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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • A mid term of phantoms – By Chidi Amuta

    A mid term of phantoms – By Chidi Amuta

    President Tinubu and his squad have been observing their mid term. I would not exactly say they have been celebrating  as they were reluctant to roll out the red carpets and call in the clowns of ceremony. Instead, the presidency has caused an elaborate avalanche of Power Point presentations and elaborate holographs of his achievements published in all major national newspapers and online platforms.

    His key officials, party hacks and sundry spokespersons have been crowing on what a pleasure road to paradise Nigerians have been travelling in the last two years.

    In one outlandish and embarrassing outburst, Mr. Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s Mr. Squeler or poor imitation of Goebbels was quoted claiming that Tinubu’s great economic reform has started yielding fruits. Nigerians are now making tons of money  producing and exporting Zobo, crude  local herbal drink known and consumed by a minority of low class citizens in the northern fringes.

    I have never heard that Zobo ever had an export market or any market outside Nigeria. Beyond such outlandish and unsubstantiated adolescent claims, no one else in the administration has had the courage to conjure up any economic or social benefit of the great Tinubi economic transformation. But the mid term phantom festivities have progressed nonetheless since the administration needs to be seen marking a significant mile stone.

    Elite economists and publicists in quest of substantiating data have instead resorted to international ratings by agencies like Fitch and the World Bank for projections on Nigeria’s economic prospects.  Among local economists, silence is the norm. No one who respects his certificate dares make any pronouncements that sound like an endorsement of the Tinubu policy landscape. No one wants to be waylaid and flogged in the streets for bearing false witness.

    It is far better to remain silent and try to navigate one’s way around spiraling inflation and impossible living costs. Beyond a slew of sponsored articles and statistics fed from official quarters, no respectable medium dares paint a rosy picture of the tragic times in which we now live. In fact on the eve of Tinubu’s Mid term point, a few fair minded publications extended invitations to key officials  of the administration to come face editors to present a score card of the administration’s mid term score card.

    The officials invited include the Governor of the Central Bank, the Minister of Finance and the Economy, the Chief Economic Adviser to the President etc. One week past the Mid Term point, hardly any of these administration “big men” has thought it safe or wise enough to face reporters or risk their fat necks on the guillotine of public scrutiny for fear of public opprobrium for what may turn out to be outright baseless lies. But the fake statistics and dubious claims have continued to fly around the public space.

    Between the elaborate bogus claims and phantom statistics, ordinary Nigerians are somewhat perplexed. People are at a loss as to which country Tinubu’s propagandists are referring to. The statistics hardly accord with the general hollowness and desperation  of the common man’s life. There is even more doubt as to whether the copious claims about achievements of the regime really refer to present day Nigeria or maybe some astral universe in which wishes have become realities.

    Defying all manner of doubts about his commitment to real development, the President himself took an unusually bold and unfamiliar leap last weekend. Having gone ahead to award one of the largest infrastructure contracts in modern Nigerian history, the Lagos-Calabar highway, the President was determined to prove doubters wrong as to whether the project would be completed within his tenure.

    He has commissioned some 30 kilometers of the 785 km highway, a laughable less than 5% of the entire length of the project. This is one of the rare occasions when a Nigerian leader has commissioned a major national project in pieces and pieces!

    Predictably, the usual coterie of clappers and cheer leaders were on hand to praise the President to high heavens. It is quite significant that the usual collection of government-bred Nigerian oligarchs of manufacturers, bankers,   traders and wheeler dealers were on hand to witness the joke. The private sector was there in full since in any case these briefcase oligarchs are all creatures of government in its familiar buccaneer iteration. It is doubtful whether any of these industry and private entrepreneurs would commission a mere 5% of any project belonging to their organizations.

    To decorate the scenery with celebrity  and lend it some presumptive credibility,  Wole Soyinka was in attendance as an extension of his controversial serial endorsements of Tinubu’s presidency.  In every way, the premature commissioning has taken place. But no one has yet said when the rest of this Alaska Highway would be completed.

    Nor has anyone told us what is so strategic in the swampy stretch between the Lagos lagoon and the swamps of Calabar. This road is just the Nigerian equivalent of the infamous Alaskan highway, a showpiece shiny highway that literally leads from and to nowhere in economic terms.

    By its nature and motivation, the proverbial Alaskan Highway is a beautiful  freeway with all modern amenities  designed and built way before anyone has had time to figure out what purpose the highway is designed to be or who exactly it is meant to serve.  The road exists. It matters little where it is coming from and where it is leading. Just build itand the traffic will come. People are always coming from somewhere and heading somewhere whether or not it makes sense. A road remains a road. As my friend Yemi Ogunbiyi says in the title of his memoir,  “ the road never forgets.”

    I am ignorant as to what trade takes place between Lagos and Calabar or what volume of cargo traffic passes through the projected route. I am not so sure where the highway will head next  when it terminates in the creeks of Calabar. Nor am I sure that the heavy commercial traffic of cargo from Lagos to the South Eastern hinterland would prefer to travel to Calabar instead of straight to Onitsha, Owerri, Aba , Nnewi and Awka.

    That would seem to  be the more natural route of cargo, passengers and trade. There is a more direct way of accessing these trading and cardo centres from Lagos. And it would probably cost much less to modernize and expand the existing Lagos-Benin-Onitsha-Owerri-Calabar highway than the trillions we are shelling out on this new phantom highway.

    I was brought up to think that economically strategic roads are about the transportation of people, goods and services from where they are abundant to where they are most desired. Big roads make recovery revenue by charging tolls along heavy traffic routs in order to recover their costs and pay back these dubious loans.

    But on this project, silence is the answer. The pursuit of grandeur in and for itself seems to have become an end is in itself. Build it and they will come. I would not know what became of the Calabar Export Processing Zone and Tinapa tourist and retail heavens.  I don’t know how much commercial traffic from Lagos goes to Calabar in search of these white elephant schemes.

    Some citizens have defied these phantom second anniversary ceremonies and claims. Important questions are being asked about real life conditions under Mr. Tinubu’s two horrible years. Anno horribilis would be Queen Elizabeth II’s characterization of such years in British life as were witnessed during the Covid-19 years.

    Tinubu’s holocaust is worse because it is not the  result of an unintended happening. Tinubu’s economic holocaust on Nigerians is not an act of nature or an accident of history. It is intentional blunder born out of pathetic ignorance of public policy and economic engineering. We are dealing with a deliberately foisted human tragedy of epic proportions.

    Through a largely thoughtless policy gamble, an entire nation has been hurled into unnecessary calamity. Energy prices have been raised. Money can hardly buy anything. The poverty population has overtaken the rest of the populace. Everything that makes life worth living is now priced beyond the reach of  the many.

    If indeed Tinubu’s gambit were in aid of a so- called reform of the economy and society, it would be understandable. No one can see the economic blueprint and destination  let alone fathom the social objectives of the Tinubu government.  We all know the Buhari wilderness  where Tinubu met us. We know what the pump price of gasoline was when he came.

    We know for how much the dollar exchanged as Buhari headed for the exit. We can recall the cost of a return economy ticket to London then. We know what we used to pay for electricity or cooking gas. Essential drugs used to be affordable to many.

    Now, most Nigerians burdened with the yoke of Tinubu’s indirection are yearning to be returned to the worst of Buhari’s days than to be left in the wilderness of this rudderless and strange paradise with no compass.  Tinubu dropped by on his inauguration date and casually dropped the bombshell that “fuel subsidy is gone”. Other thoughtless  reflexes followed in a stream. But two years down the road, no one has told us where the economic policy is leading.

    No one has defined the economic or social destination. When a multitude of over 200 million citizens are being led on empty stomach to a journey without a defined destination, to trudge on and follow is a bit foolish. To hope, following something called  “renewed hope agenda” is an even more tragic folly.  Hope cooks no food. Hope is no destination for those who love life nor is it a plan of action. Hope without direction or definable targets is a chimera, a never never land that ends in an abyss of catastrophe.

    Predictably, there is a narrative that has been rehashing the achievements of the Tinubu presidency. It depends on where you are standing to watch this rough masquerade. If you are within the precincts of Aso Villa or the many   feeding points of government patronage in Abuja and all over the country, you are likely to see and hear the claims of  grand achievements by the government propaganda apparatus.

    The uniting message of the “renewed hope agenda” is that Nigerians should believe in Tinubu’s political sagacity and leadership track record as bases of hope in the future of the country. But people are very hungry and desperate. Many are insecure even inside their own homes. A nation that thrives on hope and belief is now being asked to believe some more and have faith in the power of the unknown. The faith that has kept us this far has not brought us anywhere near the gates of paradise!

    A four year presidential tenure is a tricky time frame in the political calendar of any such democratic nation, the first two years are for setting an agenda and activating it in the form of actionable programmes, policies and projects  to give the administration an identity and direction. The third year is a dress rehearsal for the politics of re-election as the ongoing agenda rolls on. Tinubu has wasted two valuable years and is entering the third year in active preparation for the politics of a possible re-election in 2027. The populace can hardly see what the administration has achieved in two years to qualify for consideration for re-election. This is Tinubu’s political conundrum  and albatross. How to account for lost time and justify yet another campaign for tenure extension: that is Tinubu’s political burden.

    Incidentally, the remaining two years of Tinubu’s tenure is not time reserved for him and his party alone to bestride and stro;; around in the political space. It is time and space only for him to share with an aggressive opposition coalition. Tinubu knows the gathering opposition and they know him well. His record is abysmal, thus arming the opposition with tools to do him grave harm.  The opposition has confessed that they share severe hunger with the majority of Nigerians. A “hungry” political opposition is not the easiest opponent in a duel.

    Tinubu’s political future beyond this first term is a puzzle wrapped in curiosity and dressed in Nigerian uncertainty. The great question remains this: can the leader of a failed government and an unpopular party defy political gravity and win re-election?

  • A referendum on nothing – By Chidi Amuta

    A referendum on nothing – By Chidi Amuta

    The APC as the ruling party has developed a rather curious sense of comedy. It is in a way futuristic and steps ahead of the country over which it rules. From the utterances of its chief priests and prime pontiffs, it has already held the next presidential elections a  clear two years ahead of 2027. It has even declared the results well in advance. In that futuristic comedy, it has declared incumbent president Mr. Bola Tinubu as the winner. The crowd has already gathered at Eagle Square for a grand inauguration. For the APC, the president has already been reelected for a second term.

    From the length and breadth of the country, partisan hawks  and jesters have been busy in the last fortnight with gloating over a foregone Tinubu re-election. National and State party executives led the pack in declaring Tinubu the sole candidate of the party for 2027. Major party faithful all around the country have followed suit. Strategically, they have carefully arranged themselves around geopolitical zones mostly in order of demographic gravity. The more populous zones like the North West have naturally led the pack.

    The futuristic electoral tsunami has been fuelled by the recent and ongoing deluge of mass defections from other parties into the APC. Those defecting in droves need the reassurance of an assured foregone victory in order to jostle for vantage positions in their new party.  These defections have helped fuel the illusion that Nigeria is about to degenerate into a one party state.  In the euphoria f the moment, the Nigerian state presided over by Mr. Tinubu has forgotten that political parties constitute the building block of a viable multi party democracy. It ought ot be in the best interest of an enlightened government that the party system remains vibrant and viable. But in this place, the false impression of politics as warfare has tended to blind the APC and its leadership into a conquest mode.

    The myth of a foregone Tinubu succession victory is the second chapter in the APC’s carefully choreographed 2027 strategy. The first was to hoodwink the entire nation into ignoring the myriad social and economic  crises of the moment and  shift focus to the contest for 2027 presidential election. The gsmbit has largely succeeded. Every politicians is now fixated on the 2027 race. The political elite including the opposition have largely fallen for this deception. Instead of keeping Tinubu and the APC with strict accountability for the mandate given them in 2023, nearly everyone is busy speculating about the outcome of the 2027 presidential election. What happened to the epidemic of hunger all over the land? Why is no serious solution being sought to the resurgence of the Boko Haram scourge? Why are our myriad graduating kids not finding work? Why has every hospital become more of a morgue? Silence. Even more silence at state and national levels.

    It is as if there will be no life before 2027. The masses are not amused. But what they are seeing is both shocking and bemusing. Yet it is real in digitsl colour. People who contested to make our lives better just two years ago have abandoned us mid stream to  be swallowed by the ogres of want and poverty.

    It is also as though the presidency is the only consequential political office in the land. Even state governors in rival parties who have been sitting around doing little or nothing these many months are busy threatening their electoral grassroots that they are about to join the APC. This is happening even in the most unlikely places.

    The other day when President Tinubu went visiting with Governor Soludo of Anambra state, he was rewarded with a promise that Anambra has endorsed him for re-election in 2027. This is coming from a governor in a state where Labour Party’s  Peter Obi does not need to campaign to win the majority vote. In tandem, Tinubu’s Works Minister, Dave Umahi, has cajoled Governor Alex Otti and Peter Obi on the need for the South East political elite to join the national Marionette  chorus on the Tinubu mass endorsement.

    Purely from a narrow APC perspective then, the 2027 presidential election contest is looking more like an impending referendum. It promises to be a referendum first on Tinubu’s overall job approval rating as president of Nigeria. Nigerians would be called out to approve or disapprove of his leadership record on a scale that measures him against previous Nigerian leaders. It does not matter that the man’s basic qualification for the job remains cloudy. It does not matter that no one recalls any memeorable speech he has made as president. It does not even matter that he has initiated no clearly articulated policy on anything. Let alone come across as enlightened, informed or conversant with any aspect of national life. Yes, the man is an astute politician, adept at power mongering and playing. Is that what the impending referendum will be all about?

    It may be a referendum on the economy in which Nigerians are invited by INEC to approve or disapprove of Tinubu’s handling of the economy. Matters like the dying exchange rate, the tanking purchasing power  of the Naira, the raging inflation, the sky high food prices  may feature as referendum items.  On the scale of social service, Nigerians would be invited by the APC and INEC to approve or disapprove of the disappearing healthcare system, the declining educational system, the roofless classrooms, the universities turned cult covens and ritual murder centres and cybercrime hubs. The Tinubu /APC referendum will invite us all to endorse a nation in darkness. Not to talk of the intractable insecurity as evidenced by the return of Boko Haram, the spread of ISWAP and the increasing helplessness of our military. A formidable military force that took only two years to end the Nigerian civil war has spent over 12 years without containing a roving band of hungry gunmen and zealots!

    Fortunately, Nigeria is far from a one-party democracy in spite of its tattered party system. The seasonal migration into the APC does not confer on the APC the status of a monopoly of partisanship. Nor does the overall population of the APC in any way confer on the party a demographic majority of Nigeria’s voting population. On the contrary, the main body of Nigerians who detest the APC and its policies far overwhelm the party’s noisy chest beating.  Nor can the mass migration into the APC confer on Mr. Tinubu the charisma and esteem which he hardly possesses. The man is merely tolerated as a systemic throwup, not loved by even his immediate home base. Leadership endorsement through a referendum-like election is only possible when the leader commands a groundswell of popular approval and personal electricity. I cannot see it anywhere in Tinubu’s Nigeria.

    This is not to under estimate the capacity of Mr. Tinubu and his ethnocentric minions to manipulate the political process and blackmail the political elite into making the next election look like an intra -party referendum. Mr. Tinubu is reputed to sit on a nearly limitless  trove of cash resources both  from prior undertakings and deals and from the current incumbency. His capacity to deploy these resources to political effect has never been in doubt. And for as long as money and what it can buy remains the determining factor in Nigerian politics, it would be childish to write off Mr. Tinubu.

    More seriously, Tinubu has so far demonstrated a huge appetite for authoritarian flirtations. He rules more like an emperor   than an elected president in a republican democracy. He holds his key ministers to no known standards of accountability. He has repeatedly failed to restrain members of his family from acting like royalty. From his Lagos days till the present, he brooks little dissent. He humours and rewards loyalists to his personal cause.

    Under Tinubu, authoritarian streaks have emerged. Journalists are being arrested and detained randomly. Known opponents of government and outspoken critics are routinely invited for  interrogation by the police, the DSS and the EFCC. Mr. Pat Utomi has been sued by the DSS for the laughable crime of sitting in his bedroom to declare the formation of a shadow government under a presidential system, not a Westminster parliamentary system.  Something that should have qualified for an after dinner laughing session is being weaponized by the state to serve an authoritarian end.

    The illusion in the APC that the entire party could be cornered into a loud ovation for a sole Tinubu candidate for the 2027 ticket is straight from the playbooks of classic African dictators. The more one listens to the spokespersons of the APC, they echo the rhetoric of Mobutu, Nguema, Eyadema, Biya , Mugabe and even a bit of Kagame. It is all too familiar in a continent replete with sit tight dictators.

    Perhaps the more urgent task facing the APC is that of transforming into a modern political party under a more enlightened  leadership. A political party led by the Ghanduje’s of this world belong in the museum of African politics and would always be an insult to the forward-looking outlook of Nigeria’s vibrant population.

  • Trump: The stumble after 100 days – By Chidi Amuta

    Trump: The stumble after 100 days – By Chidi Amuta

    When Donald Trump first peeped into the Presidential wagon to say he wanted to run, the reception was mixed. America was united nonetheless by what we can call ‘Washington fatigue.’  People were tired of the bureaucratic gridlock, the diplomatic rigmarole and the congressional multi speak that yielded little or no progress. The boredom was palpable just as the hunger for novelty was everywhere. The consensus was that something different needed to be injected into the political culture and governmental methods of Washington to get America  out of its overall decline. America was fast degenerating into  a museum of liberal democracy and a rusty showpiece of bureaucratic humdrum. The political drama was jaded just as the institutions were beginning to fray at the limits.

    Donald Trump, long known for his disruptive behavior and public opinion outbursts and disturbing cultural insinuations was still very much a television presence better known for his disruptive interviews and business series “The Apprentice” patented for the cliché ‘You are fired’! When he showed up at a Republican political event  in Atlanta to indicate he might be seeking the forthcoming presidential ticket for the presidency, there was a stir. The media went agog with a mixture of excitement and concern. People were excited that something different was about to disturb the political peace of Washington as it had become known. The majority were concerned that a major cultural disruption was in the making given Mr. Trump’s long held racist overtones. He had discriminated against some of his workers on grounds of skin colour; had taken worrisome sides   in a much publicized case against black youth wrongly accused and convicted in a much publicized Central Park murder case. In the midst of the popular appeal of the Obama presidency, Trump had challenged Obama’s United States nationality by insisting that he was not a US citizen until his birther argument fell flat on its nose.

    For one thing, people looked forward to a replacement of the clow pace of government with a faster pace usually associated with the private sector. The poorer rural and rust belt Americans glorified Trump as one of their own who had made good and could create an atmosphere in which ordinary Americans could aspire to and attain the American dream if only they could chase off immigrants  and ‘strangers’.

    Time has since passed. Trump has been elected President once before. He had inaugurated and presided over a divided America, promoted divisive policies that discriminated against blacks, Muslims and immigants especially from the rest of Latin America and the world. Stiff opposition to his divisive policies and stance has yielded the emergence of separatist movements including white supremacist factions like Proud Boys, MAGA. Black Lives Matter etc. His illiterate opposition to Covid-19 vaccinations and mask mandate facilitated his defeat by Joe Biden and the Democrats. In turn, a rather tepid  and unimpressive tenure by the Democrats has ushered Mr. Trump back into the White House with a rousing mandate dominated by mostly white supremacist Americans and a hostile atmosphere against immigrants and a more diverse nation.

    Armed with a fundamentalist agenda and fanatical hostility to immigrants, diversity, equality and integrative policies, Trump has in the last over 100 days presided over an isolationist, divisive and belligerent America, mistaking his new mandate for a vote for his extremist positions. His aggressive hostility towards individual nations-Mexico, Canada, Panama, Greenland, Denmark and other selected destinations has attracted to America the hostility and danger of erstwhile allies and presumed friends. In a thoughtless sweep of tariff wars against virtually every imaginable nation, Trump was in the process of upending the American economy when common sense pulled him back from the brinks. The Chines wrestled him to the ground and taught him the wisdom of discernment.

    In an attempt to regain the acclaim which his ego values over and above basic common sense, he seems to have stumbled back to the original appeal of his presidential template. Trump was first admired for bringing the “can do” spirit of a business mogul to ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington. People looked forward to   a new ethos, the ethos of a business culture and deal making to drive the stalled business of American governance. While the cultural and diplomatic hostilities that he has ignited glow in the background, Trump has reawakened  the art of ‘deal making’ as his original primary appeal. In addition, he is dangling global salesmanship of America as a substitute for conventional diplomacy and foreign relations. To the American business community, he is dangling the prospect of heavy financial returns in the form of mega investments in the US economy to speed up economic growth and recovery.

    In the last one week or more, this note of self rediscovery has turned Mr. Trump’s attention to salesmanship and marketing of America more as a merchandise than as a global power leader.

    When reminded that his tariff blunders were beginning to drive the American economy to tank and isolate the United States into an isolated cubicle, Mr. Trump has revised his rhetoric  into a desire to lure major partners to negotiate and make a deal. Predictably, the language of deal making as a strategy can only appeal to countries with large resource base and with an eye on leveraging the United States’ strategic and economic advantages.

    Like the business man that he is, Mr. Trump has predictably surrounded himself with the major pillars of American finance and capital. Right from his inauguration, he has deliberately surrounded himself with the richest names in the United States. He even offered Elon Musk a slot in his cabinet to help him reduce the costs of government through a conscious disorganization of the machinery of government in  Washington. In the process, the basic infrastructure of American soft power both at home and globally has been disoriented. Worldwide, American is being weakened progressively. Mr. Musk has beaten an untidy retreat to tend the business of Tesla and other matters.

    Lacking the capacity to conduct diplomacy as the time honoured language of international relations, Mr. Trump has taken to hectoring allies and seeking to entice new allies into profitable deals. In this pursuit to replace diplomacy with transactional deals, Mr. Trump decided to head to carefully chosen Middle East countries in quest of new alliances and deals. He just returned from a four day trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. During the trips, Mr. Trip signed over 250 deals on a wide range of  transactions covering investment, defense, technology, Artificial Intelligence etc.

    In all of these deal making encounters, Mr. Trump, the quitessential business man and real estate wheeler dealer,  did not forget his personal interests. In all the countries he chose to visit, there is a thinly disguised Trump mega investment and private project. These range from luxury resorts to Golf Courses, high rise towers to vast real estate ventures.

    Easily the most conspicuous spin-off of these deal making ventures was the offer of a $450 million Boeing 747 clone jet Air Force One to Mr. Trump from the government of Qatar, a wealthy known financier of  Hamas and other terrorist squads in the Middle East. This offer left Mr. Trump gasping for moral breadth as he was reminded of the constitutional,  ethical and security barriers to his acceptance of such an unusual grandiose gift.

    Beyond this hasty reversion to deal making in place of diplomacy, Mr. Trump has returned to Washington to face the real challenges of presiding over the United States as the lead nation of the world with real life challenges  at home and abroad. The calamity of Israel’s atrocious war in Gaza is festering. The prospect of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine remains as untidy and in tatters as ever.  No one knows how the stand off between India and Pakistan will end. A good number of the tariff wars set off by Mr. Trump remain smoldering and largely unresolved and may now return to haunt him.

    There is a limit to deal making and deliberate provocation as strategies of national leadership. National and international leadership by a major global power remains a task of grit and grind demanding the old arts of governance and bureaucratic due process at home and diplomatic nuance abroad. The ways of government are as a long and winding as the corridors and hallways of the offices in which the business of state is run.

    Sometimes, governments work best with crowds of employees milling around numerous questionable offices unlike a private corporation in which each occupied seat or cubicle is accounted for. One of the unexplored secrets of governments all over the world is that of why governments build foolish structures, observe stupid ceremonies and say foolish things. Sometimes, what is called the wisdom of state is elementary idiocy. That is government 101!

    In the post 100-day period, Mr. trump and his handlers will come to grips with the reality that governance is still an ancient madness. It has its methods, its peculiar language and body language.

    Even more peculiar are the demands of diplomacy and the demands of international relations. Nations bend and bow for each other in a peculiar manner that also has its language , demands and expectations. Wars are not commanded to end in 24 hours. Long held treaties do not just end abruptly. International boundaries drawn up after centuries old negotiations and treaties do not just end because some tyrant desires it to be so. Above all, the sovereignty of nations is not a function of the size of their territories or armies but the sanctity of their national histories   and the reciprocal respect to which such history entitles each nation.

    Back at home, Mr. Trump will have to decide whether presidential power is all about Trump and his billionaire friends or the welfare of the common American whose life circumstances are determined by prices in the grocery shop. Matters like gasoline prices, price of eggs, basic medications, rents, access to food etc. will come to override the movements of figures on Wall Street. Trump now has to make a deal with ordinary Americans over these issues of bread and butter.

    By the mid term, the footprints of what may become the Trump legacy will have been firmly imprinted on the American landscape. The rough and tumble of the Trump era will have become something to prolong or forever discard as a bad dream. The hour is coming when Trump’s trade mark rhetoric will no longer appeal to anyone. The insults will be directed at himself. America will by then have come to decide whether it opted for positive reform of its democratic heritage or the institution of a pseudo monarchy of the Trump family and friends.

    Like Trump is right now telling Iran: the United States can never ever have a king or a monarchy!

  • 2027: Rehearsing an Unlikely Coronation – By Chidi Amuta

    2027: Rehearsing an Unlikely Coronation – By Chidi Amuta

    The Tinubu presidency has shown utter disrespect for Nigerians. It is above all insensitive to the suffering and hardship of most Nigerians. Instead of rendering a sensible mid term account of its mandate, the administration is celebrating the onset of the 2027 presidential election race.  A clear two years to the end of its tenure, major political voices in the ruling party are already predicting a sweeping Tinubu re -election victory and his coronation as the king hereafter. 

    The administration has cornered public opinion and its vulnerable opponents into a mindset that the most urgent national challenge of the moment is the 2027 election. The central question of the polity is being recast as: who succeeds Tinubu? Of course, there is a trusm that groundless optimism is the most common disease of political animals. Show me a politicians that is not optimistic of victory at the next election and I will point at a platoon of wise fools!

    We are at the mid term of a tenure that promised Nigerians nearly every opposite of the Buhari interregnum. Mr. Buhari, easily the most disastrous leader of modern Nigeria before the Tinubu catastrophe, had run the nation literally aground before tenure expiration saved him from himself  and rescued the nation from what was clearly the world’s most tragic instance of bad governance. Mounting debts, incoherent policies, perennial absenteeism of the leader,  disastrous elocution, embarrassing aloofness and industrial scale corruption were the hallmarks of the Buhari era. In the history of Nigeria, never had a Central Bank Governor been charged with the magnitude of treasury looting as Buhari’s Godwin Emefelie. 

    Then came Tinubu on the wagon of one of the most disgraceful elections in national history. A mandate secured on a razor thin majority of less than 30% of registered voters ushered in what has so far turned out to be Nigeria’s most clueless dispensations. Tinubu promised nothing. He said little that any one found coherent. No one recalls making sense of his campaign gibberish, They said he promised to  right the wrongs of the Buhari era even though he was running on the same party ticket as his Daura friend. In all fairness, no one remembers what exactly Tinubu said he was going to do with power. His only mission was to pack into a rent free Aso Villa. But two years after, here we are with a presidency that has turned our lives into two years in purgatory. The only Nigerians who now harbor any hope of a reprieve from hell are the few partakers in the feast of pork and patronage in Abuja. 

    Nearly every indicator of hardship is on digital display in today’s Nigeria. The majority can ill afford the next meal. Hunger has emerged as a national epidemic for the first time in our history. Access to electric  power has shrunk to the extent that even the Presidential Lodge in Abuja can hardly afford to pay its power bills and now has to install a solar panel to save costs. 

    Insecurity  has enveloped the entire national space, compelling informed people to suggest that the Ministry of Defense should be scrapped and replaced with an omnibus  Ministry of  Internal Security as all available security infrastructure and personnel all over the country have been deployed to joint internal security operations with hardly any tangible results. 

    Bandits, kidnappers, serial abductors and sundry gun men and women rule the highways and streets while official security personnel have since been outgunned by non -state agents and vigilantes of unknown nomenclature. A supposedly modern Nigerian state with well funded armed forces and over decorated officers is now shamelessly enlisting the services of native hunters, medicine men and charmers to stave off the forces of insecurity across the land. 

    It is this myriad of afflictions and failures that threaten the existence of the Nigerian state. It is these threats to national existence and the integrity of the Nigerian state that those who voted in 2023 are demanding that Tinubu and his gang should account for. At this mid term hour, Nigerians are asking for affordable food, essential drugs, affordable building materials, access to affordable education in schools without leaky roofs and guarantee of basic safety in their daily lives. It is accountability for these pressing basic needs and problems that demand urgent attention as the Tinubu government marks two years in office. National political offices that were meant to go round and give us all a sense of belonging to one nation have been cornered into one corner of our commonwealth.

    To ignore these basic needs of the people and shunt public attention to the 2027 succession political battle is the height of insincerity and political deceit. To jump from that fraud to speculation as to why Tinubu deserves a second term in office is worse than mass deceit. It can only be that the administration is investing more energy  in mass deceit and amnesia than the real grind of governance. The efforts of the government  seem to be geared more towards succession politics than real time governance on a daily basis.

    The obstacle to this deceptive politics is perhaps the possibility of an opposition coalition to challenge the APC in 2027. To counter this obstacle, whatever fickle opposition there is in the political space is being squeezed into a survival mode. The Peoples Democratic Party and its mascot, Mr. Atiku Abubakar, have been reduced to an unsettled chaotic herd. No one knows which executive now runs the party as conflicting factions engage each other in either fisticuffs  or silly litigations in various courts across the land. Corrupt judges that have to adjudicate in these cases are having a ball with their bankers. The special squad of destabilizers led by the ubiquitous FCT Minister, Mr. Nyesom Wike, are having a busy time disorganizing the PDP all over the country. If indeed the PDP survives between now and the eve of 2027, it will be a ghost of its former robust self.

    The Tinubu task force on political ‘realignment’ is leaving nothing to chance. It recognizes the potential danger posed by the Peter Obi –led Labour Party. An increasingly popular political movement led by a charismatic political ‘good man’ cannot be ignored. Obi’s Labour Party and its back -up Obidient Movement presented a veritable threat to Tinubu’s ascendancy in 2023. Therefore, two active factions of  demolishers are at work on the Labour Party.

    One faction of thugs led by one Lamidi Apapa has been busy challenging both the legitimacy and very existence of the party in court. A slightly more targeted attack is being led from within by Mr. Abure who ordinarily would be the Chairman of the party. In a recent move, Mr. Abure and his fellow travelers have suspended a slew of high level party members including a senator and the only state governor on the ticket of the party, Mr. Alex Otti of Abia state.

    Beyond these party based destabilization antics, the incumbent government and ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) has unleashed squads of recruiters all over the country who are busy attracting defectors and converts from other parties into the ruling party. So far, the results have been impressive. The most spectacular outcome has been recorded in Delta state where the incumbent governor and his immediate predecessor have defected to the APC. In addition, these political leaders decamped from the PDP with all their local government leaders. It is significant that Dr. Okowa, the immediate past governor of the state was also the vice presidential candidate of the PDP in the 2023 election. The Delta defection is therefore an arrow in the heart of the PDP in the strategic Niger Delta region.

    There have been numerous other defections into the APC from other parties and political formations across the country. There is now a palpable fear in the political space that if the rate continues, the vast majority of politicians in the country would by the eve of the 2027 election be in the APC. 

    Fears have been expressed about the possibility of Nigeria ending up as a one -party democracy with other parties ending up as fringe minority parties. Former president Goodluck Jonathan has added his voice to those of opposition politicians like Atiku Abubakar in this regard. But some key opposition politicians have waved this possibility off, insisting that what is going on is the result of a political herd mentality. 

    Politicians are trooping to the ruling party where they think the bulk of patronage is flowing. Nigerian politics is principally about instant pork and patronage. Very few Nigerian politicians want to be left out in the cold of political wilderness.  The APC hasdeployed poverty to attract membership.

    There is however an overriding political curiosity and worry about the gale of defections and mass migration into the APC in particular. At a time of grave national disquiet about worsening social and economic conditions throughout the country, it is curious that the mass of political followers should be tempted to join the very political party whose leadership has literally run the country aground. Clearly, there must be forces beyond naked political sentiments driving the entire movement. 

    The consequences are many and could be dire. An early start of campaigns for elections that are two years away  could lead to a vast dissipation of resources and political energy that would in fact make the fledgling opposition forces more attractive. The gathering of divergent political interests and tendencies in one inchoate ruling party could inject disequilibrium into the mechanism of the ruling party and lead to a pre-election implosion. A very large political party could prove difficult to manage and therefore come apart on its own weight.

    This is not to under estimate the optimistic projections of Mr. Tinubu’s strategists and planners. On the more optimistic side, it is quite possible that what APC strategists are planning is for a 2027 race with little or no significant internal or external opposition movement. If most political voices were to be drowned inside one party, the choice of candidates, especially the presidential candidate, would be a serial ritual endorsement. In a more or less one party configuration, Mr. Tinubu would literally be returned unopposed as his party’s candidate at every party primary convention and be elected with minimal opposition. In line with that simplistic line of thought, Mr. Tinubu could head effortlessly to a coronation at Eagle Square. 

    There is a lazy trait in this line of thinking that conforms to Mr. Tinubu’s authoritarian mode of politics and leadership. He has railroaded the National Assembly into becoming a glorified rubber stamp conclave with literally no opposition on vital legislations like the reversion to the old National Anthem,  tax bills, successive national budgets etc.

    More worrisomely, Mr. Tinubu has carried on more like an emperor than a democratically elected president. He identifies his interests in the system. He then gets people to convert these interests into legislative bills or projects. He then proceeds to procure a National Assembly rubber stamp or Executive Council approval. It is popularly speculated that each approval sought by the president has a price tag and once the transactional details are fine tuned, the road is clear either to railroad an unpopular legislation or the award of yet another Lagos to Calabar Alaskan highway contract.

    The road to a second term coronation for the Tinubu presidency is however strewn with booby traps and political land mines. The assumption that all politically minded Nigerians will end up in the APC by the eve of 2027 is naïve and even a bit foolish. The vast majority of voting Nigerians will hardly become card carrying members of any party. 

    Irrespective of who is in the parties, the solid majority  of ordinary Nigerians remain the victims of the incompetence of this government. They are not about to join any parties and do notneed to doso to reject an unpopular government at the polls. The greater the level of incompetence of the government, the higher their demand for voters cards and the greater their hunger to vote out the fraudulent bunch. We had a foretaste of this in 2023. The combined population of voters for both the Labour Party and the PDP overwhelmed the minority that voted for the APC. 

    It was the instrumentality of INEC’s dubious complicity and the division in the votes of the PDP and Labour Party that saved the APC thinly from deserved humiliation. 

    What is likely to abort the infantile projection of a Tinubu coronation in 2027 is therefore the continued rejection of the APC by the majority of the poor, deprived and angry Nigerians who do not care about formal party membership. The challenge of the next election is for INEC to expand its voter portal to accommodate all those who want to vote in 2027. And for the majority of Nigerians, the challenge of 2027 is not the mass migration of members into the APC. Party members are always a negligible variable in voter turnout. It is the mass of non- partisan voters that troop out to make their voice heard that matter most. They will decide who succeeds Tinubu, not the unthinking herd of “follow follow” party migrants.

    Ultimately, then, the political destiny of the country still rests with the caliber of opposition coalition that the incompetence of the APC forces into existence. That opposition coalition must be everything that the APC has failed to be. We desire and deserve a credible, competent and coherent opposition with a clear national outlook. It must consist of persons of character with proven records. Above all else, we need a social democratic coalition that can carry the majority of Nigerians along a populist path to create and distribute Nigeria’s wealth for the good of all.

  • My party will swallow all yours – By Chidi Amuta

    My party will swallow all yours – By Chidi Amuta

    Nigeria’s political landscape never ceases to astonish and amaze. In addition to our habitually surprising electoral outcomes, our politicians are dramatists of immense creativity. They have an uncanny ability to literally convert things into their opposities and still retain public attention and ignite curiosity and sustain interest. They have just as a group staged a successful mass psychological coup against the electorate. Nearly all our normal political expectations have been altered.

    Barely two years into the tenure of the Tinubu presidency, the politicians have dramatically altered the nation’s political agenda and expectations. First, instead of holding themselves to account on the unfulfilled promises of the 2023 elections, the politicians have positioned the 2027 election as the central political concern of the moment. Forget the hunger, the unemployment, the rampaging inflation and the epidemic of insecurity and daily deaths in droves. The exchange rate of the Naira is not as important as who gets to appoint the next CBN Governor. Face 2027 and the prospect of a Tinubu second term.

    Secondly, the politicians have positioned the prospect of an opposition coalition political grouping as the biggest political challenge in the horizon. Ignore the many incompetent ministers and corrupt officials of the incumbent administration. The problem of the moment is the collective of Atiku Abubakar, El-Rufai, Peter Obi, Kayode Fayemi, Dati-Ahmed, Rotimi Amaechi etc. In the perspective of the incumbent administration, these political gadflies are the ‘enemies’ of the moment. In their own right, the coalition opposition elements are complicit in diverting attention from the current challenges and focusing instead on the 2027 contest and their own chances of toppling Tinubu and the APC.

    Thirdly, the opposition political figures are being driven to a wall where they just have to struggle for dear life. Their parties are on fire with internal contradictions and subversive plots sponsored by the ruling party. So, they have to strive to save their individual political lives in addition to salvaging the remnants of their embattled parties.

    In addition, the politicians, especially the one in the ruling APC, want us to start juggling as to which parties stand a better chance of ousting Mr. Tinubu and his gang from Aso Villa. A faction of them have already declared Mr. Tinubu re-elected! In this regard, they have invented a new political pastime which we better call serial ‘party slaughter”. The object is to ‘kill’ as many of the opposing parties that have electoral prospects as possible. In this regard, the APC has converted the embattled Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) into a virtual political killing field of sorts. The casualties are piling up by the day.

    Mr. Wike and his fellow war mongers in the employ of the ruling APC are compiling the casualty figures and reporting back to headquarters where the generalisimo is nodding in satisfaction. A smaller squad of trouble makers in the ruling APC is engaged with the Labour Party and the possibility of an SDP gathering point for the prospective opposition coalition.

    But by far the greatest political drama and diversion of the moment is the increasing gale of defections and decampments from opposition parties, especially the PDP, to the ruling APC. It is like a season of mass migrations from all parties to the ruling party.

    A jungle metaphor is the most apt at this moment. A forest of larger wild creature swallowing and chewing up smaller ones best describes recent happenings in Nigeria’s political space. In a gale of defections and decampments, major politicians from other parties have been trooping into the ruling APC in a series of decampments that are best described as insane.

    In just one day, the migration took a quantum leap.
    The Delta State governor Sheriff Oborovweiri and his immediate predecessor both announced a dramatic decampment to the APC from the PDP. This particular defection is multiply significant. A siutting governor elelcted on the platform of a rival prt changes his platform midway through his tenure. Similarly, a former governor who was the vice presidential candidate of the major opposition party also defected to the ruling party that he had opposed only in the last election. More importantly, these two defections came along with the defection of all the chairmen of local governments in the state which is considered a strategic state from point of view of national resources.

    In addition, it is rumoured that Kwakwanso and the governor of Kano state are set to decamp to the APC from NNPP.
    Similarly, Kano North Senator Kawu has decamped from the NNPP to the APC. In the same vein, Labour Party Senator Imasuen of Edo State is said to be getting set to decamp from the LP to the APC. News reports from across the country indicate that a total of 216 PDP and NNPP members in Jigawa state have decamped to the APC. From the South west, House of Representatives member Oluwole Oke has also decamped from PDP to the APC.

    Once the trend has been activated, the likelihood that it would continue is clear and present. It is a trend that has been intensified by the weaponization of poverty and hardship by the policies of the Tinubu government. Most Nigerians have been driven to a solid wall of want and hardship. The perception is prevalent that only those who join the ruling party stand a chance of surviving the pervasive hardship. Forget about party ideology and beliefs. This is the hour of crass survival.

    Ordinarily, it is an implicit assumption of democracy that individuals are free to change their beliefs and party affiliations subject to the relevant rules. The right and liberty to freely associate or change affiliation is a democratic right. We can question an unusual velocity of exodus of partisans in any direction within the party spectrum. We can also raise larger issues that touch on the general trend of membership in the nation’s political party architecture.

    For instance, there is something that is quite troubling in the recent wave of migrations and decampments into the APC. At a time when the state of the nation is sorry and sordid, it is inconceivable that political leaders and notable citizens should be trooping into the very party that is squarely responsible for running the nation aground. There is a consensus among most ordinary honest Nigerians that the APC government under Mr. Tinubu has been an unmitigated disaster.

    Ordinarily, when parties are in power, they strive to a record of governance and performance that would at least make them a tolerable option in the next election. A bad party is usually punished by a denial of the mandate in the next election. A party that scores so abysmally in all areas of governance and whose leadership has the worst job approval rating in recent history has no business canvassing for increased membership let alone attracting an obvious drove of new members. In fact, such a party should be avoided like a plague so that it does not infect the electorate with a contagion of negativity.

    What we are witnessing is therefore an obvious reversal of normal political expectation and behavior. This trend is of course a reaffirmation of the transactional essence of Nigerian politics. For most Nigerians, the political party is a machinery for the distribution of resources through pork and patronage. People want to be part of where the power is and where the patronage is being dispensed and shared. In the run up to the 2027 race, therefore, politicians are jockeying for vantage positions in the political party they consider the most viable electoral platform.

    If this trend continues, we are heading for a situation in which the majority of active politicians will converge in the APC as a virtual “one party” republic. The most obvious target of the migrations is of course the PDP, the erstwhile major opposition party. The party has in recent times been the venue of the destabilization machinations of the Tinubu political machinery headed by Mr. Wike, Minister of the FCT who apparently has a mandate to destabilized and cannibalize the major opposition party to the advantage of the APC.

    The gale of migrations into the APC ordinarily make the task of an opposition coalition much easier and a more attractive proposition for the next twoyears. The exits define the enemy. The rate of departures delineates the line and rules of engagement in the looming 2027 confrontation. Depending on the strategic acuity of the opposition coalition, a fat ugly APC would be the easiest political balloon to deflate. It culd also become a behemoth that is all pervasive and difficult to overwhelm.

    The current massing in the APC also hints at the possible ideological outlines of the 2027confrontation. The APC will carry on as a signpost “progressive” party. But its new membership and configuration make it anything but progressive in essence and outlook. It poses a challenge for the coalition of real progressives that have been rumored to be working towards a new party. From the names that have been touted as leaders of the new coalition – El-Rufai, Amaechi, Fayemi, Obi, – a real progressive social democratic movement seems to be in the offing. That is the desirable direction that is required to brand the APC in its right coloration as a decadent and corrupt ultra reactionary collection of conservative rejects. A party that hoists Tinubu, Akpabio, Ganduje, Umahi and Matawalle as its mascots surely knows where it belongs on the scale of credible political gatherings.

    Irrespective of the parties from which the politicians are migrating from, they are all members of the same party. Their backgrounds are the same. Their outlook on issues are the same. Their interests are the same. Their orientations are the same.

    The opposition parties are mostly torn by crises and instability. In that process, they are reinforcing the notion that our system has no credible opposition. The so-called opposition parties lack internal integrity or self -defining identities to justify their independent existence in a multiparty democracy. In this atmosphere, only the APC wears the appearance of cohesiveness.

    Even then, the present cohesive appearance of the APC owes only to one factor: it is the party in power and has the monopoly of control of power ,patronage and pork. Outside that circumstantial exigency, the APC is as splintered as the rest. It is even more incoherent than the others in terms of ideas and a track record of governance and definable legacy.

    Effectively, then, we are in a practical one party situation. There is the ruling party and literally no opposition parties properly defined. Intrinsically, there is no difference between all the major parties in contention in our democracy. There are no ideological or value differences among our parties. They are all acronyms, colourful flags and emblems with little intrinsic ideological meaning. They may have different acronyms but a united by a common blood stream of prodigal values.

    Our parties are populated by the same caliber of Nigerian politicians drawn from a uniform national elite pool of unemployed college graduates, failed “charge and bail” lawyers, unsuccessful venturers and other jobless middle aged hustlers, etc. This is why it is ever so easy for people to migrate from one party to the other with ease. No ideology. No core beliefs. No values. No commitment to any form of service to the people. No vision for the nation. Mostly a keen eye for financial returns wherever it may be found. Nigeria has earned a distinction of being the only country in which an individual can have breakfast in one party and end up with dinner in a totally different party without any qualms.

    Going by the present trend, the ruling APC could swallow up most of the membership of the other parties and suffer no indigestion. But whether most Nigerians can inhabit the same political household up to the 2027 election is a huge uncertainty. For the APC to retain power in 2027 if Nigeria remains in this desperate disrepair, it will require more than a drove of “follow follow” membership. For the ruling party to lose power, an opposition coalition must meet the broad majority of Nigerians in the places where they feel the pain most.

  • Absent from Abuja, Present in Paris – By Chidi Amuta

    Absent from Abuja, Present in Paris – By Chidi Amuta

    The Nigerian political opposition is scoring desired attention from the Tinubu’s disappearing   antics. In apparent response to the growing outcry of opposition voices and the enlightened citizenry about the President’s prolonged absence in a bad time, the Presidency has just issued a second statement explaining and justifying Tinubu’s mysterious vacation in Europe.  The new statement is not different from the original one except that it aims at indicating that the President is at work even if away from his physical office in Abuja. It is becoming futile and even foolish creating an illusion of presidential overwork to cover up whatever else is keeping Tinubu away from Abuja. The man has been absent from his official place of work for longer than makes sense. Period.

    Ordinarily, the political opposition has every business commandeering the matter of Mr. Tinubu’s whereabouts. Every misstep of the president is a quarry for the opposition. His inexplicable long absence is of course part of the opposition’s arsenal in the build up to the frenzy of the 2027 campaigns. A president missing in action in a period of general worsening   insecurity and anarchic breakdown of order is everybody’s business. Predictably,  the opposition has conveniently added the president’s  prolonged absence to their growing inventory of anti Tinubu atrocities.

    Both Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Peter Obi of the LP , leading opposition figures, have screamed out loud that Tinubu has no business being away from the country at a time when the nation is in dire straights. There is trouble everywhere. People are being killed on an industrial scale almost daily in Plateau, Benue, Ebonyi and other vulnerable states. Boko Haram has reportedly returned to full business in Borno and its environs, gobbling up local governments and villages and killing as many soldiers as they can find. The political atmosphere in Rivers state remains uncertain and confusing as the Sole Administrator of the emergency rule there seems somewhat confused about his precise mandate or the exact meaning of emergency rule in a functioning democracy.  Whether or not Tinubu willed it, his latest mysterious vacation has given his growing opposition an early consensus.

    Very few Nigerians care about where Mr. Tinubu will spend tonight. Fewer still ever seem to notice when the president  is present or absent in Aso Villa. The street side logic is that our life circumstances remain the same whether or not the president is at home or abroad, at work or asleep. It is sad that a president that has been in office for just under two years has worked his way to a level of consequential irrelevance and ineffectuality where his presence or absence makes no difference to the people whose mandate he parades. In contrast, his  predecessor only managed to get to this point at the middle of his second unimpressive term. At that point, it no longer mattered to mot Nigerians whether Mr. Buhari was coming or going!

    From the onset, Tinubu has been mostly abroad anyway. In preparation for his busy air miles presidency, the president hurriedly equipped himself with a super luxury  “new” presidential jet bought under a very opaque procurement process or lack of it. Some argue that it is part of his job specification that he jets around the world doing the business of Nigeria. Lobbying for investment. Expanding the reach of Africa’s largest democracy and attending the many meetings that make statesmen something of travelling salesmen. No one has yet explained why and how a nation with dwindling fortunes and strategic importance should be present at every small gathering of world leaders even if Nigeria has tangential interest.

    Nonetheless, the more significant side of the argument on Tinubu’s junkets is that an elected president has an implicit obligation to stay home most of the time to man the ever –turbulent  boat of the Nigerian state. Purveyors of this argument  go further to insist that the greater part of the president’s attention is required at home. The reasons are many: our nationalism has far too many unresolved grey areas.  The business of nation building is far too incomplete for those elected to man the ship of state to stay too far from home for too long.

    These clashing perspectives do not quite impress Mr. Bola Tinubu and his handlers. The man loves to work from anywhere else but home or his luxurious Abuja office. He loves to be air borne like his predecessor who would jet out to the nearest European capital to check an ear ache or bad tooth in a small clinic.

    For Tinubu, his handlers insist that his far too frequent foreign missions and sojourns have little to do with any specific ailments or health concerns. He just feels uncomfortable with too many distracting visitors from local politicians and associates. For him, the business of overseeing Nigeria is too serious to allow for too long a stream of time wasters. So, he escapes from the rowdy crowd every now and again.

    His current absence in Paris is one such example. He was probably seated in the aircraft when his handlers informed Nigerians that the president would be away in France for the next two weeks on a “working visit”, not vacation. During the absence, he would receive and review reports from government departments on the mid term report of his administration. He would be free to summon officials, interview them on the activities of their ministries and departments. For a whole fortnight, the president would work a crowded schedule remotely from Paris!

    Where officials need to show up in person, they have to fly to Paris if they cannot fully explain their points on the phone or by email.  The president requires a minimum number of aides and assistants to do the heavy paper work  required by his mid term assessment. These officials and assistants will incur costs in hotel bills, estacode allowances and other costs. A two week working vacation in Europe will take a significant toll on the national treasury in an economy that is struggling with liquidity issues. It is even a very scandalous public relations gambit to inform Nigerians that their president is gone abroad for a whole two weeks to do the work for which the state lavishly provides for him to perform in Abuja. I hardly can think of any other country where the leadership will embark on such an expensive excursion in the name of a “working visit.”

    Of course Tinubu’s handlers have readily drawn our attention to the fact that the president is still working for Nigeria from Europe. In the modern era of real time information technology and speed of light communication, executives can discharge their functions from anywhere without any significant loss of efficiency and effectiveness. That is hardly at issue.

    A president is the political leader of a nation. He is elected to lead people through the vicissitudes of daily life. That is why most leaders only leave home in extreme necessity. And when they do leave to undertake important foreign trips, they adhere to a tight schedule that brings them home as quickly as possible. Political leadership is a homebound undertaking. The leader is not self -employed. He is an employee of the people as an electorate and public in a republican democracy. Every excuse to move from one point to the other must be credibly explained to the people. Such explanations must make sense from a cost benefit perspective and even at the level of common sense.

    Casually telling 300 million Nigerians that their president is  relocating from Abuja to Paris on “a working visit” is an insult of the intelligence of the people as well as a reckless waste of public funds. The various statements that have emanated from the Presidency on this matter  cast a pall on the basic intelligence of the issuing presidential minions that issued them as well as casting the institution itself in very poor light.

    Yes indeed, the presidency can be a crowded enterprise. That is why a good number of countries have established  presidential retreats outside the official residence of the President. In the  United States, the Camp David retreat was designed and established to provide the president with a comfortable and convenient getaway destination. It has all the conveniences of a presidential palace and also a vacation destination but also serves the president as an alternative work station. He can do his daily schedule from there and even host foreign leaders there while breathing the fresh air of a getaway location.

    Nigeria has so many locations that could host a Camp David- type resort for the president.  The Obudu Hills, Yankari Falls, Nike Lake, Ziba Beach, Ikogosi Warm Spring.  Each of these and many other locations  can host a world class presidential getaway resort built at a cost that is only a fraction of the billions being budgeted annually for renovating  existing residences for the President, Vice President and other high officials of state. We can can give such locations our peculiar cultural flavor: have resident dance troupes, entertainers etc. We can build helipads, airports and other facilities to ease access to the location.

    These speculations presume that the reasons that have been advanced so far by the presidency for Tinubu’s current absence are altruistic and basically honest and true. There is a high possibility that the president could be on an extended medical vacation if beer palor whispers in Abuja are to be believed. In that case, it is still irresponsible of the presidency not to openly inform Nigerians if indeed the president needs overseas medical attention. It is in fact easier to communicate a medical bulletin and save themselves and the public these convoluted and fake adolescent explanations. Nigerians would understand that the president is human and has a right to suffer ailments from time to time for which he might need better medical care than what is available at home.

    A man above seventy would be expected to suffer one health issue or the other from time to time. If indeed his personal doctor is in Paris or London, he is well within his rights to undertake such medical trips or even take medical vacations to attend to his health needs while the Vice President acts in his absence.  All these Mickey Mouse statements and childish attempts to disguise the truth are devaluing the credibility of the presidency as an institution. The truth is often light in weight. Incoherent lies are heavy baggage on the other hand.

  • Are we bound to this violence? – By Chidi Amuta

    Are we bound to this violence? – By Chidi Amuta

    For the better part of the last decade and half, Nigeria’s national security status has come to be measured by human casualties.  Hardly any day passes without the news headlines featuring stories of gory mass murders and senseless killings. When such news breaks, the question is usually about the scale. How many died? If it is about one or two dead, people move on. Attention and feelings only begin to be incensed when the number of dead is in scores. As a society, our collective humanity has become so inured to the loss of human lives on an industrial scale that we are literally now an insensitive society.

    In the last week or so, we have had the Uromi killings of over 18 alleged hunters by local vigilantes. The versions are varied. One says a lorry load of men armed with Dane guns was intercepted by local vigilantes in Uromi, an area of Edo state that has been constantly assaulted by armed ‘strangers’.  The armed men who happen to come from the northern parts of our country were killed by the vigilantes. In that single incident, so many aspects of our corporate existence as a national community were abused: citizens’ right to move around freely in their country, the responsibility of locals to guard their safety, the ultimate responsibility of law enforcement to determine who bers arms and for what etc. etc.

    In the same week, the familiar inter ethnic and inter communal clashes in Plateau state led to the loss of many lives. All hell was let loose in the state in a now familiar virtual state of emergency in which inter communal communications and interactions in the affected areas have become impossible. Again, religion, livelihood interests and socio cultural troubles were raked up. The Plateau state governor has lamented his loss of security control of many parts of the state to bandits and random armed gangs who have literally outgunned the security forces. Almost simultaneously, similar skirmishes have been reported in nearby Benue state with an attendant loss of yet to be determined number of lives.

    In the same week, Governor Zulum of Borno state has cried out about the resurgence of Boko Haram induced violence in many parts of the state. According to him, a new wave of the Sahelian jihadist violence has erupted and is rapidly retaking many parts of the state. Beside these major theatres of violent eruptions, sporadic killings and violence have been reported in places like Zamfara, Enugu and Ebonyi states. These are only recent incidents in a spiral of insecurity and violence that has become a permanent feature of our national scene. Literally, we sleep and wake in a virtual pool of the blood of our innocent compatriots who live in the susceptible areas.

    For the past over a decade, every annual national budget has seen spending on defense and security rise astronomically. The pattern of defense spending looks more and more like that of a nation in an openly declared war. Orders of fixed wing combat aircraft, helicopter gunships, missiles, armoured personal carriers and drones have since become part of the annual ritual of our defense and security budgeting. Nothing in our budgeting or defense orders suggests a nation at peace with itself.

    Correspondingly, insecurity has come to occupy a permanent place in the rhetoric of our politicians and political actors. Every presidential candidate and virtually every other governorship aspirant has come to include the  eradication of insecurity as a priority item in their manifestoes and agenda. There is in fact, a pervasive psychological state in the nation that seems to have come to accept insecurity as a permanent part of our reality.  We are a frightened nation. People are afraid of each other. People are afraid to travel along the highways, rail roads or urban alleys. A mood of fear has been added to the prevailing atmosphere of poverty, hunger and economic desperation in the land.

    Because our land is among the top five most dangerous places in the world, the military has since become part and parcel of our internal security profile. In virtually all the states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory, joint patrols of the police and all arms of the military have been joined by Civil Defense, Department of State Security personnel and even local hunters armed with charms and amulets in a daily round –the- clock chase after bandits, jihadists, kidnappers, abductors and sundry “unknown gunmen” in urban and rural parts of the country. Squads of combat joint patrol troops in pickup vans have become a common sight on our roads and streets.

    Beyond animated physical chases of bad people by security agents, there seem to be little effort to intelligently interrogate the real causes and patterns of our insecurity. Yes indeed, there is a fancy office of a National Security Adviser (NSA) with a full compliment of the paraphernalia of high power. But it is routinely defied by armed non- state actors who terrorize the populace consistently.

    In a nation that has weaponized faith as an instrument of national existence, religious zealots have found it attractive to arm their devotees with assault rifles, Improvised Explosive Devices and suicide vests to advance toxic versions of their faiths. In a nation where the government used to maintain a monopoly of ultimate violence and coercion, the availability of the instruments of violence to all and sundry at a market price has demystified the state. Uniforms have become common outfits made by tailors which should not frighten people. People are no longer afraid of the guns or uniforms of the state.

    Non state actors have been emboldened to challenge the state and sometimes even outgun the state. The democratization of the technologies of violence,  disruption and destruction through the internet and other dark channels have made the task of the state as possessor of the instruments of ultimate violence more herculean.

    Add to this the recent rise of micro nationalism in different parts of the world and the popularization of the  ideas of self determination of minorities as part of the rhetoric of international political language. Weapons of war and their random deployment by all manner of militias and separatist non- state forces have become part of the language of international political interaction. A new dictum of sovereign assertion has emerged: “We shoot, therefore we are.”

    Most dangerously, in parts of the developing world, politicians have come to be agents of insecurity because insecurity itself has also become a tool in the quest for political ascendancy and apex power. Investment in non- state violent expressions has become attractive to politicians and professional trouble makers. It is common knowledge in Nigerian politics that in successive years, politicians have been  known to import military uniforms, assault rifles, light arms and tear gas grenades to threaten and frighten and intimidate their opponents.

    Thus overwhelmed by rival coercive forces, the state has buckled and weakened under the pressure of violent intimidation. In the process, merchants of trouble and blood have forced the state to cede them  space in an illicit power sharing arrangement. Bandit leaders have signed MOUs with elected governors literally ceding parts of the territories of states to bandits and terrorists. Farmlands have been known to be ceded to bandit squads as concessioned territories for revenue collection. Farmers have to pay bandits to plant, weed and harvest their crops.

    In the process of this parade of illegitimacy, our society has created and tacitly come to recognize new categories of errant citizens and outlaws. We have seen the emergence of new types and archetypes of the anti social hero- Unknown Gun men, Gun Men, Bandits, Cultists, Yahoo Boys, Kidnappers etc. These categories literally wear their badges with swagger and a certain degree of ‘pride’. It is worse when each of these illicit undertakings yields troves of cash in returns. A society that has come to enthrone the worship of money is prepared to do obeisance before these new deities of money and power.

    On the social and cultural canvas, an insensitivity to blood and human suffering has come to characterize our new collective psychology.

    Capturing people like animals, maiming them with pleasure and dismembering them no longer frightens people. New forms of trade have emerged. Trade in human parts for money rituals, human sacrifice to facilitate success in cybercrime ventures, the use of rape to test male prowess and access to supernatural powers is now a vogue in some parts. A new generation of Nigerian youth sent to universities to partake in the wonders of modernity in science and technology are ending up as ritualists, rapists, voodoo priests, campus cultists and all the direct opposites of the aims of modern higher education.  A society suffused in religious superstition and all manner of prehistoric beliefs rolls out the red carpet for the new heroes who are then rewarded with lavish accolades, traditional titles and honours.

    In a society where literally everything is a form of organized crime, even the fight against violence and insecurity  has itself become a form of organized crime. Security has become an industry in itself. Security personnel collude and collaborate with kidnappers, abductors and bandits to facilitate their operations in return for a commission. Field commanders have been known to trade in intelligence that endangers their men in return for cash.

    Sometimes, commanders sit on the allowances of their subordinates. Racketeering in defense and security budgets are not strange to generals who aspire to retire as billionaire real estate moguls and big business people. All this fits snuggly  into a socio economic ecosystem in which corruption has since become the other name of public service and state assignments.

    Even our cash hungry banking system has informally recognized kidnapping ransom as a source of cash deposits. Ransoms are paid into known bank accounts and hardly any kidnapper- related arrests have been effected through information provided by the banks.

    For the police, combating violence and insecurity has become more than the business of maintaining law and order. It is not even crime fighting in its classic meaning.

    For the military, the nation is neither at war nor at peace. It is in a state of “no man’s land”, a never never land  where everything goes and all is fair in a war neither declared nor absent. This is a new abnormal.

    Yet we cannot accept that this nation is chained to a permanent  cycle of violence and insecurity. But in order to restore the sanity of our polity and the values of our society, we need to tackle our insecurity differently. Chasing after squads of bandits with squads of armed soldiers in pickup vans will yield nothing. Deploying drones manned by illiterate soldiers will only lead to more collateral casualties. Bombing villagers in their natural habitats does not recognize the humanity of the defenseless. Killing innocent villagers with sophisticated American fighter jets will harden the hearts of the people against an uncaring state. A headcount of casualties of such reckless bombings in the name of ‘anti insurgency’ is a violation of human rights. Indiscriminately branding innocent casualties as “dead terrorists and bandits “ is an insult on innocent Nigerian villagers simply for the crime that they cannot defend their identity and rights in the English language.

    Let us be fair to some chapters of the Nigerian state in the past. Serious concern about insecurity has been part of state thinking for decades. The most systematic was under the Babangida military regime. Towards the end of its tenure, the idea of a National Guard was being implemented. The recognition was that the Nigerian state was not a fully settled idea. There were too many grey zones and areas of unresolved nationalism. Neither the police nor the military was equipped to deal with these unsettled areas. The police was considered too tepid and civil while the military was designed for a more aggressive engagement with outright external enemies. There was a need for an intermediate force to manage the unresolved areas of our nationalism such as the farmer-settler issues in the Middle Belt, the unresolved animosities of the Biafran secession, the seething anger of the porous oil and gas rich Niger Delta  and the highly exposed Sahelian northern fringes bordering North Africa. These were the residual tasks of the National Guard.

    In subsequent years, the idea of the National Guard was dropped even before it was ever tried in the field. Later civilian dispensations thought of Community Policing but lacked the political will to fully articulate or implement it. Recently, the idea of a State Police structure was considered. No one knows what has become of that idea which is fraught with political and conceptual booby traps.

    While the dithering continues, violent insecurity has spread to previously unlikely places like the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja,  now  the setting for abductions, kidnappings and senseless killings of people even in their very homes.

    There is no escaping a serious intelligent conversation about violence and insecurity in our land. Fancy military hardware and fiery political rhetoric cannot replace the power of serious thought to restore our humanity as a nation. The abiding question now is: when shall we be serious enough to remove insecurity from our  political agenda by ending it permanently in our reality?

  • Our democracy and its vagrant elite – By Chidi Amuta

    Our democracy and its vagrant elite – By Chidi Amuta

    In recent weeks, we seem to have been wrestling with the very idea of democracy. After all, our political system has passed through the Westminster parliamentary system and over three decades of the Washington type presidential system.  There is a prolonged assumption that we are indeed a thriving democracy and ought by now to have come to take certain issues for granted. But on a daily basis, our politicians and political elite seem more confused about the essence and meaning of democracy itself. This is clearly an illustration of the vagrant and unserious nature of our political elite.

    Surprisingly, however, our political elite has this curious habit of returning to interrogate our democratic credentials ever so frequently. Last week, a major gathering of consequential political voices gathered in Abuja to nark the 60th birthday of former House Speaker, Emeka Ihedioha. It was yet another opportunity to interrogate the efficacy of our democracy and indeed the  very appropriateness of our democratic route.

    Former President Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo, chairman of the occasion  was his predictable cynical self, skeptical as ever.  about the appropriateness of Western democracy for Africa. His contention was essentially a cultural conservative reservation about the alien roots of democracy as practised in most African countries. Bishop Kukah in the role of keynote speaker asked the question as to whether democracy has failed in Africa. Former Sokoto Governor  Aminu  Tambuwal was definitive in disagreeing. For him, democracy has not quite failed in the country or indeed the continent. Peter Obi was non equivocal in asserting that democracy has failed totally in Africa. Segun Adeniyi was typically journalistic in saying that democracy has neither succeeded nor failed in Africa. He instead  zeroed in on the individual foibles of the political leadership as unserious mascots of democracy in Africa. Other voices found weaknesses in the practitioners of our democracy, insisting that nothing is wrong with the various concepts of democracy as practiced in Nigeria or indeed Africa.

    Pitfalls like corruption, disruptive governance, abuses of due process by politicians have combined to give democracy a bad name.  In all of these attempts to understand the failings of democracy in our country, politicians and the elite have tended to uproot the concept of democracy from is European roots. The fact of mouthing democratic concepts and systems is unfortunaltely not likely to make us a democracy. Our society has bot paid its dues. We have not passed through the economic crucible of evolving a productive economy first before exploring the most apt system of government. In Europe, the

    Industrial Revolution and the tyranny of kings and oligarchs preceded the rise of democracy. Similarly, economic independenc and the emergence of a political consensus among the urban elite created the necessity for popular democracy as an alternative to monarchical absolutism.

    It was this combination of forces that compelled Europe to behead and dethrone kings and queens and overthrow or reform the monarchy in favour of elective popular  governance. Representatives of the people took over power through a system of representative democracy to ensure that the taxes paid by the productive populace were spent by representative governments to fund social programmes and services. The modern nation state was born on the foundations of elective democracy based on the popular mandate of economically empowered citizens. With democracy, subjects became citizens. Citizens acquired rights and rulers were compelled to accountability to ‘the people’.

    Elsewhere especially in Asia where democracy later took roots, it was the rise of authoritarian military regimes  which suppressed workers rights,  whittled down civil rights, forced people to fight for the rights they wanted to enjoy and assiduously grew the economies to create the wealth and prosperity that empowered people to demand certain rights and privileges of freedom and representative government. Like in Europe, it was the empowerment of the people  that forced them to demand certain rights espcailly the right of citizenship and political representation.

    In each of these instances, democracy was not a ‘given’ handout or arrangement. It was not an organized syndicate or arrangement agreed upon by a departing colonial order and its successor local political elite of trade unionists, traditional rulers and western educated elite as in most African countries. Democracy in either the European West or Asian dictatorships did not emerge in and of itself but as a consequence of compulsive economic and social forces.

    In the Nigerian instance, our ‘democracy’ has transformed  from an arrangement of colonial selection to one cultivated by self- appointed military dictatorships. Representatives of the people have been selected whether by a colonial order or by an imposed military dictatorship. The popular masses were literally ‘invited’ or coopted into the democratic wagon and  taught the rituals of periodic electioneering. Consequently, our democracy has hardly had organic roots in and among the people. At best, the people have been ‘invited’ during election cycles to the seasonal political agenda, told major issues in contention and the major personae contending for power. In the post election periods, the politicians disappeared to the centres of power from where they lord it over the masses until the next election season. In most of Africa and in Nigeria especially, there has not been a process of consciousness creation about the rudiments of democratic culture. At best, democracy has been merely a dialect of political speak.

    Democracy is not however a voluntary self -generating force. It is an outcome, a momentum unleashed and driven by social and economic  forces of a historical nature such as happened in Europe and Asia. The driving forces include an urgent compulsion by productive working people who demand accountability for their hard earned tax money. It is the vortex of pressure by the masses which wanted their views and perspectives heard and reflected in the way the society was governed and manifested itself. Taxation is guaranteed by representation. That is the basis of accountability in governance which confers power on the people.

    Therefore, when modern constitutions and other social contract documents begin with the expression “We the People”, it is a  conscious expression of the real power of the people as tax payers, citizens and voters. It is the people’s power of tax money, the power of labour power and the exertions of workers as an orgnized force that propels the economy. It is in addition the momentum of the cultural solidarity and the willful surrender of the power of independent self- defense in preference for collective security embodied in an elected sovereign. We the people hereby surrender unto you the right and power to preside over us and protect us from one another and from hostile others!

    That is the foundation of the Social Contract,  the intangible contract that binds the broad majority to the sovereign elected authority who wields state power on the collective behalf of the “people”. Thus is born the modern nation state as the foundation of world order.

    Democracy does not give birth to itself nor does it protect and sustain itself. It has certain guardrails in the nature of institutions which it needs to operate and survice. The elected sovereign is a guided executive authority. That authority is guided and guarded along the path of law and order by a judiciary of trained honest judges and a battery of lawyers. An executive not guarded or guided by a judiciary is bound to degenerate into an unregulated anarchy, the lawless Hobbesian state of nature in which the laws of nature reign and bloody violence rules the affairs of men.

    In turn, elected conclaves representing the people as a constituent whole are empanelled as parliaments and assemblies to ensure that the affairs of the state reflect the interests of the majority and diversity of the public.

    The collective feedback voice of the people is wielded through the power of the media- the agencies of the mass media which function as the unofficial monitor and regulator of the conduct of state and its officials. It does not matter whether the media is the legacy print and electronic media that we have since come to know or the contemporary social media platforms in which everyman is a media owner and practitioner. The functions of the media in a democracy remain basically the same- moderation and modulation of public opinion in the service of the enlightened governance of the state.

    The rest of the society whose interests and opinions matter in the progression of the society is what has come to be known as civil society, that amorphous collective of chattering voices in the market of society that is usually the first to gather at the venue of protests against bad governance. It can be organized into pressure groups and interest groups or show uo facelessly as a mob.

    The guardian elite of a democracy consists of both the practicing political elite and the broad spectrum of enlightened voices-professionals and interested others with an abiding interest in the survival of the society either as a functioning state or thriving democracy. An elite cannot possibly be illiterate or ignorant. An illiterate or ignorant national elite is a danger to itself and to the perpetuation of the society it pretends to serve and represent. A national elite must share a common commitment to the wellbeing and continuity of the society.  When a bunch of vagrants, casual thugs and unemployed political jobbers control the commanding heights of the political space, the result is a perennial confusion as to the meaning and plight of democracy. Mob rule could be mistaken for democracy.

    When illiteracy, ignorance and lack of enlightenment dominates a political space, even the simplest challenges of routine democratic practice are presented as systemic earthquakes. The budget process is often rigged in favour of paddings by the legislators just as the executive muzzles its way through questionable bills. Legislators are not certain how to vote for simple legislations.  Debates on the floor of parliament are either not held at all or are muzzled through the nefarious power of open bribery. Or legislators as licensed thugs scream their way through troublesome  sessions.

    The executive frequently read or deliberately misinterpret the constitution to serve their narrow political interests. Both unfortunate features have been displayed recklessly with the President’s recent declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State.

    Those who are still troubled by the present sorry state of democracy in Nigeria should look even harder at the character of  our national elite especially those who call themselves politicians. The time is approaching when we shall ask our political class to educate us on whether politics in Nigeria is a career, a vocation, a profession, a trade or part time unregulated business.

  • Call me emperor, not just president – By Chidi Amuta

    Call me emperor, not just president – By Chidi Amuta

    President Bola Tinubu has dealt a fatal punch on Nigeria’s democratic prospects. As the head of the executive branch, he has injured the judiciary and subverted the legislature in what promises to be a dangerous drift towards authoritarianism.  On the Rivers crisis, the Supreme Court ruled on the side of deploying democratic methods to resolve outstanding issues in the crisis. The embattled Governor, Mr. Similayi Fubara was in the process of obeying the Supreme Court when Tinubu struck a lethal political blow.

    The President hastily announced a suspension of the governor and his deputy as well as all democratic structures in the state. He appointed a sole administrator for the state and inaugurated Mr. Ebas, a retired Navy Chief to run the oil rich State as he deems fit for the next six months. The Attorney General of the federation has tacitly admitted that the presidential action may have been somewhat hasty but in a bid to avert an anticipated ugly security situation,  for fear of what had not yet taken place. But the constitution provided for real credible security threats or real insecurity, not speculative fears lurking in the unknown future.

    The expectation that the National Assembly could overturn the strange emergency declaration has also been dubiously subverted. Instead of a straightforward electronic or manual vote count followed by a numerical , the two arms of the National Assembly adopted a nebulous voice vote to quickly approve the presidential declaration of an emergency over Rivers state. Hardly any informed debate on the matter took place. Scarcely any review of the security situation necessitating the emergency declaration. Just a robotic rubber stamp “yes” in  a manner that has become signature for the Tinubu era legislature.

    Prior to this sorry rubberstamp endorsement, national outcry against the declaration of the emergency had gone viral and widespread. Informed voices in Rivers State had cried out. So also had the leaders of the South South region, the Ijaw ethnic nationality and opposition political figures in the state. Governors of the South South zone had unanimously opposed the president’s declaration and suspension of Fubara and his Deputy. Notable lawyers in the nation have either as individuals or associations punched legal holes on the process and substance of the emergency declaration. More significantly, key national opposition figures have since been screaming themselves hoarse on the illegality of the path taken by the president to arrive at this curious emergency declaration. Messrs Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, Peter Obi of the LP, Nasir El-Rufai of the SDP and a host of other smaller party voices have screamed out at the illegality and unconstitutionality of the entire process.

    Ordinarily, a security deterioration in any part of the nation that could warrant a State of Emergency ought to be self evident. The danger to national security ought to be so self-evident that the public mood would in fact demand that the president declares an emergency. None of that was evident in Rivers state in the last one week. But the president went ahead to make his curious declaration, giving the judgment of the Supreme Court or the democratic process no room to resolve the issues in question. Instead, the President assumed the role of grand arbiter by declaring governor Fubara on all counts. He accused the governor of willful damage to public property through the malicious demolition of the State House of Assembly. He equally accused the governor of precipitating the political crisis in the state and rebuffing earlier peace overtures towards a resolution.

    In its totality, the presidential broadcast making the emergency declaration was anything but statesmanlike. It did not balance the blames between Fubara and his traducers. It hardly mentioned Mr. Wike who is clearly the architect of the entire Rivers crisis. In assuming that Wike is innocent, the president was taking on a partisan stance that vilified the PDP and exonerated his own APC. The trouble though is that his man Wike is neither PDP nor APC. He is a political bat that can only happen in the Nigerian political landscape.

    Not in one instance did the president mention the nefarious role of his Minister of the FCT, Mr. Nyesom Wike, who has made the political destabilization of Rivers State an adjunct of his role as FCT Minister. It is road side knowledge that since he was appointed FCT Minister, Mr. Wike has spent more time fomenting political trouble in Rivers state than ensuring tolerable governance in the disorderly Federal Capital Territory which has recently become the crime headquarters of the nation.

    On a political scale, the entire declaration of an unwarranted State of Emergency in Rivers State flies in the face of all sensible definitions of statesmanship or constitutional democracy. Its political undertone is implicit in Tinubu’s inclusions and exclusions in the text of the broadcast. The move increasing resonates with the President’s anxiety about his political future in 2027. It is common knowledge that in order to win a presidential election in Nigeria, a candidate needs to win the majority vote in a number of key population centres and states: Lagos, River/Port Harcourt, Kano and Abuja. In 2023, Tinubu nearly lost the presidential election because he was trounced in his Lagos home base, Abuja and Kano. He only ‘won’ in Rivers because Wike was on ground to allegedly manipulate the votes in  his home Obio Akpor Local Government area of Port Harcourt to deliver Rivers to Tinubu. This feat and fiat by Wike added to what sold Wike to Tinubu as a political contractor of immense value coupled with his use value as a permanent destabilizer of the opposition PDP and neutralizer of the Atiku Abubakar threat.

    As things stand today, Wike remains Tinubu’s most valuable political  asset outside his South West home base where his stronghold has narrowed to the Lagos and Ogun areas from where the majority of his political appointees have been drawn.

    Beyond this nefarious investment in Wike as a dangerous geo political capital, Tinubu recognizes the strategic importance of the Niger Delta in the nation’s economics and politics. It is a zone of sleeping instability  that can alter –for good or ill- the context of the nation’s economy and security architecture. The heavily armed miscreants in the Ijaw creeks can negate the billions of dollars annually budgeted on defence spending by the Nigerian state Those rough kids in dugout wooden boats can alter the calculations about the global energy outlook and even determine oil prices in far away Vienna. It is therefore quite possible that Mr. Tinubu may have erred on the side of political caution by this hasty declaration to avoid security embarrassment should the Rivers situation get out of hand.

    Whatever may be his prompting on this disastrous State of Emergency declaration, Mr. Tinubu has walked into a political minefield of multiple bad possibilities. By failing to name Wike as a wrong egg in the pack, he has consecrated the man into a political Warrant Chief of sorts who can hardly be touched without grave harm coming to the political calculations of the president towards 2027. By single-handedly suspending or impeaching Fubara, Tinubu has made himself a partisan  in  the political fight in Rivers. And to the best of my knowledge, Rivers is a precarious place to declare your partisanship so early in a brewing political fight.

    AS things now stand, it would be difficult to dissuade the common people of Rivers state from feeling a sense of victimhood. The Supreme Court had ruled against their entitlement to their constitutionally guaranteed federal revenue  because of disagreements among politicians. Now the president has declared an emergency garrison rule over them thus placing them under an implicit military rule, thereby reducing further their freedoms and rights as Nigerian citizens. The ordinary Rivers person in Port Harcourt or Bonny is bound to ask: “What have we done to deserve this treatment?” Do the peoples of the South South region have a right to feel that Tinubu is treating them like a zone of conquered people? Such a feeling of alienation has political consequences which I am sure both Tinubu  and his handlers fully understand.

    Worse still, by taking unconstitutional steps to declare and sustain his State of Emergency, Tinubu may have walked in the direction of early steps towards unconstitutional and authoritarian rule. On that route, his highly informed opponents in the race for 2027 are waiting with a public that is already weaponized and angry against him for reasons of economic desperation and hardship. A largely unpopular president would be taking a big risk by taking actions  that alienate even more significant populations.

    Authoritarianism and unconstitutional moves cannot possibly enhance the re-election chances of an unpopular president surviving on a tenuous mandate.

  • The Abia Interim Report – By Chidi Amuta

    The Abia Interim Report – By Chidi Amuta

    Adapted and excerpted from a Keynote Address at the 2025 Abia Think Tank Annual Lecture at the Lagos Country Club, Ikeja, on 1st March.

    Born in a dictatorship and nurtured under a fledgling but untidy democracy, Abia state has had a tortuous encounter with statehood. Its citizens have hardly found cause or space to celebrate their sovereign rights let alone savour the entitlements that make citizens in a democracy  proud and confident.

    On the contrary, Abia people have for over 24 years tumbled from one season of state capture to another. Democratic transitions have been for these people more of ritual migrations from one imperial rule to a feudal oligarchy, from one depressing season of exploitation to a more humiliating  fanfare of  deception in the name of governance. True, all manner of miscreants have come and gone, claiming electoral mandates that remain unverified. Extremely poor people  have been frightened off the bad roads by authorized hooligans blaring sirens with accompanying goons with horsewhips and assault riffles.

    However, in the more recent period since after the 2023 governorship election, Abia has witnessed an unusually positive frequency of media mention than in the over two and half decades of its previous existence. On balance, good news from Abia  has far outweighed bad news.

    We need  to put in context what the state witnessed for a whole two and half decades prior to 2023. In the period between 1999 and 2023, Abia state was an unusual political experience among the states of the federation. While it was guided and governed by the the Nigerian constitution, Abia operated more like a feudal enclave and unregulated extractive colony with peculiar characteristics.

    • It was synonymous with the name of whatever governor was in power as if it was a private estate.

    – Its most enlightened and illustrious citizens were consciously excluded from its governance  and mostly lived and earned their living outside the state. The state economy was so privatized that the commanding heights were cotrolled by the imperial governor, his family and cult of friends.

    • Over the 24 year period under reference, the quantum of resources that accrued to the state from both the Federation Account and Internally Generated Revenue was not  matched in any way by the volume or tempo of development in the state.

    –  Even in the small area of the South East, Abia developed more negatively than all the other states in the region.

    • In the same period, an annual Google search of the economy of the state indicated that in each of tthose years, of the five richest people in Abia State on a year-on-year basis, three at the top of the list coincided with the most prominent political figures.

    The inevitable conclusion therefore is that for whatever reason, Abia was essentially a feudal enclave for 24 years (1999 to 2023) and has only been struggling to free itself from feudal captivity since after the 2023 governorship election. Between 1999 and May 2023, the state does not qualify as a democratic sub sovereign part of the Nigerian federation. Politics and the democratic process were only deployed as instruments for state capture by different factions of the Abia political elite. Once captured, the state in each of these years was run more like either a private feudal enclave or an unregulated extractive colony.

    As in a feudal dominion, Citizenship rights were in abeyance while citizen expectations of the good life were limited by the extent of the interests of the feudal oligarchy. The indices indicated a drastic deviation from the requirements of a democratic state. The rights of the citizens to fair treatment were grossly violated. The entitlement of the people to good government in terms of healthcare, education, security , infrastructure and emoluments could not be guaranteed.

    The governor was more of an emperor ruling above criticism and reproach. In 24 years, no Abia governor was taken to court by a citizen on account of rights infringement or acts of misgovernance. Like feudal emperors, our successive governors were more of imperial feudal overlords.

    The machinery of state was ‘privatized’ as the separation of powers was observed mostly in default. The legislature ran the errands of the executive governor and seemed to have a duty to pass legislations ‘for’  the governor routinely. The legislations that rolled out of the State House of Assembly were more of feudal decrees and imperial edicts  than debated laws of a democratic assembly.

    The judiciary had no independent voice as judges owed their appointments, promotions and general welfare to the benevolence of the imperial governor. Officials of the state judiciary were selected and hired on the basis of loyalty to the governor and the party cabal in power.

    In  the public service, corrupt officials kept their jobs for as long as they knew on whose behalf they were eroding the state. Another way of putting this is to say that state officials were agents licensed to commit acts of criminal malfeasance on behalf of the presiding emperor governor.

    Quit routinely, the imperial governor set up and empowered an assortment of task forces and mobile courts to collect sundry revenues and levies in the name of the state but account to no institution of public accountability. Public accountability was mistaken for creative accountancy.

    From available records, between 1999 and 2007, the Governor’s Office issued and signed off on newspaper full page advertisements of the state’s financial statement compiled and “audited” by the same Governor’s Office. In other words, the governor authorized expenditure, spent the money,  ‘accounted’ for it, audited the expenses and informed the public accordingly that the audit had been certified!

    Yet the same government had in its pay roll an Accountant General, an Auditor General and could easily have hired an external audit firm to look through its accounts. The regimes that followed were not so gracious. They rendered no accounts, had no public procurement routines that I am aware of nor bothered with the finer points of public accountability. They did what comes to thieves naturally: they kept silent on matters of financial accountability!

    Rightly regarded, Abia in the years of feudal captivity could not be described as a feudal enclave, even one in desperate disrepair. It was not also an extractive colony. In a feudal estate, the manorial overlord cares about the state of the agricultural land, the welfare of the farm hands and the productivity of the feudal enterprise.  Similarly, in an extractive colony, the extracting authority may have the minerals and produce as his primary target. But he also realizes that the magnitude of his loot is a function of the state of the colony.

    Under the colonial dispensation in Nigeria, for instance, it was in the best interest of the colonial enterprise to run an efficient railway system to evacuate the produce, maintain schools for the colonized to get educated, keep them healthy through health centres and generally maintain law and order through courts that dispensed justice according to colonial law.

    In the Abia state in the years under feudal capture, the governments failed as both a badly run feudal enclave and as a dysfunctional extractive colony. The state failed as a government. It failed as an organized criminal cartel. It failed its people, failed itself as an organized syndicate of enlightened thieves (“there is honour even among thieves”, it failed the nation and failed the concept of democratic sovereignty.

    Therefore, the  question  that Abia needed to answer with the outcome of the 20223 governorship election was simple: would the state correct course and return to the path of responsible democratic governance or continue  as a feudal enclave under the captivity of a political oligarchy.

    The picture of the state on the eve of the governorship election in 2023 was sad and almost tragic. Abia was easily the most indebted state in the federation with a debt portfolio of over N189.9 billion. The then government that ratcheted up most of this debt inherited only a debt of about N35 billion from its predecessor.

    On the eve of the election, Abia  was the state with the longest period of default in the payment of the salaries of staff in the public sector especially education and health. Doctors and teachers were owed anywhere between 24 to 30 months in salary arrears.  The state university ran consistently on upwards of an average of six months in arrears of salaries and allowances of staff. The state polytechnic at Aba was in default of salaries and allowances to the tune of over 30 months. The state polytechnic  had virtually lost its accreditation. Unpaid academic and administrative staff  supplemented their livelihood as Keke and Okada riders or petty traders in inconsequential merchandise.

    Doctors in government health institutions went  without salaries almost indefinitely. The sick no longer bothered  to go to any of the state’s general hospitals or health centres knowing well that they were likely to come out feet first. Drug prescriptions are worthless since most pharmacies in state hospitals had a permanent sign on display: “OUT OF STOCK”.

    The city of Aba was  in decay. Drainage was absent. Sewage system was unheard of. Aba was literally an inhabited refuse dump. Mounds of refuse greeted the eyes at nearly every inch of the city which had a permanent stench of something dead. Most roads in the town were in desperate disrepair. Some people had forgotten when some of these were roads as many had become deep gullies and waterways. Adjoining the many dilapidated roads were one or two uncompleted flyovers that the state government had been building and commissioning in bits for the better part of the last couple of years.

    The sorry state of Abia state then was  inscribed boldly on the faces of most citizens. People were hungry, angry , poor, unkempt, aggressive and viciously frustrated. Hope and optimism were the most scarce commodities in Abia by May, 2023.

    What the state needed urgently was not just a new occupant of whatever government house there was in Umuahia. What the state needed was a transformative leadership to rescue the state from feudal captivity and restore the social contract between the government and the people. The task was to make political power translate into the welfare of the people, and redefine the political space in terms of the real needs of real people .

    Since the inception of the Otti administration, governance has been essentially about reestablishing trust, inspiring confidence and renewing hope in the state.

    From reports of public response to the efforts of the Otti government so far, people were initially a bit hesitant to embrace the modest achievements for fear that excitement could end up in a return of the betrayal of past decades. Two and half decades of serial betrayal and habitual disappointment have frightened people from something called government. Worse still, the long period of bad experienced has deepened the distrust to the degree that  when people began receiving their emoluments as and when due, they said it was “419” and did  not quite believe it. When street lights came back on in Aba, people were frightened for fear it might be a bad dream or ill omen.

    Alongside the confidence rebuilding process, the government has proceeded with modest efforts to managing the state’s economy better and to address the scandalous infrastructure decay. From the reports since the last year and half, there is reasonable progress.

    We have read the pleasant stories about the inauguration of the Aba power project by Geometrics Ltd leading to a commendable level of power supply, a plus for a place that depends on constant power to operate its small to medium manufacturing establishments.  Courageous urban renewal effort has proceeded with the clearing of refuse, reconstruction of some dilapidated roads.

    In tandem, I understand that a series of micro credit and small business support programmes are being instituted to empower the people and reignite the latent entrepreneurial power of the state

    I also understand that public sector workers like teachers and civil servants have begun receiving their emoluments regularly. So also have retirees and pensioners. The cries of anguish that used to emanate every month from relations in the villages  have subsided and been replaced by good wishes and prayers that the good days should persist.

    However, there is an urgent need for caution. The social contract is not just about roads, bridges, drainages and street lights. It is about restoring the democratic essence of the sovereign state. Democracy was never defined as a system of landscape decoration.  While citizens in a truly democratic state expect efficient social services and infrastructure, they expect a sense of ownership of the state and the restoration of rights.

    That reversal of direction and rescue from feudal oligarchy is the legacy that th The politicak struggle ahead in the state is all about whether the feudal tradition will be allowed to return or not. The struggle ahead in Abia state is not just the retention of power by one clique or faction of the Abia political eiite. It is not about which party retains the key of the uncompleted Government House in Umuahia.

    The current administration will be missing the point if it limits its battle for political survival to the survival of the party in power. It is more. It is a protection of the fundamental rights of the people to own the government of their choice. It is the protection of the rights of people to receive regular salaries, to demand and get good healthcare, sensible education, reasonable infrastructure that works and the freedom to challenge the government if they feel that the  affairs of the state are not going well.

    Let there be no mistake about it. The feudal state in Abia served certain interests. It was about growing and sustaining an unproductive  financial oligarchy in the name of politics. It was about continuing to grow a criminal tradition in government. That gang is still intent on returning to power. They will invoke all manner of crude methods and tools to return to power. Huge money, Violence, blackmail, thuggery, judicial antagonism  weaponization of sectionalism in order to upturn the new order.

    The current opposition that is building up in the state is an attempt to recapture the state and re-entrench the feudal order. At the partisan level, it is a battle for familiar partisan supremacy through alignments and alliances for electoral prevalence. But the battle for power and supremacy in Abia in the years ahead is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Abia.

    Beyond rescuing Abia state from feudal captivity, the state needs to claim a position of leadership  in the Nigerian federation. We have an unusual endowment as a people. Our entire populace is intrinsically entrepreneurial. We are an informal school of native capitalism. You do not need to teach  the Abia man, woman or child how to become a trader, a provider of goods and services and how to grow wealth.

    The challenge of the moment is to harness the natural potential of Aba  into a regional trade and manufacturing potential. Abia needs to become a hub for made in Nigeria small to medium scale manufacturing. The position of the state on the north-south rail link and the intersections of federal highways from the South West to the Eastern heartland needs to become a logistical asset linking the state from the sea in Port Harcourt to the vast demand fields of the northern hinterland.

    Above all, Education must remains the priority export of the state to the nation. But in today’s world, the emphasis must go beyond conventional classroom chalk and black board teaching and learning. Abia must aspire to lead the nation in the new digital learning. We must invest in manpower for tomorrow and leapfrog our education to prepare citizens for the new world of information technology and Artificial Intelligence.  One strategy is to embark on continuous teacher education through in- service training every vacation. Ultimately, the average Abia school teacher at every level must by law hold a minimum of a university first degree. Illiterates cannot train the work force of the future. Those from other states who want to teach in the Abia schools system in the future must meet a higher certification requirement if we must lead the nation towards the future.

    The beckoning challenge of the new ABIA is to leap from the dark ancestry of superstitious origins to the brilliant light of new modern beginnings. There is no need to wait. Taiwan did not wait. Singapore did not wait. Malaysia did not wait. Nor did South Korea or even Dubai. Rwanda is not losing a second either.