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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • IBB AT 81: Oracle of Minna, Visionary of Nigeria – By Chidi Amuta

    IBB AT 81: Oracle of Minna, Visionary of Nigeria – By Chidi Amuta

    (In line with what has become my annual tradition every August, I devote this column as a tribute to my friend and compatriot, General Ibrahim Babangida, as he marks his 81st birthday this week)

    Babangida has never told anyone that he is a politician nor has he seen or ever described himself as a politician. Even in 2007 when he was pressed into a political purpose by friends and loyalists, he allowed only his disciples and vast followership to confer the title of ‘politician’ on him. In the midst of that vague attempt, I confronted him with the fullest implications of his possible entry into partisan politics and contesting an election in typical Nigerian political tradition: ‘Can you, in all honesty, join market women to dance at a public square rally?’ Not waiting for an answer, I asked further: ‘ Can you clown, tell open lies or promise people what you cannot deliver?’ He looked me straight in the face and retorted with an unprintable but familiar friendly disapproval: “f..k off!”. Nonetheless, he deeply appreciated my acute reading of his personality. My point was to draw his attention to the incompatibility of his essential personal decency with the rough and tumble of Nigeria’s crass and untidy political culture.

    The passage of time has not dulled Babangida’s topicality in one sphere: politics. And yet his persistent relevance in national politics is something of an anachronism just as the man himself has remained an enigma. Instead, he has remained a proud self -confessed lifetime soldier. He is mostly a grand centurion approximating the Roman tradition of that noble calling.

    Yet, since he departed office in 1993, every political season has been prefaced with the question: who will IBB support or endorse? But he supports all and endorses none. Inspite of this non committal stance, each electoral season has taken off with a spate of relentless pilgrimages to Babangida’s retirement home in Minna. Every political hopeful, aspirant or candidate considers his ambition legitimate except it has been validated by the Oracle of Minna. Consequently, his abode has assumed the stature of a political Mecca or even Jerusalem or both.

    In typical Delphic fashion, the myths around Babangida have intensified and deepened as he has gotten older. The man known for walking on both sides of the pavement at once is on home ground when it comes to political double speak: ‘We do not know those who will succeed us but we know those who will not’; ‘our ideological choice is clear: a little to the right and a little to the left’!

    Like all sensible oracles, Babangida in old age has perfected this natural penchant for Delphic double speak. Oracles, in order to retain a certain aura of mystique and keep their pilgrims entranced, need to adopt a tongue that is replete with riddles which compels devotees to go home, decode and reflect. To his numerous political pilgrims and visitors, Babangida neither pledges support nor withholds it overtly. To all comers, however, he has a generous understanding. Instead, he imbues all comers with hope eternal. In the process, he transcends every pilgrim’s wish for an immediate prescription for a cure -all answer.

    He makes every pilgrim’s visit his own by using each occasion and its accompanying media coverage to renew his own unflinching commitment and allegiance to Nigeria. He wishes all pilgrims well but uses their pilgrimage as a vehicle to pronounce his sincere wishes for the nation. His seasonal political wishes mirror whatever irks the nation at each given moment.

    In the current season, his message has ranged from the inevitability of youth takeover of power to the urgent need for power devolution and rotation within the context of a decent democratic polity. No pilgrim leaves Babangida disappointed or unacknowledged. No one leaves Babangida’s presence with any assurance of victory. But you get a renewed hope in our country and confidence in what you can contribute to its leadership. The blessing of each encounter with Babangida is in coming face to face with the enthralling magnetism of a man of destiny, a legend of our time and place.

    There is a cruel irony about Babangida’s persisting credential as a compelling political oracle among the Nigerian political elite. Even more baffling is the overwhelming belief in his political indispensability. Politicians and indeed the general populace just believe he has the magic to make things happen and that no major political development can take place without his knowledge. But here is a man who carries the burden of the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election which would have enthroned M.K.O Abiola as Nigeria’s president. That tectonic political development is seen by many as the single most far reaching disruption of Nigeria’s democratic journey to date. And yet the author of that incident has now been consecrated by the political elite into a deity whose endorsement is required to proceed with any credible political agenda.

    The answer is simple. Babangida embodies the myth of eternal possibility. For a brief moment, Nigeria was led tobeleive in big dreams and its inherent greatness. To date, nostalgia for the grand vision that he inspired remains in tact. I daresay that the essence of the Babangida magic was all about his way with power. It has everthing to do with his personal magnetism, a personal charisma that disarms all who come into close contact with him. In his political actions, it is that distinctive political footwork that made the public come to see him as the political equivalent of Argentina’s late soccer legend, Diego Maradona.

    Yet there was always that Machiavellian streak in Babangida’s power plays. That dexterity enabled him to navigate the brackish divides of Nigeria’s nasty calculations old time politicians and ambitious military officers. He was able to survive in that perilous landscape and survive as the last man standing. This is an is an attribute that many envy but cannot achieve. In spite of the tragedy of June 12, the Babangida’s myth has managed to remain in tact for over three decades after he left office. Consequently, the Nigerian populace has come to concede that he was a man for all ages. In a sense, he saw and acted ahead of his time. The essence of Babangida’s enduring aura, myth and legacy is perhaps the visionary quality of his intervention in national politics.

    In the international context of his time, a close parallel can be drawn between Babangida and the other world leaders with whom he emerged almost at the same time in history. Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev held sway about the same time as Babangida of Nigeria. Like these other great leaders, Babangida instituted far reaching reforms in the economy of the country sometimes ahead of even the main current of world history along the path of reform. He switched Nigeria from a mixed economy to a free market one. He privatized wasteful government enterprises and transferred them into the hands of the private sector. He streamlined the political system and instituted a two party ideas-based political system. He recognized the rural majority and women in the scheme of national affairs. He was convinced that government has no business in business.

    To a great extent, Babangida ruled ahead of his time. But the general negative blanket of military rule clouded an appreciation of his vision hence the nation failed to take full advantage of his foresight. Three decades after he left office and after a considerable initial period of public disaffection, Babangida has bounced back and persisted as a constant refrain in national politics without openly brandishing the membership card of any party. Beyond the hubris of the June 12 disaster, the Nigerian public has over these years come to a delayed realization of the authenticity of Babangida’s vision and the redeeming value of his intervention.

    Like Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, he faced virulent political opposition during his tenure. Like these other world leaders, he acted in response to what he perceived as the urgent and fundamental challenges of the moment: economic deregulation, aggressive privatization, reduction of government presence in the economy as well as a fairly transparent political process through a bottom to top democratic transformation. Decades afterwards, Ronald Reagan has become the gold standard in US conservatism economic renewal. Margaret Thatcher has become another name for the Tory legacy of privatization and economic prosperity in the United Kingdom. Similarly, the legacy of Gorbachev in dismantling an unproductive Soviet behemoth and replacing it with a freer more prosperous Russia has become an inspirational era for the younger generation of Russians.

    What links Babangida to all these great world leaders at the turn of the millenium is the visionary quality of his intervention and the courage to pursue the reforms implicit in that vision. Specifically, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher recognized Babangida’s courage and historical value hence she is on record as having encouraged him to transform into an elected civilian leader if only to consolidate his reforms. Arguably, if Reagan and Thatcher were still alive today, they would, like Babangida, have become oracles and literal political deities to the younger generations of American Republicans and British Conservatives.

    Babangida’s vision was clear and unambiguous. He strove to enthrone a free market economy and two party liberal democracy with clear ideological options. Above all, he sought to bring about a fair society in which our diversity will be fully deployed towards the development of the nation.

    This was the Babangida mission and vision. He brought to this multiple mission a personal charisma and style that were distinct. The magnetism of that aura and style endeared him to a populace that was not always united in their embrace of him and his policies. Yet, his appeal and pull have endured even in the decades since he left power and office.

    As he has repeatedly insisted, he was one leader whose eyes were consistently fixated on the verdict of history. Therefore, the symbolism of this brief event has immense significance. It bore all the markings of the essential Babangida leadership: a consistent preoccupation with lasting legacies, a sense of historical permanence, a touch of imperial grandeur, an enduring vision of national greatness and, ultimately, a quest for a grand strategy for achieving national greatness.

    For Babangida, these attributes were not a mere patchwork of fleeting military showmanship. He set out to fill a conspicuous void in the nation’s leadership culture, namely, the
    embarrassing absence of a compelling big vision and a grand strategy for nation building. For good and hardly for ill, Babangida’s legacy in this regard is in the articulation and rigorous pursuit of big dreams for Nigeria and the adoption of a grand governmental strategy to pursue that vision.

    The combination of grand vision and grand strategy is the rare tool that distinguishes great nations from the common run of nation states. For every nation, a grand vision implies the adoption of a national big dream passed down from generation to generation. Nations propelled by such big dreams are capable of achieving feats that far outstrip their geographical size or their human and material resources. It is perhaps a combination of grand vision and great greed that could have equipped the small nation of Britain to pursue the idea of ‘Rule Britannia’ which emboldened it to conquer and colonize expansive stretches of the world as far afield as India, Nigeria, Australia, New Zealand, Palestine, East Africa and the Falklands.

    The United States of America, a large country founded on a creed of greatness is the bastion of freedom and democracy which was destined by God to lead the world in pursuit of happiness and global power. The street mobs who beheaded Louis XVI and Maria Antoinette stormed the Bastille in 1789 France and armed the successor republic of the French Revolution with a grand aspiration and vision. This is captured by the mantra of ‘freedom, equality and egalitarianism.’ That vision and its pursuit fired the subsequent ambiguous exploits of the French republic at home and abroad.

    I doubt that our founding fathers ever rose above petty peer group bickering over regional and ethnic supremacy to articulate a coherent grand vision for the future Nigerian republic. Perhaps this is one reason why successive Nigerian leadership has been mired in endless searches for some propelling vision (Vision 2010; Vision 2020!!).

    A grand strategy is what translates a grand vision into the lived realities of citizens. It is perhaps in the Babangida administration that we approach the rudiments of a coupling of a grand vision with some governmental grand strategy for national greatness in the history of Nigerian politics and leadership.

    Foreign policy is usually not the favorite turf of transient military dictatorships. Their sense of mission is usually defined by a certain tentative brevity and quest for domestic political legitimacy and international acceptability. But foreign policy is a major carrier of a nation’s vision and global mission.

    As military president, Babangida served early notice that he would be different. His grand vision of Nigeria could only be identified by a bolder more assertive and even more powerful Nigeria. With the Kissingerian Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi as foreign Minister, the Babangida administration pursued the kind of bold and activist foreign policy that befits an ambitious power.

    Yet by far the most consequential institutional landmark of the Babangida administration was the far reaching attempt to institutionalize a mandatory two-party political system for the country. The birth of the Social Democratic Party(SDP) and the National Republic Convention(NRC) was the height of idealistic institutional engineering. The current prevalence of two major parties in our political system would seem to vindicate Babangida’s vision.

    A grand vision and a mostly intellectual grand strategy in a complex country was a risky combination. Yet Babangida remained undaunted in his commitment to his nationalist and visionary ideals. He even had an idealistic notion of the type of leader that should succeed him as, hopefully, the last military leader of Nigeria.

    On 27th July, 1992, at the International Conference Center, Abuja, Ibrahim Babangida delivered what could be considered his valedictory address. He was addressing the inaugural session of the newly elected National Assembly. On this occasion, he waxed philosophical by prescribing an ideal leadership type for the nation he was about to hand over to civilian rule:

    “I submit for your consideration…the concept of a
    visionary realist as a prescriptive model of
    leadership…This model stresses the ability for effective
    implementation of vision rather than one that wallows in
    demagogic appeal. This model also calls for the leader who
    should consider himself as part and parcel of the
    social and political order rather than a figure situated
    above it…”

    As we look forward to the 2023 elections, the question of appropriate leadership remains an abiding concern among Nigerians more than ever. It may be time to look back at Babangida’s prescription for the pragmatic visionary idealist as a fitting leadership model for this moment in our national history.

  • El Rufai: Letter From the Front Line – By Chidi Amuta

    El Rufai: Letter From the Front Line – By Chidi Amuta

    The reign of terrorists is not without its own sardonic humour. Soon after storming Kuje prison in Abuja to free their comrades in arms, ISWAP terrorists indicated an interest in two pricey trophies: President Muhammadu Buhari and, my friend and brother, Nasir El Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State. While their interest in the president as their adversary in chief is understandable, the choice of El Rufai was somewhat curious. Why not Bello Matawalle of Zamfara, the national epicenter of all the variants of terrorism or Babagana Zulum of Borno state where it all began or, for that matter, even Aminu Masari of Buhari’s home state of Katsina who has advocated that citizens arm themselves against bandits and terrorists. In the buffet menu of ready targets for the jihadists’ human acquisition, there are too many attractive gubernatorial takeaways. I am fascinated by the terrorists’ fascination with el Rufai.

    Maybe the attraction is somewhat mutual. Kaduna State’s uncommon governor, Nasir el-Rufai, has been relentless in his hawkish disposition towards the terrorists and bandits who have been tormenting the entire north and his state in particular. In turn, the terrorists have been unrelenting in their attacks on targets in Kaduna state. Kaduna state may have witnessed the highest incidence of terrorists and bandit attacks in the last five years on a state by state basis.

    El Rufai has now authored an unusual but very consequential letter to President Buhari on the matter. In the normal ritual of governance, communications between our governors and the president ought to be routine. But this letter is existential in its timing and geo strategic origins and very consequential for the nation at large. It is rooted in the very kernel of our festering insecurity as a nation. Simply put, the central contention in the present state of our insecurity has been reduced to whether or not the sovereignty of Nigeria as we know it will endure. It is no longer a matter of abductions for ransom by cash strapped incidental bandits and casual criminals. It is now serious business, a contest for the sovereign control of the Nigerian state. The terrorists and jihadists want to capture control of the state so they can help themselves to the treasure pot instead of waiting endlessly to negotiate ransoms in miserable tranches.

    El Rufai’s message is simple and yet of fearsome urgency. He has technically formally informed the president that his strategic state is in immediate danger of a terrorist overrun. Among other things, the governor, a man of unusual courage and sterling patriotic zeal, has served notice that Kaduna state is at the verge of falling to the rampaging power of relentless terror. The state is sliding towards ungovernability as the terror squads have literally overrun the rural and sub urban areas.

    But Mr. El Rufai has in his characteristic direct manner posed the question to an audience of one that matters the most. The president probably needs to be told by no less a person than a state governor that the Nigerian state and its component parts are gradually being eroded. The activities of unrelenting violent non- state actors are chipping away at the territorial sovereignty of the Nigerian state, leaving a shrunken and badly compromised state.

    Mr. El Rufai’s specific alarm is that Jihadist terrorists especially of the Ansaru franchise of Boko Haram operating in much of rural and sub urban Kaduna state have literally set up a parallel government. The machinery of state security and national defense have so far proved incapable of halting this threat. To wit, these non- state agents are countering the legitimate orders and directives of the state government on matters of urgent national importance. These range from revenue collection to preparations for the imminent general elections.

    By far the most frightening aspect of the revelations in El Rufai’s letter is the speculative fear that the terrorists could plunge the state and most of the North West into darkness by breaching the power transmission system that supplies the states in the region. There is of course nothing in this scenario that should come as a surprise to Abuja. After all, the jihadists had previously overrun a number of local governments in Borno, Yobe and Niger states. They have sabotaged or destroyed critical infrastructure such as rail lines or used IEDs to blow up bridges in vital places.

    Of course, questions abound about El Rufai’s letter. Could the governor not keep the letter secret and confidential since it has a national security implication? Could the governor not have fared better breezing into Abuja to have a conversation with the president and possibly the relevant service chiefs on the matter? In a nation ruled by the politics of headlines and front page grand standing, El Rufai’s letter could as well be another ruse to catch the attention of an overwhelmed president and already frightened public.

    Mr. El Rufai’s alarm is not new. He has repeatedly cried out about the seeming helplessness of our defense and security establishment on dealing with repeated incidents of insecurity. Only recently, he advocated total aerial bombardment of forests and other ungoverned spaces where the terrorists are known to be quartered. On the appropriate disposition of the state towards repeated challenges to its monopoly of force, El Rufai has been unapologetically hawkish, insisting that the federal state has no business playing ping -pong with its armed opponents and adversaries. There is every reason to believe that El Rufai’s all too frequent outbursts on the security situation in his state and the entire northern zones is the result of frustration with conventional communication with the security authorities.

    In the context of our worsening insecurity especially the geo strategic thrust of the more recent jihadist targeted attacks, El Rufai is not just another ordinary governor. His state occupies a strategic position in relation to our overall national security geography. The consequential theatre of engagement in the advance of the jihadist forces has since moved down from Borno and Yobe states to Kaduna and Niger states with Zamfara as training base. This is an equation in which Kaduna occupies a unique position as a veritable frontline state.

    The frontline status of Kaduna derives from its historical, cultural and strategic importance. Apart from being the political and cultural centre of the old northern region, Kaduna has remained a contentions restless melting pot of different cultures. Most conspicuously, the long standing clashes between a migrant settler Fulani herder population and an a Hausa population of land owning crop agrarian indigenes has led to frequent sporadic violent upheaval. Violent clashes between generations of these groups has made Kaduna state the hotbed of a homegrown culture of bad neighborliness. Not even the succession of military regimes in the past was able to quel these frequent bouts of unrest on a sustainable basis.

    This landscape has only been aggravated by religious differences among these divergent groupings. While the settler herder community tends to be predominantly Moslem, the indigenous populace are mostly Christian. All the ugliness of the larger Nigerian Christian versus Moslem politics and jostling for predominance is constantly at play in parts of southern Kaduna at any given time.

    The recent spread of jihadist militancy in parts of northern Nigeria has only weaponized and taken advantage of this already incendiary backdrop. Southern Kaduna has consequently remained a killing field in the spate of sporadic clashes. Therefore, in the context of the wider national cultural and religious ferment of communal clashes, Kaduna remains a natural frontline state of sorts.

    By most strategic military calculations by both the Nigerian state and its jihadist adversaries, Kaduna is the decisive frontline state in the present spate of engagements with non -state actors. It is the last credible defense line for Abuja. In addition it is the home of a good number of vital military institutions and assets. These range from the Nigeria Defence Academy to the Command and Staff College in Jaji as well as some of the oldest barracks and training schools . There is also the School of Civil Aviation in Zaria.

    Under El Rufai as governor, Kaduna has also become a frontline state in more respects. Mr. El Rufai has from inception waged a protracted war against some of the long standing cultural values that he deems to have held the northern zones of the country hostage for decades. Through a rampaging reformist sweep, he has challenged the hegemony of a decadent status quo of traditional rulers and instiitutions.

    He has also tackled educational backwardness through an aggressive education reform programme. Illiterate teachers have been sacked. Ghost civil service workers have been expunged from the public pay roll. Untrained teachers have been sent back for retraining and re-orientation. In the pursuit of these reforms, the governor has been fiercely combatted by vested interest and conservative bastions. To that extent, this governor has been in the trench of a modernization drive in a state that is a critical center of culture and politics in the north.

    These governmental and political battles further define Kaduna as a frontline state in more respects than are immediately obvious. In today’s Nigeria, cultural and identity issues have come to the forefront in a vastly divided country. Matters of religion, ethnicity and long held prejudices have come to the front of national discourse and communal existence in many parts of the country.

    In addition to the now familiar weaponization of the Moslem-Christian divide by politicians, Kaduna has also been a real time theatre of more aggressive versions of religious fundamentalism. It has for long been the epicenter of the militant Shiite movement of Mr. El Zak Zakky, the embattled Iranian backed sect leader of Shiites in Nigeria. That movement has frequently engaged the Nigerian state in pitched battle and sporadic urban guerilla warfare sometimes with fire fights in the Abuja city centre.

    More importantly, Kaduna state under Mr. El Rufai has come to occupy a prominent place in the battle to deploy political will to effect long awaited reforms in society, culture and overall development. The regional ideological implications of some of these battles make the state a hotbed of more than the physical security threat posed by franchised terrorists and irate jihadist squads.

    Therefore, Mr. El Rufai’s recent pronouncements and now this letter to Buhari and its trenchant note of alarm are contextual in two respects. First, the alarm is coming at a moment when the Nigerian state seems to be shrining in terms of its control of both the territorial space and the processes of a normal society. The Abuja-Kaduna railway corridors has been shut down after a series of terrorists breaches that has left a few dead, many abducted, millions of dollars in ransom and the rail line permanently breached. The Abuja-Kuduna highway itself is sporadically ravaged by armed gangs of kidnappers, terrorists and bandits. Those intent on travelling on that route now say their last prayers first, no knowing if they will get to their destination in either direction.

    In furtherance of the shrinkage of the state, the Nigerian railway corporation has announced the closure of the Kano-Lagos, Itakpe-Ajaokuta and a partial shut down of the lucrative Lagos-Ibadan line. This is a virtual shutdown of the entire national railway network on account of the threat and activities of terrorists and violent gangs.

    In the immediate prelude to this moment in time, terrorists have targeted and successfully attacked targets in the Abuja area. The Kuje prison breach is still fresh. The threatened attack on the Abuja Law School claimed the lives of soldiers from the famed presidential Brigade of Guards. Some schools in the federal capital territory have been closed just as the police and the military have beefed up security measures around the Federal Capital Territory.

    Elsewhere in the country, the pattern is not radically different. Cells of terrorists have continued to be uncovered in different places. In Ondo state, a key operative in the unfolding drama of arrests of perpetrators of the Owo catholic church killings has turned out to be one of the convicted terrorists freed from the Kuje prison breach. In and around Ogun state and the periphery of Lagos, suspicious movements of suspected terrorists continue to engage the attention of security agencies.

    In the South East, an untidy combination of jihadist infiltrators and homegrown criminal cartels have turned Imo, Enugu and parts of Ebonyi state into danger zones for innocent citizens.

    However, El Rufai’s alarm is about Kaduna state over which he presides. This is precisely because Kaduna has become a frontline state in the nation’s encounter with jihadists, zealots and identity militants. Although the Jihadist terror of the Boko Haram variety first originated in the North East, factions and franchises of the movements have gradually moved the theatres of operation to parts of the North West and North Central zones of the country. From an initial epicenter in Borno state, the jihadist onslaught has moved southwards to overwhelm Yobe, Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi, Niger and Nassarawa states.

    To all intents, then El Rufai’s letter to the president is in many ways a parting open epilogue to a gubernatorial tenure spent literally in the trenches of reform and insecurity. It is above all a wake -up reminder to this president of the most fundamental requirement of sovereign power in a nation state in case he has forgotten. In his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, Francis Fukuyama reminds us of Max Weber’s classic definition of a state: “a state is a legitimate monopoly of force over a definite territory.”

    The question on most Nigerian lips today is simply this: does this state dominate its territorial space to enable its citizens exercise the full meaning of life in a democracy?

  • Metaphor of the Leaning Tower – By Chidi Amuta

    Metaphor of the Leaning Tower – By Chidi Amuta

    The cry is getting louder that the Nigerian state is about to fail. In the attractive parlance of some foreign reporter, the pessimists insist that the Nigerian house is about to fall. Not quite, I say. The note of perennial pessimism is merely a way of speaking, a cross generational refrain. It is not new. It has in fact been passed from generation to generation. The Nigerian house is merely maintaining its original form, a permanent tilt on a precarious brink.

    Perennial discontent is the home ground of those left outside. Writers both local and foreign are united in their embrace of the spectre of the imminence of the Nigerian Armageddon. A collapse is imminent. But it never comes. A foreign writer, John Campbell, who used to be an ambassador here put it more urgently in his book title: Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink. In another seductively titled book, Thieves of State another foreign reporter, Sarah Chayes captures an aspect of Nigeria’s numbing existence.

    Previous generations of fiery -eyed idealists crowed and cried about the creaky tower. Unknown to this generation of latter day pessimists, this tower, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, has always been on the incline. The four degree incline of the bell tower is the result of a faulty foundation. Yes, a faulty foundation created a miracle that has persisted to give the world something to be fixated on; a miracle of geometry and an attraction for tourists. Maybe Nigeria was accidentally designed to be the world’s permanent showcase of greatness unfulfilled.

    My favourite metaphor for the enduring tragic lure of the Nigerian state in perpetual disrepair remains the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is attractive because it is perennially on incline. To the observer, it is about to collapse. But it never falls over. It is beautiful because it is a tragedy always about to happen, but that manages never to happen.

    From a distance, it looks like it is going to topple over any moment. But the years go by. The tower leans still but never falls. It was a design error that turned into an accident that never happened. Architecture professors have studied it endlessly to understand why. Mathematicians have gathered and propounded theories on the angle of inclination. Conferences have been held and scholarly disputations rage as to why the tower has not collapsed and may never collapse. Pessimists argue it may still topple over time. Optimists and vested interests praise it as one of the wonders of the universe, a heritage to be preserved for the posterity humanity. Secretly, they point to the millions of tourists who throng the site annually and leave behind hundreds of millions of dollars over which politicians debate the budget endlessly.

    Nonetheless, its attraction is its perennial inline. The nightmare of permanent anxiety becomes a tourist attraction. From all over the world, people too bored with the humdrum of straight and normal towers pay to come and see this wonder of eternal tragic imminence. But this incline is in the very nature of tragedy itself. The tragic collapse could happen any moment but sometimes never does, for years, decades and even centuries. Instead, more devotees and tourists throng the site. UNESCO names it a historical site and one of the wonders of the world.

    The incline becomes an industry that sustains itself. Vendors and retailers make a fortune from the tragedy that just wont happen but is forever threatening. Millions of merchandise; T-shirts, mugs, pens, fez caps, selfie stands and art pieces sustain throngs of curious tourists from far and near.

    The government feigns indifference from a veiled distance. But government actually invests heavily to sustain the perennial incline. They have invested millions of dollars in payments to the best construction firms in the world to prop the tower in its incline. The challenge is never to make the tower stand straight. It is to keep it in its perennially inclined beauty. Beauty in deformity, something that the old Irish poet, W.B Yeats would call a “terrible beauty”.

    If this tower were ever to stand straight, towering to the sky in magnificent splendor like other skyscrapers the world over, the tourist bazaar will cease and revenue will dry up. Retailers and vendors of sundry paraphernalia will close shop and the last revelers will follow. The street entertainers and musicians that live off the tourists will sound their last trumpets and their saxophone will retire in rustic disuse. The place will be deserted, no longer the United Nations of curious humanity that we all have come to know and treasure. Even the UNESCO list of famous historical sites will shrink by one significant entry.

    For the Nigerian iteration of the leaning tower, the political behemoth bequeathed by the British, it has produced generations of patriots and idealists armed with a permanent discontentment, a habit of unhappiness. They see the leaning tower and scream for help. But the tower never topples and may never topple. Its attraction is a curiosity of appearance, the conclusion that it could fall at any moment.

    But unknown to even the most patriotic idealists, it is in the interest of its keepers, the leaders, that it remains this way: perennially in disrepair but always in business.

    Reciting the classic parameters of nation state health, decline or failure is pointless in this place. Nothing rational applies or makes sense here; Nigeria is like no other place on earth. This place was never intended as your typical nation state. Like the Leaning Tower, this place is a creation of a deliberate error in its foundation. At best, perhaps it was intended to be an arrangement, a convenience, a compromise, an understanding. Younger generations now call it a project, the Nigerian project. You embark on a project, hoping it will thrive and fly. If it does not, good luck to us all…The younger generation are careful to avoid the term citizen in describing themselves and the rest of us. We are now called stakeholders as in a joint stock company, voting demographics by political hacks, statistics by the economics minded or just variables by pure mathematicians and statisticians. To call us citizens would mean conferring us with justiciable rights and the state would then have obligations and responsibilities towards us. This state, if indeed it were one, now owes us nothing.

    Instead, we are all made to feel like a multitude of guilty debtors to the state. If the state is dysfunctional, it is our fault. If some evil collective or crime syndicate makes off with the treasury, we are made to feel guilty and compelled to pay more taxes. We are made to pay tributes to the sovereign King for that original sin of being allowed to bear the title of a Nigerian. For that sin alone, you are visited with the worst calamities that humanity has ever endured.

    You have to secure your own household from intruders, drill your own well or borehole for water, rent a few of the state’s police if you desperately need more security than you can afford. If you live in the township and dream of a good life away from the darkness of your village and the coven of witches after your success, be ready to buy a generator to dry your sweat if only to tell your less fortunate neighbor, “I pass you, my neighbour o!”

    If junior decides to develop a temperature at night, you bear the extra burden of running to the local chemist or make shift hospital to pay for a cocktail of fake pills from the backyard laboratories of India and Pakistan prescribed by a quack in lab coat. In the morning, the school bells will ring and the certified illiterate in the neighbourhood school will mount a sentry at the school gate to ask for the overdue and overpriced school fees. He must have planned the assault with your landlord who made sure his was the first face that confronted you at the doorway this morning.

    Against the insistence of those crowing that the Nigerian state has failed, there is a palliative position. The state has not failed totally. Nor is it likely to cave in in a catastrophe. But what we are presently witnessing is an incremental shrinkage of the Nigerian state in its capacity to discharge its functions to the citizens, to itself and to the rest of the world.

    Wherever the state is overwhelmed by counter non- state forces, it yields ground and abandons post. If some local governments in Borno, Yobe, Niger, Katsina, Kaduna and Zamfara states are under permanent Boko Haram and ISWAP coalition control, the state takes flight. An effete officialdom just takes flight and quietly excludes the ‘ungovernable’ spaces from the map of the nation and moves on. Or better still, deceives those who cannot speak English or tune to the BBC that all is well. The latest illustration of this rule by abandonment or the tyranny of the shrinking state is the national rail network. The Nigerian Railway Corporation has just (August, 2022) announced the suspension of its services from Lagos to Kano and from Itakpe to Ajaokuta till terrorists stop bombing and interrupting rail services in an area that is equivalent to the entire length and breadth of the nation. Earlier, the rail services along the busy ad strategic Abuja to Kaduna route had been suspended after jihadist terrorists bombed the rail line, stormed the coaches and abducted over 100 passengers. Close to 50 of them remain in captivity after huge ransoms were paid to free the others. The rail lines and services paid for by Chinese loans are out for now in a nation that keeps crowing about the efficacy of infrastructure in alleviating poverty and uniting a divided nation. We are paying the loans and interests but have no trains!

    Nearer home, Nigeria is beautiful because it is imperfect, even rough -hewn. It is not quite like anywhere else in the world. It is palin and simply Nigeria. I live in Lagos, the heartbeat of global cacophony and hotbed of instantaneous universal madness. The police want to arrest a young Danfo duo for traffic offences. They obey the police by clearing off the main street. They park their rickety sunflower bus by the roadside on a busy street in central commercial Lagos. But they decide on a drama sketch apparently rehearsed.

    Instantly, both boys decide to strip butt naked, dangling in full view of all on the open street and adjoining market. Someone screams a warning to the police: “keep clear of them o! When madness degenerates to nakedness in the market, it is risky to go near the naked ones. If they bite you, you, too, will go raving maad!” Spectators gather. Some run away in horror. But the policemen looked at each other and did the wise thing. They run away! The Police College never trains you to arrest two naked mad men in the middle of a crowded street. The boys laughed at the fleeing cops and quickly put on their clothes. Mission accomplished. They zoom off in the yellow bus. Lesson: Fear naked mad men in the sun on a crowded Lagos street! Never a dull moment. The beauty of every Nigerian moment is the moving train of tragedy and comedy rolled into one. Nigeria: Always new. Always in motion.

    Those who dream to correct Nigeria’s terminal incline do not understand where we are coming from. They may not even know us. Nigeria was born in deformity. It has lived with its cocktail of infirmities to become the bad place we all love to call home. When I consider the catalogue of woes that define today’s Nigeria and for which citizens and foreigners alike perpetually excoriate the country, it seems they have all been here even before the birth of the modern Nigerian state. It is a matter of degrees. Our ailments have always been there.

    The corruption. The nepotism. The ethnic divisions. The religious divide. The sporadic occasional xenophobia. The compulsive bloodletting. The attachment to violence as a means of settling inter communal differences. The mercantilism and comercialization of even adversity. The preference for mediocrity and compromise over merit. The love of ‘bend bend’ and ‘wuru wuru’ over the straight and narrow route. All these have been with us forever.

    The endless pre-independence conferences with the colonialists and the freedom rallies were not about building a nation. Looking back now, they were about the upliftment of the politicians; the early lawyers and their foreign friends who decamped from the logo of the United Afrcia Company (UAC) to embrace the flag of the new Nigerian nation. The nationalists were courageous men and some women nonetheless. They could look the British in the face and demand independence for the territory. But each went to dine with the British with an ethnic or regional spoon. The hope was that after independence, the real business of nation building would begin. But alas, it never happened. The struggle for independence was replaced by a vicious scramble for the lion’s share of the pinnacle of power in the new nation.

    Some of our revered founding fathers elevated sectionalism into a creed. Some of them signed the signatures of fraud with their toes instead of their fingers for fear of the colonialists fingerprint devices. What has matured is the magnitude and sophistication of vice and crookedness.

    Looking at Nigeria reminds me of a curious oddity recreated in Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. It is the image of the man-child, the newborn which at birth embodied all the decadence and infirmities of a decrepit old man nearer the grave than a crib. That is Nigeria, an ancient decadence dressed in modern garb.

    But the metaphor of the leaning tower remains the most enduring and fascinating. The keepers of the tower site, our politicians, have come to depend on its infirmity for livelihood. It is not in their collective self- interest for the tower to be erect lest the gravy train comes to a screeching halt. Successive generations of idealistic citizens behold our collective patrimony and scream in desperate fright. All those who have lived and screamed themselves hoarse on the need to correct the leaning tower of Nigeria have all died in disappointment. I call it the fatal lure of the love for a woman called motherland. Love her so dearly and risk dying in love at the orgasmic moment between love, life and death.

    The dreams of these patriots were honest and genuine nonetheless. Their patriotism was unstinted. But they failed to perceive the hidden curse of the Leaning Tower nation. See the roll call: Obafemi Awolowo, Ayodele Awojobi, Gani Fawehinmi, Christopher Okigbo, Isaac Adaka Boro, Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, Emmanuel Ifeajuna, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Ken Saro Wiwa, Beko Ransome Kuti, Bala Usman, Murtala Mohammed, Tai Solarin and more and more… One thing unites all these illustrious spirits: They lived for others. They dreamt for the rest. They screamed about the injustice done to us all in their day. They wanted the Leaning Tower to stand straight in their life time. They dreamt endlessly and screamed aloud on the need to end the Leaning Tower as a permanent metaphor of the nation they loved and lived to see. Then they all died.

    And the tower remains in perennial incline, even more fortified today in its disrepair with more interests now entrenched in our permanent infirmity.

    **Excerpted from my forthcoming Memoir, Broken Pieces

  • Enemy at the Door – By Chidi Amuta

    Enemy at the Door – By Chidi Amuta

    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 he 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 Secueity 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 is to provoke the question: Why?. The hope is that the quest for answers to that question will lead to some justice or atonement of an original injustice.

    Terrorists carry no maps or compasses. To do so would make their operations predictable. All terrorists are unhinged agents of the devil 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.

    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. It has a geo- political 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 designs.

  • Rent Me a Bishop – By Chidi Amuta

    Rent Me a Bishop – By Chidi Amuta

    Both the social media and many legacy media outlets were united in their report and verdict on a significant recent event. Majority of the untidy assemblage of ‘clergy’ that thronged Aso Rock Villa to grace the unveiling of Mr. Kassim Shettima as Mr. Bola Tinubu’s presidential running mate for 2023 were fake. Interestingly, the public was hardly shocked about the travesty, being so used to a political class that is endlessly resourceful in its creativity for good and for ill.

    An untidy pageant of strangely clad ‘clerics’ were gathered for an entertainment tour of Aso Rock. Most of the hirelings were in such a hurry to don their costumes for the show that they dressed up in a car park nearby. Like in Restoration comedy, they wore a motley of ill fitting costumes, some rented and others hurriedly knocked together by roadside tailors. It was a festival of colours: brilliant red, screaming purple, deep ocean blue, sunflower yellow and even mourning black all, competed for prominence in the costumes of these rented bishops of darkness. They were all ‘unknown’ men of God summoned to an urgent earthly mission of playing holy men for less than a day in return for a handsome payout of political cash. In a country that has become world famous for ‘unknown gunmen’, unknown bandits as well as sundry other tribes of troublemakers, the addition of fake bishops and unknown men of God is only a comic addition to an unfolding national tragedy.

    The public presentation of Mr. Tinubu’s running mate should ordinarily have gone unnoticed. Having named Mr. Shettima as his choice, the Tinubu campaign should have left the matter to rest in the hope that the anxiety over faith would burn out over time. But someone had a better idea and a business proposition. The anointed prince’ of a nebulous Muslim-Muslim ticket needed to be unveiled despite having been named to an anxious nation weeks earlier. Why ‘unveil’ a man that is already very well known? The simplistic logic was not far fetched. Flood the ‘unveiling’ event with fake Christian men of God to create the dubious impression that Mr. Shettima’s choice is acceptable to Christian’s as well.

    An indiscriminate recruitment drive yielded a mixed bag of Okada riders, mechanics, jobless housewives, ladies of the night and motor park touts. Their recruiters had improvised clerical gear on the ready: choristers gowns, cheap school graduation gowns, left over Father Christmas apparel etc. Being so garishly attired, the chorus was chaperoned into the hallowed chambers of the presidential villa as ‘Christian clerics’ from across the country massed in solidarity with the APC presidential ticket. President Buhari probably needed and possibly desired this uniform faith ticket. An impressed President Buhari was moved to enter a prophetic mode. Predictably, he prophesied a landslide victory for his APC in the 2023 elections. No one can blame the president for partaking in the inspirational moment especially when surrounded by such a powerful and colourful assemblage of ‘Christian’ clerics for full effect.

    Thank God for the social media and the age of ‘a camera in every hand’. The backstage footage of the scam was in full display. Soon enough, the foolish scam began to unravel. The cast of make believe priesthood had fulfilled their obligation under the contract. They had acted their roles up to the presidential dais. It was time to get paid by the political contractors who engaged them. It was also time to shed the costumes of fakery.

    From the revelations of the actors, each bishop or pastor was hired at an agreed sun of N100,000. But the contractors and crowd rent merchants could only pay up N30,000-N40,000! When the fake men of God threatened earthly mayhem near the citadel of power, the political contractors evaporated! The actor godlings shed their borrowed garbs and grumbled aloud as they dispersed. Shorn of their costumes, the carpenters, Keke operators, women of the night, Okada riders and small time gangsters and thugs melted back into the anonymous crowd of hunger and hopelessness from which they emerged in the first place.

    The entire incident is just another open parade of political bad manners. In a sense, the sacrilege that just took place in Abuja is merely an opening act in what might become commonplace in the dramatic run up to the 2023 election. Professional crowd renters will get even more creative. In the past, they have been known to supply fake policemen, fake soldiers and fake electoral officials during elections. The addition of fake bishops was a cake walk in the park!

    Questions and concerns have come tumbling in from across the nation. Where does political rascality stop and respect for the sensitivities of fellow citizens begin? Is there not a minimum level of civility and decorum that we should expect from those who rule us or aspire to lead us? The enlightened public can debate these troubling questions endlessly as we digest the recent abomination committed as part of the Abuja unveiling of Mr. Kassim Shettima as Mr Bola Tinubu’s running mate. Never before had bad politics brazenly strolled into the tinder zone of faith in our nation as on this occasion. To rent a motley squad of rascals under a false identity and chaperon them into the presidential villa is a reckless breach of national security. It is indeed a needless trifling with matters that touch the hearts and minds of many citizens. To deliberately clad the mixed bag of persons of doubtful livelihood as fake Christian clergy and ferry them, past all that security cordon, into the revered confines of Aso Rock is further travesty and brazen disrespect for the institution quartered in the Villa. To commit these heinous acts in the name of politics leaves the authors’ intentions open to severe doubt and entitles them to universal rebuke.

    This reconstruction of the public presentation and unveiling ceremony of the APC vice presidential candidate contains nearly everything wrong with Nigeria’s constant political tinkering with religion. For a gamut of understandable reasons, Mr. Tinubu’s option for a Muslim- Muslim presidential ticket was bound to generate more heat than light. The way out of that pregnant choice is not to manufacture an across board acceptability that does not exist. The way out is to quickly engineer a national elite consensus on the necessity for more effective good governance over and above religious, ethnic and other factional considerations. The easier way out for Mr. Tinubu is to go all out during the campaigns to promise a systematic walk back and dismantling of the divisive, religion driven policies of the outgoing Buhari government. A promise to review lopsided public sector appointments would be nearer the mark than the kind of silly political drama that took place in Abuja last week. Even then, the foolish act of creating a solidarity of non existent clerics needs to be addressed and roundly condemned for what it is.

    First, it is a blatant disregard and disrespect for the feelings of the nation’s Christian community. Anxiety to appear politically correct on the matter of a Muslim-Muslim ticket is a normal political malady. In a nation so suffused with religion and superstition, the reactions of the public, especially the Christians, is understandable but can be allayed. But you do not stage a marionette show to convey an impression of something that does not exist. What has just happened is an open mockery of a serious matter of faith which defines a very significant section of the national population.

    It is easy to dole out mounds of cash and purchase any group of political tools. But there ought to be a limit to the growing tradition of transactional politics when it comes to sensitive issues like the faith and beliefs of people. Our new tradition of transactional politics reached an industrial peak during the recent presidential nomination conventions of the two dominant parties. Politicians have been known to deploy cash to purchase favorable outcomes including votes and the support of vital constituencies. But to purchase a collection of fake Christian clerics to score a political point is to degrade the sensibilities of well meaning citizens and believers of one faith.

    In an election year, all manner of political jobbers would be available for hire. More so, the desperate economic conditions of today have created a ready market for practically every conceivable undertaking. People are broke and hungry. It was therefore easy to find any number of miscreants or even some low level pastors and cash strapped citizens to be decorated as clergy for the Shettima unveiling. But why the desperation to find clergy men and women by all means? After all, Shettima was not being unveiled as a Christian ambassador or representative of the Holy See! The Christian Association of Nigerian (CAN) has justifiably castigated the antics of the APC while of course disowning the sundry miscreants who posed as clergy.

    It is of course regrettably true that the calling of priesthood among Nigerian Christians has been serially bastardized and trivialized by the recklessness of a few bad eggs. It is true that nearly every street side miscreant who establishes a church in his living room quickly anoints himself pastor, bishop, general overseer or even pope!

    It is true that religion cannot be regulated like banks or joint stock companies in a free society. A mushrooming of Christian factions, sects, denominations and sub denominations has come with an efflorescence of titles and hierarchies sometimes too large to to keep up with.

    A travesty like the invasions of politics into religion is possible only because of the indiscriminate commercialization of religion. Faith has become a merchandise just as churches have become unregulated exploitative sole proprietorships. Denominations especially in the Pentecostal variety have become more like brands with pastors as salesmen and marketers. There is a raging competition among a new breed of faith entrepreneurs on ownership of vast real estate, private jets, retinue of expensive automobiles and cross border enterprises and chains of companies. Taken together, the blurring of the dividing line between faith and the empire of profit has conferred on Christian clerics a certain amount of financial and political clout that is hard to ignore or combat.

    The corresponding implication for the traditional division between church and state has been horrendous. The state has invaded the church just as much as mosques and churches have cornered the commanding posts of the state. By the nature of their trade, politicians like to dominate every inch of space. What they cannot dominate, they try to invade, pollute or uproot. Every politician hungry for apex power seeks out the owners of the most influential Pentecostal super churches for endorsement or ‘blessings’. What they seek is of course vast demographics of voters and donors of cash.

    Having taken the risk of a Muslim-Muslim ticket, Mr. Tinubu and his party need to get on with the urgent task of building first ands elite consensus on the primacy of delivering credible and impartial governance. That is the best way of submerging the emphasis on religion and ethnicity in our polity. But even then, those citizens who remain skeptical about the potential abuses of a single faith ticket are well within their right.

    It is risky for Tinubu and the APC to forget that they are in a contest for power. Other contenders have chosen a different type of ticket. Only the voters will ultimately decide on the wisdom or foolishness of a Muslim-Mualim ticket in today’s Nigeria.

  • Tinubu and the burden of faith – By Chidi Amuta

    Tinubu and the burden of faith – By Chidi Amuta

    The All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Mr. Bola Tinubu, has merely announced a longstanding intention. His naming of former Borno governor, Mr. Kashim Shettima, as his running mate confirms what is perhaps a long conceived preference for a Muslim-Muslim ticket for his 2023 race. That preference is neither so original nor earth shaking. On the contrary, many are likely to see it as a mere cut and paste version of the MKO Abiola template in the June 12, 1992 presidential election.

    The Muslim –Muslim gamble worked for Abiola because of his uniqueness as a genuine pan-Nigerian citizen. Abiola was first and foremost a genuine altruistic trans national philanthropist. He wanted nothing in immediate obvious return except open acknowledgment of his inherent goodness of heart across the nation. His ethnicity was not a badge on his forehead. On the contrary, Tinubu is an astute political investor. His generosity is targeted political investment aimed at specific outcomes and personal benefits. He is proud of and hardly hides his Yoruba identity. To those who have benefitted from the man’s generous handouts especially in Nigeria’s ‘northern hemisphere’, the pay back hour is at hand. The man is about to come knocking on every door for votes in return for cheques cashed in the past.

    Nonetheless, Tinubu arguably rode on the fortunes of the June 12 political excursion into public notice. A NADECO militant who roamed the globe as an associate rebel with a democratic cause eventually returned home triumphant to harvest the smoke trail of June 12 into a personal political fortune. Again, that trajectory is neither strange nor so original. It was just a matter of recognizing an opportunity that offered itself on a platter and seizing it. Time has passed and the Nigerian political landscape, compass and thermometer have all altered significantly.

    As the flag bearer of the APC, a ruling party with a tattered performance record and overall miserable reputation, Mr.Tinubu knows he has an all -important election to win or lose. If he wins, a life ambition will have been fulfilled. If he loses, he may not have another opportunity to stand for any other election in life. Therefore, his choice of a running mate for 2023 can only be part of a strategic political arsenal to win power first and foremost. In a national election, politicians look for votes where they exist in quantum and recruit allies that can help them harvest those votes. Astute political animals are not in the business of mining sentiments or pandering to crass sectarian emotions. It is only when they ascend power that they can exploit the machinery of governance and the power of public opinion to assuage popular sentiments wounded in the bloody hunt for winning votes.

    To every intent and purpose, therefore, Mr. Tinubu’s choice of Mr. Kashim Shettima is well within the bounds of mundane political expediency and his democratic prerogative of choice. It should ordinarily not cause so much indigestion among the enlightened citizenry. The standard argument has always been that faith remains a private predilection. The choice of individuals in this area remains in the private domain. This is true to the extent that, in theory, a public office holder’s choice of what and how to worship should not affect his conduct or efficiency in office. The guidebook for judging the actions of political office holders remains the constitution. A president or vice president who adheres strictly to the letter and spirit of the constitution and discharges the duties attached to his office is not likely to offend public sensibility. Trouble only comes calling when a political office holder allows his private faith to impinge on his conduct of the affairs of state.

    More pointedly, as my friend Nasir el-Rufai, Kaduna state governor has said often in recent times, a public officer’s faith should have nothing to do with his efficiency in office. By his telling illustration, we do not ask the pilot what faith he practices before taking a seat in a flight. We simply want to be taken safely to our destination by a trained professional pilot. Trouble only comes if mid flight, he announces that he can only land the aircraft safely if we convert to his faith!

    Beyond the general sensitivities around faith and state affairs, Tinubu still has to account to Nigerians on Mr. Shettima’s appropriateness for the role of number two. The criterion of ‘fit and proper person’ for the office of potential Vice President comes into play. He has understandably selected one APC leading light from the ‘northern hemisphere’ of Nigeria, an area that also has the likes of governors Zulum and El-Rufai who ordinarily would have balanced Tinubu’s street political credentials with some intellectual content. But he has exercised his right of choice, a hallmark of democracy.

    Yet, we should not allow the veneer of religion to blind or divert our attention from the more consequential matter of Mr. Shettima’s fitness for the job Tinubu has offered him. Beyond the badge of having been a former governor of the Sahelian state of Borno, very little else is known of Mr. Shettima. Even as governor, we hardly know how much the school enrolment in Borno increased under his tenure or how many jobs he created. No one has indicated how much fight he gave climate change in his semi arid state. Even on the more urgent matter of security, Mr. Shettima is yet to fully publish his landmark achievements in the fight against Boko Haram unlike say Zulum who has survived a few terrorist ambushes during his tenure.

    Borno’s overall importance is essentially geo strategic and unflattering. It is the epicenter of Nigeria’s jihadist terrorism. It is also the birth state of the notorious Boko Haram and Nigeria’s frontline state in the Sahelian jihadist frontier. Of course, the state offers no spectacular diversity management challenges, like say Lagos, that could equip anyone for the sheer complexity of deputizing for the president of Nigeria. In particular, Mr. Shettima may not have endeared himself to the Nigerian public in any particularly glowing or significant manner. If he comes immediately after Yemi Osinbajo as vice president, Mr. Shettima is likely to be a dim anti climax in the yes of the public.

    Very little indeed is in the public domain about Mr. Shettima’s erudition, governance prowess or significant knowledge of Nigeria’s history, problems and prospects. Instead, the social media had erroneously associated him with the founding and support of Boko Haram which turns out to be wrong.

    There is also the leaked phone audio of his call to former governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun state on the eve of the Jonathan ouster. That call was dripping with ethnic vitriol, religious biases and even outright bigotry. On other occasions, he has been credited with uncomplimentary and biased views against some ethnic groups. There is as yet no record of Mr. Shettima dissociating himself from any or all of these worrisome pronouncements. Taken together, these are not the attributes that should herald a candidate for the office of Vice President of Nigeria. But Tinubu, who is himself accustomed to identity controversies, probably knows best.

    The spontaneous reactions to Tinubu’s choice of his fellow Muslim as running mate should be understood in the context of the place of religion in the Nigerian psyche. In this place, faith based superstition holds the people in perpetual bondage. In other more enlightened places, those who choose to go to mosque to pray many times facing east would not threaten those who spend nights at vigil in the church. People elected into public office would not seize the podium of the Sunday sermon or the Friday prayer to comment on or validate their actions in government. Nor would a president or governor smuggle elements of his faith into state policy or programmes.

    In a civilized polity, no responsible government would in the normal process of governance seek to manipulate public policy with reckless abandon. In the most enlightened of states and societies, the separation of mosque and state or church and state would be so thoroughly observed that the individual faith preferences of the captains of sate will hardly be known.

    But Nigeria is a different place. Our political leaders are largely lawless, hardly obeying the very laws they emplace for the governance of others. Oaths of office mean nothing to these people. The society over which they rule is steeped in primordial superstition so much so that an arguable 98% of Nigerians live and breathe faith and its underlying superstition. Our people surrender their lives to the irrational dictates of one alien faith or the other.

    In this place, cause and effect defy the laws of scientific causality but obey the dark unfathomable irrational forces of divine machinations in a grey ghostly zone that is neither ancient African nor modern Judeo-Christian. There is a hand of God or the devil behind every fortune or misfortune. People do not just die as mortals of natural causes. They must have been bewitched by the evil calculus of an envious neighbour or vicious uncle from thousands of miles away in the village. Your wife will not miscarry except the witch next door has cast a spell on her. Good fortune is an act of divine benevolence, a compensation for long nights of praying and fasting. Sometimes, good fortune can be a testimony to the efficacy of a dark ritual. People with terminal health conditions prefer to go to prayer houses of hire a resident medicine man. This is where we live and why we die needless and senseless deaths.

    In Nigeria, a permanent shadow of faith and superstition hovers over the affairs of state and society. Our politicians consult oracles and juju men. Some import expensive Marabouts from as far as Mauritania and Egypt or Bhudist monks from the Himalayas. Those in power constantly allow their faith to migrate into the sanctity of the secular domain. Nigeria is a secular state on paper but a secular state inhabited by mostly religious zealots, prayer militants and an unthinking mob of sheepish devotees. In this place, an irrational divine order supersedes the empirical socio political order presided over by human political agents. Misguided politicians allow their private faith to unsettle the public by infusing governance with devious intent disguised as elements of religiosity.

    In the present circumstance, the secular authority has frequently allowed fundamentalist zealots to openly bear arms, to shoot innocent people and bomb places of worship. By design or default, agents of violence have been allowed to invade the entire nation space with cascades of terror and trails of blood. The cries of religious domination and faith -induced violence have of recent consequently filled the air. The world has heard us loud and clear. Only a few days back, some US Republican senators signed a petition alleging systematic threats to Christians in Nigeria. Even Donald Trump condemned threats against Christians in Nigeria. It is not enough for our government to keep issuing reflex denials. The reality chills the blood in the number of clerics kidnapped, abducted or killed each month. The troubling spectacle of women in church with pistol butts sticking out of their handbags or of clerics preaching the gospel with an AK 47‬ slung across their shoulder shows how far Nigeria has travelled on the road to perdition and apocalyptic unraveling.‬‬‬

    The public disquiet over Tinubu’s Muslim-Muslim ticket is therefore rooted in a place where religion rules the lives of the majority. Those who rule Nigeria know this too well and a ready to deploy faith in the pursuit of devious political ends. In the last seven years under Mr. Buhari, the power of faith in governance has been so recklessly deployed that Nigerians have cause to be thoroughly frightened by any hint that faith infused governance will persist beyond 2023.

    In such an environment, it becomes important what religious badge those at the apex of state power are wearing. Our people have been scarred by sectarian fundamentalism decorated as the authority of state. Faith has been allowed to invade the very criteria for the allocation of high offices in the land and the dispensation of patronage in an otherwise diverse and plural state. A certain untidiness in the affairs of state has seen fidelity to skewed faith replace the meritocratic essence of normal public service career advancement. Rank mediocrity has taken centre stage under the camouflage of sectarian fidelity and loyalty.

    This is the backdrop to the current reticence over who runs for what and with whom. Nigerians are afraid not of faith but its serial abuses in recent times. We are afraid not of the muezzin’s clarion call to the faithful or the preachers urgent summons to salvation of the innocent but of the bombs that keep exploding in churches and mosques. We are afraid because those who went to worship at that Catholic Church in Owo are yet to return and may never return.

    What frightens most people is that in today’s Nigeria, faith no longer travels alone. It has become mixed with complex issues of identity and politics that now make Nigeria a complex and difficult polity. Faith and ethnicity have a cruel embrace. All over Nigeria, faith has become a tool of power, an instrument of domination and subordination. Those who dominate others deploy faith to achieve a political end, to justify their excesses and recruit devotees to their uncanny project. Those who seek freedom from domination run to libertarian forms of religion. In our national history, faith has lent itself to hegemonic abuse as well as political rebellion. Today, bad politics has cast Muslims into an aggressive dominating mould while driving Christians into a reactive defensive militancy. This is the landscape that is driving the discourse on Mr. Tinubu’s troublesome choice of a running mate.

    The matter is not Tinubu’s sole headache. In normal good times, the role of Vice President can be innocuous and even inconsequential. But at those unplanned moments when for unavoidable reasons, the ship of state requires an auxiliary captain, the vice president is invited to step out and step in for the president. At such moments, it becomes important who the vice president really is. With Mr. Shettima as Tinubu’s ‘spare tire’, are we going to be left in the hands of a political rabble rouser and someone with a troubling sectional conception of Nigeria’s diversity?

    There are far too many doubts about Mr. Shettima’s conception of and attitude to Nigeria’s diversity and nationhood to give us insomnia. I think his views about Nigeria are too sectional, too ancient and cast in the old mould of tripodal ethnic stereotypes with fixated profiles for us to entrust him with the office of vice president.

    Yet in all this, it may be foolhardy to assume that Mr.Tinubu is the presumptive president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. We are too far from 2023. And Nigeria is too insecure a place to fix dates for any happy event. Seven months is an eternity in politics. The history of insecure and unstable nation states is best defined by “What if…?”
    Nigeria is in that uncertain territory at the moment.

  • Will There Still Be Life Before 2023? – By Chidi Amuta

    Will There Still Be Life Before 2023? – By Chidi Amuta

    The period between now and May 2023 is Nigeria’s season of expectations and grave anxiety. Nigerians are expectant that the forthcoming general election will enable them as an electorate to renew our national leadership through the ritual of voting. On the other hand, the perilous state of the state has raised the level of anxiety among the people about what might chance in both our private lives and our collective plight as a nation. The optimistic electoral expectation is a legitimate democratic entitlement. Anxiety about our individual lives is also natural. Concern about the plight of the Nigerian state is equally natural especially among the elite. But happily, the essence of the nation remains intact in the hearts and minds of the generality of ordinary people.

    Going by the agenda that the Buhari administration set for itself in 2015, we are eleven months away from paradise. We are eleven months away from comprehensive security, a corruption free society, an economy that guarantees prosperity for most and food for the majority.

    Happily, the just completed party nominations has shown us who among two and half ambitious adult males is most likely to move into Aso Villa on 29th May, 2023. Spouses of two of them are already said to be literally measuring the drapes in the Presidential Villa and ordering new apparel for the great day of inauguration or coronation. What remains uncertain is what symbol better guarantees a gate pass into the villa. But whether you are armed with a broom in this age of vacuum cleaners or an umbrella when you are mostly cocooned from rainy days, high expectation is the legitimate entitlement of every aspirant to the highest political job in the land. In this uncertain ritual of democratic pool betting incurable optimism is the best armor against the unexpected. Trust Nigerian politicians. They are up to date in the drama of expectation of imminent power.

    The buzz is that one of the virtual presidents is so anxious to assume power that he cannot wait any longer. In the privacy of his home, he is said to be practicing the footsteps of a big man of great power. He takes the dignified measured steps in the loneliness of his sitting room. He is also practicing the elocution of presidential absolutism, a manner of speaking that conveys the finality of the power of life and death. The man is rehearsing to an audience of trusted aides or sometimes alone. A man talking to himself in the dead of night and in such grandiloquence should ordinarily attract the attention of concerned relatives or even mental health doctors. But this is Nigeria. Everything a man of great wealth and imminent maximum power does is a display of either genius or style. It was the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo who once said that “the African is a born actor”!

    Another of the presidents apparent has even been recently spotted taxying his aircraft to the presidential wing of one of our major airports in anticipation of imminent presidential power. Thereafter, he moved in an endless motorcade, complete with authorized hooligans to his private home. A foretaste of the coming days!

    Yet another one of the virtual presidents has taken up residence in some cozy foreign land and is prepping to direct his campaign from anywhere else in the world. It is just so we can get used to the imminent junkets in search of ‘investors’ when he is finally sworn into office. The man is used to wining and dining with princes and monarchs under golden chandeliers. Do not expect him to settle for anything less grand just because he conceded to become your president.

    In this unfolding tale of the unexpected, one of the expectant men may probably walk up the dais at Eagle Square on inauguration day from the unexpected anonymity of people’s power and popular acclaim. What unites politicians gathered around all of these three most likely factions is the expectation of assuming ultimate power over the rest of us next May.

    Let us not forget the expectations of the incumbent administration and its support cast of tepid and uninspiring prefects. As an entitlement, the incumbent administration now in a flat lame duck state anxiously expects its term to end quickly so that the cup of responsibility can pass them by. This collection of office occupants is just going through the motions, having run out of steam, ideas and commitment to anything beyond the self and its endless interests. The general public wish and prayer for this collection is simple: “Finish and go!”. Just manage to keep the ship of state afloat for the remaining 11 odd months.

    For the rest of us ordinary Nigerian citizens and the electorate, the season of democratic transition entitles us to grand expectations about our conditions. We are literally fired up even if pushed to the wall. Against the ugly backdrop of our tormented present, there is a universal wish that hard times and bloody nightmares will yield place to the return of laughter and a little bit of sweetness. We expect the outcome of the elections to bring forth new leaders, a few good men and women, with the courage to chase away all terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and highway robbers.

    As ordinary folk, our expectations are not so lofty. We expect that the elections will restore the missing second and third meals from our shriveled daily menu. We expect that our wives and daughters who leave home for work or for the market will return without being kidnapped and raped by strange rough men with guns. There is widespread expectation that those who go to our public hospitals in search of cure and care will no longer return in caskets. Above all, we expect 2023 to end the epidemic of endless strikes and jobless queues so that the bitterness in the hearts of many can turn into a burning desire for the pursuit of happiness. Maybe at least, Nigerians can find work in return for pay cheques that can support living instead of mere existence.

    Sadly, there is little in our present condition that supports this barrage of positive expectations. Our general living conditions continue to worsen by the day. The question of the moment is now whether there will still be life before the 2023 election and its outcome. It is many worrying questions in one. Will most ordinary people be able to survive up to 2023? Will the sick be able to afford basic medications? How many parents will still be able to send their kids to school? How many homes will remain lit as electricity tariffs head for the sky? How many will be able to afford cooking gas or kerosene or even fire wood if they find the food to cook.?

    Even more frightening, the threats to the survival of the Nigerian state are now clear and present. The litany of our woes no longer merits a fresh rehash. Bad things have become a new name for our new normal. It is not easy to overlook the specific bread and butter issues like the price of diesel, the price of cooking gas, the perennial scarcity of gasoline, the rising food and other inflation that have made food and other essential necessities beyond the reach of most honest ordinary people.

    The high minded among us could insist that we concentrate on the big issues that threaten the very survival of the Nigerian state and forget mundane existential setbacks. In other words, let us worry more about the steady slide into avoidable anarchy and compulsive dysfunction. Let us lose sleep instead over the perennial absence of order and strategic purpose. The argument is that these sate survival issues will not pause simply because Nigerians are expectant about elections and their outcome. But these larger and lofty issues of state can never replace the material conditions of the lives of ordinary people.

    Nor does the lame duck status of the current incumbency exonerate the present officialdom from responsibility for the welfare of the citizens and as well as the continuation of the state. The easy argument is always that we need a viable nation state in order to pursue the rights and welfare issues of individual citizens. The corollary can be even more compelling. You need living citizens to indulge in the luxury of the nation state with its cascade of ceremonies and bureaucratic pomposity. For the ordinary Nigerian, the nation is good when most necessities of life remain affordable so that they can live their lives here on earth. At those times, when you ask ordinary people the iconic question, “How Country?”, you get a resounding existential affirmation that ‘life is good’.

    In focusing attention on the survival of the state, the assumption is that the state itself has the inbuilt resilience and capacity to roll back the imminent anarchy and can protect us all from the possibility of a meltdown. We also assume that the wisdom of state is strong as to avoid fresh blunders. That optimism may in fact be groundless after all as new gambles are in the offing.

    For instance, a much delayed national census is scheduled to take place before the elections. In a country where previous census figures have sparked off political firestorms, no one knows what the 2022 census will breed in the countdown to an election that is already surrounded by uncertainty in an atmosphere of divisive politics.

    Meanwhile, President Buhari who seems quite comfortable in the new coziness of his lame duck status has revved up his globe trotting instincts. The engines of his presidential jet seem to be permanently in start position and in wait for the next junket. He has in recent weeks clocked up more air miles to all manner of inconsequential destinations. In the midst of his party’s troubled succession nomination primaries, he jetted to Spain a country with sparse business and trade links with Nigeria, to receive national honours and decorations. He has also just returned from another series of meetings in Portugal, an erstwhile colonial nation that is now in a miserable state with a sorry economy.

    Predictably, Nigeria’s ceaseless cascade of now systemic insecurity has continued to spiral. In the latest iterations, roving bandits and gunmen have ambushed platoons of soldiers and policemen in Shiroro, killing as many as 30 by official admission. A horde of ISWAP terrorists stormed the Kuje medium security prison in Abuja and freed over 800 prisoners including dangerous Boko Haram prisoners. Gunmen have attacked the president’s advance convoy in his Katsina home state.

    Nor are private lives immune from the gale of insecurity. People on their way to market or from work are no longer sure that the public bus on which they are riding is not a ‘one chance’ ride to a kidnapper’s den. This risk is now rampant even in the relative security of cities like Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt and Kaduna. Foreign missions in our midst are paying heed. In its latest travel advisory to its citizens in Nigeria, the Canadian government has advised against travel to 32 of our 36 states because of the ever present risk of kidnapping, armed robbery, ritual murder or the spontaneous eruption of mob violence.

    Meanwhile, those who know anything about economics insist that Nigeria is nearly bankrupt. With over 98% percent of current revenue going into debt service, there is clear danger that Nigeria could soon begin to default on its foreign loans. An avoidable petroleum subsidy regime has been allowed to persist by a collusion of government bureaucrats and oil and gas oligarchs. Subsidy bills currently gulp somewhere in the neighborhood of N600 billion a month.

    Fuel scarcity has remained a permanent condition in major cities including the capital, Abuja. A timid incumbent administration has consistently shied away from abrogating the subsidy regime for fear of social upheaval, leaving the hard decision to its successor administration. Meanwhile, the treasury bleeds to upwards of $40 billion annually, an amount slightly higher than Nigeria’s total external reserves.

    While the daily existential survival of the people has now become doubtful, the coherence of the state to survive and persist has been thoroughly perforated and whittled. The very institutions of state survival and integrity are in tatters. Barely a fortnight ago, a sitting Chief Justice of Nigeria ‘resigned’ his uncompleted tenure in a shroud of smoke filled with the smell of corruption and collegial distrust. It turns out that he was presiding over a judiciary in which judges had become virtual mendicants. The military which used to be the last fortress of hope for national cohesion and survival has in the last 10 years repeatedly failed to tame a rash of secessionist militias, roving bandits and apprentice terrorists with neither training nor doctrine.

    Yes indeed, life may have become hard for the majority while the architecture of state has become fatally creaky. Yet against all odds, some incredible intangible force continues to hold Nigeria together and to keep its people incurably united and optimistic. Ordinary Nigerians on the streets and in the villages are insistent that this house must not fall. I have hardly seen any ordinary Nigerians who wish that Nigeria should disappear and be replaced by anything else. Instead, there is this stubborn hope that these bad times shall pass. In the rhetoric of ordinary people, there is a Nigeria in their hearts that has only been temporarily contaminated and fatally injured by present bad leadership and the deviant behavior of a few bad men and women. Their constant refrain continues to be, in street parlance: “Nigeria go better”!

    Less than a week ago, information minister Mr. Lai Mohammed was in London touring media houses to burnish the image of the outgoing administration . He insisted in open television camera interviews that Boko Haram and ISWAP have been defeated, that the economy is faring well while infrastructure development has been amped up. Overall, he repeated the tired line that the Buhari administration will leave Nigeria better than they found it in 2015.

    While he was still in London regaling his audiences with fairy tales, terrorists attacked and overran the Kuje medium security prison in Abuja. They freed over 800 inmates including 60 dangerous high value Boko Haram prisoners. ISWAP has since assumed responsibility for the well coordinated attack right in the heart of the Abuja capital city with supporting video of the operation. A nearby residential estate, the El-Rufai estate in Abuja, was invaded by gunmen and some residents kidnapped or injured.A week earlier, a band of roving terrorists ambushed a company of Nigerian troops in Shiroro, a hydro power town in Niger State and killed no less than 30 troops and police men. In the same week, a convoy of presidential advance party heading into the Daura home town of the president ahead of his arrival for the upcoming Muslim Salah holiday was ambushed by gunmen. Two were reportedly injured.

  • Did Buhari Really See Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials? – Chidi Amuta

    Did Buhari Really See Rwanda’s Genocide Memorials? – Chidi Amuta

    No one sees Kigali and remains the same. In many ways, Rwanda embodies Africa’s real triple heritage: the curse of colonial injustice, the tragedy of African misrule and the possibility of redemption and real African renaissance. The capital, Kigali, is at once a place of past regrets, a theatre of recent blood- letting and indeed a symbol of Africa’s hope in the prospect of healing, hope and change born of progressive leadership.

    You arrive Kigali with mixed expectations. The allure is irresistible in its ambiguity. You want to see Africa’s much talked about New Jerusalem, rising stubbornly from the red earth of recent historic tragedy. You want to see on the faces of the people signs of recent scars of hurt and collective pain. You want to see the skyline of present day Kigali, the defiance of new skyscrapers reaching to the skies beyond the limitations of the gravity of past ugliness.

    You actually hear the hum of new development, the restless bulldozers and towering cranes at countless construction sites, massive presences of international assistance and local initiative in fresh infrastructure. You feel the optimism of a people literally inhabiting a new nation, an African phoenix rising from the ashes of perdition and pain. You are bound to be impressed by the sparkling streets, the intrinsic discipline of a people visibly in a hurry to flee the haunting specter of something dreadful and invisible.

    When you unpack and head out later to see what Kigali has to offer, your tour guide nicely reminds you that no trip to Rwanda is ever complete without seeing the ‘other’ side. Knowing what you already know from a distance, you accept a tour of the genocide memorials. You are greeted by graphic photographs of the days of blood and madness. No need for a tour guide’s usual rehash of familiar history. You are face to face with the chilling site of countless skulls and bones of the living dead, the hundreds of thousands of innocent Rwandans, mostly Tutsi, who were massacred in what has become one of the world’s most memorable instances of modern day genocide.

    The echoes and parallels come tumbling in from diverse places and times. Auschwitz, Kosovo, Biafra, Mai Lai, Chabra and Chatilla…, past places of blood where the bestiality of humanity has exhibited itself in hundreds and thousands of wasted lives and terminated laughter. It is a trip to hell and back. Some of the hundreds of skulls still wear the final expressions of the departed, the open jaws speak of the anguish of those hacked down when they were most unready to die. Some gaping jaws speak of unheard shouts of protest or defiance, some unspoken wishes in the moment of death and the hour of destiny that will never be heard. Rwanda’s genocide memorial is a gruesome testimony to the fundamental bestiality of humanity when the reins of law, order and common sense are loosened and society comes apart, gripped by tragic misrule. Authority descends into the abyss of apocalyptic anarchy.

    When you return to the tranquility of your hotel, you realize that you are visiting two countries in one. The spontaneous hospitality of the people and their new found sense of friendship is perhaps an attempt to hide something terrible and nasty in the history that made skulls and skeletons into objects of irresistible tourist curiosity. In today’s Rwanda, the ugly depressing past of tragedy and hate is an ever present part of ongoing national reconciliation and some tortured love of nation and compatriots.

    The story of Rwanda is now a household tale in the world. Deeply entrenched divisive ethnocentric leadership had split a nation down the line. In pre-Kagame Rwanda, you were either Hutu or Tutsi. No middle ground. Two parallel nations under one sovereign. One, the place of hegemonic privileged overlords and the other the abode of those who must obey and live in fear. The road from old Rwanda to the new began in tragedy. Sometimes, the foundations of national greatness are laid in the wombs of tragic accident.

    On April 6th, 1994, Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda was assassinated. His presidential jet was making its final approach to land at Kigali airport when it came under a barrage of rocket fire. The president and his entourage were killed. The assassination sparked off what has become one of the world’s most horrendous genocides. The rest has become an iconic blood on the canvas of world history.

    The tragic assassination of the president immediately sparked off a gale of mayhem and reprisal killings mostly of the Tutsi minority in a genocidal orgy that consumed an entire nation. Government media, the army and all key institutions of state, being de facto Hutu dominated, became shameless promoters of hate and genocide. The international community was overwhelmed. Death and destruction swept through the entire country in dizzying rapidity, leaving over 800,000 dead. This is the effective backdrop to the emergence of Paul Kagame, a soldier for good, an exemplary statesman and nation builder of historic proportions.

    The recent Commonwealth summit in Kigali was an opportunity for world leaders to reaffirm Rwanda’s triumph over evil and hate. Invariably, the visiting leaders had an opportunity to see the genocide memorials. It was a cruel reminder not only of what an indifferent world community failed to do but also of what the deliberate cultivation of hate and divisiveness as a directive principle of state policy in a multi ethnic nation can lead to.

    The images of Nigeria’s president, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, as he visited the Kigali genocide memorials evoked both pity and some belated hope that he could perhaps learn something about the consequences of bad leadership. The irresistible temptation is to ask what lessons Buhari took away from that guided tour beyond the diplomatic platitudes and courtesies of his hosts and co leaders. Beyond his physical presence at the memorials, did Mr. Buhari really feel the tragic enormity of that piece of our earth and the memories preserved there? Indeed, did he ask why it was necessary for the Rwandans to keep that memory or a past tragedy forever alive?

    For President Paul Kagame, himself a former army officer like Buhari, the Kigali genocide memorial is an unmistakable NEVER AGAIN statement, a permanent reminder to both Rwandans and the world at large that the wrongful deployment of power breeds consequences that reach come to haunt national history and afflict our collective humanity. The genocide memorial has also become for Rwanda a powerful permanent diplomatic public relations poster. Without many words, Paul Kagame has become Africa’s poster kid of national reconciliation and nation building statesmanship.

    In a tragic recollection during the visit, Mr. Buhari recalled that Nigeria went through a bloody civil war whose essential prelude was a genocidal outburst no less grave and far- reaching than the Rwandan episode. The president graciously admitted that no less than 2 million Nigerians died in the Nigerian civil war and the crises that led to it. He of course failed to admit that over fifty years after, Nigeria has failed to memorialize our tragic experience. Millions died. Homesteads and property were eviscerated. Fortunes and fates were irreversibly altered for the worst. When the war ended, Nigeria moved on. No conscious effort was made to keep the memories of tragedy forever in our hearts as a deterrence against future misdeeds. Of course some miserable War Museum, a collection of odds and ends from the scrap heaps of war was established in Umuahia.

    In terms of present day relevance, Buhari’s Kigali genocide memorial visit is in fact a searing indictment of his own record of power and leadership in the last seven years. Here we have a leader who has consciously divided his nation along all perceivable lines. In seven years under Buhari, the combined death toll of Nigerians that have died from a spate of insecurity is far higher than what is recorded in many declared wars. The figures so far range from 28,000 to 50,000 dead and still counting.

    The indicators of Nigeria’s avoidable division under Buhari are everywhere in evidence. Nigerians are now Moslems and Christians, Northerners and Southerners, Arewa, Oduduwa, Biafrans and a thousand other hideous nomenclatures hitherto unheard of. For seven years plus, the dominant language of our national discourse from the high media to the street corners has been hate and division disguised as political debate and identity politics.

    The president has himself unfortunately been a merchant of open hate and division. On national television, this president once described one of our major ethnic nationalities as a nation of “dots” surrounded by “a circle” of hostility. He saw no reason why the Igbos should be seeking a fairer Nigerian order and better opportunities in a nation they call theirs since they already own property and businesses all over the country!

    At the height of the IPOB separatist agitations and protests, the president threatened the people of the South East region with a repeat of the genocidal violence of the civil war years. In his own words, he promised to speak to them “in a language they understand”. This hardly veiled threat was viewed by Twitter as hate speech leading to the Twitter post by the Nigerian presidency being taken down. The instant reprisal was the authoritarian shut down of Twitter in Nigeria for over a year.

    In the security crackdown on the South East ostensibly against the IPOB separatists, Mr. Buhari ordered a combined police and military garrisoning of the entire South East region. Hundreds of youth have been arrested, detained without trial and, in some cases, remain unaccounted for in the name of internal security. The Nigerian security establishment is yet to give a convincing account of the whereabouts of many innocent citizens in the region.

    His visit to the Kigali genocide memorial ought to have jolted Mr. Buhari to the dire consequences of the kind of divisive politics and policies that he has presided over in Nigeria over the last seven years.

    The present frightening gale of insecurity and virtual meltdown of the Nigerian state can only be a crime against the Nigerian state and people. The most elementary guarantee of the security of life and limbs has drifted away in most parts. An array of casual criminal gangs have virtually overrun the entire country thereby abridging the freedom of citizens to move freely in a nation they call home. All over the country, it is an unbroken tale of kidnappings, assassinations, senseless killings, armed robbery and rape. On nearly every lip, insecurity has become a unifying idiom that cuts across our multiple divides, afflicting the lowly and the mighty alike.

    As citizens scamper for whatever protection they can find, regional security formations have sprouted in rapid succession. From the primordial dark forests of ancestry, politicians are invoking mostly animals of prey for names of their regional security outfits. The choice of predators to convey the hunger to protect one’s region is also a metaphor of what Nigeria under Major General Buhari has become. This place is degenerating into a Hobbesian jungle in which life is short and brutish while clashing factions prime to consume each other in a frenzy of rapacious hate dripping with blood. The current national landscape is no longer recognizable as the Nigeria we once knew and loved.

    There is nothing wrong with President Buhari tagging along to visit the places that other world leaders go to edify their nations and status. But the challenge is for him to take away the lessons of those excursions to reassess his own performance record at home.

    As Buhari strolls carelessly towards the exit gate of power, it is doubtful that he can absolve himself of the seven years during which he has led a once united nation to the precipice of the kind of apocalypse that produced the Rwandan genocide. It was not for want of trying. It was just that some intangible bond holding Nigerians together has refused to tip the balance in favour of the bloody conflagration that Mr. Buhari has worked so hard to inaugurate.

  • Time to License the Vote Trade – By Chidi Amuta

    Time to License the Vote Trade – By Chidi Amuta

    The recent presidential nomination primaries of the two big parties and the just concluded Ekiti state governorship elections are united by a paradox. In both, Nigerian democracy recorded some dubious progress. An orderly and fairly credible electoral processes seems to have finally evolved. Correspondingly, however, the monetization of the electoral process hit the highest peak in our history.

    In a sickening Arab street bazaar at the presidential nomination conventions, APC and PDP delegates exchanged their convictions for wads of dollar bills reportedly ranging in value from $5000 to upwards of $35,000. In the Ekiti governorship election, the entire state became a retail market place for haggling over the price of each vote and finally settling for a range between N3000 and a princely N15,000 per vote cast.

    As things stand, our electoral outcomes are beginning to look more like validations of financial prowess rather than vindications of genuine intentions of public good. In both the APC and the PDP presidential primaries, the two presidential candidates that finally emerged happen to be the richest citizens among the aspirants. In Ekiti, it seems that a well to do candidate backed by the treasury prowess of the incumbent state administration also won. In both sets of elections, therefore, we may have reached that point in our descent into decadence where electoral victories may have acquired a new Nigerian name: Coronation of the Highest Bidder.

    At the centre of this aberration is a helpless acceptance of vote buying and selling of votes as a legitimate seasonal trade. As has been variously reported, serial bribing of delegates and retail vote buying at polling sites dominated both exercise. Most observers have concluded that the outcome of the presidential nomination conventions of the two big parties merely confirmed the primacy of cash as the deciding factor in the outcome. This is only a foretaste of what is likely to transpire at the real general elections in 2023.

    On the scale of state governorship elections, the Ekiti governorship election now holds the gold trophy in retail direct vote buying and selling. From informed reports, pay masters of the leading candidates were located strategically at vantage points in the vicinities of the polling booths with cell phone cameras focused on the balloting point for verification. Once the voter thumb printed the correct party emblem, he/she qualifies to received the agreed price of the vote at the point of exit from the polling area. Eye contact and thumb signals were the confirmation signals. Reportedly, the going rates in Ekiti ranged from N3,000 to N15,000 depending on the depth of the candidate’s pocket. The highest rate guarantees the more certain win. In one epic unguarded moment, a social media viral photo showed a leading candidate personally openly handing out wads of naira notes to a throng of supporters at a last minute campaign. No one has cared to deny that footage!

    In all this drama, we need to accord INEC its deserved credit. It may have finally made election rigging and vote robbery less attractive than ever before. So far, hardly anyone has alleged that either the presidential primaries of the big parties or the Ekiti governorship election was rigged in any material way. The announced results have so far corresponded neatly with the numbers of accredited delegates and voters in each case. INEC’s adoption of new anti fraud technologies seem to be working. In Ekiti, tallying of votes and the issuing of results were completed in about one day. Some INEC staffers still function as facilitators of residual electoral fraud. But most importantly, potential election riggers and vote thieves now need to think faster than INEC and its new devices. That is bad news for habitual election fraudsters and other ugly Nigerians.

    In all fairness, INEC’s contract with us ends with delivering credible, accurate, free and fair elections. It has no responsibility when it comes to regulating the conduct of voters and the behaviour of candidates and party supporters. Security s the business of the security people. The brazen monetization of our elections is a matter of social deviance that ought to preoccupy government and the political parties that give birth to them. And yet it is the very parties themselves and their leaders that are the source of the brazen monetization of the electoral process.

    We have every cause to celebrate the general acceptance of orderly electoral process as the best way to advance the cause of democracy. Already, lovers and champions of democracy have saluted the progress and success in Ekiti. The United States government has congratulated Nigeria on the success in Ekiti. Even the habitually litigious Nigerian politicians in Ekiti have carefully focused their attention on the open vote buying and selling than on the credibility of INEC’s procedures and processes. The complaint seems to be that they were out bidded in the bazaar!

    But we should all be ashamed that our endemic corruption culture has assumed a permanent seat in something as strategic as our electoral process. Democracy dies the moment the choices made at elections do not reflect the genuine wishes and aspirations of the people but accord with a market logic. Worse still, when cash stands between political aspirants and the genuine feelings of the people, it is hard for electoral outcomes to reflect the desirable direction of public policy. The aberration befuddles the real needs and urgencies of the society and fuels the existing decay of the state.

    There is yet another way of viewing the matter. As it stands now, the quantum of monetization in the recent electoral contests indicates the emergence of the vote trade as something of a new economic trend and nascent sector. We may in fact have indirectly created a seasonal economic sector with a quantum cash turnover. An industry of sorts has found a place among the gamut of new nefarious undertakings now struggling for prominence in our infinitely entrepreneurial nation.

    The trade in votes has just joined the ranks of other illicit trades now thriving in our midst. Cyber crime, trading in babies produced by ‘baby factories’, trade in human body parts, human trafficking across state and international boundaries, online fake celebrity endorsement scams and circuses etc. These are the faces of the ‘new economy’. Add these to the already flourishing lethal sectors of transactional kidnapping and industrial banditry.

    The vote trade is the complementary face of our new era politics. Let us call it transactional politics. It is informed by the Nigerian craze of “cash and carry” or “carry go” in popular parlance. The ‘Ghana must go” politics is the unofficial certification of a cargo cult political culture that feeds on compulsive corruption. While the new INEC is the face of a promising future for democracy in our country, the rise of transactional politics is the death knell of democracy as well.

    The unscripted understanding is that politicians have no moral obligation to attend to the needs of their constituents once they have bought off their votes at election time. The business of the next four years becomes how to recover the investment made at election time and ensure some return on investment. The avenues for investment recovery are well known in our political economy. Inflated and phantom contracts, dubious claims of perks and entitlements, padding of annual budget provisions, countless official trips and tours to all corners of the earth in the name of either finding foreign investors or learning new tricks in nation building or institution management. There is of course the familiar serial scam of oversight visits to public institutions and departments by federal and state legislators. It is an endless cesspool.

    Once sold, the citizens’ vote is a blank cheque that relieves the political office holder of all responsibility for delivery of the benefits of democracy and accountability to the electorate as citizens. The insensitivity of politicians is only complemented by the indifference of an electorate that has sold its votes for a pittance or was absent on election day.

    Interestingly, neither politicians nor the general public find transactional politics unusual or minimally offensive. Our politicians have no qualms about openly negotiating or bidding to buy your votes. Neither do voters feel any moral reservations about selling their votes. It is an anomaly that has found a fertile ground in an atmosphere and culture of endemic corruption. The unwritten common wisdom is that the public sphere is a no man’s land, a place where the treasure of the nation belongs to no one and in which politicians once in office are entitlement to help themselves to the public till. Since the citizens’ vote is the only ticket that grants access to the feast called government, politicians and the citizens have vicariously placed a monetary value on the vote as the ticket to political power. The trade in votes therefore becomes a normal transaction process in the business of political exchange. There is a desperate demand for votes by politicians and a ready supply by voters eager to cash out and move on.

    In the business of the vote trade, then, we are dealing with a market situation. Able buyers and willing sellers which is the basic requirement for the creation of a market. Never before in the history of electoral democracy in Nigeria has adversity created such a thriving ready market in a basic instrument of democracy: the vote.

    Here then is one toxic dividend of Nigeria’s democracy under Mr. Buhari’s presidency. The democratization of abject penury and crippling poverty, the generous distribution of misery among the populace has created a country in which the distrust of politics and politicians is so thorough that people only believe in instant encashment of their citizenship rights in order to survive in the present as against belief in a forlorn hope that things will get better any time soon. Ultimately, the article of trade here is power, the sovereign power to decide the fate of a nation of over 200 million people most of whom are held hostage in the fangs of poverty and desperation.

    The currency is the vote now symbolized by the Permanent Voters Card or PVC. The raging demand for PVCs is driven by two opposing forces. One is the desire by more citizens, especially the youth, to genuinely vote their convictions hoping it will change this ugly present. The opposite is the existence of humongous troves of cash in a few political hands ready to buy any number of PVC carrying voters in order to gain or retain power.

    In the election season, however, the trade in votes becomes brisk business with a fleeting expiration date. The day after the election, life resumes. Delegates smile home and to the banks while bribed voters content themselves with perhaps ‘one nice pot of soup’ in the parlance of former Ekiti governor, Ayo Fayose, who invented the term ‘stomach infrastructure’ to capture the politics of instant gratification of the poor electorate in a period of ravaging hardship and virtual mass starvation.

    In the immediate aftermath of every monetized election, politicians tally their vote haul. The highest bidders head for the streets to celebrate. Those who could not hit the benchmark going prices for votes on sale quietly head home to lick their wounds, recalibrate their depleted bank accounts and console their disappointed spouses.

    It is futile to continue to deny the existence of the vote trade, the unbridled unregulated free market of vote buyers and sellers. After all, this is a free market (free racket!) economy. Instead, perhaps what we urgently need is to recognize and perhaps regulates the vote trade as a seasonal sub sector of our economy. In terms of quantum of cash in circulation, the election season witnesses such a high volume of transactions in a regime dominated by a largely of invisible trade. The greater part of the money movement is undocumented and part of our robust underground economy. It is all about of cash, undocumented unofficial transfers via numerous electronic and human channels. The benefits of these transactions do not accrue to the official public treasury.

    Perhaps the best way to re-inject the monetary benefits of this vast seasonal economic activity is to recognize the vote trade as a legitimate activity. Why deny the existence of something you know will always be there? Let us ‘legitimize’ vote buying, delegate payouts etc as legitimate transactions in the political sector of the economy.

    Therefore, payments to delegates should be declared just like gratuity is entered in your hotel meal invoice. There should be a tax on both the paying party and receiving parties. There should be extra taxes levied on bank accounts with unusual traffic during election seasons.

    Beyond this cynical suggestion, I recognize the urgent need to save our democracy from the scourge of monetization. But sermons and preachments will not do it. Legislation will not do it either. Existing anti graft agencies are as useless as they have been in fighting corruption. Instead, it is better to fight what money has caused with money in the form of higher prices for votes znd open declaration of transactions in the vote trade.

    First, vote buying and selling need to attract heavy financial penalties for its perpetrators and beneficiaries alike. The political parties should lead the charge. They should fix the applicable rates. After all the parties fixed the price tags for their nomination forms for all elective offices which may have helped to exclude those who could not afford the princely sums.

    Since voters now know the rate of return on investment by politicians, they should charge appropriate prices per vote. Let us ask politicians to pay each voter say a minimum of N100, 000 per ballot. That way, the average voter can set up a small cottage business to take care of their needs since the politicians will not look their way once in power. Let the parties ask each governorship aspirant to pay each nomination delegate a minimum of N20 million. Similarly, each presidential aspirant should pay each nomination delegate a minimum of N50 million. At least those who trade their votes and their conscience will become players in the Small to Medium Enterprises sector instead of waiting for government patronage. If the financial cost to individual politicians is high enough, perhaps it might become a disincentive to discourage the survival of the vote trade. Confronted with such high price tags, politicians will come to value each vote and opt to discuss with their constituents instead. I believe such dialogue will lead to the death of transactional politics as both sides will realize that it is cheaper to revert to the original intention of democracy which insulates it from undue financial influence.

    It is time to kill the vote trade by granting it terminal license.

    Beyond nominations and primaries, the rates and price tags for buying and selling of votes in general elections should perhaps be fixed and controlled by market forces determined by the wealth and status of previous holders of the office being sought. Those vying for re-election as councilors, state assembly members, federal legislators, governors and presidents should pay higher than new entrants. But in general, there should be a graduated sliding rate scale for the different levels of public office determined by their potential for return on investment. These rates should be so high in anticipation of the dividends to be reaped as to discourage the faint hearted.

  • Peter Obi and the Last ‘Big Men’ – Chidi Amuta

    The outcome of our presidential nominations season has produced a new landscape of mixed blessings. The two major parties have produced rival contestants straight from the dark recesses of Africa’e political past. Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu are in many ways a throw back to the African ‘Big Man’ politician of the 1970s to 1990s. On the contrary, a minor party, the Labour Party, has positioned a presidential candidate who symbolizes the urgent present and the imminent future of African political contest. Mr. Peter Obi has emerged as both a generational shift and a redefinition of both political message and medium. The politics of business as usual is about to come face to face with the politics of norm shattering conveyed through the multiple devices and platforms of the internet age.

    It is hard to forget where and who we are. In Nigeria’s politics of ethnic identity, Tinubu is a Yoruba candidate while Atiku is the Hausa/Fulani opposite. Peter Obi is the candidate of ethnic anonymity, a sort of political everyman with perspectives that cut across all the silly barriers that have held us hostage.

    There are other benefits of the presidential nominations season. A partisan frenzy has been unleashed. The public is falling over itself either in triumphant adulation or mournful regret over the emergence of Atiku Abubakar and Bola Tinubu as mascots of the dominant parties. The emergence of both men replaces the anonymity of their respective party platforms with recognizable names. Overnight, those who prefer the PDP have become Atiku devotees whether or not they like Mr. Atiku’s nose or not. The same goes for the other side. People who a few weeks back were ready to cast stones at anything that bore a Tinubu sign are now finding justifications on why the man should relocate from his Lagos Bourdillon home to Aso Rock Villa.

    The epidemic of partisanship is of course a healthy sign for our quirky democracy. Schism and alignment are perfect entitlements of an activated public in a place of democracy. Moreover, in the absence of any ideological markers to distinguish between the parties, people are better off queuing up and falling over each other behind emblems.

    A tragic feature of today’s African democracy is the ease with which the parties become extensions of the private political estates of their overbearing founders or leaders. At this moment, the APC is now synonymous with Tinubu while the PDP has become Atiku Abubakar by other means.

    Together, both men are political Siamese twins. They represent an easily recognizable feature of Africa’s political landscape. Somehow, they are in many ways our own version of the reign and rule of the African “Big Man” as sovereign. They will carry the imprints of the modern African nation state mostly as pseudo traditional chiefs disguised as elected presidents. Both are immensely wealthy men. Their political prominence is mostly a product of their awesome economic power. They have used economic power to buy into and invoke the major classic indices of power. They have bought into primordial traditional authority by overwhelming the traditional institutions. They even influence the appointment of some traditional rulers. They control and endorse religious authority by donating churches and mosques. They own media houses and powerful information platforms and channels.. They have amorphous families sometimes with multiple spouses and offspring. Both men have an identical political trajectories with many previous attempts at the top job. Their humongous wealth spans all major sectors. Those interested in following their big money usually get lost in the confusing hazy borderline between private fortune and the public treasury. Some inquisitive people end up in the confusing intersection between private fortune and privileged access to the public treasury in one way or the other.

    The political gravity of both Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar is ultimately more a function of their economic and financial leverage than the ideas and policy propositions they are associated with. In each case, the emergence of a personality cult is well within reach in spite of the constraints of constitutional conformity. African history is littered with the nasty footsteps of a succession of African ‘Big Men’. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. Paul Biya of Cameroun. Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Brazaville, Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola, Mobutu Sese Seko of former Zaire. These are the more memorable variants of the Africa Big Man president.

    The African Big Man as modern day ruler of the nation state is a quaint anomaly, the cultural continuation of the fabled African Chief in most traditional African cultures and societies. The Chief is the inheritor of privileges beyond reproach or questioning. He has a natural entitlement to communal assets and benefits. The Chief expects to be gifted the best maidens, the fattest cows, the most fertile communal lands and the best harvests from those who toil. These entitlements are hardly subject to questioning. The modern African Big Man president feels a similar sense of entitlement.

    In practice, the existence of a national constitution hardly regulates or limits the powers and entitlement of the African Big Man President. In most cases, the rule of law, the power of due process and the requirements of standard public accountability and the observance of a code of public conduct are mostly observed in breach. Civil society activists and rights lawyers who insist on these matters are quickly lumped with the political opposition ‘enemies of the people’ and could end up with endless prison terms.

    The classic African Big Man ruler did not quite materialize centre stage in Nigerian politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This coincides with a period in which Nigerian politics and governance, like in Argentina and much of Latin America, was dominated by a rival but equally fearsome power contender: Big Generals. From the 1970s up to 1999 and even till President Buhari, Nigerian politics and power was straddled by Big Generals either in uniform or as elected democracy converts. As a rule, civilian political Big Men and Big Generals do not sleep on the same bed. This is one reason why the military neutralized the threatened emergence of Chief M.K.O Abiola in the early 1990s. In the current nominations of Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar, the Big Man has re-emerged centre stage in Nigeria’s political arena through the democratic process.

    However, the reign and rule of the few remaining African Big Men is doomed to imminent end. A combination of biological extinction and technological substitution will see to that. The few of this specie left are mostly in their mid 70s to 80s. They are being challenged and replaced by younger politicians with support bases rooted in a new demographics and new messaging. African democracy is now appealing directly to a broad popular demographic base with an egalitarian consciousness. A younger generation of leaders and aspiring leaders empowered and connected by the internet and an array of new technologies is on the ascent. International best practices are increasingly beaming the searchlight on African governance and politics. African democracies are being compelled, through peer pressure, to shape up to global standards of citizens rights and public accountability.

    The younger generation of African political activists and leaders is no longer frightened by decadent myths, ancient customs or the deployment of medieval intimidation and repression strategies. Nor are they impressed by long motorcades, authorized state gangsters in the name of security or the sickening opulence of Big Men.

    Out of the loud and wide expectation of a Third Force to counter Nigeria’s dominant two party politics, something unexpected has reared its head. The real unexpected tale from our season of presidential nomination primaries is the emergence of Mr. Peter Obi. Beyond being the flag bearer of a little known fringe Labour Party, Mr. Obi has materialized as a one man political squad. Somehow, the lone scraggy voice of an ex -state governor has risen above the national political noise to reach the usually fractious Nigerian public. A new message that is both refreshingly new and unifying is afloat.

    With no retinue of groveling followers, no intimidating motorcade of glimmering SUVs, no political fellow travellers in over embroidered flowing gowns, Mr. Peter Obi broke loose from the suffocating embrace of his former PDP. At a disarming final moment before the presidential nomination primaries, he had the uncommon decency to say a polite good bye to Atiku Abubakar whose running mate he had been in the 2019 race. At another political event where Atiku declared his presidential intention, Mr. Obi described his former principal as ‘my brother’ and ‘leader’ only to take his leave of both the PDP and Mr. Atiku shortly afterwards.

    Prior to leaving the PDP, Peter Obi had gradually emerged as a the darling of the Nigerian Online Republic. He is easily the most followed and admired political figure among Nigerians on Twitter where he has a following of over 1,000,000 and still counting. His Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok followership is growing by the moment. So far, his few open forum events are packed with active audiences who only seem to want more of his inspirational political messages. He is already a cross between a power preacher and a rock star.

    The Peter Obi phenomenon is a timely reversal of the old African Big Man narrative. Enter the youthful politician clad in simple outfit. He is determined to shorten the length of the presidential motorcade, curb wasteful governance, live modestly in simple circumstances, resist corruption, shun the filthy lucre, empty opulence and gradiosity of public office and avoid or curb the pomposity of state ceremony. Here is a leader who has undertaken to connect with the people as one of them. This is the regular Bayo, Emeka, Abu or Joe next door who wakes up early to pray for his nation, undertake his morning exercise, make his own coffee. Mr. Obi carries his own bag at the airport and holds up his own umbrella in the rain. Peter Obi’s increasing magnetism lies mostly in the fact that of all the political salesmen at our doorstep these days, he alone embodies the highpoints of the this new anti-Big Man narrative.

    Peter Obi is communicating and connecting directly with ordinary Nigerians on the streets and in the markets. His catchment is a new strategic demographics of youth and the internet generation, the urban unemployed who see their hopeless situation as a consequence of the years of wasteful governance by Big Men politicians. But the traditional party membership and configuration still gives an advantage to the rural grassroot poor who remain in the vice grip of the politics and parties of Big Men.

    In Nigeria’s emerging democratic culture, Mr. Pater Obi is the galvanization of the convergence of new realities and new technologies. Mr. Obi is merely the embodiment a new spirit and the carrier of a generational burden. An entirely new generation and vast population of Nigerians feel challenged to reject decades of bad politics and worsening social and economic conditions. Peter Obi is merely the current embodiment of a spirit that was hinted at by the spontaneous outburst of the ENDSARS protests. He may be the first political expression of the new spirit of protest against bad government and ugly social and economic conditions.

    Peter Obi is still a fad, not quite a movement yet. There are pitfalls and obstacles. His solo dance is not yet a movement. His party platform still lacks a nationwide structure at the base. He fits rather untidily into the labour camp. No one knows his links to the Nigerian labour movement nor his ideological affinity to the movement’s leftist and left of centre inclination. His proposition remains at best a solo flight. His perspective are personal convictions. His life style and frugality are more of a personal choice. In his political train, there are no fellow travellers or disciples to convert his personal message into a creed. Beyond his instinctual appeal as a more frugal, unassuming and more accountable leadership proposition, we are waiting for a systematic worldview and alternative perspective in a world full of models and options.

    Meanwhile, questions abound: Is Peter Obi a socialist? Not at all. Is he a social democrat? No one is certain. Is he a laissez faire capitalist or random trader who made good and stumbled into the government house in Awka? Not quite sure. Given his business antecedents as a bank owner, wine merchant, general importer, retailer of sundry wares and serial global investor, Mr. Obi would at best be a left of center politician with a personal life style of frugality, modesty and simplicity. All these qualities appeal naturally to a Nigerian public that has spent decades longing for a minimum level of modesty and accountability on the part of our leaders.

    The immediate political risk confronting Mr. Obi is that of insulating his movement from ethnic pigeonholing. An Igbo mass who cannot find their own among the major political figurines of this season may want to own Peter Obi. His communicators must duck that trap by sustaining his nationalist and popular message.

    On closer examination, there may be issues arising from the alternative leadership style and culture that Mr. Obi is increasingly symbolizing. The politician with a disciplined Spartan life style and compulsive frugality in government may be new in these parts but it is not entirely a novelty in other places. It is in fact a common feature of post industrial European countries. When industrialization and economic development has created reasonable egalitarianism and prosperity, material glamour and glitz stops impressing the majority of citizens. Leaders become more of everyman. Utilitarian functionality replaces grotesque opulence and senseless gadgetry. Substance replaces appearance and the lofty insensitivity of kings and princes gives way to the modesty of republican equality. Nigeria is not an industrial let alone a post -industrial society. Government still remains the cash machine that sustains the economic life and livelihood of the majority of our citizens.

    Peter Obi’s message is mostly about shrinking government and freeing resources for development. But government and its wasteful ways employs a multitude. Our huge public service is more of a social insurance mechanism than an engine of growth or bureaucratic functionality and efficiency. Sometimes the foolish ceremonies of government create employment. When a Nigerian government stages an elaborate ceremony to dish out awards to ‘deserving’ Nigerians in an annual festival, all the multiplier effect of moving a crowd of people from various parts to Abuja are activated. Hotels. Airlines, transporter, food vendors, dress makers etc reap a harvest.

    Mr. Peter Obi has come to serve notice on our behalf: Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar (whoever wins in 2023) are perhaps the last Big Men that will rule Nigeria. Similarly, we have seen the last Big Generals in power. After this season, political contest and power will revert to a majority in a true republic. Mr. Obi’s emergence has value as a timely signal of the direction in which a new consciousness and new technologies will lead Nigeria long after the last Big Man has exited the central place of power.