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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • Enemy at the Door – By Chidi Amuta

    Enemy at the Door – By Chidi Amuta

    (This piece was earlier published in the immediate aftermath of the July Kuje prison break in Abuja by ISWAP operatives and subsequent sporadic terrorist attacks in and around the Federal Capital. This week’s coordinated terror alerts by embassies of different Western countries in Abuja compel a re-run of the piece.)

    On the matter of ensuring national security by all means necessary, I accept being called a hawk. But on the concomitant cautious fear that bad things could happen to the nation if our defenses are lax, I will accept the title of coward. In short, a nation is entitled to deploy maximum force to ensure its continued sovereignty while constantly looking out to protect its citizens from those forces that do not wish both government and people well. Taken together, this is the contradiction that now defines our security imperative. Nothing better gives our situation more urgency than the clear consistent threat on the security of Abuja. Life, limbs and the very state are now at risk as the national capital is daily assaulted by an undisguised enemy force. And yet the embarrassing laxity of our defense and security forces in response to this existential threat dictates that we prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

    In the last couple of weeks, an enemy we are used to casually dismissing as a bunch of bandits has consistently targeted Abuja. Without fear of any contradiction, the forces of insecurity have coalesced into an enemy with a concerted strategic focus. The target of this adversary is clearly and unambiguously the sovereign heart of the Nigerian state. I am convinced that some evil force is out to hoist its nasty flag and shout a familiar bad slogan somewhere in the heart of Abuja.

    Only in the last fortnight, ISWAP terrorists have stormed and breached the Kuje medium security prison and freed an indeterminate number of inmates. These includd over 60 dangerous Boko Haram combatants. An operation that reportedly involved over 200 ISWAP operatives on motorbikes and which lasted a few hours has merely been explained away by an untidy exchange of blames and excuses by those paid to secure that facility. An embarrassed President Buari visited the broken prison and demanded a report on why our intelligence set up woefully failed to prevent the attack.

    Soon afterwards, alarms by some institutions in Abuja about imminent terrorist attacks have produced evidence that the enemy we fear to name is very much at the door. An elite Brigade of Guards patrol in the reported area of the Abuja Law School yielded a bloody ambush that has claimed the lives of a number of soldiers of the presidential guards unit. If the well trained and armed guards of the president cannot survive an attack by thi enemy force, what chance is there for the ordinary Abuja resident?

    Meanwhile a reported siege of a Federal Government high school in…a neighborhood of Abuja has alarmed school authorities into asking parents to evacuate their children from the school. In a reflex over reaction, authorities of the Federal Capital Authority have ordered a shut down of any number of private and public schools in and around Abuja as a preventive measure. There is no word as to for how long these unforeseen closures will last. I shtere a level of intelligence available to the officials ordering these closured that is not available to either commonsense or the public?

    As if that was not enough, only last Thursday evening, a roving unit of terrorists attacked an army checkpoint around Zuma Rock on the busy Abuja-Kaduna highway. Casualty figures remain hazy and conflicting. Predictably, these sporadic attacks in and around Abuja have created an understandable atmosphere of fear among the populace.

    Understandably, the president has taken some feeble action. He has met with his Security Council. The National Security Adviser has briefed a frightened and unsettled nation about steps being taken to tame terrorists and in particular defend Abuja. In an unusually candid admission, the NSA admitted that Nigerians have become weary of the security situation and the numerous official reassurances. By his admission, the public has incrementally lost confidence in the ability of the state to protect and defend the citizenry thereby making self-help and personal protection an increasingly attractive option.

    Mr. Monguno revealed that defense and security authorities are working on a new set of strategies to contain and combat the insecurity in the nation! After seven years of Buhari’s anti corruption and maximum security administration? The army has quickly reshuffled its commanders as if the mere moving of personnel and military furniture will translate into a fundamental strategic refocusing or tactical review of the old methods that have woefully failed us in the last seven years under a president with a military background.

    Clearly, the political leadership of the nation has been vastly deficient. Mr. Buhari has serially fallen short in the enormous powers which the Nigerian constitution give him as commander –in- chief. Moreso, for a president who was elected partly because he has a military background that was hoped would equip him to deal with the insecurity that preceded his ascendancy. However, given the present critical stage of the threat to national security , it would be a disservice to the nation for politicians to aggravate what is already and incendiary moment. Therefore, the six -week ultimatum given the president to fix the insecueity or face impeachment is an irresponsible political gambit. It is at best a cheap political blackmail with an intent to frighten an insecure president with a history of epic incompetence. At worst, the threat by senators of the opposition PDP has an inbuilt extortionist undertone that is familiar in Nigeria’s murky political culture of corruption and unbridled mercantilism. It is bad business to try and extort money out of a desperate national security emergency.

    Call my alert on the threat to Abuja baseless scare mongering if you like. But I see a clear strategic purpose in the pattern of recent attacks on facilities in and around Abuja. It ought to interest a perceptive public however that the government has never given the adversary a name. It is in fact the terrorists themselves who strike installations like the Kuje prison and reveal unapologetically through vivid videos that they are ISWAP. The government has been reluctant to admit either Boko Haram or ISWAP as the enemy against which they are fighting. The government just tags the attacks the handiwork of terrorists and moves on.

    The progressive advance of the enemy forces is by no means haphazard or just opportunistic. What we are witnessing is a clear purposive and directed movement of hostile actions even in an asymmetrical fashion which is typical of jihadist guerilla tactics. But the direction is obvious. It is governed by the territorial ambition of a movement intent on controlling a strategic swathe of territory from the Sahel to the larger West African Gulf of Guinea oceanfront. Nigeria is central to that calculation on account of its population and resource base. It has also become more attractive in recent times on account of the proven serial failures of the institutions of state and the weakness of national defense and security to stoutly defend the nation’s sovereignty.

    Some analysts have pointed at signs of collusion between elements in Nigeria’s security forces and the enabling financiers of Boko Haram and ISWAP. Some have seen signs of infiltration of intelligence sources and outright complicity between guardians of state security and defence and the enemy forces leading to ease of some of the operations. No one is certain that these suspicions are either true or totally false.

    What we can see is a clear purposive enlargement of the theatre of these attacks in the direction of Abuja as the centre of power in Nigeria. What started out in Borno state has spread throughout the entire North East. It has strayed into the North West and descended on the North Central zone in the North West zone, it has targeted Kaduna as the military industrial nerve centre of the nation and the last line of defense for Abuja. It has successfully tested the nerves of the Nigerian Defence Academy by killing and abducting some of its officers right on the campus.

    The enemy briefly knocked out the Kaduna airport by invading its perimeters and abducting some airport workers, thereby briefly closing the airport to many commercial airlines. It has made the Abuja- Kaduna highway untenable as a route for normal civil traffic. The enemy has severally attacked the rail link between Abuja and Kaduna and has knocked it out of the national civil transportation grid. It has taken out the rail link on the Abuja-Kaduna corridor while its rolling stock is marooned. Meanwhile, the Chinese loan that funded the rail line is gathering interest and charges while the project is returning zero revenue. Government has remained silent on when the rail link will reopen. And yet we remain silent on the identity and purpose of this enemy!

    The ISWAP/Boko Haram coalition forces have similarly zeroed in on states adjoining Abuja. In Niger state, for instance, the terrorists have taken over whole local governments and are exacting tributes, rents and levies from local populations. It attacked a miners in Shiroro and. killed over 30 soldiers and policemen that dared to challenge their abduction of Chinese miners. In the same week, an advance contingent of presidential staff on their way to president Buhari’s home town of Daura were attacked and a couple of them injured. A deliberate targeting of the president as the ultimate symbol of our national sovereignty cn only mean one thing: an arrow in the heart of the Nigerian nation.

    Those intent on diminishing the urgency and import of the obvious threat to Abuja and Nigeria’s sovereignty need to learn from recent jihadist takeovers and disruptions of nations in recent times. The dramatic fall of Kabul to the forces of the Taliban proceeded in similar fashion, At first the Taliban forces were concentrated far in the provinces, far away from the capital. Through a series of lightning raids and coordinated but sporadic attacks on major strategic routes to Kabul, they stunned both the government in Kabul as well as its supporting US military backers. All that American training, air power, hardware, logistics and communications backing were neutralized overnight. Taliban operatives who had effectively infiltrated the intelligence and defense architecture of the state merely streamed into an already softened and besieged Kabul.

    America retreated in stampede almost like in Saigon on April 30, 1975. All that sophisticated arsenal was reduced to a huge scrap yard of useless military technology that no one could use. All the generals with their fancy titles, epaulets and shiny medals were reduced to a horde of scampering cowards on the run. Many of them had long been in the payroll of both the Americans and the Taliban simultaneously. That lesson ought to be instructive to those paid to guard the secrets of Nigeria’s security and defence in today’s unfolding engagement.

    There may still be some residual professional muscle left in our military to confront our security nightmare. But the political interpretation of the crisis has bred a doctrinal anarchy and confusion of terminologies which is not helping those whose business it is to worry about Nigeria’s insecurity.

    The political leadership has finally agreed that the power base of the state is confronted by a terrorist onslaught. It took a while to officially pronounce the ISWAP/Boko Haram coalition a terrorist undertaking. But even that is hardly the whole truth by the strict characterization of terrorism. We are not dealing with mere sporadic terrorists. Terrorists strike at the soft underbelly of society’s complacent zones to disturb the peace, violently distort the norm and frighten the innocent. Terrorists storm train stations, airports, convert air planes into Kamikaze missiles, blow up restaurants, mosques, churches, night clubs and other places where society takes normalcy and tranquility for granted. These are the favorite targets of determined terrorists. As a rule, terrorists do not take territory or seek sovereignty over any place, peoples or things. They bomb, shoot or stab and instill horror through sudden violent acts. Thereafter, they move on, hoping not to be caught but leaving an unmistakable message through blood and tears. Their aim is to shock us all into an awareness of a cause or a cultural injury. The aim of terrorists is always to provoke the question: Why?. The hope is that the quest for answers will lead to some justice or atonement of an original injustice that has been etched into the mind of terrorist foot soldiers.

    Terrorists carry no maps or compasses. To do so would make their operations predictable and their trail obvious. All terrorists are unhinged agents of the devil, satan’s foot soldiers with neither direction nor compass. In some cases, they decorate their violence with a sectarian creed in order to keep their followership and attract new devotees. Sectarian terrorism is best rooted out by political means from its creedal source not massaged by silly palliatives and symbolic amnesties.

    Let us make no mistake about it. In Nigeria, we are not confronted by transactional bandits merely out to collect loose cash to assuage their socio economic deprivation and flee the trade after making enough money. Of course there are criminal bandit elements in our mix of sundry trouble makers. But those ones merely frighten innocent people, take hostages, rape women, demand ransom and sometimes storm schools, transit buses, trains and isolated motorists. Banditry is bad violent entrepreneurship gone out of control. But the majority of those we call bandits are recruits of the ISWAP/Boko Haram enterprise. The ransoms collected by bandits go to swell the war chest of the larger jihadist enterprise. Criminal banditry is easy to root out. Take out the gangster chieftains and you are likely to exterminate the ring. But systemic jihadist banditry has an almost limitless pool of recruits and is therefore self -renewing.

    Nigeria’s more strategic insecurity is therefore a local off -shoot and subset of the larger ISIS global jihadist terrorist network. In its Sahelian iteration, ISIS has metamorphosed into ISWAP/Boko Haram which has swallowed up Boko Haram and other isolated local chapters. That is why it became necessary and urgent for ISWAP to exterminate Abubakar Shekau and the leadership of Boko Haram. It has territorial ambition. It has political and strategic purpose. It has a sectarian dressing to appeal to innocent hearts and minds. It has a geo- strategic design. Its operations have a strategic compass and political map. What is unfolding in Nigeria especially the virtual siege on Abuja are the manifestations of these more concerted purposes and larger designs hence the concerted international concern. We need to key into the international onslaught to save our nation instead of this laughable grand standing by marionette minions of state power.

  • The Rise of Tyrant Governors – By Chidi Amuta

    The Rise of Tyrant Governors – By Chidi Amuta

    An urgent threat hovers over Nigeria’s democracy. It is not just the spectre of bad elections or the predominance of atrocious politicians. It is instead the rise and increasing numbers of authoritarian governors all over the country. Though enthroned by our often murky democratic process, an increasing number of state governors now carry on more like banana republic tin gods than elected representatives of the people. This is perhaps the most visible flagrant subversion of Nigeria’s democratic pretensions at the present moment. Ironically, however, not much of our media focus has been interested in drawing attention to the long term danger of this trend. Instead, people are clapping for these fledgling autocrats seeing them more as entertainers on social media rather than condemning them for the danger they pose to our future culture of freedom and democracy. While we watch and hail the authoritarian content creators, the Nigerian democratic shell now houses islands of the equivalents of the vile autocrats that we see in places that we are too ashamed to be associated with. Let us take a random look at recent trends.

    The governor of Zamfara State, Mr. Bello Matawalle recently ordered the shutdown of a number of media houses in the state on account of their coverage of political activities in the state. The affected media houses include the Nigeria Television Authority, Gamji Television, Al-Umma Television and Pride FM Radio in Gusau, the state Capital. Their crime ostensibly is that they covered and reported the campaign rally of the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), the opposition to the governor’s ruling All Progressive Congress (APC). The government statement on the matter claimed that the state government had suspended political activities in the state while the PDP went ahead and held its rally which was covered by the offending media. By the wordings of the order of closure, the offending media houses are, in the governor’s judgment, in breach of “the rules of journalism”. Reportedly, some journalists from the affected media houses were arrested for entering their respective work premises to perform their legitimate functions.

    Predictably, outcries and condemnations by international and national media organisations as well as civil society groups have followed but none of that has impressed the authoritarian despot in the Gusau Governor’s Lodge.

    By the illogic of this action, the governor has placed his partisan interests above the fundamental freedom of expression of the media which is a cornerstone of all democracies. Above all, the governor has usurped the regulatory powers of the relevant authorities on media practice and arrogated those powers to his executive fiat. If indeed he felt that the affected media houses had flouted any state laws, he should have reported them to the relevant regulatory bodies like the National Broad Commission(NBC) instead of taking recourse to a line of action which even a military regime would be reluctant to undertake.

    Mr. Bello Matawalle is not new to authoritarian flirtations and reckless pronouncements. Earlier, he had unilaterally announced that citizens of the state were free to acquire whatever arms they thought fit to secure themselves against the menace of bandits in the state. Of course, in the absence of a federal law granting citizens authority to bear arms, this declaration was in flagrant violation of all existing laws and the constitution of the country. The leadership of all national security agencies were unanimous in condemning the governor’s directive as an open invitation to anarchy.

    It would be recalled that Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina state had previously advocated the same self- help approach to citizens’ personal security, encouraging his people to take measures to protect themselves including the acquisition and possession of weapons. Masari’s pronouncement was consequential since he is the governor of the President’s home state.

    But nothing compares to Bello Matawalle’s record in terms of recklessness and flagrant disregard for democratic order. This is a governor who had previously entered into all manner of agreements with bandit leaders in the state, sometimes allowing them to roam free in certain areas only to scream aloud each time his agreement with them appeared to be foundering. Meanwhile, he has ceded the state to terrorists to the extent that his state is arguably the epicentre of banditry and rural terrorism in the nation. Most ungoverned spaces in Zamfara are effectively under bandit control even now. Local farmers pay levies to bandits and war lords in order to plant or harvest their crops.

    Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi state typifies a different dimension in the descent into low levels of authoritarianism. His contribution is In the area of the conscious cultivation of a political personality cult. A recent viral video in the social media showed Governor Umahi gleefully ‘overseeing’ the open flogging of innocent public servants by soldiers and policemen because they arrived after him during a visit to a government facility. It is uncertain whether the governor ordered the floggings. But it remains doubtful that such an act of open abuse of citizens rights can take place in the presence of the governor without his authorisation.

    What is common knowledge is that Mr. Umahi has been consistently intolerant of dissenting views. He has embarked on the use of rough tactics to mzintain his political predominance in the state. To criticize Mr. Umahi in Ebonyi state is to transgress against all known deities. For him, intimidation and harassment of his political opponents seems routine. Opposition politicians, journalists and plain well -meaning citizens have been subjected to this governor’s ire for just holding contrary views or questioning the governor’s half- baked and ill digested ideas and policies. Ig does not matter that he has changed political parties in pursuit of some phantom Igbo presidency project which he saw as his entitlement.

    Probably because he is uncomfortable with the growing popularity of Mr. Peter Obi and his OBIdients movement, a peaceful street rally in Abakaliki by the movement was visited with police tear gas and truncheons ostensibly on the orders of the state police commissioner. It remains doubtful whether any state police commissioner can undertake an action that violates the constitutional right of assembly of citizens without the authorisation of the governor of the state. But that incident went down as the first and only state where the rallies and street marches of the OBIdients has been dispersed with tear gas anywhere in the federation.

    The governors of Ondo and Benue states belong in a somewhat different category. They have engaged in acts that run in open contradiction to the spirit and letter of the constitution. Reacting to the pervasive insecurity in the nation and the heavy tolls it has taken on lives and property in both states in particular, the governors have responded to what is clearly an emergency. They have pioneered the setting up of state security outfits. In the case of Ondo, it is the Amotekun vigilante outfit which is a pan-South West endeavour. But Mr. Akeredolu has gone a step further than his other South West counterparts. He has vociferously taken federal authorities to task on the matter of the calibre of weapons that Ondo state Amotekun should bear. He has requested for military grade weapons such as AK-47 assault rifles and other high calibre armaments that clearly go beyond the security needs of a state. Mr. Ortom of Benue state has followed suit.

    There may be some justification in the stance of both governors. Their argument is hinged on the nature of the threat on their states. After all, the armed herdsmen, sundry terrorists and bandits who attack and kill their citizens are armed with military grade weapons and display a proficiency in weapons use that can only be found among highly trained and professional killer squads. But the insistence of the governors on arming their respective militias with military grade weapons runs counter to the law of the land. Constitutionally, only the authorised security agencies are allowed to acquire and use weapons like assault rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers. The insistence of these governors on their request is in violation of the constitutional provision which places the armed and security services and their equipment in the exclusive hands of the federal government. To insist otherwise is to run foul of the demarcation of powers between the two tiers of government. It is also an open challenge of the supreme sovereignty of the federal government.

    Basic constitutional compliance is at the root of the democratic essence of every sovereign nation state. Open challenges to the national constitution except through the judicial process amount to political rascality under the guise of protection of citizens of their respective states. The argument of the federal authorities that a state government cannot be more concerned about citizen security than the federal government is, to some extent valid. But the security of citizens is a joint responsibility of the federal and state authorities.

    In Imo State, Governor Hope Uzodinma has tended to pursue political survival and pre- eminence in his fractious state through all manner of authoritarian head butts. For a governor whose legitimacy and ascendancy hinges on the verdict of a handful of Supreme Court judges, his every step seems to be immersed in controversy. He walked into a political minefield with a predecessor that was considerably popular. The state was already charged with challenges. A hostile populace plus a former governor, Mr. Rochas Okorocha, who was embattled over illicit property matters and who is deeply entrenched in the Imo power structure meant that Mr. Uzodinma has to fight for every inch of political foothold he enjoys.

    Add to this the weaponization of politics in Imo and the enlistment of factions of IPOB separatist militia and other opportunistic criminal gangs into the Imo fray and you have the makings of a battle field of sorts. A small Mexico! A state like this can only be conducive to anarchy and violent insecurity. The rapid descent of a hitherto peaceful and happy- go- lucky state into a hell hole of violence and anarchy is a study in the convergence of bad politics and opportunistic criminality as an enterprise.

    Mr. Uzodinma is clearly an embattled governor from many fronts. Arguably, therefore, the niceties of democratic civility may not secure him the power longevity he desires as a politician. He has tended to adopt autocratic measures to survive while pretending to catering to state security and restoration of order. He has, for instance, enacted a law authorizing him to arrest and detain citizens who may not share his views or those whose activities and views he adjudges inimical to peace and order in the state. He has also reportedly cooperated with federal security agencies to levy acts that amount to war against communities in parts of the state where separatist militants allegedly have calls and camps. The trouble in these so called special ‘security operations’ has been how to distinguish between the governor’s armed political opponents and genuine criminals or IPOB activists.

    This warlike situation has exposed federal security operatives deployed to the state to great risk leading to a high casualty rate among policemen and soldiers and of course grave human rights violations. This has perhaps become a license for more authoritarian measures. In the process, the governor’s credentials as a democratic leader have become badly tainted as his state has descended into a permanent state of undeclared emergency. And states under some form of ‘emergency rule are never the best venues for democratic civility or genteel displays.

    In present day Rivers state, we come face to face with all the facets of the abuse of democratic mandate to propagate the worst traits of authoritarianism and despotic rascality. The most recent initiative of Governor Nyesom Wike is a plan to recruit no less than 100,000 ‘special assistants’ predictably to act as authorised political thugs in the 2023 election season. Prior to this, Mr. Wike, who is in the political trench with his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as a factional leader, has used undisguised intimidation, harassment, blackmail and violence against his political enemies within the state. He has closed the businesses of his adversaries, demolished houses and hotels of his enemies and withdrawn titles, privileges and patronage from political allies who now believe and align differently. He has unilaterally converted the apparatus of state to an instrument of political blackmail, authorized gangsterism and reckless charity.

    In utter devaluation of all democratic norms, Mr. Wike has barred political campaigns in public premises including schools. He has used the State House of Assembly to instigating the de-listing of Mr. Omehia as former governor despite earlier recognizing and rewarding the same man as an ex governor. The fact that the list of Mr. Wike’s political victims and adversaries corresponds to all those who now support his opponent, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, who roundly trounced him to emerge as the PDP presidential candidate, is interesting. In terms of general political conduct, Mr. Wike has descended from the high pinnacle of an elected state chief executive to adopt the language and mannerisms of an undisguised gutter snipe and motor park bus conductor. The candour of expression, respect for decorum and consideration for public sensitivities are utterly lacking in the dictionary of this elected autocratic upstart. In his embodiment of all the anomalies in Nigeria’s democracy today, Governor Wike may have unwittingly ended up more as an online comic content creator than a serious politician. The most lowly in the public merely laugh off his foibles for entertainment.

    Taken together the multiple transgressions of this diversity of governors amplify the crisis of Nigeria’s democratic pretensions. Nothing in our constitution amounts to a code of conduct for state governors in a democracy. We are therefore left with only the schedule of duties and responsibilities of state governors in the constitution to guide our basic assessment of the conduct of our 36 governors.

    Perhaps the most compelling indictment of the current spate of authoritarianism among many governors is democracy itself. Democracy in itself should impose an ethical code, requiring basic civility on the part of those elected to rule over us. This implies respect for the rights of the citizenry as the prime enablers of power, privilege and authority in a democracy. It also implies strict observance of the rule of law and the observance of the rules of democratic civility by those in positions of authority. A good number of our current crop of governors are in defiance of the basic tenets of democratic governance.

    To remind us all, especially our tyrannical governors, the job of state governor does not include certain defilements that we are now witnessing. A governor should not insult his opponents for believing differently. A governor should not spend or ‘donate’ public money without legitimate appropriation. A governor should not bulldoze the property of their opponents or deny people their right to free expression. Governance in a drunken state is worse than drunk driving; its casualties could include the driver himself and other innocent road users!

  • This Time Next Year – By Chidi Amuta

    This Time Next Year – By Chidi Amuta

    The distance between political campaign promises and their fulfilment is an infinity. Between when these promises are made and the end of the tenure of those who usually promise paradise and deliver hell, people are often too dazed to remember. As it were, empty promises seem to be part of the language of political campaigning. At the root of this anomaly especially in Africa is the crooked assumption that politics is by its very nature an amoral undertaking. It has therefore come to be assumed in these parts, at least, that politicians are inherently a tribe of professional liars. Over time, this has led to what is now called a trust deficit with politicians. Simply put, most citizens no longer believe most of what politicians say either during campaigns or even while in office. Call it counter truth or Donald Trump’s ‘alternate truth’. Politicians seem to have redefined truth in their own image.

    Election seasons are democracy’s season of reveries or mass delusion decorated in hysteria. The opening of Nigeria’s campaign season for 2023, is also the inauguration of our season of reverie and carnivals. It is carnival time, a great time to dream while wide awake. The electorate is taken on a sustained make belief roller coaster ride, entertained with endless vistas of paradise in the horizon. The worse the society and its conditions, the wider the market for decorated lies and unrealisable promises of paradise.

    In a sense, every serious politician is a dream weaver of sorts. First, they spend fortunes on commissioned policy papers, manifestoes and action plans. In these days of PowerPoint presentations and digital wonders, political and public relations consultants come up with endless computer holograms, graphs, animations and virtual scenarios at the behest of their clients. Political marketing has assumed wild dimensions as major tech companies now help politicians to buy and sell followers and would be voters online. Nigerian politicians have joined the fray of digital scams. Recall how some of the presidential aspirants were sold holographs that indicated they had already won their party tickets until the morning after. Some aspirants went into instant depression while the consultants vanished into thin with brief cases stuffed with dollars!

    It is not only local politicians that are exploiting the power of information technology and the digital revolution. Even politicians in the most sophisticated of nations are in it. Preparatory to his very first visit with North Korea’s young autocratic leader, Kim Jung Un, the irrepressible President Donald Trump had his public relations gurus prepare him a digital wonderland of what North Korea would look like after it opens up to the West. The presentation was replete with shiny new cities with white sand beaches, chains of seaside luxury hotels and apartment high rises with sprawling malls and casinos. It was an undisguised marketing tool in aid of greater Westernization and all the creature comforts that have ensnared many societies to embrace the neon lure of western materialism and ostentatious consumption.

    As it turned out, a faction of the CIA had fed President Trump the delusion that since the young dictator had received the best of western education and exposure, having studied in elite Swiss schools, he would be tempted to swallow the bait of Western investment and take the glory for opening up the hermit kingdom to the world. No dice. Trump had disastrously miscalculated. After Trump’s presentation, Kim Jung Un got even angrier with the West. He wrote fewer ‘love’ letters to Trump thereafter and instead fired more missiles with a capacity to hit fancy US cities if matters came to a head. Trump never returned in the direction of North Korea and nicely swallowed his promises. A similar gambit had also failed in his attempt to lure the Palestinian Authority to swallow a phantom peace deal with Israel in return for life more abundant.

    At election time in today’s world, the best politicians now hire credible marketers and marketing corporations to bear the burden of their own famed credibility gaps. It is not only here. In most parts of the world, people have grown to habitually NOT believe politicians and the promises they make at election time. The so-called trust deficit about politicians has become a global pandemic.

    The old tradition used to be that political spokes persons and marketers needed to be acclaimed talkatives and unserious men and women with unusual gifts of the gab. They need to be smooth- talking and savvy enough to deceive an undiscerning electorate into buying into their wagon of rotten apples. Since politicians cannot themselves step out to market dodgy used cars, they look within their party faithful for famed marketers of fake things.

    Generally, the ground is most fertile in certain places for marketing fishy vistas of imminent heaven. A bad place with a tradition of ready belief is the birthplace of gods of salvation. When a society hits bottom, every miscreant bearing a basket of promises of better times is greeted as the harbinger of a messiah.

    As in every prelude to the promised hour, this is Nigeria’s hour of promises, the hour of deliverance from the menace of bad leadership and the ogres of tragic governance. Nigeria in the countdown of the 2023 elections is a natural fertile ground for a basket of promises. And the major political parties have keyed into the fad of the hour. But unlike their counterparts in the advanced Western democracies, Nigerian politicians and their parties have done the predictable. Completely insensitive to the trust deficit, see whom the parties have chosen as their campaign spokespersons.

    The ruling APC has chosen Mr. Femi Fani Kayode, a man for all seasons and all possibly parties in partnership with lawyer turned political town crier Festus Keyamo as the paired of duelling talkaholics. The duo seem to balance out the interests that will make or wound the APC’s chances in 2023: one for Mr. Tinubu and the other for the receding shadow of the Buhari lame duck. The opposition PDP has opted for the loquacious Dino Melaye while Mr. Obi’s Labour Party has predictably settled for doctor turned political attack hound, Mr. Doyin Okupe. These gentlemen are all , in their own right, illustrious Nigerian political animals of unmistakable pedigree and tested track records. But I doubt that any modern political agenda with the slightest regard for the prevailing trust deficit haunting our politicians will place any of these gentlemen in the forecourt of their used car shop! But the message of this campaign season goes beyond the pedigree and credibility of the party messengers per se.

    Nigeria is not new to the politics of campaign promises and the flourish of fancy rhetoric. The motor park grade exchange of insults has come to stay just as the abuse of logic and descent into personal name calling is to be expected. Politicians who themselves are mostly bereft of policy depth or a reasonable level of knowledge of the issues of the day can only be expected to relapse into mundane superficial inanities and the mouthing of lazy catch phrases and cliches.

    We have been here before. President Obasanjo campaigned on the basis of consolidating Nigeria’s nationhood and restoring democratic freedoms after three decades of military rule about which he knows quite a bit. He gave it his best shot in all fairness. Mr. Yar’dua, though short lived, was not a man of promises and propaganda. He got on with the job with a clarity of thought and a surefootedness that impressed a sceptical nation. The only promise Yar’dua made was to uphold Obasanjo’s legacy and deepen his reform of the economy and end militant insurgency in the Niger Delta.

    President Goodluck Jonathan, probably overwhelmed by the enormity of his responsibility, insisted that he did not want to make any promises so that no one would hold him responsible for any unfulfilled promises. Smart chap! He sauntered through his tenure before he was relieved by the electorate who chose Mr. Buhari to succeed him. Since he made no promises, his only legacy is that he peacefully handed us over to Mr. Buhari.

    Both President Buhari and his marketers in the new coalition that became the APC were full of promises. Mr. Jonathan’s bumbling presidency had provided them with enough ammunition to shoot down whatever he thought would be his legacy. For insecurity, Buhari brandished his old soldier’s rusty credentials. For the economy, the man promised greater frugality since he was known for a spartan life and indifference to materialism. No one asked him what he had ever managed profitably. For national unity, he trumpeted his questionable role in the civil war. For discipline, he drummed up his record of indiscriminate detentions and flogging of innocent people during his two years of frowning military autocracy. Myths, promises, high hopes and expectations.
    Now, almost eight years down the road, Nigerians can hardly recognise what strange animal has bitten them.

    We are where we are. Irrespective of which party manifesto is in question, there is now a political consensus of national urgency. For the first time, Nigerian political parties and the electorate have a broad agreement. All parties agree that the Buhari administration is a watershed, a dividing line between hell and anything else. No honest party or candidate wants to re-enact the nightmare of the last seven and half years. But everyone agrees that the Buhari administration is not totally useless. Like poison, it has its uses: you can use it to cure or to kill. It has provided all the ingredients that any politician needs to make his campaign easy. All the themes and issues are complete. Check through Buhari’s legacy of serial infamy: Insecurity. Poverty. Economic chaos. National disunity. Rudderless governance. Corruption. Apathy to ideas. Nepotism. Unemployment…

    It is therefore a classic irony when the incumbent president only last week admonished politicians and candidates to dwell on issues and avoid sensationalism and emotional subjects. Why not? He has created a long enough list of issues to fuel more than one campaign season. This could indeed be a lazy campaign season because the incumbent has defined all the issues and the parameters for fruitful electioneering. Candidates just need to plug in and play.

    Yet there remains a lot of work to be done. There is an urgent need for specifics and precision in campaign promises. Mr. Peter Obi, easily the most exciting of the presidential candidates, has insisted that he wants to run a different agenda and inaugurate a different political tradition from the politics as usual represented by his opponents. But he remains scanty on details and specific directions.

    For now, though, Mr. Obi who is yet to publish or publicise a manifesto or work plan continues to ride on his growing wave of popularity fed on the trust and hype of a populace glued to his difference. So far, there is no specific work plan either on the economy or basic governance strategies.

    Mr. Tinubu who just returned from a vacation trip in the United Kingdom has joined the campaign fray. He remains for now stuck at the level of cliches and catch phrases. He has not yet presented any manifesto or policy document. Addressing his teeming devotees and campaign women on his return, he has reassured all that “your hope is back!”, “the future is bright!”

    So far, only Mr. Atiku Abubakar has come forward with a sensible and fairly detailed policy document. His policy template is a condensed and updated postscript of the Obasanjo reform agenda. He wants to improve power, generate employment, improve security by training and recruiting more service personnel. Most importantly, he wants to restructure the federation into more economically viable federating units even if he stops shy of how he hopes to jump the constitutional hurdle on that one.

    For now, it promises to be an avalanche of promises and programmes with at least 18 presidential candidates on the ballot. What no one can say for sure, however, is how soon after Mr. Buhari’s anxiously awaited exit to Daura Nigerians can expect to breathe an air of optimism with a foretaste of some sweetness. One thing is certain though, after the first 100 days of whoever becomes the next president, our minimum expectation is a swing in our national mood from the present gloom, anxiety and depression to one of possibility, optimism and some anticipation of hope in the horizon. By this time next year, perhaps we can see a ray of sunshine.

  • My crowd is bigger than yours – By Chidi Amuta

    My crowd is bigger than yours – By Chidi Amuta

    The crowds of power wear an amorphous but identical face. It does not matter whether they are the Roman plebeians, renegade factions of the Athenian metropole or the rough racist hounds that accompanied Donald Trump to defile the US Capitol on 6th January 2021. They are all roughly the same. Political crowds troop out in passionate pursuit of whatever incenses them at a given time.

    Hitler was always greeted by throngs of Nazi devotees as he rallied popular support in support of his exploits and toxic theology of hate and phantom supremacist myths. Unconsciously, the crowds began to salute like the Fuhrer and the swastika became a badge of curious honour. In Caracas, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez had a special budget for entertaining the crowds that trooped out ever so frequently to listen to his periodic lengthy rants about the socialist utopia and the capitalist devil nearby. After each bout of propaganda, Venezuelans would return home to find no food and visit shops with empty shelves. Wherever and whenever power is in contest, the crowds gather irrespective of whether the hero of the moment is a fiery revolutionary, preachy decrepit democrat or confused military despot. The crowd just marched in the streets of Ouagadougou to welcome yet another African baby dictator!

    In a democracy, those who judge the popularity of a political cause by the quantum of crowds at rallies need to think again. Those throngs and multitudes that troop out to chant the anthem of a cause or greet the moment’s man of power often have little or nothing to do with definitive partisanship or real support. The crowds are often massed in the service of something new. Democracy’s periodic elections have a way of being constant sources of seasonal messiahs. Politicians are the most creative species when it comes to creating new embodiments of promise, hope and utopia. Rented crowds show up in the most unexpected places and in quantities that no one imagined previously.

    Rented crowds are as old as party politics everywhere. They are the most common expression of democracy as the currency and facilitator of the modern market society. Here, everything is a commodity and every interaction is transactional: “if you pay, we will troop out for you! If you pay, we shall mobilize votes for you!” Enter the crowd contractor as a specialist in the game of democracy. The crowd contractor can rent you a rally crowd, rent you emergency bishops complete with a variety of cassocks. Just name it!

    At other times, the crowds of power are massed in the pursuit of a creed, a catechism or a phantom ideal like the sudden emergence of a messianic leader. Processions of protesting crowds may emerge when a popular disquiet graduates into a movement in pursuit of an ideal. The crowds that swept the Arab world during the Arab Spring were a spontaneous eruption of pent -up opposition to perpetual tyrants in power all over the Arab world. Throngs and crowds can also mass up in pursuit of a ‘gold rush’ when political oligarchs dish out bales of cash to rent crowds in support of their political enterprise. In the course of my career, have seen different metamorphoses of crowds in support of diverse causes.

    In Tripoli from June to August 2011, a combined air strikes of Western powers was pounding the fortress of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. The initial demonstrations featured huge impenetrable crowds of Gaddafi supporters. They were united in denouncing the imperialist forces of the West for seeking the overthrow of the populist leader. At the town centres and popular squares, the crowds were an unmistakable daily feature. With a bit of training, this reporter could track the leaders of the protests who showed up daily to rally the crowds and sustain the protests. As time progressed and the air strikes progressively took out the strategic heights of the Gaddafi power stronghold, the supporting crowds began to thin out as it became more dangerous and also clear that the strongman had only a matter of days to either flee, surrender or get killed.

    Gradually, a counter crowd began to mass in parts of the suburbs of Tripoli and different urban centres like Benghazi. The counter throngs built up as the strong air power of the West incinerated what remained of Mr. Gaddafi’s hold on power. The chants changed from “Down with America!” to “Away with Gaddafi!”. The same faces, the same crowds, the same leaders! I was able to identify about half a dozen regular faces, having studied the film footages of the weeks- long protests. The same faces, the same individuals had led the protests and crowds that denounced the West initially and were now calling for Gaddafi’s head. They must be either professional crowd managers or deliberate malefactors. The day the strongman was killed like a common criminal on the streets as he tried to flee in a convoy, the same faces led the throng of a final citizens parade to whom a bloodied and humiliated Gaddafi was pleading for mercy and forgiveness! So much for the solidarity of crowds!

    As the frenzied countdown to Nigeria’s 2023 elections enter the streets in campaign mode, we are being treated to a contest of crowds by the top contenders for the presidential slot. On October 1st, Mr. Peter Obi’s OBI-dients stormed the political fortress of Lagos in novel fashion. An anticipation that they will mass up at the Lekki Toll Gate had misled the police into supporting a court injunction outlawing political campaigns at the location. But the OBI-dients are not your usual political rally crowd. They may not even be Labour Party members or supporters. I reckon that over 98% of Mr. Obi’s crowd of supporters hardly know anything about the Labour Party or care about its logo or manifesto. And outside Mr. Obi who has become something of a pop star mascot of a popular movement, most OBI-dients do not know and cannot recognize any other face in the Labour Party.

    To mark independence day, Mr. Obi’s supporters trooped out and massed up from all corners of Lagos: Festac, Ikeja, Surulere, Lekki , Victoria Island, Ikoyi etc. The mammoth crowds were literally everywhere, even in tiny street corners in the slums and outskirts. Even the Lekki Toll Gate was overwhelmed as the thousands of youth gathered at the Toll Gate. At the climactic moment, the gathered youth burst spontaneously into an emotional rendition of the Nigerian national anthem. At that moment, even the police personnel sent to enforce the court order against rallying at the Toll Gate stood at attention to respect the national anthem.

    As it turns out, the tumultuous OBI-dient rallies were replicated in other urban centres of the country: Uyo, Calabar, Zaria, Benin and Warri among others. Some aspects of the OBI-dient rallies stood out in their supreme symbolism and emotional solemnity. A toddler dressed in national green outfit carrying a tiny flag of the Labour Party emerged as a befitting poster child of the campaign. In Warri, a squad of physically challenged citizens rallied on their wheelchairs chanting the national anthem with hope in their eyes.

    Not to be outdone by the OBI-dients’ increasing showing of popular support, the other major party campaigns have latched on to the crowd sourcing challenge. Barely a few days after October 1st, a huge collection of women supporters of Mr. Bola Tinubu of the APC massed up at the Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos. Shortly afterwards, a mammoth crowd of Tinubu supporters marched in the streets of ancient Ibadan. All these took place as Mr. Tinubu himself was away in London on a private vacation of sorts. In a similar move, Mr. Kwakwanso of the NNPP showed his Kano support base with an equally tumultuous outing in Kano last week. Clearly, a contest for crowds is in the offing.

    On his part, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the PDP defied the internal wrangling threatening the cohesion of his party to put up a show of strength in Bauchi a few days ago. The crowd of supporters that trooped out to welcome Mr. Atiku in Bauch is a potent message to all those who are yet to understand the geo- political heartbeats of the 2023 presidential election. It was a tumultuous crowd that stepped out to own Mr. Atiku and his campaign for the presidency this time around.

    From all this, the public assessment of the 2023 elections will be gauged by the size of the crowds that mass up in support of the various candidates. What is likely to play out is that over time, the size and momentum of these crowds will come to reflect a number of factors playing in favour of each candidate. Factors such as religion, geo politics, gender and the youth bulge will emerge to be reflected in favour of each candidate. These factors are yet in incubation as the campaign organisations of the various candidates get to work.

    However, at this early stage, a clear distinction needs to be made between two emerging patterns on the campaign trail. On the one hand, there is the decentralised crowds of mostly spontaneous volunteers in support of Mr. Obi and therefore the Labour Party. This spontaneity is driven by the peculiar factors that have combined to earn Mr. Obi such a large following in a relatively short time. That the OBI-dients should emerge in less than six months of the party primaries to compete for crowd volume with the PDP which has been in existence for 23 years and the APC which has been here for a little over 8 years speaks to a fundamental difference of structure, messaging and timing.

    The earliest criticism and reservation that most observers had about the relative popularity of the OBI-dient movement is its ‘lack’ of structure in the conventional sense of parties as we have come to know them. We need to understand the source of this phenomenon. First, the relative nationwide popularity of Mr. Peter Obi and his movement is the result of a novel convergence. It is the convergence between the current mood of the nation which has found a credible messenger in Mr. Obi and an appropriate message for the time. The quest for political leadership that can be trusted and promising a different people oriented politics is a refreshing departure from the old politics as usual which many now see as represented by both Messrs Atiku and Tinubu respectively.

    Over and above this thematic distinction, the Peter Obi movement or OBI-dients is not strictly speaking about the stake of a party. It is instead an idea of a new nation that needs a party to contest the next election. At best, it is a movement-party, a common feature of the new wave populist democratic movements in parts of the world like Chile, Hungary and a bit of post -Mugabe Zimbabwe. In the context of a movement-party, then, structure is not vertical top to bottom as it obtains in conventional parties. In that old model, authority is passed down a hierarchy that flows down from the national, the zonal, the state, local government and ward levels.

    In contrast, the movement- party has a horizontal bottom -up structure. Authority is dispersed and derives from voluntary individuals and citizen groups. It is the broad horizontal support base of the citizens that empowers the structures of the party to act on their behalf. Authority, power, control and even funding are derived from the bottom and flow up to support the common national cause. What powers the movement-party is the shared conviction, the belief in an idea whose time has come. That horizontal imperative cuts across and through all other divides: religion, ethnicity, region, class. It is the fact that the broad citizenry want to transcend these barriers that holds a movement-party together and makes it different. It is therefore wrong to dismiss the OBI-dients as being without a structure. Their structure is inherent in what they are, a popular movement that needs a pafrty logo to legitimize its quest for power. That we do not know or understand something does not mean that it does not exist!

    This structural difference also implies different campaign formats. The conventional parties will organise rallies at state capitals, mass up supporters (rented or otherwise) in stadia, huge town halls and other gathering places. There, they will be addressed by a gamut of party hierarchy and chieftains. By the time it comes to the turn of the flag bearer or presidential candidate to speak, the crowd will have built up into a frenzied cacophonous babel and rowdy tumult. The candidate will be lucky to utter more than party slogans and silly catch phrases: “PDP! Power!!”, “APC! Change!!” etc. In the process, effective communication with the crowd is lost as there is nothing said at the rally that can be quoted thereafter. That is how come we have candidates that no one can hold accountable for any promises made at campaign rallies.

    On the contrary, a movement-party imposes a different campaign format and communication imperative. The campaigns even in a state cannot hold in any one location. Wherever there is a reasonable demographics of followers, a major march through the town takes place. It is hardly ever a stationary campaign. It is a moving train of citizen followers and advocates organising themselves on a volunteer basis. The social media is the standard communication platform of the campaign. Once the central message from the movement leadership is issued, it spirals, trends and goes viral among all followers and advocates. The message is usually simple and direct to the broad majority: “We want to take back our country!” “It is time to return the country to YOU!”, “Power belongs to YOU. We are running for power through YOU”! etc.

    There is nothing in this distinction between the two models on display that as yet confers an electoral advantage on either in the imminent confrontation in Nigeria. But the emergence of the OBI-dients on the Nigerian political scene is a novel disruptive phenomenon. We need to better understand its popularity, pattern of campaigning and crowd sourcing template. There is already evidence that the conventional parties will try to emulate some features of the movement format- like street marches- as against stationary fixed venue campaigns.

    Ultimately, however, it is the extent of mobilization and the mix of factors at play in a vast country such as this that will determine who becomes Nigeria’s next president. It will not be just the size of crowds alone.

  • Buhari as Change Agent – By Chidi Amuta

    Buhari as Change Agent – By Chidi Amuta

    The truths of history often reveal themselves to us by a ruse. A president who in 2015 happened on us on a mantra of ‘Change’ is today the object and embodiment of a clamour for decisive urgent change. Call him Mr. Change and pronounce it anyway you like, something is clearly undeniable. Mr. Buhari has changed the Nigerian landscape more for ill than for good.

    Even as he heads for the exit gate of power, it is very true that the man has left Nigeria vastly different from the way he found it, which is arguably what a presidential tenures are all about. Consequently, he has made decisive urgent change an imperative for all those who seek to succeed him in office. His track record as elected president has also become the benchmark for marking what just has to change about how Nigeria is governed and how our people live and relate with each other. Call it a watershed, but the Buhari presidency has become the gold standard that demarcates good governance from serial mendacious atrocities in the name of power incumbency.

    As campaigns for the 2023 elections open and hit the streets, Buhari’s ambiguous legacy will occupy centre stage in nearly all the campaigns. Candidates who want to make Nigeria safer and more secure will be citing the total collapse of national security under the Daura general as the basis for the changes they want to make. Those whose campaign is to fix the economy will have enough statistics of woeful economic management since 2015 to cite. Candidates whose interest is in the astronomical increase in the rate of impoverishment among our populace will have abundant statistical support in the figures which in the last seven years have made Nigeria the poverty capital of the world. Not to talk of candidates who want to preach the urgent need to reunite the country after seven and half years of divisive politicking under Buhari and his friends and cohorts. The fields of negative emphasis are too numerous to catalogue. As the source of urgent campaign subjects, the Buhari presidency has provided more than a generous supply of concerns.

    It is in this cynical sense that Mr. Buhari can rightfully be seen as the indisputable single dominant change agent in this season of campaigns. His presence will loom in every campaign even if he says nothing. The loud footsteps of his inactions deafen other contending noises just as his serial bumbling will provide models of what no serious presidential candidate should aim to be.

    A leader becomes a change agent either by the positive examples he lays to be emulated by his successors or the negative footprints he leaves to be avoided by all respectable aspirants to the throne. In our context, the broad majority of what the candidates do not want to see in the Nigeria of the future are embodied in the essence of Mr. Buhari’s toxic presidency. This is the mood today and it is the one that will pervade the campaign season and lead into the elections proper.

    The ambiguous legacy of the man from Daura does not end there. Too many Nigerians will swear that Buhari has divided Nigeria more than ever before. But again by a trick of history, Nigerians are also now more united than ever in one respect: everybody is determined that never again must a Buhari type presidency happen here. That has become a unifying cry, a loud determination and clear and present wish. It cuts across faith, region, class and tongue. Most importantly, it cuts across partisan divides. Of all the 18 presidential candidates of the parties now assembled and ready to traverse the country, there is no single one who has opted for a continuation of Buhari’s leadership or legacy as his campaign objective.

    Not even Mr. Tinubu of the originating APC dares take this gamble.

    What may in fact be unfolding is a historic convergence and a curious informal consensus in the politics of Nigeria. Somehow, all the significant presidential candidates are joined at the hips by one aim: how to stylishly reject Buhari’s unenviable legacy. Ordinarily, an incumbent president cannot be casually wished away in an election to choose his successor. He is significant in either of two ways. Candidates, especially of his party, may want to massage his ego by rhetorically promising to advance his cause, sustain his goals or uphold his legacy. On the contrary, all opposition candidates will campaign to replace or reverse his programmes , policies and legacies. In the best traditions of political civility, a moderately tolerable outgoing president can at best be politely ignored if his actions did not hurt the polity or key interest groups. Rarely do we find departing incumbents on whose legacies all aspiring candidates show a unanimous rejection and an intent for immediate reversal when elected. It is even rarer where the common run of public opnion across board coincides with the consensus among political aspirants to the throne. Mr. Buhari happens to have met this rare strange combination of requirement.

    There are of course redeeming features that some candidates may want to market about Buhari’s legacy. A candidate may want to point at some infrastructure bright spots such a few successful rail and road projects. This would only fly for as long as the candidate believes in physical landscape decoration as the essence of the dividend of democracy. But politics is about human beings living meaningful lives in a safe space called a nation state. A space full of modern highways, bullet trains and shiny sky scrapers but full of impoverished people who are not sure to see tomorrow is a nightmare. No one wants to go there!

    Of all the presidential candidates seeking to take Buhari’s job, however, Mr. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is in the most unenviable position. His campaign promises to be the most difficult and also most engaging from point of view of messaging. For reasons of all manner of political conveniences and exigencies, Mr. Tinubu may not want to annoy Mr. Buhari. Even in the face of aggravated irritation, Tinubu is the least likely to look Buhari in the face and tell him to go you know where.

    Instead, Tinubu is doomed to sing a meliorative campaign anthem in which Mr. Buhari does no overt wrong. In critical high demographic locations, the standard expectation would be that Mr. Buhari would stand shoulder to shoulder with Tinubu to endorse him publicly as his party anointed. Already, both the Buhari presidency and the Tinubu campaign are sharing common platforms of spokespersons and a common propaganda line. They can still plead party solidarity at this early stage. Regime town criers like Lai Mohammed and the rowdy Festus Keyamo are already busy singing Buhari’s positive anthems hoping to confer Tinubu with the benefits. At some point, however, ordinary Nigerians are likely to ask if they are being asked to vote for Mr. Tinubu or to re-endorse Mr. Buhari for a third term. If care is not taken, Mr. Tinubu’s campaign train and indeed his entire political project may struggle to survive this quagmire.

    Between a calamitous lame duck Buhari and candidate Tinubu, a war of jaded nerves will certainly erupt sooner or later along the campaign trail. Both men will need to determine their status fairly early in the day. Buhari will need to be reminded that he should be heading in the direction of humble dusty Daura. Mr Tinubu, on the other hand, will not need to be prodded to scream out loud that he has an election to win. People in his campaign, if they are minimally honest, will need to tell him that eulogizing Buhari will not take him to the Villa but only back to his Bourdillon abode. In effect, not even an APC presidential candidate can expect to win in 2023 if he insists on running on even a sanitized Buhari script. How Mr. Bola Tinubu navigates this treacherous divide will be the high point of his journey to Aso Rock Villa.

    For Mr. Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), running against Buhari should by now have become second nature. Atiku has wisely re-attached himself and his messaging to the Obasanjo legacy. With the benefit of hindsight, most adult Nigerians now look back at the Obasanjo presidency (1999-1997) as a recent bright spot in Nigeria’s post military democratic politics and governance. People recall that Obasanjo had easily the most credible economic management team in recent times. Debt management saw a near total wipe out of our external debts and a significant reduction in domestic debts. The economy witnessed the emergence of clear growth sectors in telecommunications, banking, the stock market and the oil and gas industries. The Nigerian economy joined the international system of payments through the introduction of credit and debit electronic cards. Security of life and property was significantly reasonable while government’s resolve to deal with corruption saw the establishment of anti -graft agenciesn like the EFCC and ICPC as legal entities.

    Mr. Atiku has indicated a determination to run the 2023 race on an improved version of the Obasanjo template with the additional impetus of correcting the misdeeds of the Buhari tenure. On the track of politics as usual, Mr. Atiku would seem to be defiant of Buhari’s conservative political fixations and embarrassing economic mismanagement.

    Among the three foremost presidential candidates, Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) is the more pointed departure from the Buhari albatross. Mr. Obi has boldly and courageously name the felonies of the Buhari government one by one. He has described the continuing fuel subsidy regime as an ‘organised crime’. He has decried the astronomical poverty numbers and the high (40%) unemployment rate. He has openly pointed at the rampant insecurity as the greatest enemy of economic growth.

    Mr. Obi has, in a relatively short time, emerged from the shadows of relative anonymity to become a disruptive force in the nation’s political history. His appeal is to the broad majority of Nigerians whom previous politics had left behind. Most of these people detest the old “Big Man” politics symbolized now by both Mr. Tinubu and Mr. Atiku. Mr. Peter Obi is of course the first to admit that between him and the politicians of the ancien regime, there is indeed no ideological difference. He describes himself as an Onitsha market trader, a free- wheeling capitalist who however cherishes law, order and security in order for the market to thrive and business to survive. However, he maintains, with incontrovertible anecdotal evidence from his stewardship as a two term governor of Anambra State in the South East, that he is the one Nigerian should trust for integrity, character, commitment and a can do spirit that can fix the nation from the devastated crime scene that Mr. Buhari is leaving behind. He has emerged as something of a pop star who can do no wrong. His outings have become tumultuous pseudo crusades attended by hundreds of thousands of devotees. In public places, to speak ill of Obi and the “Obididients” is to run a risk of being mobbed. It is even worse in the social media.

    Even ahead of the formal commencement of campaigns a few days ago, Mr. Obi’s devotees stylishly called “Obidients” have thronged the streets of every significant urban area in all zones of the country. Their street parades and solidarity marches have since translated into a huge followership for the simple man in love with simple back outfits. Over and above his Labour Party affiliation, the “Obidients” have metamorphosed into a popular movement of the type that we have recently come to associate with major popular revolts and mass led changes in places like Egypt and Sri Lanka.

    Perhaps Mr. Peter Obi may emerge as the greatest beneficiary of the overwhelming imperative of change that Mr. Buhari has unconsciously made inevitable. The extremes of adversity and negativity that the incumbent administration has enthroned as the new normal in the country have made the Peter Obi appeal irresistible. The new man in black has emerged as something of a messianic figure, a good man who seeks power not for his personal aggrandisement but for the good of the majority of ordinary people. His narrative of personal modesty, discipline and frugality as evidenced in his past record in managing public finances has caught on like wildfire among a populace that had hitherto come to see politicians as a tribe of wasteful brigands whose recklessness has sacked the treasury and imposed misery and poverty on the citizens. Mr. Obi’s appeal is in his presentation as a credible antithesis to a past tradition of treacherous and wasteful politics. His immediate attraction is also as a symbol of law, order and security in contrast to Buhari’s reign of terror and promotion of bloody anarchy.

    As matters now stand, the 2023 elections are looking more and more like two sets of referendums rolled into one. At the level of Mr. Buhari as the principal causative change agent, the election may be a referendum between pro Buhari policies and an anti-Buhari wave. The outcome of that referendum is not far to seek. The screaming unpopularity of the incumbent regime ought to instruct its few remaining devotees that the train has since left the platform of fake myths and dubious claims.

    By far the more far- reaching referendum is that on the old politics. The choice is between the populist new movement of “Obidients” and the gamut of traditional parties with the APC and PDP as leading cartels of power. In this more consequential confrontation, Mr. Peter Obi seems poised as the symbol of something new against Messrs Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu as mascots of an old order. Three significant international opinion polls , including Bloomberg, have recently in quick succession projected the direction in which Nigerian politics is moving in this new volcanic disruption. In either of these referendums or confrontations, however, Mr. Buhari must be credited with the role of catalyst and change agent as the one who authored what must now be changed at all costs. Without Buhari’s disastrous presidency, the need for urgent change would not have been so pressing. Similarly, the areas of radical change would not have been so clearly marked if he did not dabble and muddle up most areas of national life. Even more consequential, the crushing urgency to save Nigeria before it sinks would not have acquired the fierce urgency that we all now feel.

  • Putin: Loneliness of the Tyrant – By Chidi Amuta

    Putin: Loneliness of the Tyrant – By Chidi Amuta

    Tyrants and mad men suffer a common ailment: they are condemned to a feeling of loneliness and a routine of endless wandering in search of what they alone understand. No other world leader at the present time better illustrates this ancient folk wisdom than Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

    Mr. Putin would ordinarily qualify as a very brilliant strategist, a quality that catapulted him from the shadows of a spook into the prime light as the leader of post Soviet Russia. The former KGB officer with a fairly distinguished career record is credited with a capacity for multi- tasking and also time his strategic moves in a manner that never fails to disarm and overwhelm his adversaries. But his reputed strengths have of late begun to fail him as he bungles from one international escapade to another.

    Mr. Putin has had difficulty understanding that his invasion of Ukraine has gone badly. As it turns out, his plans and projections were disastrous. His troops have been vastly decimated as they has lost territory they had previously occupied in the early stages of a war that was planned to last less than a few days. Months have rolled by. Russian casualties, including high ranking generals, have mounted. His troops are on the run as territory previously overrun have fallen under a Ukrainian counter offensive. Vast amounts of equipment and gear have been abandoned by fleeing Russian troops. Fields of human remains that loudly testify to serious war crimes have been uncovered. Domestic opinion against the war and indeed the Putin regime has begun to mount and has recently graduated into street protests.are
    Of course, Ukraine’s newfound battlefield successes and military mojo are the result of a combination of patriotic fervor and the sheer quantum of Western military support. The Ukrainian arsenal is bristling with a vast armada of sophisticated high precision weapons generously supplied by both the United States and other NATO member nations in the Western alliance. No one knows for how long more an isolated, over sanctioned and economically strangulated Russia can sustain its aggression on Ukraine.

    The prospect of imminent defeat on the battlefield is an unthinkable nightmare for any dictator let alone one with the elephantine ego of a Vladimir Putin. There lies the greater strategic danger of the logic of the Ukrainian war. Predictably, Mr. Putin has played the dictators’ game. He has threatened the world with a nuclear holocaust if the war in Ukraine continues to go against his wish.

    He carefully chose the eve of the 77th United Nations General Assembly to broadcast this grave threat. To indicate that he may not be bluffing, he disclosed the obvious fact that Russia is armed to the teeth with all classes of nuclear weapons both strategic and tactical. In addition, he unveiled a hasty plan to call up a reservist force of an additional 300,000 men to join his army of mostly conscripts in the Ukrainian operation. It did not matter to him that that additional force will need to be mobilized, trained, equipped and motivated to go into a war that many realize has entered an attrition stage. Worde still, Putin revealed a micro wave plan to hold referenda in the Donbast and Luhansk regions of Ukraine which it had previously occupied and colonized.

    Besides his setbacks in the battlefield, Putin’s earlier attempt to dress up the Ukraine invasion in revisionist propaganda has since collapsed as it failed to gain traction among both Russians and the rest of the world. The Zelensky administration is far from being the Zionist collection of neo –Nazis that Putin painted them as. Instead the former comedian has turned out to be an epitome of patriotic heroism and unusual courage. Similarly, the revisionist claim that Ukraine’s sovereignty is fictitious has fallen flat on its face. But Mr. Putin needs a fake referendum in the occupied regions that favours his invasion in order to sustain the claim that his occupation of these areas is part of his obligation to defend the sovereignty of “mother Russia”.

    While Putin has proceeded in earnest with his hasty mobilization and microwave referenda barely three days after they were announced, the Russian populace is reacting differently. Russians are fleeing the homeland across the borders into more friendly republics like Krigykistan, Tajikistan and others to avoid Putin’s draft. Widespread protests and demonstrations have commenced in Moscow against the draft and the entire Ukraine war. No one knows how far the opposition forces will go and what it will cost Mr. Putin in terms of his hold on power.

    In response to Putin’s bluff and veiled nuclear threat, world leaders assembled in New York have heard Mr. Putin and displayed a mixture of brave reassurance and understandable trepidation. The brave face stems from the tacit assurance that NATO has the capacity to deter Putin’s nuclear threat or at worst retaliate in a manner that may leave Russia badly injured and worsted. The fear is a response to the familiar threat which insane dictators have always posed to the security of the world. It is indeed a credible and present fear that Mr. Putin, pushed to the wall as he increasingly is, is likely to plunge the world into a nuclear blitzkrieg that no one planned for. For one thing, in spite of the elaborate protocols required by the Russian system to initiate a nuclear strike, there is the fear that Putin is an outlaw at heart and is unlikely to obey the protocols which a more democratic system would have made imperative.

    On the face of it, Putin’s belligerent rhetoric addressed to the United Nations is not unprecedented. Since its formation, the United Nations has always been confronted with the urgency of managing the dissenting voices of non -conformist leaders in a world that has remained divided either along ideological or temperamental lines. There is in fact an unwritten code that what has sustained the United Nations as a multinational platform is the freshness of dissenting voices and uncommon leadership types that it has had to deal with over the years. Leaders with divergent ideas, viewpoints and orientations have come to New York in previous years to hawk ideas an perspectives that do not necessarily conform to universally accepted norms.

    In decades past, it was the presence of such diverse leadership types as Fidel Castro, Muammar Gadaffi, Yassir Arafat, Hugo Chavez and Thomas Sankara that alleviated the boring conformist rhetoric of the United Nations General Assembly. These dissenting voices and non -conformist personae have disappeared or become rare. The end of the Cold War and the triumph of a
    Western liberal international order have joined forces to reduce or even eliminate the alleviating presence of leaders who see the world differently.

    This is one sense in which Vladimir Putin becomes something of a refreshing even if toxic diversion from the humdrum proposition of a Western liberal overlordship. But in positing an alternative to a Western liberal democratic order, Mr. Putin is presenting the world with the untenable alternative of autocracy or, at best illiberal democracy. Unfortunately, with the overwhelming economic and ideological presence of China, Putin is driven to the fringes as a powerful mad man rather than a credible alternative to the Western liberal order. Even if Putin’s Russia intended it, it lacks the economic power and ideological coherence to convince anyone else in the world that it can pose a credible counter force to the liberal democratic order that has gripped most of the world. At best, the Russian voice of dissent deserves to be heard but it needs to re-jig its message to make sense to the rest of humanity. For now, Russia’s voice is being heard in all the wrong ways. Threatening the world with nuclear holocaust is not the best way to posit an alternative worldview to a peaceful liberal international order.

    Rewind to 20th February, 2022 when the latest Russia-Ukraine war began.
    From the onset of the Ukrainian invasion, Mr. Putin has never managed to conceal the fact that he may have become a bit unhinged of late. At the onset of the war, Putin’s Foreign Minister, Mr. Sergei Lavrov warned that a Third World War between Russia and NATO is possible and that it would be a nuclear war. On the same day, Russian artillery fire set off a blaze at a Ukrainian nuclear facility, the largest in Europe. Luckily, before dawn, Ukrainian fire fighters had put out the fire. Still on the same day, French President Emmanuel Macron after a telephone conversation with Putin cautioned that: ”the worst is yet to come.” Later in the day, it was a visibly jittery and troubled Putin that addressed Russians and the world to affirm that the invasion of Ukraine was going well according to his plan. Instructively, the broadcast was interrupted twice as Putin stood up in front of global television to adjust his ill-fitting jacket, all the time shying from eye contact with the audience in spite of a teleprompter ahead of him.

    There are enough reasons why Mr. Putin could become more dangerous to us all. An unpredictable autocrat presiding over a nuclear super power is not exactly a pleasant playmate. An autocrat who is easily the richest man in the world can acquire the mindset of a God figure with the power of life and death over the rest of humanity. An ex- KGB officer with an inscrutable face and shadowy family life may not worry much about the familiar moral qualms of regular mortals about human lives and ultimate tragedy. Worse still, a man with a permanent nostalgia for the defunct great USSR and the days of Cold War sabre rattling can pursue his obsession at the expense of others if events keep pushing him to the brinks of sanity.

    When such a man is encircled, his country isolated, his military rendered ineffectual and his private fortunes threatened, it is uncertain how far he can go in seeking revenge against those he sees as his traducers. Throughout history, the mind of a typical autocratic demagogue has been an area of darkness, full of uncanny possibilities. On hindsight, I shudder to think of what could have become of the world if Hitler had access to the codes of a nuclear weapons system. In the isolated seclusion of his bunker, he ordered some of the most massive military assaults that humanity has known during the Second World War. The body count meant nothing to him.

    But here we are today with Mr. Putin, a real autocrat with a record of serial murders of his opponents. He is in control of the world’s second largest arsenal of lethal and nuclear weapons. How far could he go to hurt the rest of the world just to assuage his injured ego? How far will Putin go just to prove to the world that he is not necessarily weak and will not go down in humiliation? Could Vladimir Putin become further demented by frustration of his territorial ambition in Ukraine and beyond as to do the kind of irrational things that dictators have done in history?

    Russia as an isolated rogue state is not the best prospect in a world dominated by aspiring democracies. Over 85% of the nations of the world are now democracies or aspiring democracies. In that world, an illiberal democracy or fringe autocracy such as Russia is not your favourite next door neighbor. Worse still, a nuclear super power presided over by an unstable dictator with an injured ego and threatened financial fortunes is a nightmare that could blow up in our faces. As we speak, Mr. Putin has placed his most strategic military units including his nuclear command, at alert and in an active disposition. Lethal weapons banned by the Geneva Convention have already been generously used in this war.

    The best way out of this possible nightmare is to show Mr. Putin clearly marked exit points to escape from the consequences of his disastrous judgment. Clearly, he miscalculated his chances in the Ukraine mission. He probably underestimated the extent to which Ukrainians detest and even hate the Russians. You cannot sustain a massive military campaign in a terrain where the occupying force is so despised. Also, Mr. Putin never estimated the groundswell of international opposition that his invasion of Ukraine would attract. More tragically, he probably did not calculate the character of Russia’s post war relations with the European states and former Soviet republics that Russia has to live with in perpetuity.

    Peace is the only antithesis to war. Therefor, every war inevitably ends in peace. The best prosecutors of wars are also the most creative seekers of peace. Peace talks between Russia and Ukraine were at first an encouraging sign. The talks that led to the resumption of exports of Ukrainian wheat to the rest of the world were an encouraging sign. The recent prisoner exchanges between Ukraine and Russia point to what is still possible on the avenue of peace. But Mr. Putin would rather negotiate with Ukraine as a conqueror hence his recently announced new mobilization. It is doubtful if the two parallel lines will meet somewhere in a bombed out Ukraine. Putin would probably find more satisfaction in being a party and also a guarantor of the kind of peace he desires.

    The West can help Mr. Putin find a convenient exit point out of the cage he has built around himself. But the interest of a more enduring world peace is not served by the present attitude and rhetoric of the US and the West. It is a good thing to marshal a global coalition against a menacing adversary of the international rule- based order. It is also in order to contain a belligerent autocrat who tramples on the sovereignty of less powerful nations. It is quite understandable to pile up crushing sanctions to bend such a determined aggressor.

    The object of the war is the protection of the sovereign integrity of independent states from the aggression and deliberate belligerence of more powerful nations. It is of course in the enlightened self -interest of the US and the West to contain Russian influence and Putin’s territorial ambitions. But in the end, the world still needs a powerful stable Russia as a bulwark against the excesses of the West just as much as we need a wealthy Europe and the US to demonstrate the relative advantages of liberal democracy and the power of the free market.

    For those who are desirous or anxious about how this war will end, there are a few certainties. First, Russia can neither crush nor annihilate Ukraine. Second, Russia will not be able to prevail against a coalition of the US, NATO and the rest of the free world. Third, the coalition of pro-Ukrainian forces will not be able to defeat Russia and exclude it from the international system. A humiliated Russia is an unlikely historical oddity.

    There is a new way out. Both China and India have recently shown open reservations about Russia’s war aims. They have hinted at reservations about the continuation of hostilities. Both nations exert tremendous influence with Russia and are respected by the US and the Western alliance. Both of them believe in the inviolability of the sovereignty of nations. A joint peace initiative by China and India with definite guarantees from both sides would be acceptable to the warring parties. A peace process brokered by both and guaranteed by the United Nations is perhaps the best way out of the Ukraine quagmire.

    Beyond the tragic temptations of his injured ego, Vladimir Putin understands the consequences of pursuing this war to conclusion. His political career could become a casualty of this untenable war. The costs are already monumental. They include international isolation, crushing sanctions and Ruussia’s inevitable encirclement by states that are bound to be hostile and perennially suspicious neighbours and at best uneasy allies. No leader, no matter his mindset, can wish his nation such catastrophe.

  • Help, Our Future is Relocating – By Chidi Amuta

    Help, Our Future is Relocating – By Chidi Amuta

    Perhaps unconsciously, a new sense of identity has crept in and is becoming dominant among many Nigerians. A curious sense of ‘anywhere is home’ is becoming commonplace among young Nigerians. A compulsive migration to other lands, a sense of “otherness” is beginning to define the aspiration of our youth in terms of where they call home. Pride in our national identity which used to define those now in their 50s and 60s is gradually being replaced by a longing for other lands, a sense of ‘the grass is greener over there’ as the destination for the fulfillment of private dreams and the attainment of personal happiness and contentment. In droves, our youth are being attracted outwards by the order, peace and opportunity in other lands where good governance and orderly progress has created a home for all who treasure a better life.

    Relocation has suddenly assumed the status of a wild current and a common preoccupation. What began as a voluntary choice of place of abode has become a compulsive drive to flee to other lands in search of work, personal fulfillment and peace of mind. A cross section of Nigerians, mostly youth, are scrambling to leave the country, to relocate to some other country where they can find employment, security and contentment.

    A strange word has been coined from one of our languages to describe the spirit of the fleeing generation. Let us freely call them the “japa” generation, those who must flee in order literally to live. They are an army of young people who see no hope in our country. They leave school but cannot find work for their able hands, eager minds and willing souls. Even where they find the rare work opportunity, their earnings can neither buy them sustenance nor a better life than their ageing parents. Lives and limbs are too unsafe for their democratic rights of freedom of movement to be safely exercised.

    In today’s Nigeria, a certain indifference to the aspirations of the youth defines the doctrine of an insensitive regime. President Buhari was addressing the Commonwealth Business Forum on 18th April, 2018 and was reported as having made some distasteful remarks about Nigerian youth to interviewers. He had remarked that Nigerian, youth most of whom had not bothered to receive an education, felt entitled to free social services simply because Nigeria is an oil producing country. These reservations were quickly summarized as the president branding all Nigerian youth as lazy and unprepared for leadership and responsibility. A combination of opposition political hawks and social media sharks tore the president to shreds even before his plane landed back in Abuja. Realising that those aged under 35 constitute the bulk of Nigeria’s surging demographics, the president who was heading towards a bumpy second term campaign beat a hasty retreat. Ever since, hostility to youth has become one of the unsavoury trademarks of the Buhari presidency even as it prepares to leave office in 2023. A youth spiring angered by this attitude was to erupt in wild open protests across the country in the 2020 ENDSARS protests.

    Today, in nearly every state capital, the passport office has become a thriving market place. Throngs of passport seekers, mostly youth aged under 35, besiege the offices either through touting agents or directly in a bid to acquire passports that can at least give them a fighting chance to escape from this place. Data recently released by the Immigration Department indicates that passport issuance increased by 38% in 2021 mostly as a result of more Nigerians seeking to relocate from the country.

    The direction of recent relocation migrations is predictable. A recent PEW research survey revealed that about 45% of Nigeria’s adult population is planning to relocate to another country in five years time. Of the 12 countries surveyed from Africa, Middle East, Europe and North America, Nigerians ranked highest among countries whose highest number of citizens want to relocate to some other country. In another study in 2021, it was revealed that 7 in every 10 Nigerians planned to relocate if the opportunity presented itself. The favorite destinations of relocating Nigerians are the US, the UK, Canada , Australia, Spain and South Africa.

    Among these destinations, Canada represents a new world of opportunities with profuse openings for Nigerians so much so that ‘moving to Canada’ has become a sub industry in Nigeria. Offices for immigration facilitation services for those moving to Canada have sprang up in many urban areas.

    Recent official data from from Canadian immigration sources indicate that12,595 Nigerians relocated to Canada alone in 2019. Applications for permanent residency by to Nigerians in Canada in 2015 was 4000. By 2019, the number had climbed to 15,595, an increase of over 214.9% in a period that roughly corresponds with the tenure of the Buhari presidency.

    Besides outright relocations in response worsening economic and security concerns, recent dysfunctions in Nigeria’s educational system have increased the outflow of Nigerian students going to study abroad. Following endless strikes and work stoppages by teachers in public universities, Nigeria’s public universities have remained largely closed for most of the last couple of years. This has put pressure on well to do parents to find the resources to send their children to foreign universities. Most of these educational migrants leave Nigeria with little prospect of ever returning home again after their studies.

    Here again, we can identify the United Kingdom as a favourite destination for obvious reasons. In the 2019/2020 session, the number of Nigerian students in UK universities was 13,000. By the 2021/2022 session, the number had grown to 21,300, an increase of over 64% in a little over one year. This can be attributed to the prolonged ASUU strikes and other disruptions in Nigeria’s tertiary education calendar. These educational migrants include the children of most of the senior government officials who have now made it part of their summer vacation schedules to travel abroad to attend their children’s graduation ceremonies in lavish phopt opportunities routinely beamed through the internet to their less fortunate compatriots whose children in public universities are marooned at home for endless strikes by their teachers. The number of educational migrants to the United Kingdom is projected to increase to over 30,000 in another year or so.

    This population of students would ordinary not qualify as immigrants but for the incentives being provided by the host country. From 2020, the British government introduced an incentive for Nigerian graduates of British universities. Under the Tier 2 Visa programme, such Nigerian graduates are allowed to stay back and work in the uk for a further two years after which they can decide on whether they want to return home or stay on.

    By most informed estimates, the recent wave of Nigerians relocating out of the country represents the largest movement of Nigerians out of the country since the end of the civil war over fifty years ago. What is significant is the profile of those who are relocating. They are mostly skilled youth including doctors, nurses, IT engineers, university lecturers and technicians. They also include young people who complete their studies abroad and opt to stay back because our country has nothing to offer them either by way of jobs, opportunities or even basic safety. Some of them have been educated in elite universities at home and abroad. This demographics is the more debilitating for our national development prospects. They are the ones whom our elite have expended huge foreign exchange to train as well as the best from our public and private universities.

    Add to this migration of skilled persons the now familiar feature of illegal migrations across the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean mostly of unskilled youth, artisans, labourers and migrant sex workers.

    Tragically for our nation, the areas worst hit by the current wave of migration are the most strategic. We live in a world where the ranking of nations in the development ladder is being determined by competitive advantage in IT, engineering, medicine and the availability of a skilled work force. These are the youth leaving in droves. What it means is that in the y/ears ahead, our nation will not be able to compete with the rest of the world in the vital areas of specialization in a world ruled by new ideas and novel strategies.

    The psychological profile and disposition of those leaving is antithetical to patriotism and any hope of national development. Many of them are angry with a homeland that many of them hoped and believed in but has turned their hopes into ashes. There is also palpable disdain for our national leadership which ahs continued to disappoint the hopes of the people. And yet beneath all this is as certain secret wish for a better nation, a more worthy patrimony and a place worthy of being called home.

    Our skilled work force migration is being fueled by an external pressure as well. There is a new common hunger among major nations of the world for greater diversity of skilled workers to drive their economies. Every major nation now habours a secret wish for greater demographic diversity. Envy of America’s prosperity fueled partly by its original diversity and the miracle of immigrant contribution to its greatness has driven the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and even Saudi Arabia to stretch out their arms to foreigners who have skills to contribute to their development efforts to come forth. A good number of these countries have increasingly ageing populations as a result of strict population control measures initiated a few years back.

    The massive relocation of skilled Nigerians abroad has had a consequence of mixed blessings. It has created a Nigerian diaspora with considerable economic clout. New relocations have only swelled a pre existing diaspora. The economic dividend of this demographic development is significant. Diaspora remittances reported by the CBN currently hover between $25bn and $30bn annually and still rising. At some point, diaspora remittances dwarfed receipts from oil and gas combined.

    Increasingly, this economically enabled population is also becoming politically significant. They constantly
    gauge the political temperature at home, influence public opinion and have acquired a trenchant voice that is hard to ignore. The social media, enhanced by access to major media and information hubs of the world has made the Nigerian diaspora a voice on matters that concern Nigeria. As recent instances have shown, the Nigerian diaspora has been ready to support causes they consider worthy at home and readily condemn those they oppose as well. At some point in the Buhari administration, diaspora Nigerians took to self help, assaulting and flogging visiting Nigerian officials in major centers of the world.

    In the current partisan frenzy in Nigeria, the diaspora may not exercise definitive influence on the electoral process and outcome. There is as yet no legislative enablement for diaspora voting. But their public opinion input into the campaign especially through the social media will be significant. Similarly, their financial contribution to candidates of their choice will come in handy as a determining factor in a political system that has become increasingly monetized and transactional.

    The major strategic concern of our increasing demographic hemorrhage is the emigration of skilled Nigerian youth. The people on whom our future depends are leaving. Our best energies and brains are being drained. Our IT wiz kids, our medical scientists, economists, biotechnologists, academics etc. are flooding flights headed out to better climes. Many of them have no plans of returning home in any hurry. A certain disturbing pessimism that this place will bot get better any time soon pervades the attitude of many of these feeing youth. They are leaving because the place we all call home has degenerated into a hell hole of calamities devoid of opportunities or hope.

    When highly skilled Nigerian manpower trained abroad cannot come home, it is an economic and developmental misfortune. The sheer foreign exchange cost of training our children abroad is indirectly passed on to the very developed nations as invisible subsidy or reverse development aid. Our national economy is denied the benefit of inputs by the best brains of the nation.

    For our population size, it is only natural that a significant number of Nigerians would be found all over the world. Other nations have culturally identifiable diasporas in major world centres- Chinese, Indians, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Jewish – have become identifiable features of the global cultural and demographic landscape of major global population centres. It is hard to get into Houston Texas and fail to feel the cultural imprint of Nigeria. The freedom to emigrate, to find an alternative place of work and abode remains a right of people in a free world. But the almost involuntary exodus of persons from a country in response to dire economic and security pressures is something else.

    What is going on in Nigeria is beyond normal voluntary migration of persons driven by the quest for exposure and opportunities. What we have on our hands is a mass migration of social and economic refugees, system dissidents and existential asylum seekers. These are people who would ordinarily remain in the country but for the dire circumstance in which we find ourselves. And there is no certainty that most of them will ever return to Nigeria even if our political and economic circumstances were to miraculously improve.

    When a nation compels its youth to turn into rebels and disguised asylum seekers abroad, it creates a hostility of would have been patriots and therefore a permanent breeding ground for an opposition of angry citizens.

  • The APC on Trial – By Chidi Amuta

    The APC on Trial – By Chidi Amuta

    The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) expects victory in the 2023 election almost as an entitlement. This is for one reason only: it is the incumbent party in national power. President Buhari and core party leaders are carrying on in a manner that suggests that electoral victory is a befitting necklace or medal to be decorated with merely for presiding over the nation for two uninspiring presidential terms.

    Ironically, however, Mr. Buhari’s troublesome presidency and whatever legacy he may pride in may have become millstones around the neck of the party’s presidential candidate and Buhari’s presumptive successor in 2023. It is still uncertain for how long Mr. Bola Tinubu, the party’s presidential candidate, is ready to wear the Buhari millstone around his neck. There lies the key to bith the vindication of the APC and indeed the electoral chances of Mr. Tinubu himself.

    At best, the electoral chances of the APC in the 2023 election are now chiefly defined by a series of nagging questions. The axiom mostly in African politics and democracy is that incumbency invariably confers an easy winning chance on the ruling party. Part of the urgent trial of the APC is to test this assumption. Hidden under that lazy assumption is a series of other questions that ought to interest those interested in the growth and development of democracy in Nigeria. The critical questions are many.

    Do electorates punish non- performing parties by denying them victory at the next election? Or, in the alternative, can a party, in spite of a dismal performance in government, still coast to victory at the next election irrespective of a massive popularity deficit? Is the electorate of registered voters a true representation of the popular wish at elections? Does the electorate have a mind, a memory, like a person, that either punishes or rewards past experience in the hands of a political party and its elected officials? Finally, is the public of voters in a democracy an insensitive mob that returns a party to power even if its government has hurt the people badly and betrayed the public trust and devalued the good of the nation?

    In respect of these questions, there is a sense in which both the APC and Nigeria’s democratic evolution are on trial for 2023. The party that coasted to power crowing ‘change’ has itself made change the logical consequence of its own power tenure. A populace that went out to energetically oust the virtual hegemony of the PDP is today drained of any energy whtsoever. A combination of grinding poverty and warlike insecurity under the APC government has enthroned uncertainty as the new normal. There is no point rehashing the catalogue of woes that characterize Buhari’s Nigeria.

    The Goebelian propaganda machinery of the APC government is urging Nigerians to believe the opposite of what they are experiencing. We should ignore World Bank statistics and content ourselves with living in what has become the poverty capital of the world. We should be thankful for living in the world’s second most terrorized country. There is no point complaining about being a citizen of one of the most dangerous places in the world. We are told that it could have been worse if not for the valiant messianic efforts of General Buhari. Even after over seven years in federal power, there are elements in the ruling party who still blame president Jonathan’s PDP for the nation’s woes.

    Those with no appetite for politics could perhaps ignore the more social and political adversities of our time. A party’s public policy thrust does not have to be universally popular after all. But the yawning absence of any coherent policy in any area of national life is a felony in government. To add this atrocity to a rudderless handling of matters of economic management is nearly treasonable. How else does anyone describe a government whose debt service obligation has risen above its best revenue expectations? Or, even worse, how does any group of people in the name of government run a nation’s economy aground to the point of habitually borrowing trillions from the Central Bank just to keep up salary obligations? Government has dug the nation into a ditch and its solution is to dig an even deeper and ditch. Government is broke in a literal sense and the people are themselves broken in every way.

    This catalogue of adversity has put the very survival of the nation to serious question. A divisive nativist politics has torn the fabrics of national unity to shreds as Nigerians are splintered more than ever along all ethnic, religious, regional and partisan lines. In sum, the APC has achieved something remarkable in political theory. Under Mr. Buhari, the party has demonstrated how easy it is to wreck a nation in less than eight years. A Nigerian who left the country in 2015 and returns today may find it hard to recognize the nation he left behind.

    Even then, the report card of the APC is not a total landscape of unrestrained disaster and hopeless incompetence. Here and there, there are specs of fickle brightness. A commitment to infrastructure restoration has yielded a few kilometers of rehabilitated federal highways. A major bridge across the River Niger at Onitsha has been completed at last after decades of rhetorical commitments and shifting political antics. In all fairness, several kilometers of needed railroads have been completed and sparkling Chinese trains deployed briefly only for the rail services along major routes to be shut down or suspended because of the fear of terrorists.

    In states controlled by the APC, a few good men as governors have stepped forward to assert good governance as a possibility. In Kaduna, a reform of education and the public service has only been interrupted by the ceaseless scourge of terrorist attacks. In Lagos, a humanistic young governor has calmed the usually frayed nerves of a noisy and untidy city- state. In the less fortunate APC controlled states, however, woes have been heaped on tragedies to produce scenes of unmitigated disaster and unrestrained autocratic excursions.

    The pastoral state of Zamfara is now the national epicenter of terrorism, with all ungoverned spaces literally garrisoned off by fierce armed bandits and imported terrorists flowing freely from across the border with Niger Republic. Katsina, the home state of the president, is now a poster state of a strange illicit diarchy in which sovereign state power is split almost equally between an elected governor and squads of state authorized bandit power contenders.

    This general profile of the APC at national and state levels is the backdrop and landscape against which the chances of the party in 2023 can be assessed. It is of course the right of every democratic nation to expect a wave of elevating promises of change each time it is about to elect a new leadership. It is also the just expectation of any ruling party to work towards victory and self -perpetuation in power. But the feasibility of political survival and longevity must be founded on clear rational logic of what is possible.

    Justifiably therefore, the APC is positioning itself to succeed itself come 2023. It has chosen a presidential candidate after a massively transactional primary convention season. The party has ramped up its rhetoric to give Mr. Bola Tinubu a winning chance. The onset of the campaigns any time from now should unveil the new message of the party . Hopefully, the new message and its carrier can renew the trust which gave the party a mandate to rule in 2015 and 2019 respectively.

    As the mascot of the APC in the countdown to 2023, Mr. Bola Tinubu comes to table with a mixed bag of strenuous advantages. He is however in a tripartite race with a fellow political old war horse, Atiku Abubakar, and a disruptive populist figure with a growing pop star followership, Mr. Peter Obi.

    On his own, Mr. Tinubu comes with a fairly competitive political credentials. He creditably reformed and modernized the government of Lagos state, Nigeria’s fractious and disorderly metropolis. He was among a few politicians who opposed the late kleptocratic despot, General Sani Abacha, which earned him the reward of exile under the banner of then dissident movement NADECO (National Democratic Coalition) . A co-founder and author of many political projects and groupings, Mr. Tinubu was once a senator, founding member of Alliance for Democracy (AD), Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and later the ruling All Progessives Congress(APC). He can be credited with the emergence of Mr. Buhari as APC presidential candidate who needed Tinubu’s catchment home base of the South West to become president in 2015.

    However, Mr. Tinubu is burdened with a cocktail of resume headaches which can prove costly in a national contest. These range from questionable school records to dodgy affidavits about certificates and big money matters. He has so far weathered these controversies in a political career that is typical of the ‘big men’ of Nigerian politics. On the face of it, there is nothing so disadvantageous on Mr. Tinubu’s resume that can unsettle his electoral chances. Most of those who vote in Nigeria could not be bothered what school you attended or where your grand father hailed from. His problems lie elsewhere in the very nature and configuration of the Nigerian national electoral geography and compass.

    As the presidential candidate of the APC, Mr. Tinubu is not necessarily more burdened than his two major frontline contenders. But his party platform is an albatross. As a party mascot, he has the unenviable task of defending the performance record of his rather blemished party and its crassly incompetent now lame duck president. The question on Tinubu’s chances now come down to this: How does Mr. Tinubu make progress without rejecting or disowning Mr. Buhari’s performance baggage? If he insists on continuing, even if rhetorically, with the Buhari legacy, it means undertaking to continue with insecurity, mass poverty, unchecked corruption, indecisive governance, bad economics and an incoherent policy approach.

    So far, Mr. Tinubu has not yet evolved a personal messaging that distances him from the effete and bumbling Buhari. It would be political bad manners to disown Buhari. It is even worse politics to allow members of his family (so far, his wife and his daughter) to keep pledging his commitment to continuing with Buhari’s policies. Their open appearance in political marketing is bad for Mr. Tinubu as it hints at a political dynasty in the making. As a matter of political expediency, he can ill afford to disavow Mr. Buhari’s legacy. And yet a messaging that suggests a wish to continue along the Buhari path is a sure way to certain electoral defeat. Tinubu can neither swallow Buhari nor spit him out without suffering fatal political indigestion. He needs to find a consensus within the party that modifies the party’s messaging to Nigerians which must include an admission of Buhari’s failures and disastrous legacy.

    Thus, the plight of defective APC and the fortunes of the Tinubu candidacy are joined at the hips. The party’s unpopularity can ordinarily be fixed with a lot of hard work. A creative campaign strategy can boldly admit Mr. Buhari’s errors as evolutionary in the life of a young party. That admission alone cannot however win an election. It can be quickly followed by the marketing of an alternative pathway that frontally proffers creative solutions to the most urgent national emergencies. That alternative pathway must however be superior to the programmes and solutions of both Mr. Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi respectively. The way out is not through motor park grade propaganda or abusive communication of the sort we have previewed between Mr. Keyamo and Femi Fani Kayode on the one hand and Dino Melaye on the other. Insulting the intelligence of Nigerians can no longer pass as political salesmanship in this day and age. The concept of attack dogs as political communication belongs somewhere in the antiquity of Nigerian politics.

    So far, Mr. Tinubu seems to be stuck in the Buhari and APC quagmire. He wants to carry on with Buhari and even deepen his divisiveness. The choice of a Muslim-Muslim ticket as a vote catching antic is an ancient and foolish strategy. Religion may be unimportant in the business of governance but Mr. Buhari has weaponized it and sharpened sectarian sensitivities in the nation. Mr. Tinubu wants to be in religious contention for northern popular votes with Mr. Atiku Abubakar. But in the popular imagination of the average streetside northerner, Atiku Abubakar is the more authentic northern Muslim who also happens to carry Buhari’s Fulani DNA. There is even a Machiavellian hint that has suggested that pairing Mr. Shettima with a health compromised Tinubu may in fact be a ruse to emplace another northern Muslim president if Tinubu flips or slides!

    In real terms, the bloc vote of the South West which Mr. Tinubu ‘donated’ to help coronate Mr. Buhari in 2015 may no longer be in tact. States like Oyo, Osun, Ondo and significant portions of Lagos may now not vote the way they did in 2015. New political and financial centres of gravity have since emerged in the zone that could unsettle the Tinubu/APC advantage. The APC now has to work for its votes in the South West more than it did in 2015.

    The party also has clear consequential problems in two strategic zones in the Southern hemisphere. In the South East, no one can vouch for the popularity of the APC in both Imo and Ebonyi states where the incumbent governors happen to be in the party by default. They are in the party mostly mostly for reasons of their personal ambitions. But both Mr. Hope Uzodinma and Dave Umahi are not the most popular governors even in their respective states. Their presidential ambition have taken a nose dive with the collapse of the campaign for a president of Igbo extraction in 2023. Elsewhere in the zone, the APC is more of an inconsequential acronym.

    Worse still, Mr. Buhari’s rhetoric and body language towards the zone has poisoned the pool for the party. The president never disguised his personal indifference towards the people of the zone whom he has described variously as ‘dots’ in a national circle of hate. These people have the memory of an elephant; they hardly forget. Like the Jews, the Igbos carry a perennial sense of collective hurt; once hurt, the injury is passed from generation to generation!

    The situation in the South South is not any better for the APC. Majority of the governors of the states in the zone are mostly in the rival PDP and may have no dividend to show their people to justify an alignment towards the APC. There are no too many federal projects in the last seven years to show in the zone that produces the bulk of the nation’s oil and gas wealth.

    Yet, the elections are still a clear six months away. That is like eternity in politics. The party could still re-make itself. Mr. Tinubu could still re-engineer both himself and the message of the party on whose platform he is building his presidential hopes. In the 2023 election, the APC faces a race with more complex determinants than the simple binary (either or) choice that propelled it to power in 2015.

  • Nonsense in PDP – By Chidi Amuta

    Nonsense in PDP – By Chidi Amuta

    The race for the 2023 presidency is looking more like a tripartite sprint among unequal parties. In that race, the PDP’s advantage should ordinarily have been defined by two factors: age and a minus sign. It is the oldest of the three major contenders. Most importantly, It is NOT the incumbent APC which is mired in a swamp of its legacy of endemic incompetence and dismal approval rating. Yet the PDP has in recent times fatally injured itself through endless crises, internal wrangling and foolish lawsuits. The party does not seem to be in any hurry to get up and run towards the elections. But instead, the PDP seems to have chosen a permanent wrestling match of the stunted egos of its leading lights over the possibility of victory in the imminent general elections.

    The ongoing brawls in the PDP could be part of the culture of discord in parties. But beyond a certain scope, internal wrangling within political parties can become a national security concern because of what parties mean to the survival of a stable democracy.

    Though they are playgrounds for political animals, parties are first and foremost institutions of state stability. They may house rowdy political mammals but they have intrinsic rules nonetheless. Parties are by nature vulnerable institutions. Though designed to serve a democratic end, they are subject to authoritarian drifts because of the nature of politicians as scheming animals and politics itself as a treacherous game that alters its own rules continuously.

    The PDP has of late emerged as a perennial battleground of political minimals. The tragedy is that of a political party with the longest institutional longevity and memory in post military Nigerian politics which has degenerated into a free for all beer parlor. Though out of federal level power for the last 8 years, the PDP has managed to retain grassroots loyalty, membership and name recognition. It has also retained a recognizable basic internal mechanism. But its integrity in terms of quality of leadership has suffered tremendously since 2015.

    A handful of ambitious governors have literally hijacked the party executive, installing pliant cronies of doubtful credibility at will and using the leverage to advance their pre-scripted ambitions. The emergence of Mr. Uche Secondus as party chairman for instance was a classic instance of this miniaturization of the party for reasons of personal manipulative forecast. River’s state governor, Mr. Nyesom Wike left his untidy imprint on the party’s wobbly leadership from the moment of the Secondus handpicked ascendancy. Mr. Wike hardly disguised his interest in the tenure of the rudderless Mr. Secondus as his ‘man Friday’ for reasons other than the good of the party.

    In the previous life of the party as the party in power, the president, specifically, President Obassnjo, made sure that successive party chairmen were frequently changed more like disposable underpants of the president. In his eight years as president, Obasanjo let party chairmen file past like hurriedly picked damsels in a pageant of middle aged men. The roll call: Barnabas Gemade, Audu Ogbeh, Okwesilieze Nwodo etc. filed past quickly mostly at Obasanjo’s behest.

    Now In the absence of presidential power, a power vacuum has left the field of party headship manipulation open to the most influential governors in the party. This mantle has naturally been usurped by Mr. Nyesom Wike, River’s state’s combustible governor who is easily the most ambitious and financially enabled of PDP governors in the current era. He appears to have the largest war chest of loose cash and a fitting compliment of reckless spending, careless talk and elephantine ego.

    Wike has thus emerged as a veritable political gadfly. His interest in the leadership of the party has trailed his personal political ambition. It was of course his democratic right to seek his party’s nomination at the recent primaries for the presidential ticket of the party. It was also the responsibility of the party delegates gathered in Abuja to elect the most fit and proper person to fly its presidential flag at the 2023 elections.

    Even after losing out to Mr. Atiku Abubakar at the presidential primary, it was still in order for Mr. Wike and any other PDP front liner to vie for the vice presidential slot. Again Wike lost out to Delta state governor, Ifeanyi Okowa. With that reverse, Mr. Wike should ordinarily have gone home to lick his wounds and restrategize for sa more sensible political pathway. He did not. But instead seems to have opted for a career of trouble making and habitual rabble rousing.

    Instead, he has relentlessly challenged the party at every step. He has derided the party leadership, frontally challenged the presidential candidate, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, and blatantly affronted him at every opportunity. He has even demanded the resignation of party chairperson, Dr. Iyiorcha Ayu, a veteran of the original PDP.

    Ostensibly, Mr. Wike is now championing the cause for north-south geo political balance in the leadership of the PDP. In reality he has merely grafted his personal political ambition onto larger geo political issues in the party. It is of course true that the PDP cannot survive on the basis of perpetuating a northern hegemonic dominance in its leadership. A situation in which the presidential candidate, national chairman and chairman of Board of Trustees are all from Nigeri’s northern hemisphere is untenable and unacceptable in a national party properly defined.

    No doubt, these are anomalies that a responsible party leadership should urgently redress through the processes and mechanisms available in its constitution. The recourse to lawsuits, grandstanding, hurling of crass abuses and open recrimination by Mr. Wike and his acolytes is uncalled for. By resorting to these rough tactics, Mr. Wike and his friends are converting party wide problems into vehicles for propelling personal vendetta against Mr. Atiku and the party leadership for his (Wike’s) deserved rejection for both the presidential and vice presidential slots. In furtherance of his private power crusade, Mr. Wike has proceeded to recruit some governors and a few aggrieved party leaders to split party ranks and degrade the support for Mr. Atiku’s candidacy.

    Of course, splits along tendencies and loyalties in a party are normal political phenomena. But a sustained campaign of personal vendetta and unguarded subversion of one’s own party cannot be excused in the name of partisan freedom. Membership of a political party comes with definite behavioral requirements and ground rules.

    In the context of party supremacy, no single individual can place himself or his personal interests above the coherence and corporate interests of the party. Such disruptive behavior becomes even more consequential in an election year where the party faces a crucial power contest with other parties.

    Clearly, then, Mr. Wike has allowed his right to dissent to undermine the supremacy of the PDP as an institutional pillar of the Nigerian state and its democratic stability. He is in active consultation with the leadership of another party, the APC. It is on record that he invited several APC kingpins to commission his many public relations projects. He is on record to have made a series of reckless utterances and outbursts against his party’s chairman and its presidential candidate. He has just accused the party chairman of subversive arrogance.

    Even as an ambassador of the party in his state, Mr. Wike has engaged in a series of autocratic displays against his fellow citizens simply for believing differently. He has locked up and openly disrupted businesses owned by politicians who dare to oppose him or support his opponents in the party. He has threatened to demolish hotels and event venues that dare host meetings of opposition political groups, terming them ‘criminal cults’ to suit his convenience. As a feature of his political method, Mr. Wike has perfected a rhetoric that indiscriminately rains invectives on perceived opponents. Add to this the reckless
    deployment of demagoguery and authoritarian antics to frighten his opponents. A democratically elected governor in a republic has no business carrying on like an imperial tyrant in a banana republic.

    Taken together, then, Wike’s recent actions inside the PDP amount to a gross abuse of all known rules of party membership. To that extent, Mr. Wike’s actions amount to serious anti party offenses and they qualify him for appropriate disciplinary sanctions in the context of the principle of party supremacy.

    In a liberal democracy, the principle of party supremacy is an unwritten code that protects parties as institutions from the excesses of overbearing members who may want to place themselves above the party. In that sense, parties use the principle of party supremacy to mimic the larger dictate of democracy which places the interests of the whole society above individual interests. This is the principle of majoritarian prevalence which undergirds every open democracy. In that context, the subordination of individual ambition to the party’s collective will and interest becomes an overriding imperative.

    An unfortunate situation has been created in the PDP. It is the spectacle of one man versus the party; Wike versus PDP. This must not be allowed to persist except the party wants to sacrifice its electoral chances on the altar of a private ego war between Mr. Wike and Mr. Atiku as the dominant forces in the new PDP.

    This is a problem that can be solved through the rigorous invocation of the principle of party supremacy. Under the doctrine of party supremacy, therefore, the range of sanctions that the Wike factor now deserves should include suspension for a specific period or outright expulsion from the party. In fact, an outright immediate neutralization of the Wike factor through his outright expulsion from the party would be the most expedient.

    That single act will resolve the issues at stake by exposing Wike’s political vulnerability. He will have no party platform to continue flexing and distracting the party. His supporters will desert him in a matter of weeks. He cannot join the APC this late without losing his followers in a state which has long remained a PDP dominant state and in which he desperately needs to secure the governorship. He cannot expect Rivers state PDP voters to vote for any other party just because he says so.

    Outside the PDP, Wike’s political relevance and nuisance value will quickly expire and evaporate. The fear that he could split the party at the national level is unfounded. No new parties can be formed or registered now, definitely not for the 2023 election.

    Wike has no significant national political followership nor can he purchase it off the shelf. He only has a media nuisance value. He has little or no followership in the South South where he has alienated most of the governors and political leaders. He is unwanted in the South East and barely tolerated in the entire North. His gambits to use the incumbency value of the South West in the present APC configuration will cave in the moment they discover that he has no more platform to be of electoral value.

    Left alone in the cold political wilderness, Mr. Wike is likely to rant, rave and fume for a few weeks and fade into tragic insignificance and political inconsequence. His rented crowd will dissipate just as his cheering band will now play its last elegiac tunes to an audience of one miserable man in faded glory. His supporters will dwindle. None of the other governors now clinging to him will resign their membership of the PDP in sympathy with Wike. He will be left to battle alone for dear life in the brackish waters of Rivers politics where his rough tactics have created a pool full of fierce injured political sharks. They will bite him very hard in his lonely days without a party platform.

    Thereafter, Mr. Atiku can reunite the party and prosecute his campaign free of these irritating distractions. The party can readjust the distortions in its geo political outlook as part of strategies to strengthen its drive for a balanced nationwide voter catchment. The challenge of enforcing party supremacy remains the urgent joint responsibility of both Mr. Atiku Abubakar and Dr. Iyiorcha Ayu. They cannot afford to shirk that responsibility unless they want to sacrifice the stake of the party in the 2023 elections.

  • Peter Obi: Man in Black, Politics of ‘No!’ – By Chidi Amuta

    Peter Obi: Man in Black, Politics of ‘No!’ – By Chidi Amuta

    Politics as usual has run into trouble. Decades of political bad behavior have birthed a new and subversive urgent counter force, a movement with a momentum of its own. An unusual man in black with a husky voice and a shy mien has mounted the soap box with a message of fearsome urgency and unanimous appeal. Perennially clad in the anonymity of black outfits, Mr. Peter Obi, a modest man with a message bigger than himself is at the front door.

    Perhaps more for good than for ill, the movement in the making variously called “Obidients” or “Obi-Datti” after its man political dirvers, will likely alter the political landscape of Nigeria for a long time. What is unfolding before our eyes is mostly unintended. But it is coming at a most auspicious moment. A crucial general election offers our democracy an opportunity to renew itself peacefully through the electoral process.

    But this election season is like no other one in the history of our country. The challenges that await urgent political action are unprecedented. The Nigerian state is tottering with institutional incapacity. Fierce armed gangs of sundry identities have besieged the nation from nearly every corner. The theory of absolute sovereign control of the monopoly of force as a definition of the nation state is in today’s Nigeria untenable. The death toll from violent insecurity surpasses that in a formally declared war. Hardship and poverty are taking casualties and enrolling millions into an army of desperate survivalists. The multitudes that rowdily throng to Peter Obi’s sporadic outings are hungry for an unusual leadership with a different politics to surmount our countless woes. The note of urgency is palpable.

    In a sense, Mr. Obi is an unexpected and and gentle guest that somehow makes a rowdy entrance each time he comes calling. He can hardly be ignored. Peter Obi and the omnipresent movement building around him are everywhere and gathering momentum by the day

    Rewind to two months back. By the time the presidential conventions ended in late June/early July, no one anticipated that anything different from the predictable two- party albatross would chance. By the outcome of that largely transactional process, it was going to be either the All Progressives Congress or the Peoples Democratic Party, a choice between two rather familiar houses of mammon. Nigerians were once condemned in a binary choice between a lame and a cripple.

    Suddenly, Mr. Peter Obi shows up in gentle rebellion against his former party, the PDP. He quickly emerged as the presidential candidate of a hitherto nondescript and lack luster Labour Party. There was nothing new about either the Labour Party or even Mr. Obi himself for that matter. Both could conveniently be ignored as neither spectacular nor unusual. The last time Nigerians heard of Mr. Obi, he was Mr. Atiku Abubakar’s running mate in the 2019 contest. He made a few notable noises then that merely brought the perspectives of an Onitsha market trader into timid national focus. He highlighted the consequences of economic recklessness and leadership prodigality whenever he found an opportunity. But he was not the main masquerade. It was someone else’s show and dance. He was merely the support cast of Mr. Atiku, an all so familiar mascot of an ancient cult to whom the dance belonged.

    But now as his own man, Mr. Obi has quickly transformed into something else. He has lent his hoarse raspy voice to the expression of something that no one in the past dared name. He has spent the last few weeks stomping the nation, naming the many things that have troubled Nigerians for decades. He has shed his personal mask and assumed the mantle and face of spokesperson of every troubled Nigerian. It is not Obi but his message that has ignited an unfamiliar flame among Nigerians.

    Conversations in market places, buses, churches , mosques, board rooms, barber’s shops and campuses are no longer complete without discussions about the man in black as the embodiment of what every sensible Nigerian wants in a the next leadership of the country. He has defied animosity and any form of bitterness. He refused to embrace the usual divisions that have made our politics episodes of vicious warfare. For Obi and his followers, this hour is not the turn of any nationality, creed, section or person. It is Nigeria’s turn to become great by removing the shame of generations of its citizens.

    His message belongs to this time and this place. It also belongs to all times and all places where the politics of elite distance and greed has laid nations waste and rendered peoples destitute. It is an urgent message carrying an idea whose time has now arrived. It is the idea of Nigeria as a land of hope and possibility. It is about the urgency of a rescue mission to free Nigeria from the vice grip of what the French would call the sins of the ancien regime, the old order and its defining politics. It is a rejection of the politics of anything goes, of ‘Ghana Must Go’ bales of cash ferried around at night to purchase the conscience of those who decide the fate of many.

    It is also a generational message. The youth of our land have found a rallying cry, someone to carry the blood stained banner rescued from Lekki Toll Gate. It is something that had been simmering under the surface, ready to erupt. It briefly peeped in during the brief Endsars surge. It is the clear message from those we have been waiting for, the youth of Nigeria united by a rejection of the old order and its politics. It is the voice of those impatient to wait another day for the sweetness that was long promised and long denied.

    The message is something that defies a label or a name. It defies geography or ethnic identity. Those who have tried to pigeon hole either the message of its carrier have come against a barrage of incendiary anger from every corner of Nigeria and the world where Nigerians live. And yet the message has become a tectonic force, a moving locomotive of history that no one in their right senses can ignore. It is something beyond the cheap blackmail of ethnicity, religion, and geographical permutations. It means politics to the power of infinity.

    Yet it is not politics as usual. It is the politics of No! an open rejection of stasis, the power to say No! ‘even in thunder’ as the late poet Christopher Okigbo wrote. It is a resounding No! in the united voice of those long denied a voice. That voice has broken out and become a force. That force is growing into a movement. The force they call ‘Obidients’ is not a party. It is not a personality cult. It is the message of a movement that has found a suitable voice and convincing mascot to carry it to the arena of national attention.

    In a sense, then, we all, the common folk of long betrayed Nigerians, created the Obidients. They are not party faithfuls. They are not devotees of a cult. They are not worshippers of any hero or subscribers to any known myth. They are Nigerians eager to reclaim a decent nation from too long a political captivity. Above all, they seem poised to retake their nation as their entitlement. Mr. Obi has only just emerged to reduce the aspiration of most Nigerians into a simple message: It is time to take back our country!

    The new movement is a gathering storm; hard to ignore and tempting to embrace. It has identified the prevailing ruling class and its politics as usual as the enemy. This coincides with the common perception on the streets that the trouble with Nigeria is embedded in a political tradition that sidelines the people and consigns them to eternal poverty. In the logic of this messaging, there is no need for a detailed apportionment of blame or guilt. We are all victims of bad politics and deplorable leadership by the rulers of politics as usual.

    Even the elite of the established parties have acknowledged the logic of the new Obedients movement as a force. Those who want to keep their party affiliations want to use their PVCS for a different purpose this time around. The rhetoric of the movement coincides with the popular consensus on the streets. That consensus is simply this: it is time to say No! It is a No to the old parties. No to the old style politics and politicians. No to business and politics as usual. It is a no to the rule of aliens, a clan that rules for itself and alienates the rest. A new inclusiveness has been defined. Nigeria belongs to us all.

    But in the euphoric welcoming of this new thing, no one has asled what would replace the old order. Even Mr. Obi has only defined his alternative vision mostly by a negative signage. He has sais what is wrong. He has said what we do not want. But he has been too busiy to articulate what follows the day after the fall of Babylon. That is the urgent burden of the new song.

    Sometimes Peter Obi has denied his personal ambition and stake, insisting that he is not running for President but is running an errand for the popular sovereign. He has said that his understanding of his emerging mandate is that the masses want him to rescue and retake the government on their behalf. That is classic populist rhetoric. The rabble and the mob do not rule a country; only the power elite do.

    Mr. Obi may not have seen this coming. An ordinary man, a self- effacing trader turned politician without any ideological pretensions or megaphone could never have imagined himself a candidate for national heroism of such volcanic proportions. But that is where the logic of national history and the depressing reality of this anxious moment have placed Peter Obi.

    The personal pull of the Man in Black as a messenger of change is that he is one of us. He proudly describes himself as a trader. He is rich by most standards. He is rich because he worked hard to make an impressive amount of money. He was rich before he became governor. He did not take advantage of his privileged office to get hopelessly richer. He is not claiming messianic innocence or some immaculate conception. He is saying that Nigeria is rich and can be a happier place if it’s resources are managed better by a more honest leadership that understands the rule of economic management. He has demonstrable anecdotes to back his aspiration. His moral credentials are reasonably credible in a nation traditionally ruled by successive pageants of crooks and gangsters in costumes of decency.

    Unlike the personae of old politics, Obi’s political rhetoric is a language of facts, laced with statistics and animated by common sense. Most of all, it is rhetoric backed by a record of demonstrable transparency. The trader’s modesty and thrift are its bedrock. Onitsha market thrift and a certain Catholic simplicity and modesty are the major background inspirations of the Peter Obi Phenomenon. But Mr. Obi understands that a nation is neither a mercantile enclave nor a monastery.

    Great Questions have arisen. Can a street movement defeat the hegemony of established parties? Can the mere force of incensed mobs trounce traditional party faithful? Can a minority party with neither a state governorship or hardly any recognizable national legislative presence overwhelm long standing parties that dominate the political space? Can the Labour Party defeat the dominant organized syndicates ? Can an individual armed only with a popular message and depressing statistics overturn the entrenched fortresses of vested interest and vicious power?
    In short, can Mr. Peter Obi win the 2023 presidential election?

    Possibilities abound. First, if the popular movement around Mr. Obi assumes a clear demographic majority among voters in majority of states, then the man in black could become president with a precarious hold on power. He will have neither a legislative majority in parliament to back him nor the financial heft of some state governors to stand strong. This could breed instant instability as the entrenched parties could quickly become an opposition coalition with immense political muscle.The newly elected president could be instantly impeached and the country could dive into an instant constitutional crisis.

    Second, Obi’s movement by dint of its demographic quantum could score a majority of the popular vote but for some reasons fail to achieve the requisite 25% spread in two thirds of the states. That means there will be a run off between Mr. Obi and the second runner up. A run -off will be determined by a simple majority. So, here again, Mr. Obi and his Labour Party could win with the same constraints. The only survival kit Obi will have is an offer to set up a government of national unity with representation that reflects the voter performance of the various parties. In that event, everybody becomes an ‘Obidient’ by default. The movement becomes a national movement that kills off the two big parties and eventually also dilutes itself into anonymity.

    If the Peter Obi movement continues to get stronger as the elections approach, the 2023 presidential election could become more of a referendum on the old political order. Nigerians will troop out to choose between the new movement and the old order and its politicians. In that event, the outcome would be predictable.

    There is also a possibility that the Obidient movement loses steam over the next six months. In that case, politics as usual will prevail and the Obidients movement could fizzle out. In that case, either Mr. Atiku Abubakar or Bola Tinubu will step forward to be sworn in as president. My. Obi returns to his shop in Onitsha and slowly peters out as a lonely political totem.

    At best, either old party victor could incorporate elements of the new movement into a national unity government designed to kill the new youth surge and stifle the opposition towards a single party hegemony. This scenario is not historically viable. Political forces unleashed by economic and social realities are not easily wiped out.

    Whichever of these possibilities prevails, one thing is clear. Peter Obi has rattled the venomous rattle snake of Nigeria’s dangerous power structure. Whether or not he intends it, he and his movement have emerged as a credible threat to the existing power structure of the Nigerian state. Big money is at stake. A long standing geo political hegemony is at stake. Tremendous influence and huge power is threatened. The deep state of entrenched bureaucracy and technocracy s is threatened.

    It would be naive of Mr. Obi and his followers to assume that they can uproot this monstrous contraption without a fight. The power establishment is likely to combat the threat with everything at its disposal. A threat to the political establishment is likely to be branded a threat to the nation itself. What began as a partisan political contest could become a battle over the forces of order and those of perceived anarchy. Mr. Obi has set out on a journey whose logic we do not know. He must view himself as something beyond a pop star. When you step out to contest the power of entrenched power, you must not go in your sunday best. Maybe, Mr. Obi knows this hence his wise choice of a simple black outfit. His followers must then follow suit and become an army of warriors in black, Ninjas of the new Nigeria!