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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • Not Quite the Coronation – By Chidi Amuta

    Not Quite the Coronation – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    The aftermath of the APC presidential nomination convention is a landscape of political ruin. In the rubble lies the treasures and broken remnants of nearly everything both right and wrong with today’s politics in Nigeria. In the long hours of accreditation, patient waiting and painstaking balloting, we witnessed a growing culture of democratic forbearance among our people. The insistence on genuine balloting based on verifiable delegates lists spoke volumes about the future of democracy among the common run of a vigilant public.

    There are the genuine disappointments of those who hoped and failed. There are of course the wreckages of many unsustainable ambitions and plain foolish gambles.

    But by far the more enduring outcomes of the convention are the lessons it has left on the ambiguities of democracy in our kind of time and place. Though limited to the ruling party, the ripples of the just concluded APC nomination convention touch us all in one way or the other.

    First, the prime challenge remains that of democratic succession in our typically African ‘ Big Man’ democracy, a system in which the idiosyncrasies of one man can alter the destinies of millions.

    The immediate subject remains president Buhari himself. He was faced with a stark choice between the enlightened self interest of hand picking his successor and the more ennobling option of allowing the internal party democracy of the APC produce a candidate to face up to the PDP opponent. Buhari left that choice dangling in uncertain territory up to the dying minute. It uncertain whether the uncertainty was the result of incompetence or deliberate strategy. The former conclusion is more tempting given his trademark record of serial incompetence on important matters. Moreover, deft political footwork has never been his bright spot. He is more of a power office occupant than Machiavelli’s practical disciple.

    In the dying prelude to the convention, an apparently unfazed president Buhari found more excitement paying a state visit to Spain or jetting off to nearby Equatorial Guinea for an inconsequential summit and even a one day hop to an ECOWAS meeting in the neighborhood.
    However, the president found time in between these distracting excursions to indicate his succession preference. He addressed governors and leaders of his party and literally begged them to allow him the courtesy of choosing his successor from among the APC’s terming motley of aspirants. That was a dangerous signal for democracy and a destabilizing stratagem for the ambitious aspirants to his privileged stool. Aspirants were torn between privately groveling for a presidential endorsement and the democratic imperative of facing the challenge of a competitive elective convention. No one is exactly sure of what Mr. Buhari really wanted. But the odds were evenly divided between hopefuls for his endorsement and the few who felt confident enough to purchase a big enough delegate constituency. There is increasing anecdotal evidence that Mr. Buhari may have dangled the carrot of endorsement before at least half a dozen aspirants.

    For a president with such a miserable current job approval rating and now a lame duck with a hostile national constituency, the more expedient option was perhaps a conscious undemocratic selection of a faithful ally as successor.
    Moreover, Mr Buhari has in the past seven years presided over a lopsided administration which would ordinarily tilt his succession towards either a fellow northern hegemonist or a quisling southern worshipper. So, the logic tilted more towards selective endorsement. But control of the succession train drifted from his hands. The safety zone was to appear to have chosen a purely elective convention out of conscious preference for democratic correctness.

    Yet it is also true that this president, unlike Obasanjo before him, would find it difficult to expend whatever political capital he has to elevate or advance anyone else’s cause other than his own. It was therefore only safe for him to don an appearance of democratic objectivity and commitment while privately wishing for a conservative regionalist successor. The current of national feeling dictated a southward direction in the APC’s succession politics after Mr. Buhari’s seven ruinous years.

    The most ambiguous twist in the APC convention drama however remains the emergence of the bloc of northern governors as a political factor. On the face of it, their position insisting on a southern presidential candidate looks like an open revolt against the president’s non committal stance on zoning or in fact his rumored preference for a northern Muslim candidate. No one but the president can explain why APC chairman . Abdullahi Adamu, could have unilaterally announced Ahmed Lawan as the anticipated consensus candidate in the heat of the pre convention jockeying.

    To the rest of Nigerians, especially the significant southern Christian population, the position of the northern governors appears patriotic and nationalistic. But it may eventually end up as the contrary if Mr. Tinubu slips. Otherwise it remains for now a negotiating strategy which is perefrctly legitimate in political gamesmanship.

    Nonetheless, the favorable twist of the northern APC governors has obvious strategic advantages. First, it re-establishes the geopolitical equilibrium of bipolarity that has remained the basis of Nigeria’s precarious cultural and political unity. Secondly, it creates an atmosphere of apparent normalcy and amity in which the 2023 elections can painlessly take place. It also quickly blunts the sharp edges of a contest that would have been poisoned by religious and geo political bitterness and hate. Thirdly, it prepares the ground for a future closing of ranks and reciprocity between northern and southern governors on matters as mundane as cattle grazing and the free movement of persons and economic factors.

    For Buhari, the recourse to the democratic imperative of open election has yielded a friendly nightmare. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is no stranger to power games. He is neither a friend nor an outright foe. He is first and foremost a political customer whose time has come to reclaim his warehoused good.

    In the immediate prelude to the convention, Tinubu was briefly rattled. His political intelligence machinery misread Buhari’s quest for a favorite successor and didn’t quite see Tinubu in the horizon. In fact, the offending intel was that the Oyegun screening committee had disqualified Tinubu. Tinubu chose to bark and threaten to bite! In that brief moment of unguarded eruption, in Abeokuta, he lashed out in every direction, showing his fangs to Buhari and his devotees. The message got home.

    The convention came and went the way it did. Tinubu’s original cash inundated playbook prevailed. He won fit and square. With the outcome of the convention, a few things are obvious.

    Tinubu may be the incidental political heir to an APC dynasty. He may be the prime beneficiary of Buhari’s belated choice of free elective primary. He may have finally harvested his support for Buhari in 2015. That in itself frees him from any sense of indebtedness to the Daura general if he wins the general elections. He may be Buhari’s fellow Muslim and prime political facilitator since the formation of the APC. But to the Aso Rock mafia and hegemonist cabal, Tinubu is perhaps the ultimate nemesis. He knows where they are coming from and how far down they can go. He goes to the same Mecca and Medina as they do.

    Above all, among the key indices of power identified by the old English philosopher, Bertrand Russel, Bola Tinubu controls the greatest number of all the levers of Nigerian power compared to his co- contestants. Check: Media and opinion. Traditional authority. Religion and belief on both sides. Means in the form of instant armada of raw cash!

    On his own merit for the job of president, Mr. Tinubu still comes decked in positive precedents. Successful governance, urban renewal , diversity management, revenue digitization and transformation of Lagos is all the resume anyone needs to presage a successful presidency of Nigeria. The man may not be an epitome of all the knowledge that ruling Nigeria demands. But he has one thing going for him: he knows what he doesn’t know but knows how to find others who know how.

    Above all, if he succeeds in becoming Buhari’s successor, the electorate will have succeeded in fulfilling a cardinal aim of democratic renewal: changing a bad leadership with a better one through the ballot box. Buhari is bad. Tinubu may not be excellent but he will end up a better overall leader of a nation in desperate trouble.

    The emergence of Tinubu as APC flag bearer does not in anyway guarantee a direct entry into Aso Rock. His party is a baggage. The APC under Buhari has run Nigeria aground in the last seven years. He is running to succeed a president with the worst approval rating in recent Nigerian history. Reassuring Nigerians that the APC under Tinubu will do a better job is a tall order.

    What Tinubu just eon is only a privileged fighting chance because the opposition has also chosen a candidate from the same bag as Tinubu. Atiku is as much a money man as Tinubu. He has a wide network of nearly everything Tinubu has. He is as Muslim as Tinubu and has a marginal home region demographic access advantage.

    In a sense, the 2023 presidential contest promises to be a more animated circus than previous ones. Two contestants powered by humongous wealth; two contestants drawing inspiration from the same holy book; two contestants with nearly equal national reach. Two men considered tolerable by the national elite. Above all, two men who literally purchased the tickets to centre stage with immense private resources traceable to our commonwealth. The 2023 presidential election promises to be a fair fight between two tainted equals, none of whom will qualify as a candidate for heaven or messianism.

    But the APC convention is not only about Tinubu’s ascendancy. It showcased other stars in the hierarchy of the ruling party. Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, waged a spirited fight and in the process further defined himself as an upcoming political star. In this race, he came ahead of a sitting Vice President and incumbent Senate President to emerge in second position. This performance backed by his sterling performance as a minister places him in the forefront of the leadership hierarchy of his party and hopefully the nation.

    Professor Yemi Osinbajo , the Vice President, was consistent in running easily the most civilized and enlightened presidential campaign in the nation’s history. He remained calm, brilliant and issue oriented.

    Beneath the tolerable procedural outcome of the APC convention hides the contradictions of our democracy. Much has been said about the brazen corruption implicit in the monetization of our democratic processes. A system in which the social contract is reduced to a transaction with a monetary value first among moneyed contestants and in which the citizens are but broken spectators deserves a second look. More curiously, the world cannot but shudder at the contradiction of a nation of mostly poor people in which a few rich people each paid $200,000, roughly the equivalent of the real annual salary of the US president, just to buy a form to qualify to run in a presidential contest.

    Now that most parties have their presidential candidates, let the travel king circus hit the road. The INEC time table provides a long enough time frame for a sustainable issue -oriented campaign season. Let the games begin.

  • Long Week of Power Bazaars – By Chidi Amuta

    Long Week of Power Bazaars – By Chidi Amuta

    In a little over another week, a great deal of the political cacophony all over the country will have abated. The period will end with gatherings of Nigeria’s political tribes in Abuja. Their major achievement will be to lower the deafening decibels of our current political noise pollution. From then on, there will be no more consultation visitations. No more tongue-in-cheek promises by royals trying so hard to hide their lies in political correctness. No more cosmetic courtesies by host governors who believe and speak differently. No more undigested promises by mostly ill prepared aspirants.

    Delegates drawn from across the national spectrum representing lower levels of the two dominant parties will by tomorrow have decided on the two persons who will subsequently be authorized to make noise on their behalf. In the alternative, some form of inconvenient consensus will hopefully have been hammered out among ambitious aspirants as to who among them should parade the title of ‘presidential candidate’ out of the multitude. That in itself will mark some progress for Nigeria’s rabble democracy.

    From a tumultuous multitude of presidential aspirants, we will by the upper week hopefully be down to a binary choice of either or. Of course, the minor parties will exercise their constitutional right of fielding presidential candidates even if only to justify their registration certificates. There may likely be a microwave coalition of small to medium scale parties populated by all those disappointed in the big parties to form a party of ‘no’, a sort of conclave of the angry and rejected.  INEC will take note of all these minor skirmishes as it takes a  closer look at the continued existence of our motley of parties.

    Whatever happens, next week promises to be refreshingly more quiet on the political front. There will still be lawsuits and threats thereof arising from these untidy primaries at nearly every level. Noisy lawyers will invariably goad the ambitious aspirants towards the courts with the hope of getting a piece of the legal action in this season of political disputations. There will of course be widespread disillusionment among the losers and their disappointed spouses some of whom may have rehearsed new dance steps in anticipation of victory in the roles their partners dreamt about. A good number will count their losses in gold and cowries. A minority will move on in the hope that better days lie ahead. In a nation drenched in religious fanfare and superstitious determinism, quite a few pastors and imams will urge the disappointed to look up to heaven for better luck next time. All they need do is come forward with some token offerings of gratitude to God for the gift of life in this dangerous time and place.

    Ordinarily, the idea of party primaries should impose some order on the wildness of the democratic instinct among our myriad political animals. At every level from ward to local government, state and national, the party primaries that have dominated most of this week have had the beneficial effect of sifting aspirants from candidates. Imperfect as the system may seem, we need to celebrate this milestone of democracy. Anyone who expected perfect primaries in today’s Nigeria may not be one of us.

    Specifically, the presidential primaries of the two major parties should hold the greatest significance for the nation. From the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC), an estimated over 2000 delegates have converged in Abuja while another 800 plus party faithful from the opposition Peoples Democratic Party are gathered for the same purpose. This ritual gathering should ordinarily be a political carnival at which political leaders representing our rich diversity would meet and mix in Abuja to compare experiences and in the process further cement the bonds of unity. At such a time of serious national emergencies, the delegates ought to take seriously the task of leadership renewal through the instrument of the political party which is the essence of the primaries.

    At no other time has leadership renewal and change been such a dire and urgent imperative as in today’s Nigeria. The nation is besieged in all directions with clear and present threats of a strategic nature. Combat troops and sundry policemen and security personnel are on active patrol in all states of the federation. Nearly a hundred fellow citizens that have been held hostage for over a month after being abducted from the Abuja-Kaduna train terrorist attack are now at the risk of being murdered en masse by a band of blood thirsty terrorists. They have issued a seven-day ultimatum to the government to pay up or come for the corpses of their victims.

    In various urban centres of the nation, lynch mobs are on the prowl bludgeoning and setting fellow citizens ablaze for the flimsiest reasons. In yet other places, deranged gunmen of unspecified motives are killing fellow citizens, including mothers and their children, in an orgy of blood and madness. The general populace would be perfectly reasonable to feel entitled to the emergence of the right quality of leadership from these party primaries if only to be saved from this string of tragedies. In a democratic setting, only the process of peaceful change can replace the bumbling squad in Abuja with a more purposeful leadership from 2023.

    But judging by the media highlights since the immediate run up to the presidential primaries, public attention is hardly on the policies, ideas and qualities of the numerous presidential aspirants. Instead, the attention has been more on the ethnicity, religion, region or financial weight of the major aspirants in both major parties. Among a sample of the delegates themselves, the thrust of the discussion has since shifted to a more embarrassing area. Most delegates on their way to the Abuja presidential primaries have been more interested in how much money they were going to harvest from the competing aspirants in exchange for their votes.

    In the fortnight to the week of the primaries, Bloomberg reported a sharp further decline in the value of Nigeria’s beleaguered national currency, the Naira. Its value plummeted to over N600 to $1 US dollar from a previous already miserable N475 to $1 in streetside currency markets. The current predictable pressure on the Naira is the result of unusually heavy demand for dollars by leading politicians. The lighter more easily transportable US dollar is the currency of choice in Nigeria for payoffs, bribes, inducements, kickbacks and other nefarious under the table payments. In a political culture where vote buying and rampant monetization of political transactions are taken for granted, the demand for cash dollars is at an all time high in this election season.

    In these hotly contested party primaries to choose who becomes Nigeria’s next president, wads and bundles of American dollars are a convenient medium for buying off impoverished party delegates from the hinterland, some of whom have been waiting for the opportunity of these carnivalesque primaries to jet into Abuja for an all expenses paid weekend break of lavish free meals and splurges of cash. To some of them, this is a political wealth redistribution season that happens every four years. The only difference now is that the financial expectations have been adjusted for inflation, exchange rate fluctuations and other contingencies.

    The nearly 40 presidential aspirants from both major parties and their proxies have already each paid the equivalent of $100,000 to $200,000 just to procure the application forms for the party presidential gate passes. They seem even more prepared to shell out a few more hundreds of thousands of dollars to clinch the prize presidential ticket of each party.

    The major aspirants for the presidential ticket of each major party are speculated to have budgeted anything from $15,000 to a princely $50,000 per delegate. These are to be delivered in sealed parcels to delegates in the dead of the night preceding the delegate elections. The precise price tag of each delegate vote is not yet fixed. It could go up as aspirants weigh and balance their chances and compute the required number of delegates to defeat their rivals. It is all an open-ended equivalent of an Arab street bazaar. The highest bidder is bound to win. In effect, what could turn out to be one of the most lavish vote buying sprees in the history of party democracy anywhere in the world is in progress in Nigeria’s capital city as we speak.

    To most rational observers, the extent of monetization of politics in Nigeria defies all understanding and logic. Here is one of the most indebted countries in the world, spending over 98% of its mostly oil revenue on debt servicing. Here is a nation with the largest population of poor people (over 100 million) in the world. Here is a nation whose most prosperous city-Lagos- was this week voted the most difficult place to live in in the world.

    The sheer quantum of cash that will change hands to produce the outcome of who gets to rule Nigeria from 2023 is best left to the imagination. The open bargaining in this Arab street bazaar politics is often justified by the general simplification that politics everywhere costs money. Yes indeed, money and politics are bound by an ancient umbilical cord that is now nearly universal. It however remains a matter of how and to what ends money is deployed in a given political system in the competitive quest for power.  In normal political transactions, power is never treated like a commodity on the shelf to be purchased by the highest bidder in the kind of open market bazaar that has become the staple of Nigeria’s political industry.

    Yes indeed, in liberal democratic societies and their free market systems, the political enterprise has become a subset of the modern market economy. In such market societies, it is quite legitimate to buy media space, pay for advertising slots in the press, radio, television and the internet. It costs money to print innumerable posters, banners, mount billboards static and electronic, erect banners and other campaign material. These are the props that convert political candidates and aspirants into commodities that are either more attractive than their competition or fall by the wayside for scant marketing effect.

    It is equally legitimate to hire lobbyists, researchers, statisticians, strategists, consultants, influencers and facilitators of all shades at great costs to achieve political ends. In all of this, there remains an abiding requirement that political spending, like other aspects of the free market economic system, is subject to a regulatory framework. Campaign spending has ceilings and regulations and ought to be subjected to minimum accountability requirements and standards. Pre and post election audits ought to determine whether practitioners have complied with spending limits and caps.

    The accountability requirements of political money spending include the tracking of funds to ensure that bad money from terrorists, narcotics traffickers, gangster collectives and other bad sources are not deployed to political ends. It also ought to include limitations on contributions from local and foreign companies and a moratorium on campaign fund donations from foreign governments with or without business interests in the recipient country. Nigeria’s rule books contain most of these regulatory guard rails.

    In spite of extant laws on political spending and campaign financing,  money continues to play a less than edifying role in Nigerian politics. This is of course a reflection of the porous regulations that guide a great deal of Nigeria’s public sector spending with its lax accountability standards. The Nigerian system elevates the political leadership above most rules of public accountability. The concept of the king being the law himself is an underlying carry over from most Nigerian ancient traditions onto the modern state.

    There is a culture of inbuilt absolutism in Nigerian traditions that have been smuggled into the operation of the modern nation state. In this regard, the Nigerian president is easily one of the most powerful public officers in the world. There may be limitations to his power on paper but hardly any Nigerian president since 1999 has been held to strict account for the actions taken or not taken while in office. Nigeria’s presidentialism is said to have been adapted from the Washington model. The American president pays for his food and that of his guests except on state occasions. But the Nigerian president lives in a lavish and expansive string of mansions free of charge. He and his family and countless dependents and guests are fed, entertained transported and feasted at state expense. In addition to the power of life and death which is reserved for most sovereigns, the Nigerian president literally has an exclusive prerogative of impunity.

    The budget for feeding, entertainment, travel and maintenance in the Nigerian presidency is practically above legislative scrutiny. It of course features in the annual budget only as a matter of courtesy to the legislature.  There is a saying that the Nigerian president is free to help himself to limitless cash from the Central Bank only subject to his own moral restraint. Those who author these stories have often pointed to the late General Sani Abacha who is said to periodically send a truck with instructions to the Central Bank to load cash in specified foreign currencies. Twenty four years after Abacha’s sudden death, the funds he looted from the Nigerian treasury are still being discovered and repatriated from different countries and jurisdictions!

    Therefore, aspirants for the Nigerian presidential job will spare no expense to secure a ticket to the party ticket. It is this almost limitless lack of accountability that drives the literal stampede of a multitude of aspirants to the presidential palace in Abuja every four years.

    In the advanced democracies of the West, former presidents return to the real world of ordinary mortals at the end of their tenure and are expected to live by the limitations of mortals in a republican setting. Check Angela Merkel’s modest apartment block abode in East Berlin. Check Barrack Obama’s ordinary residence in a Washington precinct. In contrast, former Nigerian presidents literally enrol into a pantheon of men transformed into virtual deities.

    It is not the power and privilege of office that is at issue here. It is the destructive role of the ‘cash and carry’ culture on the development of Nigeria’s democracy that ought to be the lingering concern from this week’s party primaries. The success of most of the primaries should be commended in spite of the observed lapses in places.

    The monetization of our democracy and its processes is dangerous. Political parties that charge a fee of N100 million for a presidential nomination form can only be the prime promoter of a regime of corruption. A presidential ticket procured on a transactional basis can at best produce a mercantile president. A leader who literally bought his way into office cannot be trusted to honour the social contract which is a non-transactional bond between a leader and his fellow citizens.

  • Overcrowding the Presidential Doorway – By Chidi Amuta

    Overcrowding the Presidential Doorway – By Chidi Amuta

    Democracy was never intended to amuse nor was politics meant to offend. The ritual of periodic leadership renewal through elections was instead meant to be a serious business to guarantee the health of the polis. The Athenian and Roman senates were collections of people of knowledge and wisdom who were respected and also held the populace in utmost regard. Representative leadership selection was never designed as an endless charade, a crowded circus. Neither was democracy meant to annoy or insult the populace. Staging pageants of unlikely pretenders as aspirants to the highest office is a deliberate annoyance of the populace. But despite its Nigerian debasement, democracy remains a serious and noble enterprise.

    But politics is a different matter. Politics may not score too highly on the scale of seriousness. But even the most cavalier traditions of transactional politics recognize the hazard of insulting the people. They will be waiting at the polls! Yet politics remains a strange drama of absurdity. Unlikely people in laughable costume show up to say what they neither mean nor believe. Politicians on the campaign trail are salesmen without wares who promise to promptly deliver what they do not have or even know. When held down to account for their lies, politicians say they were misquoted! What politics unfailingly offers us however is an endless parade of unserious people who however want to be taken seriously. That ambiguity is the staple of the political undertaking especially in these parts. And nowhere else is this cavalier tradition of politics more widespread than in today’s Nigeria: a nation of good people ruled by the cast of a perpetual self recruiting circus.

    In the countdown to the 2023 elections, Nigerians are now challenged to manage a combination of the seriousness of democracy and the comedy of politics.
    Nigeria’s 2023 election season is offering us an abundance of both cruel humour and casual mass insult.

    The evidence in chief is the sheer quantum of people aspiring to be president. At the last count, about 30 aspirants had indicated serious interest in the presidency in the ruling APC alone. Two thirds of that number have so far filed papers and paid up in the opposition PDP. This is in addition to 350 senate aspirants , about 900 House of Representatives aspirants in the APC alone.

    For the PDP, the record is 17 presidential aspirants , over 300 senate aspirants and 1,300 House of Representatives aspirants.

    As for the governorships, we could get dizzy with the mathematical possibilities. Let us liberally multiply the 36 governorships by 5 aspirants for each of the two major parties. That is 360 pretend governors. Discount states whose governorships overlap this election season and the number comes down by about Let us not discount the minor parties because each of them has a constitutional right to field candidates for elective offices at every level. Let us not even go down the ladder to state Houses of Assembly. The democracy market is in full session.

    By most accounts, this is a deluge. It is by far the largest number of aspirants to elective offices in the history of Nigeria’s sporadic encounters with democracy. Some have argued that as a function of our population, the number of sundry aspirants may just be justifiable. But it is a large congregation nonetheless, only slightly outdone by India’s quantum democracy.

    But let us focus attention on the most consequential elective office, the presidency. The search for explanations for the overcrowded presidential aspirants bus needs not go so far or deep. The large turnout of presidential aspirants may indicate that
    democracy is becoming more popular among us. It could mean that citizens consciousness of their right to actively participate in the democratic process has heightened after over 20 years of uninterrupted democratic rule. It might as well be that so many are angered by the abysmal misrule and disastrous governance that have become our lot of late. They may justifiably be trooping out to right the wrongs.

    There is nothing wrong with so many citizens trooping out to vie for the top job. The right to vote and be voted for is the most fundamental right in any democracy. Subject to the constitutional requirements and the applicable electoral laws, any number of citizens can crowd the aspiration queue for the office of President. In the observance of these rights, then, there is no numerical limitation.

    On the face of it and for the sake of those worried about this many ‘presidents’ on the queue, I suspect so many things are at work simultaneously. The caption of ‘former presidential aspirant’ probably sounds good for the resume of all manner of political journey men. Do not be surprised to see a new breed of call cards after the election season with the prefix: ‘former presidential aspirant XYZ Party’! Also, given the huge price tag of presidential nomination forms in both major parties, the mere ability to buy these expensive gate passes marks out a super elite class in parties that are already elite collectives. No successful contender for the presidential mantle can ignore the interests of those who have vicariously contributed 50 or 100 million Naira to party coffers in the run up to a general election. Political patronage in the form of significant appointments and contracts go mostly to those who contribute ‘something’ to the winning party and ticket. These huge sums to buy presidential gate passes may have been stolen, borrowed, coughed out or leased with a common promissory note as investment in the political industry in this season of political casino.

    It would be unwise to ignore the role of the socio economics of the political industry in a matter like this. The times are hard. Most sectors have closed shop. Businesses are ghosts of what they were intended to be. For the better part of the last decade, Nigeria has been mass producing elite destitutes on an industrial scale. The natural recourse has been to the political industry.

    Nigeria’s elite joblessness figures are among the highest in the world. Big names with fat certificates but without productive engagements. Charge and bail lawyers that have never seen the outer walls of a court let alone file a suit or win a minor case. Businessmen with offices condensed to the size of their fancy call cards. Young professionals in search of challenges. And of course a few good men and women, fiery idealists in whose eyes burns the unquenchable desire to serve our public and make this place a happier land. It is from this mixed army of desperate elite that our political industry draws its incoherent practitioners.

    Our political sector is the only industry with lax entry requirements. It has the highest rate of return on investment over a relatively short time. Moreover, you do not have to do much work to come by stupendous wealth and astonishing influence. The Nigerian political industry is one of the most profitable in the world. It has an unbelievable risk to reward ratio and an inverse relationship between work and wealth. A destitute of yesterday can turn out a billionaire in less than a four year term. People who used to go for political meetings in Abuja by night bus have been known to fly first class relentlessly ever after becoming ‘something’ in Abuja. In a free racket economy, the political rags to riches stories in Nigeria Will make useful teachable case studies in some good business schools.

    This may not totally account for the over crowding of the 2023 presidential bus. In fairness to our political class, some of them have developed a certain ‘can do’ confidence. The role of president has become very ordinary and trivialized that practically any street side hustler or high school dropout can aspire to and actually become president in Nigeria. You do not need to be able to spell your name, read anything beyond three paragraphs or understand the contents of the annual budget. No need to break your head over what bookish columnists in silly newspapers are rationalizing. Flip to the cartoon pages instead and enjoy a good laugh. The world is not such a serious place after all.

    Nothing can justify the audacity of some of the more unserious and laughable aspirations. Unserious aspirants have a way of debasing and trivializing the target office. The laughable aspirants show a basic lack of respect for the dignified office of president of Nigeria. Inherent in that is also a disrespect for the people themselves. A sitting Central Bank Governor that defies the non- partisan nature of his office to openly aspire and campaign for the presidency is patently disrespectful of his office and the very people whose money and financial well-being are in his custody.

    On a normal day, an aspirant to the position of president should possess certain irreducible minimum qualities. A basic track record of service with demonstrable results, a clear knowledge of Nigeria and the world, an executive capacity to manage people and resources in a diverse polity are some of the minimum requirements. Keeping their hands and eyes off the public till is an even greater prerequisite.

    Yet in the long queue of presidential aspirants, we can pick out only a few good men, people with good public service records and sound education. Even fewer in the pack are people who can fix problems that require courage and innovativeness.

    In the minor parties, my friend Kingsley Moghalu stands out for knowledge about Nigeria and informed options on how to rescue the nation from the present prison house of tragic misgovernance. From the PDP queue, I can see Pius Anyim, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar. Each comes with options outside the box and undeniable experience in getting good things done.

    In the APC, there is Bola Tinubu who set Lagos on the path to a modern mega city status and introduced a tradition of enlightened governance. Rotimi Amaechi stands tall in the APC pack as one man with an unusual courage and boldness to fix frightening problems. He has fixed things we can see and feel in his Rivers state and all around Nigeria. There is Yemi Osinbajo, exemplary Vice President, an unusual combination of morality, ideas and practical solutions. I hardly know about the rest of the crowded choir.

    In real terms then, only about seven from the multitude of presidential aspirants have any business aspiring to lead anything beyond a local government or town union.

    The party primaries had better come quickly. Nigerians need to be spared the deafening cacophony of this motley crowd at the gate of the 2023 presidency. The messages from this crowd are clashing and increasing the tumult. Only the impending binary choice after the primaries can spare us the rowdy shouting match.

  • Referendum on a Hegemony – By Chidi Amuta

    Referendum on a Hegemony – By Chidi Amuta

    We might as well sound the end time alarm bugle loud and clear. This is in the desperate hope that we can avert a national catastrophe. Whether we are Christians or Muslims, APC or PDP, Northerners or southerners, a common existential burden now hangs over us all. The future of the nation, our common heritage , hangs on a balance because our politics is being manipulated to a perilous brink.

    In the run up to a crucial power transition election, a terminal divisiveness threatens to overwhelm our fragile political system. Suddenly, the defining question of the moment has been reduced to the future of the regional hegemony that the Buhari presidency deepened , entrenched and weaponized. The dominant question of the imminent presidential election is now simply this: Can Nigeria survive another presidential term under a northern Muslim president?

    The foreseeable eventuality is the possibility that both major parties could field northern Muslim presidential candidates. That will quickly transform the 2023 presidential election into a referendum on the continuation of northern rule and hegemony. It could also become the ultimate referendum on the future of the country as a united entity. That is how close we are to doomsday.

    All perceivable signals in the political parties point in this dangerous direction. As it is, every activity in the major political parties is now consumed by north-south computations. Instead of working towards a free and fair democratic election, the hidden hands of hegemonic prevalence are manipulating the political system into a shameful plebiscite about two poles on the national compass.

    The frightening omens of a systemic meltdown are in abundance . The two dominant parties are in the process of being toppled by the power of regionalism and geo political maneuvering. The internal democracy of the parties is being rubbished by the conservative forces of geo- political myth making. Attention has shifted in both parties from organizing orderly presidential primaries to crude antics for perpetuating the prevailing regional hegemony. As we speak, both major parties have clandestinely reneged on the north-south power zoning understanding. This however happens to be the pillar on which the nation’s stability and precarious balance of power has so far depended. As a result, the very survival of our fragile nation is being trifled with by a political class that does not care if Nigeria crumbles.

    The APC which had for a long time repeatedly publicly announced its zoning of the 2023 presidential slot to the southern zones now seems to be walking back on that commitment. Its decrepit newly minted chairman, Mr. Abdullahi Adamu, has cast doubts on the party’s long standing commitment on the matter. In a statement that no one has so far denied, Mr. Adamu sheepishly rehashed the politically convenient line that the APC is yet to decide on a zoning principle for the 2023 presidential slot. This is a shorthand for smuggling in the possibility of yet another northern presidential candidate for the party. Some hidden hand has activated an insane deluge of southern presidential aspirants in the party- over 20 at the last count and hardly any one from the north except the Sharia advocate former Zamfara governor, Alhaja Yerima! A conservative task force is said to be daily pressuring President Buhari to buy into the new twist.

    The PDP on its part was the first to turn its back on zoning. It has since opted to insist on a northern candidate while pretending to have opened the playing field to all aspirants for its presidential ticket.

    While this political trampoline dance goes on, there is an urgent alarm of political wisdom that needs to be sounded to save the nation.

    Political parties remain the cornerstone of the architecture of the democratic state. They are institutions of nation state survival without which the polity cannot renew or sustain itself. Even countries wracked by crisis and shattered by anarchy and war begin their recovery to democratic wholeness by forming political parties to aggregate citizen interests. Elections follow and precede the restoration of governance and order. Parties may not strike you with an expansive institutional presence. In fact, parties tend to inhabit small headquarter buildings from where they mint those who decide the plight of institutions with expansive reach and overwhelming presence. By their nature, political parties are modest but powerful institutional presences in the life of nations. They are not like , say the army, the stock exchange , the judiciary or the legislature which dominate space and deafen people with noise. Every party headquarters tends to be a badly furnished building manned by scruffy apparatchiks. But without parties, the entire elaborate edifice of the democratic state falters and collapses. That is why coup makers begin their business by proscribing parties and abrogating the constitutions that give them life. Therefore, any political antic that seeks to overthrow a political party system is a treasonous exercise. Those dark political knights now scheming to topple the internal democratic arrangements of both the APC and the PDP by scrapping presidential zoning had better have a rethink. They are attempting a coup d’etat and the consequences of such misadventure are very pretty known.

    This is no time to debate the scientific enlightenment of power zoning. Everyone knows the ideal but Nigeria does not survive on ideals. We are a nation of contingency, expediency and compromises. The expediency of north-south power rotation has kept us going even under the worst autocracies. Why topple it now?

    The impending upheaval in the parties has already produced a rash of clashing statements and utterances from diverse geo political groups. South east politicians in the PDP have become a political trade union of malcontents . Leaders of major Southwest political and cultural groups are rooting for a president from the south east. Chief E.K Clark of the Niger Delta has added his weighty voice, warning that Nigeria may not survive another northern Muslim president right after Buhari. The Arewa Youth organization has however added a sensible voice , insisting on the imperative of a southward zoning of the 2023 presidency.

    Remarkably, some northern state governors , notably Nasir El Rufai of Kaduna and Babagana Zulum of Borno, have consistently advocated the zoning of the 2023 presidency to the southern zones.

    Meanwhile, barely a few months to the 2023 presidential election, clandestine political dark knights are busy manipulating attention from urgent national problems of basic security and mundane economic survival for citizens. Everything is now about whether the next president should be a Northern Muslim or southern Christian, an Igbo or a Fulani, Yoruba or Urhobo. But by far the overriding axis of discord is the north-south divide which poses a strategic threat to the continuation of the Nigerian state. The note of mutual antagonism is palpable. Interest groups are fanning the embers of hate with incendiary rhetoric.

    The systematic mismanagement of our diversity and the north-south balance of power by Buhari’s hegemonic excesses has weaponized what should be a normal democratic transition politics, converting us all into war mongers. No sensible nation allows the spread of hate and the rhetoric of war while preparing for a ritual of peaceful coexistence which is what elections ultimately are.

    Inside the opposition PDP, an extant zoning agreement has been shredded by a fixation with the mathematical advantages of a northern presidential candidate. This has instantly alienated party leaders and politicians from other sections of the country . In the interim, all manner of webs and manipulations are being contrived to strike compromises in a pursuit of a non existent consensus.

    The assumptions behind the scramble for a northern presidential candidate are based on a curious , lazy arithmetic and dubious political strategy . The logic seems to be that the fabled northern large demographics of voters will only vote for a northern presidential candidate. That is an insult to the sense of discrimination of the average Northern voting citizen. That line of thinking has no room for loyalty to party or subscription to people friendly policies. But a cursory look at previous presidential election results reveals the foolishness of this assumption.

    Northern voters like all other Nigerians will vote for the candidates that the contending parties present to them. They do not insist that presidential candidates must be northern Muslims to earn their votes! We may need to ask who voted for president Obasanjo for two terms? Was the assumed northern majority voters not in existence when Obasanjo was being elected and re-elected? Who voted for Jonathan’s single term? Nigerians, irrespective of religion and region, vote for party candidates according to their preferences, not as unthinking regional mobs.

    The myth of the cultic northern voting majority as an electoral factor came into being with Mr. Buhari’s desperation for power and his presentation as the ultimate northern redeemer. Jonathan’s rudderless governance and epic incompetence enabled the Buhari ascent . For the past seven years, however, the president that came to power on the wave of national goodwill and amnesty has pursued a sickening regional hegemonic agenda to nauseating levels. As a result, even the most ardent enlightened northern elite are now utterly embarrassed by this effete presidency.

    The tragic irony of this single minded hegemonic mindset is that it has cast the north in poor light. Buhari’s chosen few are mostly a choir of incompetent mediocrity. They have fared abysmally and virtually run Nigeria aground. Happily, they do not represent the best of the north. Under the watch of the Buhari bunch, the Nigerian state has failed itself, failed its citizens and failed as a credible member of the international community. A vile and uncontrolled regional army of bandits, terrorists and vengeful thugs has been enabled.

    An Irresponsible new political elite has abandoned the ordinary people of the north to the violent forces that their insensitivity has unleashed. Governors that prefer to remain perpetually on vacation in Abuja or Dubai while their states are overrun by casual terrorists are the same people now scheming to retain national power in a region they have laid waste. These are the people funding and fanning the current confusion in the parties.

    Those now scheming for a perpetuation of northern rule are vicariously wishing Nigerians a continuation of the Buhari-type nightmare. Eight more years of unbridled corruption, inactivity, insensitivity, mercantile terrorism and economic morass.

    Today’s power adventurers do not seem to understand the current mood of the nation. In the north, even in the mosques, the mood is to curse and disown the present version of northern hegemony as the source of violence and increased poverty. In the south, the hegemony is seen as the source of killer herdsmen and unsafe highways and railroads. Response to hegemonic arrogance and domination is the source of IPOB militancy and the Igboho separatist agitation. It is also the origin of the fear of Islamization.

    Therefore, the overriding challenge of the 2023 presidential contest is how to pry the heart of the Nigerian nation from the fangs of a vicious Buhari bred regional ogre of incompetent and unproductive hegemonists.

    Even the north, the presumptive beneficiary region of the Buhari hegemony, is somewhat dazed and utterly embarrassed. Consequently, the northern political voice has acquired multiple tongues and many hues. The more enlightened nationalistic wing cried out early in the Buhari tenure. They opined that Buhari’s hegemonic extremism would damage the nation, alienate the north itself and endanger us all. Another northern faction disowned Buhari as a traitor of northern interests and an embarrassment to the best standards and aspirations of the region. A minority political voice , mostly Arewa youth, cried out that the best way out is to abide by a zoned power rotation arrangement to enable a southern Christian president succeed eight years of the Buhari interregnum.

    The Northern Elders Forum has usurped the megaphone of regional spokesmanship in the service of the subsisting hegemony. The position of the Northern Elders Forum on zoning of the presidency has over the years been inconsistent, opportunistic and self serving. On 15 th May, 2013, the NEF issued a statement in which it insisted that:
    ‘Power rotation is a mark of equity and justice.’ That was in the midst of President Jonathan’s bid for re-election and in support of Buhari’s desperate bid for the presidency to revert to the north in the 2015 presidential elections.

    Now in the countdown to the 2023 election and the end of Buhari’s parochial reign, the same Northern Elders Forum is back in business. On 16th January, 2022, the Forum stated: ‘power rotation is anti- democracy’. One Forum, two positions on the same subject but of course a consistent interest in the perpetuation of a regional power hegemony. The NEF supports zoning only in one sense: that the political leadership of the country should remain permanently zoned to the north. Hear the arrogant Hakeem Baba Ahmed, the Mauritanian – Nigerian spokesman of the Forum two weeks ago: ‘We will lead Nigeria the way we have always led Nigeria before. Whether we are President or Vice President, we will lead Nigeria. We have the majority of the voters…’

    The forces behind the new surge of hegemonic preeminence are not hard to find or easy to ignore. They must also be credited with a certain devious sense of strategic expediency. They recognize the pivotal place of the political parties in presidential power zoning hence the present guerrilla operation to get both major parties to field northern presidential candidates. Whether they are working in the PDP or the APC, it is a common task force at work in the service of the same hegemonic project.

    But this conservative squad of hegemonists does not represent the collective enlightened self interest of the north. It is the narrow group interest of the handful of old school ‘Kaduna Mafia’ -type conservatives that seems to have held Buhari under house arrest in the last seven years.

    The more enlightened liberal democratic wing of the northern elite is embarrassed by all this. Of course they are hardly in the commanding heights of the present power politics. Nor do they subscribe to the hegemonic fixation of their uncles and fathers! The more liberal younger generation consists of persons who have served Nigeria creditably in various capacities. They take their departure from a nationalistic pedestal, recognizing the diversity of Nigeria and the necessity to balance the interests of competing groups in a diverse polity. They are mostly modern in outlook, armed with exposure to the best of both Western and Arab modernism. Ideologically, they are mostly social democrats with a reformist mindset and a more liberal outlook. A select roll call: Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Nasir ElRufai, Abubakar Dangiwa Umar, Buba Marwa, Babagana Umara Zulum, Atahiru Jega and a host of other kindred spirits.

    These people hold the key to the future of a modern progressive north. They must seek political eminence and constructive consensus with their opposite numbers in the rest of the country. Their task is to smash the hegemonic blackmail of ancient knights and power racketeers so that the masses of the north can become proud Nigerians and empowered citizens like their opposite numbers in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

    The present state of discourse and rhetoric among our politicians remains disgraceful. We must keep insisting that what nigeria needs now is a president who can read the balance sheet of the national economy and address our numerous pressing problems. Nigeria’s leadership selection criteria must eventually move away from the from directions on the compass to a meritocracy of competence.

    Of course we know how we got to this dirty pass. Our nation was birthed in sectionalism, nurtured in regionalism and has been sustained by ethnic and geo political computations. Our politicians have made it all important which end of the compass the next president emanates from.

    The fierce urgency of this moment is how to free the two main parties from the north-south conundrum. It is also a struggle to free the nation from the vice grip of an unrelenting hegemony. The more urgent need is to free the 2023 transition from this ancient curse and re- focus national attention on the issues currently troubling all Nigerians. We must rescue 2023 from the death grip of hegemonic arrogance so that Nigeria does not die.

  • Digital Sex and Make-Up Wonders – By Chidi Amuta

    Digital Sex and Make-Up Wonders – By Chidi Amuta

    The rave of the moment is not only the raging politics of presidential stampede. We have to admit that the ongoing pageant of presidential aspirants is an impressive circus with limitless comic value. the material of good political entertainment. Underneath all this, however, two other endemic obsessions have recently crept in and taken root among us.

    The first is an obsession with sex as a form of national sport that unites young and old alike both online and in real time. The other is a new fascination with externals, with appearance and make belief. The latter is marked by the emergence of make-up artists as mobile illusionists and new aesthetics wonder workers. There is now an explosion of make-up and disguise artistry as a vibrant new economic sub sector.

    Suddenly, the strange things that have sneaked in on us have acquired their own language and assumed new names. Transgender, cross dressing, LGBTQ are the names of a strange animal in town. These are the fancy names for an open sex regime in which even toddlers are playing what has become a national game. Sometimes it takes place in full public glare or via viral social media posts in full digital colour. To compound the confusing picture, we have entered an age in which things are no longer what they seem. A make-up epidemic has come to muddle the divide between appearance and reality, between beauty and ugliness and between modern and ancient. Ancient and Modern used to be a catch phrase to capture the divide of time. Not anymore. The divide has been breached and rudely bridged by a new art form whose canvass is the human face. Welcome to the age of illusion, the season of masks. Everything looks like its opposite and everything is nothing in the final analysis.

    For a long time, hardly anyone in authority seemed to care about the societal moral implications of the new epidemic of gender and sex code violations. While officialdom was preoccupied with more weighty issues of pocket books and bread and butter, a clandestine gay culture emerged and crept under the radar of law enforcement and legislative surveillance. In that hazy moral underground universe, rape and under age sex abuse and other sordid violations grew into a national virus.

    The police has been overwhelmed and shocked into opening novel files to accommodate new forms of deviance and sexual criminality. How does the law deal with a pastor who commandeers a squad of hapless women and converts them into a temporary harem on lease for a short while. How does the law judge the wonder of miracles wrought in the process? Or, for that matter, how does the law deal with a man who sleeps with both his wife and their daughter until a neighbor lodges a complain? Worse still, what does the system do with a healthy young man who is a normal male in the day and an alluring ‘female’ at night , complete with a real female voice, coyness, bums and boobs of real texture? Not to talk of the money tree that thrives in between his groins at night with immense transactional value and lavish returns? So, as things stand now, no one seems so sure anymore as to whether sexual deviance and perversion constitute immorality, criminality, digital age entertainment or democratic freedom turned into license.

    Gradually, a curious cultural aberration called ‘cross dressing’ emerged. It was first part comedy and part fashion until it took root as a disguise for sexual perversion and other trespasses across a badly perforated national moral canvass. Underneath the canopy of ‘cross dressing’, crimes like narcotics peddling and money laundering dropped abundant hints. A cult of dubious ‘celebrity’ emerged to decorate these aberrations into a fad.

    Something was bound to give in a society where ‘celebrity’ has become another name for embarrassing emptiness and glorified mediocrity. A daughter who dropped out of an undergraduate programme in a local university but has the temerity to go periodically naked in a fourth rate a movie set becomes a ‘celebrity’. It gets worse if she is paid enough to buy some fake designer atrocities that scream “Gucci”, “Fendi” or “Ferragamo” committed in some Shanghai backyard, the home of intellectual property desecrations. That is how our ‘celebrities” are born! Disturbing the peace of innocent people on multiple social media platforms follows logically. The routine dishing and flaunting of videos of half clad youth is forced down our throats. A new profession called ‘twerking’ emerges which is no more than a relentless swirling of near naked backsides to the beat of wild esoteric beats. Forget the brain; no one cares what is in hour head.

    Sometimes the boys fare even worse. “Junior” returns home on vacation hiding his bad grades under the disguise of braids, natty dread locks, countless dangling ear rings, nasty nose piercings and an annoying accent that is neither male nor female, neither Anglo Saxon nor African American, neither Indian nor Ajegunle Nigerian. It is time to look mum and dad straight in the eyes and tell them the new truth: junior has found a new passion: music, dance, entertainment with excessively ripped jeans to wit. But let us leave fashion and life style outrage to the spirit of the times, the grip of modernity and the license that unlimited freedom breeds. We are in an individualistic society; it is a free world. People now walk about as islands of legalized insanity. The mad man in rags at Oshodi a few years back never knew he was prophesying a future in which tattered clothes would become the fashion rave.

    Cross dressing is in a somewhat different class. It is the new phenomenon of youth who start out dressing like the opposite sex. Healthy young men dressed like women or women dressed like men who gradually abandon their original sexuality and adopt the opposite. Cosmetic surgery, sex change, voice alteration therapy, elaborate make-up, severe physiological alterations follow. The result is a quaint creature that mocks the original intent of nature and embarrasses the cult of parenthood. “Oga, your son is now a girl o!’, is the spontaneous outcry of hapless passersby and neighborhood busy bodies.

    Some of the transformations are disarmingly real or surreal. In the more common ones of ‘men’ turned into ‘women’, the results can be curiously seductive and deceptively tantalizing. Hips retract. Sumptuous backsides emerge overnight and gyrate. Rebellious bosoms and breasts are held in check by retraining harnesses and extreme bras variously called ‘waist trainers’ and ‘body shapers’!. False eye lashes blinker and hallucinate the unsuspecting. Lips drip in deepest red lipstick and the practiced voice of a real damsel lures the unsuspecting into unprintable indulgences. The phenomenon of cross dressing has become a short hand for a clandestine thriving gay culture and sundry sexual ‘419s’!

    Other associated industries and merchandise have grown in response to the new wave of demand. A thriving trade in false buttocks, lush hair extensions, natural hair of dead Indian and Latino women, false eye lashes and fake boobs is booming. Your reporter once wandered into a part of Balogun market in Lagos that houses shops dealing in these oddities and ‘cosmetic’ wares. The itinerant marketing foot soldiers of these products are a theatre unto themselves. “Oga, you want buy …bum or boob? What size?” Just as you try to recover from the initial shock, another more aggressive voice comes along: ”We get plenty boobs o!… This one soft well well o!” The sheer volume and variety of the merchandise on display is a disarming confirmation that there is a new rave of sexual enhancers and illusion paraphernalia.

    Happily, some important people have noticed our slide into a moral wilderness. A draft legislation is reportedly in the offing at the National Assembly to ban and punish the aberrant practitioners of cross dressing and related aberrations. Known and proven cross dressers are liable on conviction to months and even years of imprisonment. Just the mere hint of that approaching legislation has sent some of the faint hearted cross dressers scampering. Some of the ‘boys’ have quickly cleaned up their dressing and returned to their smart suits, trendy jeans and T-shirts. But the more ardent ones have already invested too heavily in irreversible alteration surgeries and gone too far into the wild to come back now.

    The intervention of the House of Representatives is a welcome direction in our legislative history. The House has woken up to a matter of urgent national moral importance. As a human society, we are not just a collection of economic and political animals. We are first and foremost a human society, a moral community that ought to be held together by agreed norms and values. We are kept sane by a certain stability of values and clear moral boundaries. It is those moral guardrails that keep us all clothed, forcing us indoors when we seek to copulate or procreate.

    I hear the loud voice of liberal democratic advocates. After all, it is a free society. People are free to look however they like, free to love whoever they like and anyhow they feel. What I eat does not make you fat! Strict insistence on the traditional boundaries between male and female indicate an unfree society. So, the argument goes, transgender is good and cool! After all, the gay and transgender people are not bullying the straight and compliant majority. In a free society, my freedom to swing my arms ends where your nose begins. So, why harass the cross dressers and trans people thereby limiting their freedoms as citizens?

    I also hear the contrary voice of conservative African cultural nationalists in our midst. We are first and foremost Africans. Matters of sexuality belong in the privacy of individual life. Women and men are wired and sculpted differently. Men marrying men or women marrying women are abominable taboos for which the gods are bound to visit transgressors and the society that permits them with apocalyptic vengeance and incendiary calamity. African gods would smite today’s gay rights advocates and practitioners with a thousand poxes and a million maladies too gruesome to name. We should insist that the sexes remain what they were intended to be. Let men be men and women be their kind. Matters of sex and sexuality should be left behind closed doors.

    There is an even more aggressive source of moral reservations. The religious army mostly of Christendom. In a country where religion is easily the largest industry, the fellowship of ‘casting’ and ‘binding’ priesthood are not finding this cross dressing, gay and trans gender epidemic funny. The emergence of this cultural curiosity has been variously used as evidence that the end is nigh. The signs and wonders of biblical end time describe a season when strange happenings become the norm. The more recent misguided and primitive versions of end time signs and harbingers of the apocalypse include the global spread of commercial pornography, the coming of 5G technology, the rise of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and the advent of jihadist terrorism.

    A key enabler of the cross dressing and LGBTQ hurricane is the cosmetics industry. It has birthed the new age industry of make-up artistry. A new breed of itinerant young men and women armed with attaché cases replete with assorted concoctions, brushes, concealers, dyes, sprays and false eye lashes are on the prowl. Prior to any social event, they have a capacity to banish decades and even generations with strokes of brushes and the magic of their trade secret concoctions.

    Ahead of a television appearance, men already blessed with several years in excess of the biblical three scores and ten are transformed into dashing youngsters. See what magic a talented make-up artist can perform with the freckled and wrinkled visage of the great grandma around the corner who is instantly transformed into a glamourous damsel and star of the next wedding party.

    Digital television, digital photography, multiple internet Apps and the necessary nuisance of the social media have stepped in to assist the make-up warriors in their onslaught against our sense of reality, beauty and the inevitable passage of time. You can now filter, fade, highlight, air brush, photoshop, tint, slice, tighten, pull in, spread out or mangle a captured face to the extent that the unsuspecting will swear that the illusion is the reality. Make-up artists are a cross between plastic artists, graphic artists and magical illusionists.

    The make-up revolution has drastically altered our sense of aesthetics for both good and for grave ill. The striving for beauty, the natural attraction for the physically attractive and the repulsion of the ugly is part of our natural wiring. That accounts for the current universal appeal of make-up artistry.

    Arguably, make up artistry is making the world a lovelier place to live in. Suddenly everybody touched by a make-up artist is either extremely handsome or supremely beautiful. A mix of the right concealers, covering of faders, the right combination of sprayers and brushes erases decades from the ageing tired face. Add a matching hairdo or wig as the case may be and the right eye lashes, lip gloss and a sprinkling of skin energizers and Mona Lisa is reborn!

    But the blossoming of make-up artistry is also creating other unintended problems in a world ruled by the eruption of new recognition technologies. Digital security technologies use facial recognition to enhance security across international boundaries. With elaborate make-up on faces, people are no longer who they originally said they were. Security technologies are using techniques like iris recognition to overwrite the reliance on facial recognition alone. It is even worse with your new generation cell phones. They now use face ID in addition to numerical codes to get activated. Too elaborate a make-up can deny you access to your very own phone if you forget your numeric ID. If your phone can no longer recognize your face, you are literally lost.

    Elaborate make-up, sex change surgeries and criss -crossing dressing boundaries can find validation in some constituencies. But the choice of telling oneself the truth about your sex, age , and state of beauty remains a private and personal obligation. It is even a democratic right bound to your freedom which no one can take away. But creating a new genre of humanity by pretending to be a cross dresser affects the rights of others and the sensibilities of the society we all share. Deliberately creating and sustaining identity illusions to gain advantages or deceive the unsuspecting into parting with either their money or sexual favours could be criminal.

    Once the National Assembly rolls out the new anti cross dressing law, the prison houses should happily receive this new set of inmates and convicts. But let us keep the toilet facilities at ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ for goodness sake. And the prison uniforms should not be transgender. No unisex prison uniforms please! All make-up remain banned in the prison yard as well!

  • PDP: Politics of survival and bad manners – By Chidi Amuta

    PDP: Politics of survival and bad manners – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s troubled opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has scored a pre-election own goal. It has forced its presidential aspirants to retreat into factional enclaves. These are roughly: the Northern, Gubernatorial and Igbo formations.

    How to engineer a consensus out of these conflicting interests has become the defining burden of a party that has neither federal incumbency nor the quantum of cash required to wage the imminent presidential battle. Yet the struggle for a consensus has become desperate and urgent. It has also become existential because the party has only this election season to survive or dissipate into irrelevance and inevitable death. But it is approaching its battle for survival through ancient bad manners.

    Easily the most consequential outcome of the PDP’s untidy house keeping is its handling of the bid for a president of Igbo extraction on its ticket. The tacit rebuff of this identity political pressure is telling on its cohesion. The Igbo presidential aspirants in its fold have gone into an unusual protest trade union mode. As a result, when the PDP special committee on zoning rejected the extant principle of rotating the presidency between north and south, the Igbo aspirants in the party felt betrayed. They have staged a curious trade union -like protest in Abuja. At a joint press briefing, the gathering of red cap politicians decided to pose for a group photo opportunity with all of them holding hands in political solidarity. My good friends Anyim Pius Anyim , Peter Obi, Sam Ohuabunwa and the others came clad in befitting red caps and national tunics. We were witnessing a symbolic descent from national partisan politics to glorified ethnic trade unionism. That was a first in recent Nigerian politics. If care is not taken, that photo may go down in record as the beginning of the end of the PDP which used to be Africa’s largest political party.

    The PDP was once a great vibrant party. It still retains the institutional memory and residual grassroots support of an ageing population of political followers. It’s current followership is mostly a fellowship of discontent. But time used to be when the PDP under president Obasanjo proudly waved its kindergarten colorful umbrella as next to the ANC of South Africa as Africa’s most consequential party. Obassnjo had dreams as big as his ego for the party. He envisaged a political behemoth that would dominate the leadership of Nigeria for far in excess of 24 years. In his retirement, he schemed a far reaching amendment to the party’s constitution in which he would be the life chairman of the party’s Board of Trustees and an honorary life ‘father of the party’ and invariably of the nation. This was an autocratic prescription for an otherwise Democratic Party. But Obasanjo was hardly out of the exit door of Aso Rock Villa when his adolescent potentially authoritarian scheme was toppled and thrashed. His telephone calls to the Villa were soon limited. His all too frequent unsolicited counsels to the new president became less in demand.

    By the time the leadership of the PDP went into the hands of Jonathan as president and Bamangar Tukur as party Chairman, Mr. Obasanjo could hardly recognize his political edifice as it came crumbling, one step at a time. He shredded his party card in televised public view.

    The incremental meltdown continued unchecked. By the eve of the 2015 elections, the PDP had degenerated into a political contraption, a machinery of corruption and vast enabler of disastrous governance. Before then, it had midwifed its own systematic and irreversible disintegration. The classic visual was unmistakable. The demise of the great party was televised.

    In full view of a sitting President in the televised splendor of Eagle Square and a well attended party event, a powerful faction of five governors and many influential party faithful walked out on a sitting president and mainstream party faithful . The rebels trooped out to the Shehu Yar’dua Centre to found what became the New PDP (nPDP), a powerful breakaway faction of the ruling party. Mr. Atiku Abubakar was present and in the forefront of this rebellious birthing which led him into the then fledgling opposition APC. He is now a leading contender for the 2023 presidential ticket in his original PDP!

    From then on, the end of PDP’s hegemony was a foretold crash landing. It went from friction to factions, from division to decline and, more disastrously, from unbridled corruption to wholesale organized and licensed evacuation of the commonwealth . Under Mr. Jonathan’s effete watch, government degenerated into a badly organized crime syndicate. A surviving memento to this infamous era is perhaps Diezani Madueke’s trove of underpants, braziers and Imelda Marcos sized jewelry box now on display auction by the EFCC.

    By a combination of crass incompetence and political naïveté, the PDP ended up scoring an African record at the 2015 election. It became one of the few major African parties to lose power from an incumbent position. A couple of years prior, Kenya’s KANU (Kenya African National Union ) had been chased away by an opposition coalition led by Kibaki.

    Thus routed from power, the PDP has spent the last seven years plus in an arid political zone, learning how to be an opposition party and also learning how to survive and be relevant without federal incumbency and the patronage and power that goes with it.

    As an opposition platform since 2015, the PDP has divided its time between remaining electorally relevant and protecting its leading lights from Buhari’s skewed and selective anti corruption sniper operation . Somehow, the PDP has been more alive in times of general elections than in times of normal governance. In the 2019 elections, for instance, the PDP acquitted itself well as a credible threat to the emergent APC oligarchy of Buhari’s vicious sectional hegemony. It won a total of 15 governorships as against the APC’s 20.

    But as a credible and sustainable opposition party in normal governance time, the PDP has been a woeful nuisance. It has not been able to challenge the APC on policy issues, basic competence and simple political ethics. Of course it has been a rather predictable and noisy ensemble of discordant voices of disjointed criticism . Its critique of the failings of the incumbent APC government has been routine, run of the mill and hardly superior to street corner jive. It has never displayed any superiority of strategy let alone tactics compared to its equally bumbling opponent. The PDP has never confronted the incumbent party with superior data on public matters nor advanced alternative approaches to the many headaches tormenting the nation.

    Some have observed that in the absence of any ideological identity for almost all Nigerian parties, it would be asking for too much to expect the PDP to be different from its APC rival. They are ultimately one and the same party with different acronyms and battle colours. A free movement of members including governors, across party divides, has become a normal feature of a free for all jamboree of inter party migrations largely condoned by a pliant and mercantile judiciary.

    Yet, by their respective acronyms, Nigeria’s two dominant parties ought to represent the main strands in the nation’s tendencies. The APC should ordinarily be the progressive left of center party while the PDP should represent a nationalist right of center strand. This distinction is only academic. Neither the leaders nor the faithful of both parties understand or attach meaning to either acronyms or ideology.

    This is the effective backdrop to the PDP’s current logjam. In the run up to the 2023 presidential scramble, the party is caught between playing politics and playing pranks. It had a ready made answer to the contest if only it could manage to obey the rules it made on its own. Its extant zoning formula could have placed it in a competitive position. It could have retained that principle and used it to match the APC. But the party has allowed itself to be blackmailed by a combination of gubernatorial authoritarians and geo ethnic myth makers. While a handful of wealthy state governors are intent on imposing themselves on the party as presidential candidates, a masked squad of northern dark knights and political marksmen are marketing the ancient script that there exists a northern majority of voters that will dutifully vote PDP once the party shows up with a northern Muslim presidential candidate.

    Moreover, since the incumbent APC has zoned its 2023 presidency to the broad south, the lazy logic in the PDP is that a north-south presidential contest between both major parties will inevitably produce a northern Muslim president. No thoughts on the mood of the nation after eight years of Buhari’s divisive sectarian hegemony. No thought about the sectarian undertones of the industrial killings in some parts of the north. No consideration of the geo politics of the nuisance of killer herdsmen and Miyetti Allah. No consideration of the drift of current significant northern political opinion that agrees that northern rule under Mr. Buhari has been a disaster that requires a pause and an intervening rescue period under southern leadership.

    Under its prevailing illusion, the PDP’s zoning committee has foolishly jettisoned its zoning formula. The naive recourse seems to be to a Middle Belt or North Central consensus candidate with a make belief Igbo Vice President. The consequences of either an outright northern presidential candidate or hybrid northern Muslim one are the same. A humiliating defeat in 2023.

    Waiting in ambush is the direct tragic consequence of ignoring the Igbo question. The PDP will self destruct if it buys into the current fallacy among some of its strategists that the Igbos will be content with yet another number two slot. The consequences are predictable. Apathy or outright voter revolt against the PDP in the South West, South South and South East zones are in the horizon.

    The presumptive northern demographic majority is a myth of the past. It is simply no longer there. It is the perpetuation of a tradition of lazy politics and fraudulent strategizing.

    Courtesy of Mr. Buhari’s divisive politics and legacy of political nativism, the north today is splintered along all kinds of lines: Fulanis, Hausas, Kanuris, Christians, Shiites, Wahhabis, Sunnis have all come into political reckoning. Among the so -called Muslim north, pro Buhari cultists remain the strongest faction going by the results of both the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections. That followership is not automatically transferable to just any ‘northern’ presidential salesman that shows up.

    Unfortunately, the PDP has merely activated and animated existing divides both in the north and in the nation at large. Both areas are vastly consequential for the party in 2023. If the party insists on a northern presidential candidate, it will alienate the major southern zones to the advantage of the APC who have zoned wisely and is likely to sweep the south and possibly inherit the Buhari northern cultic followership.

    Therefore, a new political consequence is staring the PDP in the face. The party has for long remained the political reserve bank of the South East . The matter of Igbo presidency has now come to the fore in the 2023 presidential race. The Igbo expect a draw down from its PDP political bank. In addition, the Igbos want to harvest the national moral burden of an Igbo alternative in our national political leadership. Incidentally, the proposition of Igbo presidency will not quietly go away any time soon. How it is resolved will have huge political implications and consequences especially for the PDP. Justifiably, the Igbo political elite in the PDP has developed a higher sense of political entitlement than in the APC. To that extent , the success or failure of the Igbo presidency bid will help determine the future of the PDP. If that project founders on the altar of the PDP’s internal dysfunctions, that may be the end of the party.

    The Igbo presidential project has become an albatross around the neck of the PDP. It is one which the APC will easily mine by nominating a hybrid Igbo presidential candidate. That will still be a superior strategy than the PDP’s impending outright rebuff of the Igbo question . The Igbos will prefer a hybrid Igbo President and commander in Chief than a pure breed Vice President.

    For the opposition PDP , then, this imminent election season may be one of endless insomnia and a struggle to fend off imminent suicide. If the PDP out of its own narrow vision loses the 2023 presidential election, that might be the party’s last presidential election. If on the other hand it miraculously manages to oust the APC, the day after will be the political equivalent of resurrection morning.

  • For whom will Buhari vote? – By Chidi Amuta

    For whom will Buhari vote? – By Chidi Amuta

    The race for Nigeria’s next president is progressing down to the wire. The two major political parties have held their conventions and chosen their end term executives. Most of the minor parties are yet to make their presence known let alone felt. Talks and speculations about mergers, fusions and electoral alliances remain just that: speculations.

    As matters stand, our largely unadventurous electorate will still look mostly up to the APC and PDP to provide us with Buhari’s successor. The other parties may have collections of good men and women but have not worked hard enough to deserve credible attention.

    Both the APC and PDP have forged ahead, defying their internal dysfunctions to abide by INEC’s rule books. They are now at that decisive point of bracing the finishing tape to confront the nation with a binary choice. In a two party dominated democracy, the choice of president comes down to an ‘either or ‘ choice. Each of the two parties now has to joggle it’s internal factors to present the electorate with its best contender for the ultimate binary choice.

    Since after 1999, our presidential succession has been an affair of the big parties. The others also show up. 2023 is not likely to be different. Similarly, since the Obasanjo succession, the most significant power bloc in contention for presidential succession has been our all powerful state governors. The face off between President Obasanjo and his Vice President , Atiku Abubakar, was over control of the ambitious governors all scrambling either to support Atiku to oust Obasanjo half term or succeed him at full term.

    Under the inevitable political shadow of the conclave of governors, Mr. Obasanjo was compelled to choose the more pliant pair of Umaru Yar’dua and Goodluck Jonathan as against more belligerent and hawkish combinations that included the imperial minded Peter Odili.

    In the run up to the 2023 race, the PDP is using the familiar to do the obvious. A new oligarchy of governors is staging a decisive stake for the presidential nomination. A slew of moneyed governors seem hell bent on apportioning the jobs of President and VIce President among themselves to the tacit exclusion of long standing party people. Initially, it was Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers, Bala Mohammed of Bauchi and Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto. It now includes Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta who is being touted as potential Vice President to a possible pre-conceived northern Muslim president. The party’s belated thrashing of the zoning formula may likely throw the race ‘open’ to a northern presidential candidate and cost the party most votes in the South South, South West and South East.

    The PDP’s lazy strategy and recourse seems to be the familiar north -south balancing dance . It is almost a thoughtless reflex: let’s go in direction opposite to the APC!

    But in terms of the internal dynamics of the opposition party, it is a race between incumbent governors and old party members. It is either two governors emerge as President and Vice President or an old party man runs with an incumbent governor. The presumption that a demographic dominance of northern voters will produce another northern president to rule immediately after Buhari’s 8 years sounds a bit foolish and may be stretching political optimism too far. One of the primary moving factors in the 2023 presidential race seems to be the imperative of a power shift to the south. If the PDP ignores this, it may be in for a shocker as majority of PDP supporters in the South South, South East and south West may prefer to move their votes to the APC which has wisely zoned its 2023 presidential slot to the broad south. An opposition party should present the electorate with an option that runs counter to the proposition of the ruling party. Is the PDP presenting Nigeria with the option of another 8 years of northern Muslim hegemony immediately after Buhari?

    Worse still, the PDP is taking this gamble at a time when it is neither the incumbent party nor in possession of the resource power to swing a national election.

    On the contrary, the incumbent APC has neutralized the stake of the governors as a political bloc. It has zoned the presidency to the broad south. There is no APC governor in the southern zones that has the name recognition or political gravitas to win a national election. There is even none in the horizon. My friend Kayode Fayemi probably recognizes his limits, hence he has desisted from sounding serious about a presidential bid. Mr. Dave Umahi of state is terminally embattled over his decampment from PDP to APC. Even on a normal day, he does not possess the political weight or intellect to vie for the presidency of anything beyond a town union. Similarly, Mr. Ayade of Cross River State is simply unelectable on account of his own superficiality and total lack of political consequence even in his state.

    That leaves the field open to mostly a trio of non governor APC party men: Bola Tinubu, Rotimi Amaechi and incumbent Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

    All three gentlemen as individuals come with considerable weight on their own merit and relative political gravity.

    Mr. Bola Tinubu wears the empty and somewhat foolish title of ‘National Leader’ of the APC. Beyond this, he has tremendous national reach, an outstanding record of performance as governor of Lagos and a natural knack for assembling capable teams. Tinubu has easily the most robust and long standing political structure of the APC trio. He deployed that structure and influence to Buhari’s advantage in 2015, leading to a convincing win that could not have happened if Tinubu did not bring the South West Yoruba votes along.

    He is however hampered by numerous debilitating controversies which could become political liabilities. These are issues over his real age, state of health, excessive wealth of unclear origins as well as troubles over his faith which might necessitate his floating a Muslim-Muslim ticket in a nation already weakened by matters of faith. Tinubu is a rich powerful man with equally powerful foes. More recently, his untidy association with the Lekki Toll Gate palaver and the EndSARS tragedy would seem to have fatally damaged his image with the youth majority and the general public. How he navigates this complexity to become electable as president is now Tinubu’s political albatross. Yet if the APC were to place a price tag on its presidential ticket in June, I doubt that any of the other aspirants in the party will find the courage to remotely rival Mr. Tinubu’s bid.

    Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is helped by his sterling elocution and impeccable academic and professional credentials. Though a Christian clergy msn, he has never won his cassock to work. Above all, he has an unmistakable modernist inclination, a yearning for enlightened governance and a carriage of decency and detribalization. Buhari owes him the political debt of his being a reliable level headed deputy for over seven years. His loyalty and fidelity could perhaps compensate for his slim political sagacity especially in the context of the formation and prevalence of the APC as a party.

    Chibuike Amaechi comes to table with a trove of positives and assets. His relative youth, a track record of blistering performance both as state governor and as federal minister and a forthright political stance. In addition, he has maintained a close trusty personal relationship with Buhari as a reliable ally. From about 2013, he has remained Buhari’s most dependable political facilitator with tremendous capacities and unfailing efficiency and results. Some members of the elite are a bit uncomfortable with Amaechi’s straight shooting, fearless approach and his brute courage that often grates the nerves of conventional wisdom and offends the niceties of the establishment. But these are precisely the attributes that endear Amaechi to the youth majority who have come to see him as embodying the spirit of their age. But by far his most unexplored political asset is the fact that he straddles the two strategic zones of the South East and South South. Amaechi is a pure Igbo conveniently located in the strategic oil and gas Niger Delta. In the 2023 presidential race, this is an identity that has come to the political centre stage and can hardly be ignored.

    In spite of their relative individual strengths, however, no one of the major APC gladiators can go too far without Mr. Buhari’s tacit endorsement and implicit support. The president may now be unpopular. But he retains a cultic followership in most population centers in the north. Up until mid day on 29th May 2023, he remains an incumbent African president. He doesn’t hand over the levers of power until he does so.

    Most importantly, his administration is ending on a most controversial negative note and adverse popularity rating. He is not likely to allow his legacy to be managed by a hostile successor. He is and will remain interested in who succeeds him. Therefore, Buhari is the most consequential single factor in matters of his succession. As a citizen he of course has only one vote. But his political ‘vote ‘ is multiple. The gravity of his political vote can be a counter weight to the entire popular vote if his party scores an undeniable electoral advantage at the polls.

    While Buhari is entitled to a legitimate interest in who succeeds him, he can only exhibit that interest within the bounds of democratic norms and license. Antics like ‘consensus’ candidate will only drive political dissent underground and may subvert the party and unsettle the nation. For once, let this lame duck president ‘play’ politics.

  • Campus Babalawos and Cyber Ritualists – By Chidi Amuta

    Campus Babalawos and Cyber Ritualists – By Chidi Amuta

    As a young teacher at Ife, one of the climactic moments of my career was the rise of Prof. Wande Abimbola as Vice Chancellor. A modern tertiary institution founded on a futuristic vision of national greatness was to be led by a scholar steeped in Yoruba tradition with its pillar of superstition and ancestor worship. A renowned cultural scholar and accomplished traditionalist, Professor Wande Abimbola was undoubtedly a leading authority in traditional religions as well a devout follower of Yoruba ancestral divinities. Some accused him of being an Ifa priest, a charge that he never denied, but instead tended to affirm by often prefacing his scholarly presentations with short incantations and brief divinations.

    Some feared that his ascension to the vice chancellorship of the University would dilute the national character of the university and its modernist thrust and ethos. To his credit, however, Wande Abimbola, though a Yoruba native son, served out his term without reducing the stature of the university or localizing its cosmopolitan cultural orientation.

    For many of us then, the University of Ife was the perfect synthesis of a certain fidelity to national cultural authenticity and the urgent need for national development and modernization. The modernizing instinct at Ife was rooted in the belief in cutting edge research in science and technology as well as a cultural rootedness in its symbolic location. No wonder, Ife was designated a centre for the then national nuclear power programme. In fact, an experimental reactor was in the process of being built there hence my friend Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, then Foreign Minister, could boast of the imminence of the black bomb as Nigeria’s answer to the mania of nuclear power threats that saw Pakistan, Libya and even South Africa at various stages of joining the nuclear club.

    In many ways, Ife was powered by a certain fidelity to the guidance of its founding motto: For learning and Culture. The learning aspect was global and perfectionist in the pursuit of excellence in diverse fields. Ife assembled some of the best scholars from all over the world in a community of learning that respected excellence and diversity. The culture aspect was animated by a certain closeness to the symbolism of Ife itself as the spiritual epicenter and fountain of the Yoruba nation as one of the main hubs of Nigeria’s cultural ecosystem. The University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) was simultaneously national and international. Our humanities and social sciences were animated by lively ideological fights dictated by the reality of Cold War partisanship. Those arguments animated academic debates and also made the cold beer sessions at the Staff Club unforgettable.

    I must confess from the onset that on matters that concern the University of Ife or Obafemi Awolowo University, I am not likely to be totally dispassionate. I am a proud alumnus of that great institution. But on one matter, I am pretty certain. Ife remains a centre of important learning in our country. Those of us who attended that university have not only distinguished ourselves in various fields nationally and globally, holding our own among the best in the most distinguished centres of learning and industry all over the world.

    The current news from Ife is disheartening. A viral video doing the rounds of the social media has shown a parade of devotees of sundry traditional worship clad in all white and a motley other costumes invade the campus of the University in a protest mode. I understand the macabre parade is in aid of some matter that has nothing to do with either tradition, faith or culture. The media reports indicate that the strange protesters were indigenous Ife traditional worshippers who were on the campus to protest the recent appointment of the 12th Vice Chancellor of the institution. Media reports on the trouble at Ife are united in the common story strand.

    In line with its extant traditions and processes, the university council duly selected one Professor Adebayo Bamire as the 12th Vice Chancellor of the University. Like his predecessors, Professor Bamire parades the full gamut of academic qualifications and the usual litany of publications, research and teaching records. His other 15 colleagues who vied for the position but failed to clinch the job were no less qualified. A university is first and foremost a meritocratic institution.

    But in a rather dramatic development, one of the unsuccessful contenders in the vice chancellorship race, a Professor Rufus Adedoyin, has challenged the process that saw the emergence of Bamire as fraught with lack of fairness and irregularities. The aggrieved contender has petitioned the University’s Governing Council, alleging some procedural defects. It has been established that the petitioning professor came a distant ninth in the process that produced the new leadership. Apart from the unproven grounds of procedural irregularity, the grounds of protest has expanded to include the charge that the protesting Professor Adedoyin was discriminated against in the process because he happens to be “an Ife indigene.”

    Therefore, without waiting for the outcome of the petition to the university’s governing council, the tools of protest have been expanded to include a violent procession of worshippers of some traditional Ife cults and ancient sects. A violent pageant of juju priests and worshippers have invaded the campus of the Obafemi Awolowo University. They came armed with charms, amulets, cudgels, machetes and other dangerous weapons to upset the peace and order of the campus. In addition to incantations and curses, the embarrassing ancestral train also inflicted injuries on innocent staff while damages to public property have been reported. The main thrust of their grouse is that Professor Bamire, the new vice chancellor, is not a native son of Ife. No one has however questioned the man’s academic credentials or other qualifications for the position. To the best of my knowledge, the university authorities have stood by the transparency and fairness of the process that produced the new vice chancellor. Beyond the purely meritocratic requirements of the due process required in the selection of a vice chancellor, there is no indication that indigeneship and nativity are part of the qualifications for vice chancellorship in this or any other Nigerian federal university.

    The world outside is not too interested in how the Ile Ife academic community resolves its internal leadership tussle. It is purely an internal administrative ritual. What is a matter of urgent national interest and curiosity is the unusual turn of events in what is ordinarily a routine leadership selection matter. Matters of administrative or procedural irregularity are best settled following the due process of petition, investigation and remedial resolution. I am not aware that our federal universities have in their statutes any prescription requiring that their vice chancellors should be selected from among scholars from the immediate catchment locality or community. The location of a university in one’s village does not automatically entitle a son or daughter of that village to the headship of the institution.

    Nor does the Nigerian regressive political rhetoric of ‘turn by turn’ have any place in the hallowed precincts of a university campus where merit in its purest definition should guide appointments especially into academic leadership positions. However, as a former teacher, I am aware that the vast majority of junior and intermediate staff in each federal university where I taught were drawn from the local communities. I am also not aware of any statutory or other requirement that the headship of these institutions should be drawn from among persons of any religious, geographical or cultural persuasion.

    The most disconcerting aspect of the recent happenings at Ife is perhaps its symbolism for present day Nigeria. The embarrassment has spread to opinion and political leaders. The Governor of Ondo State, Mr. Akeredolu has cried out against the sacrilege at Ife. So has Wole Soyinka, himself a former Ife teacher. Here is a university, a citadel of learning and modernity in an enlightened part of the country suddenly overrun by the forces of ancient ancestry. The forces of ancient superstition in their most undiluted form have been invoked by ambitious academic politicians. The powers of ancient gods and deities have been summoned to wreak evil repercussions on enemies of the soil on which the university is planted. That these ancient customs and their agents are being summoned to fight the cause of a learned professor is indicative of how far Nigeria’s regression has gone.

    The Ife incident is by no means isolated. It in fact contains the major elements of the current Nigerian malaise. The basic impulses behind the actions at Ife are coming from a larger Nigerian national canvas or moral derailment. This is a nation in which the patronage of all manner of esoteric cults and faiths has drowned all pretensions to modernity. This is a country in which even the high priesthood of Christianity visit juju priests and fortune tellers at night to enrich their prophetic ensemble.

    Our politicians are devout Christians doing the rounds of Pentecostal crusade locations in the day and reverting into Ogboni cultists at night. Our leaders are clients of sleek worldly pastors in the morning and patrons of ritual fetish cultists at night. Investigations into recent episodes of politics related corruption revealed the allocation of hundreds of millions of naira for ‘spiritual services’.

    Our politicians of a particular persuasion spend millions of dollars annually to import marabouts from places as far away as Mauritania, Egypt, Yemen and Istanbul. A particular leading figure once confessed that he imported a barefoot Buhdist monk from the Himalayas who walked all the way to Nigeria to reside in his study for years to tell him in advance what might happen to him on a daily basis. After years when the monk had exhausted his financial quarry, it was time to depart. The Nigerian politician demanded a parting prediction. He got one: You Shall Live Long! Maybe he was right as the politicians, now retired is approaching age 90! The monk probably forgot that he had “trekked” to Nigeria. He requested and got a first class ticket home!

    A frightening dimension to our regression into the depths of superstition and the occult is its relative popularity among our youth. It is not just the youth out on the urban streets or in the rural areas or the ones who did not go to school. On most of our university campuses, students have recently graduated from the mindless violence of cultism in the early 2000s to the present viral popularity of cyber crimes. Nearly every Nigerian university campus now has a cyber crime cell of students. The EFCC and other security agencies have a hard time keeping track of these groups of “Yahoo Yahoo” undergraduates. Among these students and youth is the belief that cyber scams or 419 are better instruments for attaining instant wealth than the ancient grind of study and excruciating hard work that we older generations endured to get to this junction. The successful cyber scammers on campus have outlandish automobiles, troves of cash and assorted designer wares to show for their valiant exploits.

    To be a cyber criminal is to have advanced mastery of information technology. This is one step above basic scientific knowledge. To be a master of cutting edge internet know how and still be so backward as to believe in the efficacy of the superstitious world of rituals and the occult is the defining puzzle of modern day Nigeria. And yet our future is founded on this anachronism because it is now the home ground of our youth.

    As things stand today, the dividing line between cyber crimes and involvement in real organized criminal activity is hazy. A new gruesome logic has followed. A gruesome logic has emerged that says the chances of success in cyber crimes and instant wealth are increased by a bit of human sacrifice. Consequently, youth are kidnapping and killing their mates to harvest body parts for sale to fetish agents who promise them instant prosperity. This is why of late the police has had far too many cases of ritual murder and harvesting of body parts cases. No one has had the courage to expose the arrant foolishness of believing that there is any connection whatsoever between ritual murder and wealth creation. The entire human organ trade and epidemic of ritual murders is based on the new currency of a culture of superstition.

    Worse still, as in the Ife university incident, a certain sense of sectional or nativist entitlement has created a nation in which the elite when beaten in the meritocratic contest for privileges and patronage at the national level quickly run back to their ancestral roots to demand those same privileges as rights of ancestry. They insist on positions that should accrue to their zone, tribe, ethnic group or faith. What follows is the failure of meritocracy and the systemic dilution of quality to please the mobs of tribe, faith and geo political nonsense. Its key drivers rejuvenate the powers of ancient customs and traditions and re-enact gruesome practices such as ritual murder for sacrifice in order to frighten their opponents with the sight of the blood of their innocent victims.

    The nation suffers the consequences. First violence rules the waves. Human life is reduced to numbers on the front page of daily journals. A new paradigm of heroism is created. The politicians as hoodlum, patron of thugs and assorted touts is assumed to be normal in a new definition of normal that benumbs all rationality. The gunman, ‘known’ or ‘unknown’, becomes the national dread of everyman. Agents of death are waiting at the street corner to exact tributes or terminal justice.

    Of all the damages done to our progress by the resurgence of all forms of arbitrariness, impunity and regression into ancient customs and superstition, the most lethal is the damage to the emergence of a scientific sensibility. The greatest marker of human progress is the transition from superstition to the scientific spirit. The logical relationship between cause and effect governed by the laws of logic and evidence is what distinguishes primitive societies from the modern ones. Evidence, observation, experimentation and inference is the logical sequence of the scientific mindset. The logic of human progress is the movement away from superstition and illogicality to the realm of science, of cause and effect and of logic. Without the scientific spirit there is neither progress nor even justice based on the rule of law on which society and democracy are based.

    Nigeria’s future is caught in a tragic trap that looks more like self cancelling charmed circle straddled by three ominous agents. The politician leading us to a new world of modern development but who is also a patron of decadent superstitions from church, mosque and shrine. The professor of science who invites ancient juju priests to validate his academic credentials. The young internet wiz kid who is also a cyber criminal and ritual cultist.

  • Oligarch Governors and Politics in Troubled Times – By Chidi Amuta

    Oligarch Governors and Politics in Troubled Times – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    We are witnessing the coming of a new type of politics. Between the ruling All Progressive Congress(APC) and its rival, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), some strange political bad manners is taking root. In this political tradition, the actions and conducts of politicians have no bearing to the prevailing mood of the nation. Politics is seen as an independent province of activities that have little or nothing to do with solving the daily problems of the electorate.

    In the playbook of this new school, politics is transacted above worsening insecurity, spreading hunger, collapse of vital infrastructure and a general mood of despair and disillusionment among the people. Politicians even find it demeaning to dwell on these mundane troubles lest they reduce their stature or de-market their parties. The parties themselves have become more like alien cults, cabals of insensitive visiting overlords who occasionally look in to see how the natives are doing.

    The two dominant political parties are the theatres of this drama of alienation and political bad manners. Recently, both parties have engaged public attention on matters that have to do with their internal incoherence. The APC, long held captive by the reign of a caretaker national executive headed by Governor Mr. Mai Mala Buni of Yobe State, has been teetering on the brinks of virtual implosion. In spite of the appearance of coherence and unity under the leadership of president Buhari, the party is infested with factionalism and conflicts in nearly every state of the federation. Any number of spurious law suits (reportedly up to 26!) are flying around various levels of the nation’s judiciary, filed by parties within the APC. Endless reconciliation efforts have yielded little or no results.

    Matters almost came to a head in Mr. Buhari’s current absence when APC governors broke into two rival factions. A pro- Buhari faction was going along with the scheduled party convention for 26th March when a rival formation struck. In an amateurish political coup, the rival faction of APC governors sought to hijack the leadership of the caretaker executive while both President Buhari and Governor Mai Buni were abroad on medical vacation. INEC cried fowl. The plight of the party convention was only salvaged by Buhari’s intervention on the side of the status quo. Let us hope that Mr. Buhari’s lame duck incumbency continues to command the followership of his party’s pack of ambitious and rebellious governors.

    While Buhari’s intervention may have temporarily saved the party some face in the immediate countdown to the convention of the 26th March, there are enough grounds for trepidation after the convention when the stakes get higher. The struggle for the APC presidential ticket will be nasty and brutish. While the brief political brawl ensued, matters of governance and general welfare of the citizenry took a back seat. Between the factions of governors on both sides of the divide, no one heard of any fundamental disagreement on policy, ideology or even tangential issues from whatever the moribund APC manifesto. It was all a power grabbing contest and a jostling for vantage positions for Buhari’s job.

    A similar scenario played out in the PDP but from a different direction. The battle lines in the PDP are also among overly ambitious governors. A select conclave of governors led by Rivers State’s Nyesom Wike with his cohorts Governors Bala Mohammed of Bauchi, Abiodun Makinde of Oyo State, Benedict Ayade of Cross River State and Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu State seem to have concluded that they will have to produce the next presidential candidate of the party.

    Between these ambitious governors and long standing members of the party like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi and former Senate President Anyim Pius Anyim, the battle lines for supremacy and vantage positioning for the 2023 presidential ticket seem to have been drawn. The schism would be a hard one for new party Chairman Iyiorcha Ayu to bridge.

    The tension in the PDP made a nasty public outing in the recent embarrassing exchange between Edo state governor Mr. Godwin Obaseki and his boisterous Rivers state counterpart, Mr. Nyesom Wike. There would seem to be no substance in the loud squabble. Its major public appeal was perhaps the entertainment value of lowly adolescent name calling sessions between two governors. There was nothing in the copious airtime wasted by the duo that had anything to do with either the long suffering peoples of Edo or Rivers state.

    Similarly, there was not much of public interest in an earlier tirade by Governor Wike against the embattled Ebonyi state governor, Dave Umahi, who was recently sacked by a high court for jumping from the PDP to the ruling APC. Mr. Wike’s recent absolutist stance on PDP issues has tended to give the impression that he may be carrying on more like the sole administrator of the PDP than merely as a governor carrying a party card and ticket.

    The internal political wrangling in the parties is within their prerogative. The factional fights and the counter currents they are generating also belong in the normal realm of healthy intra party politicking. However, the parties are the pillars that hold the architecture of the nation’s political edifice. To that extent, they are primary strategic institutions of our national democratic identity. Within that context, politicians have an overarching responsibility to prioritize issues of public interest over and above their internal squabbles. A situation in which politicians who are also leaders at both national and sub national levels play internal party politics in a manner that negates the welfare and interest of the public undermines national security and order.

    There is a M\more worrisome dimension. Events in both major parties since the return of democracy in 1999 reveal a disturbing emergent feature of our polity. We may have unwittingly erected an oligarchy of governors. Obasanjo found that he had no alternative than to hand over to a pair of governors: Yar’dua and Jonathan.

    This is on account of the immense powers which the 1999 constitution has bestowed on governors. Governors literally control the state assemblies once they get into the governors mansion. Governors have almost unfettered control of state finances as they require no superior approvals from any other authority once they have pocketed the state legislators. On account of their robust financial powers and monopoly of patronage in the states, governors bestride the political landscape of their respective states by deciding who rules the local governments, who represents the state in the House of Representatives, the Senate and who is nominated to the president as the state’s Ministerial representative in the Federal Executive Council as well as who gets appointed to boards of federal parastatals and diplomatic missions. In most cases, incumbent governors invariably get to decide their successors.

    Even when they leave office, a good number of our former governors opt to proceed to the Senate. In today’s Senate, therefore, there is a sizeable and powerful conclave of former governors. We hardly hear of former governors who retire into respectable corporate positions. They do not go into academia or opt for farming let alone take on humanitarian or community service roles. Our outgoing governors prefer to either vie for the presidency or reserve Senate seats for themselves. Some find nothing else as attractive as partisan politics and the large returns that accrue to operatives of our political industry. For our outgoing governors, the retirement destination of choice is Abuja, Africa’s most expensive piece of real estate sustained by only one invisible but lucrative item of trade: politics.

    There is little wonder that the current battle for the soul of the two dominant parties is between factions of governors on the one hand and other party members who believe that democracy ought to entitle them to also seek control of the parties. But for anyone pitted against the oligarchy of governors, it is almost certainly a losing battle. In Nigeria’s murky political ecosystem, money buys all things. The governors either as individuals or acting as cabals of vested interest seem to hold the key to our political future.

    Therefore, movements in our current political drama are mere rumblings generated by clashes among gubernatorial oligarchs. The only trouble with Nigerian governors is that they are unproductive autocrats. Given the quantum of national wealth and resources that have been at their unregulated disposal since 1999, our gamut of serving and former governors ought to have become a major economic force as industrialists, real estate moguls, partners of foreign direct investments or mega farmers. That this has not happened is the tragedy of our warped political economy.

    But our troubles will not go away because our governors are busy levying their politics of group absolutism on the rest of us. We are now literally in the eye of every conceivable storm in the world. Just before Russia invaded Ukraine, the NNPC, flooded our gas stations with methanol enriched fuel. Many cars were ruined. Many lives may have been affected by toxic fumes from millions of coughing cars. Even the toxic gasoline was scarce. Queues at gas stations in Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kano and Kaduna stretched for as long as the imagination could go. Before the government could admit its negligent culpability in poisoning our cars and lungs, gas stations who had clean fuel hiked their prices to high heavens. We were helpless as always.

    Ever since, scarcity of gasoline has become endemic in most parts of the country as vendors fix their own prices while hapless motorists are left to their own designs. Meanwhile, we are constantly reminded that the subsidy on fuel is still in place even as we pay prices at the pump that are near enough to what it would have been if Mr. Buhari buried the subsidy regime in a courageous sweep.

    Meanwhile the investigation into whose idea it was to flood Nigeria with high methanol content toxic gasoline may have gone cold. In a country where the President is also the Petroleum Minister, the NNPC chief routinely ‘apologized’ to Nigerians and those with damaged car engines for the hurt and moved on. No consequences.

    Three weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we have suddenly found ourselves in the midst of other consequential crippling shortages of a strategic nature. Diesel now sells for as much as N800 a litre. Aviation fuel is scarce and equally exorbitant. Domestic airlines have threatened a total shut down of their services in a matter of days if they cannot find affordable fuel to keep flying. Their grouse is not only the scarcity and high prices which has already made nonsense of flight schedules.

    There is something more dreadful. Aviation fuel is said to have gone into the black market underground. All manner of wheeler dealers are now hawking aviation fuel. In Nigeria, that is a short hand for all manner of ingenious concoctions including mixtures of kerosene and water, kerosene and black oil, aviation fuel and petrol etc. The airline operators are wary and prefer to err on the side of extreme caution. Adulterated aviation fuel is not quite like toxic gasoline in your ‘tokunbo’ car’s fuel tank. No sensible airline operator wants to risk the lives of innocent passengers and the safety of their expensive aircraft. In Nigeria, nearly every airline that suffers a crash goes out of business quickly as insurance claims wipe off their bank balances.

    As if these tragedies are not enough, the various agencies that exist to provide electricity lately plunged the nation into an avoidable blackout. The explanations and excuses have been as wild, varied and familiar as typically Nigerian. It has ranged from a Power Minister who blamed low water levels and insufficient gas supply. Many power generating companies came up with excuses about gas power stations that suddenly became dysfunctional for lack of maintenance. Quickly, the distribution companies latched on to the parade of excuses. They have shifted the blame to the generation companies while the transmission company sat easy on the lame excuse that there is nothing to transmit if nothing is being generated. Of course, the distribution companies serving your neighbourhood are fully covered in the blame supply chain as they cannot distribute what does not exist. Meanwhile, a nation was tossed into darkness. Homes and businesses returned to Medieval times. Factories shut down. Many businesses preferred to close shop than to operate with diesel at satanic prices.

    Suddenly, the Federal Government has announced that all the ills of the collapsed electricity system have disappeared overnight! From far away London, the President issued a blanket apology to Nigerians for the inconvenience of the collapse of the national electricity grid. Again, no investigations as to the precise causes. No establishment of direct culpability. No undertaking or assurance that this will not happen again tomorrow. Most importantly, no consequences.

    When a nation is overwhelmed by a cocktail of challenges as we currently are, an election season should promise hope and relief. It is a legitimate entitlement of people living in a presumed democracy to hope and expect a better life as an expiring dispensation winds down. We should at least expect that the election season in the horizon will get our politicians to quit lazy distractions with the drama of power and focus for once on the many serious things that trouble us.

    A general election should herald new leaders. Hopefully, with new men and women of power could come more regular salaries, better electricity, cheaper food, more drugs in hospitals, fewer ASUU strikes and fewer bandits everywhere.

    Most importantly, the hope is often high that the population of angry people on the streets will reduce in the festive euphoria of campaigns. Maybe the bitterness in the hearts of men and the anguish in the bosom of women may reduce and tame the monster on the loose around the country.

    In the vast spread of rural Nigeria, election season is a time of transient plenty. ‘Stomach infrastructure’ is the ingenious term coined by our creative politicians (ex-Governor Fayose, are you there?) to describe the transactional essence of our democracy. It is a time to give poor folk the rare opportunity to break the four year cycles of literal famine and unconditional starvation. As it turns out, the assurance of brief goodness is the only relief that election seasons bring to the vast majority now used to the politics of betrayal and disappointments.

    Sadly, nothing in this legacy of politics of betrayal seems to embarrass our present breed of gubernatorial oligarchs. That is the tragedy of this time and place.

  • Mr. Putin is Nearby – By Chidi Amuta

    Mr. Putin is Nearby – By Chidi Amuta

    By Chidi Amuta

    The military junta in Mali recently chased away the French ambassador to the country. In quick response to a degenerating reciprocal diplomatic nastiness, President Emmanuel Macron ordered the withdrawal of a French stabilization force of over 3500 from Mali. The French troops had in 2013 gone to save the government in Bamako from being toppled by Islamic jihadists advancing from its northern regions and poised to overrun the country. The French troops quickly neutralized the jihadist advance and saved Mali from becoming an Islamic fundamentalist state.

    Quite significantly, the Bamako junta has quickly signed on a contingent of 1000 Russian mercenaries to replace the withdrawing French troops. The Russian mercenaries came from the infamous Wagner Group which enjoys the support and patronage of the Kremlin and corporate Russia. The Wagner Group is backed Yevgeny Prigozhin, Putin’s intimate friend.

    The Group is reportedly also in cahoots with cells of the Russian Mafia. In the raging Ukraine invasion, for instance, a contingent of 400 mercenaries from the Wagner Group were dispatched to infiltrate into Kyiv for the sole aim of assassinating President Zelensky. Ukrainian intelligence uncovered the plot and it has been frustrated so far. Undeterred, Moscow is reportedly in the process of increasing the Ukraine Wagner Group mercenary task force to 1000, to carry out various destabilization operations in the light of the frustration of the Russian mission in Ukraine.

    The Russian mercenaries in Mali are merely an expeditionary force tacitly supported by the Kremlin to probe a strategic opening in the region. With close links to Russian intelligence and big business, the Wagner Group mercenaries are out to explore new areas of strategic vulnerability and declining Western influence in troubled spots around the world.

    In the short run, the Russian mercenaries are likely to neutralize the jihadist menace in Mali and wherever else they go in West Africa, making their services an attractive security option to more troubled countries. These would be countries from which the French may still withdraw or those with ineffective national security apparatus.

    The Russian mercenaries may however have a wider interest than instant cash payments for their services. In return for securing vital mineral locations, they might negotiate mineral prospecting rights and contracts for major Russian corporations. If the venture becomes lucrative, an ambitious and aggressive Moscow might see an opening to expand its strategic influence in West Africa if only to fill the gap being left by a major West European power.

    If what is happening in Mali is an indication of the direction of developments in West Africa’s French speaking states, the presence of Moscow inspired mercenaries and hordes of Chinese contractors and free lance minerals marauders in the region could herald a tectonic shift in the strategic character of the region.

    French speaking countries bordering the Sahel have recently begun to witness a systematic reduction in French influence and support. Social and economic circumstances are worsening as France curtails its economic support for its erstwhile colonies. Islamic jihadist insurgents have recently ramped up pressure on these countries, squeezing their weakened security forces.

    In turn, their fragile democratic governments are being systematically overthrown by ambitious military adventurists. In quick succession, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Chad have all recently witnessed military coups. In each case, the cocktail of justifications by coup makers have included the bad handling of jihadist insurgency and terrorist pressure by elected governments.

    As French troops leave Mali in an untidy haste, the possibility that French military stabilization forces in the other West African countries could- also decline is clear and present. French domestic opinion in an election year is against continued support for its long -standing African former colonies and dependencies. There has of late been a general weariness about the continuation of colonial liabilities among the French populace.

    The return of military juntas in the region is a convenient reason for a weary France to pull support from its prodigal African dependents. After all, military regimes are anti democratic and a major European country like France can use this string of new dictatorships in former colonies as enough reason to cut off or drastically aid and support. Clearly, the resurgence of political instability in French West Africa as evidenced in these silly coups is a product of two major factors: a reduction in France’s interest and support and security pressure from increasing Islamic jihadist armed activity in the Sahel.

    The Sahel has since been recognized as a strategic nightmare for West Africa, Europe and indeed the rest of the world that is worried by the expansion of Islamic jihadist violence. Similarly, illegal migration of unskilled Africans across the Meditarennean with transit through the Sahel remains a headache for Europe. The Sahel is a hostile, barren, poverty stricken and unstable zone that spans many West African countries. Guinea, Mali, Cote d”Ivoire, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso and Nigeria are all in the direct footprints of the Sahel.

    By all estimates, the Sahel has become the world headquarters of jihadist terrorism. In 2021, the Global Terrorism Index reported that half of all those killed in terrorist attacks worldwide were from sub Saharan Africa with the Sahel recording the highest figures. The Institute for Economics and Peace records that the Sahel accounts for 35% of the sub Saharan terrorist casualties. By most accounts, the leading jihadist group affiliated to al- Queda in the region is Jama’t Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin. In different countries in the Sahel, this umbrella group goes by different local names and parades diverse iterations.

    In all of these countries, the spread of Islamic jihadist terrorism has in recent years complicated the task of individual national security and bedeviled regional strategic stability. In addition to the armed jihadist activity, these countries are all subject to the impact of climate change induced by the southward expansion of the Sahara desert . Drought has shrunk agricultural land. Agricultural communities have gotten poorer. There has been a forced southward migration of large populations and increased unenemp;oyment. Many of the unemployed and hungry youth have joined violent jihadist movements thereby destabilizing some the countries.

    Mali has set a dangerous precedent. The junta in Bamako has used the face off with France as a distraction from its reluctance to honour previous pledges to hand over power to elected democratic rulers. The Mali precedent is that of replacing a colonial military presence with rogue mercenary elements from Russia. The possibility that the other juntas in the neigbourhood could buy into the propaganda and seek Russian help against their own jihadists is within the zone of possibility.

    This development is coming at a time when France is actively re-assessing its relationship with its former colonies. The economic benefits have shrunk. The cultural affinity is dying. The security assistance budget is getting too bloated for a France that is faced with severe economic challenges at home.

    The impression that France’s Mali disconnection has created goes beyond a quarrel between a former colony and its old master. It signals an impending shrinkage in a major Western interest in West Africa. For historical reasons, there is hardly any other Western contender that could fill the vacuum that France could leave in its West African former colonies. And in the context of present day global power competition, Russia and China are ever so eager to rush into strategic spaces vacated by the West. The new contest in world affairs is between the liberal democratic West and an ambitious autocratic alliance of China and Russia. Western appetite for foreign markets and sources of raw materials is declining while China is hungry for a global sphere of influence. Russia, a rogue ambitious state thrives on dark schemes involving arms and violence in vulnerable places.

    The Chinese are already copiously present in West Africa as contractors, concessionary lenders of funds for development and vendors of different wares. They are involved in financing and actual execution of major infrastructure projects ranging from railroads to airports, highways and bridges. Russia does not have credit or technical aid to export. But it has excess capacity in terms of redundant Soviet era veterans, an array mothballed military hardware and major corporations with an appetite for mineral rights, raw materials for their industries and government contracts. Cash strapped West African countries that cannot defend themselves in spite of their large standing armies are easy prey to such nefarious Russian influence. The danger of an expansion of Russian influence could become real in the event that more West African countries collapse into a heap of insecurity and economic hopelessness.

    Russian influence in Africa remains sporadic and uncoordinated but cannot be ignored as a significant part of the strategic future of the continent. 2019- inaugural Russia-Africa Summit in Sochi attended by 43 African countries. It was a forum for Mr. Putin to critique the West’s policies towards Africa. Nonetheless, Russia’s trade with Africa is only 2% of Africa’s goods trade with the rest of the world. A Russian bank VEB now under Western sanctions is a share holder in the African Development Bank. Even then, Russia’s economic and military interest and roles in some African fragile states remains substantial. Russia is the largest arms supplier to African countries, a net extractor of mineral and other resources and a prop for fragile even if unpopular regimes.

    Central African Republic is host to 2000 Wagner mercenaries where they are protecting the government from being overrun by rebels. They are being paid in gold and diamonds. In Guinea, Rusal, a major Russian aluminum company has three mines which supplied their factories in Ukraine, now closed, with bauxite from mines in Guinea. The junta in Guinea has chased away the Ukrainian envoy in the country to placate Mr. Putin.

    On March 2nd, the UN General Assembly voted on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Of the 54 African member states, 28 voted against Russia while 17 abstained and 8 refused to show up. Towards Russia or more precisely the old Soviet Union, some elite nostalgia still exists in some African countries. Many of the first and second generation African elite in the days of the Cold War studied in the USSR. Ideological nostalgia towards the ‘evil empire’ is strongest in places like Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa where political parties that pioneered the independence and anti racist struggles were backed by the old Soviet Union. This does not signal an unconditional love for the West among African nations. African countries are yet to forget the Western destabilization of Libya in 2011.

    For Nigeria, the last decade has witnessed a resilient insecurity, insurgency and jihadist criminality. Boko Haram has been joined by ISWAP in an unholy alliance that does not bode well for Nigeria. Their combined force has made the insecurity in parts of the North east even more problematic and intractable. Over a decade has gone by and no one can see the end of the insurgency in parts of northern Nigeria. A new wave of banditry and various iterations of casual terrorists now provide Boko Haram and ISWAP with captives. Between an outright counter insurgency war and what ought to be a crime control operation against free lance bandits lately branded terrorists by Abuja, no one knows the dividing line any more.

    The seemingly intractable nature of these challenges has tempted many otherwise sensible political leaders and opinion leaders to throw up the mercenary option. It no longer matters to anyone that the mercenary option implies a tacit vote of no confidence in Nigeria’s large security forces on whom so much resources have been committed in the last 10 years and more. In the public perception, all the big generals and their dazzling medals, the sophisticated aircraft, fleets of armoured personnel carriers and assorted weapons seem to have been neutralized by bands of roving untrained rag tag terrorists. The call for the engagement of mercenaries is therefore a cry of helplessness and desperation.

    As part of this sad twist to our narrative, the Jonathan administration in 2014 briefly engaged some South African mercenaries in the fight against Boko Haram just before the 2015 elections. No one can say for certain how effective this gambit was. Recently, Mr. Zulum, the Governor of Borno State, which is the epicenter of jihadist terrorism and insurgency in Nigeria, has advocated the engagement of mercenaries to contain the expanding influence of the insurgents. This governor has been in the front line of the ravages of the terrorists and is perhaps in the best position to offer a realistic assessment of how things stand.

    For the avoidance of doubt, the factors that have made the mercenary option attractive to Mali are arguably present in Nigeria as well. Government security agencies that appear to be in disarray. Pressure from jihadist forces that seem unrelenting and increasingly audacious. Unmanned mining fields of solid mineral scattered in ungoverned spaces of states with failing governance structures. The presence of diverse foreign adventurers and rogue miners who arrange their own security and make illicit deals with local chieftains, state officials and rogue official security agents. Corruption within the official security establishment which is sabotaging genuine efforts at containing the jihadist onslaught. There is the reality of local populations who are beginning to find more protection in the hands of the jihadists than in the hands of government security forces. Local populations that are being forced to shift their allegiance and pay taxes and tributes to jihadist terror gangs who are more present than distant official security forces.

    In this chaotic and dangerous atmosphere which is prevalent in many parts of Nigeria’s North West, if Russian mercenaries get a strong political nod from Nigerian leaders, they could become a ready alternative to our armed and security forces. In the event that the toxic proposition of engaging mercenaries acquires enough political support and traction, we may find ourselves playing host to thousands of Russian agents and combatants in the troubled parts of the country. In that event, if Vladimir Putin comes calling on Abuja for any reason, our politicians may find it expedient to welcome him to Maiduguri as our new partner in national and regional security.