -aways and memorable words to hold on to. The day belongs to the incoming leadership of Mr. Tinubu and Alhaji Shettima. Perhaps this is the moment that Mr. Tinubu was anticipating when he exclaimed “Emi lokan”- It is my turn. It is his turn to renew our hope, to reactivate the commitments that have kept us together despite odds. He needs to go beyond any suggestions of a personality cult in the making to utter words to kill the mocking bird of campaign season animosity and madness.

    Beyond words, we need deeds to redefine our nationhood. It is not just a restoration of a semblance of order in our normal daily existence that is urgently required. That is a necessary starting point. Nigerians now need to step out of their homes and be sure to return safely. People need to travel our highways and be certain to get to their destinations without the risk of being kidnapped or murdered. The poor of today need hope that tomorrow will uplift their situation. The next generation of Nigerians must not continue to live life encaged in the helpless knowledge that even they too will bequeath poverty to their own children. Purpose must replace futility if Mr. Tinubu is to justify his feeling of entitlement to aspire to presidential power. Otherwise he will have wasted his time and that of every other Nigerian.

    Our schools need to be open year round to impart knowledge and not disperse ignorance and deepen superstition. The sick and infirm must seek and find succor and healing in clinics, health centres and hospitals that cure rather than kill people who seek their help. All these and more are the minimum irreducible demands of the moment to begin reversing the disorder that the departing dispensation unleashed on us as a legacy.

    But beyond these immediate and choking challenges, a serious new leadership must take another look at the Nigeria in which tomorrow’s succession ceremony is taking place. After a brutal civil war, Nigeria was remade in accordance with a new national order in 1970. Structurally, the nation was reconfigured from regions into states. Psychologically, a new sense of reconciliation and renewed unity was inaugurated. Economically, the oil boom was born to empower government and people to tackle the things that money could buy- infrastructure, human capital development, international sagacity etc. The new Nigeria was one in which young Nigerians embraced education because there was a job waiting at the end of the road. While that order prevailed, it seemed as if there was indeed a Nigerian dream which was attainable in a life time. The honest worker knew he would earn enough to save for his children’s education and perhaps a modest retirement home in the village.
    Our new post war national order was guaranteed by a strong federal might presiding over states that could hardly pose a political threat to that authority.

    Today, that order has literally dissolved. Separatist pressures from ethnicities, regions and communities now freely threaten the dwindling might of the federal guarantor of a receding national order. That previously overwhelming might is now easily outgunned and overrun by all manner of fierce contenders. Guns and uniforms that used to confer superior authority by frightening citizens into conformity are now two a kobo at the roadside market and readily in the hands of casual thugs and free ranging cultists.

    The monopoly of control over economic resources has been burst as marauding gangs of thugs and official armed agents help themselves to resources ranging from oil to precious minerals in far flung locations. There is a thriving separate market specializing in ‘Zamfara gold’ in Guangzou, China! Our entire ungoverned spaces are squarely in the hands of vicious armed non state militants. Sometimes, the official security forces equipped with costly weapons of war have had to seek the help of local hunters armed with charms, amulets and Dane guns to ward off roving gangs of marauders and killers armed with AK-47s and GPS devices.

    The power of the social media with a cacophony of millions of loud discordant voices has drowned the previous authoritative voice of the government which is now often lost for direction and message. The alternative power of information carried by cheap cell phones in literally every hand portends a transfer of the power of information from the high and mighty to the low and many. A new society has been born complete with its own values and powers of choice. The youth that Nigeria can hardly provide for are redefining the Nigerian dream through the immense creative profitability of technology as well as its potential for devastating criminality. Our children are now being taught to count money in billions. Anything less glamorous depresses them into open revolts.

    The power of overwhelming corruption has blurred the distinction between government coffers and private treasure vaults. In Nigeria, both are literally one and the same. In some quarters, the state and its treasures have been privatized. As a defining force of the Nigerian political and economic ecosystem, corruption defeated and humbled Mr. Buhari and even took him hostage without a whimper. How Mr. Tinubu defines corruption and approaches it will perhaps be the most interesting engagement of his presidency.

    The beauty of tomorrow’s ceremonies is that they will quickly yield place to the stark realities of a new era: Nigeria AB, Nigeria After Buhari. Interesting days indeed.

  • Henry Kissinger at 100: Diplomatic centurion – By Chidi Amuta

    Henry Kissinger at 100: Diplomatic centurion – By Chidi Amuta

    His distinctive deep baritone with a heavy German inflected accent testifies to a man of world historic mission and accomplishment. Henry Alfred Kissinger has in one life time graduated from an outstanding scholar and global diplomatic icon into a foreign policy institution and veritable oracle. As he turns 100 on the 27th of May, the world of international affairs and global diplomacy is likely to stand still in tribute to a man whose career embodies and traces the major outlines of United States foreign policy in the 20th century and part of the 21 st century. His Teutonic energy remains in tact just as his intellect and analytical insight remain razor sharp. Age and experience have converted his measured elocution into oracular echoes from this world and all ages. Either as National Security Adviser or Secretary of State and, at one point, a combination of both, the strategic footprints and foreign policy compass of the United States still carry the unmistakable imprints of Alfred Heinz Kissinger.

    Henry Kissinger’s towering influence has seen the United States grow from a rising global power in the post World War II era to the major bulwark of a rising West and now the undisputed dominant global military and economic power. Kissinger has been in the forefront of the management of American foreign policy power and influence in a bipolar world characterized by the Cold War between the West and the United States on the one hand and the old Soviet Union and the East bloc countries on the other. It is perhaps to the glory of his strategic foresight that by the late 1980s, the United States emerged triumphant as the pre-eminent champion of a unipolar world of free markets and liberal democracy with an obvious technological and industrial advantage.  The indices of America’s power have only been widely imitated but not yet equaled or surpassed. 

    His was a diplomatic influence and intellectual prowess that saw the United States through major wars in Indochina and the Middle East. It spanned the era of nuclear weapons, intercontinental ballistic  missiles and lethal biological weapons. From a world in which global power was a contest of two dominant power blocs, the Kissinger era also witnessed “the rise of others”, the emergence of smaller equally lethal powers with considerable regional and geo strategic influence and ambition  in Asia , Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Oceania . We now have China, India, North and South Korea, Iran and Israel as armed contestants for regional eminence occasionally brandishing military (including nuclear) capabilities to cause their neighbourhoods considerable insomnia. 

    In many ways, Henry Kissinger’s career path is a very American story. From his early days as a junior officer in the German army, his family fled from Nazi Germany and the evil of the holocaust and emigrated to the United States. The young German  Heinz Alfred Kissinger, a German Jew became the American Henry Kissinger, the Harvard scholar of modern European history. He soon became part of the pursuit of the American dream of upward mobility through hard work and higher education. Twenty five years of study and academic ascendancy in Harvard revealed his outstanding knack for diplomacy and unique analytical skills in international affairs. He was noticed through the strength of his research and writing by the US establishment. He came to be engaged as a consultant by the State Department under the Kennedy presidency. Specifically, it was the US ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, who initially hired Kissinger as a consultant to assist the State Department with the Vietnam situation which was America’s central foreign policy challenge at the time.

    Subsequent interactions with President Kennedy earned him the job of National Security Adviser, a position that placed him in the centre of the raging Vietnam policy vortex. A war was raging between North and South Vietnam mostly along ideological lines placed the United States at the center of global attention because of the ideological underpinnings of the conflict. Because of the material and human costs of the war, what to do with the Vietnam war became a major political and domestic policy issue in the United States. Protests and demonstrations raged in major urban centres as young Americans protested against a war they considered unjust and wasteful and so far afrom home. Young people intent on dodging the Vietnam draft fuelled the protests as images of war casualties and Prisoners of War were broadcast through the novelty of television and inter continental radio broadcasts.   .

    Between 1969-75, Kissinger served as National Security Adviser to President John F. Kennedy. For Kennedy, the quest for peace and triumph in Vietnam could only lead through a decisive victory in the war. And because Vietnam was far away, superiority on the ground could only be assured through intense and massive superiority in the air. This in turn meant intense bombardment of the Vietnamese countryside. Therefore, Kissinger was confronted with the dual task of pursuing peace through diplomatic engagement while working for United States’ victory through a decisive military conquest of North Vietnam. 

    The irony of Kissinger’s Vietnam legacy is that he was praised for the diplomatic negotiations that led to the signing of the Paris Peace Accord in 1973 which led to the ceasefire. He even received the Nobel Prize for peace on his role in resolving the Vietnam war.  But he  knew about and kept a secret of US bombing of Cambodia. He never believed in South Vietnam as a possible ally except as a strategic bulwark of the US’s larger fight against communism.  

    After Kennedy and under Richard Nixon’s presidency, Kissinger was to combine the roles of National Security Adviser and Secretary of State. He became very close to Nixon and the latter became so enamored of Kissinger’s  sweeping intellect and capacity for deft analysis of global tends.  The president came to entrust him with the management of complex negotiations and covert outreach to major allies and adversaries. He superintended the end of the Vietnam war and of course the chaotic US evacuation from Saigon on April 29, 1975.

    Easily his most significant assignment and achievement under Nixon was the opening up of links between Washington and Beijing. Kissinger saw opening of links with China as one of the most effective diplomatic coups to deny Moscow of a major ally in the unfolding bipolar world order. Rapprochement with China would also open up great economic opportunities for American industry in the years ahead. After a seemingly endless series of shuttle diplomatic missions initially through allies and proxies, Kissinger visited Beijing severally to prepare the grounds for Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China from 21st to 28 th February, 1972. The president met with Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung in the presence of Kissinger and his deputy, Winston Lord.

    As for engagements with the Soviet Union, Kissinger believed and worked for constant diplomatic engagement. He prepared the grounds for the grand Washington summit of 1973 between Richard Nixon and the then Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev. Kissinger was present alongside Alexei Kosygin, then Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers. The summit was mostly about inconsequential matters like oceanography, marine rights, agriculture and other tangential issues. In Kissinger’s playbook,  summits and meetings with Soviet leaders was a strategy in the ancient rule of keeping your enemies close and under watch in order to follow their thought processes in order to second guess them when necessary. 

    In the Middle East, Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy was instrumental to the signing of the peace accord between Israel and Egypt in 1979. He was able to achieve this feat as spinoff from his friendship with Anwar Sadat who trusted him as an honest broker . He also enjoyed the the confidence of Prime Ministers Golda Meir and Yizshak Rabin who also trusted Kissinger as a person of Jewish descent. This peace accord formed the backbone of the Middle East peace process for over four decades and has subsisted till the present without fundamental distortions. 

    The burden of history placed the design, execution and management of U.S foreign policy in most of the years of the East-West Cold War in the hands of Henry Kissinger and  his ideological and intellectual disciples in the White House and the Department of State. While engaging in the various encounters in which the US was embroiled, Kissinger and his successors had to contend with balancing between the pre-eminence of the United States and the maneuvers of an ambitious and powerful adversary, the Soviet Union. From 1945 to 1989, the world order was governed by confrontations and threats thereof  between the United States and a counterveilling Soviet Union  in theatres of trouble around the world. The management of this precarious bi-polarity as a US  foreign policy burden fell on the broad shoulders of Dr. Henry Kissinger.

    In the process, he evolved what has been described as the Kissinger doctrine in the evolution of US foreign policy. Broadly, the major elements of this doctrine can be distilled into the following: 

    • The overriding primacy of US national interest as defined by the prevailing conditions, 
    • Deterrence as a principle of discouraging adversarial intentions towards the United States and its allies and their interests around the world, 
    • Championing of nuclear non-proliferation to prevent the acquisition and development of nuclear capability by rogue states, 
    • United States nuclear pre-eminence in the world 
    • An overriding technological advantage of the United states as a foreign policy tool. 

    In short, the kernel of the Kissinger doctrine in foreign policy is the concept of ‘order through pre-eminence’. The United States must strive to maintain its dominance of the post -World War II world order by remaining the dominant military, technological and economic power in the world. In addition, a powerful America must remain the principal guarantor of the world order through these instruments of global power. Kissinger’s foreign policy construct was anchored on strength, not weakness. It was the pursuit of world order and peace through the instrumentality of undisputed and overwhelming American power and strength.

    For him, the guiding beacon of United states foreign policy must always be the national interest defined on a dynamic scale. The national interest must translate into a grand vision to be pursued through an appropriate grand strategy. These principles and concepts became ingrained in the post -Kissinger days and became the guideposts of subsequent White House foreign policy regimes. It has therefore become convenient to characterize some subsequent National Security Advisers and Secretaries of State such as the late Zbigniev Brezinsky as “Kissingerians”  as a way of acknowledging his clear tradition in the evolution of US foreign policy. 

    Kissinger’s prodigious intellect has witnessed a vast output of publications that capture not just his experience  on the job but also his insights into the discipline of foreign relations and diplomacy. His major books include: On China, World Order, Leadership, White House Years, Diplomacy , Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Years of Upheaval, Years of Renewal, The Age of Artificial Intelligence. As a result, Kissinger remains the most cited and quoted authority on US foreign policy and global affairs in the modern era.

    In his career in and out of government, Kissinger’s global Influence and reach remains strong among those he met at work. Among this select group, his collateral and residual influence as an expert remained strong. In the course of his high profile diplomatic shuttles to project and protect the influence and interests of the United States over these decades, Kissinger was rewarded with ‘friends in high places’. This wide network of leaders included 

    Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, president Richard Nixon, 

    France’s President Charles DeGaul, Israel’s Golda Meir and Yishak Rabin, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and many others.  

    In his post -White House years, Kissinger has spent the last 46 years as a consultant and emissary to the apex of power all over the world. He has remained relevant for as long as America’s global influence has been evolving.  He has continued to consult for successive occupants of the White House and the Department of State in addition to other world leaders. His advice continues to be sought by leaders and statesmen the world over in an increasingly complex international setting. In turn, he has never ceased to be relevant in the changing times. He has kept abreast and continues to proffer clear headed analyses and solutions to increasingly complex global problems. 

    On the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Kissinger has condemned the invasion but advised that the best way to end the war is to let Russian return to the pre-war territorial boundaries while Ukraine is allowed to join NATO as a matter of urgency. In his view, Ukraine in NATO is the best check on Putin’s future escapades. On the possible big power face -off between the United States and China,  he recently said “Both sides have convinced themselves that the other represents a strategic danger” In his assessment, while America seeks pre-eminence it can show off, China seeks an acknowledgment of its power to attain equilibrium with the West and be respected for its achievements. His fear is that the equilibrium of power between the two major powers may be tilted by advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next decade. He reckons that AI could interfere with decision making on matters of war and peace among technologically advanced nations. In that eventuality, the persistent war of nerves over recurrent issues like Taiwan could push the United States and China over the brink. 

    As we celebrate the centenary of this great man, Kissinger’s ultimate legacy to humanity may be his recognition that the critical determinant of world history is the caliber of leadership that great nations emplace to drive world affairs. That makes the difference between war and peace and between progress and retrogression. 

    Perhaps Kissinger will leave us with the wisdom that human history is ultimately a perennial contest between heroes and villains.

  • Democracy’s untidy offspring – By Chidi Amuta

    Democracy’s untidy offspring – By Chidi Amuta

    The politics of democratic transition is hardly ever a beauty pageant. Oftentimes, the dazzling brilliance of campaign media displays conceal an underlying ugliness in the substance of what is on offer. It is all an ancient marketing gimmick in which the public is sold the new messiah as the product of an immaculate conception. The woman or woman to save society is packaged as a new brand of detergent, toot paste or antacid to ease our current discomfort.

    Ultimately, when the campaign is over and the frenzy of marketing ends, the elegant Photo Shopped images of the contestants on campaign billboards  and Instagram posts end up in the trash. The ‘’fine boys” and “sharp girls” that street people would have liked to see as winners end up being scrubbed off the walls of public places. More often than not, the most morally attractive and physically appealing people hardly win democratic elections. Morally ugly and physically unkempt people emerge from behind the screen of marketing and campaign make-up.

    In parts of the Third World especially Africa, elections into high political office are mostly a contest among the rough hewn and  jagged operators of the power system. It is often the jugglers of multi- dimensional crookedness or at best the princes of the hegemonic deep state that get rewarded with the prime seat at the high table of power. Other power aspirants merely crawl around the high table in concentric circles of relative power access dictated by proximity to the master. African democracy is mostly a referendum to choose the most decorated fox.

    So, as tribunals and sundry courts deliberate on an avalanche of petitions arising from Nigeria’s last general elections, public response to the outcome of the elections has shifted to matters of the morality of those who won. Some people are lamenting the emergence of persons of doubtful integrity as the imminent leaders. Others are regretting the emergence of persons of less than papal  purity as leaders of the next government. That is not totally true. After all, in Benue, the long suffering citizens have elected a serving Reverend gentleman as the next governor. Nonetheless, there is now a residual excessive moral emphasis on  the imminent leadership of our republic.

    The social media is perhaps the prime purveyor of the emergent moral crusade. All available platforms are awash with moral valuations of the major figures that the elections have produced especially at the presidential level. I personally do not like the unprintable things that people have been posting in the social media about the major figures of the incoming administration.

    Mr. Dino Melaye as spokesperson of the campaign organization of Mr. Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) literally set the tone in the immediate aftermath of the elections. He was bitter, sounding more like a nattering co-wife. He called the President-elect all manner of uncomplimentary names that have to do with the assumed murky origins of the man’s humongous wealth and fortune. Similarly, he characterized the Vice President- elect, Mr Kassim Shettima, in unedifying epithets that make him look like a world famous Al Queda villain. In fairness to his myriad critics, Mr. Shettima did not quite help himself when he went to represent Mr. Tinubu wearing that over-sized musty grey suit complete with a knee length tie and a bad pair of workout shoes! The comic essence of his outfit on that occasion was probably lost on his bespoke audience!

    In more recent times, the power game has shifted to the leadership of the incoming National Assembly. There again, the front runners Mr. Akpabio and Orji Kalu, both senators,  have been cast in not very attractive moral portraits. Some social media cranks have argued that when coupled with the incoming first two citizens, the three foremost citizens would look like a triumvirate assembled from Columbia, Afghanistan and clans of old Sicily.

    The social media and widespread Pentecostalism are largely to blame for the confusion of values. Judgments and value assessments about people thrust onto high places are being made by both street urchins on social media and all manner of religious zealots. The other powerful set of moral arbiters of the new power people are the new crop of religious fanatics being spewed by the thriving national industry of Pentecostal pastors and congregants of sundry churches. Along with them are sundry free lance moral crusaders in mosques whose targets are everything secular. Consequently, conversations about the appropriateness of our democratic choices of personnel  are failing to address the pragmatic political and governance challenges that now face us. I would contend that the excessive emphasis on the moral credentials of our new leaders is fatally misplaced and wrong headed. People are mixing up things that do not work together or necessarily add up.

    Politics and ethics do not work well together. It is often said that politics is an amoral undertaking. No one knows whether it is a profession, an occupation, a hobby, a game or a business. But one thing is clear: the normal parameters of any known professional ethics and moral code have no place in the political enterprise. The story is often told and re-told of the old Ibadan dark political genius who used to insist on a screening interview for apprentice politicians who sought his assistance or want to sign on to him for tutelage. The first entry qualification interview used to consist of a set of related questions: “ Can you tell lies without batting an eye lid?” “Can you see what everybody says is white and swear an oath before the most powerful gods that it is actually black?”  “Can you kill your opponent to clear your way to power?” “Can you betray your mother if it becomes necessary?” “Can you swear and stand by a lie on oath with any of the Holy books?” Applicants who score the highest affirmative marks at this screening interview sessions end up as the next set of successful politicians!

    Secondly, power and morality are strange bedfellows. The old Machiavellian dictum is a classic of this school of power politics: the end justifies the meanness. On your way to power, it does not matter whose ox is butchered and converted into ‘suya’ to energize the race. The key objective is to get there. Power has its own driving morality. What is right is what takes the power seeker to the place of power. All else is a distraction. The preachments of a thousand pastors and bishops amount to nothing. Power defines and decorates its own saints. It does not matter what you call a man of power on his way to the summit. When he gets there, he will re-christen himself in the most glowing and saintly epithets. He will pile up all the accolades that the best of men desire and dream about and heap them on himself.

    More importantly, the criteria for the selection of those who must contest elections to our highest  political offices are guided by existing legislation and procedures. The current Electoral Law in its most current version reserves the screening of party candidates for elections for the political parties. Each candidate is deemed an ambassador of his/her party. Only the party can decide who to present to INEC as the candidate for an election. Once that decision is made, no other body can contest or invalidate the choice. Not the police even if the person has been arrested a thousand times for sundry crimes. Not the security services even if the candidate has endangered the state in words or deeds in the past without being convicted by a court of appropriate jurisdiction. Even the law courts have their hands tied because the Electoral Law happens to be the law that guides and guards all election matters. Therefore social morality as protected by law enforcement, the judiciary or state security have no meaning in matters of determining who seeks or ascends to power in our polity.

    There is therefore a conspiracy of factors that insulate  those who contest for and emerge from our elections from the normal run of moral and ethical scrutiny that would ordinarily bar common criminals and other miscreants from aspiring to high public office in other climes. In other places, even ordinary traffic infractions, drunk driving, an unwarranted wink at a damsel or falsification of a birth certificate can deny you clearance to run for a county election let alone a presidential contest.

    Even in situations  where clearance for electoral contest follow reasonable scrutiny, democracies have a way of returning outcomes that may not showcase the best that a society has to offer. The offspring of even the best democracies can be decidedly ugly and unattractive. American democracy in the 20th and 21st centuries was believed to have graduated to an exceptional  meritocracy in which only the best candidates in each party can hope to be cleared to contest for the presidency. Additional merits are accorded to moral credentials, quality of knowledge of national and world affairs as demonstrated in open media debates and speaking engagements. Yet in the 2016 presidential contest, a nasty Donald defeated a relatively decent and brilliant Hillary Clinton to become president. Trump merely honed his ability to mouth gutter clichés, to abuse and mock opponents and to trivialize serious national and global issues. He abused and cursed his way into the White House and used the same antics to hang in there for four years.

    This anomaly in democratic outcomes is worse in illiberal democracies. Check Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Syria and the Philippines under Duterte. The reality of the illogic of democracy is that the electoral outcome is the product of a popular mandate delivered at the ballot by an irrational mob. On election day, I step out to go and cast my vote just as my security guard, steward or janitor is on their way there as well. The egalitarian end of democracy overwhelms enlightened votes with irrational inputs.

    More often than not, the outcomes that make the elite unhappy  are the result of so many non -rational variables that may not have anything to do with common sense or enlightened  moral considerations. It is very often  dominated by simple bread and butter or pocket book issues. But at least a credible democratic system ought to emplace sufficient guardrails on the way to critical power contests to protect the society against the emergence of proven criminals.

    But the bottom line remains that cannot limit individual access to power with rules outside what our enabling laws allow. To that extent, all those who have emerged as a result of the February and March presidential and governorship elections are qualified by law to wear their new toga. Roadside reservations about their moral credentials are neither here nor there. The challenge of ensuring an appropriate moral context for public office is to change the enabling law that determines who qualifies to run for crucial public office. Such a revised electoral law should have roles for the police and the national security apparatus.

    In the aftermath of the 2023 elections therefore and as we await the swearing in of the new governments, what becomes of utmost importance is the performance of those elected to the various offices. Equally important is the moral conduct of those newly elected after being sworn in. Technical qualification to contest these elections does not however confer immunity from moral censure on the office holders once they are sworn in. Their present and past actions remain subject to scrutiny and investigation throughout their tenure in office and perhaps afterwards. It is only in their incumbent positions that they can be held accountable as moral examples for the society.

    However, the imperative of maintaining the moral leadership is not diminished by the laxity in the electoral selection process. Big camels may slip through the needle’s eye of party qualification to contest. But once elected and sworn in, rulers are held morally accountable by the strength of the institutions of state. The police, the anti corruption agencies, national security agencies ,the judiciary and the mechanism of public book keeping must remain the gaurrails of accountability of the political leadership.

    When democracy births illegitimate offspring, the same electorate that enthroned the ugliness waits to judge the moral compass and competence of the new power wielders. If the electorate fails to bring its will to bear on those who rule, the only recourse for society is the strength of the institutions of state. There lies the beauty and contradiction of the democratic state.

  • Buhari: A Farewell With Benefits – By Chidi Amuta

    Buhari: A Farewell With Benefits – By Chidi Amuta

    Every tenure of power is a gallery of omissions and commissions. At the point of exit, the man of power pauses, looks back to wave goodbye amidst a confetti of both real legacies and many unfulfilled good intentions. No exit from power is totally devoid of the rituals of accountability. Even the tenures of unpretentious fascists and outright autocrats exit with some kind of balance sheet. It does not matter if they be statistics of untimely deaths, dilapidated roads, or a parade of destitutes, orphans and widows. The exit moment is the moment to record both worthy footprints and lofty intentions aborted. An avalanche of hurried commissioning and inaugurations has become the standard fare of Nigerian power farewell seasons.

    For President Buhari, that hour of historical inevitability is around the corner. And the man and his squad have risen to the occasion. A 90-paage summary of achievements has just been issued by palace chroniclers. It is a telephone directory of roads constructed or contracts ongoing, terrorists liquidated, kidnap victims rescued, meetings attended everywhere in the world and addresses read to sundry listless audiences.

    In fairness, some projects like railway lines, some major highways, roads and bridges are hard to deny. Not to talk of the limitless foreign trips still ongoing. Arms and fighting gear have been bought for the armed forces and may have claimed more innocent civilian casualties than enemy combatants. Also undeniable is a long list of expressions of presidential good intentions up to the launch of some phantom ‘Project 2050’ only a few days ago!

    But Mr. Buhari’s scorecard and legacy can only be measured in two broad realms. First is his degree of success in doing what he and his party, the APC,  promised Nigerians in 2015. His promises were in three broad areas: ending insecurity, fixing the wobbly economy and containing rampaging corruption. Mr. Buhari made these promises voluntarily. It was on his own accord. No one put a pistol to his head to extract these commitments. It was willful and voluntary.

    Based on a persisting myth of the man in the public mind, the electorate voted for him. Even after being declared winner of the 2015 election, Mr. Buhari could be seen at the airport carrying his own bag and generally dramatizing the austere, simple patriarch on a mission to right the wrongs of a nation that had long gone astray. He had promised to sell off some the excess luxury jets in the presidential fleet, tone down the pomp of state and manage resources more frugally.

    In all three areas of his enabling manifesto, it was a season of great expectations.  As he heads for the exit door, Nigerians are now in a better place to assess Buhari’s mantra of “change”. The pomp and ceremony of state has magnified. The presidential fleet of luxury jets is still fully in place. The First Family has more all less transformed into a royal household. The number of presidential flight miles has ballooned.

    The scale of insecurity is unprecedented. The military is in active combat deployment in 33 of our 36 states. Kidnapping has grown into a national  industry recognized even by banks as a revenue head. Banditry and casual armed robbery are new commercial undertakings. Urban cultism, violent political thuggery and a culture of violence have come to stay. A lively trade in human body parts is thriving. An odd mixture of an epidemic of cybercrimes and ritual killings have come to define our society.  In Buhari’s Nigeria, the digital age and primitive superstition mix freely with a Pentecostal obsession for instant salvation. A new hunger for instant martyrdom among Muslim youth marks a hurry to go to heaven and partake of the promised rewards. Terrorism and instant jungle mob justice in matters pertaining to faith have led to lynchings of innocent kids who dared proclaim a different faith.

    The economic programme of the Buhari administration is the virtual disappearance of professional  economic experts from the cast of policy makers. A presidential Economic Advisory Council has been empanelled and disappeared soon after inauguration. National economic policy making and implementation have been left in the hands of a politicized Central Bank Sheikh Governor and a hapless Finance Minister who could have fared better managing her family’s monthly grocery budget. Completely flabbergasted by the abracadabra  economic policies and management style of this presidency, brilliant world class Nigerian economists have kept a distance.

    As a consequence, Buhari is about to hand over to his successor an economic hell hole. A president who inherited the Naira at 185 to the US dollar is about to hand over a sorry N750 to the dollar to his successors. The mountain of external debts is in excess of $40 billion while the domestic debt stock is now in excess of N30 trillion. In dollar terms, both external and domestic debts are closer to $100 billion dollars.

    Debt service now gulps a whopping 105% of national revenue. An estimated 30% of our daily oil production is stolen under the supervision of government officials and security personnel. An unverified N7.2 trillion is going to be burnt on oil subsidy in 2023 alone. Our unemployment figure is hovering around 40%, one of the highest in the world.  Droves of young talented and highly qualified Nigerians troop out daily to Canada, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom and even Rwanda.

    On the troublesome issue of corruption, Nigeria’s reputation has been amplified in the last eight years. We are among the top 5 most corrupt nations in the world. Yes, there was rampant corruption under Buhari’s predecessors but the quantum and prevalence has become frightening. Even the former head of the anti corruption agency(EFCC) had to be investigated for corruption related allegations. He never returned to his post after an investigation whose report remains shrouded in mystical secrecy. Between industrial scale corruption and an epidemic of killings, abductions and kidnappings, there is a lively contest for front page news position in the Nigerian media. Spirited efforts to track corruption seem to have been arrested and detained by corruption itself. No one can vouch for the integrity of the judiciary either.

    There may be no point worrying about the minutiae of the quantum omissions, commissions and missteps of the Buhari presidency. He has failed woefully on all his manifesto promises. Perhaps governments are doomed to failure. Missteps and errors in governance seem implicit in the business of government. Unforeseen economic factors like fall in oil prices could derail budgetary estimates. A global calamity like the Covid-19 emergency could happen. A bad cabinet can foul up good plans. Unintended happenings at home and abroad could show up and convert mangled good intentions into a pile of visionary rubble. Even in the absence of unforeseen happenings, bad things can happen to well meaning good people. Worse still, a government devoid of executive capacity but with an overload of good intentions is a calamity waiting at the point of exit.

    Mr. Buhari has lately owned up to his baggage of errors. He has even had the unusual humility and courage to ask Nigerians for forgiveness for the grave hurt he has obviously inflicted on the majority. He has in turn informed us of his retirement itinerary. He is set to return to either dusty Daura or to his kith and kin in Niger Republic at least to justify the illicit ‘export’ of our resources spent on projects in that country.

    To most Nigerians, Buhari is free to retire wherever he likes. Even without formal retirement, he was hardly there for or with us anyway. In our hours of pain or need when the soothing words of a compassionate leader could have healed a nation in pain, he either ignored us in quiescent indifferent aloofness or jetted out to wherever the wind carried him. In our hours of pain like when our youth were murdered over SARS or when Covid-19 ravaged the land, the President had to be begged to show up and console a grieving nation. Now that he has to go home as a matter of compulsive necessity, we can only wish him the best of retirements.

    He can also take the forgiveness of Nigerians for granted. We are a magnanimous nation when it comes to how we treat our past leaders. We forgive our errant leaders and we forgive each other. That is what makes us exceptional as a people. Mr. Buhari knows this. As a military leader, he jailed people for several lifetimes and was forgiven. He ordered people flogged in public for the crime of queuing up in hunger lines and he was forgiven. He lined up hustling young men at the Bar Beach and shot them in cold blood for alleged possession of narcotics. Innocent people were arrested and locked away for months on his orders and we forgave him. He kidnapped a big political animal  (Umaru Dikko)  in the streets of London, crated him for onward cargo delivery to himself in Nigeria. For that, too, he was forgiven. As a leader, Buhari is easily the greatest beneficiary of the habitual magnanimity of Nigerians among all our leaders. For all his serial transgressions against us, we have even rewarded this man with so many positions of trust over the years. Since he is retiring in fairly good health and opulent circumstances, we can only hope that Buhari will now begin to reciprocate the magnanimity of Nigerians through acts of philanthropy and genuine community service.

    Over and above the pitiful performance  record of the Buhari presidency now in its last days, however, we need to locate the higher historical significance of his mission in power. Where does he stand in the ranks of Nigerian leaders? What is the ultimate purpose of the Buhari presidency in our national quest for nationhood? Where does he fit in the context of democratic governance and genuine economic development?

    Contrary to the popular misgivings that I will highlight presently, I think that Mr. Buhari may have an enduring  significance in our national history. We may even find some use value for this lucky Daura general.  First, Buhari has demonstrated that the Nigerian nation is resilient and can survive the worst leadership accidents on its path. For most of jis eight years in office, Nigeria was literally on auto pilot. Neither the gross misrule nor serial incompetence of the last eight years diminished the will of Nigerians to live together as a national community and get on with their lives. In fact, the conventional wisdom in the streets is captured by this saying that “this, too, shall pass”!

    It is perhaps best to see Buhari’s incompetence and misrule as an eight year long stress test of Nigeria’s resilience as a nation. The things that could have drowned other nations have happened here and yet Nigeria is still standing as one nation. The number of poor people has skyrocketed from 40 million to 130 million in less than a decade and there are still no street riots. The inflation rate has gone up from less than 9% to nearly 20% under Buhari and yet our people have remained faithful.

    We saw hitherto peaceful and harmless herdsmen of yesteryears emboldened into armed killer gangs on rampage all over the country and no one has declared war on the Fulani as a Nigerian people. We have seen our youth rise up against police brutality during the ENDSARS protests and once the annoying SARS was disbanded, peace returned. Government has consciously sowed division among the regions, ethnicities and faiths in the nation and yet our people have instead embraced each other as one people, blaming bad politics for bringing division among them.

    Secondly, the various positions of authority that Mr. Buhari has been entrusted with over the years say something curious  about Nigeria’s power distribution, system of rewards, leadership selection standards and criteria of leadership evaluation. In his career, Mr. Buhari has been a state governor, a two term Minister of Petroleum Resources, a military Head of State and a two term democratically elected President. These are not just fancy titles and honorary accolades. They are serious positions of strategic responsibility and executive authority  with consequences for the lives and livelihood of millions of Nigerians. In effect, we as a nation have at different times placed Mr. Buhari in charge of the plight of the world’s largest and most important black nation. Yet no one recalls any giant leaps or outstanding breakthroughs made under his watch. No policy highpoints. No developmental strides. No diplomatic splashes. No great policy reforms. No milestones in nation building. Not even one memorable quotable speech or moment of insightful illumination on any aspect of national life. Just a plain drab, boring and inconsequential stretch.

    Given the embarrassing display of incompetence and ineptitude that have become the hallmarks of the presidency that is about to end, Buhari may have opened an inquiry into a worrisome part of the group psychology of Nigeria as a nation. Many questions arise. What character of nation would place this series of strategic positions in the hands of a man of doubtful competence? What system of reward and leadership selection would opt for palpable mediocrity in a nation of millions of sparkling intellect and competence? The answers are many and varied in their speculative breadth.

    There may be a fatal flaw in the psychological make up of the entire national populace that makes us frequently settle for the fifth eleven. It may also be that Buhari himself possesses a superior wisdom of the Nigerian power mechanics that is not obvious to the common eye or mind. He may be something of a power genius. In that case, he may possess something that most of us do not. It is only a person of uncommon political wisdom that can hoodwink a nation of otherwise smart people for so long to concede him this number of important leadership positions in one life time.

    The speculations do not end there. There may be something in the power configuration of the Nigerian state that makes it amenable to periodic power heists led by all manner of pretenders. At a personal level, there may even be something inherently questionable about a citizen who consistently seeks and ascends to lofty public positions knowing that he possesses neither the intellect, competence, knowledge nor vision to discharge the minimal obligations of such important positions.  Taken together, all these speculative possibilities are at play in the Buhari scenario. I doubt that any serious historian can do justice to this chapter of Nigerian history without seriously coming to terms with the ambiguities of the Buhari anomaly or phenomenon. He himself may have taken the lid off his serial deceptions when he recently beat his chest with satisfaction to say that he has accomplished all he set out to achieve in power.

    Even if we take just his elected tenure as President only, there remains an abiding value to Buhari’s abysmal failures. Mr. Buhari and his discordant choir may have set a gold standard as to what future Nigerian leadership must NOT be like. In that sense, it can be argued that Mr. Buhari has more or less defined the agenda of any serious future government in Nigeria. The political shorthand seems to be a consensus.  In order to be minimally acceptable, any future government must NOT be any thing like the Buhari presidency. Instead, future generations of Nigerians are likely to recall the Buhari era almost in a startle after a nightmare and swear in tears: NEVER AGAIN!

  • The APC on the cross – By Chidi Amuta

    The APC on the cross – By Chidi Amuta

    The ruling All Progressives Congress is entitled to roll out the drums in an orgy of triumphalism. The feverish inauguration rehearsals at national and relevant state levels are all in order given the announced outcome of the last general election. After all, democratic succession is ultimately a ritual of collective self renewal. We have an entitlement to expect a season of change both in personnel and in the general method of governance. This is partly why hordes of jobless office seekers have now taken up residence in hotels in Abuja and some state capitals.  It is almost a gold rush in a country where some attachment to government office and free money is the easiest way to come by unaccountable wealth and influence.

    A few days ago, an interminable motorcade of shiny black SUVs followed Mr. Tinubu and his deputy Alhaji Shettima as they moved into Defence House to begin the effective transition rituals. No one knows exactly why that cacophonous multitude had to follow the president-elect and his deputy to their power transit camp. It can only be hoped hat both men will find time to think through whatever they want to do for Nigeria in the midst of the surging crowd of lobbyists, hustlers and attention seekers.

    All things considered, as the party in the forefront of fray of our partisan ‘grab and keep’ politics, the APC  cannot be denied the endless clinking of champagne glasses of triumph. In the just concluded elections, both at the national and state levels, it  has fared decisively better than its opponents. In addition to producing the INEC declared president-elect, the APC clinched a total of 16 new state governorships out of the 26 that were in contention. It has scored a clear majority in the membership of the incoming National Assembly.

    On balance also, the decibel of triumphalist noise coming from the APC and its endless campaign megaphones remains the highest in the land. A lot of this is plain empty rabble rousing and motor park grade bluster which has nothing to do with any clues as to the content, substance and character of the administration that Nigerians should expect come May 29th.

    However,  the APC’s electoral success and stature as the de facto dominant party in the land has raised far too many fundamental questions about the present state and future prospects of Nigerian democracy. The central curiosity remains that of how a party with a dismal record of governance in the last eight years can score such overwhelming electoral success. If democratic elections are indeed periodic tests of the popularity and acceptability of a party, the verdict of the Nigerian electorate in this last election deserves closer look.

    At the expense of rehashing the familiar features of the sad realities of the last eigth years, the consensus on the eve of the last election was that the APC under Mr. Buhari had run Nigeria aground. In every conceivable direction, the business of Nigeria has been in tatters. The economy is at its most hopelessly indebted in recetn memory. With debt service at 108% of revenue, an inflation rate of close to 22% and unemployment rate of clse to 40%, this is no place for cheers.

    Under Mr. Buhari, the size if the poor population has increased from less than 40 million to an acknowledged 130 million, the largest in the world,  in eight years. The Naira in your pocket has shrunk in value from 185 to the US dollar in 2015 to the current 750 to the dollar. An epidemic of insecurity has come to be taken as the new normal all over the country. Literally anyone can be abducted, kidnapped, raped, killed or wasted without a trace. Many have disappeared into thin air without a trace. The catalogue of missing persons has continued to grow to the extent that some states like Anambra have had to open a register of missing persons just to keep track.

    On the eve of the election, the APC government colluded with the Central Bank of Nigeria to ostensibly redesign the Naira. No one knows exactly why this foolish gambit became necessary.  Government claimed it was an anti inflationary move while the veiled assumption was that it was designed to curb the vote buying power of the APC’s own presidential candidate!

    At the end of the day, it turned out to be one of the most foolish and self defeating and thoughtless policy escapades in our national history. People’s money was confiscated and locked up in banks under the guise of a swap to new notes. Many innocent people lost their lives because they could not access their own legitimate funds to pay hospital bills or meet basic existential needs. An economy already hobbled by inflation, general shrinkage of productivity and massive business closures was brought to its knees. At the end, there were neither new notes nor economic reprieve nor a curb on vote trading.

    With this backdrop, the general anticipation especially among the elite was that the 2023 general election would be an opportunity to sack the APC at the federal level and a number of state government houses. Many thought that the election would be a referendum on Buhari and the APC with the anticipation of a resounding  NO on both. It was a logical democratic expectation therefore that the electorate would throw out or minimally punish the APC as a non performing party. On the contrary, what we have witnessed is the opposite of such a normal and rational  democratic expectation.

    But electorate are not like individual voters. Electorates are made of mobs. They have no collective mind. A mob is a collective mass of divided interests. They will individually vote according to faith, ethnicity, region or plain crass financial inducement as in a transactional vote buying and selling situation.

    The speculative and analytical spectrum is quite wide. Could it be that Nigerians as a people love suffering and deprivation as to reward a party that has subjected them to such harrowing anguish? This is the ‘donkey syndrome’, the belief that the people are mere beasts of burden who are insensitive to suffering and in fact would vote for a harsh master again and again.

    Is there a possibility therefore that Nigerian democracy operates through an inverse logic in which electoral outcomes defy commonsense logic and the drift of public opinion? Could it be that the outcome of our elections bear no relationship with voter sensibility and sensitivity? In other words, if periodic elections in our democracy do not serve as a test of the popularity of governments, what other justification can we find for staging these elaborate and costly periodic elections?

    One compelling perspective holds that the electoral endorsement of the APC came from the mob of illiterate and ignorant voters in those states of the federation where the people may have been deliberately  quarantined in relative ignorance and illiteracy. The argument is that in those states, people voted for whichever party the political and religious elite directed them to. In such places, the progressivism of the APC amounted to a mere signpost rather than a serious ideological commitment.

    I am inclined to fall back to the classical  political theory postulation that in a predominantly ignorant and illiterate electorate, the crowds that troop out to greet the rallies during election campaigns are no more than  an irrational mob. In general, mobs do not have a mind of their won. They are actually masses of unthinking humanity driven mostly by the rave of momentary excitement. They are out there to belong with whatever is driving the moment.

    The mobs of liberal democracy are somewhat different. They share the collective foolishness of the illiterate masses of Third world illiberal democracy mobs but are different in one respect. They consciously buy into the convictions of a partisan demagogue, adopt his defining mantra and allow that mantra to become a political theology to which they subscribe as devotees in a cultic religious sense. That mantra and obsessions overwhelm the values of the political party to assume a near narcotic hallucinatory effect.

    For instance, the Donald Trump mobs that invaded the US Capitol to kill, destroy and maim on January 6, 2021 fit into this mould. The group insanity of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) mob is only a gross devaluation of the conservative extremity of the Republican party.  In an election, they would vote for the icon of their ‘faith’ in an irrational deluge. The pro Buhari mobs of 2015, 2019 and,  to a less extent 2023, were no less incensed by a theological mantra than their educated American opposites.

    There is an even more disturbing distortion. The APC presidential campaign was deficient in content and substance. The presidential candidate of the party refused to honour nearly all invitations to media platforms to advance his case or market his party’s programme. No press conferences. No question and answer sessions. No town hall meets and no spirited presentations. When in fact he got the platform of the Chatham House in London to make his case, he chose to outsource  both presentation and question and answer session to a motley assembly of discordant associates.

    The party’s presidential campaign literally said nothing about any substantive national problem. As a matter of fact, Mr. Tinubu at some point in the campaign promised that he would continue with the programmes and policies of the infamous Mr. Buhari.  At one of his most memorable campaign outings, the presidential candidate of the APC just said: “Buhari! Buhari!! Buhari!!!”. The crowd echoed in approving shouts of APC! APC!! Overall, the most disturbing feature of the APC’s electoral prevalence is in fact in its tacit campaign commitment to continue with the Buhari agenda.

    In contrast, the other three major parties struck a decisive difference in their serious attitude to policy issues. Their presidential candidates traversed the nation with tangible programmes and policy options. They made fiery speeches at literally every platform they were invited to. Mr. Atiku Abubalar of the PDP was easily the most incisive, mute  and informed at the level of policy and programme options. He insisted on a whole gamut of business friendly policies. Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party struck a note of critical difference from the rest. He envisioned a new nation that defies the business as usual politics of the past. Mr. Kwakwanso was equally incisive especially in his policy propositions on national security and defense. But in the end, the APC has prevailed with a road much travelled.

    However, the APC’s electoral prevalence does not of itself absolve the party of the serious burden of responsibility.  A political party remains a pillar of democracy in any nation. Nothing distinguishes the APC from the other 80 odd political parties in the INEC register. Its acronym is merely a badge of infamy. There is no element of progressivism in either its membership or leadership.

    So far, there is nothing coherent about the governance style and principles of the APC states. Nothing unites the cosmopolitan robustness and modern revenue targeting of Lagos state and the prebendalism of Mr. Ganduje’s Kano state. Similarly, there is absolutely no ideological identity in the rudderless economic knee jerk approach of the Buhari presidency vis a vis the drifting chorus that was the Jonathan presidency.

    An electoral outcome that looks like an endorsement of an unpopular party can goad the party into the complacency of unchallenged incumbency.  If critics insist the economy is dysfunctional,  government  shows them the result of the last election. If they say the nation is insecure, why did the people vote for us? If you trumpet that the population of the poor is increasing, but the same poor people voted for us! After all, one holy book says that “the poor you will always have among you!” Maybe the people like corruption, poverty and high cost of living. They keep them in check worrying about how to survive to the next day. The critics of government become habitual malcontents, a predictive opposition of grumbletonians and enemies of progress and the state who need to be either silences or put away. That is how the electoral endorsement of unpopular parties leads to the enthronement of corrupt authoritarians regimes and illiberal democracies.

    A complacent party becomes an elected autocracy. Its leaders mistake the forced compliance and popular indifference for popular acceptance. What was elected as a democratic government becomes a machinery of evil authoritarianism. A nation is deleted from the ranks of democratic countries. Polite sanctions come into place.

    Continuous electoral victory becomes an assumption of inevitable victory at every election. A virulent opposition builds up underneath. But the presumptive perennial party dies from within as well.

    And with it, the state decays and the nation withers. This same process is currently ongoing with the African National Congress(ANC) in South Africa. Corruption has yielded a presidency that hides stacks of US dollars in sofas in a farm.  The mational electricity grid has collapsed, plunging Africa’s most industrialized nation into periodic hours of darkness. Honest politicians confess that today’s South Africa is worse than the worst of the Apartheid era.

    For Nigeria’s APC, therefore, the largely undeserved victory in the 2023 election poses a big challenge. The incoming Tinubu administration has a herculean dual mandate as it were. The first mandate is to rescue the nation from the long night of Mr. Buhari’s unrelenting incompetence and divisive rudderless rule. The second mandate is to remake the APC into a responsible political party that has internal democratic accountability,  listens to Nigerians and stops investing in the perpetuation  of poverty and ignorance as strategies of vote catching.  Strategies that  guarantees the party a mob of unthinking voters may eventually ruin the nation. Incidentally, both mandates are mutually inclusive and contingent. The are at the heart of any sensible commitment to the development of democracy.

  • From Sudan, the perils of bad manners – By Chidi Amuta

    From Sudan, the perils of bad manners – By Chidi Amuta

    In a tragic sense, Sudan is somehow lucky. Its leading political figures, who also happen to be combatant generals, have not hidden their differences beneath a façade of mutual deceit.  They have instead allowed their differences to blossom into an open bloody confrontation. The two top generals who also happen to be the top political citizens of a nation with many hidden wounds have spared no effort in coming into the open to display their differences and clashing ambitions. These differences also happen to reflect the many hidden complications in Sudan’s national life: religious differences, economic interests, political ambition, a politicized military, big power transferred aggression and the aggressive strategic goals of big powers.

    When an animosity between two rotten warlords blossoms into a shooting war, it opens the path to either a national meltdown or some kind of settlement. It is either the stronger force subdues the weaker and dictates the terms of a peaceful settlement or an equilibrium of forces is achieved in which case peace through negotiation becomes the only path open to all. In the next couple of weeks, Sudan may have to migrate from the present rage of clashing warlords to a full civil war, yet another in a series since after independence in 1956.

    In a little over a week, Khartoum, the capital, has been transformed from a scraggy sprawling city in the sun into the battlefield of an undeclared civil war. A contest for power supremacy between two corrupt ambitious generals has reopened the window for familiar military adventurism. The bloody rivalry between the two topmost senior military and political leaders has exploded into a real combat situation between factions of the Sudanese military and security forces. War planes, tanks and other weapons of war are being used freely as troops shoot into civilian population centres in Khartoum and beyond.

    The raging confrontation is between the forces of General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, Commander of the Sudanese Army, against those of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the Rapid Support Force(RSF), a paramilitary security force. Both are semi autonomous forces competing for pre-eminence in the post al- Bashir era. Both men happen to be the topmost political figures, Head and Deputy  respectively, in an interim semi military government presiding over the country after  a series of shifting power arrangements after the toppling of Omar al Bashir in a 2019 coup led by both men. Both men also staged a coup that wrested power from the revolutionary civilian coalition of civil society groups whose protests facilitated the ousting of al-Bashir’s three decades of Islamist authoritarianism.

    The raging bloody confrontation has degenerated into a blood bath.  Casualties have mounted and order has collapsed. Close to 300 deaths have been reported with over 3,500 injured. Most of the victims are innocent civilians and international workers according to independent journalists and observers. The diplomatic community has been badly hit with United Nations offices and diplomats’ residences openly ransacked and looted. Disturbing cases of open harassment of female diplomats have been reported. Attempts by the international community to broker a cessation of hostilities has led to two failed ceasefires that collapsed within minutes of being announced.

    The African Union(AU) has, as usual, been generous with condemnations of the violence with a basket of resolutions and threats, calling on both sides to come to the negotiating table. The United Nations has in turn joined in ritual condemnations of the fighting and its tragic fallouts. Meanwhile, the hostilities are assuming the character and dimensions of a full blown civil war.

    The origins and drivers of the resurgent violence in Sudan go beyond a mere interpersonal power tussle between the two very corrupt and ambitious political and military overlords. It goes down to the strategic issues and factors that have always defined the country’s existence and recurrent crises. The primary conflict is that between a growing popular democratic wave and the long standing conservative Islamist power establishment that was the basis of the three decades long Omar al-Bashir hegemony. The pro- democracy forces led the 2018 street protests and revolution that helped topple Omar Al Bashir’s 30 year autocracy remain alive. They had started with agitations and street protests for greater accountability and a better standard of living. Pitted against this nascent populist democratic wave is the conservative Islamist power core of the Sudanese state. The current power structure led by both Generals  Hamdani and Dagalo are thinly disguised factions of the al-Bashir regime.

    It would be recalled that the popular uprising softened the al Bashir autocracy for toppling by the military. In turn, the two dueling generals staged a coup that upstaged the popular revolution,  refusing to cede power to the leadership of the popular movement.

    In many ways, a perennial power tussle between factions of the usurping military leaders has become the centerpiece of Sudan’s political life in recent times. It has consistently sidestepped the transition to popular democracy which remains the major issue in the post al-Bashir era. The compromise that legitimized the now crumbling semi military administration remains an attempt to forge a tenuous balance of ambitions between these two dominant forces on the one hand and the popular civil society  coalition on the other.

    Predictably, therefore, the appearance of uneasy political stability that would lead to the planned democratic elections later in two years was more an appearance than a reality. It has now burst into the bloody confrontation on display in and around Khartoum. It is unlikely that the two dueling generals and their followers will be willing to sheath their swords for as long as they still have forces and formations under their respective command and control. Already,  deal to subsume the paramilitary Response Force under the larger umbrella of the Sudanese Armed Forces has fallen apart.

    Strategically, Sudan’s peculiarities may escalate the present confrontation. The interplay of internal political interests may be overwhelmed by international conspiracies and interests occasioned by a convergence of Sudan’s strategic location and internal composition. The United States has always seen Sudan as something of a precarious and suspicious rogue nation  that needs to be constantly kept under watch because of its deep Islamic leanings and sporadic terrorist affinities. Sudan was for a long time a hiding place for jihadist terrorist and fundamentalist organizations associated with a long tradition of anti-Western activism. These range from Yassir Arafat’s temporary refuge in Sudan in the days of the Black September organization. Similarly, Al Queda found refuge in Sudan in its formative years leading President Bill Clinton to send cruise missiles to bomb suspected  terrorist havens in Sudan in the run up to the emergence of Osama Bin Laden.

    As a result, the two opposing tendencies in the global Islamic world have sought and found allies within the Sudanese political leadership. At different times, Iran and Saudi Arabia as well as their client states and allies in the Middle East have courted different regimes in Sudan. Even now, major interests in the Middle East are tending to support either of the two warring generals. Egypt and Libya have assumed opposing alliances in the ongoing confrontation.

    At the present time, the Russians have emerged to further complicate an already complex scenario. They have seen an opportunity in the establishment of a naval base in Sudan as an opportunity to counter long standing US and Western influence in Sudan. Similarly, the Saudi’s remain interested in exploiting the political fluidity in the Sudan to advance their interests. Others like Egypt, Libya and the UAE have of late weighed in in a running jostle for regional influence and pre eminence. Sudan’s neighbours like Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, South Sudan  and even smaller African authoritarian regimes all have an interest in the contest for supremacy among Sudan’s ambitious and politicized military leaders.

    As it turns out, contrary to the prevalent notion that Sudan is merely a vast arid semi desert country, the country actually contains 10 percent of the arable and fertile land mass of Africa. In addition, it has an abundance of natural resources. Its oil reserves are the main attraction for an increasing Chinese presence in the country. It also has abundant gold and uranium resources in which both its immediate neighbours and major international players  are deeply interested. Therefore, there is a convergence of international interest in the current instability in Sudan which may make the confrontation degenerate into a full blown civil war with deeply interested external players intent on finding lasting foothold.

    For the international community especially both the United Nations and the African Union, a quick resolution to the sudden violent eruption in Sudan is now imperative before the parties ossify into combatant footholds with friends abroad. Sudan should be more  than a casual engagement. The international community will have to untangle the web of complex interests that are at play in the Sudanese crisis. The Sudan crisis calls for the highest display of diplomatic dexterity to sufficiently assuage the interests and reassure the combatants.  A ceasefire leading to dialogue is the only way out.  A quick resolution is imperative if the escalating humanitarian tragedy is not to worsen. Most importantly, the challenge in Sudan is first and foremost that of restoring the original sanctity of the civil society coalition that pressured al Bashir out of power. This should be quickly followed by the restoration of civil authority through a democratic election and return to civil rule. Continuing to sweep the prodemocracy current under the carpet of warlords can only prolong the crisis and plunge Sudan into yet another avoidable civil war. Sudan is boiling from an urgent desire for genuine democracy, not the superficial contest of the huge ego of ambitious war mongers and  power oligarchs.

    For Nigeria, the evolving tragedy in Sudan has far fetched repercussions. The United States initiative with its special military mission in AFRICOM will be in peril if Sudan crumbles in an all out civil war. Sudan holds a delicate geographical place in the international effort to contain the spread of jihadist terror in the Sahel.

    Happily, the Nigerian political landscape has evolved beyond the point where politicized generals have privatized commands that can be used to hold the nation to ransom. It is perhaps a happier  place to be in the hands of rough political entrepreneurs than be caught in a cross fire between armed warlords funded by the state.

  • ‘OBIdients’ and the Gangster Conspiracy – By Chidi Amuta

    ‘OBIdients’ and the Gangster Conspiracy – By Chidi Amuta

    Of all the cards that I carry around with me, none is a political party membership card. I have never and do not belong to any political party in Nigeria. Nor have I ever belonged to one or aspired to belong to any. My attitude to political party membership is pretty much the same as that towards organized religion. I am a Christian of the Anglican variety by birth and baptism. I however respect and admire those who go to either mosque or church every week. My liberal attitude to organized everything has nothing to do with either my estimation of those who join and lead political parties or subscribe to organized religion.

    My option is more a product of education and general humanistic orientation. I was trained to think freely and roam the forest of global culture and history for ideas and currents that can enhance my humanity and help me contribute to the society in which I live. By instinct therefore, I have come to respect the choices that different people make for themselves in the context of a free society. My friends and associates around the world therefore range from devout Moslems to committed Christians, Hindus, atheists and Himalayan Budhist monks. From each of the belief systems of those I interact with, I find something of benefit through a compulsively liberal attitude and mindset.

    In the current Nigerian post election climate, something unfortunate has happened. A group of citizens are being branded, vilified, spat upon by all manner of tyrannical political spokespersons. They have been joined by public opinion autocrats and disguised entrepreneurs. Suddenly, it is now fashionable to abuse, condemn and generally vitiate the Obidients. All it has taken to initiate this shift in attitude is for INEC to announce the result of the last presidential elections in favour of Mr. Tinubu of the All Progressive Congress. Both APC official jackals and those who want to ingratiate themselves with the winning squad have since been falling over each other to win the trophy of ‘Obidient bashers or killers’.

    Tragically, even otherwise respectable citizens with previous records of sanity and respectability have joined the fray of frying the Obidients. Someone has described them as the most despicable group ever to come to earth. Another has described them as a mob of miscreants. Yet more desperate people have quickly said that the Obidients are the political arm of IPOB while Mr. Peter Obi is a patron of and sponsor rolled into one.

    An informed source told me that one of the more conspicuous latter day Obidient bashers had actually written two different congratulatory messages while waiting for the outcome of the presidential elections of 25th February.  One letter profusely congratulated Peter Obi for upturn ing the long standing  political behemoth of old Nigeria and ushering in a new world led by the youth. The other letter was a subdued congratulation to Bola Tinubu, his tribesman, for a victory much deserved and a pledge to do whatever is necessary to ensure that his imminent reign was successful and free from distractions.

    Rewind to the just ended campaign season. Literally out of the political blues, Mr. Peter Obi emerged onto the political scene. In the campaign season that followed, he laid out his vision for a new Nigeria free from the familiar blights of what has come to be accepted as normal Nigerian politics. His message, largely addressed to the youth and all tose left behind and locked out by the old order, caught on like wild fire. Obi’s adherents voluntarily and informally assumed the broad name of “Obidients”. Trust the creativity of Nigerians in all such situations.

    The name caught on in the public imagination. It tallied with the broad perspective of Mr. Obi as the carrier of an unusual third force message in an ossified bipartisan political architecture. The name became the mantra of a movement that grew first in the social media and became a reflection of the lived experience and conviction of many. At first, Obi’s growing mass followership was dismissed as a creation of the social media. Someone in the APC inisisted that the viral following g of the Obidients was merely the work of less than six social media hands locked up in some basement and spreading the news on all available social media platforms.

    Undeterred, Mr. Obi and the Obidient movement surged ahead. In city after city where Obi went with his message, throngs of followers and believers in the new message followed through street matches and spontaneous gatherings. Spontaneity was the secret of the new movement. Advocates grew into armies of adherents. Believers grew into a mass movement. A lone man in black attire with a different message delivered in a hoarse shy voice became a pop star figure in every public space. Mass gatherings became a political force. It latched onto the political platform of a minority Labour Party. The rest is history as they say.

    The strengths and weaknesses of the Obidient movement can only be understood by those who understand the difference between a movement and a party. A party has a prescribe structure. A movement is amorphous, held together by the beliefs around which people gather spontaneously. It is an invisible meeting of minds, at once spontenous and organic. It develops its own code of conduct from its loose understanding of th emission of its inspiration figure. A movement is in a hurry to capture power and overturn the status quo which as locked so many people out of the power nexus. Therefore, tose who were expecting the Labour Party and Obidients to come forward with a structure as in conventional parties were disappointed. It is therefore unfair for any sensible commentator after the even to expect that Peter Obi as the insiopiration of the Obidient movement could have also been a head master figure, handing down a code of behaviour for a movement of spontaneous citizen followership.

    The throngs of Obidients out there defied order in the conventional sense. They were incensed with the idea of ‘taking back our country’. They saw themselves as the alternative government and Peter Obi as the next president. They would settle for nothing less. No one could blame them. They only needed the electorate to prove them right or wrong. Even after the elections, the conviction has lingered among them that their party won but was edged out by the gangster state and its stranglehold on all agencies of state including INEC. It now remains for the judiciary to prove them either right or wrong. Even at that, their deep suspicion of the state extends to the judiciary.

    The present and triumphalist critics of the Obidient movement need to go to school on the dynamics of recent popular uprisings and mass movements either in support of popular causes or the conservative backlash. They are driven by the social media. They are largely uncontrollable. They obey only their major drivers and inspiration figures. These movements take on a life of their own. Those who have rtrieed to quell them by orce have either failed or been thrown out of power or remained there tenuously with neither legitimacy nor credibility except by sheer force of arms. The confrontation between popular movements and unpopular states has mostly bred instability or authoritarianism and endless instability. The most that the authoritarian state has achieved in recent times has been to usuep the spireit of the popular movement and convert it to their won fo foster further autocracy. Examples: Jaiye Bolsanario in Brazil, Tayib Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Victor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jaroslaw Kazynzki in Poland.

    In the places where autocrats have failed to usurp the poer of the mass movement, they have triumphed and brought down autocratic regimes. The Arab Spring led to a serial collapse of Middle East dictatorships including those of Hosni Mubarak in Efypt and Muamar Gaddafi in Libya.

    In the post election climate in Nigeria, a president –elect duly returned by INEC and so declared is still locked in a credibility war with a man and a movement that came a distant third in the contest. This raises so many questions. There is an instant puzzle. How come the Obidients suddenly became a Fascist force after the election and Tinubu’s declaration? How come the movement became a political threat when there is a formal opposition party, the PDP,  that came second by INEC’s reckoning?

    Yet questions abound for those who understand the geo- architecture of the Nigerian power conspiracy. How come Mr. Atiku and his PDP who scored second position in INEC’s ranking have suddenly become so docile and quiet? How come Obi suddenly became part of IPOB and a sponsor of ESN only after a successful election outing?

    The truth is that the emergence of Obi and the Obidients is the first credible threat to the power base of Nigeria’s long standing decrepit gangster state and its support cast of open and disguised defenders and trumpeters. If the threat were Obi alone, it would be easy for the gangster state to isolate and eliminate him.

    But in the massive crowd of the Obidients movement, many Peter Obis have germinated. They are the unemployed youth, the teenagers leaving school with no hope or prospects but armed only with their PVCs. They are the artisans long without a voice, the many Nigerians in the diaspora hungry for a country they will be proud to call home. It used to be easy for the state to wipe off and eliminate individual threats and adversaries. Not any more. The adversaries are our own citizens in multitudes with an awakened consciousness. They wrote their prologue in the ENDSARS rpotests and now have shown their power in the 2023 elections.

    Peter Obi merely activated this latent force. They have seen themselves as the owners of a new Nigeria. In their quest for hope, they met a simple man in black speaking a new political language free from tribe, religion and elite arrogance. They saw a genuine window of opportunity to take back their country. They saw the prospect of a new kind of leadership shorn of the pompous ceremony of state, freed of the massive corruption of the deep state and entitlement syndrome of power hegemonists. These are the real threats of the Obidients. The outcome of the 2023 elections ignited a fright in the system. Power was going to slip from the bloody claws of the criminal network of politicians, moguls and their noisy apologists. That is the real threat that is powering the present climate of harassment of Peter Obi and the Obidients.

    The election revealed the vulnerability of the criminal state. They had thought the OBIdients were a mere social media hoax. But they ended up winning real votes, real legislative seats and real states. They did not just win real votes in strategic places,  they penetrated the fortresses of gangster chieftains, smashed the myths of tribe, faith, geography and violent thuggery. Twelve states for each of the INEC winner candidates, 12 states for the Obidients and their Labour Party! A real seat at the table of power. That is the real threat of the moment.

    For the advocates of Fascism and other name calling schemes, a few home questions: what name do we give to the criminal gangs of Lagos? What should we call those who have used touts and dangerous thugs to convert our democracy into ‘Agberocracy’? What name do we give to the entrepreneurs of organized political crime who used ethnic blackmail to suppress votes in Lagos during the governorship elections? What do we call those who have industrialized ethnic bigotry and now seek to reduce the cosmopolitan beauty of our Lagos to the autocracy of tribal hamlets and their chieftains?

    Once so threatened, the gangster state will try to find a way to neutralize the adversary: bribe, cajole, incorporate or destroy. That is the present stage of the battle for the political soul of Nigeria. All the name calling, blackmail, fake arrests in London, campaigns of revisionist lies etc, are all part of the same recalcitrant and crude retaliatory assault. It may intensify after the 29th May swearing in and the formal handover of power to Mr. Tinubu.

    The road against the Obidients as the only credible opposition for the future will lead in one of two either directions. It could be time after the inauguration to begin genuine national reconciliation through populist programmes. At the other extreme, the new administration could begin a clampdown on Obi and the Obidients thereby inaugurating a season of authoritarianism by an elected government.

  • Peter Obi and the looming tyranny – By Chidi Amuta

    Peter Obi and the looming tyranny – By Chidi Amuta

    The period between a general election and the swearing in of a successor administration ought to be filled with excited anticipation. It is usually a time of pleasant speculations on the new faces that will soon grace television screens and newspaper front pages. For the masses in a polity in virtual captivity, it is time to begin getting used to new overlords and masters. For the elite, this ought to be time to debate policy perspectives and options for the new administration.

    There is so much in the present atmosphere that defies the tradition of a civilized political transition season. Instead, the incumbent All Progressives Congress(APC), which is also the incoming triumphant squad, is consumed by an overwhelming nervousness. Instead of engaging the public in sensible debates about policy options and directions, the APC appears to have retreated into a perpetual campaign mode.

    Party hawks and attack hounds are still busy insulting our public sensibility. They are berating, abusing and profiling their election season opponents. It is as though the elections are not yet over. In the process, two dangerous things are happening. First, the polarization and bitter divisions in the country is being further deepened. Second, the groundwork for a new climate of tyranny and authoritarianism is being laid. Clearly, we are in the throes of an imminent administration that is likely to invest in tormenting the opposition and abridging the liberties of citizens. Otherwise, why has Mr. Tinubu not disbanded his abusive and divisive campaign propaganda machinery?

    After a bitterly fought election, the nation requires soothing words and healing hands to mend broken bonds and assuage wounded feelings. But unfortunately, all we are getting from APC’s front line propagandists is an overdose of negativity and sickening ethnocentrism. They are still fighting the ghosts of Mr. Bola Tinubu’s opponents in the presidential election. Consequently, in the prelude to May 29th, the nation still wears the appearance of a landscape of war with hate as the dominant language of public discourse.

    By some unwritten law of tyrannical power consensus, however, all the post election hostile barbs have now found one common target: Mr. Peter Obi and his political movement. Hardly any one in the APC and the incumbent government (one and the same) mentions Mr. Atiku Abubakar who came second in the INEC presidential election vote tally. It is now all about Peter Obi, Datti Ahmed and the Obidients. This systematic narrowing down requires further investigation.

    To give official stamp to the concerted targeting of Mr. Obi, Buhari’s Minister of Information, the famous Lai Mohammed has gone junketing to far away Washington DC to announce that Mr. Obi could be guilty of treason. His crime? Just expressing his reservations about the credibility of February 25th presidential elections ‘won’ by Mohammed’s party, the APC. He has followed this by getting the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission(NBC) to slam a fine of N5 million on Channels Television for hosting an interview with Obi’s running mate in which the gentleman expressed strong reservations about the conduct and outcome of the presidential elections.

    Quite interestingly, the rhetoric of the APC/Tinubu campaign trumpeters has opted for the same choice of words as the government organs in characterizing Peter Obi and his followers. ‘Treason’ is the word of common choice. Insisting that the election of 25th February was not free and fair is now treasonable. Going to court to challenge the outcome of that election is now also ‘treason’. Pointing out anomalies in INEC’s procedures and processes is also ‘treason’.

    They have gone several steps further. Government and APC propagandists and pro-Tinubu enthusiasts on the social media have begun linking Peter Obi with IPOB and ESN, even if there is no evidence to that effect and in spite of the man’s repeated dissociations from these groups. Implicit in these mischievous associations and linkages is the assumption that Mr. Obi is just another Igbo politician. There is also an ongoing feverish attempt to use paid party jobbers in the Labour Party to destabilize the party and discredit the Obidient movement. The desperation is to disentangle the Obidient movement from the Labour Party and return the party to its previous small time status. In Imo state, the party has been factionlaised and its offices shut down by factional hoodlums supervised by the police. In Abuja, a renegade faction claims to have ousted the party chairman and forced its way into the party headquarters.

    The Department of State Security (DSS) has joined this nattering choir of scare mongers by issuing a yet unsubstantiated warning against those planning to disturb the peace by plotting to emplace an interim Government in preference to the swearing in of the elected new administration on May 29th. The Defence Headquarter and the Army have sounded the same warning. All Nigerians agree that we do not need any interim arrangement. It is uncalled for.

    What unites all these voices is that they are in one way or the other tied to the incumbent power setup. They are all either officials of government or affiliates of the APC in one way or the other. They are united in a strange consensus that the most consequential adversary of the Nigerian state at this point in time is the combination of Mr. Peter Obi, his running mate and of course the Labour Party respectively. This writer foretold this eventuality as the campaigns unfolded.

    In the run up to the last presidential election, I wrote in a piece in ths column , “What If Macchiavelli Votes” in which I speculated on what the victory of each of the three front runners would mean for the power equation in Nigeria as we know it.

    On the threat posed by the possible emergence of Mr. Peter Obi Obi of the Labour Party, here is what I wrote in January 2023, a few weeks before the presidential election:

    “With Mr. Obi of the Labour Party, we come face to face with a real threat to Nigeria’s power nexus. Mr. Obi is challenging the political establishment, the traditional architecture of parties and the ethos of old politicians. He is challenging the bastions of vested interest, the organized crime syndicates of fuel subsidies and inflated state contracts. He has openly indicated a desire to run a people oriented administration that is accountable, frugal and open. All these grate on the nerves of the deep state and the warlords of enshrined corruption. He wants to reorganize national security and thus curb the crime dividends enjoyed by the security high command.

    Peter Obi and his OBIdients movement could have been dismissed with a wave of the hand if they were not so consequential, menacing and expanding. In a relatively short space of time, Mr. Obi has had a movement grow around him and his counter narrative. He has become the emblematic poster “man in black” of this season with a targeted appeal mostly to the youth.

    He is the convergence of moment, message and messenger. His message is simple: ‘It is time to take back our country’. That message has resonated with the youth and the disenchanted majority of urban poor and unemployed. The desire to create a new Nigeria transcends the barriers that have held Nigeria hostage. There lies Obi’s real threat to the power establishment.

    The system is not going to sit idly by while Mr. Obi and his followers sweep vested interest out of power. Therefore, he will be the meeting ground of all the dark forces intent on maintaining the status quo. In quick rehearsals, financial blackmail of Mr. Obi has been tried and did not work. Ethnic profiling has not stuck. As the campaign season progresses, more sophisticated antics may be rolled out if Mr. Obi and the OBIdients sustain their appeal and gather momentum.

    But the ultimate triumph of our democracy will remain a function of the state of health of our democratic institutions: a truly independent and credible INEC, a judiciary of honest judges, a media of fair and truthful journalists and a non- partisan state structure.

    In a sense, the speculative possibility of a Machiavelli vote in 2023 is another way of posing the great universal question of history: What if?

    The moment prefigured in that prophetic excerpt has arrived. We have crossed the junction of “What if?” The election has produced an outcome. INEC has pronounced Mr. Bola Tinubu as the President-elect on the basis of its best judgment of what transpired and the summation of the information and other procedural outcomes. As required by law, those who lost have since filed their objections in the form of petitions to the relevant tribunals and courts. It would therefore be a natural course for the winners to set about setting up their programmes, policies and unique governance procedures and structures so that the business of Nigeria could proceed unhindered.

    The losers in that disgraceful election should be busy putting our judiciary to an ultimate test of their credibility. The pursuit of justice according to law should be the final berth of the journey of democracy. Peter Obi was not pronounced winner by INEC but somehow, his political presence and electoral feats have earned him unusual attention by the Octopus of the Nigerian power behemoth.

    We must make some concessions. Admittedly, there have been a few incensed and even careless statements by both the losing PDP and the LP. Peter Obi’s running mate, Mr.Datti Ahmed, may have been a bit too emphatic and irreverent in his Channels Television interview on a matter that should be left to the judicial finality of the Supreme Court. But Mr. Dino Melaye of the PDP has been even more unguarded. Not to talk of the serial indiscretion and incendiary incitements of Mr. Fani Kayode and Festus Keyamo of the APC. Mr. Bayo Onanuga of the Tinubu campaign has been even more vitriolic and dripping with ethnic hate in his choice of utterances.

    In the heat of the campaign, some fringe elements of the Obidients movement may have overstepped the bounds of decent assembly in response to the hooliganism of the APC in places like Lagos for instance. Even then, with the Labour Party and the Obidients, we are dealing with uncharted territory. A populist movement that finds itself as the rave of the political moment has a capability to go overboard. But critics of the Obidients have hardly spared a thought for the many of them that were killed, maimed and seriously injured in parts of the country by APC professional thugs.

    Nonetheless, in spite of coming third in INEC’s ranking of the presidential candidates in the last election, interest in Peter Obi and his movement has recently been on the increase. Obi is lately being demonized systematically. The Obidients are being rebranded as urban terrorists by people who should know better including, most regrettably, Mr. Wole Soyinka. The threat level has become so intense that Mr. Peter Obi recently hinted that he has come under pressure to leave the country for fear of his personal safety.

    The reasons for the special interest in Peter Obi by the Nigerian power establishment are multiple.

    Of all the presidential candidates, he posed the most credible threat to the Nigerian power status quo. By side-stepping the established bipartisan architecture of the political structure and stepping forward to directly seek the top power slot, he audaciously upset the tripodal ethnic architecture of Nigerian power. He threatened the existing political order by challenging the old money politics of African Big Men. By openly challenging the system to name his wrongs, if any, he was calling out the decadent moral edifice of traditional Nigerian political culture.

    Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Peter Obi evolved a message that appealed to a cross section of Nigerians across ethnic, religious, class and geo-political divides. As it turns out, what unites most Nigerians is the hunger for a better country in which the leadership presents a moral and performance example that most citizens can emulate. Obi embodied that message and it conferred on him an automatic charisma and electrifying appeal especially among the youth.

    Peter Obi thus threatened the hegemonic dominance of power fundamentalists and regional/religionist hegemonists. His electric popularity attraction came as a rude shock to those who had come to take the youth and urban detribalized Nigerians for granted. A man who joined a small party and, in less than a year transformed the Labour Party into a serious power contender, a populist magnet and an electoral threat cannot be written off casually.

    Like a bolt out of the political blues, Peter Obi and the Labour Party trounced Mr. Tinubu and his thriving thuggery industry in Lagos. He swept the Federal Capital Territory like a political hurricane, leaving his rivals no room for even a miserable 25% vote score. He demonstrated the truism that every politics is first local by sweeping through the whole of the South East and South South as well as the bulk of the Middle Belt states of Nasarawa, Benue and Plateau. From Nasarawa and Southern Kaduna, Obi and his rampaging political train menacingly eyed the conservative Nothern bastions with the force of a powerful national message. INEC announced a Bola Tinubu win with 12 states; so also did Peter Obi win in 12 states and perhaps more.

    These electoral milestones should frighten the traditional political establishment. They were achieved without a so called political structure. They were achieved without lorry loads of ‘stomach infrastructure’ or bullion vans of Naira or dollars.

    However, because of his surname, Peter Obi has also become a strategic threat to both the Nigerian power machinery as well as the political elite of his home base South East. Aspirants to the trade mark ‘Igbo presidency’ slot in the big parties were thoroughly rattled and shredded.

    To the political elite in the rest of the country, Peter Obi, perhaps unconsciously because of his surname, also became the unspoken voice, the uncomfortable variable and indeed the ominous face of something that at once frightens and attracts the Nigerian imagination. All those factors that have held Nigeria hostage since 1970 have remained curious of what Nigeria could become under the leadership of the Igbo people who have been absent from the central seat of Nigerian power for 57 years.

    There is in the Nigerian subconscious a certain envious curiosity and yearning about the difference that the Igbo ethnic identity could make in the way Nigeria is run. But Nigeria is also united by a baseless fear of what the Igbo could become if Nigeria were to let them add apex power the entrepreneurial and mercantile sagacity and expansive spirit. There lies their strength and also their weaknesses as a people.

    But Peter Obi is a completely detribalized Nigerian. He is also above everything else an Igbo man, a quintessential one at that, one who is both a catholic, a trader, a politician and a man of Spartan discipline. Nigerian youth and the urban majority believed in the power of his example and shared his vision of a new better Nigeria.

    The many pluses of the Peter Obi and Obedients phenomenon has engendered a fear in the political consciousness of both the incumbent and incoming dispensations. Fear of the man in black has replaced normal opposition allergies. Having commenced a programme of repression and harassment of Mr. Obi and his followers, we can look forward to a coming dispensation ruled by fear and that will therefore rely on authoritarian methods to silence an opposition that is already in place as an alternative power contender. Unfortunately, the incoming government can only fix the economy through unpopular policies. When trouble erupts in the streets because of hardship, the natural first recourse would be to blame it on Mr. Obi and the Obedients. Welcome to the new APC republic!

  • Scare tactics and interim fiction – By Chidi Amuta

    Scare tactics and interim fiction – By Chidi Amuta

    Under the Buhari presidency, Nigeria’s security police, the DSS , has gradually acquired a political costume. Like all adept political masquerades, the DSS chooses its moments and sides. At one such moment during this president’s first term, the agency woke up one morning and sent out hooded goons to invade and barricade access to the National Assembly. The aim was ostensibly to prevent PDP opposition legislators from assembling to impeach embattled Senate president Bukola Saraki of the APC . That was a politically defensive posture and an open foray into the partisan fray.

    The images unsettled local and foreign audiences. Government under acting prefecture of vice President Yemi Osinbajo was embarrassed and quickly fired Director General Lawal Daura. Buhari was reportedly uncomfortable with the turn of events and appointed a successor of his own choosing who is the current head of the agency. The rest is a known story.

    Just before the last elections, the DSS instituted a surprising court action seeking permission to arrest CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele for, among so many unprintable allegations, terrorism financing. The nation was shocked that the man who holds and signs all our money could be associated with such nefarious meddling. It would be recalled that Mr. Emefiele was at one point both incumbent CBN governor as well as a card carrying APC presidential aspirant with an elaborated well oiled campaign apparatus until hounds in the Villa reportedly shot him down mid air. The court case miraculously died on arrival or is still in suspended animation. Mr. Emefiele survived to resume presiding over our money and its plight.

    The next day, a pack of organized political jackals was out on public prowl, threatening hell fire against the DSS and stiffly defending Mr. Emefiele as a man who could do no wrong. Shortly afterwards, an emboldened Emefiele resurfaced from hiding and appeared in Aso Villa to the warm embrace of president Buhari. The president ushered him back from his vacation and back to his duty post. Thereafter, the duo conspired and unleashed the largest currency confiscation project in our history. Our cashless and hapless public is still bleeding from that thoughtless gambit.

    In the run up to the last elections, the atmosphere of general uncertainty and imminent threat to national security was palpable. Fear was high that pre-existing fault spots could be aggravated by election tension to unsettle our fragile national security even further. The public expected the DSS and other security agencies to be at their best. They probably were. But their best delivered an election full of crisis, violence, intimidation and open abuse of the electoral process.

    Worse still, the nation came under severe security stress as we witnessed the worst type of ethnic profiling and divisive hate tactics during the governorship election especially in Lagos. Voters were injured. Some were killed or maimed for life. Animosities tore neighbourhoods apart. The many casualties of the election fiasco are still being counted. A revamped reign of armed thuggery has emerged and literally transformed into an untidy ethnic militia. Innocent victims are still counting their losses. A new version of ethnocentrism which president Obasanjo has recently described as ‘Igbophobia’ has emerged. One of our strategic nationalities has been under consistent ethnic profiling and targeting from emboldened arsonists and armed thugs. The freedom which democracy ought to confer on all citizens has been severely curtailed in Lagos especially. Fear thy neighbor has replaced love thy neighbor!

    Interestingly, the DSS remained silent in the face of these inter ethnic aggravations and blatant threats to the security, peace order and unity of the nation. I am not aware that the DSS issued any cautions to the ethnic war lords who profiled and filtered voters by ethnicity and party in Lagos. I am also not sure whether the DSS has managed to compile its own classified list of polling units where the worst electoral criminalities occurred all over the country. Maybe those findings remain ‘classified’ or ‘secret’ as usual!

    The election is over. Outcomes have been announced. The nation is looking forward to a peaceful handover of power to a new president and government on 29th May.‬ Those who lost or are aggrieved have since headed to tribunals and courts to get a hearing. As in every healthy democracy, there are post election after shocks. Partisans have mildly protested the announced outcomes. Party officials have issued all manner of conflicting statements. The public has remained calm, having gone back to their lives while politicians duel mostly in words.

    Meanwhile, some Nigerian politicians and their trumpeters have been true to type. Predictably, winners and losers have engaged in incendiary exchanges. That is in the nature of partisan democracy. Winners tend to be triumphant while losers bear an abiding bitterness that lasts until the courts deliver judgments on election cases and scheming for the next election commences. The heat of these exchanges has now bred a new level of concern. People fear that angry excjanges amongpoliticians could unsettle a fragile and factious polity. But even then, nothing has been said or heard that detracts from the normal run of anger and disappointment among parties in a democracy.

    The DSS has now weighed in to cry and warn out about a ‘plot’ by some political interests to generate enough heat to discredit the outcome of the election. According to the secret police, there are plans by yet unnamed entities to procure conflictual court orders to discredit the elections especially at the presidential level. By the phantom plot. There are plans to arrange subversive protests to destabilize social order. By this same script, the authors of this toxic trend hope to secure an ungovernable public space leading to a state of emergency and a logical formation of an ‘interim government’.

    The logic and sequence is an acceptable Nollywood plot line. It however drips of a scare tactic that could tempt the lame duck administration to believe that the DSS is up and about. Not exactly, By any serious definition of pre -emptive intelligence, this interim government alarm is a superficial hoax. All the elements of the so called plot fall squarely within the confines of normal democratic expressions. Those who lost elections are bound to go to court. The courts will pronounce a diversity of judgments some of which may overturn some received outcomes. Some political groups and parties are likely to organize rpotests to air their grievances or reinforce their confidence in victory. Some protests at home or abroad could exceed the bounds of civil protest but the police and other security agencies are paid to contain such situations. All these are well within the normal expectations of a post election scenario in a democracy. See what happened in Brazil after the recent elections. Even the post election anger in Kenya is still alive in riots and protests all around the country.

    Unconsciously, the DSS may in fact have entered the Nigerian post election conversation through a political back gate. By a curious coincidence, the DSS argument and warning sounds similar to those of the spokespersons of the APC. Both Mr. Festus Keyamo and Femi Fani Kayode have been issuing the same warnings and threats to the major opposition parties. They have even crossed the line to issue ethnic oriented threats, with Mr. Fani Kayode warning against a possible ‘Kigali scenario’. Both the DSS and the APC hawks are targeting the leaders of the two major opposition parties. What unites the APC town criers and the DSS is their joint concern and informing logic that nothing must disrupt the swearing in of Mr. Bola Tinubu on May 29th.‬ The APC people are predictably defending the interest of their party. The DSS is , on the other hand, out in defense of the constitutional requirement that you swear in the winner while the losers go to court in the hope that justice could vindicate their contention.

    Common sense and the constitution make any mischief outside this logic unthinkable. The constitution is clear. No sensible opposition political leader can seek to prevent the May 29th‬ event at Eagle Square. That is in line with our constitutional order and serves the interest of an orderly democracy.

    However, there is an implicit threat in the DSS statement of alarm that could stoke national unrest. If they play according to the script of the APC hawks and proceed to arrest either or both Mr. Atiku or Mr. Obi to prevent them and their followers from disturbing the peace on May 29th‬, then comes trouble in battalions. Partisan mobs will be incensed. Public order will be disrupted. The nation will splinter into disruptive gangs of angered partisans. Ethnic war mongers will have a field day. Free ranging anarchists will take over the streets. In the general drift towards anarchy, uninvited power adventurers wearing frightening but familiar uniforms may even be tempted to walk a familiar path. The new government, if it mamanges to survive, will enter office with the poisoned chalice of a divided and violently rowdy nation. No one in the present configuration of interests and forces wants any of this. The unwritten consensus among all interests is that we all want Nigeria to survive so that we can continue to advance our interests and fight our battles.

    As for the kite of the possibility of a so called ‘interim government’, that is as far fetched and foolish as can be. The elaborate democratic edifice of the nation remains firmly in place. There is a federal government both incumbent and impending. There are 36 elected state governments both incumbent and imminent. There are 774 local governments deriving their powers and legitimacy from an elective sovereignty. It is therefore something of an insane flight of fiction to imagine a serial disruption of this elaborate edifice in favour of some transient contraption. I think our politicians and their associate mischief makers are a little more serious and sensible than to make a mess of this in the name of some interim government. The last time we tried that path under the military, it produced a disaster that the courts later ruled out of order.

    As for the DSS, we expect a higher level of scare mongering and fictionalizing from an intelligent security outfit. This interim government joke does not do sufficient credit to the long institutional heritage and memory of what used to be the SSS and is now the DSS.

    If indeed there is any such plot backed by credible factual intelligence, let the DSS, as the United States FBI would do, come out with the details, make arrests and file charges in court against the suspects. Institutional fiction writing and amateurish creative mischief are unbecoming of a serious security agency entrusted with the security of the Nigerian state. In it all, what in fact could actually destabilize the nation and unhinge the state is the adoption of conspiracy fiction making as the basis of a national security strategy. It is time to get serious, please.