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Chidi Amuta

  • Peter Obi and the Northern challenge – By Chidi Amuta

    Peter Obi and the Northern challenge – By Chidi Amuta

    Politicians on a nationwide campaign for the top job in the land are condemned to a life of compulsive nomadism. They are perpetually on the go, sometimes armed with a compass they alone can read or no compass at all. Mapping their itinerary can be quite an arduous task. Worse still, matching the marketing routes of key political candidates in a large and diverse country like Nigeria can be a disarming and troublesome undertaking.

    Perhaps the best way to mediate between a key politician and his choice of where to go hunting for votes is to match the route of his wandering with whatever his core message is. A serious politician is mostly an itinerant salesman who must go first to the places where his essential message resonates and can also garner the most votes. In a fatally injured polity such as today’s Nigeria, the imperative is for leading politicians to go to those places where most voters reside and where the nation bleeds the most. Therefore, political campaign travels tend to be transactional road shows: politicians go promising to fix everybody’s leaking roof in return for votes.

    Of the major contestants for the presidential podium in this campaign season, Mr. Peter Obi has shown unusual depth of independent knowledge of “the trouble with Nigeria.” Like the rest of his colleagues, he has made speeches on the insecurity, the poverty, the criminal corruption and recklessness in public finance management as well as the disunity and factionalism in the land. Over and above the rest, however, he has analytically dissected and linked these problems while demonstrating an impatient desire to go at Nigeria’s problems head on from day one in office. His difference from the rest is in the articulation of a clear social democratic vision. Going for him is his background of impeccable discipline, service delivery and moral astuteness.

    This implies a concerted subversion of the present endangered social order, wobbly state and alienated politics. His is a vision of a new Nigeria which neither fellow politicians nor the enlightened public has yet faulted. Of course the other top contenders have their own vision of Nigeria under them. We cannot call it a name yet nor has any of them had the courage of calling their destination a ‘new’ Nigeria! Only Mr. Obi has had the temerity to name his destination. It is a political risk because it threatens the existing behemoth and its supporting infrastructure of special interests and hegemonic warlords.

    But curiously, Mr. Obi’s campaign itinerary has not quite featured so much of the core north. He has concentrated instead on the south with occasionally forays into the north central zone. Yet the avalanche of depressing statistics that Mr. Obi constantly uses to enliven his campaign presentations are abundantly domiciled in the north. From all estimates, the north has become an embodiment of the Nigeria challenge at the present moment.

    Irrespective of our political leanings and preferences, no matter where else in Nigeria we live and call home and no matter what deities we worship and which direction we face when we pray, a common reality stares us all in the face. The development challenges and virtual carnage in the northern half of Nigeria concerns us all. It is in fact the most pressing urgency of our national existence today. And I doubt that we can anticipate any sensible political outcome in next month’s election without thinking deeply about where the outcome will place the north. In a certain curious sense, therefore, we are all northerners now on the basis of the national consequences of the many troubles we face in the north.

    Nowhere else is the new order of Obi’s message crying so loudly for its urgent realization than in what I choose to call the nation’s “Northern Hemisphere”. Obi wants to change Nigeria fundamentally by tackling the challenges that bedevil us. But he has not quite paid sufficient attention to the core north in his campaign road show so far.

    In the last eight years of Nigeria under Mr. Buhari’s APC government, the situation in the north has degenerated to a desperate level. Of the nation’s population of 130 million multi dimensionally poor people, 65% are in the north. Of the 20 million out of school kids in Nigeria, nearly 18 million are in the northern states. Since after the abduction of the 175 Chibok school girls, another 1,500 school kids in the north have been abducted and trucked away from their schools into slavery in all forms. A total of 11,336 primary and secondary schools all in the north have been closed because of the menace of terrorist abductors and kidnappers. Over 40,000 lives have been lost to terrorist insurgency mostly in the north kn the last decade. Of the estimated N680 million that has been paid as ransom to kidnappers, more than 60% was spent in the north, a region whose economic situation continues to tank by the day. Unemployment of youth prevails while foreign contractors and miners are perennial targets of kidnapping and senseless murder.

    A proliferation of small to medium military grade weapons ranging from AK- 47s, assorted machine guns, rocket propelled grenades and their launchers has rendered the region and the rest of the country a virtual playground for non state violent actors. Instead of learning plumbing, auto mechanics and other artisanal trades, healthy youth have been taught the rudinments of the fabrication of IEDs. Some of the northern states have graduated into net ‘exporters’ of armed dangerous herdsmen and other unknown gunmen to other states of the nation.

    Of the 19 states in the region, about half are virtual diarchies in which armed bandit war lords have been blackmailed into power sharing arrangements with democratically elected governors, sharing authority and sovereign control in murky exchanges of troves of cash.

    These challenges coincide with the objects of Mr. Obi’s national retrieval message. But he has not quite yet articulated a comprehensive vision for the recovery of north. Yet, this is where the bulk of our national wealth is trapped. All that vast arable land, the numerous solid mineral fields, the vast human resources waiting to be empowered with skills and knowledge etc. Mr. Obi has admittedly spoken briefly about combining Koranic education with skills and entrepreneurship training. He has also expressed a commitment to better security all over the country, better education, an agrarian revolution, and general improvements in health care. None of these indicates deep enough reflection or a comprehensive project of modernization on the scale of what has taken place in parts of the new Middle East. The Obi campaign work group needs to school itself on the instruments of the raging contemporary modernization in the Islamic and Arab world.

    Measured against its demographic size and its share of our current national problems, the north has not received the level of attention it deserves from the Labour Party in terms of campaign visits. Regrettably therefore, in spite of his growing national and international presence and gravitas, Mr. Obi remains a distant and vague presence in the imagination of the average core northerner. This should not be so.

    The Obi message of economic and socio political emancipation in a new Nigerian order where the people become the custodians of state power is a message our people in the core north need to hear. It is not an ethnic message nor a religious one. It is not a geo-political message either. People in the north do not want to hear the message of Nigeria’s recovery from the Buhari holocaust through hearsay or through surrogate messengers.

    The tumultuous crowds of Sokoto, Katsina, Kano, Maiduguri are waiting to get a first hand feel of Peter Obi’s personal magnetism. The noise of his political difference needs to be relayed first hand. When he embarks on this long awaited campaign tour, his pop star charisma should be complemented by a clear message delivered to local audiences preferably through Datti Ahmed, his very brilliant and cosmopolitan deputy. When that hour comes, people who attend those rallies will go home not with empty promises, paltry cash, branded little bags of rice and boxes of Indonesian noodles. There will be a hope that that perhaps after these elections, their lives will return to normal in a place of peace and calm they used to know.

    On the contrary, both Mr. Bola Tinubu of the APC and Atiku Abubakar of the PDP have made copious visits to the north. Arguably, these other candidates are on home ground campaigning in the north because they find it a convenient catchment area on account of their faith. There is nothing in that landscape that Mr. Peter Obi should be afraid of. Wherever he goes, he is on Nigerian soil with a patriotic message and mission. The prevalent mood of the region or even the entire nation is not one dictated by faith alone. It is a time of intense collective self -assessment of their experience in the hands of leaders who spoke this familiar language of politics as usual in the past.

    In response to the politics of ‘turn by turn’ the people of the north are now openly questioning the last eight years under the Buhari presidency. After all, it has been eight years under a fellow northerner; eight years under a Muslim lrader and eight years under a former army general . The people of the north are asking why their lot should be the litany of woes that now characterize their daily lives.

    In this nightmare, they have lost their farms to bandits, their livestock to sundry rustlers, their wives and daughters to armed rapists and bandits. They have lost the freedom to live their simple lives in peace because fear has become their most common daily experience. The kids they sent to school cannot come back except with knowledge of captivity as hostages in the hands of armed strangers sometimes speaking in strange tongues. A whole generation of young innocent Nigerians will grow up with life long trauma and psychological stress disorder. Even traditional rulers have been kidnapped for ransom. There is now a consensus throughout the region that their lives need to either be restored to the normalcy they knew before Buhari or improved in a new order.

    Irrespective of the outcome of next month’s presidential election, Mr. Peter Obi has earned the singular right to be taken seriously in the current campaign season. To that extent, his message and stated mission have become national assets which need to be shared by all Nigerians. He must not however run the risk of allowing his message to be quarantined away from any part of the nation. We all are entitled to the dividends of Peter Obi disruptive politics. In order to change our reality for the better, we must look the Nigerian monster in the face wrestle it to the ground and surmount it for a better future. The north is an auspicious battleground for our collective national salvation and renewal.

  • Buhari’s Long Farewell – By Chidi Amuta

    Buhari’s Long Farewell – By Chidi Amuta

    In recent weeks, President Muhammadu Buhari has been unusually busy. In addition to his normal routines in the line of duty, the president has been making the most of the last lap of his rather unflattering tenure. Through a series of farewell utterances and gestures that will last from now till May, he has been reminding Nigerians that he is on his way out of an eight year long paid vacation in Aso Rock Villa. In the process, he has assumed the role of his own personal valedictorian. Perhaps unsure of the tenacity of his in- house squad of town criers, the president is personally laying the guideposts for his way out of power and, in the process, implicitly defining the outlines of what he considers his legacy.

    While in Washington to attend the US-Africa conference last December, Mr. Buhari told virtually everyone that dropped by that he was tired of the job he has occupied for nearly as long as he spent seeking it. He told one audience that he felt constantly harassed on the job. He equally portrayed his Nigerian compatriots as hard to satisfy, insisting to a visiting United Arab Emirates interfaith delegation that he has ‘done his best’ for Nigeria. He continued on the same note a few days back when a government delegation from Burundi came calling at the Villa. In all of this, he has not failed to sing his own praises by highlighting what he considers his sterling achievements and landmark legacies.

    In an hour long documentary on his life and career trajectory which recently aired on major television networks nationwide, the president fills some gaps about his private life and provides some background to his actions both in office and in his private life.
    Buhari capped his valedictory resume in his final New Year message to Nigerians on January 1st.

    He summed up his defining mission in the theme of a man who meant well and gave of his best to his nation, but is leaving the helm under appreciated and harassed. The impression he givesof hisfellow Nigerians overwhom he presided is that of a people that are difficult to satisfy, a public whose expectations are sohigh that even the leader’s best is hardly enough. One of the highpoints of this recent personal self portraits is a certain note of self pity and even self- deprecating pathos when the president recalls his bitterness on realizing that quite a number of Nigerians had gone to town with the incredulous tale that the real Buhari died in a London hospital and was replaced by an Aso Rock power cabal with a Sudanese clone called Jubril. Nonetheless, like the old soldier that he is, Buhari indicated that he is leaving office on the familiar military commander’s note of: “mission accomplished”. The summary of what may turn out as Buhari’s long farewell is, therefore, simply this: ‘I have done my best for Nigeria.’

    Before the praises and condemnations drown out reason, Buhari needs to be acknowledged in his correct historical location. In the growing pantheon of Nigeria’s former rulers, Mr. Buhari is about to leave office in a blaze of some landmarks. Hate him or love him, the sprightly Daura general is likely to be the last of the civil war generals to ever seek elective presidential power in Nigeria. Buhari is also the second Nigerian leader to have presided over the affairs of the nation as both an active duty soldier and an elected civilian politician. Even in that capacity, he holds a record as the first of the retired civil war generals to seek the office of elected president for the highest number of times.

    More significantly, Buhari is the first Nigerian leader to be propped into elective power by a series of myths and to exit power after personally bursting and demolishing nearly all aspects of his enabling mythology.

    The myth of the ‘can do ‘ advocate has turned out a pathetic embodiment of epic incompetence. The man believed to be an island of personal integrity has comfortably co-habited with and stomached all manner of crooks around the citadel of power for eight years. His famed façade of impeccable nationalism has degenerated into unparalleled nativism, sectionalism and sickening nepotism. A reputation for careful economic management has plunged the nation into a N77 trillion debt pit with an exchange rate of over N750 to one US dollar. A general belief in the man’s military background as a solution to insecurity has converted the nation into a brutish killing field and virtual Hobbesian state of nature. A belief that Buhari could unite the nation around prudence and nationalism has yielded a nation that has become fragmented into hostile factions and ethnic enclaves. Our famed unity in diversity has turned into a nightmare of hate and endless recriminations.

    The irony that defines the essence of the Buhari phenomenon is perhaps best captured in beer parlor and barbershop banter all over the country. The joke on every street corner is that it is a curious blessing that the Buhari was returned to power. If he failed to return to power as an elected president after so many desperate attempts , , his ardent devotees would have tormented Nigerians by insisting that Nigeria is a ‘paradise lost’ because messiah Buhari was somehow excluded from presidential power by unkind forces. Some devotees may even have invaded the social media with posts lamenting about ‘the best president Nigeria never had’!

    Yet, Mr. Buhari cannot be denied certain scores. Whatever his end legacy ultimately turns out to be, Buhari achieved a feat in Nigerian history. As a military officer, he had enough professional presence to convince his colleagues to place him at the helm of a military administration for two years. He was also able to convince the political elite to make him electable in 2015 and to sustain him in power for two full presidential terms up to 2022. To that extent, he deserves the benefit of the doubts that accrue to every leader in a democracy.

    By its very nature, the challenge of leadership in a democracy includes the ability to walk the distance between good intentions and the limitations in execution forced by resource gaps and human factors. This is not to deny the force of public opinion in its responsibility to keep leaders on their toes. Leaders are elected to lead and deliver results that enhance the lives of the people, not to offer endless excuses. That is the imperative of public opinion in every democracy.

    In his newfound role as his own valedictorian, however, the president has just over reached himself. He says his rowdy ruling party, the All Progressives Congress(APC), has fulfilled ALL its campaign promises made to Nigerians in 2014-15! The president was perhaps obviously courting a needless controversy as his own contribution to the lifeless campaign of his troubled party. It could also be a deliberate distortion informed by his own habitual aloofness from reality. The chances are that an otherwise well meaning president may have been so alienated from the realities of the society that he is mistaking illusion for reality. In that case, it is quite possible that the APC may have been overcome by a viral amnesia. But the rest of us are still wide awake.

    Even then, not every Nigerian has the generosity of spirit to let Buhari go home in self delusion. Ever the gadfly of the public conscience, Catholic Bishop ofSokoto, Mathew Hassan Kukah , has unfailingly reminded Buhari that he has led Nigeria into “the valley of the shadows of death” and the depths of darkness.

    Most Nigerian adults recall vividly that in the run up to the 2015 elections, the APC with Mr. Buhari as its electoral mascot promised to end insecurity and terrorism, restore the economy by enhancing the Naira exchange rate then at N185 to US$1, fight corruption to a standstill, and ensure food security. We can only assess the outgoing Buhari administration by the extent of its success in these areas. These are targets and objectives it freely set for itself without any compulsion whatsoever. They are the articles of faith on the basis of which it sought and secured the mandate of the people. Even on this limited shopping list, the scorecard after eight years is too abysmally embarrassing to warrant any chest beating either by the party or its now lame duck flag bearer.

    It is good that Buhari returned and has ruled Nigeria for eight years as an elected president. In the course of this period, he has earned a right to be judged like every other elected sovereign. It is of course hard to deny any leader their right to self -assessment at the end of their tenure. No one can fairly deny this president some direct credits.

    A few roads and bridges have been built. Of particular note is the Second Niger Bridge at Onitsha, the first major federal infrastructure undertaking in the Southeast 53 years after the end of the civil war! Railway projects begun by previous administrations have been completed even if insecurity has made most of the rail corridors unusable. Passengers who boarded trains to familiar places have ended up in the den of bandits and kidnappers. A long delayed implementation of a petroleum industries bill has seen the national oil company restructured and prepped for full commercialization.

    Yet the menace of terrorism and universal insecurity remains pervasive. In spite of some feverish military operations in recent weeks, Boko Haram and its various franchises remain in active business in a number of states like Borno, Yobe, Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna and the president’s home state of Katsina. Elsewhere in the country, kidnapping, banditry, rampaging gunmen of various iterations remain on the loose and are causing death and mayhem on a scale hitherto unknown. Fears have recently risen that rampant insecurity in many parts of the country especially the southeast and northeast could frighten off many voters from the elections in February. At best there may be low voter turnout in the worst affected areas. At worst it could lead to ballot suppression in a few places thereby undermining the credibility and universal acceptability of the elections and their results. Bad political consequences might follow.

    The president and his team need not continue digging for legacies. They already have a surfeit of them. Mr. Buhari is leaving behind quite a few memorable firsts in the history of Nigerian governance. Insecurity in the last seven years has claimed more lives than at any other equivalent time frame in peace time Nigeria. In addition, the administration is leaving behind over 130 million Nigerians certified in the world’s largest poverty republic in the world. Over 40% of the total population of over 200 million is unemployed. For the first time since the creation of the 775 local governments, 550 of them are enveloped by insecurity, hit by terrorism, banditry, kidnapping or separatist insurgent violence. Of Nigeria’s 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), active combat military formations are engaged in internal security operations in 33 states. According to The Economist, over 3,000 Nigerians were kidnapped last year alone, another unprecedented legacy in the kitty of the administration.

    On the economic front, Mr. Buhari is also leaving quite some legacy. For the first time in Nigerian history, a serving Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria aspired and prepped to run for a presidential election as a partisan politician and still retained his office. The same individual has been sued to court by the apex internal security outfit, the Department of State Security (DSS), for alleged heinous offences including terrorism financing while still in office and nothing has been heard from the Presidency. For the first time in national history, over 100% of annual revenue is going into debt servicing. The 2023 federal budget contains the highest deficit figure (over 12 trillion Naira) in our national history with no clear indication of how the deficit will be financed. The Debt Management Office of the government has revealed that the Buhari government is leaving a debt of 77 trillion Naira for the incoming administration. For the first time also, the open market exchange rate of the Naira to the benchmark US dollar is now N750 to $1!

    At the level of governance, Mr. Buhari has set his own records. He has clocked up easily the highest number of travel air miles than his predecessors. He has been absent from the country for over 230 days, mostly on medical leave in the United kingdom. He has been in attendance at nearly every forum where Nigeria was expected to be present. These range from highly technical conferences whose subjects he knew little or nothing about to routine United Nations, African Union and ECOWAS assemblies of heads of state. And to think that this elaborate travel history has been undertaken by a government that never made articulated a foreign policy in eight years! The president played the role of foreign minister in spite of the fixture in that portfolio. This is in addition to the portfolio of petroleum minister which Buhari held for the entire eight years of his two terms.

    It is a curious tribute to Mr. Buhari’s unique contribution to Nigerian governance that he maintained a system in which key ministers and heads of strategic institutions were running their own shows in an uncoordinated administration in which the government spoke with several voices on nearly every important subject of national interest.

    While the government is crowing about its positive achievements at home, a record number of Nigerian youth, including qualified professionals in medicine, information technology, basic sciences, engineering and nursing are trooping out of the country in an unprecedented deluge of emigration hitherto unknown in Nigerian history. Our skilled youth are trooping to Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, United Arab Emirates, South Africa and Australia.

    This catalogue of unenviable legacies ought to compel a more penitent attitude on the part of the outgoing president and his party. They ought to be items in a rhetoric of regret and even apologies to most Nigerians who now feel largely betrayed by a government and party they gave an overwhelming mandate to make their lives better but instead turned the country into a hell hole.

    Perhaps President Buhari’s most enduring legacy is to be located in the subversive essence of the nation he is leaving behind. Because of the Buhari misfortune, Nigerians are now poised to make democracy produce leaders who will ensure that the country is no longer unsafe, that the economy will never again be left in disarray and that our nation is rescued from disintegration. It is the determination never again to see a repeat of the Buhari model of leadership that has become the driving force behind the enthusiasm about next month’s general elections. As Nigerians unanimously look forward to positive anti-Buhari change on May 29th, the attitude to President Buhari and his long good bye is simply: Just Go! Enough is Enough!!

  • Pope Obasanjo’s message – By Chidi Amuta

    Pope Obasanjo’s message – By Chidi Amuta

    Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has once again done what he is reputed for. He has cast a big stone into Nigeria’s brackish political pool. The splash is all over the place. Like a papal encyclical, Obasanjo’s new year day’s endorsement of Labour Party’s Mr. Peter Obi for the imminent presidential election has hit the political landscape with some loud bang. Some partisans still pretend they cannot hear the bang. But the feverish responses testify to a political landscape that is basically agitated by a disruptive presence.

    Obasanjo’s intervention has come in the midst of a rudderless campaign that is heavy on personal abuse and light on issues, substance and depth. Admittedly, the Abeokuta general has neither deepened nor expanded the scope of the ongoing campaigns. He merely threw his mass into the tripartite partisan scale on the side of Mr. Peter Obi. And by bundling Mr. Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar into one heap of “politics as usual” compartment, Obasanjo has vicariously restored the original bipartisan architecture of the looming contest by redesigning it. The election is now a referendum between Obi’s ‘new nation’ youth driven politics versus the old traditional politics that we are used to and largely fed up with .

    Afraid that his intervention might be orphaned, Obasanjo embraces the youth appeal of Mr. Obi’s movement. His appeal to the youth is as pointed as it is trenchantly self -serving. But it does resonate with a contemporary relevance that is clear and urgent. The youth of Nigeria , to be fair, constitute the target audience of much of Obi’s appeal and are the definitive demographics that every serious politician should now target.

    Predictably, Obasanjo’s endorsement of Obi has been greeted by a barrage of hostile verbal and media firepower from three predictable quarters. Obasanjo predicates his endorsement on the carnage that has been created by incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari and his APC devotees. So, Obasanjo has vicariously lumped Mr. Buhari and the other two major parties in one untidy heap.

    On their part, the major contenders and their parties have understandably swooped mercilessly on the Owu chief. Of course, the jungle rules of partisan dueling dictate that the friend of your opponent automatically becomes your adversary. The APC and PDP have a right, indeed an obligation, to jump on Obasanjo and try to diminish the import of his endorsement intervention. And the easiest way to do this is to go after the man and his past.

    For the APC in particular, there are multiple echoes underneath the disquiet. Some APC partisans see Obasanjo’s inherent opposition as a continuation of his frequent anti Buhari stance. Some may even concluded that it may be a nostalgic hangover effect of his previous PDP alignment.

    The presidency’s attack hounds have sprang into action, smelling blood in Obasanjo’s current unfriendly political trail. They have delved into motives and reduced the endorsement to the continuation of a personality contest between Mr. Buhari and Obasanjo, his erstwhile boss and supporter. They have of course gone into an untenable comparison of Obasanjo’s gigantic national and international stature with Buhari’s more modest and even pathetic credentials.

    Other predictable castigations of Mr. Obasanjo’s perceived partisan meddlesomeness have followed in tandem by a parade of pro regime attack hounds. It remains doubtful whether any significant audience will spare a second for the Aso Rock rebuttals and authorized bullying. The Buhari lame duck incumbency is too badly degraded and terminally deformed to attract any meaningful audience.

    Within the Tinubu camp, there is a hint that Obasanjo is continuing the anti Tinubu streak that characterized his attitude as president to Tinubu as governor of Lagos state. Beneath the reactions to Obasanjo’s endorsement of Obi is a loud echo of ethno national discontent and sense of kinship entitlement.

    On the part of Mr. Atiku and the PDP, the animosity is somewhat personal. No one knows exactly what transpired between both men in their Aso Rock days. While Atiku keeps trumpeting his stewardship as Obasanjo’s deputy as his cardinal qualification for insisting on seeking a job he had sought on three previous occasions, Mr. Obasanjo does not seem to have been so impressed by Mr. Atiku’s deputizing skills. Obasanjo remains hesitant to entrust Nigeria’s future into Atiku’s hands. An applicant for a job who cannot get a ready positive reference from his boss of eight years definitely has a bit of private soul searching to do.

    Politically, the repeated question has been that of whether Obasanjo’s endorsement carries any political weight. Yes, it does to an extent. Obasanjo is a two term elected president. To that extent, he comes with considerable national political gravity. That political heft is however dispersed instead of being localized in his home base southwest environment. His name recognition is phenomenal both nationally and internationally. Every voting age Nigerian knows Obasanjo even if not everybody loves him. To that extent, Obasanjo’s knock can open a few important doors for Mr. Obi at home and abroad. Among the so -called ‘owners of Nigeria’ the pantheon of former Nigerian leaders and political heavy weights whose influence controls Nigerian affairs, Obasanjo is not exactly a light weight. He shares with Babangida a certain oracular import that can get many Nigerians looking up at least to listen.

    In terms of votes, which ultimately will determine who moves into Aso Rock Villa, Obasanjo’s endorsement of Obi will deny Atiku and Tinubu a few thousand votes and cause both of them many nights of insomnia. In an electoral democracy, Obasanjo of course has one vote. But his voice resonates in the ears and hearts of many. Yet by endorsing Mr. Obi, Obasanjo could sway quite a few undecided voters. Statistically, every vote lost to Tinubu and Atiku by Obasanjo’s urging would be a vote earned by Mr. Obi.

    To that extent, the Obasanjo endorsement can contribute a substantial trove of votes to Obi’s growing popularity and disruptive power to the political status quo.

    On the surface, those who may not support the emergence of Mr. Obi as Nigeria’s future president have dismissed the Obasanjo endorsement as inconsequential. Yet the loudness of their protests, condemnations and tirades indicate a high level of anxiety which may be an admission of the threat posed by Mr. Peter Obi. Mr. Obi’s rising profile is understandably menacing to the collective unconscious of the Nigerian political establishment in the post civil war era. The unstated discomfort about Mr. Obi’s prospects come from a subliminal discomfort with the sound of his surname and maybe his mode of worship.

    Nonetheless, at the level of basic norms of democracy, those who have been condemning Obasanjo for this endorsement are being unfair and even deliberately mischievous. As a citizen, Mr. Obasanjo, like everyone else, has a right to express his preference for any of the candidates vying for the office of president. It is his inalienable right. It is an expression of his freedom of choice under the law. We should respect that freedom and strenuously protect it both for Mr. Obasanjo and for every other single Nigerian. To abuse, excoriate or torment Obasanjo for holding views, expressing a preference for or even a partisan alignment is to go against this fundamental tenet of democracy.

    In saying so, one is fully cognizant of Obasanjo’s problematic roles and history in Nigeria’s previous leadership selection processes. As an outgoing president in 2007, Mr. Obasanjo arm twisted his PDP machinery to enthrone the ailing Mr. Yar’dua as his successor in office. With the benefit of hindsight, that act runs against his current reservations against one of the presidential candidates in the 2023 race on grounds of health. Similarly, his role in the emergence of both Goodluck Jonathan as Yar’dua’s successor has come under attack. On the surface, thes interventions fly in the face of his persistent pretensions to absolute objectivity in matters of national leadership. But underneath Obasanjo’s past interventions in our leadership slection, there is a perceivable strategic intent. Geopolitically, the northern Yar’dua was a natural choice after eight years of an Obasanjo southerner. Similarly, a Goodluck Jonathan was a logical palliative to the restiveness and cries for justice in the Niger Delta. Fifty three years after the civil war and unbroken exclusion of Igbos from apex political leadership, there is both a strategic logic and an overarching urgent moral imperative to Obasanjo’s Peter Obi endorsement.

    But as he rightly admits in his latest papal message, no one is infallible in matters of political judgment. Both society and politics are dynamic. Obasanjo cannot be denied the right to adjust his political alignments and beliefs in line with changing national realities. This is the context in which his endorsement of Mr. Obi becomes understandable. And in all fairness, Obasanjo is on record as having made repeated efforts to birth a Third Force in Nigeria’s political architecture. His aim in these efforts has been to break the bipartisan monopoly of two dominant parties in the post military politics of the country. It is quite possible that Obasanjo may have seen in the emergence and momentum of Mr. Obi’s ‘OBIdients’ and the Labour Party a short cut to his pet project of a Third Force. Every political experiment needs a chance to prove itself.

    Hate him or love him, nonetheless, the positive contributions of Mr. Obasanjo to our national evolution cannot be denied or sacrificed on the altar of present political expediency. Nor can anyone rightfully diminish Obasanjo as a credible role model for Nigeria’s aspiring leadership. Yes, Obasanjo is not infallible. He can be instinctually bullish at times. He has a tendency to want to monopolize wisdom even on matters that he knows little about. He is frequently subject to an unmerited messianic complex. He has this disturbing tendency to feel that no one else can surpass his contribution to Nigeria’s development and progress. All these are well within the limits of the range of flaws allowed a heroic figure and historic personage.

    Yet he remains a beacon of willful personal accomplishment and therefore a good role model for our youth. From very modest beginnings as an ordinary army mechanic, Obasanjo rose to become an active combat officer struggling to become a gentleman. History thrust him into the roles of deputy to Murtala Mohammed and subsequently Head of State. As military Head of State, he is on record as the first of our military leaders to hand over power peacefully to a democratically elected civilian administration in 1979. Later, when he was elected president, he was also the first democratically elected leader to hand over power to a successor democratically elected administration in 2007. To that extent, his contributions to the emergence of Nigerian democracy remains unsurpassed and cannot be waved off casually.

    At the level of personal improvement and leadership preparation, Obasanjo since has since after retiring from the military in 1979 embarked on significant self -improvement in education especially. In addition to owning and running schools and universities, he has personally undertaken significant adult education. In the process, he has earned post graduate degrees including a Ph.D. from the National Open university of Nigeria. In these post- retirement years, he has written books and papers on a variety of subjects such as politics, warfare, governance, African development, international relations, religion, self- improvement and agriculture. To wit, he has also been a ‘political prisoner’ during Abacha’s bloody interregnum, a veritable ‘qualification’ of many third world politicians.

    Obasanjo remains a detribalized leader, a transparent and inclusive patriot and a veritable inspiration for those who seek leadership that tried to govern responsibly in his days both as military and elected sovereign. It is on record that as elected president, Obasanjo led the last growth driven administration which also reduced our external debt burden to almost zero. Because of these and his other many interventions in national history, Mr. Obasanjo has earned a right to judge subsequent administrations on matters of responsible leadership and reasonably accountable governance. Above all, he has earned a right to be heard on major national issues and at critical moments of national history. To ignore his towering nationalistic import and instead take to castigating and insulting him is political bad manners and polemical rascality taken to ridiculous levels. That such personal abuses and insults are coming from the sundry minions of today’s presiding Medieval court says much about the level of decline of not only our public affairs but also a certain collapse of public discourse and civil communication in our nation.

    It matters little to this reporter who Obasanjo decides to endorse or oppose for 2023. That is squarely within his democratic prerogative as a citizen of Nigerian. Leaders and followers alike reserve the right to support or pull their support from candidates of their choice. In the run up to the 2021 US presidential election, America’s past leaders like George Bush Jr., Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and even Jimmy Carter refused to endorse Donald Trump for a second term in the White House. Other major voices and leaders like the late Collin Powell and many past military and key civil leaders joined in the opposition to Trump. In America’s bipartisan political architecture, refusal to endorse Trump invariably implied endorsement of Joe Biden. Biden won clean and square and American democracy got a chance to recover from the tragedy of Trump’s first term.

    But in all this, I must confess to a personal sympathy for Mr. Obasanjo and a high regard for his patriotic fervor. While I detest his sanctimonious rhetoric and crude methods, I must pay tribute to his unstinted nationalism, essential humanism and inclusive patriotism. His sense of inclusiveness and embrace of our diversity remain unquestionable.

    In 1970 as Commander of the Third Marine Commando Division, he had the task of bringing the Biafran war to a close by receiving Biafra’s surrender instruments. Obasanjo had a choice. He had all the instruments of war and a decisive open-ended command in a chaotic atmosphere. He could have exterminated most Biafrans. He did not. That principled conduct spared Nigeria a heritage of last minute genocide, thus ensuring an orderly end to an unfortunate conflict.

    A Pope is after all still a human like the rest of us. But the roles implicit in the discharge of his papal duties make him infallible in the eyes of the faithful. Pope Obasanjo is one of us!

  • 2023: Of polls, projections and partisanship – By Chidi Amuta

    2023: Of polls, projections and partisanship – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigerians are a very impatient people. Our hunger for instant outcomes should have made us the nation that invented the microwave oven. But our impatience is directed at other ends. We can at least content ourselves with the many unusual things that we have reinvented and perfected our instincts in, namely, politics and religion.

    Politics is the immediate one on the table. Campaigns for the 2023 elections are raging. Three and half major contestants have acquired pre eminence in an unconscious reincarnation of Nigeria’s original ethnic tripod.  Each one of the hopefuls is suffering from the principal disease of politicians, incurable optimism. The elections are still two months away but the presidential contenders and the public are eager for the results to be announced even before the first ballots are cast. To fill the gap of anxiety, something interim and deceptive has crept in to fill the void of anxiety. It is the rash of Mickey Mouse opinion polls and sometimes wild partisan projections on the outcome of the presidential elections.

    Three and half major contestants have emerged, each one of them suffering from the principal disease of politicians, incurable optimism. Since the elections are still two months away while the contestants, especially at the presidential level, are eager for the results to be announced even before the first ballots are cast. While we all wait, something interim has crept in to fill the void. It is the rash of Mickey Mouse opinion polls and sometimes thinly veiled partisan projections on the outcome of the elections.

    Opinion polls and informed speculations on the possible outcomes of an imminent election have become an integral part of election seasons in most democracies. As an intellectual undertaking, an opinion poll is an enlightened guess as to the possible outcome of an election. It takes into consideration known factors and variables in the electoral environment. Poll results, if based on accurate scientific variables, can help politicians and the electorate prepare for the inevitable and the imminent.

    In the best of traditions, polls are first and foremost scientific tools and ought to be free from intellectual shortcuts and partisan mischief. Once a poll is exposed as defective in method and intent, it loses its validity as a tool for forecasting the future. A pollster with a reputation for dodgy partisan poll results lose their affiliation with the realm of science and head in the direction of superstition or partisan jingoism.

    The credibility of a polling company or agency is a function of the tested predictive validity of their polls in repeated instances or repeated occasions on a wide variety of events or subjects. Even then, in order to be respectable and reputable, an opinion poll must of necessity contain certain indices that would reassure the public of their objectivity, fairness and thus credibility.

    The public needs to know the size of the polling sample; the basis for the determination of the sample size, the representativeness, geographical spread, age distribution and occupational disposition of the polled sample. We need to know the method of polling (questionnaire, phone calls, online questionnaires) as well as the margin of error allowed in the final computations. In the absence of these standard verifiable parameters and indices, a published opinion poll opens itself to questions that can be tricky to answer. The credibility of a poll is independent of how lofty and fanciful its promoter’s or author’s name or status may sound.

    Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election in particular has been awash with all manner of polls and speculations. It started much earlier but from more respectable quarters. The earliest polls on who is likely to win the forthcoming presidential polls came earlier in the year mostly from foreign media outlets. Powered by global interest in Nigeria and its precarious plight, a number of international media outlets have published sometimes very impressionistic projections on the outcome of our next presidential election.

    I believe it was Bloomberg that popped the first cork with a poll projection that indicated that the newest entrant in Nigeria’s presidential contest, Mr. Peter Obi, was likely to move into Aso Rock come next May. Obi was by then the newest kid on the political block with a novel message and method. The Nigerian media was literally ablaze with a supermarket of opinions on that poll. Both those who agreed with Bloomberg and those who did not, took positions based mostly on raw unvarnished emotions and partisanship as well as the many familiar murky computations (ethnicity, religion, economic interest etc) that condition the political reflexes of most Nigerians.

    Other polls and media based projections have since followed in quick succession. In October, a Fitch Solutions and Country Risk Research Report poll indicated that Mr. Bola Tinubu, flagbearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC) would win the Nigerian presidency if the elections were to hold then. Similarly, the influential Economist Intelligence Unit in its 2022 Annual Country Report on Nigeria predicted a Tinubu victory. This particular prediction indicated that Mr. Tinubu’s controversial Muslim-Muslim ticket would be inconsequential in determining his victory in the election.

    In similar vein, last September, a hitherto unknown group We2Geda Foundation reportedly conducted a poll among registered voters and predicted that Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party would score a 51% lead over his fellow contestants. In this rash of polls and projections, Mr. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has not been quite as lucky as his fellow contestants in spite of his solid leadership and experience profile. The least fortunate player has been Mr. Kwakwanso of the NNPP. Some say it is because his name is a bit hard to pronounce while the acronym of his party has one letter too many compared to the three leading contenders!

    Polls have come to be recognized for what they are: highly educated guesses about projected electoral outcomes. The validity of polls in democracies is a function of the level of education and enlightenment in the society. The more generally developed the society, the more reliable the polls tend to be because they derive from the general spirit of enlightenment and scientific consciousness of the society. In less enlightened environments, the electorate is mostly illiterate or politically unenlightened. In such places, people neither believe in nor participate in polling exercises. The percentage of undecided voters is very high because people just wait and cast their votes and await the results.

    But even in the enlightened western democracies, polls are never accurate or foolproof but mostly indicative. Professional polling companies and agencies have occasionally found themselves embarrassed by their own projections in specific electoral instances. For instance, nearly every US opinion poll including the famous Gallup was worsted by their miscalculations during the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton presidential contest in 2016. The pollsters became a little more cautious by the 2020/1 Biden versus Trump race. Accuracy improved even though the margins of error narrowed significantly.

    On the Nigerian presidential election, by far the most contentious recent polls and projections on the 2023 presidential election are those that have come from Mr. Atedo Peterside’s ANAP Polls and of course the speculative projection by Thisday Newspapers last weekend. The NOI/ANAP poll on the 2023 presidential contest in Nigeria gives Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party a solid lead over his two other frontline contestants. The NOI/ANAP poll could have been left to defend itself with its less than transparent parameters. But typically, the organizing and overriding intelligence in this enterprise would seem to be the political slant and interests of Mr Atedo Peterside, banking and finance oligarch. He has been most reluctant to distance his personal partisanship perspectives  from ANAP polls and their findings. Following the release of the latest of his contentious polls, he was on Channels Television to rationalize the veracity of the polls and its conclusions.

    Quite worrisomely, the credibility of the ANAP poll is not helped by its previous doubtful outings. In the run up to the 2015 elections, ANAP predicted a slim victory for Mr. Goodluck Jonathan against Mr Buhari which ended up being the reverse. Similarly, ANAP predicted a narrow margin of victory for Buhari against Atiku which was wide off the mark.

    Ordinarily, the chances of credibility for ANAP’s poll predictions could probably have improved but for Mr. Peterside’s frequent personal editorial interventions either as a defender or explainer of the rationale for these dodgy polls. Nothing is wrong with an oligarch owning a polling outfit. It may even serve the partisan ends of the oligarch in question if his polling company or outfit were to become reputable and reliable. That way, the polls could become an instrument of power mongering and influence peddling. But to engineer an apriori  skewed opinion poll and still proceed to editorialize in defense of its partisan drift is enlightened self interest driven to the brinks.

    On its part, the Thisday’s speculative projection predicts that the elections may be decided  in a runoff since neither of the contestants is likely to score 25% of voters in two thirds of the states of the federation. By the Thisday projection, Mr. Atiku will lead the pack in 23 states followed by Mr. Tinubu in 22 states. Mr. Obi and his Labour Party are projected to come third with barely 25% score in16 states. The newspaper predicts a possible runoff between the two frontrunners , namely, between Mr. Tinubu and Mr. Atiku with Mr. Obi clinging precariously to a third position. The fact that the Thisday projection has grated rather adversely on the political perceptions of even the newspapers’s most ardent readers must concern the authors of that troubling projection.

    Thankfully, the Thisday projection makes no pretensions to being an opinion poll by any stretch of the imagination. It lays no claims to the familiar known polling parameters as guideposts. As a national newspaper, Thisday can justifiably lay claims to a certain familiarity with the national political terrain to be able to project on possible outcomes in the forthcoming presidential elections. But to proceed from a free ranging speculative projection to allocate percentages of votes to different geo political zones is a bit worrisome and presumptious.

    A projection like Thisday’s seems rooted in a certain fixation with Nigeria’s known political indices: religion, region, ethnicity etc. However, a projection like this also fails to capture the national landscape in its dynamic and vastly altered state. Nigerians now live and vote everywhere in the nation irrespective of their ethnicity. There are hardly any pure ethnicities in the country. We are all mixed up and interspersed now. Religion has become a political determinant only in so far as a prevailing political order has weaponized it to make it a factor in the choices that voters have to make in 2023. Other critical indices of political choice have emerged.

    A critical mass of citizens have since attained voting age. The demographic profile of the country has since altered in favour of a youth bulge of persons aged between 18 and 38, making persons aged 38 and under the majority of the population. The issues that will determine where and how people are likely to vote in 2023 have vastly been changed by the actions or inactions of the incumbent order. Suddenly, insecurity, unemployment, failing education, cost of living, quantum poverty have popped to dominate public discourse and election campaign rhetoric. A more perceptive newspaper-based election projection ought to reflect these new variables in the Nigerian environment in a more methodical and systematic manner.

    In a politically charged atmosphere such as the current situation in Nigeria, every poll is subject to suspicion except where its scientific veracity is impeccable. More so, in a political atmosphere, a poll can become victim of the use of an intellectual tool to influence the outcome of a democratic process. There have been far too many instances where polls have been used to deceive the public or market an outright falsehood. On the eve of the last APC presidential primaries, one such poll was advertised on the front page of literally all national dailies indicating that the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was the clear choice of his party. The survey was complete with graphs, holographs, statistical computations, demographic and geo political distribution etc.

    On the contrary, the disguise of a politically motivated partisan speculation as an opinion poll or valid electoral projection is basically fraudulent and mischievous. This is made more dangerous by the fact of our illiterate and gullible populace and an electorate that is easily swayed by elite predispositions. As elite often at the helm of fancy media and corporate outfits, the ordinary people look up to us to proffer enlightened and reasonably honest leads to the direction of political developments. To deliberately feed the public with individual or collective partisan biases and dress it up as respectable opinion polls or credible projections is elite mischief carried to the extreme.

    As an instrument for the prediction of who becomes Nigeria’s next president, the various elite polls and projections have limited value. The majority of those whose votes will determine the outcome of the elections do not care about fancy intellectual polls.

    Even up to this moment, no one can determine precisely where the pendulum of outcome is tilting in terms of the outcome of the 2023 presidential elections. The reason is that most of the parameters for past predictions have largely been overtaken by recent developments both in the demographics of the Nigerian electorate and the issues that will determine how and why people will vote.

    In a world ruled by a flux of factors, the safest place to anchor our expectations is to seek refuge in the best available technologies to deliver outcomes that we can at least believe in. That, perhaps, is where we are in Nigeria on the eve of the crucial 2023 elections.

  • Christmas in the Age of ‘Delete’ – By Chidi Amuta

    Christmas in the Age of ‘Delete’ – By Chidi Amuta

    Jingle bells! Jingle bells!! Jingle all the way!!!

    Christian clergy and congregations all over the world will today flock and dance all the way to the altar in an ancient commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ. Joy to the world and food in abundance to those who can afford it are emblematic of a season of goodwill and peace to all of believing humanity. Christmas has become more than the holy birthday which it was originally intended as. It now has something to offer to all and sundry including those whose hope fopr salvation is tilted in different directions.

    The current commercial and mercantile essence of Christmas is ironically an aberration, an act of disobedience and defiance of an early injunction from the messiah himself. Those familiar with the biblical chronicles will recall the image of a young swash buckling Christ on horseback who rode in anger to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem to disperse traders and gamblers who had made the Temple their shop floor. Ostensibly with horse whip in hand, he scattered their wares, upset their trading tables and in anger whipped them as they scampered in different directions. He charged them with defilement f a holy place by converting the temple into a ‘den of theives’ and a haven of iniquity. He left them with an eternal injunction that the temple was never intended as a place of commerce. It was an act of defilemnet to convert the place of worship into a place of trade. In other worlds, the work of God and its holy places was never to be degraded through commercialism and the drive for profit.

    By an irony of history, after several centuries of that mass flogging and original injunction, humanity has become curiously united in the global retail frenzy and annual ritual of consumerism of the season of Christmas. The familiar tunes of Christmas – ‘Jingle Bells!’, ‘Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer!!’, “Noel Noel!!!”, “Silent Nights, Holy Nights!” now openly clash with the clanging of tills and cash registers in mega retail shops as millions of shoppers get immersed in orgies of Christmas shopping all over the world.

    Soon after Christmas day, it has become customary for retail business managers, accountants and executives to tall’y their sales figures and sum up their books as the best way to terminate the monotony of the ‘’jingle bells” season. They grin and dance ‘all the way’ to the banks. In the 2021, for instance, total retail sales over Christmas in the United States alone was $889.30 billion. In the 19 countries of the European Union, the numbers were a staggering 3.1 trillion Euro. The figures for 2022 are expected to be even higher in spite of economic hardship and the earlier lull caused by the Covid emergency. The profit creed of retail consumer executives the world over has now overwhelmed the sober celebration of the birth of a sectarian messiah. Gold versus God has become the summation of the phenomenon of Christmas. Body over spirit.

    Largely stripped of its original religious essence, Christmas has since degenerated into more of a fixture in the revenue calendar of retailers worldwide. It is estimated that retail vendors of apparel, grocery, decorations, costumes and allied seasonal wares and accessories expect over 65% of their annual turnover to happen over the Christmas season alone. Christmas has become a holy birthday seized by the frenzy of a global market place.

    There is above all else, a certain cultural frenzy and carnivalesque effusion about the entire Christmas enterprise. It has become a season of global frenzy. City landmarks are decorated in glittering and dazzling illumination. Shops, entertainment and amusement centres and sundry retail outlets wear similar dazzle. An effusion of neon lights at night hide the depressing reality of a world that is nasty in the day. The global culture of aggressive merchandizing has since overthrown the Vatican and other high places of Christendom in the ownership of Christmas. The battle for the souls of men has nearly been overwhelmed by the scramble for the dollar in every consumer’s pocket.

    Christmas is not a lone victim of this invasion by the demons of the market place. It is like that for most important religious and cultural festivities on the global calendar. It does not matter if it the Chinese Lunar New Year, the various Muslim holy observances. These special occasions have also become important markers on the calendar of profit hungry barons and mega retailers. Take St. Valentine’s day for instance. It is no longer a day merely dedicated to the celebration of love in the tradition of Cupid. It has become more a field day for the explosion of retail trade. An array of restaurants, fast food vendors, ‘mama put’ kiosks and merchandizers of assorted inconsequential wares apparel, gifts, flowers etc. Red -themed costumes and accessories are the favourites because Cupid’s arrow of love pierced the hearts of the lovers and sprinkled the world with the blood of lovers thenceforth! Profit hungry merchandizers of Valentine’s goods nicely disguise their greed as an elaborate ceremony of love.

    Christmas is not all about shopping and merchandize trafficking. It has become a time for the global end of year travel and vacation. It is literally a period of travel frenzy. The global travel and hospitality industries have become part of the Christmas industry. Airlines, cruise companies, hotels etc witness their largest annual traffic during summer and over Christmas. It is time to catch up with family and friends. This year alone, the airline industry in the United States estimates that an estimated 10 million passengers will take 97,715 flights through US domestic airports this holiday season while an estimated 113 million Americans will drive to various destinations by road in the same period.

    In Nigeria, Christmas is a season of home going for many Nigerians especially in the southern parts. Air fares skyrocket just as transport fares by land transportation also head for the skies. In the South- eastern parts of the country, end of year homecoming is a cultural constant. It is a time of great reunion among families and communities. It is time to embark on community development projects and to renew the bonds of fraternity that hold communities together.

    In recent years, however, the disrepair of the Nigerian state has adversely affect this cultural practice. The places that we used to call home have become strange and dangerous. Danger and violence now lie in wait at nearly every turn on the way home. Kidnappers and bad people lie in wait. A good number of people can no longer go home. Christmas used to be another name for this ritual of home going. These days, when people from those parts are asked: “Will you go for Christmas?”, the spontaneous answer is now: ”There is no more Christmas!”

    The Nigerian state in its incremental meltdown has killed Christmas for most Nigerians. Food inflation and serial poverty have taken away food from most tables. A bad state has put a knife in the things that once gave us hope and held us together. We can sum up the present realities of our nation in the idiom of the great novelist Chinua Achebe. As he lamented, “things have fallen apart”. There is no longer a center let alone one that can hold a nation or a people together. The arrows of a bad god have felled many good people and the nation is “no longer at ease”. The 2023 election now comes down to a frantic and desperate search for “a man of the people”!

    Among the things that once used to mark out Christmas as memorable, the Christmas card used to be iconic and ever present. But the Christmas card is dead! Long live the spirit of Christmas fellowship and seasonal greetings. Christmas greeting cards used to be a sizeable chunk of the wares of book sellers, stationers, grocery shops and road side kiosks all over the world at this time of the year. It used to be part of the ritual of Christmas observance in homes and offices to stage an elaborate display of all manner of Christmas cards from years past . It was part of domestic and office decor if only to display the expanse of one’s social network and sphere of good will.

    All manner of adaptations of designs became part of the Christmas card world. The most traditional were the ones foregrounded in the snowy white landscapes of the arctic. Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeers, the dog sleighs and reindeer drawn wagons of the frigid arctic were the readiest design motifs on most traditional Christmas cards. As cultural diversity came, so did the diversity of designs on Christmas cards come to reflect the multitude of landscapes. Turkeys and rams on their way to the guillotine, cooking pots and frying pans and ovens of Christmas luncheons joined the parade of artistic motifs. Individuals were joined by corporations and institutions as dispensers of Christmas cards.

    Suddenly, technology crept in to erode aspects of this Christmas tradition. The once thriving industry of Christmas cards and associated printed wares has suddenly been supplanted by a digital revolution. The Christmas card made the good wishes of friends and loved ones tangible pieces with a diversity of messages. You had something to hold and keep even after the season.

    The information age and its enabling gadgets of computers, tablets, and assorted cellphones has come to snatch away the good old Christmas card. Digital instant messaging by SMS, emails, Whatsapp, Tweets etc have since become the most widespread formats of sending and receiving messages on nearly every subject under the sun. Christmas wishes are now exchanged mostly through these freeways of the new technologies. Through a litany of applications and formats, individuals can now design and customize their messages on nearly every subject and every occasion. People can even print beautiful greeting cards if they so choose.

    Those who have no time for such creative indulgence just send the lazy “Merry Christmas” and copy and paste it to a multitude of recipients including total strangers on your contact list. In a few seconds and at the touch of a button on the keyboard of a two penny cellphone, your good wishes to everyman for Christmas are shared and forwarded to myriads of people all over the world.

    Distance has been erased. In nearly every country, the postal services have lost most of their revenue and almost died. Post boxes are becoming moribund. Courier companies have similarly been bled and compelled to find work in ferrying gifts and presents on behalf of Amazon and other mass merchandizing multinational companies. Thank God some people still send and receive gifts at Christmas.

    In Nigeria, some smart companies no longer encourage the elaborate spending on Christmas gifts. The now say there is something called Corporate Social Responsibility. It is better to aggregate the gifts of the company and instead of giving them to individuals or even staff, let every one join the company by surrendering their Christmas gifts in support of a ‘good cause’. No one has audited how many of these companies really support any good or even bad or doubtful causes. Smart executives have found a way of saving money for these companies through support for phantom charities and ‘good’ or bad causes.

    By far the most selfish outgrowth of this digital invasion of the world of good wishes and camaraderie is the coming of fantasy digital Christmas food and drinks ferried around the social media. Welcome to the era of digital celebrations. Countless Emojis, templates and minute designs of cocktails, clicking glasses, fancy cakes, eye popping turkeys and mouth watering set dinners and other celebratory fares are sent across great distances to friends and well wishers on their special occasions. Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings etc. If you ask too many old questions, you get a microwave answer: ‘the important thing is the thought!!’ ‘ At least someone remembered you even from afar!!!’

    Like most things in this digital age, people choose what is important to in every handheld device. Our freedom of choice has been reduced to the keyboard in every miserable device. Choose your favourite button on the keyboard.

    For me, the most important button on the keyboard is the ‘delete’ button. If a caller becomes an irritant, press delete. If a contact becomes a pest, press delete. If a relationship becomes a headache, press delete. If you succumb to greed masquerading as love with a sharp eye for that bank alert from you, press delete. If family harasses the life out of you for money and support, press delete. If a friendship goes cold, press delete. When the messages on your Whatsapp folder become too many, press delete. After this Christmas and its barrage of exchanges of good will and unwarranted greetings, real or imagined, press delete. After all, there is no way of remembering to whom those messages of goodwill went and for what reason.

    Some greetings were acts of ritual. Others were acts of genuine affection and familiarity. Some may be for old time’s sake. But the majority may have been spontaneous reflex acts of seasonal fashion. Whatever may have prompted those spontaneous bulk Christmas SMS, emails, Whatsapp messages, Tweets, Instagram posts etc, they all die a common death and are buried in a common cemetery: DELETE!!

    Merry Christmas everyone! Please do not DELETE this wish.

  • Democracy and its Discontents – By Chidi Amuta

    Democracy and its Discontents – By Chidi Amuta

    In his most recent book, Liberalism and its Discontents, leading American political philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, throws light on the imminent crisis of democracy.  The historical logic of democracy’s development is leading liberal democracy in particular towards a disastrous unraveling worldwide. But the unfolding catastrophe of democracy will impact nations according to the stage at which they are in their individual democratic development.

    The advanced Western democracies have since coupled democratic freedom with individual rights of choice in order to qualify as liberal democracies. “I choose for myself, therefore, I am” seems to be the cardinal axiom of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is therefore the highest form in the development of democracy. In a liberal democracy, citizens are first recognized as free agents entitled to the fullest expressions of democratic choice and rights. But in addition, those rights are rooted in the individual’s freedom of choice as an individual that is different from all other individuals. In liberal democracy, the individual’s choice is not encumbered by tribe, tongue, faith, ethnicity, region and skin colour. It is that free entitlement to subscribe to democracy as an animal of choice in a liberal context that distinguishes liberal democracy from other stages of democratic development. 

    However, significant parts of the world like Nigeria and the new democracies of the developing world remain stuck at the level of just nominal democracy. They merely swell the number of nation states that are adjudged democratic simply because they choose or change their political leadership through periodic elections. By counting nations that hold elections, the percentage of the world population living under democracy is swollen. Triumphal advocates of the victory of the liberal international order can order a beer and be happy!

    These nominally democratic countries restrict themselves to the right of citizens to troop out in periodic electoral rituals to select new leaderships or renew the mandate of old leaders. The rights of individuals living in the society are hardly recognized let alone respected by the state. In such nominal democracies, the observance of the full freedoms and rights of individual citizens living in society is left for another day, an indeterminate future that no one can fathom. 

    A third version of ‘democracy’ has recently established itself as an instrument of leadership legitimation. It is a tool for the domestication of authoritarianism  to make it acceptable in the more distinguished company of free societies. This is illiberal democracy which is a version of  nominal democracy sustained with the tools of authoritarianism: suppression of free speech, police brutality, controlled judges and a frightened populace fed official propaganda by the state. In recent times, illiberal democracy has come to shunt itself into the broad ranks of ‘democracy’. Autocrats in disguise use a rough combination of sham elections and jackboot pretensions to law and order to gain and maintain legitimacy. The claim is usually that each society adopts a form of democracy that is ‘appropriate’ to its circumstances! 

    Countries as far flung as Russia, Hungary, Iran, Syria, Rwanda and Uganda are in this sense also democracies because their leaderships are selected or renewed through periodic elections. Like in the other nominally democratic countries, individual rights and freedoms are kept in the back burner. Literally, freedom is not predicated on the individual’s right to choose but rather on the freedom to vote because everyone else is trooping out to vote. Otherwise, the state decides and enforces what is ‘good’ for the individual. The institutions of a free society are securely tucked in the back pockets of the state and its managers.

    The thrust of Fukuyama’s argument in the new book is that liberal democracy is the highest form of the democratic enterprise because it combines freedom of individual choice with respect for the rights of individuals as citizens to decide and choose for themselves in matters of politics and other aspects of life. But in its full liberal manifestation, democracy has evolved to enable  forces that now threaten its very foundation and survival. 

    New forces such as right wing extremism, left wing identity radicalism, micro nationalism and outright militant challenges to the state have emerged. Hidden under the canopy of the multiple individual rights allowed by liberal democracy, these forces are the new threats ravaging the state in many places. Before our every eyes, even the most hallowed traditions and institutions of democracy are being assaulted and desecrated. All manner of fringe groups with wild conspiracy theories are creeping out of the wood work. Some of the extremist groups are armed with dangerous weapons to do harm to fellow citizens, assault the institution of the state and challenge its supremacy of force and  authorized violence. From the right, Trump’s QAnon and Proud Boys and other White Supremacist groups are out on the prowl. From the left, Black Lives Matter and sundry militia factions have erupted.

    Recently, Donald Trump, the enfant terrible of America’s democratic deviance has called for an abrogation or total scrapping of the US constitution in order to allow for the kind of lawlessness that will allow for his revalidation as the winner of the 2021 presidential election. Unsurprisingly, his followers have echoed his anarchic advocacy even as mainstream American democracy forges ahead with maintaining the dictates of democratic decorum and order. 

    Only last week, the world was shocked when Germany witnessed a real coup attempt.  At least 25 Right Wing extremists representing a broad spectrum of professions, occupations and callings have so far been arrested for planning a coup to overthrow the German government.  Among those so far arrested include a judge, some soldiers, an aristocrat, medical doctors, some far right anti-establishment militants and theorists. It was a real attempt to breach the parliament, arrest and handcuff key legislators, declare themselves as the new government of Germany with the aristocrat as leader. The plan was so elaborate and grotesque that the coup planners even had one of them being responsible for ‘spiritual’ affairs. Another was the group psychic, responsible for psychic vetting  of prospective members of the group to determine their suitability for group membership. Clearly, the last has not been heard of such attempts in the advanced liberal democracies. 

    Even nominal democracies are not immune to the prevailing discontent with democracy around the world. Electorates are becoming bored and frustrated with repeated cycles of electioneering that re-cycle the same set of leaders. More worrisome is the fact that the citizens are getting frustrated with periodic elections that do not bring about tangible changes in their lives. Elections take place every four years but the percentage of poor people keeps increasing. Living conditions worsen. Hopes dim and expectations are dashed. The rituals and institutions of democratic reality become fixtures in a ritual landscape. Nothing changes for the better. Everything remains the same or changes for the  worse.

    Legislatures frustrate executives. Judges mangle justice and rule in favour of the rich. In the process, citizens are overwhelmed by a sense of stasis and despair. In general, there is increasing frustration with democracy as a means of bringing about the changes that citizens are urgently demanding. As a consequence, nominal democracies are witnessing shock waves hitherto unknown. The nation state in such fragile places has come under the pressure of sundry forces and threats. Militancy, banditry, terrorism, cartels, rackets, organized crime  syndicates masquerading as govedrnment, monumental corruption etc.  Those elected through the rituals of nominal democracy occasionally try self -help in desperate search of  solutions to urgent social and economic problems plaguing those who elected them into office. Yet, no one has quite found a replacememnt for democracy as a system of government.

    In Peru, a democratically elected president has just overthrown himself in a foolish constitutional coup. Pedro Castillo, a monumentally incompetent  president on December 7th announced the dissolution of parliament and the convening of a new one with powers to write a new constitution and hand down a new code for judges. The coup attempt failed as parliament ousted him with a vote of 107 to 6.  The police moved in to arrest the errant fleeing president for rebelling against the state. He is under house arrest , replaced with his deputy. Street mobs on both sides have overwhelmed the capital in protest on both sides. 

    Castillo was only staging an amateurish version of the 1992 episode in which  the elected president, Alberto Fujimori, rolled out military tanks to stage a coup that sacked parliament. He succeeded in securing himself 8 years if unperturbed rule as an autocrat. Fujimori was a competent and astute politician. Castillo was a political idiot!

    In fragile nominal democracies like Nigeria, the greatest danger to democracy is the assumption that the fever of an election season reflects the popularity of democracy or its universal acceptance by competing elites. In a place where democracy has not yet permeated the cultural fabric of society, it is futile to assume that every faction of the elite is anxiously awaiting the next election and its outcome. Far from it. Partisan divisions are merely intra elite schisms dressed up as democratic options. There are no options. There is only a feverish  scramble for access to the keys of the presidential lodge. This may be the situation in Nigeria as the nation preps for the 2023 elections.

    In today’s pre election Nigeria, the major current of public expectation is that the 2023 elections will go according to plan. The logic of this optimism is the hope that the presidential election will be peaceful and a peaceful transition of power will proceed therefrom and culminate in the swearing in of the next president on 29th May, 2023. 

    But listening closely in recent weeks, there is a hint in the utterances of significant public voices, we have reasons to worry about the fate of the elections and the future of the nation. Chief of Defense Staff, Mr. Lucky Irabor, is an eloquent soldier of not too many unnecessary words. Speaking to journalists at the State House in Abuja on Thursday, he made an inconvenient disclosure. The Nigerian military is under pressure from unnamed quarters to compromise the 2023 elections. Soldiers are being tempted with inducements to possibly compromise the democracy train by unnamed forces. The alarm is not strange in Nigeria’s political history. 

    Yet, it was a convenient  opportunity for the Defense Chief to reiterate the extant fact of the subordination of the armed forces to the primacy of civil authority as a cardinal guardrail of democracy. It was also an opportunity to emphasize the imperative for security forces to remain loyal to and obey President Buhari’s  injunction for the armed and security forces to remain neutral in the prevailing season of partisan political frenzy.

    Less than a fortnight ago, President Buhari himself had cause to reiterate the obvious fact that he will hand over power to a successor administration come 29th May, 2023. On the surface, this reassurance looked unnecessary and superfluous. It is a restatement of the obvious that was coming from nowhere. But the president is the ultimate receptacle of all high intelligence. Taken together with Mr. Irabor’s alarming warning, there is reason to suspect that the high expectations about the outcome of the 2023 elections may have come under greater scrutiny. The president has himself readjusted his political rhetoric from a rabid “APC by all means” to “Nigerians are free to vote for any party or candidate of their choice” earlier this week. 

    There has been a more consequential expression of concern about the 2023 elections and their outcome. At a public lecture in Abuja recently, former INEC Chairman Atahiru Jega, had cause to sound a note of concern and dire warning. Jega was deeply concerned about the undercurrents of the election and the possible outcome. Given his experience in managing what would have been Nigeria’s most catastrophic election back in 2015. 

    The spate of violent attacks on INEC facilities in the South East especially does not make things any better for our nominal democracy. Other separatist factions and their militias are no less dangerous. INEC has itself  warned about the consequences of these episodes of violence for orderly polls. 

    In fractious states like Nigeria, the risk sto nominal democracy are magnified if nothing binds political contestants with the electorate and general citizenry. The survival of democracy is often underwritten by an elite consensus on the urgent indices of national survival. Election campaigns become a means of securing citizens’ buy -in into that consensus.  Elections have meaning for as long as they will guarantee the survival of the nation and a minimum level of security, peace and orderly life. 

    Brazil’s last presidential election illustrated this poignantly. The tenure of Jair Bolsonaro tilted Brazil in the direction of catastrophic illiberal democracy. Bolsonaro  was deriving his model from the Donald Trump anarchy in the United States. But a national consensus on Brazil’s dire economic situation and the worsening climate change consequences of the destruction of the Amazon created a national nostalgia for a return to the social welfare strides of former Lula da Silva. Brazil voted for national survival and returned Lula to power to save the country.

    Nigeria’s survival as a nation state has become tied to whether it survives as a democracy. The 2023 presidential election is in many ways a referendum on whether Nigeria survives as the imperfect union that we have come to know. Therefore, all those covertly scheming to subvert the election must come to terms with the existential imperative that if 2023 fails, Nigeria falls into pieces.

  • Education: From Bumbling to Babel – By Chidi Amuta

    Education: From Bumbling to Babel – By Chidi Amuta

    President Buhari’s Minister of Education, Mr. Adamu Adamu, is a man who likes to take himself seriously. In ordinary circumstances, he should pass as one of the islands of some enlightenment in the arid cabinet of the outgoing administration. A long standing regional newspaper columnist and commentator on public affairs who finds himself at the helm of a strategic federal ministry should minimally arouse some excitement and legitimate grand expectations.

    But after a prolonged tenure  (seven and half years and still counting) at the helm of a ministry that has grave national importance, Mr. Adamu is literally in a wilderness, left alone to determine whether he has not wasted his and everyone else’s time.

    The nation’s education sector under Mr. Adamu’s watch is arguably in its most tattered state since after the civil war. No one knows when the pubic universities are open or shut. Standards in public schools and colleges are at an abysmal low. There is now a chasm of standards and quality between private and public institutions at every level. An insensitive national elite has opted to educate their offspring mostly in the West. The foundations of a segregated society of the future has been laid. Perhaps only Mr. Adamu and his boss can, in good conscience, look at the current carnage in the nation’s education system and nod with satisfaction.

    Perhaps out of a self righteous indignation and political expediency, Mr. Adamu recently tendered  what amounts to a public apology to the nation for his dismal performance as minister of education. In his estimation, he had failed tragically in two core areas. First is the virtual collapse of the public university system following a series of protracted strikes and work stoppages by various unions in the university system.

    He regretted the protracted strikes and infinite closures of public universities under his watch. The brickbat with the university teachers trade union, ASUU, lasted almost the entire length of his tenure. While the ASUU crisis lasted, students were at home, swelling the ranks of the aimless and the jobless free agents of criminality and raging army of the unemployed. Otherwise respectable academics and scholars were rendered destitute and dirt poor. Minor technical arguments about simple accounting and arithmetic were allowed to delay negotations with the teachers while the system died in installments.

    The ASUU imbroglio may not have been strictly Mr. Adamu’s sole making. His colleagues in the Ministry of Labout never understood or respected the different nature of the work of university teachers. Nor was the government in itself ready to explore alternative templates for public university funding and operation. Yet the universities remain a educational enterprises and therefore fall squarely under Mr. Adamu’s portfolio.

    The long period of university closure was agolden opportunity for anysensible minister of education to have mounted serious public campaigns on how best to reform and salvage the nation’s public university system. Mr. Adamu didpractivally nothing in this direction. Instead he stood by and watched the fire fights between ASUU snd the Ministry of Labour more like a spectator than as an active and engaged participant. There is no evidence that the Minister of Education rose to the occasion of defending the integrity of the universities. Nor is there any record of innovative problem solving from Adamu’s ministry of education. Instead, the Ministry of education was in an observer role while Labour treated the ASUU matter purely as a trade union matter. All through, the core educational challenges were relegated to the hazy backdrop. As a result, Mr. Adamu is likely to go down as the nation’s worst Minister of Education under whose watch Nigeria’s public universities were shut perhaps for the longest stretch of time in national history.

    A second leg of his public apology was the astronomical increase in Nigeria’s out of school population in recent years. According to UNESCO figures, the population of out of school children in Nigeria now stands at a staggering 20 million as at October 2022 . This indicates that 40% of Nigerian children aged between 6 and 11 years are out of school mostly in the northern half of the country. The UN has estimated that Nigeria’s out of school population accounts for 20% of the global total. Former President Obasanjo recently said the crisis of Nigeria’s budgeoning out of school population was laying the foundation for the next wave of terrorists upsurge.

    Here again, there is little or no evidence that the Ministry of education under Mr. Adamu was in any case engaged or concerned about how to stem the tide of what is easily a global embarrassment. It does not matter that primary education education remains mostly the responsibility of state and local governments. But national policy and the kind of initiate ve required to end the scourge of out of school children  remains a federal national responsibility. On this critical matter, Mr. Adamu maintained a stone silence.

    The recourse to a public apology on matters that are so strategic and central to his portfolio is a curious strategy. The appearance of humility and good intention does not address the patent lack of competence in so vital a department of state responsibility. The elite could grudgingly accept Mr. Adamu’s apology but the damage has already been done.

    Whole generations of Nigerian children are out of school, denied the only right that should liberate them from poverty and darkness for life. Hundreds of thousands of undergraduates have failed to enter the labour market even if it has few opportunities for them. Some have dropped out. Many ambitions have been truncated, dreams amputated and livelihood killed. While the nation’s human asset rotted away during the ASUU absences under Mr. Adamu’s watch, the minister, like the rest of our national elite, was content with ferreting his offspring to foreign universities to benefit from more sensibly run systems. When protesting NANS students trooped to his office in protest to draw his drew his attention to this anomaly, Mr. Adamu felt so slighted that he rudely walked out of a meeting with a delegation of Nigerian students.

    As a parting gift and perhaps some legacy inititative, the Minister has just announced Cabinet’s approval of a new language policy template for the nation’s public primary schools. Under the proposed policy, which is still a rough draft, all instruction in Nigerian primary schools will be in the child’s ‘mother tongue’. In effect, all Nigerian children from age 6 will be instructed in their ‘mother tongue’. No one has yet told us the definition of ‘mother tongue in the context of this strange policy proposition. The children will only begin to learn in English from the secondary school, presumably from age 11.

    In a nation that has well over 600 languages, no one knows what will be the ‘mother tongue’ of children in different locations. Not ot talk of the fact that in most Nigerian locations, cultural interfaces and cross currents has produced children of mixed linguistic parentage and whose mother tongue cannot easily be defined. Nor is there any evidence that there exist enough teachers with language proficiency in these languages to be able to instruct children in them. Not to talk of whether our educational system has developed enough teacher capacity and proficiency in even the major national languages to be able to base primary education instruction on those languages.

    Even the determination of what constitutes a child’s mother tongue can be a herculean task in a diverse, multi lingual and composite federation such as this. Is the child’s mother tongue that of where his/her school happens to be located? Or is the mother tongue that of where his parents originated from? Or is it the language spoken at home or the one in which the child communicates with his two parents who happen to hail from different nationalities?

    The new draft policy may have disciples among advocates of linguistic nationalism. The ancient argument is that a child is more likely to internalize knowledge when it is imparted in his ‘mother tongue’ or local language. Concepts are clearer and lose their strangeness or  foreignness when imparted in a language that the child uses in his natural interactions and social communication.  Those who parrot this advantage are quick to insist that English or any other foreign language is part of a colonial foreign cultural orientation which has alienated homegrown knowledge and bred generations of alienated citizens far removed from their roots. They quickly point to the strides of other cultures like the Japanese and Chinese who for centuries have instructed their citizens in their local languages and achieved great cultural, scientific and technological feats.

    But these are nations that are mostly homogeneous in ethnic and linguistic composition. They have the additional advantage of having witnessed long periods of historical and civilizational pre eminence and continuity as monolithic cultures for many centuries. Language and national culture have fused.

    In our instance, we are dealing with a muti cultural, multi lingual and highly diverse society. One of the bonds that holds our nation together is the use of English as an instrument of education and social communication. The history of our nationhood is the story of ancient tribes brought together by English speakers and held together by the legacy of a unifying pan-Nigerian language. The business of Nigeria will not survive for a day fter we stop communicating in English as a national community. Our children are better Nigerians when they are able to communicate and interact with each other in English. In that uniform mould, they shed their ethnic identities and fuse into one uniform national identity.  We are by far better off when a uniform national identity is part of the educational process from the onset.

    To insist otherwise as Mr. Adamu’s envisaged policy template does is to deliberately use the education system to enshrine division. Moreso, to educate our primary school children in local ‘mother tongues’ is to lock them up, early in life , in enclaves of nativity where their immediate embrace is with superstition, backwardness and decadence. That zone of our national life is now the bastion of ritual, superstition and antiquity. We left our homegrown potential for authentic development behind in the villages decades ago. It is too late in the day to retreat from the rest of humanity to rediscover paradise lost.

    The local ‘mother tongues’ may indeed have their intrinsic knowledge and cultural values in diverse fields. But little or ne effort has been made to develop these languages  to the level where they can become tools for instruction in different subjects at such an early stage in the child’s development process.

    There is a need of course to develop the local languages alongside English. Children should be able to communicate in their relevant local tongues alongside English. But the imperative of national integration and the pull of global integration and belonging demands that we start early to prepare citizens to be able to compete with their peers in the rest of the world. Such competitiveness  should be in the areas of basic universal literacy and numeracy as well as basic science and technology.

    Even as Mr. Adamu and his principal prepare to leave their dismal legacy in our educational system, there remain clear and urgent questions and challenges that confront us as a nation. How do our children rank in maths, basic science, functional literacy as against their opposite numbers in other countries? What is the state of health and nutrition of the average Nigerian primary school kid? In what kind of environment are we raising the children in terms ofaceesto basic social services?

    These are the fundamental challenges of Nigeria’s early childhood education. It is not the initiation of a confusing babel of mother tongues among children in a nation that desperately needs integration and unity.

  • Playing Games with Poverty – By Chidi Amuta

    Playing Games with Poverty – By Chidi Amuta

    The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has stirred an unnecessary storm and in the process may have scored an inconsequential victory. Last week, the NBS revised the definition of poverty by shifting from the now proverbial living on $2 a day to something called “multidimensional poverty”. This has unsettled our politicians.

    While the politicians are used to saying that we have an internal poverty republic of 100 million people, the NBS now says the poor are a disarming 133 million/This represents 65% of the fictional total population of population about 200 million. In simple language, this means that thosde who are NOT poor have now been overwhelmed by the poor. The poor are now omni present, literally all around us.

    When the Christian holy book insisted that ‘ the poor you will always have among you’, it was underlining the inevitability of inequality and poverty as features of socio economic life. But the Bible never envisaged that a deluge of the poor will overwhelm the rest of us so soon anywhere. Nigeria has achieved a Biblical unforeseen, a record in itself.

    Under the Multidimensional Poverty categorization , poverty is merely broken down into its familiar indices: homelessness, lack of access to healthcare, education, affordable energy, fair opportuity etc. These lacks are now recognized as the defining indicators of poverty. Nothing in this postulation sounds like ground breaking rocket science. Telling us what everyone already knows and using that obvious measure to arrive at a new poverty demographics is merely shifting the future in an old familiar home.

    Predictably, our media and public technocrats have since broken into feuding social media factions. All manner of rationalizations have sprung up. The quarrel seems to be about the upturning or revision of accepted indices in the new computation. But while the more academic disputation about categories and indices rages, no one has dared dispute the golden basic economic rule of poverty: if your country is mostly unproductive with a GDP growth rate that is slower than the rate of your population growth rate, your road to universal poverty is guaranteed. No amount of sanctimonious preachments or political grandstanding can save you from his fate. This seems to be the kernel of Nigeria’s spiraling poverty crisis. We might as well forget the statistical categories disputes for a while.

    Poverty does not need too much academic quarrel. Nor does it require too much arcane intellectual definition. The victims of poverty know their adversary all too well. A lifelong embrace with poverty leaves permanent unmistakable scars. If you have no roof over your head, you know who you are. If there is perennial uncertainty about where the next meal will come from, you can guess where you belong. If you are tormented by avoidable and curable diseases and you dare not find a hospital, health center or pharmacy shop because you have no money, you can draw your conclusions. Worse still, if junior cannot continue in the neighborhood school because there is no way of paying his fees, his fate is nailed because your own branding is complete. Lack of access to everything that distinguishes us humans from beasts in the state of nature is the commonest marker of poverty. The poor know themselves and their condition. We also know them but sometimes prefer to live in criminal insensitive denial.

    As overfed and pampered elite, we may find intellectual sport in playing with and around poverty. We might even treat poverty as an academic discipline or its discourse as part of a political manner of speaking, a meta language deployed often to secure international donor attention. Itmay even be part of a sanctimonious distant indulgence of priests and fancy humanitarians. But poverty does not joke. It afflicts, invades, ravages, dominates and pervades whole segments of the populace. It conquers territory as we notice shanty towns and slums spring up right before our eyes to surround our fancy new estates and neighborhoods. An adversary that has conquered 63% of a national population is not a laughing matter. Surrounded by such a rapacious enemy, we all are doomed.

    How did we get here? Either defined by Multidimensional indices or as people living on less than $2 a day, poverty in Nigeria seems to have institutionalized itself. With a very young population, Nigerians aged under 45 constitute an estimated 38% of the country’s total population. Since 1970, Nigeria has continued to depend on oil and gas royalties for 95% of its foreign exchange revenue. With a very low level of foreign direct investment inflow and a declining manufacturing capacity in recent years, the economy has been unable to generate employment at a rate to cope with the demographic increase and the pace of production of skilled manpower and educated people especially the teeming youth population.

    By its rate of increase and the dislocations it breeds, poverty has become a national security issue of urgent concern. The state is today threatened by factions of its own citizens mostly united by the universal lack of access to the indices of poverty now identified by the statisticians. The criminality, violence and insensitivity of those entrapped in the internal poverty republic has made life unsafe for the rest of us. Today’s Nigeria is wracked by a specter of insecurity and a pervasive psychology of fear. Everybody is afraid of everybody. To keep us safe, the state has to buy bigger guns than the criminals with the money meant for medicines, school books, basic housing and clean water.

    Worse still, poverty has grown somewhat resilient and incremental in recent years. Upward mobility and the pursuit of a dream of a better life by succeeding generations are fast disappearing from our psychology as a people. Among those of us in our 50s and up, education and hard work used to be antidotes to poverty. It used to be part of the ‘Nigerian dream’ that with education and dedicated hard work, one could overcome poverty in a lifetime or generation. It used to be a favorite saying among us that the poverty in our beginnings will not accompany us to the grave nor escort our children through life. Not anymore.

    These days, the most pervasive and assured legacy that people pass on to succeeding generations is a near universal assurance of poverty. Poor parents survived by even poorer offspring in a land devoid of opportunities. Poverty as an inheritance and a legacy defines a new pervasive lack of upward social and economic mobility that now pervades the Nigerian nation space.

    For the younger generation, the narrow gates out of this vicious charmed circle are few. Cybercrimes, unusual creative talent, violent crime, terrorism and stealing from the organized crime syndicate that we call government are the new narrow gates out of the vice grip of universal poverty.

    A youth bulge has resulted in stratospheric unemployment figures while secondary and tertiary institutions have increased exponentially and continue to spew out unemployed youth onto the streets of decaying urban centers and deserted rural areas.

    Inequality has produced an anarchic populace as life has degenerated into a vicious scramble and perennial for existence among the many. Poverty induced criminality has sent crime statistics through the roof nationwide resulting in the culture of perennial insecurity that now haunts the nation. A resource poor treasury has led to considerable decay in the capacity of the state to equip the armed and security forces to contain an upsurge in crime and militant insurgency. Our hospitals and healthcare delivery system is in desperate disrepair just as our public infrastructure has continued to decay almost unchecked.

    The poverty burden has implications for the very survival of the Nigerian nation state. Its immediate meaning for our national unity and national security are too obvious. The poverty burden may even be the greatest obstacle to the emergence of a truly democratic polity. How can an impoverished anddeprived populace make rational and informed democratic choices when they are faced with clear and present lack of everything that makes life meaningful? A democracy dominated by a population of impoverished ignorant people is merely a disguised mob rule.

    There is a contradiction buried in the bosom of this inequality Somehow, perhaps poverty has become a leveler and a unifier even in a time of political divisiveness. There is no discrimination between the poor man or woman in Maiduguri and the one in Port Harcourt; between the poor woman in Yenagoa and their opposite number in Sokoto. They all speak the same dialect of desperate survival. They are hungry, homeless and most times hopeless. They are united by the indices of the landscape of poverty.

    In response to the scourge of increasing global poverty, in recent years, poverty alleviation has emerged as a separate department of the state and governance in general. Emerging markets in quest of international financial help hardly get a hearing unless they have in place an active poverty reduction program. Elaborate bureaucracies have sprang up just as fancy ceremonies of state have evolved. A certain showmanship has grown out of the poverty alleviation industry.

    A curious irony has emerged in the process. The more funds are allocated to reduce poverty, the higher the annual poverty figures have risen in some countries. It is either that a declining GDP is continuously overwhelmed by an uncontrolled population increase or that net productivity keeps declining year –on- year, making poverty a permanent condition.

    There is a more cynical possibility. Poverty alleviation has become a lucrative industry that is being sustained by the greed of its key drivers. If poverty is suddenly eradicated, a sub sector of the corruption industry will die. Yet, some countries that recgnisedpoverty as an impediment to national development have made decisive progress.

    Three countries stand out in their success with poverty alleviation. China, India and Brazil stand out in this regard. They stand out because they were, until recently, in identical socio economic circumstances as Nigeria as Third World countries with huge poor populations and struggling economies.

    China’s poverty reduction is a modern day miracle. According to the World Bank, a total of 850 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years. The poverty rate fell from 88% in 1981 to 0.7% in 2015. This is poverty as measured by the percentage of people living on $1.90 or less per day by 2011 purchasing power parity terms. This translates into an average poverty reduction rate of 42 million people per annum. In total, the Chinese have therefore reduced their poverty rate by over 60% of the population in 20 years.

    As its economy grew after liberalisation, China focused on the poorest people in the rural areas. It massively moved them from poor homes in the countryside to high rise apartment blocks in new urban centers. This led to rapid urban renewal and the uplifting of the standards of hygiene and living among the former rural dwellers with a corresponding economic empowerment. They could now leverage the market value of their new apartments to raise capital for small enterprises and improvement of their living standards. By 2021, the poverty rate among the Chinese had further declined to near zero.

    The Chinese miracle cameabout as a result of many factors: the adoption of a market economy, an increase in the banked population, explosion of the stock market and an astronomical growth in foreign investments. Gigantic strides in Information Technology transformed a huge population into a unified manufacturing hub and common market with the rest of the world as a target market.

    India adopted a different route. According to UN reports, in 10 years (2006-2016) , India has lifted a record 273 million of its population out of poverty. This has been achieved through a series of measures targeted specifically at poverty alleviation in the rural areas . With its rural emphasis, the Indian strategy resembles the Chinese one. But India developed specific programmes targeted at different dimensions of poverty.

    First, there is the Rural Livelihood Mission(NRLM) which
    guarantees the rural poor access to finance to increase household incomes. Secondly, there is the Mahatma Ghandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 which is designed to guarantee a minimum living wage for rural people. Thirdly, there is the Rural Housing Guarantee Scheme designed to provide housing for all by the year 2022. It guarantees the rural poor access to permanent housing with electricity, LPG connections, pipe borne water and toilet facilities under an affordable mortgage arrangement that is simple.

    Finally, there is the Public Distribution System which aims to manage food distribution and reduce the scarcity of essential food items to rural dwellers at affordable prices. This combination of policies and strategies has assured India of a modest poverty reduction rate of 13.65 million people per annum in the last twenty years.

    The poverty reduction strategy of Brazil is guided by a simple principle. It aims to improve the incomes of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid at a rate faster than those of people at the top and also faster than the rate of GDP growth. The result is that Brazil has been able to reduce both poverty and inequality simultaneously in the last two decades.

    Between 2003 and 2009, 21 million Brazilians escaped poverty. The Brazil National Institute of Applied Economic Research says that the country’s Poverty Incidence Rate declined from 35.8% to 21.4% between 2001 and 2009, a period during which the country’s Gini Index (which measures rate of inequality) dropped by 9%, the lowest since the 1970s.

    Some major policy initiatives led to Brazil’s success.
    First is the Bolsa Familia (Family Scholarship) which provides family income support for families whose per capita monthly income is less than $47. In return, families must ensure that they vaccinate their children, attend routine health programmes, and ensure they keep their children in school. Compliance with these requirements is what assures people of continued participation and benefit from the programme.

    In Nigeria on the other hand, we have seen a metamorphosis of agencies: mass transit, school feeding, cash transfers, market empowerment, apprentice support etc. In the most recent iteration, the Nigerian presidency has created a dedicated ministry- Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs- for a collection of afflictions united by poverty. Emergency disaster relief, school feeding, mass cash transfers to the abjectly poor etc. come under the purview of this amorphous ministry. Periodically, outrageous figures of expenditures of sums spent feeding poor school children, assisting widows or in relief to victims of flooding, terrorist attacks etc.

    The resurrection of the poverty debate on the eve of the 2023 elections is timely. Politicians may be too busy campaigning for votes to bother with NBS poverty statistics. But the poor will be waiting at the polling stations. After the elections, the poverty scourge that afflicts the majority of our people will place itself right in the forefront of all sensible governance programmes.

  • Campaigning Amidst the Carnage – By Chidi Amuta

    Campaigning Amidst the Carnage – By Chidi Amuta

    The current landscape of Nigeria is somewhere between a violent crime scene and the ruin of an imperfect edifice. It is like ‘the day after’ a great holocaust, an atomic upheaval or some other man made disaster. Those who left here seven years ago can no longer easily recognize familiar places. The highways are dangerous just as familiar neighborhoods have become treacherous. A society that produces orphans, widows and suicides faster than the birth rate in maternity homes deserves a contemplative rethink instead of a celebration. What, in real terms, is the current campaign season all about?

    Uncertainty of prospects coupled with viral poverty makes everything and everywhere strange. This is not the place that used to fire hope and drive ambition when we were young. Community has been replaced by clashing clans of hate and raging tribes of suspicion. Viral pessimism and incurable cynicism are everywhere. The perennial sadness on nearly every face says all about a place where happiness is now a scarce commodity to be hidden from the gaze of the disenchanted mob.

    Yet we are in an election season with campaign carnivals all around us. The politicians are seeking our mandate to alleviate the mood of depression and vicious anger. In a democracy, seasonal election campaigns can alleviate depression and imbue hope. Campaign carnivals can become rituals of hope and ceremonies of renewal. The prospect of new managers of popular expectations, familiar people promising to do old things in new ways can give hope and elevate moods. Even if the expectations that go with campaign promises end up in smoke eventually, camapaigns have a way of creating that air of festival relief and ease which every society occasionally needs to vent and postpone the implosion that bad governance breeds. That is where we are right now in Nigeria.

    But it is hard to sow hope in a landscape of carnage, of utter devastation. Seven and half years of the Buhari administration has created easily the most decadent years of Nigeria’s history. Nearly every aspect of national life has been devastated by a sad combination of incompetence, tacit corruption, disastrous governance and distant insensitivity. There is a raging argument among scholars as to how a whole national edifice could be destroyed in less than a decade. Those with a historical mindset  readily point to the examples of parallel disasters in recent history: Somalia, former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Lebanon etc.

    From the general tone of the ongoing campaigns, even the most casual observer can detect the near hopelessness. Where will the new men begin? Which is the priority?

    A backdrop of perilous national drift has shaping the campaign season and possibly deprived it of a redeeming hope.

    It is not one campaign that is raging. There are in fact many campaigns going on simultaneously. Suddenly woken up to the emptiness of its own legacy, a lame duck Buhari administration is converting the remaining vestiges of federal power into an opportunity for a legacy campaign. Devoid of any redeeming landmark achievements except a mound of debts and a sea of deaths, the beleaguered president and his rabble are clutching to free and fair elections as a worthy legacy worth bequeathing to a nation that has since drawn its conclusions. In this context, it is a credible election legacy if the opposition overwhelms the incumbent and emerges victorious. That would be a legacy of a a fair minded and objective incumbent rather than the routing of an incumbent in disorderly retreat. A ruin is after all also a form of architecture!

    Afraid of deserting its own faulty tower, Mr. Buhari cannot but campaign for his lack luster partyand its infinitely controversial presidential candidate. Last week in Jos, it was a miserable outgoing president Buhari that sat through the opening campaign of his party. There, in full view of a world in utter consternation, his party’s flag bearer repeatedly called his party the ‘PDP’ while endlessly invoking the Buhari spirit in repeated recitations of the President’s name as a curative mantra! Buhari! Buhari!! Buhari!!! What a tragic reversal and blatant linguistic subversion of political intention.

    In other areas, the campaign season has donned a typically Nigerian garb. A parade of carefully selected renowned Court Jesters have been picked as spokespersons of the major presidential contenders. In the process, the agenda of the candidates have been deliberately drained of issues or any semblance of seriousness.  This same collective of political entertainers have in recent times so frequently moved between the two main parties that most times they tend to forget whose servant they now are. Mr. Dino Melaye of the Atiku campaign spent so much time singing the praise of the opposition APC that he needed a prompter to nudge him into reality from an obvious state of habitual delirium. But the damage had been done by the time he realized that he was now singing the anthem of the PDP once again!

    In all this, most perceptive citizens are now asking: when will the campaigns really begin? People are desirous to get the perspectives of leading presidential candidates on the issues that define today’s reality. People agree that today’s reality is a veritable carnage. But we expect those who are aspiring to lead us out of this morass to come up with serious ideas. This should be the object of the ongoing campaigns. Instead, we are getting a surfeit of inanities and a pageant of hired clowns.

    In all this, comedy has replaced substance. Name -calling has replaced serious engagement. Trivia has replaced substance while motor park grade personal abuse is being bandied as campaign rhetoric. A free trading in fake news and the blatant mangling of facts in the social media has created a new market for scandals and manufactured half truths to score political points. In the process, the public is left in the quagmire of a carnage of known origins.  Political actors are afraid to name the source of the carnage for fear of reprisals by an unforgiving incumbent.

    The Nigerian carnage is total. Some say insecurity is the key to a return to normalcy; only the living can afford to hope. Others counter that it is the absence of economic well being  that is generating violent insecurity. The desperately poor have blood in their eyes and anger in their hearts. They want to kill to live, knowing that the certainty of their own slow death is guaranteed. The presidential candidates are finding it hard to navigate around the carnage, to place the blame where it lies and to pick their priorities to move the campaign forward.

    Mr. Atiku Abubakar thinks the economy is the gathering point of all our woes. He wants to recreate the Obasanjo agenda of primary growth sectors and drastic debt reduction. May Nigerians recall that Mr.Obasanjo with Atikyu as his deputy  created growth sectors in banking and finance, the stock market, the telecommunications industry, oil and gas and a bit of power generation. Next in Atiku’s priority list is the structure of our federation. He thinks that the easiest and best way to re-engineer national unity is to create a federation of economically competing units in a fiscal federation where states congregate mostly on the issues of collective security. No one is sure that a secure and economically contented populace will be so bothered about the structure and forms of governance. But there is a distant refrain that our federation is too unitary and the states are too dependent on centrally conllected rents and royalties to become centres of productivity and wealth creation.

    For Mr. Tinubu, a manifesto of tinkering odds and ends is more of a repairers toolbox than an agenda of national renewal and redemption. Worse still, his 81 page manifesto is overwhelmed by an open commitment to carry on with elements of the Buhari legacy. But there is hardly any legacy; only a bleeding carnage of death, criminality, devastation and misrule. How does anyone carry such a burden and add the ones of his own creation? Political expediency may dictate no less but a commitment to deepen this carnage requires more of sympathy than understanding and endorsement.

    Mr. Peter Obi is headed in direct opposition to a moving train. Seeking to replace politics as usual with a nameless street movement is huge enough. But the carnage still needs to be confronted and the crime scene rid of gangsters. Mr. Obi has a trader’s economic blueprint any time in the breast pocket of his now familiar black outfit. His handy tool of economic management is the trader ‘s pocket calculator. His formula for economic success is simple: if the numbers do not add up, something requires fixing. The way to fix the economy is to total up the sums and find what is missing. Clsing the shop to chase after thieves is not a good idea. Government should keepthe shipopen but send some people after the thieves.

    Mr. Obi wants to drain  the Abuja swamp by starving it of excess pork,  fat and slush money. He wants to chase back the bandits and terrorists to wherever they came from. He also wants to change governance in Nigeria from a network of organized crime to a structure that works the people. All these and more sound like direct affronts to Nigeria’s ancient power structure. That assemblage of hegemonists, oligarchs, entrenched ageing generals,  multi nationals, militarists and traditional rulers is not about to sit idly by as Mr. Obi and his street mobs dismantle their stranglehold on Nigeria.

    In spite of the occasional flashes of high ideals and honest intentions, all the leading presidential candidates seem afflicted by the bug of incoherence and confusion that is haunting this campaign season. Maybe, they are overwhelmed by the extent of the Buhari inspired carnage. As a result, candidates have occasionally relapsed into ethnic and sectional expressions. In Kaduna earlier in the month, Mr. Atiku found himself urging northern Hausa Fulanis to avoid voting for Southern Igbo and Yoruba candidates. Mr. Tinubu has stated that although Peter Obi lives in Lagos, as president he will send him back to Anambra state, a regrettable violation of the right of Nigerians to live and thrive wherever they choose in the federation. Mr. Obi has himself urged his major rivals to go into retirement on grounds of age and age related infirmities. No one is certain how these candidates can sustain credible campaigns for another four months in cview of the weaknesses that are already obvious.

    In the frenzy for presidential high grounds, campaigns at the lower levels of governance have received less attention and media. All roads seem to lead to Aso Rock, the grand venue of the national bazaar. Our political imagination seems to have forgotten that in real terms , Nigerians live and work in the states. We are all citizens of Nigeria but our needs are met first by the 36 states and the FCT.

    The challenge of this campaign season is both simple and complex. The simple part is to design and implement credible campaigns with clear messages that do not insult the public mind. The hard part is for politicians to navigate their way through the Buhari carnage and re-imagine Nigeria. Neither if these seems to be happening. That is why it has become difficult to predict the outcome of a election that seems too far to call.

  • 2023: What if Machiavelli votes? – By Chidi Amuta

    2023: What if Machiavelli votes? – By Chidi Amuta

    Ordinarily, the hidden hands of an ancient Italian devious thinker should have no relevance to Nigeria’s 2023 election. But Machiavelli lived in a bad time and in a treacherous political terrain pretty much like the Nigeria of 2022. Like in the Florentine city state, our politics has been reduced to seasonal undeclared civil wars moderated by the hidden hands of dark knights of vested interests and primordial loyalties. Somehow, the often trivialized and battered dictum that the end of a power exploit justifies the means has come to rule our political history in spite of fancy pretensions to democratic fidelity.

    Machiavelli was himself variously a victim and traducer of a system wracked by perennial turmoil and serial instability. He was even tried and convicted for treasonous subversion of the state and sacked from his public service career. It was in his period of internal exile and isolation that he found time to write The Prince which later became the classic text on statecraft especially for ambitious power seekers and power mongers in bad places. Machiavelli meant well in his philosophical enquiry. But his legacy has become one of an evil genius of political thinking.

    Several centuries after his demise, he and his handbook have become the universal primers of dark power schemes and manipulative statecraft. Therefore, anywhere the contest for power becomes subject to unwritten rules, unstated assumptions and murky computations, Machiavelli is cited as an inspiration. Whenever the normal political process is derailed in the service of devious ends, Machiavelli is said to have cast a vote. Wherever unintended detours occur on the road to a power destination, Machiavelli is invoked. Whenever rough seekers of power succeed in decapitating the state or usurping its power pinnacles, their untidy methods find accommodation in Machiavelli’ scheme. Coups and counter coups, all shades of revolutions, political assassinations, bogus elections and political gangsterism and other nasty power games all find philosophical legitimation in the license of political language as ‘Machiavellian’.

    Nigeria is not new to devious detours and nasty disruptions at the verge of power transitions. In 1983, President Shehu Shagari was on the way to a two -term presidential tenure. A lanky Machiavelli donned a battle fatigue and struck, sending democracy on a reverse trip. The end of a military power grab was justified by the meanness of the subsequent legitimacy excuses. A frowning autocracy replaced an imperfect democracy. A more sophisticated smiling Machiavellian disciple came calling. The rest is just one chapter from a past of many tragic power usurpations and disruptions.

    Today, we are literally at the doorstep of the 2023 elections. This is like no other normal democratic transition moments. Nearly all the variables that define our nationhood have come unhinged. Such moments try even the most settled of nations and call for the emergence of more than power occupants.

    All the parties have activated into a campaign mode, having fulfilled all INEC requirements. The public is in an expectant mood as wagers and opinion polls pass the mantle of victorious odds from Obi to Atiku and Tinubu and back again in no particular ranking order. On its part, INEC has been busy perfecting all its processes and mechanics to ensure a tolerably credible election. From what we are reading, INEC’s increased confidence stems mostly from its near perfection of the use of the BVACS technology and logistical clean-up. These have worked fairly well in producing fairly credible recent governorship elections in Edo, Anambra, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun respectively.

    There is an emergent consensus that INEC under the present leadership has come to a point where the integrity of electoral outcomes has become relatively axiomatic. Confidence in the electoral process and hope in the promise of democracy have grown. A great deal of this improved electoral ecosystem and democratic landscape is the result of the reliability of the technology mix that INEC has adopted. The fears of a Machiavellian disruption begin here. Machiavellian political philosophy is essentially disruptive, not conformist or preservative.

    As it turns out, Machiavelli and other dark power forces now also have a technology wing. In the age of information technology wizardry, nearly every perfect system is vulnerable. Hacking and unauthorised cyber access have become an undystry. There is nothing in the BVACS technology that completely insulates it from compromise by a determined and desperate political interest intent on influencing the outcome of the 2023 elections. Hackers and vendors of all manner of viruses and malware are out there on the prowl for hire for a couple of thousands of dollars. From a basement or garage somewhere in Shanghai, Wuse or Lekki, a group of internet freaks and cyber criminals could actually clone INEC’s BVACS machines and their footprints. The cloned BVACS machines could overwrite the genuine machines and transmit fake results well ahead of the genuine terminals. By the time INEC realises it, the damage would have been done. This is only one way in which the technological advantage of INEC’s success could be turned into a gruesome liability. The ingenuity of technological evil hands and minds has no limits in today’s world.

    On a wider scale, the fear of political instability hovers over Nigeria even as we speak. It has nothing to do with preparations for the elections themselves. But instead, fundamental issues of national security and stability have emerged anew. In the last fortnight, all major Western diplomatic missions in Abuja have sent out travel advisories and feverish alerts pointing to an imminent string of terrorist events in Abuja. The United States and Canada have issued guidelines to their nationals for the evacuation of non- essential personnel from Nigeria. The United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Denmark and others have followed suit. All Nigerian security agencies have fanned out all over Abuja in search of the trouble makers. All this is taking place under a veneer of normalcy and tranquility in and around the city. So far, security people have reported some significant arrests and found items of interest in residential estates in Abuja. But there has not been anything of a magnitude to justify the scope of the diplomatic stampede.

    Predictably, all manner of Machiavellian narratives and conspiracy theories have gone to town. The most consequential is the postulation that those who threaten Abuja may have larger political scripts hidden in their tunics. A series of synchronized terror events in and around Abuja could send the message that the 2023 elections would be untenable in an atmosphere of anarchy and insecurity in the capital city. In place of the election, this devious logic would want to emplace a government of national unity as a stabilization mechanism until security and stability return. This satanic script is said to be the handiwork of the famous conservative clique in and around the Villa. Beyond conspiracy schemes, there is a sense in which each of the frontline presidential candidates is open to schemes outside their control.

    Mr. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is easily the most adept power player in the present mix. Mr. Atiku has torpedoed his party’s power rotation understanding thereby stifling the hope of the South East to furnish a presidential candidate for the PDP in 2023. He garnered the support of the northern elite of the party to upstage other contenders at the May presidential primaries convention. A ding dong intra party series of skirmishes is raging between him and Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers state.

    Mr. Atiku may be holding the mainframe of the party with the support and collaboration of Dr. Iyiorcha Ayu, the party’s savvy chairman. Both men can rely on the longer institutional memory of the party to advance their cause. But Mr. Wike is a threat to the Rivers State bloc vote which is only next to Lagos in the south. The party has to find its way around Mr. Wike to gain access to that demographics of voters.

    Mr. Atiku remains vulnerable to the Machiavellian manoeuvres of three human political forces: he needs to reach some accommodation with Mr. Wike and his fellow travellers. More importantly, Atiku is politically indebted to two political deities: ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and former military president Ibrahim Babangida. Both men bear him deep grudges and possess considerable political clout. They could both keep Atiku awake for a few nights in the months ahead.

    But Mr. Atiku is a Fulani Muslim. But he remains something of a suspicious figure among the common northern street folk who see him as too much of a Westernized capitalist apologist and mogul. To approximate the cultic followership of a Buhari in the north, Mr. Atiku will need to move from his known centre right position towards a more conservative posture. That could cost him the support of corporate Nigeria and influential friends in the south. Of the three frontline presidential candidates, therefore, Mr. Atiku has the advantage of being the most pro establishment and pro northern hegemony.

    The ghosts of Machiavelli that will haunt Mr. Atiku reside in three zones of the country: the South West, the South East and the South South. In the South West, he has to wrestle with the potly ghost of Mr. Obasanjo. There is of course the looming presence of Mr. Bola Tinubu. In the South East, the wounded collective consciousness of a people lies in wait. For the south south, an Atiku presidency is inconsequential.

    Mr. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) can be an exciting old war horse. All the major indices of Nigerian power are on display in his armoury. He can rely on the troubled Buhari incumbency and the myth of an incumbent party. Hanging on to the Buhari coat tail could earn him the cultic followership of the departing Daura musketeer. However, Buhari’s cultic followership in the major Muslim states of Kano, Katsina and Kaduna , like all political followership, is not automatically transferable. If Tinubi could lay hands on that inheritance, he could get a decisive edge when added to his Lagos trove. His hands have extended to Rivers where he has effectively undermined the PDP by entering into an electoral understanding with Governor Wike. His Muslim-Muslim ticket could be an insurance policy to enhance his access to Buhari’s core Muslim base. But northern voters who have to choose between the Islam of Atiku and that of Atiku will have in interesting choice.

    Mr. Tinubu remains the candidate with the deepest pocket. He seems ready to deploy that war chest into the service of his political goals. His financial blitzkrieg during the APC presidential primaries says it all. He literally drowned his opponents in a sea of dollar bills to take home the prize presidential ticket.

    Inherent in Mr. Tinubu’s advantages are grave vulnerabilities as well. Some close watchers of President Buhari believe that his nativist instincts may not in fact favour a Tinubu succession. A school of thought believes that the Aso Rock power cartel around him may not be so excited about a Tinubu presidency either. There is an even more sinister Machiavellian conspiracy theory afloat. What if the assumed support of northern APC governors is designed to obtain Tinubu’s money and use it to fund an Atiku succession, thereby consolidating the northern hegemony? Tinubu may have the transactional support of ordinary northerners through cash and lorry loads of branded bags of rice. While Buhari gave the northern masses empty promises of a better life, Mr. Tinubu has instant goodness in cash and supplies in generous quantities!

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

    Peter Obi and his OBIdients movement could have been dismissed with a wave of the hand if they were not so consequential, menacing and expanding. In a relatively short space of time, Mr. Obi has had a movement grow around him and his counter narrative. He has become the emblematic poster “man in black” of this season with a targeted appeal mostly to the youth. He is the convergence of moment, message and messenger. His message is simple: ‘It is time to take back our country’. That message has resonated with the youth and the disenchanted majority of urban poor and unemployed. The desire to create a new Nigeria transcends the barriers that have held Nigeria hostage. There lies Obi’s real threat to the power establishment.

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

    The possible release of IPOB chieftain, Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, could be weaponized against Mr. Obi in the event that he becomes an electoral threat. Nnamdi Kanu’s considerable folk popularity in the South East could be deployed to erode Mr. Obi’s anticipated South East home base. The devious calculation would be to use Nnamdi Kanu’s release sas an effective antidote against an Obi presidential emergence.

    On the other hand, an unlikely mass embrace of Obi by Kanu and his IPOB mob will still spell the death of the OBIdients as a national movement and credible political alternative. It will be quickly consigned to the convenient category of separatist troublemakers. If Kanu and his followers decide to oppose Obi, it could convert the South East into a political battle field in every sense and distract from the national contest for apex power.

    Beyond such overtly mischievous and presumably far- fetched schemes, the major indices and constant unknowns of power and politics in Nigeria remain active. They will determine who assumes apex power in 2023. These constant determinants include issues of faith, ethnicity, region and big money interests and the deep state. Even in spite of the present veneer of democratic orderliness towards the 2023 elections, the prospects of democratic succession remain fractious and somewhat uncertain. The possibility of all manner of last minute Machiavellian antics remains potent. But the ultimate triumph of our democracy will remain a function of the state of health of our democratic institutions: a truly independent and credible INEC, a judiciary of honest judges, a media of fair and truthful journalists and a non- partisan state structure.

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