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Chidi Amuta

  • Casualties of Democracy as Warfare – By Chidi Amuta

    Casualties of Democracy as Warfare – By Chidi Amuta

    The ballot elections are over now. The next stage of Nigeria’s democracy warfare will soon shift to courtrooms at various levels of the judiciary. The morning after, we are in a nation that looks and feels more like the scene of a recent battle. After the bitter fights, now the head count of casualties. The season of campaigns and elections which ought to have climaxed in a ritual of political self -renewal was converted into a series of pitched battles between political hounds.

    What just took place was a bewitched national frenzy of fraud and disruptive violence. It left no section of the country out. In every sense, we all are now, as the poet said, ‘all casualties of a war’ of democracy that was unintended and uncalled for. It was a war of everybody against everybody in which a blighted system democratized pain and disappointment instead of the promise of goodness.

    Politicians as literal war commanders deployed their foot soldiers and all their lethal arsenal to unleash near anarchy and blood. A war in which every combatant wants to win is bound to produce a landscape of carnage, ruin and lingering bitterness. That is why the mood of the nation after this election is one of sourness and bitterness.

    In some places, neighbours and friends have suddenly become unspoken adversaries. People ordinarily bound together by decades of peaceful coexistence have suddenly discovered that they are divided by differences of primordial nativity. Suddenly, tribe and tongue now differs after many decades and vast resources spent in efforts to unify the nation and manage a diversity that should have been our major strength.

    In the process, numerous casualties are now on open display. First, individual citizens have died. Many have been wounded or maimed for life and are now languishing in hospitals. Some persons are missing, unaccounted for by both family or police. All these trauma and tragedy for no other reason other than that they went out to vote their conscience or participate in an electoral process as a civic obligation.

    The electoral process as the ultimate test of the integrity of a democracy has been trivialized and shredded. Ballot boxes were snatched by force and carted to unknown destinations. Election materials were snatched and vandalized and in some cases set ablaze in full view of those who came out to vote. In some places, hoodlums invaded the polling units with prepared result sheets to replace the authentic ones.

    As we speak, no one is certain as to what version of the election results INEC uploaded onto its tainted IREV platform. There is no certainty as to what version of the controversial results INEC used to declare key outcomes especially at the presidential level. An estimated close to 10% of the results of the presidential election that took place since 25th of February have not yet been uploaded onto the INEC platform! Attention has since shifted to an equally contentious gubernatorial election. As an indication of public disdain and disappointment, the voter turnout in the governorship election was abysmally low.

    It is curious and even tragic that politicians deployed hate and ethnic bigotry to undermine the sense of unity and community in the nation. Politicians and political interests deliberately deployed divisive hate speech and the resurrection of primitive tribalism of the most shameful variety to advanced their goals. In Lagos, a primitive type of ethnic stereotyping and profiling pitched the Igbos against the Yorubas in a city that has been the melting pot of Nigerian cultures and ethnic groups for decades. All manner of decadent myths of ethnic origins have been popularized by otherwise educated and supposedly enlightened citizens just to win one governorship election kin a state that has been producing elected state governors since 1979.

    An atmosphere of lingering bitterness and increasing bigotry in all directions has been created and is festering in the social media and private conversations. Lagos was literally at the brink of a xenophobic meltdown because of the March 18th governorship election. But the politicians who planted and weaponized the virus have since withdrawn to celebrate their victory or protest their defeat, leaving a bitterly divided citizenry to wallow in lingering hate.

    In the desperation to manipulate the elections, INEC’s recourse to technology as a source of solutions that defy our human frailties has also fallen casualty of this recent war. A political class has allegedly collaborated with some deviant election officials to sabotage the BVAS system. A new system that worked flawlessly in recent governorship elections inEdo, Anambra, Osun and Ekiti was deliberately allowed to fail in the presidential election of 25th February. In the absence of a functioning BVAS regime, the system in some places reverted to the discredited manual compilation of results or the uploading of badly altered result sheets to the INEC platform. The result was a collapse of the credibility of both the electoral process and INEC itself.

    In the clear and present danger of a breakdown of law and order following the widespread endangerment of the safety of innocent citizens, the apparatus of law enforcement and public security failed the citizens once again. The police and security apparatus of state was either overwhelmed or became a shamefully partisan and compromised. In Rivers state and a few other places, police vehicles were used to truck away snatched ballot boxes in full view of international observers and a televised public audience. In some cases, persons in doubtful military and police uniforms were deployed to facilitate a widespread election rigging enterprise.

    Among the casualties of this undeclared war, the biggest and most consequential is perhaps democracy itself. Nigerian politicians and their facilitators defamed and abused democracy both as a leadership selection mechanism and as a system of values and cultural index. All the basic elements of democracy were either destroyed or called to question. Freedom of choice was rubbished by goons and ethnic war lords who insisted that some voters should vote for particular candidates rather than others. The plurality of democratic choice in a plural society was reduced to an either or ethnic equation as processing centres sprang up in voting vicinities to filter voters on grounds of ethnicity and partisanship criteria. Now the abiding question is whether Nigeria is indeed ready to be counted among democratic countries.

    The flagrant abuse of process and system was so widespread that many international observers who had come to observe the presidential elections left in disappointment and anger. Those who have insisted on reducing the incidents of bad behavior in the elections to a statistical minority do not get the point about the essence of democracy. A system is either a democracy or it is a primitive autocracy with demagogues as contestants. The question as to whether Nigeria would eventually graduate into the league of democratic countries is now open to speculative debate.

    The most fundamental requirement and end of democracy is freedom. An atmosphere in which citizens are afraid to go out and discharge a basic obligation such as voting for candidates of their choice is at variance with a democratic order.

    The search for explanations for this warlike version of democracy is deeply ingrained in what has emerged as the defining character of the Nigerian state and its political architecture. It must take into consideration Nigeria’s emerging national character and long standing reputation as a crime scene state merely pretending to use the veneer of democracy to earn respectability among nations. Joining the club of democratic nations is different from cultivating a culture of credible democracy.

    As this reporter recently opined in this column a few weeks back, “Nigeria’s institutions of nationhood are essentially administered more like criminal cartels than as tools of collective sovereignty in any enlightened sense. At best, Nigeria under Mr. Buhari has degenerated into a sovereign crime scene. A crime scene with flag, anthem and the insignia and paraphernalia of sovereign nationhood is itself a dangerous proposition. It is made even more dangerous when it is a nation state presided over by a revolving conclave of gangster collectives. It exports crude oil but insists on importing refined petroleum products to line the pockets of a handful of oligarchs. It runs on multiple exchange rates so that patronage can feed unfettered on the commonwealth. It arms a security force to supervise the routine stealing of half of its crude oil production. It buys arms and ammunition to fight an insurgency funded and created by known political figures so that a “security industry” of corrupt officers can thrive. Who needs a more elaborate crime scene than this?

    In such a crime scene state, it is foolish to judge the actions of any state institution by rational moral parameters. Politics is ordinarily said to be amoral. Worse still, the politics of a sovereign crime scene cannot but reflect the essential morality of a jungle ruled by the ethics of gangsters. In such a place, the quest for political preeminence can only be a battle among captains of a pirate ship, a stampede among treasure raiders. The rules of engagement in that battle can at best only be a code of dishonour drawn up by thieves in a jungle retreat.”

    Yet the possibility of collective retrieval is not beyond us. We have survived worse times. At those moments when the world fears that the Nigerian house is about to fall, our Tower of Pisa has endured. Our exceptionalism as a nation resides in the fact that we have become the come back nation. It is precisely that quality of resilience and resurgent renaissance that we now need to remake our democracy and heal our nation. The burden of that resurgence lies most heavily on the shoulders of the youth who trooped out at this election to answer a different call,

    It is a long route and a treacherous path. But we must begin again now to build a new national order founded on unity and the abiding principles of credible democracy. Here then is the well defined agenda of the next set of ‘elected’ leaders of our land.

  • Nigeria Expects – By Chidi Amuta

    Yesterday’s governorship election closed a season of anxiety over democracy in Nigeria. After 24 years of democratic transitions, imperfect as they may have been, Nigerians have a right to claim that they now live in a democratic country. Even American democracy is still reeling from the injuries of Donald Trump and trying to answer numerous questions about its very legitimacy.

    Democracy is of course a continuous festival of expectations. A good government excites a hunger for an even better one. A bad government creates an even greater and more urgent hunger for a different and better one. A campaign season quickens the expectation of elections and their outcome. A feverish campaign season wets our appetite for the real elections and for the coming of the paradise promised by politicians. A successful election, perfect or tainted, raises expectations of what replaces the incumbent order. Let the new order come quickly so that we can lay garlands on the path of the new king only to cast stones and rotten eggs in his face a few months down the road. The gale of expectations goes on indefinitely nonetheless. So, after our election season, what is left is for nerves to calm and the courts to adjudicate.

    At this point however, Nigeria remains expectant of two things: the first is justice from the law courts on account of the myriad election related cases that will flood them. The second, more consequential one, is the expectation of a better government after eight years of Mr. Buhari’s season of darkness and locusts.

    On the lighter side, the completion of this election cycle has regrettably shut a window of national entertainment in a time of hardship and despair. It has been a season of drama mostly of a comic variety punctuated by episodes of tragedy. Verbal emptiness has occasionally been punctuated by the arson of the lawless and the gun fire of dissidents.

    The elections were preceded by very Nigerian  primaries. A street bazaar of vote buyers and sellers helped produce a slimmed down list of 4 presidential candidates out of over 100 who expressed initial interest on the platforms of parties ranging from barber’s shop gatherings to simulated comic collectives. Like every typically Nigerian market, the highest bidders took the prize especially if they transacted in wads of dollar bills. The losers went home to grumble and point fingers in every direction.

    Politicians were true to type in the campaign season that followed especially at the presidential level. We were regaled with a supermarket of promises. Paradise was on the way. Our pot -hole riddled roads would be replaced with Appian highways. The bandits and terrorists tormenting our people would be sent to hell. Terrorists would experience matyrdom much faster so they will not have to wait much longer for the promised virgins and limitless pleasures. Kidnappers would soon go out of business while angry youth will find work to keep them from the japa craze or the hunger for perennial street protests. But none of the politicians dared promise to deliver cheaper gasoline at the pumps or lower taxes on inessentials.

    It was not just the promises that kept us engaged and hopeful. There was the sheer comedy of it all.  Mr. Atiku Abubakar took to the dance floor a number of times without saying a word. When he did speak, he made few unfounded promises. He just promised to restructure the federation for better competition among states. He did not however summon the courage to say that he would replace the present chop-I –chop federal arrangement with a ‘competitive’ federation. But he never failed to remind us that he has taken wives from literally every zone of the federation. If we made him president, he would be the in- law of every Nigerian!

    On his part, Mr. Peter Obi was perhaps the most ambitious in the field of promises. He promised to retire the like of Atiku and Tinubu and replace their genre of African “Big Man” politics with a government of the people. He would ‘give back’ the government to the people and return to Onitsha market to carry on with his trading concerns. He did not, however, quite say so but it was implied. If he could find enough good people to run his new improved style of popular democracy, he would gladly go home and man his shop in Ochanja market or Upper Iweka.

    More seriously, Peter Obi raised the most hope on the basis of a youthful government and a departure from government and politics as usual. Somehow, Mr. Obi’s promises found the most attraction for the people as the crowds of “Obidients” would testify. They have not quite deserted Mr. Obi even after the elections and the declaration of interim winners awaiting the ubiquitous courts.

    In this sphere of politics as entertainment, Mr. Bola Tinubu beat his competitors hands down. Here was a presidential candidate that literally said nothing. Healthy exchange between him and his competitors was beneath him. He shunned most media outings. He avoided town halls but instead created his won genre of “a town hall is a town hall!”. He invented his own political speak, a new language that ordinary mortals thought was full of gibberish but apparently communicated to his diviners and some unseen audiences.

    The “Bula ba, ba ba blu” that we laughed off may have actually been meant for the ears of the deities that would return to crown Tinubu president-elect. The only line that stuck to memeory was perhaps rendered in his Yroruba language: “E mi lo kan”. Some thought he was incoherent because of some clinical infirmity but it turns out they were not listening between the lines.

    He further confounded all by threatening to ‘recharge ‘ the lake Chad to neutralize the insurgents operating there. As if that was not enough, he would find the money to re-energize Nigerias’s electricity sector so that it can at least find power to “produce a roasted corn”.

    Tinubu went to Chatham House in London and re-wrote the rules of political discourse. He opted to share the elevated podium with his ‘team’ who spoke for him by answering all the questions from Chatham House questioners. It worked for him perhaps since the end justifies the means in his brand of African politics. Yet those who insist that democracy is nothing if it does not allow for free discourse and canvassing of views between and among those who seek power may find the Tinubu strategy of interest. His campaign may have established a new parameter for scholarship on the place of open debate and rigorous exchange in democratic contest. It may not be necessary after all. Just say little but go ahead and win the election among the throngs and mobs out there.

    Interestingly, since after being declared president-elect by INEC, Mr. Tinubu has addressed countless audiences flawlessly with rhetoric laced with oratorical skill and fluent English of his own variety. The question that may arise is as to whether the man was merely acting a script which has now served his political ‘end’. We shall soon find out.

    We must not forget the many whose expectations have been smashed by the outcomes of the elections. The many who toiled, waiting to be appointed so so and so. The vendors of all manner of merchandise targeting specific inaugurations. Most importantly, the ambitious women, wives of their Excellencies in waiting who had rehearsed dance steps and commissioned special outfits waiting for the great day when their husbands would be crowned. All that is now in the ash heap of dashed hopes and mangled expectations. It is the way of the world and the language of democratic expectations.

    Beyond comedy, however, this is a season of serious expectations. People expect their lives to imporive. Not so quickly I am afraid. A few lives will change for the better but the many may be for the worse. The bandits are not likely to close shop and go home. The kidnappers may tarry awhile. Bad roads may worsen in the next rainy reason. Many more of the youth may still japa! But then, there lives the stubborn hope that tomorrow is a better day and it is better to live a life of hope and expectation than to despair and die before the next season of expectations comes .

    As it turns out, Nigerian democracy has evolved into a peculiar variety whose final outcomes are only determined by a series of tribunals and courts. Some people have suggested, rather wisely, that we should abolish the people and enthrone the courts to vote on our collective behalf since they ultimately decide who wins our elections. The cases go from loud protestations by injured political animals to copious courts filings. Then they go to the election tribunals, the Court of Appeal and ultimately to the almighty Supreme Court. Contradictory verdicts end with the finality of a Supreme Court judgment. Thereafter, all appeals go to either God or Allah depending on how the protester best chooses to worship.

    Thereafter, the illustrious candidate of yesterday becomes a humbled supplicant that is hardly noticed at the airport as his retinue of hangers on and followers dwindles to a few lonely miserable souls who cannot quite find a job. Water finds its level while their new excellencies frighten the rest of us off the roads with humongous SUVs and authorized hooligans armed with horsewhips and AK-47s.

    Somehow, Nigerian democracy in its perennially contentious outcomes has become a testing ground for the Nigerian judiciary. Some insist that our judges are some of the best and most credible in the world. On some occasions, judges have usurped the functions of INEC and taken to tallying contentious votes and announcing their own results right there in the courtroom. In order not to be beaten to it, they even proceed to order the victorious litigant politician to proceed to being sworn in right away.

    I can only enter a brief for the Supreme Court which always has to end up carrying the can. The judges of our Supreme Court are not like their American counterparts. The American ones are chosen on the basis of what they believe in- whetehr they are liberals or conservatives. Ours believe in nothing in particular. They are ordinarily honourable men and women who may not like the sight or feel of dollar bills as to be swayed by money and political influence. They are above all people of great experience and voluminous learning. But when it comes to election related cases, they have a way of adjudicating on the basis of ultimate jurisdiction and philosophical jurisprudence.

    They know that after them, all other appeals can only go to Almighty God. So, whoever the Supreme Court declares winner in an election matter is the Lord’s anointed. ‘God’s case, no appeal!’ as they say in my barber’s shop. Irtis even written on the tail board of the bolekaja on the way to Ore!

    But there is also some other weighty consideration. If a verdict in a political matter is serves the end of justice but is likely to produce dangerous political consequences, every Supreme Court whether in Washington or Abuja will rule on the side of order and political expediency. The ready argument is always that it is better to deliver a judgment that maintains the status quo of law and order instead of one that will overturn the polity, send the society into tumultuous anarchy and erase the nation. You must have a nation before you have right and wrong, good and bad judgments and heroic judges. It is wiser to save the nation so that even the just man who loses a case today has a country in which to try his luck next time. There needs to be a ‘next time’ first before a Supreme Court is applauded!

    In the says ahead, the nation that expects is like an expectant parent. No one knows whether what is expected will bless or curse the household. The joy and anxiety of expectation overwhelms us all and opens our hearts to infinite possibilities.

  • The moment to rescue ABIA state – By Chidi Amuta

    The governorship election on Saturday 18th is more decisive for Abia state than many others. It is an opportunity to end the tragedy of a long night of disastrous governance that has plagued the state in the last twenty four years. It is a unique opportunity to etch a difference between darkness and light and between government for a selfish cartel and democracy as government of the people for their own good by one of their own kind.

    This election is coming at a time when Abia state has accumulated so many negative records among states of the nation. To citizens of the state, a tradition of irresponsible and insensitive governance may have become all too familiar and normal. The records speak for themselves. From the administration of Mr. Orji Kalu to that of Theodore Orji and the outgoing Okezie Ikpeazu, the story of Abia has been one long night of deceit, unbridled corruption and epic incompetence. Even as the people prepare to troop out once again to vote for yet another governor, the question on the lips of most honest Abia citizens is whether democracy will bring them hope and some goodness or continue with a life of perpetual despair, poverty and hopelessness.

    The picture of the state on this eve of a governorship election is sad and almost tragic. As we speak, Abia is easily the most indebted state in the federation with a debt portfolio of over N189.9 billion. The present government that ratcheted up most to this debts inherited a debt of about N35 billion from its predecessor. It is the state with the longest period of default in the payment of the salaries of staff in the public sector especially education and health. Doctors in the state’s service are owed upwards of 30 months in salary arrears. No one knows when they are on duty or on strike. Teachers in government primary, secondary and tertiary institutions are in the same boat or slightly worse.

    The state university runs consistently on upwards of an average of six months in arrears of salaries and allowances of staff. The state polytechnic at Aba is in default of salaries and allowances to the tune of over 30 months and still counting. The institution has virtually lost its accreditation while its academic and administrative staff now supplement their livelihood as keke and Okada riders or petty traders in inconsequential merchandise.

    Doctors in government health institutions have gone without salaries for upwards of 30 months. Most state pensioners have since forgotten when last they received their pensions let alone gratuities. The sick no longer bother to go to any of the state’s general hospitals or health centres knowing well that they are likely to come out feet first because doctors and nurses are either perennially on strike or have no motivation or facilities to provide care or cure. Drug prescriptions are worthless since most pharmacies in state hospitals have a permanent sign on display: “OUT OF STOCK” to announce a perennial absence of essential and basic drugs and medicaments.

    The city of Aba has been in decline and abandonment for the last 24 years. Drainage is absent. Sewage system is unheard of. Open drains filled to the brim with unprintable effluents empty onto the surface of the few ill maintained roads available.

    Aba is literally an inhabited refuse dump. Mounds of refuse greet the eyes at nearly every inch of the city which has a permanent stench of something dead. Most roads in the town are in desperate disrepair. Some people have forgotten when some of these were roads as many have become deep gullies and waterways that are hardly impassable when it rains. Adjoining the many dilapidated roads is one or two uncompleted flyovers that the state government has been building and commissioning in bits for the better part of the last seven and half years.

    The sorry state of Abia state is inscribed boldly on the faces of every citizen except the few who are responsible for this scandalous absence of responsibility in government. People are hungry, poor, unkempt and viciously frustrated.

    This is the effective backdrop to the elections that will take place in the next three or four days to elect a new governor. The choice before the people is therefore a clear one. The crisis of governance in the state has defined the type of governor that Abia people should be looking forward to having from May 29th 2023. The ideal next governor of Abia state must therefore come to the table with a mix of qualities that have openly been deficient in the last 24 years. These are competence, capacity, track record of performance, knowledge and character with conscience and empathy.

    Abia needs a governor who can read a balance sheet. We need somebody who understands the essence of governance. It must be somebody who understands the complimentary relationship, the social contract between government and people. The new governor must understand that in government, as in business, there is a clear distinction between revenue and expenditure and between recurrent expenditure and capital costs.

    Above all, the new governor of Abia state must have empathy for the people he governs. Governance without compassion becomes a machine of insensitivity and evil. The new governor must know that a government thrives when the minimum expectations of the people are met. Salaries and wages must be paid as and when due. When workers receive their salaries and allowances regularly, demand is stimulated and supply of goods and services is ignited. Contentment and prosperity are generated.

    Abia is easily the most industrially and commercially viable state in Nigeria. But the spirit of enterprise and industry among the people has been stifled and crushed by a succession of bad and irresponsible governments. If brought back to life, the city of Aba alone can give the state an internally generated revenue base of at least N5 billion a month as against the little over N1 billion collected at present. Even the present level of IGR is an understatement as a plethora of criminal networks are known to cream off most of the internally generated revenue in the name of task forces, consultants and other cartels of corruption. The state’s dormant revenue pool must now be activated in order to deliver to the Abia people the prosperity they deserve but have waited endlessly for.

    I have seen most of the political propaganda material being brandished around the Abia governorship campaign. The noisiest faction is the one claiming that the governor must come from a particular geo political zone. That argument is moribund, redundant and prehistoric. Abia does not need a Bende or Ngwa or Umuahia governor. I agree that ewuity and identity are part of politics but we must distinguish between what is strategically important and what is politically expedient.

    Therefore, what Abia needs now is a good governor, in fact a better governor than the parade of locusts that have so far reduced the state to its present sorry state. If you ask me, I would confidently say that on the contrary, it is now the turn of Abia state to rise to the promise of its founding fathers through the election of a capable, enlightened and committed governor. Parochial sentiments and little primordial micro nationality qualms should not obscure this larger goal.

    I have heard the loud voices of the Ukwa/Ngwa faction of the Abia political elite. For the avoidance of doubt, I was born in Abia state. My birth chord lies buried there beneath a kola nut tree. The bones of my parents and grand parents lie buried in the soil of Abia. I n addition, I can confidently assert, factually, that there is no citizen of the state, living or dead, that contributed more than my humble self in getting then president General Ibrahim Babangida to sign off on the creation of Abia state. But I have never directly or indirectly staked a proprietary entitlement to the political leadership of the state. I am also solidly from Ngwaland. None of the people shouting about the entitlement of the Ngwas to use their demographics to dominate the leadership of the state is more Ngwa than myself. I have probably contributed more to the development of Ngwaland and the Ngwa identity in Nigeria than the majority of these campaigners. But, I have never, however, insisted that the choice of a fit and proper governor for the state should be restricted to my village, clan or sub ethnicity. What Abia, or indeed any and every state or Nigeria for that matter needs is a capable and competent leader to deliver to the majority the dividends of democracy. That is the message of the moment’s political reality as we have seen it.

    By a historical coincidence, the crop of candidates vying for the governorship of Abia state are in general qualitatively better than their predecessors but the political party configuration of the moment is vastly in favour of the candidate and agenda of the Labour Party. The attributes that earned Mr. Peter Obi the shattering success in the last presidential election are now at the disposal of Abia state in the person of the Labour Party candidate, Mr.Alex Otti.

    After a careful scrutiny of the antecedents and qualities of the contenders, I am convinced that only Mr. Alex Otti, of the present crop of candidates, possesses the attributes of the kind of governor that can rescue Abia state from the doldrums in which it has been plunged by the present and past administrations of locust governors.

    Mr. Peter Obi had outlined character, capacity and competence as core qualities for the highest political offices in today’s Nigeria. As it was valid and attractive for Nigeria, it is even more imperative for Abia state.

    At a personal level, I have known Mr. Alex Otti for the past many years and can boldly assert that he possesses the requisite attributes and proven qualities to lead a rescue mission to dig Abia state out of the deep ditch into which the present and past governors have dumped the state.

    I knew him as a young boy growing up at Umu-uru, next door to my Umuguru village. Later, as one of my students at the University of Port Harcourt, I remain proud of Alex who justified the confidence of we his teachers with a brilliant First Class Honours degree in economics and the social sciences. In his banking career, first at First Bank and, later, as Managing Director of Diamond Bank, Mr. Otti distinguished himself by being in the forefront of outstanding management turnarounds in both organizations. In the contest for the present tenure of the position of Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria under president Jonathan, Alex Otti was a front line candidate and stood a very good chance of being the current Governor of the Central Bank but for reasons of political considerations. I

    n his private business, Alex has recorded undoubted success. As a manager, Alex Otti is competent, informed, enlightened and has the requisite private sector linkages to expand the economic horizon of Abia state and thus lift it from the present centre of poverty to its deserved status as a place of prosperity and economic influence.

    For the avoidance of doubt, I make this bold endorsement of Mr. Otti in full cognizance of the respectability that Abia state deserves but cannot get under the lack lustre and embarrassing canopy of the present leadership in the state and the ones that preceded it.

    Abia is no ordinary state. Many fellow Nigerians have expressed consternation that a state that boasts of some of the most distinguished and illustrious citizens of our nation both living and dead can degenerate into such a laughing stock. This is the state of Michael Okpara, Ebitu Ukiwe, Kalu Idika Kalu, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, late Ndubuisi Kanu, Anya O Anya, Darlington Uzu, Onyema Ugochukwu, the late Stanley Macebuh and many more others.

    This plea for a fit and proper person as the next governor of Abia state is entered on behalf of these illustrious citizens as well as the millions of long suffering people of the state who have simply suffered too much. Our people cannot remain in bondage for much longer than this moment.

  • Return of the Tribesmen – By Chidi Amuta

    Return of the Tribesmen – By Chidi Amuta

    In a bid to retain power beyond 2015, former president Goodluck Jonathan ran a campaign with a somewhat foolish and simplistic slogan: “Neighbour to Neighbour”. I believe the aim of it all was to emphasize the sense of communal good neighbourliness that had been the kernel of national unity among Nigerians of all hues over the decades. With the benefit of hindsight, that tepid and colorless slogan served a useful purpose even if it did not deliver a continuation of the Jonathan presidency.

    It served to underline the essential sense of community and commonality of destiny that prevailed while Jonathan was at the villa. In every sense, the Jonathan presidency was a national gesture of goodwill in aid of fairness, equity and justice towards our Niger Delta kith and kin. President Jonathan reciprocated that good gesture by handing to his successor a nation that was in tact and in which ”Neighbour to Neighbour” was an article of faith. Sadly, Mr. Buhari who inherited that united nation from Jonathan is about to hand his successor a more imperfect union.

    For all his unrelenting political adventurism and rascality, former president Olusegun Obasanjo must be commended for engineering the political leadership selection process of his party to deliver that morally beneficial outcome of the Jonathan presidency. That outcome was strategically in the service of a nation troubled by selective injustice. Even if Jonathan recorded no earth shaking breakthroughs as president, he at least remained faithful to the unity of a nation that gave him so much without caring about his humble and remote Ijaw beginnings.

    Against this backdrop, the just concluded 2023 presidential election has beamed our best hopes and worst prospects. Take the good part first. Against a concrete wall of skepticism and cynicism, we will by next Saturday have gone through yet another series of elections, marking 24 unbroken years of democratic succession. With all the imperfections and anxieties, we can safely say that democracy has found a home and a future here.

    However, the 2023 presidential contest has also revealed something ugly about us which many thought had diminished. The unfolding outcome of the election process has exposed the return of rabid ethnocentrism in some parts of the nation. We are still, sadly, a deeply tribalistic society. In the media influential south west, national discourse is currently bleeding profusely with all manner of ethnic myth making and unnecessary revisionist effusions. The outcome of a rather important presidential election is being reduced to spirited arguments about ethnicity and the ownership of parcels and portions of the Nigerian real estate. In fact, a new wave of toxic identity politics has signaled the return of a resistant strain of tribalism among many Nigerians including ,unfortunately, the highly educated and widely travelled elite.

    It was foreseen and intrinsic in the very picture of this season’s contest for presidential ascendancy. The three front running candidates were an unconscious resurgence of Nigeria’s tripodal politics of ethnic pre- eminence. With a Yoruba Bola Tinubu, a Fulani Atiku Abubakar and an Igbo Peter Obi, the subterranean impulses that would drive the election and condition its outcome were very much predictable. At best, loyalty to party would trump primordial sentiments. At worst, partisan endorsements of each candidate would assume a regional ethnic appeal that could grow into a national appeal.

    Since Obi and Tinubu are southerners, the familiar computation was that both of them would at best match up to an Atiku northern demographic predominance. The race would then become a north-south confrontation which would again be perfectly manageable and predictable. On the other hand, an outcome that pitted Peter Obi against Bola Tinubu as co-equal contenders would be a nasty political replay of the familiar contest of cultural superiority between Yorubas and Igbos. A modified Awolowo versus Azikiwe contest was a foreseeable scenario while an Ahmadu Bello/Balewa duo of superior contestants look on.

    In spite of his statistical second place score in the election result so far, the Atiku threat was more muted than Peter Obi’s disruptive presence. Atiku was important in this election mostly because the PDP as a party has a long standing footprint on the political landscape.

    On the contrary, the Tinubu versus Obi contest though separated by nearly two million votes has turned out to be the more dominant and consequential contest of this last presidential election. By putting up such a valiant show of political clout, Mr. Peter Obi has come from a political nowhere to literally annoy the Gods of the Nigerian political status quo. His winning streak blazed a trajectory through unfamiliar territory to redefine the national political landscape. Peter Obi, in one breadth, unified the Igbos of the south east by sweeping all the five states of the zone. He has politically reconciled the Igbos and their immediate neighbours in the south south states of Edo, Delta, Akwa Ibom, Cross River and Rivers states. His winning trajectory shot up northwards by taking the core middle belt states of Plateau, Nasarawa, and arguably Benue with significant inroads into Kaduna and Taraba states and parts of Adamawa. To add to his national appeal, Mr. Obi swept the polls in the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja. Overall, the man won the election in 12 states, the same number as both Tinubu and Atiku.

    By far the more troublesome and perhaps consequential outcome is Obi’s defeat of Bola Tinubu in Lagos state of all places. That outcome has turned out to be something of an act of political iconoclasm. For the Yoruba and Mr. Tinubu’s devotees, this would seem to be the most consequential outcome of the election. It does not matter wherever else Peter Obi and his disruptive Obidients won, the Lagos win is like an arrow in the heart of Hercules. On the positive side, it does confirm the cosmopolitan and truly national character of the demographics of Lagos as the nation’s melting pot and heartbeat. It is to the pan-Nigerian demographics such as the one in Lagos that Obi’s message of a new Nigeria was targeted. Lagos heard him loud and clear.

    The explanations are obvious. Lagos has a very national and cosmopolitan population. As the economic nerve centre of the nation, Lagos is the centre of youth unemployment and ferment. It is the place where the most diverse population of youth and young at heart are gathered. As the home of multinational corporations and international business activity, the messaging of the Obidients resonates most loudly in Lagos. More importantly, the message of the Labour Party and the Obidients appeals more to a detribalized Nigerian audience who are hungry for a better nation with a level playing field for economic competition and socio political equity.

    Consequently, Igbos as Nigeria’s most economically mobile ethnic nationality though everywhere in the country are more abundant in Lagos which is to them a bursting market. With an affinity to trade, commerce and general enterprise, they have a sizeable population in Lagos and other urban and semi urban centres of economic activity both in Nigeria and along the West African coast.

    What unites capitalism and democracy is that both thrive on a certain spatial expansiveness. They both emphasize the freedom of citizens to live and thrive anywhere in a given nation space. Both democracy and capitalism are underpinned by an inherent mobility of capital, labour, resources and persons in quest of an enabling environment. For profitability. Wherever an enterprising people settle in pursuit of their enterprise, they feel a sense of belonging hence they establish factories, shops, schools, and build homes, raise their children and induct their families. Over time, the settler business communities begin to overwhelm their host environments and therefore alter the demographic profile of their new home. In every place where the business environment encourages diversity, there is always a demographic consequence. The settlers increase and multiply often at a rate faster than the indifenous population with obvious political consequences. The United States population has altered along these lines in the last thirty years with poltical consequences. Nonetheless, the settlers remain culturally distinct and pursue their political and economic interests through the political alignments they feel will enhance their interests.

    Obi’s victory in the presidential election of February 25th in Lagos state is the product of first the appeal of his message to the youth and youthful majority of the state who cut across ethnic and religious divides. The single most visible other majority in his support base are the Igbo traders and urban youth. The rest are other Nigerians of diverse nationalities and faiths who are attracted to his message of an alternative to politics as usual.

    Unfortunately, a devious political narrative has been floated in Lagos and parts of the south west that the Igbos are about to take over Lagos. It is further said that given their overwhelming vote for the Labour Party in the presidential election, the Igbos may be plotting a takeover of Lagos from its Yoruba owners. In the course of this unhelpful narrative, ethnic sentiments have flared up between the Yorubas and the Igbo population in high density neighbourhoods of Lagos. Some acts of arson targeted at markets dominated by Igbo traders have been alleged. In general, there have been subtle threats to lives and property on both sides even by the elite. A climate of unspoken fear of something no one dares name currently hangs over Lagos in the run up to the governorship election next Saturday.

    In the process, a whole needless debate about who “owns” Lagos has germinated once again. A great deal of this debate is being sponsored by mischievous political interests who are inspiring misguided traditional rulers. A governorship candidate of one of the parties has been compelled to go about Lagos proving that he is not of some non -Yoruba origin! All this is in spite of a constitutional guarantee of the right of every Nigerian and law abiding foreigner to live and invest anywhere in Nigeria without fear of discrimination or negative branding.

    From point of view of indigenous proprietary and cultural ownership, everyone knows who “owns” Lagos. There can be no argument or disputation about the right of the people in Isale Eko to assert their ownership rights over a substantial portion of the real estate called Lagos. This is perhaps in the same sense that American Indians of the United States or the Aboriginals or Australia have a right to claim ownership of both countries. It is through legislation that the rights of all indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands can be credibly protected in perpetuity. I am not aware that Nigeria or Lagos state has any such laws in place at the current time.

    Because Lagos is growing at such a fast rate, a time will come soon when it will be difficult to identify who really is an original Lagosian. Because of that imminent reality, it may become necessary to begin contemplating creating special reserves for indigenes of Lagos. This may involve carving out protected lands in Lagos state where original Lagosians could be settled and where their values, institutions and norms may be preserved in perpetuity. In the absence of any such provision, what will obtain would be existing state and federal laws guided by the constitution.

    Outside the existence of any such special legislation, the applicable law remains the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. That constitution grants to every Nigerian wherever they may be the right to reside in any part of the federation and assert the full rights of citizenship . And because Lagos is a cosmopolitan metropolis which is a home to persons of all nationalities both Nigerians and foreigners, the meaning of “ownership” is no longer governed by traditional cultural rights. In Lagos or New York or London or Brisbane or any other modern metropolis, individuals partake in the ownership of the city through the normal process of property acquisition or occupancy. You buy, lease or rent a piece of real estate in the city where you choose to live and that title deed or deed of lease confers on you a right of ownership to that part of the city. To that extent, every legitimate property owner, leasee or tenant in a city is to that extent part of the ownership of the city in question. For as long as such persons are in full compliance with the range of obligations and rights of citizenship, they become legitimate owners of the city or state of which it is part. As things stand, the owners of Eko Atlantic City now own the entire Atlantic beach of Lagos in perpetuity as far as the eye can see into the Atlantic shoreline.

    Therefore, the near xenophobic reactions to the Obi electoral win in Lagos are wrong headed and mischievous. That win is not an ethnic affront on the proprietary and ancestral rights of the Yorubas as the indigenous population of Lagos. It is instead a political outcome which testifies to the growth of Nigerian democracy from an essentially ethnic driven expression to a reflection of the preferences of Nigerians wherever they may live.

  • Democracy in a Crime Scene – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s much anticipated presidential election has yielded an outcome, leaving behind a thick smoke trail of disquiet and global infamy. Mr. Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has since been announced winner of the February 23rd election. At home, the emotions are unevenly mixed between the minority whose partisanship has triumphed and the opposing majority who are understandably disappointed. Internationally, the consensus among independent observers is that the conduct and outcome of the election fell short of the expectations of the majority of Nigerians.

    The high expectation was palpable among Nigerians in the run up to the polls. The optimism among an army of youth most of whom were voting for the first time signaled a more than usual level of optimism in the promise of democracy to heal the multiple wounds of a country that has been badly injured in the last eight years. For the first time, majority of Nigerians believed that the imminent elections would assuage their collective hurt from eight years of easily the most rudderless administration in the history of the country.

    Early on election day, the atmosphere in most parts of the country was almost that of a carnival. Polling stations were over filled and the enthusiasm of young voters was readable on the faces of throngs. They had come to believe that the ballot held the key to a better country. Strangers at polling stations became friends united by a common aspiration, a shared hope and confidence in the power of democracy. Perhaps at last democracy had found hope and home in the largest black nation on earth.

    People at polling units shared food, drinks and hope. Somewhere in Kogi state, a man was arrested by the mob after he snatched a ballot box. The mob descended on him. At the point of lynching, he was rescued by youth, INEC and the police, all intent on having a peaceful election. At the slightest suspicion of INEC staff trying to play outside the rule book, a uniform cry rent the air: “We no go ‘gree o! We no go ‘gree!” That became a universal national outcry by crowds, mostly of youth, protesting slip ups and attempts by INEC and officialdom to deviate from the rules.

    At other times, when it seemed that people would not have an opportunity to vote, a different, more militant outcry erupted: ‘We must vote o!! We must vote o!! We must vote!!!’ That was another nationwide battle cry of youth armies at different polling stations either when INEC officials were late in coming or voting material were lacking or INEC’s efficiency was lagging. In one place, women with bare hands fought off hoodlums with clubs and machetes who had come to disrupt voting.

    At another polling station, people waited all through the day and well into the night just to cast a vote. A female voter from the neighborhood excused herself to go a make food for the multitude. She returned with a hot basin of Jollof rice to feed the crowd of voters. As night fell and the voting was yet to be completed or even start in some stations, the sloppy preparedness of INEC began to show. The batteries of the BVACS appliances began to run down and fail. But voters freely volunteered the power banks of their cell phones to help. Where there was no electricity, voters eagerly lit up the voting points with the torch lights from their cell phones; hundreds of points of light by so many hopeful people seeking to free their nation from dark rule and the powers of darkness.

    But as the voting got underway and the day began to wane, the optimism of those who had not yet voted turned into anger. Camaraderie turned into open frustration. Worse still, news came that in a number of places, thugs had invaded polling units and were disrupting the process. In other parts of Lagos in particular, some people had been injured, ballot boxes snatched, ballot strips burnt. Hoodlums had taken over parts of the city and were roaming free. Many could not vote.

    Others waited in endless queues for the entire day. In some places, those who went out to vote returned home in bandages from wounds inflicted by hordes of thugs and hoodlums unleashed by political vampires. A day that began with the optimism of millions of democracy enthusiasts was ending with a national disquiet and a realization that the darker side of Nigeria had overwhelmed the promise of hope and the prospect of unfettered freedom. The results began to trickle in. Most people could not believe what they were seeing and hearing even from the very polling units where they had cast their votes earlier in the day and left for home.

    As it turned out, the commitment by INEC that the new technology of the BVACS would ensure instant faithful uploads of results from polling units to INEC’s IREV central servers had failed or been compromised. In its place, INEC was relying largely on manual reportage of results from assorted sources. Where uploads were taking place, what was being uploaded was at wide variance from the actual results that people witnessed at polling stations.

    Uploading of results was slow in starting and has continued to be slow. At the time of this writing, only 83% of results have been uploading though final results were announced two days earlier. In a number of places, results from states far away were uploaded in the name of other states. In a few reported cases, fictitious results were allocated and uploaded to INEC. For instance, on INEC’s online results portal, results were uploaded for polling units in Okigwe where no election took place at all. In a rural place in Rivers state, villagers found a heap of signed and stamped INEC result sheets in a nearby bush bearing a different set of results from what was on display on INEC’s online site being beamed to the world!

    Through it all, a result has been announced. A president-elect has emerged. Mr. Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress(APC) is the president-elect. This outcome has not in any way doused the embers of anger and disquiet among Nigerians. Grave fears still abound that disappointment could spiral into mass protests even as the opposition candidates that lost the election have vowed to head to court to challenge the outcome.

    The picture that has emerged still speaks of a closely contested election with interesting figures. All three leading candidates won outright in 12 each of our 36 states. The votes scored by the three are interspaced by a margin of about one million votes. Yet in spite of the reportedly large turnout of voters, only 25% of registered voters were recorded. This is against 35% in the 2019 election which had a lower voter turnout.

    The overall result is still a close call. Bola Tinubu scored 37% of total votes cast. Atiku Abubakar scored 29% while Peter Obi brought the rear of the three with 24%. In the attainment of the margin of 25% in two thirds of the total  number of states , Tinubu scored a razor edge margin of in Bayelsa and Adamawa states. Mr. Tinubu scored 25.01% in Adamawa and 25.8% in Bayelsa respectively.

    In spite of the catalogue of anomalies and failings recorded in this election, it is only fair to acknowledge the overall political significance of the results we have so far seen. There are changing patterns in the nation’s political landscape. For instance, in spite of his incumbency and famed cultic followership, President Buhari’s APC was defeated in his home state of Katsina by Mr. Atiku’s Peoples Democratic Party(PDP). Mr. Bola Tinubu, famed juggernaut of Lagos politics, was roundly trounced  in Lagos state by Mr. Peter Obi, a fledgling third party newcomer in national politics. Similarly, Mr. Peter Obi swept the polls in the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja while making significant inroads into the Northern hemisphere with substantial wins in Nasarawa, Kaduna, Plateau.

    Since the three leading candidates reflected the tripod of dominant ethnic nationalities in our political layout, the results also indicated a throwback to identity politics of the past. Outside Lagos, Bola Tinubu swept the South West. Peter Obi chased the PDP from most of the South East and most of the South South. Atiku Abubakar shared the high grounds of the demographically huge political north with Tinubu of the APC.

    At the national level, the emergence of Mr. Obi and the Labour Party indicates the emergence of a viable Third Force in the nation’s political architecture, thus supplanting what has always been largely a bipartisan picture. Peter Obi effectively banished the binary option of “either or” from our political thought process by proving that a third force can offer voters an alternative to the two ageing older parties.  Largely, Bola Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket made no significant impact in the outcomes as his running mate, Mr. Shettima, merely delivered his Borno state and can hardly be credited with the wins of his party in either the north east of the rest of the Muslim north.

    There are two very significant outcomes in the political landscape. The emergence of Mr. Obi who ran on a national message of a new Nigeria predicated on a new politics and dominated by developmental issues addressed to the youth indicates a future politics of ideas and issues. Similarly, Obi’s massive win in the south east sends a message to advocates of an Igbo presidency that what is urgently needed is not necessarily an Igbo president but a Nigerian president of Igbo extraction who embraces and embodies the essence of Nigeria’s broad questions and unites the nation under a common banner of progress, enlightenment and modernization. Peter Obi may have effectively ended the political isolation of the Igbo by expanding his reach beyond the homeland to the rest of the nation.

    Perhaps the days of ethnic bigotry as a political creed are coming to an end at last. We see the beginnings of a polity gradually growing out of traditional political loyalties compelled by a national youth bulge and urban national consciousness.

    Most international observers of the election have questioned the performance of INEC and therefore the overall integrity of the polls. Even the United States department of State in its congratulatory message to Mr.Tinubu has urged INEC to clean up its act from the untidiness of the presidential election. They all concluded that the election fell short of the expectations of most Nigerians.

    That evaluation is essentially a moral judgment and indictment. It however ails to take into consideration Nigeria’s emerging national character and long standing reputation as a crime scene merely pretending to use democracy to earn respectability among nations.

    Nigeria’s institutions of nationhood are essentially administered more like criminal cartels than as tools of collective sovereignty in any enlightened sense. At best, Nigeria under Mr. Buhari has degenerated into a sovereign crime scene. A crime scene with flag, anthem and the insignia and paraphernalia of sovereign nationhood is itself a dangerous proposition. It is made even more dangerous when it is a nation state presided over by a revolving conclave of gangster collectives. It exports crude oil but insists on importing refined petroleum products to line the pockets of a handful of oligarchs. It runs on multiple exchange rates so that patronage can feed unfettered on the commonwealth. It arms a security force to supervise the routine stealing of half of its crude oil production. It buys arms and ammunition to fight an insurgency funded and created by known political figures so that a “security industry” of corrupt officers can thrive. Who needs a more elaborate crime scene than this?

    In such a crime scene state, it is foolish to judge the actions of any state institution by rational moral parameters. Politics is ordinarily said to be amoral. Worse still, the politics of a sovereign crime scene cannot but reflect the essential morality of a jungle ruled by the ethics of gangsters. In such a place, the quest for political preeminence can only be a battle among captains of a pirate ship, a stampede among treasure raiders. The rules of engagement in that battle can at best only be a code of dishonour drawn up by thieves in a jungle retreat.

    Democracy in such a place cannot escape the organized riot that took place on 23rd of February. The common people were put through a ritual whose outcome may have been pre-arranged. INEC administered the fatal hypnosis through a pretension to technological savvy. A technology that delivered unquestionably credible elections in Anambra, Edo, Ekiti and Osun governorship elections decided to flutter and fail when it came to an election to choose the president of the crime scene!

    Understandably, therefore, the voices of protest by parties that lost this election have been greeted by a unified cry by both the APC and INEC. ‘Go to court!’ has been the constant refrain. The only line they cannot add publicly is this: ‘Our judges are waiting for you there!’ Yes, indeed, there is nothing in the record of recent judgments by the Nigerian Supreme Court on political cases that should fuel anyone’s hope that recourse to judicial remedy holds any promise of justice in the cases that have been evoked by this election.

    There is an even more worrisome question from this electoral outcome. A ruling party that has presided over eight years of harrowing suffering for the people has literally arranged for itself a contentious succession in spite of a reign of infamy and monumental ineptitude. Two conclusions are possible: the voting mob is irrational and basically foolish or the ruling party as a cartel of political gangsters has hoodwinked and conned the people.

    Whichever we choose, Mr. Buhari will return to Daura as the ultimate carrier of the moral burden of this hour. His de-mythification is complete. A man who swore to bequeath a legacy of free and fair elections is going home after delivering a dubious self -adulating referendum. A man who came to power vowing to drain the swamp of corruption in Abuja may have ended up placing a presidential seal of approval on the triumph of industrial scale corruption. A man who was hailed into the town square as the hero that will chase away the ogre of insecurity is leaving us in the pool of the blood of friends and family needlessly killed. For Buhari, then, this outcome is the ultimate inversion of a deceptive mythology. We may have witnessed the greatest political heist of the century.

    Somehow though, Mr. Bola Tinubu is an apt and inevitable outcome. Perhaps a crime scene state needs none other than someone who fully understands the mechanics of the game to lead it. Perhaps the president -elect’s long and elaborate resume eminently qualifies him as the most apt leader of this kind of state at this moment in time.

  • Buhari’s Lonely Days – By Chidi Amuta

    In his final days, Joseph Stalin was adjudged somewhat unhinged by the public and his close lieutenants. But he insisted that he was acting rationally and in the best interests of the nation. The periodic weekend garden party was part of his routine to which he usually invited his close lieutenants, friends and associates. On this occasion towards the end of his turbulent career, he noticed that the attendance was unusually scanty. His usual collection of friends and associates had thinned out to a mere handful.

    When he made his usual grand entrance, he asked aloud: ‘Where have all my friends gone?’ An aide leaned over and whispered into his ears: ‘All gone, all purged…’ Unknown to Stalin, his sweeping purges of anti revolutionary elements had also wiped out majority of his friends and allies. Close to six million had perished on Stalin’s orders. They included party faithful, political allies, secueity king pins and many ordinary folk on whose behalf the revolution was ostensibly launched.

    But for Stalin, mass murder and unparalleled human suffering among the masses meant little. As he famously said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. But the death of many is statistics…”

    The lesson? When a leader unleashes a wild change, it sometimes consumes unintended victims including his acolytes, power devotees and the crowd of hapless citizens. The leader’s curious reward as his career tapers off is usually loneliness, the loneliness of the change maker, the man at the top at the twilight hour between fading incumbency and the exit door of power. The majority of men of power head towards the horizon of powerlessness as lonely miserable figures.

    For Buhari and his Nigerian compatriots, the much anticipated 2023 presidential election has come and gone. As the nation anxiously awaits an outcome, Mr. Buhari must be trying to come to terms with his lonely trek back towards the dusty anonymity of Daura. It does not matter now which way the election turns out. It does not matter who wins or loses. One reality stares Mr. Buhari in the face. It is the imminence of his lonely stretch into the horizon. The preparation came in droves just before the presidential election.

    Though imbued with the habitual quiescence of a Fulani chieftain, Buhari may not find words to describe the stampede among his devotees and party colleagues on the eve of the election. In direct response to the Naira crisis that he deliberately initiated, the reality of political self -interest overwhelmed presidential supremacy. A populace that was eagerly preparing for elections was also caught in the grips of a severe and unanticipated cash scarcity.

    My friend and brother Governor El-Rufai of Kaduna State fired the opening political salvo. El Rufai, long known to support the president in most situations, suggested that the resident power cabal in Aso Villa had taken over the mechanics of Buhari’s power transition. He alleged that the dark knights of the Villa were opposed to the emergence of Bola Tinubu as Buhari’s succe
    Mrs. Aisha Buhari quickly endorsed El Rufai’s contention through a social media share.  The clear and unmistakable message was that Mr. Buhari had lost control not only of his presidency but also the choice of his successor. He had also effectively lost control of his ruling party, the APC.

    Soon afterwards, a chaotic stampede over the raging Central Bank Naira re-coating exercise generated even more discordant voices within the President’s camp.  By choosing to change the higher denominations of the Naira on the eve of yesterday’s presidential election, Buhari had scorched the political rattle snakes in his camp. A cacophony of voices from inside his political household could be heard loudly.

    El-Rufai has accused the Villa of using the Naira crisis to foment trouble in order to scuttle the election that just took place and pave the way for some interim government. Governor Ganduje of Kano joined that toxic narrative. El Rufai had all along been mistaken for an avid Buhari devotee. But he was now an avid Tinubu supporter.

    Overnight, the entire APC governors  in one way or the other joined the legal rebellion against the FG and the CBN over the continuing legal tender of the old N500 and N1000 denominations. A few of the governors insisted publicly that the N500 and N1000 denominations withdrawn by the Central Bank on Presidential orders would remain legal tender in their states. Of course wise people chose to mostly obey the supreme sovereign of the land.

    Festus Keyamo, Buhari’s junior minister for labour insisted in several media interviews that Buhari was ill advised on his  ban on the legal tender of the old N500 and N1000 Naira bills. Typically, Mr. Keyamo tried to spin the Naira controversy in Buhari’s favour while openly revealing that the APC presidential campaign had been injured by the new Naira policy. Hard as he tried, Keyamo ended up with a blistering critique of the president. A spokesman of a ruling party virtually ended up deepening the crisis within the party by dividing the party in power from its leader.

    He did not stop there, he waded into the murky zone of the Supreme Court’s interim order on the Naira crisis by suggesting that the President may have disobeyed the apex court by exempting the N200 bill from the ban on old large denomination notes.
    That contentious intervention attracted an equally weighty counter attack. Mr. Babatunde Fashola, Buhari’s Minister of Works and himself a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, disagreed with Keyamo. Fashola argued that the president did not necessarily undermine or disobeye the Supreme Court. Two senior lawyers in the same cabinet, the same party, the same cabinet with diametrically opposed views.

    But Mr. Keyamo had yanked his pound of flesh. As the spokesperson of the Bola Tinubu campaign, Keyamo knows where the butter of his political future is buttered. He openly chose to defend the APC presidential candidate over the party and the lame duck president. Yet, he remains a minister in Buhari’s rump cabinet! In an earlier maneuver, he had preferred to don his lawyer’s Whig and Gown and rush to court to press charges against Mr. Atiku Abubakar over a purely political propaganda disagreement over political money movements.

    In a similar vein, Buhari’s Information Commissar, Lai Mohammed, deepened the confusion and pandemonium within the president’s political enclave. He saw no reason why the president of a ruling party should initiate a hostile policy such as the Naira swap crisis on the eve of a general election. Worse still, he saw no reason why Bola Tinubu as APC presidential candidate should  be critical of Buhari since he is a candidate of the incumbent party presided over by Mr. Buhari.

    For him, quite rightly, Mr. Tinubu ought to have been running on the performance record of the party under Buhari in the last eight years in power. Lai Mohammed reminded Tinubu that he is not an independent candidate but a ruling party flag bearer.

    Just before the presidential election, injured politicians and political court messengers were up in arms.  A major party man, Adams Oshiomole, did not want to be left out of the fray. Mr. Oshiomole had been Edo State governor on an APC ticket and was later the party’s National chairman. But he is also a known Bola Tinubu acolyte. He added his voice to the political quarrels over the Naira crisis. He sided with Mr. Tinubu and others in criticizing the president and the Central Bnk for a policy which he saw as clearly targeted at Mr. Tinubu and money pot politics.

    Regard for the president’s glorified toga seemed to have evaporated matter little. Party loyalty and solidarity also counted for little. In any case, a ruling party not bound by any common belief is no better than a conclave of thieves. When the common bond of power incumbency becomes shaky, the party degenerates into a free for all. Everyman to himself and the devil to us all! Inside the APC on the eve of the presidential election, support for and opposition to Tinubu’s presidential ambition seemed to have swamped devotion to the lame duck Buhari. Why?

    The flight of APC and other governors towards Tinubu is a natural political migration of convenience. The ongoing desertion of Buhari will accelerate. It is a consequence of his lack of his fading relevance as his tenure wanes. For the avoidance of doubt, Buhari has always been a political merchandise with an expiration date. The date is on hand and is irreversible.

    The political hawks used him and his mythology to come to federal power as APC. He has largely expired. His moment of supremacy is nearly over. A party that stood for nothing tangible other than an evanescent Buhari myth cannot outlast the life span of that mascot. That hour has come. We can see the beginnings in the cacophony of voices  among the APC governors.

    The President’s northern solidarity and cult followership is also about to end as ordinary northerners come to terms with their massive deficits of the last eight years, Violence, massive school shut downs, banditry, deserted farms, unemployment, deepened poverty would seem to summarize the Buhari presidency. From the loud shouts of ‘Sai Baba!’, the youth are now hurling stones at him.

    It has taken the Naira crisis just before the presidential election to bring Mr. Buhari face to face with the clear and present danger of an unraveling party. Perhaps he needed the Naira crisis to come to a full realization of the true nature of political self interest among Nigerian politicians. It is for him a sneak preview of his own imminent loneliness in power.

    Politics and big money travel together. Take away money from political actors at election time and all hell is let loose. The fangs and red teeth of the political jackals is exposed. The Nigerian politician, starved of money to buy votes, bribe enablers and corrupt the political process, the  red claws of the politician cones out.

    Therefore, beneath the rage of leading political actors over the Naira crisis is the outrage of threatened political fortunes.  State governors are destabilized that they cannot deploy their huge cash holdings to influence the outcome of the elections in their domains. Their anger with the Central Bank and the President is principally on this score. Of course, given the widespread hardship and economic dislocation that the Naira re-issue has created all over the country, it is convenient for infuriated state governors to override tdheir own interests with the larger concern for the welfare of the populace. In the run up to a crucial election, the appeal to a ready popular outrage over scarcity of cash becomes a political weapon in the hands of a president that is seen as a serial traducer of the political class irrespective of partisan affiliation.

    But the damage of the Naira crisis to the APC is by far the most consequential. President Buhari remains the major cohesive cforce that was instrumental to the formation of the APC. His leadership, effete as it has been, remained the cohesive force that held the coat of many colours together as a party in power. Power incumbency remained the lifeblood of the party for the last eight years.

    With no substantial idea to hold on to, the APC could only survice as a party for as long as it remains in power. Once the president collaborated with the Central Bank of Nigeria to unleash the Naira ambush at a last critical moment before the election, the president had vicariously parted company politically with his party. The contraption was doomed to unravel unless it produces the next president. That hypothesis should be tested in the next couple of days or hours.

    Yet the gravity of the immediate pre-election stampede in the APC will outlast this transition period. Since the results of the presidential election are still awaited, we can only hazard a guess as to the immensity of Buhari’s looming loneliness on his way home. If Mr. Bola Tinubu of the APC emerges the winner of this election, he would have scored that victory in spite of the clear financial obstacles placed in his way by an incumbent president of his own party. A victorious Tinubu is not likely to assume the most friendly stance towards Mr.Buhari after May 29th. But even at that, Buhri cannot expect to control the party once he is out of the Villa.

    If, on the contrary, Mr. Tinubu loses the election to any of the other contestants, we may have seen the end of APC as a party. A Tinubu loss in this election will also be the end of APC. The factions in the party will seek to take control of whatever remains of the party. There will be nothing seriously at stake to compel a survival of the party.

    Mr. Tinubu will head home to lick his wounds after a predictable period of post election trfouble making. The APC governors who survive politically either in enthroning their own successors or winning elections into the Senate are likely to fly the APC flag for as long as it takes for a new majority party to gain control of power at the center. The gale of decampment will follow as alignmnets and re-alignments among politicians take over the stage.

    Mr. Buhari will go home into a deserved retirement and bear the burden of being the man who torpedoed his own party from power at the moment of succession. But privately, he will have had a definitive say on who ‘ does not succeed him”. If it turns out that the election is adjudged free and fair by local and international observers and opinion drivers, then Mr. Buhari will have scored his definitive legacy. He will go down as the president who presided over a free and fair election to ensure a succession that did not necessarily sustain his party’s hold on power. Privately, whatever personal grievance the president may have had against the conduct and outcome of the APC presidential primaries in May 2022 will have been assuaged.

    Let us hope that in the next couple of hours, the Nigerian electorate will have decided the fate of the contending parties, especially the APC. Interestingly, the APC also confronts us with an answer to an interesting question of political theory and the nature of democracy. Will an electorate reward a political party which has punished the people with every known calamity in the last eight years? That is the crux of the verdict that we are all anxiously waiting for.

  • Just before midnight – By Chidi Amuta

    Just before midnight – By Chidi Amuta

    On the eve of the presidential election in 2015, I had cause to write a piece as my column in this newspaper entitled “A Call Before Midnight”. That piece was a desperate cry for sanity as the nation tottered at the brink of a political catastrophe. The kernel of that intervention was to remind the feverish contestants and presidential candidates that their political bad manners were endangering national security.

    At that point, we stood a clear risk of losing the nation we all love. The political gladiators had activated all the divisive forces and national security threat factors. However, the politicians were more interested in the spoils of office than the national interest or even the basic survival of the nation.

    The two major contenders for power pre-eminence then were incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and his opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, the present incumbent. The nation then waited in extreme nervous anxiety as both political camps waged the political equivalent of a bloody war.

    Unbelievably, eight years have passed since Mr. Jonathan conceded to Buhari and thus defused the imminent national catastrophe. Buhari ascended the presidential throne and promised to retrieve the nation from the brinks of an abyss. The rest is present day Nigerian history.

    Fortuitously, in barely another one week, the nation will embark on yet another presidential election. But we are clearly in the throes of yet another more consequential and complicated uncertainly. Another week of even far greater anxiety looms. What distinguishes the uncertainty of this moment is its uniqueness. It is curious how an incumbent administration at the exit door can deliberately organize destabilizing confusion against a populace that is preparing for a transition election. The current nightmare of money and fuel scarcity coupled with simulated political and judicial anarchy amount to a strange regime death wish. It is a ohenomenon that is quite uncommon in political history.

    Today’s threat to national security is by far more urgent and desperate than what obtained on the eve of the 2015 election. Time is short but the sources of anxiety are too many and deep- rooted. It is curious how an incumbent administration on its way to the exit door would unleash a major economic policy that touches the very livelihood of the greatest majority. The Naira re-design or ‘re-painting’ exercise has unsettled the very livelihood of the majority especially the poor, the rural majority, the economically down trodden and the most economically vulnerable.

    As we write, nationwide protests and violent eruptions are spreading across the nation. People are hungry, frustrated, angry and pushed to the margins of patience. Their existence is threatened as they cannot access their hard earned cash. An atmosphere of general instability looms in major population centres. None of the mechanisms of incumbent power stabilization seems to be capable of assuaging the raging anger.

    In the interim, the major institutions of state seem to be unraveling. The president has acted in a manner that defies the basic democratic doctrine of the supremacy of the rule of law by tacitly disobeying the Supreme Court on the matter of legal tender of the old Naira high denomination notes. Similarly, any number of state administrations have issued orders on legal tender of old naira that run counter to the position of the President and the Central Bank. Clearly, we are in the midst of contending and clashing sovereignties and serial power clashes between the federal center and the states. The populace are confused as to who can best protect their livelihood in this anarchic setting.

    The clear constitutional reality that the authority of the president and the federal government supersedes those of all state governors is not in doubt. But the political daring of governors who have chosen to openly defy the president on this matter is significant and far reaching. Hungry and angry people are wont to obey their dissenting state governors on the continued use of their old naira notes. But the federal government and the Central Bank still have the last word on which generation of Naira notes can buy the next handful of peanuts or bowl of gari.

    At the level of practical political reality, the question is that of what supersedes the other: is it economic survival or democratic ritual? In less than a week down the road, Nigerians are being tasked to make a rather difficult and fundamental choice between the two realms. Will anger over hunger and money scarcity take precedence over queuing up to elect another set of confused politicians?

    More curiously, an incumbent administration that has performed dismally is ending its effective tenure by inflicting a very unforgettable punishment on the populace. The litany of economic theories to justify the Naira redesign policy are neither here nor there. As far as the popular masses are concerned, the policy is an act of wickedness against innocent people. Yet, the president and his ruling APC still feel entitled to victory at the imminent polls. Here is another test for the assumptions of democratic choice. Can a party that has unleashed such horrendous suffering and atrocious governance on the people be returned to power by their victim populace?

    However, the stated political motive of the Naira swap, that of checking vote buying is somewhat problematic in the present configuration of presidential contestants. Mr. Bola Tinubu’s campaign has allowed itself to be boxed into the corner of owning that the Naira redesign policy is aimed at their obviously wealthy principal. That sounds incongruous given the fact that Mr. Tinubu is the flag bearer of the president’s party. It is illogical at the level of enlightened political self -interest for the president to deliberately want to use economic policy to scheme out his lparty from victory.

    In the midst of the confusion that has ensued in recent weeks, a conspiracy school has emerged with the conclusion that the Naira re-design gambit and the yet unresolved nationwide fuel scarcity are aimed and timed to scuttle the general elections by creating a social and security situation that makes elections impossible. As the logic goes, this would lead to the imposition of a so-called interim government of national unity. This would be the clearest illustration that the Buhari presidency has failed the basic democratic test of transitioning power from one democratic dispensation to an elected successor. Yet both INEC and the federal government have insisted and reassured that next week’s election is on course.

    Perhaps the major threat to the election remains the antics of politicians and political players. The raging face off between the president and the state governors of his own party poses a far greater danger to the elections. Confusion about the outcome of elections held in an atmosphere of political acrimony can be more unsettling than pre-existing economic and logistical headaches. Similarly, in a three –horse race of candidates that reflect an ancient ethnic tripod the possibility of ethnic and sectarian discord in the aftermath of the election is an ever present danger. These can only aggravate the atmosphere of protest over money scarcity and other economic deprivations that are already raging across the nation.

    In the light of these complications and the very present dangers to democratic transition, I can only replay the cautions and counsels that I sounded on the eve of the 2015 presidential election. The fears and cautions raised then remain relevant and valid in today’s atmosphere of political confusion and rascality heightened by unnecessary economic hardship.

    As a way of avoiding or mitigating the catastrophe that could follow the truncation or disruption of next week’s election, I want to take readers back to the high points of my more general and still relevant observations at this same point in 2015.

    We need the survival of the nation first in order to realize our disparate ambitions and aspirations whatever they may be. To this end, our elder statesmen ought to be busy by now trying to pre-emptively manage the foreseeable outcome of the imminent elections. There is a wisdom shared by most Nigerian societies that the homestead cannot go up in flames when wise elders are at home…

    Given the centrality of the political industry in our national life, it is imperative that the outcomes of our democratic transition processes be carefully managed. Intense negotiation is now called for both by those who win and those who stand to lose the next elections especially the presidential elections. These negotiations ought to be moderated and mediated by those citizens whose standing in our society transcends partisanship…

    Let us make no mistake about it. The forthcoming election is not necessarily a moral contest. Both sides represent the ugliness of contemporary Nigeria. We can argue endlessly about which side has the greater number of overgrown miscreants at its core. The hour for that apportionment is past. We know what we know. The clear and present danger is that an election is imminent and there is going to be winning and losing parties. Winners cannot take all and losers cannot lose it all…

    Victory or defeat by any of the parties is almost equally loaded with dynamites that could unsettle the faulty tower of our national existence. Those of us who feel compelled to view reality beyond the present prism of venal and frantic partisanship should feel a responsibility to counsel caution and magnanimity. The winner in this election must be the Nigerian nation and its people, the multitude of ordinary folk who desire no more than a roof over their heads, one and half meals if possible, affordable schools for their wards and a safe land they can call home. Above all, our people just want to be. That is really not asking for too much…

    For now, a palpable climate of fear and mutual suspicion defines the attitudes of the leading political parties to each other… So, what we have is a national atmosphere pervaded by the fear of fear. But we cannot build a nation or advance the cause of democracy with the instrument of fear…

    Of course, there is cause for fear, but from a different direction. It is not the fear engendered by the mutual antagonism and reciprocal reprisals of the major political gladiators. On the contrary, what should frighten us all are the images of our injured multitudes on the streets. The crowds that we see at the rallies are beautiful because in spite of their varied costumes, they have one unifying colour: green- white- green, the colours of hope. They hope that these rallies will end with an outcome that can at least begin to address their pains. If we mismanage this outcome, I am afraid of the wrath this time around…

    Through the hopes that have been repeatedly dashed and the promises that have never been kept, politicians have united the hopes and fears of Nigerian youth in a dangerous way. We have produced a generation that is no longer afraid of guns, tear gas or tanks. Not even death has meaning anymore to those who have to pass through youth devoid of hope…

    Indeed there is anger in the land. So much time has past and there is hardly any sweetness here. Too much waste has occurred. Too many opportunities for national greatness have been squandered. Disastrous governance and, sometimes, authorized criminality has given politics a bad name. On the basic obligations of government to the governed, our governments, especially the current one, have failed abysmally. The Nigerian state has failed itself and failed the international community. Above all, on most scores, the Nigerian state has serially failed its people…

    But Nigeria is not beyond redemption. The one thing that makes Nigeria indestructible has not totally disappeared. Nigeria has survived repeated trials and tribulations because of our capacity to forego, to forget and collectively self-repair. We just move on regardless and somehow manage to remain in tact. At the core of this priceless exceptionalism is an incredible ability to forgive each other and forgive our leaders…

    In the run up to the elections, therefore, I suggest that whichever way the election goes, our democratic continuity as a nation should be ‘a negotiated continuity’. I call on President Jonathan to immediately set in motion a mechanism either to negotiate his imminent exit or his possible continuation into a second term. If the former is the case, let him dialogue directly with General Buhari on a broad range of issues including policy modifications, immunity for self and significant adherents on punishable transgressions and, most importantly, areas of bipartisan co-operation…

    Most importantly, there needs to be a new commitment by both sides not to invoke sectarian and sectional loyalties to advance their political causes before, during and after the elections. This should be a follow up to the non-violence agreement earlier signed in Abuja among the parties. In the latter eventuality, Jonathan must commit himself to a more responsible, more accountable, more enlightened, inclusive and open administration in the event that he wins.

  • Spring of Discontent – By Chidi Amuta

    Spring of Discontent – By Chidi Amuta

    December 17, 2010 marked the beginning of the Arab Spring, a modern day revolution sparked by an assault on human dignity. Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street corner vegetable vendor had his produce and weighing scale confiscated by a female police officer ostensibly because he did not have a permit. The police officer not only slapped him but also spat in his face. Bouazizi subsequently went to complain to the governor and requested to at least have his scale back. Neither the governor nor any of his officials gave the aggrieved man audience. He returned to the street, doused himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze with an unanswered question of desperation as his last cry: ‘How do you expect me to make a living?”

    The rest of what followed that self immolation is history. Wild street protests and rioting followed. In less than a month, Tunisia’s long standing dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted. Protests spread to other Arab capitals. Long entrenched dictatorships in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain were rattled and mostly sacked. The Arab Spring was born and spread like a wild fire. It did not however bring about the spread or acceptance of liberal democracy in the entire Arab World but it shook the foundations of the prevailing order.

    It has however left in its aftermath a few better democracies (Tunisia), some failed states (Libya and Yemen) and reinforced autocracies (Egypt, Iran, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia). But in all of the region, protests based on the dignity of individual citizens are not likely to be ignored any more.

    I recount this prefatory scenario in order to foreground the developments in Nigeria in the last fortnight or more. On the eve of a decisive general election, the Central Bank of Nigeria with the express authority of lame duck President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, sprang the surprise of a currency change on Nigerians. Ostensibly, a colour tweaked version of the Naira’s three highest denominations was to replace the existing ones in a swift economic guerilla operation. After all, as a military despot back in 1984, Mr. Buhari had changed the nation’s currency in a bid to impoverish Second Republic politicians who were suspected to have stashed away huge troves of cash. That earlier maneuver was a resounding thoughtless disaster.

    Now again, another currency change shock has been deployed. As it turns out, the new policy is backed by neither informed policy design thinking nor even basic mathematical common sense. More embarrassing is the ignorance about the danger that a defective economic policy poses to national security and political well being. Apparently, not enough of the new notes were minted to replace the old ones. So, the new notes became instantly scarce and have become the object of illicit underhand trade and black marketeering. Meanwhile, most honest people had turned in their old notes in obedience of deadlines that have now been shifted twice. Suddenly, the nation of over 200 million has been hit by a scarcity of both new and old currencies. What was initially touted as a move towards an automatic ‘cashless’ regime has become an unintended descent into a primitive moneyless economy. For a people that were waiting for democracy to alleviate their other hardships, an instant democratization of penury is the new reality.

    Belated official explanations of the intention of the policy have since tumbled out of the incoherent voice of a government famous for speaking in several tongues about the same subject. Some court economists said the currency change was aimed at fighting run away inflation. They quickly cited instance of other countries that have carried out similar changes. India is their favourite reference. Another school of Central Bank rationalizers has insisted that the policy is aimed at deepening the nation’s cashless economy so that most Nigerians can be forced to transact via online digital channels and abandon their habitual reliance on cash.

    The more political wing of official town criers has belatedly confessed that the policy was actually aimed at preventing wealthy political barons from buying up most votes in the forthcoming elections. The primitive calculation is that government would deny such politicians of access to excess old Naira notes they had stashed away in private vaults and thus prevent them from converting the February and March elections into yet another bazaar of transactional democracy.

    The various excuses advanced as the basis of this currency change have all turned out somewhat foolish. The excuse of fighting inflation has neutralized itself. Scarcity has made access to the Naira subject to upwards of 10%-20% premium. Instead of inflation meaning too much money chasing too few goods, Nigeria’s Central Bank has redefined it to mean no money at all chasing available goods or expensive money chasing available expensive goods! When you add the new cost of the local currency to the sky high exchange rate and of course the elevated prices of goods, the anti inflation arguments bursts like a two penny balloon.

    The phantom cashless argument has almost unraveled. Whatever cashless mechanisms were in place before this recent currency change have gone up literally in smoke. In any event, the cashless policy has been with us since the early 2000 if not earlier. It has achieved some commendable success without a currency change or deliberately inflicting hardship on an already distressed public.

    At present, cash scarcity has stretched existing online platforms for financial transactions to their limits. The channels have been over burdened and now hardly work. ATM machines of the various banks deployed all over the country have neither new nor old notes to dispense. Most are empty to begin with. Most online Bank transfers hardly work as the channels and platforms are either not functioning or are over congested. In the rural and semi rural areas, illiterates and poor people cannot access cash.

    Most of those who have bank accounts have now come to see banks as that place where you deposit your hard earned money and can no longer get it out. The very credibility of the formal financial sector has been eroded. Even the last line POS operators that helped cushion rural and poor people from the tyranny of the cashless regime have been knocked out of the system by the sheer logjam in the banking system and the real scarcity of cash in the system. Out of fear of spreading vandalism and attacks, most banks have shut their branches to safeguard their assets and the lives of their staff. Cashless has now come to mean ‘moneyless’!

    On the matter of the vote trade, many questions have emerged. Why would a responsible government unleash a far reaching economic policy based on a one factor political intent? As a factor of the entire population, how many bad politicians can buy enough votes to vitiate the outcome of a free and fair technology based election?

    More worrisomely, the political meaning of the policy in terms of vote buying has been tilted by political parties and interests. In the popular lore, the Naira redesign gimmick is understood as a ploy deliberately designed to stall the vote buying schemes of the APC presidential candidate, Mr. Bola Tinubu. For some reason, Mr. Tinubu has become synonymous in the popular imagination with excessive wealth and a readiness to deploy an armada of cash to achieve his political ends. The readiest symbolism of his attachment to ‘cash and carry’ politics is the bullion van. More uncharitable commentators have come to characterize Mr. Tinubu as the bullion van politician. The veracity of this attachment remains contentious but it seems to have stuck to the man and his complicated reputational liabilities.

    Yet the conundrum of the moment remains that of Mr. Muhammadu Buhari. The readiest question is this: if indeed this policy was targeted at Mr. Tinubu, why would the president authorize the Central Bank to initiate a policy that would limit the electoral chances of the candidate of his own ruling party? But there are even more fundamental questions since Mr. Buhari is himself a product of the transactional politics he now seems to want to combat.

    The more far -reaching concerns of the raging Naira crisis touch on the credibility and very integrity of the current Nigerian state. Ordinarily, the Central Bank has no business with politics even if its economic policies could have political consequences. But to design and roll out an economic policy and openly own up to its political intent does not become a credible Central Bank. And this is what Mr. Godwin Emefiele, Governor of the Central Bank, has repeatedly done throughout this crisis. He has even expressed an unusual readiness to provide cash to INEC to support the elections if necessary!

    Curiously, President Buhari seems to have repeatedly turned a blind eye to the serial transgressions of Mr. Emefiele. In the run up to the party presidential primaries, Mr. Emefiele was a card carrying member of the ruling APC . He even acquired the N100 million nomination form for the presidential slot of the party. He mobilized huge political followership, bought and branded countless campaign vehicles and floated a huge underground campaign. In his recent altercations with security agencies and political interests, Mr. Emefiele has shown that he is more of an engaged political agent than a professional economist or banker for that matter. And yet he continues to insist that he derives all the authority for his curious actions from the president.

    Meanwhile in the entire national space, all hell has now been let loose. The nation has been hit by an unprecedented scarcity of both new and old notes. Most honest people had surrendered their old notes in obedience of deadlines that have kept shifting in a habitual government culture of flip flops. Across the country, ordinary people have been hit by an embarrassing scarcity of cash. Online channels are mostly off. Banks have no new notes to dispense to irate customers who have occasionally resorted to acts of vandalism to vent their frustration.

    Meanwhile the worst hit are the poor and rural masses. Small businesses who thrive on hand –to- mouth cash flows have literally been wiped out. Most people cannot find cash to pay their basic bills. The rural majority and the unbanked amounting to over 50% of the population have been knocked off the economic wagon. In the villages, ancient modes of transaction such as trade by barter have resurfaced to meet basic needs but to no avail.

    In desperate bids to protest the injustice and lack of compassion in the currency exchange exercise, innocent people have had their basic dignity assaulted, their esteem denigrated and their psychological balance dislodged. In one instance, a gentleman went stark naked in a Lagos banking hall in the hope that his dangling nudity would force the bank officials to avail him of some of his hard earned cash to meet his urgent needs. No luck! Another woman, driven to the limits by the same experience, opted to go half naked exposing her top end while screaming in the banking hall because she cannot find cash to feed her children.

    Open public protestations against the inhumanity of this policy have spread. Sporadic instances of protest and vandalism of banking halls and ATMs have been reported all over the country. In places like Abeokuta, wild protest has been visited by the police with live bullets leading to some deaths. Most of these protests are driven by the implicit assault on human dignity by an officialdom that has since lost all compassion. In the interim, most banks have taken the common sense precaution of shutting their branches in major cities till further notice thereby deepening a hardship and frustration that non one saw coming.

    The political reverberation of this thoughtless policy are loud and clear. The most immediate and consequential implication is the threat it now poses to the elections of February 25th and March 11th. As an added self -imposed strategic obstacle to the elections, the Naira scarcity is a clear and present danger. It has become a major national security concern. Election logistics needs to be funded seamlessly. INEC needs a functioning economic landscape to fund its massive nationwide logistics throughout the country. Contractors, transporters and service providers must be funded in a seamless manner.

    People need to have access to their own cash resources to get to polling booths. Political parties need money to pay their agents, pay for the services that fuel their activities before, during and after the elections. All these processes from the private and individual to the corporate and institutional all need a free flowing financial system. People and organizations need access to resources to function as free agents of a free society. You cannot have free and fair elections in a constricted economic space.

    In the interim, there is scant evidence that the end of the nightmare is any where in sight. President Buhari has held endless meetings with the Central Bank, security agencies, governors and party people with miserable outcome. He has now scheduled a meeting of the National Council of State to seek additional adult intervention in a self inflicted crisis. But in the interim, conflicting judicial injunctions and court orders are climbing over each other as to when the deadline should be for the exchange of old naira notes. The Central Bank has gone to court to push its own autonomy from the federal government. Three state governors have sued the federal government seeking an indefinite extension of the deadline. Even the Supreme Court has entered an interim injunction seeking an extension of the old Naira exchange deadline from the 10th to 15th of February. As things stand, we have a judicial anarchy on a matter that touches the very livelihood of the people. The interests encouraging this judicial mayhem and its implicit political mischief had better find an alternative country if their enterprise prevail.

    I began this piece by drawing attention to how the state’s assault on and insensitivity to the dignity of the individual citizen can spark off far reaching unintended political and social consequences. The spreading discontent about this Buhari/Emefiele Naira change is pushing too many Nigerians across the brink. By accident or deliberate mischief, it is all happening at a bad moment. This widening mass anger and discontent must not be allowed to graduate into protests that could imperil the forthcoming elections.

    Popular anger and discontent must not be allowed to derail the greater good of democratic transition. A faulty democracy is better than the slide into anarchy and an undemocratic pretension to order. It is bad enough to live in a state devoid of all the protections and guarantees that a responsible sovereign owes its citizens as we currently do.

    On a good day, present day Nigeria resembles a state in anarchy. To formally enable or invite a descent into something worse would transform a bad dream into an endless nightmare. Yet, there may be a democratic dividend to the present discontent. At least people now know what party and what kind of leadership not to vote for in the imminent election.

  • Elections and Non-Ballot Factors – By Chidi Amuta

    Elections and Non-Ballot Factors – By Chidi Amuta

    As the organized fanfare of the campaigns wind down, something more potent is about to take its place. The drama and travelling circus of the campaigns will shortly be followed by the ritual of democratic observance. In a little over two weeks, people will queue up to cast their ballot in ritual conformity with democratic routine. Those are the obvious proceedings. The real forces that will determine the outcome of the elections this month are less obvious and perceptible. It is the interplay of unseen forces that will determine the outcome of the elections. Let us call them non-ballot forces. They are already rehearsing in different theatres and may shape the decisive moment.

    In effect, we are approaching the moment of non- ballot combinations that could determine the outcome of the elections we have prepared so much for. This may be the hour of a more ancient struggle, the real struggle for raw power. The interplay of underground interests, forces and unintended determinants of real power are sharpening their cudgels for a go at the throne. The summary of the drama of the next few weeks comes down to one supreme question: who will assume occupancy of Aso Rck Villa on May 29th‬?

    It may be distasteful to hint that a democracy with elaborate structures and guided by INEC’ s convoluted processes could be subject to outcomes determined by unseen forces not easily captured by poll projections and intellectual statistical forecasts. But we are where we are. In this place, power ascendancy can be guided by factors that are above the ballot box. It is in the realm of vested interests, received assumptions and unintended consequences that we need to look for the outcomes of the forthcoming election especially at the presidential level.

    The contenders are already crawling out of the dark into full display. Kaduna state governor, my friend Nasir El Rufai, has a way of being around when power succession becomes subject to unclear schemes and uncertain calculations. Remember his whereabouts when Obasanjo’s succession drama ran into a bump and led to the emergence of Yar’dua. El-Rufai was on the wrong side of the train and so fled only to return after the demise of Yar’dua.

    Now again, he has fired the opening salvo in what looks like an interesting power transition chronicle. He has openly alleged that there are forces in the Villa who are working against the emergence of Mr. Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress(APC) as Mr. Buhari’s successor. That proposition is by no means a light one but is indicative of the emerging disquiet in the place of receding power.

    Very quickly, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, easily among Nigeria’s most politically engaged First Ladies in recent times, has tacitly endorsed El Rufai’s contentious submission by reposting the footage on the social media. Apparently rattle and embarrassed by El Rufai’s troublesome claim, the presidency has been dragged into a fray it probably did not prepare for. The presidency has reaffirmed the president’s support for Tinubu as h is party’s flag bearer.

    Following the Kaduna governor’s stormy claim, speculative fingers have begun pointing in the direction of the Villa’s in-house cabal led by Mr. Mamman Daura, Mr. Buhari’s ubiquitous and meddlesome nephew. Knowledgeable sources see Mr. Daura as the helmsman among the unseen hands in El Rufai’s proposition. There is no certainty of what Mr. Daura and his court collective may have been up to in recent times.

    What is however undeniable is that the syndicate did set up an informal parallel clearing house for Buhari’s possible successor prior to last May’s presidential primaries. The narrative is that this is how come diverse persons as far flung as Dr. Akinwumi Adesina of the African Development Bank, Godwin Emefiele of the Central Bank and even former president Goodluck Jonathan found themselves paying for APC’s N100 million apiece nomination forms.

    Somehow, Mr. Bola Tinubu may have wriggled through from outside the preferred candidates’ list of the cabal. From within the Villa then, it would appear that two clear factions have emerged on the Buhari succession train: the Mamman Daura faction and the Aisha Buhari factions.

    But the diversity of unstated interest around the presidential succession election are not restricted to the schemes inside Aso Rock. Norare they limited to the ruling APC for that matter. What is at stake is the ultimate power in Nigeria. Therefore, the other major candidates, namely, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi also come with their own stakes and interests.

    All the major candidates come with their own bag of factors and interests. This season’ top contenders come loaded with their peculiarities.

    First, for the first time in our post military partisan politics, the three top contenders represent an unconscious replay of Nigeria’s tripodal ethnic equation. Tinubu from the Yoruba south west; Atiku from the perennial Hausa Fulani north and Mr. Peter Obi who gate crashed to the top of the race is the unexpected Igbo man flying the most nationalistic and detribalized flag. By accident or design, this representation puts on display the familiar stock assumptions of Nigerian politics. Each of them therefore comes with a baggage of deficits, unstated assumptions and supporting attributes.

    Secondly, the three candidates come with an interesting mix of religious profiles and undertones. Mr. Atiku Abubakar is an undisguised northern Fulani Muslim. Mr. Tinubu is a Yoruba Muslim with a Christian wife parading a Muslim-Muslim ticket with Mr. Kashim Shettima, a Fulani fellow Muslim, as his running mate. On the other hand, Mr. Peter Obi is an unadulterated Igbo Christian, an unrepentant Roman Catholic. This mix and match of backgrounds of faith and ethnicity is perhaps representative of the Nigerian diversity. The campaign has been all about each of the candidates proving that they can transcend their ethnic and regional identities to be more Nigerian than the others. But the combination comes packed with multiple electoral and political permutations, possibilities and advantages.

    Thirdly, this is the first time in the post military political era that the presidential race is not featuring a war time military hero or general. Therefore, it is the track record of the candidates in previous elective public office rather than the myths of military and battle field heroism that is being invoked in marketing them to the Nigerian electorate. To that extent, none of them is in a position to frighten us with tales of war time leadership and sometimes dubious heroism.

    Over and beyond the unstated factors in the backgrounds of the contestants, there are frightening developments that could affect the very conduct of the elections themselves. Already, systemic darts are being aimed at the elections themselves. INEC has in recent days been compelled to reassure the public and the world that the elections will not be postponed or the schedule tampered with.

    An inexplicable nationwide fuel scarcity has overwhelmed the entire nation. As a consequence, the pump price of gasoline has gone haywire all around the country with some areas recording prices as high as N600 per litre over and beyond the regulated N180 per litre. This is a clear danger and threat to election logistics. A general election in the whole of Nigeria is a massive logistical undertaking requiring uninterrupted energy, power and unhindered robust internet network viability.

    Official excuses for the nationwide fuel scarcity have ranged from sabotage to smuggling across the borders to the mischief of system ghosts. A presidential task force with the president himself as chairman has been set up with no perceptible improvements yet. Since the president, who is also the Minister of Petroleum, is the chairman of the new task force, failure of the committee cannot easily find a fall guy. But the threat of fuel scarcity to the election remains. Even at the private level, people will need to get to their polling boots and back. INEC will need to move electoral materials to the most remote places by road, air or boats.

    Barely three weeks to the elections, an apparently unplanned and disastrously executed currency change has been unleashed. The entire nation is literally cash strapped. A maneuver that was originally advanced as an anti inflationary measure became a ruse to check vote buying by wealthy politicians. The sloppy policy has thrown the entire national economy into a tail spin. Majority of Nigerians can hardly find cash to transact their daily needs. To access limited quantities of their own cash, they have to pay a premium, thereby worsening the already scandalous inflation situation. Banks are starved of the new notes just as the existing old high denomination notes have been decreed out of legal tender. The spiral impact of possible upheaval is everywhere in evidence. If unchecked, the development could seriously threaten public peace and orderly social and economic life. The possibility of holding the the elections could be threatened with a heightened possibility that the emergency powers in the constitution could be invoked if matters get out of hand.

    Against the background of the prevailing insecurity across the country, fears remain that elections may be interrupted in parts of the country. In the south east, for instance, repeated attacks on INEC facilities and personnel in Imo State have raised fears that the elections may be interrupted by violence and heightened separatist agitations. Of course IPOB, the lead separatist group in the zone has issued a statement absolving itself of threat to the elections.

    Similar fears have been expressed about parts of the north like the north east where remnants of Boko Haram and ISWAP still constitute a security concern. The troubled states of Zamfara, Kaduna, Katsina and Niger remain places of high security interest. The possibility that terrorists and bandits in these areas could be determined to disrupt the elections is a matter of course.

    Even in states that are not directly subject to terrorist or bandit attack, sitting governors are disturbing the peace. In a bid to monopolize the political space in their states, some governors have lately resorted to draconian authoritarian tactics to stifle their opponents. In Rivers State, for instance, Governor Nyesom Wike has literally garrisoned the state with violent thugs. He has in addition outlawed campaigns by all rival parties in public spaces like stadia, schools and arenas. His armed thugs have occasionally barricaded campaign venues of rival parties with gun shots and attacks with dangerous weapons. The possibility of reprisal attacks and equally violent responses could plunge the state into anarchy which could necessitate a state of emergency and the postponement of elections.

    Taken together, this wide range of circumstances in the national social and economic environment are enough to truncate the best intentions of those who have designed and marketed an orderly democratic transition through a free and fair election. And the possibility of botched elections would open a range of undemocratic possibilities in a bid to ensure national survival and collective security. All informed assessments of Nigeria’s chances with this month’s elections have never failed to factor in undemocratic interventions in government in the event that the elections do not go well.

    Even if the elections go well, there remains a fear about the outcome and the possibility of post election upheaval. The configuration of backgrounds and loyalties among the three major contenders for the presidency leaves room for contentious outcomes. If the ailing Mr. Tinubu wins the election with his Muslim-Muslim ticket, there remains a fear that the Christian population of the south could rise against his victory on religious grounds. His Aso Villa based traducers could also engineer a rejection of his victory for all manner of reasons. Widespread triumphalism among his devotees in the south west could grate badly on the feelings of other nationalities.

    An Atiku Abubakar victory would in the same vein meet with a faith based series of protests. Against the backdrop of Mr. Buhari’s jihadist antics, the fear that another Fulani Muslim president could deepen existing fears of sectional hegemony and herdsmen violence may spark pan-southern protests and a violent rejection of the outcome of the elections.

    On the other hand, a surprising Peter Obi victory would be the most tectonic outcome of the 2023 presidential election. An Obi victory would unsettle some of the assumptions on which the Nigerian federation has existed in the post-civil war era. An Igbo man as president of Nigeria would unsettle the political, security and even psychological comportment of the Nigerian state and society. Christians would rise triumphant just as the Igbos would feel a new sense of inclusion in the Nigerian federation 53 years after an unfortunate civil war.

    That outcome could produce unintended resistance and even violent protest in parts of the federation since the fear of Igbo ascendancy is one factor that has continued to unite the rest of Nigeria’s ethnic nationalities. For the youth and most urban educated Nigerians, that would perhaps be the most desirable outcome of the forthcoming presidential election. A feeling of real change is likely to sweep through the nation as most people have become enamored of Mr.Obi’s gospel of a new Nigeria in which power is returned to the people.

    As Nigerians prepare to troop out to cast their votes, it is best to bear in mind that the factors that will determine the outcome of these elections may lie beyond the polling stations. Incidentally, it is the non ballot forces at play in a society that determine the quality of its democratic choices.

  • Atiku versus Tinubu: Dance of Naked Emperors – By Chidi Amuta

    Atiku versus Tinubu: Dance of Naked Emperors – By Chidi Amuta

    What began as a promising campaign season is about to end up as a roving circus ofpolitical emperors and their minions. As the campaigns for next month’s elections wind down, we probably now have a convenient summation of the surreal experience. We might as well call it ‘the Lost Campaign’. The over six months window which INEC allowed us for campaigns was greeted as time enough for exhaustive issues- related campaigns by the political parties. It was expected that the campaign would depart from the usual parade of superficiality to yield a a national engagement in a rigorous debate about how we are , how we got here and how we can dig ourselves out of this ditch. It was expected that our political parties would for a change rise to the occasion of leading the national conversation.

    Alas, the time and opportunity seems to have been squandered. The campaigns are winding down and yet the issues have hardly been addressed. Rather predictably and unfortunately, the two dominant parties have instead elevated their presidential candidates into the centres of attention. Their personal lives and foibles have become the central issues of the campaign. Attention has shifted from the nation to the two imperial candidates. The campaign teams of the two big parties have degenerated into opposing squads of howling pirates and quarrelsome co-wives. All manner of unprintable personal insults, accusations and counter accusations are flying around the two presidential candidates.

    A former aide to Mr. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has gone rogue with tales of trafficking in ugly money linked to the former Vice President . The disclosures of the errant former aide include a laughable ‘revelation’ that Mr. Atiku has 31 children all of whom he plans to enrich by stealing from the national till when and if he becomes president. Atiku is also alleged to have floated special purpose vehicle companies that were deployed into money laundering schemes to finance political projects many years ago. There is a lingering undertone in these murky revelations that Mr. Atiku may not have been such an honest deputy in his private financial dealings with Mr. Obasanjo during their tenure, hence the unrelenting bitterness of the Owu chief towards his erstwhile deputy.

    On the Tinubu side, it is repeatedly alleged that Mr. Tinubu may have, earlier in his opaque career, been involved in trade in bad products including narcotics between the US and Nigeria. Repeated references are made to court papers from far away United States that showed clearly that Mr. Tinubu’s bank accounts may have hosted funds that were proceeds of questionable narcotics related transactions. It is an open secret that Mr. Tinubu paid a legally agreed reparation to the US government in a plea bargain settlement on one such questionable transaction.

    Nearer home and more recently, other hazy accusations against Mr. Tinubu include countless unsubstantiated charges that he may have fleeced the Lagos treasury during and after his tenure as governor through sweet heart contracts, consultancies and commissions. We have heard all these repeatedly before. Nothing has been conclusively proven or legally sustained neither has much been convincingly repudiated. There remains a certain lingering smell of bad things hanging around the man in matters as diverse as real estate, toll gates and revenue collection consultancies in Lagos etc.

    In the process of choreographing the nasty exchanges between the two presidential candidates, a whole genre of Nigeria’s thriving comedy industry has sprouted. There are now endless adolescent skits from both sides on the foibles and fumblings of both principals. Drama and comedy are thriving. The most entertaining pieces are perhaps the musical renditions of Mr. Tinubu’s ill health induced recent linguistic resourcefulness and creativity. The famous indecipherable ‘Ba ba blu…’ gibberish series has yielded danceable raps accompanied by endless gyrations of young female waists backed by instant street-side musical ensembles. While we ponder the meaning of the gibberish, we cannot but savor the captivating melody of these instant hit compositions. No one can deny the infinite creativity of Nigeria’s restless young generation.

    The Atiku side has repeatedly resorted to making political capital out of Mr. Tinubu’s much orchestrated health issues. It is of course crassly indecent and demeaning to convert people’s health issues into political capital. We are Africans. Ill health and death remain areas beyond public ridicule. But our modern pretensions demand that those who are playing in the public sphere must come clean with their health records because they cease to be private patients once they have stepped out onto the arena of public service. Therefore, the public is entitled to full disclosure on Mr. Tinubu’s health status as well as those of the other presidential candidates for as long as they insist on vying for public office.

    The contending accusdations and exchangeof insults between both sides remains childish in content and adolescent in mode of expression. But both campaigns have deployed all the communication tools at their disposal to make these high school exchanges look serious. For instance, in a desperate bid to confer legal respectability on Atiku’s supposed past financial indiscretion, Mr. Festus Keyamo, spokesman of the Tinubu APC campaign, has headed to court to give a legalistic appearance to an otherwise laughable matter.

    From the Atiku side, there have been more colourful displays spearheaded by Dino Melaye, the familiar Senator of colour, bombast and a gifted performing artist. On the campaign trail, Dino Melaye has occasionally mimicked Tinubu’s infirm swoons by deliberately and foolishly falling off the campaign podium to audience applause.

    In all this, the public has been relegated to the status of spectators. In place of debate and serious conversation, we are left with no other option than to laugh at the foibles of our political actors and their rented jesters. Instead of participating in lively debates about our future , we are relegated to the status of a circus audience, helplessly diverted from the serious existential issues of nation and people. It all amounts to a grand scheme of political distraction. Our attention is shifted away from issues to antics and spurious allegations.

    Unfortunately, the allegations and charges over which the PDP and APC are squabbling are all too familiar to our public. Every Nigerian out there knows that both Mr. Atiku and Mr. Tinubu are stupendously wealthy men. But if beer parlor you ask how they came by their wealth, you are likely to meet a wall of silence as people find their way out of the bar!. Whether they are founded allegations or glorified beer parlor rumours, there is nothing new that we have been told about the wealth of either Mr. Atiku or his friend Bola Tinubu in recent times that is new. They know each other well. We the people also know quite a bit about them. For their campaigns to elevate their known identities and circumstances into matters of urgent public attention is unnecessary political drama and at best a grand scheme of political diversion. The campaigns are merely dodging serious political debate about their programmes if indeed they have any.

    Their handlers, having run out ideas, are merely watching the clock as the days roll by and the campaign season draws to a close. When the curtain falls on the eve of the election, they will have both artfully side- stepped the serious issues that beset our nation and left us to queue up at the polling booths to anoint one of them our emperor for the next four years. That is the state of the scheme.

    These diversionary antics are not accidental. They are generic in the tradition of politics that has produced both Mr. Atiku and Mr. Tinubu. They are playing typical African ‘Big Man’ and ‘African Chief’ politics. This politics is not about the people or the nation. It is about the political gladiators as totems of power. This is a dying but nonetheless still potent political tradition.

    This ancient politics is not an orphan either. It has an ancestry. Nor is it exclusively Nigerian. It is in fact postcolonial African. It is the politics of ‘African Chiefs’ and ‘Big Men ‘. The Big man owns the state, its resources and controls its institutions. It is a crude unmitigated rehearsal of the medieval absolutism of le etat c’est moi. This is the politics of Mobutu Se Se Sekou, Theodore Obiang, Arap Moi, Paul Biya, Yoweri Museveni, Siad Barre, Hosni Mubarak and Robert Mugabe. It is a crude combination of Medieval cruelty and morbid insensitivity to the feelings of ordinary people. Corruption is merely an expression of the big Chief’s entitlement to the resources of his kingdom as a divine ancestral right of the king. The modern Nigerian state has only codified the travesty by imposing a veneer of some fancy things like an Electoral Law, an INEC and emplaced a judiciary of compliant judges.

    There is therefore a sad imperial dimension to our ongoing political drama. Both Atiku and Tinubu behave, generally carry on and speak to Nigerians as emperors in waiting. They are not relating to fellow Nigerians as fellow citizens in a Republican democracy but as emperors from an Olympian height and distance. The collective ‘we’, the voice of a collective partisan leader in a democracy gives way to the all conquering ‘I’ of the imperial overlord.

    The political obligations of the aspiring leader to the electorate are presented as generous concessions from a benevolent aspiring emperor to his future subjects. At a PDP rally in Abeokuta the other day, Mr. Atiku threatened to withhold contracts and political appointments from party members who do not ‘deliver’ their polling booths. As it were, the people as citizens in a democracy have no entitlements except they do the bidding of the emperor. The relationship between the presidential candidate and the electorate becomes a transactional one: votes for patronage. Votes for the rights and privileges of citizenship. Only the emperor’s devotees and minions qualify for patronage. Forget meritocracy and democratic entitlement.

    At similar party campaign events in Owerri, Enugu and Onitsha respectively, an arrogant Atiku insisted that he will ensure that the much talked about Igbo president comes only after his reign as imperial president. He would make it happen by political fiat! It is only after his presidential tenure that he would graciously pay heed to the legitimate right of Igbos as citizens to vie for and expect to be elected president in a country they call theirs. The legitimate right of the Igbos as citizens to vie for Nigeria’s presidency becomes a quid pro quo proposition, something to be earned by voting for Mr. Atiku.

    Similarly, Mr. Bola Tinubu prefaced his outing in the presidential contest with an unmistakable sense of personal entitlement. In his now famous Abeokuta first outburst, he defiantly stated that it was his ‘turn’ to be president. It was not about his party, zone or ethnicity. It was a statement of personal claim to power. He was vying for the presidency in 2023 to cash his personal political cheque in return for enthroning Buhari and facilitating the birth of the APC. “Emi l’okan” (it is my turn) is an unmistakable personal statement of entitlement to national power.

    Throughout the campaign season, Tinubu has treated citizen rights and entitlements as personal imperial concessions which he alone can grant on being elected the next president. In his mindset, Lagos is his property and every citizen who dwells or transacts in Lagos must have his blessing. For instance, other Nigerians who live and work or trade in the South West, especially Lagos, should be grateful to him for being allowed to live and thrive in the region. Specifically, Mr. Tinubu says Mr. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour party, who owns a home in Lagos as well as other Nigerians resident in Lagos should pay ‘rent’ to him, the imperial owner of Lagos for being allowed to live and contribute to the economy of Lagos.

    In this imperial mindset, even wives and offspring of the imperial presidential candidates have crawled out of the wood work to blackmail and cajole a hapless citizenry to vote for their principals. Mr. Tinubu’s Senator Christian wife has added her voice to the aspiration of her Muslim husband. His daughter and son have also weighed in, with his son recently taking an Igbo chieftaincy title from his in laws in the south east to the bargain. Under our very eyes, all the trappings and symptoms of an impending imperial personality cult presidency are on full display here. Similarly, one of Mr. Atiku’s many wives has pleaded that Nigerians should elect her husband president in order to qualify for his generosity of spirit and kingly favours.

    The elements of imperial personality cult politics are complete in the tone of the two campaigns. The language of both sides is predictably combative, arrogant and belligerent with frequent grandstanding as in warfare. Mr. Tinubu’s people have hectored the media as in their quarrel with Arise Television over his failed town hall appearances. Mr. Atiku visited Anambra state and had Governor Soludo summon traditional rulers, including the revered Obi of Onitsha, to congregate at the Government House in Awka to pay homage to him instead of him visiting their domains.

    Conspicuously missing in the utterances of both sides is the candour of civil rhetoric and respect for both opponents and the public that we should expect from responsible people seeking to be hired to serve the public through a democratic contest.

    In this campaign of comic blitzkrieg, nothing is sacrosanct. The institutions of state including the very pillars and guardrails of democratic order are purchased, conscripted, enlisted or roped into the nasty privatization of partisan contest. The Tinubu camp has enlisted the judiciary by having Mr. Keyamo go to court over a trivial old tale. They have invited the police and EFCC to come and arrest Mr. Atiku. The Atiku camp has in return invited the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) and the police to search underneath Tinubu’s bed for narcotics. Both sides have called on INEC to disqualify their opponents. Vicariously and variously, the key agencies of the state have been called into the nasty fights of these naked emperors.

    The contest between the emperors is not a moral one by any stretch. It is instead a desperate stampede for vantage positioning occasioned by economic interests. It is a wrestling match between two naked emperors in the national market place.

    It is the institutionalization of politics of ‘anyhow’. We are within a political culture where the public is invited to compare candidates for the highest office in terms of their levels of criminality and serial moral transgressions and social infractions. The effective code of behavior here becomes that of politics as an amoral game. In a contest among ‘bad guys’, who wins is not a triumph of virtue or merit but a glorification of the nastier man. Sadly, this is what the impending election for the Nigerian president has turned into.

    Therefore, the tragedy of Nigeria is that the February election may present one of these untidy emperors as the president of Nigeria. In that sad eventuality, which seems clear and present, we are stuck with a tragedy foretold. Maybe it is true that democracy presents every society with a mirror image of itself as hero. We are the leader we choose!

    These emperors have, however, stripped each other naked in the market place. What do we do with them in a season that offers us a choice?