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Chidi Amuta

  • Running on empty – By Chidi Amuta

    Running on empty – By Chidi Amuta

    A giant question mark seems to hang over the Nigerian political landscape. Everybody seems to be asking everyone else this single question: What is going on? Suddenly, all seems quiet and clueless from the choir of government. The affairs of state seem  frozen into a humdrum of routine and miserable predictability.

    There are no new excitements. No new programmes and policy initiatives. Behind the ritual of state affairs, the usual FEC meetings, the goings and comings of the presidential motorcades and the boring unintelligible pronouncements of ministers and other senior officials of state bearing fancy titles, you get a feeling that perhaps government is not at home. But this is only in the zone of governance and policy formulation and implementation. Yet the urgent concerns that fired the minds of the people at election time remain largely unaddressed.

    For an administration that is not quite yet two years old, the present barrenness of ideas and programmes is not only disturbing. It is tragic. Worse still, for an administration that has finally branded itself as engaged in a reform of the economy, the dearth of ideas can be worrisome.

    Let us admit that a few big things have been showcased. There has been a grand fanfare about an Alaskan highway that will stretch from the beaches of Lagos to the pristine sands of Calabar. Hundreds of thousands of bags of rice and beans have been distributed among state governments for onward distribution to hungry people. A hurriedly assembled student loan scheme has been shoe-horned into place sithout any serious thought as to how the loans will be recovered.

    The Tinubu government insists that it is on a reformist  path. The essence and definition of this reform orientation is to unleash an avalanche of hardships on the people. A litany of taxes, price hikes, tariff hikes, levies and surcharges on practically everything that means anything to ordinary people has been has been imposed. Gasoline prices have since multiplied manifold. The deregulation of the Naira exchange rate has since thrashed the Naira exchange rate towards its present struggle to catch a breadth.

    Nearly every price of every service or good that means anything to anyone has skyrocketed to a level where most Nigerians have resigned themselves to fate. People have since learnt to live life by the day and take what each day brings as their lot, often turning their eyes only to bare essentials.

    The lack of new ideas and initiatives in the area of governance and policy has been counter balanced by sporadic dress rehearsals in the area of political activity at the level of the legislature and the states. Of course political life allows no vacuum. In the absence of concerted effort and purposive   momentum, something happens. The political space has in recent weeks assumed a mix of comedy and potentially dangerous drama.

    At the Senate, a female senator popularly called Natasha has seized centre stage. She has accused Mr. Akpabio, the Senate President of doing what weak men with access to big money and immense power often do in high places. Mrs. Natasha has accused Mr. Akpabio of sexually harassing her. Her evidence for now remains remains scanty and doubtful. The relevant Senate committees have used technicality and legislative bureaucracy to befuddle what is ordinarily a straightforward ethical transgression at the height of power in the Senate.

    Even the simple  procedural tidiness to bring forward her accusation properly before the relevant Senate committee has been flawed by a bit of carelessness on her part. Her sympathizers and those of Mr. Akpabio have since thronged the premises of the National Assembly, desperately angling for public attention.  No one is sure where this charade could lead. But the brickbat has led to Natasha’s hasty suspension for six months by the ethics committee of the Senate. The public is perplexed that a Senate that is known for tardiness in more serious matters of state legislation was in such a hurry to suspend Natasha in a matter of hours.

    The uproar is not yet over in spite of the suspension order. If Madam Natasha does manage to advance a serious enough subtantiated allegation against Mr. Akpabio,  then the Senate President could find himself quite busy  untangling his lofty apparels from a woman’s complicated underpants.

    For now, there is no certainty as to what the Natasha situation is all about and where it could lead. Some say it is politics. Others insist it is a business deal to wring some cash off the vaults of the allegedly loaded Akpabio. A minority feel Akpabio is too fond of the sniff of highly polished and perfumed womenfolk  that he can hardly resist their lure. Ready evidence is drawn from his untidy encounters with Ms. Joi Nunieh , former Managing Director of the NDDC.  The odiom of that earlier scandal is still heavy in the air of the current drama.

    For whatever it is worth, the Senate’s Natasha versus Akpabio absurd theatre is just one sign that the Tinubu presidency is running out of steam and ideas. A political space that is serious with urgent national issues such as we have in abundance would have no time to waste on matters of pants and bras in highly placed places. The Natasha distraction is just one big evidence that ouor political life as a nation is fast running on empty.

    Elsewhere in the states, govrnors and power moguls are busy testing their nerves in advance of 2027. In Lagos, factions in  the drama of political incumbency and succession tested each other’s nerves. House Speaker Mr. Obasa had taken a casual vacation abroad. On his way back to the country, he found that there was no royal welcome awaiting him at the premises of the Lagos State House of Assembly where he had been holding sway as a powerful Speaker and de facto political emperor. Before he could unpack his bags, his colleagues had impeached him in absentia and elected Mrs. Meranda as Speaker in his place.

    He hardly understood what hit him. He began to feverishly work the phones to call the most important numbers in the politics of Lagos state. An atmosphere of instability and uncertainty enveloped the Alausa secretariat of the state government especially the precincts of the House of Assembly. Two hidden hands were pulling the strings of the Assembly leadership apparently in a dance without a name. The impression that the hands of the state governor were behind the ouster of Obasa was palpable. But then, he was ousted by a vote by 30 out 35 members of the house. He was clearly unpopular among his colleagues, accused of many sins including high handedness, arrogance, insensitivity to the needs of the other members. Obasa was rumoured to be disrespectful of the youngish popular governor.

    The counter narrative was that Obasa did not need to pay the governor much attention since he seemed to have the ears of a higher political deity in Abuja whose wish is the law in the affairs of Lagos. Uncertailty reigned in Lagos for weeks. Obasa sat home and kept threatening to reclaim his speakership toga at the appropriate time. An emboldened Obasa threatened to invade and overrun the Assembly premises in a bid to reclaim his throne.

    The state police command initially took over the premises. Legislators stayed away. Workers who were doing the biddings of the new speaker were rounded up and take away by the police. No one knows whose orders the State police commissioner was obeying or enforcing. A few days down the line, the state police commissioner lost his command and was sent off into anonymity by higher police authorities. The hidden hands replaced the police presence at the Assembly premises with goons of the DSS who made it obvious that they were not in Alausa to play silly games with local politicians.

    A few days later, an enboldend Mr. Obasa returned to the Assembly premises in a triumphant march to stage a comeback to the office of Speaker while poor Mrs. Meranda was placated with the lowly innocuous office of Deputy Speaker.  There was no obvious change in the disposition of the majority of the Assembly members. The simmering crisis in Lagos seemed to have been ‘nicely’ resolved. But the political signals seemed quite loud and obvious.

    Lagos politics is not likely to be the sdame in the rest of the present tenure of both the governor and his president boss and enabler. We have just seen a hooded dress rehearsal of what might happen to the ruling APC in the state come 2027.  Many say that the president showed his hands in the insistence on Obasa as Speaker for reasons that many are too frightened to name.

    Days after the resolution of the crisis, a heavy overhang of dejection was detectable on the faces of opposition legislators who did not like Obasa’s tenure and the manner in which he was reinstated or reimposed. If this disquiet lingers and flows into the contest for power and supremacy in Lagos in 2027, then the governorship succession race in Lagos is likely to be slightly more bumpy than before. It is likely to be more than a wrestle and more of a civil war. Even more frigthening is the use or abuse to which the security agencies are likely to be put by politicl gladiators.

    In nearby Osun State, a more gruesome drama of political existence played out.  The famed dancing governor of the state was not in any laughing, singing or dancing mood. He needed to take over the grassroots by staging an impromptu local government election process. A challenge was lurking in the dark opposition APC led by the former governor who happens to be a cousin of the President.

    Another former governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, had similarly fallen out of favour with the former governors, now Osun’s man in Abuja. Proxy wars among the followers of these gladiators was expected and did take place nastily. It went bloody and claimed a few casualties in the Osun countryside.

    But the dancing governor and his gang swept the polls. This is merely a dress rehearsal of what lies ahead in the state come 2027. Osun promises to be a theatre of blood and nasty sweat for many reasons. They say it is the actual home state of the president who has never stepped forward to claim ancestry. Nor has he disowned the immediate past former who claims to be his cousin and seems still bitter about his sacking by the dancing governor and his train. For now, the dancing governor could resume his dance steps while rehearsing for the fire next time.

    Rivers state is a somewhat different and more tragic instance of politics in the absence of development and governance. The state seems to have settled into the status of a place where there is hardly any governance or development since the last two years or so.

    Since Mr. Nyesom Wike reluctantly handed over the keys of the government house in Port Harcourt to Mr. Fubara and relocated to Abuja as Tinubu’s emperor of Abuja, the state has hardly known an unbroken week of peace, sanity let alone any semblance of governance and normalcy. Politics has taken centre stage in the lives of the people. It is not the politics that promotes development, good governance or healthy partisanship. It is the political equivalent of warfare. Impeachments and threats thereof.

    Multiple court cases and foolish litigations. A state legislature that has been burnt down or demolished or both. Local warriors brandishing ancient amulets and invoking primordial myths and loyalties. Free brandishing of dangerous weapons in the centre of Port Harcourt while trade, commerce and public service take a back seat. Political contractors and habitual trouble makers have seized the political space and come to town in occasional menacing war dances and rehearsals of ancient battle dance.

    Mr. Fubara, poor governor, has been kept busy by Mr. Wike and his cohorts who have been busy picking and choosing godfathers and elders and changing them like nasty underpants. In turn, otherwise respectable state elders have found themselves changing allegiances and alliances with the contending partisans depending on which faction sends them the fattest bundle of cash under the cover of night.

    In all of it, the politics of bad manners has taken over Rivers state at the expense of normalcy, development and the normal business of governance. If indeed Mr. Fubara survives his first tenure without impeachment, that would probably be his most spectacular achievement in office. When the story of Rivers state between 2023 and 2027 is written, it would simply be that there was a governor that occupied the office but was never allowed to govern the state for one day.

    In the latest round of judicial somersaults on the politics of the state, the Supreme Court has just ruled that the state be denied the statutory federal revenue allocation. The reason is ostensibly that the embattled governor has used the judiciary to exclude the majority of state legislators from the legislative functions of the state. As a result, he has had an Assembly of 5 pass the state’s 2025 budget into law while the majority of law makers were legally excluded. The Supreme Court’s argument is that our democracy was never designed to be without a legilative oversight.

    The 23 Local government chairpersons have similarly been declared null by the Supreme Court, necessitating fresh Local Government elections now scheduled for sometime in August. As matters stand now, the political future of Rivers state is more uncertain than it has ever been.

    Taken together, these political motions without movement have provided the Tinubu presidency with a growing camouflage of activity in a polity with an embarrassing degree of governance and policy inactivity. Worse of all is the near absence of intellectual stimulus and original thought on even the most mundance problems confronting the nation. Nothing kills a nation than addiction to boredom and humdrum.

  • Babangida’s long exhale – By Chidi Amuta

    Babangida’s long exhale – By Chidi Amuta

    Even after three decades of his untidy retreat to his Minna hometown, Babangida never forget the ‘public’ debts he owed to Nigerians. He owed Nigerian history an expose on his turbulent leadership . He owed the Nigerian populace an insight into his personal enigma and enduring charisma. He also owed us a personal perspective on the worrisome things that happened under his watch. Above all things, Babangida owed a personal recompense and reconciliation with Nigeria on the political headache of the June 12 1983 elections.

    Through the public outing of his long awaited memoir-A Journey in Service-Babangida has settled nearly all his outstanding liabilities to his fellow citizens. In addition to previously unknown details of ‘what happened’ , he has finally come to a personal resolution of and reconciliation with the outcome of the contentious June 12 election. Abiola won. His election was annulled by Abacha’s hidden hands of limitless power ambition.  Nigeria survived. Above all, he (IBB) has survived into ripening old age to look back and tell the story himself. Professional trouble makers and history manglers have been deprived of an opportunity to end the Babangida story in malignant tales.

    Three decades is long enough time for a man to exhale after leading a sweltering marathon in Nigeria’s turbulent power waters. It is time enough for actors and spectators to have calmed down and taken a respite . Anger would have turned into resignation. Vengeful partisans would have handed the entire matter over to God in a nation where the divine has the final say in all matters political .

    The man of power himself should have reflected on the roads he couldn’t travel and the paths that he and even the angels dreaded to try.

    Babangida led us through troubling times and a treacherous landscape of existential problems. The times were hard and the options daunting in every direction. Our treasury was nearly empty as almost all leaders had turned dealers and fled with our common treasure. Our economic dance had no name. Nor could we look money lenders in the face

    and say: ‘please help a prodigal nation.’

    We resolved by public acclaim after nationwide debates to retreat inwards in search of homegrown solutions. Harrowing reform was the name of the only option left. IBB showed us a new path, a hard road never before traveled. A free market economy of  citizens chained under martial rule! Capitalism without capital and without freedom , rebuilding an economy under a retreating state and a frightened citizenry,

    Babangida has spent three decades and more as one of us. He has watched history roll along. He may have lived through his errors and watched others ride the waves of his triumphs. His ultimate nemesis, Buhari , has come and gone, renaming his major pitfall- June 12- into a historical milestone of political advantage. The nation has learnt new names, new dance steps under new leaders. Wobbly as it is, Nigeria has survived as a democracy.

    Despite the passage of time, however, something about Babangida has remained constant. His personal allure, the instant electricity of his name, the countless myths about the kind, gentle and smiling general at once capable of incredible compassion and unequaled humanity but readily credited with unthinkable atrocities. The Machiavellian Prince that left the throne but still elicits love but also compels chilling fear.

    Above all, Babangida’s personal attraction and a certain public acknowledgment of his political genius has remained in tact. Politicians seeking national acknowledgment seek him. Those wanting to command access to power levers look for him. Those seeking recognition as political notables pay him homage. Those in want of the magic of political wisdom have made pilgrimage to his Minna home.

    His Minna retirement home has remained something of a favourite destination  for political pilgrims. Younger political gladiators in search of relevance, older political animals seeking to test their own relevance, regional leaders seeking a national acclaim and audience have gone to seek his blessing. He has remained something of a political oracle and universal counselor.

    IBB’S tenure and time with us have remained alive for these years. People did not give up hoping  for the story of those days from the man himself. The reasons behind the persistence of demands for a Babangida memoir are many.

    The questions that have lingered are mostly about matters unusual that happened in the Babangida days : abnormal ways of dying; difficult ways of surviving and living; coups and runouts of coups and counter coups; impossible rules of governance. And yet, the man at the center of it all was constant, smiling, infinitely humane but stern as the professional warrior he was trained to be.

    Rulership under him etched new rules and explored unfamiliar paths. It became a dance, a drama of hard choices: a man in full military gear that insisted strangely on being called ‘president’ without resigning his military commission; the msn who in the storm of the Cold War insisted that Nigeria should go:  ‘a little to the right and a little to the left’, a man who enabled elected governors to rule under a martial president; a military ruler who allowed an elected legislature to thrive under ultimate garrison decrees. A master of multiple speak and the wisdom of Delphic ancestry: ‘ we do not know those who will succeed us but we know those who will NOT succeed us’!

    The public outing of Babangida’s memoirs – A Journey in Service- is deserving of the national splash we have seen. Everything about IBB is news, sensation and headline. This is for good reason. In the growing pantheon of our former leaders, Babangida elicits the greatest anxiety and much deserved excitement . No memoir of a former leader has been and is likely to be so long awaited.

    Why the anxious wait? The man’s actions in power deserve no less. He was an original author of the impossible. An army general who seized power, suspended the constitution but insists on being called President and genuinely in love with presidential democracy. A practicing Moslem who insisted that the ideal Nigerian family size should be a couple with four children. A dictator who ruled by decrees but committed himself to a rigorous democratic reform process. To rule by decree and allow elected local governments, state governors and an elected National Assembly.

    The Babangida memoir is therefore a comprehensive answer to many lingering national questions but rendered as a

    string of varied personal stories of an individual life turned into national history

    There are multiple stories in this master tale. The primary personal narrative is about his early life. It is story of a young lad who was orphaned at 14 and for whomSchool was a surrogate home. It is the story of proceeding to high school in Bida where he became classmates with people with whom his later life and career became intertwined. Gado Nasko, Sani Bello, Sani Sami, Mamman Vatsa, Mohammed Magoro , Garba Duba and others. It is the story of a boy who was good in sports and also had obvious natural leadership qualities. He was greeted by the envy of some peers and the obedience of many mates. These lives became more intertwined as most of these young boys later opted for careers in the military. They were inspired by among others young Capt Yakubu Gowon. They went ahead to head different areas of Nigeria’s military establishment.

    The other story is that of his career path in the military, his involvement in the series of military coups that altered the history and course of the nation. His instinct for coups was so ingrained that many observers have said that his ultimate exit from power in 1983 was perhaps a self-inflicted coup .

    The major tragic chapter of the IBB story is his combat experience in the civil war. His battlefield injury in

    Uzuakoli and subsequent recovery ended in A decision to get married. Easily the most touching aspect of his war story is the breach with colleagues who fought on the Biafran side.

    There are sub stories in this narrative that raise the temperature of the story to near tragic catastrophic dimensions. His bare handed encounter to disarm Col. Dimka after the assassination of Murtala Mohammed. There was also his narrow escape and survival following the Orkar coup. These aspects of the IBB story come close to fictional suspense crime stories.

    The major story of public interest is Babangida and the drama of power incumbency. In this crucial part, the many unanswered questions come into view. he touching accounts of the death of Dele Giwa, the trial and execution of Mamman Vatsa, the dreadful night of the  Orkar coup and the unfortunate crash of the military C-130 aircraft all come together as instances of the bad things that could happen in a season of power.

    Babangida renders his account with the consummate ease of a master story teller. The difficult accounts of state action and the unattractive business of policy are made  to be readable. He animates the landscape of the story with anecdotes and recollections of the human angle of  difficult national decisions. In this memoir, there is hardly any name calling, hardly any contentious arguments. The audience is drawn into serious national issues by the allure of a very human story.

    In the end, A Journey in Service becomes a shared experience between a national audience and the author as a heroic figure in a national experience of epic proportions.

  • Tinubu and his many opponents – By Chidi Amuta

    Tinubu and his many opponents – By Chidi Amuta

    Barely mid way into his four-year tenure, President Tinubu has scored a contradictory political victory. He has succeeded in getting the political barometer of the nation to swing towards preparations for 2027 instead of pressuring him to deliver on the promises he and his party made in 2023. In tandem, a nationwide gale of opposition to the Tinubu presidency is building up in many fronts.

    The national discourse has however moved gradually away from whether Mr. Tinubu is a good president to whether he stands a chance of being re-elected for a second term in 2027. This is a major political victory albeit one that promises to rebound with dire consequences for both the president and the many who seek his job in 2027.

    Those who insist that Mr. Tinubu is more of an adept politician than a technocratic administrator may have this development to swear by. Ordinarily, the current mood of the nation ought to dictate that our political discourse should be dominated by  arguments as to how to make the lives of Nigerians more livable. The epidemic of hunger, the massive deprivations, the avoidable economic hardship and the desperate internal security situation are all issues that dominate the lives and thoughts of most Nigerians. But Tinubu and the politicians have managed to thwart these and navigate the focus into the brackish waters of Nigerian election politics.

    But in Nigerian politics, matters of rice and gari, house rents and school fees not to talk of fuel prices and transport fares and prices of basic medications have a way of refusing to disappear from the radar of public perception.  But for now, it is all about the prospects of 2027 and the profiles of the gathering opposition to Mr. Tinubu’s lack lustre  dispensation.

    Interestingly, the politicians do not seem so concerned about what the public thinks about Mr. Tinubu’s performance on the job. It all seems to be about  seeking to uproot the man from his political deep roots and all costs paid accommodation at Aso Villa.

    A primary level of the brewing opposition is of course at the partisan level. The main opposition party is still the PDP  with former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as its perennial mascot. Characteristically, Atiku has been busy with pointed criticisms of the Tinubu government nearly every inch of the way. As an opposition leader, his perspectives  on the pitfalls incumbent government  seem somewhat too predictable.

    As the major opposition party, the fate of the PDP is literally in the hands of the Tinubu formation. Through the agency of FCT Minister, Mr. Nyesom Wike, the PDP has a resident destabilization machinery acting on behalf of the APC . That machinery has only one charge: to ensure that the party dies an incremental death and is in no position to wage a consequential challenge against the APC in 2027 or any time. We can already see the handiwork of the agents in the festering crises in the party. The free for all fights, the ejections of the BOT chairperson from the party, the conflicting court rulings on who really presides over the party etc.

    The other strident voice of the opposition is that of Mr. Peter Obi and his dwindling Labour Party. Unlike Atiku, Obi has two voices. He speaks for both Labour Party and for his ubiquitous ‘Obedient family’.  He has been busy following the incumbent government with day to day close marking with criticisms based on basic fundamentals of  governance, public responsibility, accountability and sensitivity to the welfare of the masses. Consistently, Obi has mostly assessed the performance and priorities of the incumbent government on the basis of his own emphasis on education, healthcare and poverty alleviation. He has hardly presented the Nigerian public with an alternative governance and development template. Consequently, his considerable youth followership still remains a social media and mostly Twitter  phenomenon.

    Yet the business of political opposition, properly conceived, goes far beyond pointed criticism of the incumbent government. A properly structured opposition ought to be literally an alternative government in the shadows. For every government policy or programme it disagrees with, the public ought to expect it to come up with a reasoned alternative to that of the incumbent.

    Many Nigerians will recall the character of political opposition in the days of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his Unity Party of Nigeria in particular. Awo and his party had alternative computations on the national debt, the cost of each primary and secondary school, what it would cost to provide low cost housing for deserving Nigerians etc. There was an alternative template for governance. In effect, we have passed through political periods when opposition was rooted in ideological differences and differences of strategy and policy implementation. We have arrived at the point where political opposition is literally now more of a beer parlor banter and street side quarrels among politicians.

    Majorly, then, President Bola Tinubu’s political career is faced with three major opposition threats. An aggressive multi party opposition is building up against him and they are not disguising their determination to chuck him out of the Villa in 2027. From inside his ruling APC,  the more progressive wing of the party is organizing an oppositional standpoint against the Tinubu government as retribution for their alienation since after the party’s victory in the 2023 presidential election.

    Thirdly and perhaps most consequentially, the Tinubu administration is faced with an increasingly widespread nationwide indifference and apathy from the general populace. People are so innured of suffering and hardship that they can hardly feel the presence of a government that faintly appears to have a mandate to rule a united nation. It is only that the President has been quarantined into his personal power cubicle or is cocooned in the comfort of his South West primary constituency.

    Partisan opposition from other parties and the disgruntlement of the populace are natural occurrences in the political life of any nation. But opposition from within a ruling party has a potential of weakening the ruling party from within.

    The co- existence of different tendencies in a political party is a sign of good health. By their nature, parties are organic creatures that bring together people with different shades of the same basic conviction in broad consensus about society. The elite of a party represent only a rough consensus, not a perfect unity of beliefs, ideas and strategies. So the coexistence of different  tendencies is  natural in the anatomy of parties as political organisms.

    The ruling APC went into the 2023 presidential primaries and election looking like one party. It emerged in power as the truly fractured and divided party that  is now on display. There are at least two APCs. There is the dominant Tinubu APC which is in power at the federal level and in most states of the federation.

    The APC whose ‘progressive’ name and flag the party flies is mostly progressive merely at the level of party label. But the APC of Tinubu, Akpabio, Umahi and Ganduje is essentially a conservative and traditional Nigerian political assemblage of convenience held together by money, influence and vested interest. It is a party on the side of the rich and with an undisguised  commitment to create more billionaires through government patronage. It does not matter to the party whether the billions they put in private pockets trickle down to the masses. Instead,, the masses are further pushed to the walls of poverty through tariff hikes, levies, taxes and higher rates on utilities. Mass immiseration becomes a tool of governance to create a more pliant  populace.

    This wing of the party has an ideal of the Nigerian future which happens to be in the past- the place of old national anthems and old political models.

    On the contrary, there is the more truly progressive, radical  wing of the APC  most of whose candidates lost the party primaries at the state and federal levels. A social democratic wing with clearly identifiable nationalist slant. A clear people oriented idea of social progress. They believe that an enlightened leadership that adheres to the popular wishes of the popular masses, does what they want, tells them what they want to hear and maintains an activist proactive approach to governance. Lineage, history, examples in contemporary global political leadership. This arm of the APC is the party of Yemi Osinbajo, Adams Oshiomole, Rotimi Amaechi, Nasir El-Rufai and the many others who think in their mould.

    The illusion that this more progressive arm of the APC would remain silent into the 2027 political season is foolish. Most of them are relatively young politicians. They are visible, aggressive, eloquent  brilliant and aggrieved. They feel short changed and cheated out of the power game. To that extent, they are angry about the state of the nation and their own collective plight as part of a political elite. They are afraid of being counted among the Buhari-bred politicians that later came to betray the nation and the hopes of its peoples. How to exonerate themselves from the infamy of the Tinubu faction. That is the historic burden of the ‘the other APC’.

    In my view, the most consequential groundswell of opposition to the Tinubu presidency is an internal APC elite opposition rooted in the northern precincts of the country. There is a growing feeling among the northern political elite that Mr. Tinubu has betrayed the political followership that Mr. Buhari bequeathed to him. Not even his Moslem-Moslem ticket seems to have dented the growing disquiet in the north.   Unfortunately, there is no corresponding increase in any southern zonal followership.

    Clearly then, there is an efflorescence of opposition forces massing up against the Tinubu presidency towards 2027. It is regional, partisan and even broad based among the masses. Yet the more diverse this opposition is , the larger it gets. And yet, the larger it is, the most difficult it could be to form a coalition of forces. The paradox is that a large and unmanageable opposition is in the interest of Mr. Tinubu. He is in a unique position to use his power and resources to keep his opponents permanently divided and thus prevent the emergence of the kind of formidable opposition coalition that can chase him away from  Aso Rock Villa in 2027.

  • Courting global anti-Americanism – By Chidi Amuta

    Courting global anti-Americanism – By Chidi Amuta

    An unwritten paradox has defined the United States up to this moment. It is the only country loved by most of those who have never set foot on its soil. It is also the one nation most despised by many who have not visited it. Loved and hated in nearly equal measure by people across the world. The return of Donald Trump to the White House is about to change all that for the worse. There is a growing wave of people around the world who are beginning to hate America with passion because of the actions of Mr. Trump. It is not hatred for Americans as a people but for the actions of its new government.

    The day after Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from Canada,  spontaneous boos greeted the playing of the American national anthem at most sporting venues across  Canada. Previously, Canadians used to hail at the Star Spangled Banner. Similarly, hostile  street marches in Mexico and other Latin American countries greeted the arrival of planes bringing home deportees from the United States. Most of those Latin Americans who went to America as illegal immigrants went there in quest of the American dream, in search of a better life for themselves and their children in a land that had been historically touted as God’s Own Country, a place of gold and goodness.

    Many of them may not even have paid attention to the fine points of migrant documentation as a condition for embracing the good life promised by the lure of America.  Now they are being hoarded home in plane loads of unfulfilled cargo and broken dreams. Some are returning home in manncles and leg iron, humiliated for the crime of dreaming.  Worse still, even the innocent are being mass branded as criminals and gangsters, carriers of poison in their blood with which they went to poison the perfect American stock.

    This is not the moment to dispute the rhetoric of the new old man in the White House. Nor is it a time or even proper to query the right of sovereign states to protect their borders or define their national interests. It is only a moment to contemplate what damage Mr. Trump’s actions are likely to do to the image and conception of America in the minds of the peoples and nations of the world.

    Tariffs have been slammed on many significant nations. China, Mexico, Canada.  The European union countries have been threatened with tariffs and other hostile acts of American economic nastiness. For instance, a purely domestic land legislation matter in South Africa has been greeted by indecent hectoring and bad language from the White House. South African leadership has responded in kind, indicating that bad manners is not the exclusive preserve of any nation irrespective of its gravity and the reach of its guns.

    Plane loads of angry deportees  have been delivered to Mexico, Guatemela, Columbia, Venezuela and other Latin American nations. Mr. Marco Rubio, the new Secretary of State has travelled round to places like Panama to warn them of the bad days coming. Going round the world with a single message of threats to sovereign nations seems to be the new diplomacy from Washington.

    Mr. Trump had earlier pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization thereby shrinking the volume of resources available to the poorer nations of the world for medicine and primary healthcare. Without any notice, the poor of the world have been rudely told to “look out for yourselves”. In the same vein, Mr. Trump, in the pretext to cut the costs of American government, has sent out his new billionaire friend. Elon Musk, to physically shut down the long standing department of USAID –United States Agency for International Development. Its work force of over 10,000 is being reduced to an inhuman 250. An agency established more than 40 years ago by late President John F. Kennedy as a bearer of development assistance for the poorer segments of the world is being shut down without notice or a humane programme. Its American and international work force is being suddenly laid off work while its worldwide stretch of humanitarian programmes is being shut down. The millions of mouths it previously fed will now go without food. The sick that depended on USAID medical outreach to continue living are being left to die  slow avoidable deaths. An epidemic of deprivation is being deliberately unleashed on the most vulnerable segments of our global humanity.

    For President Kennedy and those who came after him and maintained the tradition of United States assistance to the poor and vulnerable, agencies like USAID were agencies of soft power, instruments for the projection of American power as a force for good and an instrument to help heal a world damaged and injured by the Second World War and the injustice of global inequity. But suddenly, these agencies of good are now being terminated crudely and rudely by a leadership propped up by democracy itself in a place of hope and original goodness.

    Add to this potential well of international anti-Americanism, the groundswell of domestic ill will that is already being bred by the tsunami of firings and layoffs in many government departments in America itself- environmental activity departments, the FBI, the military, the DEI departments and those whose employment they facilitated. Not to talk of the hundreds of thousands through the value chain of agricultural and industrial production and those whose employment depended on the work of the illegal immigrants – farm hands, food processors, grocery shop packers and loaders etc.

    This groundswell of brewing anti-Americanism is of course in addition to long standing and existing anti-American feelings around the world. In the Muslim word, that negativity towards the United States and its foreign policies and shows of power around the world over time is axiomatic. In Iran and Yemen, in Iraq and Lebanon, in Syria and a good number of the new Middle East states, America is merely tolerated because of its economic aggression  and cultural omnipresence.

    This fertile ground of anti-Americanism in the Arab world is only being fertilized by recent US policy overtures. Take the latest proposal of Mr. Trump to purge the disputed Gaza strip of its indigenous Palestinian population  by relocating them to other Arab countries. This  disguised land grab and ethnic cleansing is being greeted globally by the international community as a further  deepening of the injustice against the Palestinians. It is also seen as an unjust strengthening of the colonialist oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation.

    Even in the best of times, Arab fundamentalist anti-Americanism is both cultural and historically unavoidable. America as an efflorescent outgrowth of Western civilization. It is therefore essentially a Judaeo-Christian manifestation of human civilization. To that extent, it remains antithetical to the values espoused and long cherished and pursued by the contrary Islamic civilization.

    Similarly, Chinese anti-Americanism remains a latent force. Chinese do not need to make any special effort to cultivate an anti-American attitude. The Confucian ethos is inherently in competition  with the classic Western ethos most lavishly displayed by the United States as a global power. It is a power with a civilizational muscle and undisguised global dominating aspirations. To the Chinese state and public psychology, then, America is and has always been a competing power for world domination.

    To the Chinese, anti-Americanism is part and parcel of a long standing global competition. For Mr. Trump to fire up that perennially latent sentiment with a 10% tariff on Chinese imports into the United States is to further weaponize a pre-existing sentiment. This is the reason why the retaliatory tariff regime by Xi Jipoing was greeted with universal applause by a cross section of the Chinese public.

    Anti-Americanism in Russia is alive and recent. In the aftermath of the Cold War, successive administrations in Moscow have carried on with the anti-American mindset except for the brief spell under Mikhail Gorbachev which was essentially a transitional regime. Vladimir has no problem with being inherently anti-American. He can operate a pseudo-capitalist economy for purposes of trading with the rest of the world. But in terms of values and global power competition, Russia is unashamedly anti- American and anti Western for reasons of power competition and ideology. An inherently authoritarian ethos on the basis of which Russian power is being groomed cannot but be counter democratic.  Even Mr. Trump’s inherently authoritarian manners do not impress the Russians as anything approaching the existenti of the Russian establishment.

    To carry his untidy trade war of tariffs to Europe will tempt to export anti-Americanism to an unlikely destination. EWurope’s link to the United States is both ideological and strategic. In terms of global security the United States is joined to Europe at the hips. The trans Atlantic corridor has historcally served as both a cultural and common defense bond. More importantly, the economic link between the US and continental Europe is also a cultural bond. A tariff war may breed anti-Americanism in Europe but will hurt both sides deeply.

    For us in Africa, the Trump stampede could be damaging from the poerpective of the little tradethat has been thriving between some African couontries and the United States since the passage of Bill Clinton’s AGOA trade agreement encouraging the export of African goods to the United States. The fear here is that though the volume of trade between the US and

    Africa remains negligible, Mr. Trump’s primordial racism might tempt him to want to punish some “s-hole” counties with punitive trade measures.

  • Stampede among the opposition – By Chidi Amuta

    Stampede among the opposition – By Chidi Amuta

    Almost mid way into the Tinubu presidency, the face of the 2027  opposition to his perpetuation is on display. An untidy opposition is nearly on full display but in a perpetual stampede. Key opposition figures are lashing out at surrogates of the ruling party from different  angles in a most uncoordinated matter. In the process, they are all exposing their weaknesses and unpreparedness to assume power.

    The major organized opposition party, the PDP, is in perpetual flux. Perpetually writhing from internal chaos fuelled by planted dissidents, the party still manages to  host major opposition voices. Their mascot is former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, a perpetual presidential candidate and national lead grumbletonian.  He seems to have monopolized the enterprise of opposition rhetoric and thus kept Tinubu’s spokespersons busy.  In his latest bouts, Atiku has kept up the theme of accusing Tinubu and the ruling APC of trying so very hard to make Nigeria a one party autocracy.

    On a weekly basis, herds of PDP members have been migrating into the ruling party. This is familiar Nigerian political behaviour. Unofficial sources insist that the Tinubu war machinery has a secret budget for fomenting trouble in the PDP and literally buying defecting members from all opposition parties. It is said that the PDP and Labour Party are pricier than defectors from other minor parties.  In turn, permanent trouble makers in both major opposition parties are on permanent retainership to ensure that the major opposition parties remain perennially embroiled in crises, including fisticuffs and open wrestling at meetings.

    Only last week, a meeting of the Board of Trustees(BOT) of the PDP in Abuja was so engulfed in open brawls that when the police arrived, they could only play the untidy role of fight separators instead of firing tear gas and rubber bullets for which they are better practiced and trained in such situations.

    The unconfirmed narrative around the confusion in the PDP is that Mr. Nyesom Wike, FCT Minister and Tinubu’s resident political attack spaniel, has the unscripted job description of keeping the PDP in perpetual discord up to and beyond 2027. He has no business in facilitating settlement in the party or even ensuring that the party survices as one.

    In  his practiced role of opposition town crier, Mr. Atiku has recently  upped the ante of his alarm bells. Only a few days ago, he screamed out against the arrest and detention of Mr. Yele Sowore and Prof. Usman Yusuf  on baseless charges as evidence of a plan to incarcerate all outspoken critics and opposition figures all over the country. The ruling administration is yet to respond to this charge but has insisted on the criminal culpability of the affected individuals for the offences that led to their arrest and arraignment.

    The Bauchi State Governor, Mr. Bala Mohammed has similarly been insistent in his solo criticisms of the Tinubu administration from a policy perspective. His attacks have focused on northern regional interests. He has been insistent that Tinubu’s troubled Tax Bill, for instance,  is essentially an anti- northern ploy to keep the region in perpetual economic under development. Tinubu and his support cast of partisan governors have insisted otherwise but Governor Mohammed is unbowed and unbent. So far, he has targeted Nyesom Wike at the level of the opposition PDP, insisting that Wike is playing an untidy partisan script on behalf of Tinubu to permanently destabilize the PDP ahead of 2027.

    The case of Mr. Peter Obi and his host Labour Party belongs differently. Obi has remained the most consistent and orderly voice of the opposition  especially in the post-2023 election season. Mr. Obi has hinged his opposition voice on systemic irregularities in the Tinubu-APC regime. He has been insistent on harping on the neglect of funding and prioritization of healthcare, education and poverty alleviation in the policy mix of the Tinubu presidency. Not to mention the disastrous security landscape and dastardly economic management profile of the administration. The major headache of the ruling party with the Obi version of opposition is the role of the Obidient Movement in the Obi political factor. It is not the Labour Party per se.

    While the Labour Party remains a minority party controlling only the lone state of Abia, the Obidient Movement is an amorphous popular movement with an intangible horizontal structure that has been difficult to track and control. The Obidients are everybody who disagrees with the status quo, every youth who rejects the politics of business as usual and the bogey of ethnic factionalism in Nigerian. There is literally no ward, local government, state or national structure to bribe, buy or systemically  destabilize. The Obidients are a broad spectrum of Nigerians spread across the length and breadth of the nation in no particular pattern.  They are people with a shared belief  and shared values. Those shared beliefs happen to run counter to the dominant doctrine and creed of the ruling party and traditional Nigerian political doctrine of “anything goes for as long as we win”.

    The apparent formlessness of the Obidients phenomenon is what equipped them to ambush the Tinubu party in the 2023 presidential elections. They shocked Lagos, shook Abuja, swept the South East, South South and almost took the North Central. The formlessness of the Obidients equipped them to stage these surprise political ambush operations which was a major upset in that election.  Therefore, on the scale of opposition threats, Peter Obi and the Obidients pose by far the more lethal and credible threat to the political status quo going forward.

    In an attempt to penetrate the inscrutable mien of the Obidients, the Tinubu-ethnic high command floated a kite only a fortnight ago. Chief Bisi Akande, known Yoruba chieftain and Tinubu-APC political  gadfly went on the social media to allege that the Obidients movement was behind the “EndSars” revolt of 2020 which shook Lagos and the rest of the country. According to this latest fabrication, the “EndSars” revolt was manufactured by the Obidients in far away United

    States and ‘imported’ into Nigeria with the sole aim of ending Tinubu’s political career, hence the revolt made landfall mostly in Lagos and the location of the Lekki Toll Gate.

    Yet, it is widely known that the “EndSars” revolt was a nearly spontaneous uprising of Nigerian youth against rampant nationwide harassment of and brutality against Nigerian youth by the SARS unit of the Nigerian police. Obviously, Mr. Akande’s recent fabrication is an attempt to criminalize the Obidients by tainting them with a subversive tar brush so that they could perhaps be branded a treasonous ‘terrorist’ organization by a pliant NASS and over compromised national security establishment.

    It is therefore proper that Peter Obi and other Obidients have risen to speak out against Mr. Akande’s myth making by challenging him to substantiate his claims. The task before the Obidients movement in the light of this is to deepen the sources  of the strength that led it to dazzling success in the 2023 presidential elections.

    Of late however, opposition to the Tinubu-APC hegemony has showed up in a more consequential quarter- from inside the APC itself. My friend Nasir El-Rufai, former Kaduna State Governor, has been quite busy politically of late. In addition to battling his local opponents in the state, he has openly attacked the APC hierarchy and political leadership at the national level openly. Specifically, El-Rufai has pointed at the intellectual hollowness of the APC leadership as the source of its policy incoherence and bad governance in the country.

    Tinubu’s resident hounds have quickly accused El- Rufai of a ‘sour grapes’ mentality, insisting that he is being critical of the party and the government because he was unsuccessful in securing security clearance to get onto the Tinubu cabinet. The man has stubbornly stood his grounds. He has insisted that he will carry on with his opposition spirit but within the party. This is a clear indication of imminent cracks within the walls of the ruling APC party.

    Soon after El-Rufai’s face off with mainstream APC, former Transportation Minister and first runner –up in the last APC presidential convention, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, spoke out at a democracy conference in Abuja. His contention was that Nigeria’s political culture is essentially Machiavellian in a rather devious and even violent manner. Nigerian politicians will kill, maim, steal to secure and remain in power. He indicated clearly that those expecting Tinubu to voluntarily hand over power to them are being delusional. He reiterated the standard Machiavellian dictum that power is never voluntarily given away  but must be violently snatched.

    This assertion has thoroughly upset the Tinubu power establishment.  They have condemned Amaechi for advocating violence in politics. Specifically, Tinubu’s Minister of Defense and former Governor of Zamfara State, Mr. Matawalle,  has come out to criticize Amaechi’s perspective. The federal government has also spoken out against Amaechi through the many minions in the Abuja state house.

    An interesting  response has emanated from the Tinubu camp on the swelling opposition currents against the administration in the count down to its mid term. Staunch Tinubu acolytes have reminded opponents of the man’s hidden strengths and track record of power absolutism. In a viral Facebook post about four days ago, Mr. Joe Igbokwe, an unrepentant Tinubu devotee, reminded those opposed to Tinubu’s second term of the man’s arsenal of political assets which include tenacity, ruthlessness, huge resources, preparedness and experience. What Mr. Igbokwe dared not openly mention is of course Tinubu’s stupendous wealth which implies an awesome war chest of cash that can be deployed to submerge any and every opposition in the country at any moment.

    The present state of the exchange between the incumbent Tinubu power formation and the opposition indicates a less than clear picture. The opposition parties are in a flux and uncoordinated state. At the level of their own internal party dynamics, these parties are in a state of perpetual calamity. At the level of policy divergence from the ruling party, we can hardly identify the opposition parties as different or divergent in any substantial way from the incumbent calamity which has literally ruined the country.

    The possibility of an internal split within the ruling APC is a latent possibility. It is clear that the Tinubu faction that is the incumbent authority in the land is a conservative prebendal money-grabbing faction of the APC. It has no intellectual or ideological content or focus. The more enlightened social democratic and progressive wing of the APC is the arm with people like El-Rufai, Amaechi, Osinbajo, Oshiomole etc as main voices. They were excluded from the power centre soon after the Tinubu victory.

    The only option open to the opposition political forces in the country ahead of 2027 is a serious structural and electoral  coalition. This should consist of elements of the PDP, Peter Obi and his  Obidient Movement and the alienated progressive  arm of the APC. The Labour Party should be discounted. It does not exist as an objective political reality except as a weak link in the destabilizing arsenal of the incumbent authority. The new opposition coalition must however aim beyond 2027.While it can upstage Tinubu and his rabble in the immediate 2027 contest, the coalition must redefine Nigerian politics in a manner that incorporates more serious Nigerian technocrats, academics and civil society leaders as party members and think tanks.

    The current stampede in the opposition camp is a positive development. It should point opposition politicians in the direction of the task ahead. For them to sit back and think that their isolated noise making will end the Tinubu infamy is the height of self delusion. The work ahead is serious and tasking.

  • The limits of presidential absolutism – By Chidi Amuta

    The limits of presidential absolutism – By Chidi Amuta

    Barely one week into his refurbished presidential tenure, America’s Donald Trump seems poised to set new precedents in the model of the Presidency as the pinnacle of America’s democracy. From a bumbling and bigoted first term, the newly minted Donald Trump seems to be a refurbished version of his original version. A combination of sickening egotism and perennial television consciousness has now become an urgent desire to be historical. He has relentlessly branded his return to the White House as the ‘greatest political come back’ in modern history. He has spent the week touting his America as the dream nation, the “ golden age of America”. forgetting that the triumphs he is praising are in deed the achievements of his immediate past predecessor whose record he has been so viciouskly shredding.

    Right from his inauguration, he has unleashed a slew of wild changes in both the presidency as an institution and indeed the place of the United States as a nation. Against the backdrop of his landslide electoral victory, he stepped onto the podium of presidential power with an air of absolutism which is unlikely to help the presidency as an institution governed by the constraints of constitutionalism. Trump has an addiction to saluting and dressing himself in superlatives. In his mind, he is the greatest thing that has ever happened to the American presidency.

    Nonetheless, his predecessor’s lack luster style and business as usual Washington manners created a backdrop of anxious expectation and excitement about the return of the more dramatic Trump. Unlike his first inauguration which was greeted by a divided nation, this time around there was a veneer of unity of purpose and reconciliation in the Capitol Rotunda where the inauguration took place. A cross section of his predecessors and the Washington political elite conferred a certain air of unity on the event. Moreover, Trump was surrounded by some of the richest business elite especially the leaders of the tech industry.

    Right from the inauguration ground, Mr. Trump launched what he himself called a sane revolution. His dream of the new America is one in which the nation reassumes a supremacist position among nations. It is a new America that looks out first for itself  and relates to the rest of the world from a nationalist almost isolationist perspective. It is :

    “America First” in real practical terms once again. In relation to the rest of the world, Trump’s America is a somewhat isolationist, ultra nationalistic nation.

    Trump has boasted that he would slam all manner of prohibitive tariffs on nations as close and strategic as Canada, Mexico and China. Under his new hostile foreign policy posture, he has renamed the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of Amerca, He is looking to forcefully snatch Greenland from Denmark and to retake the Panama Canal from Panama.

    He has since restated to the World Economic Forum in Davos that nations who want to do business with the US must be ready to move their manufacturing operations to the US or face the penalty of hostile tariffs. He would increase the contribution of NATO nations to their joint defense fund from 2% to 5%. Europe has heard him but kept silent for now.

    On his first day in office, Mr. Trump has pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organisation. He has also claimed credit for the ceasefire accord between Israel and Hamas over Gaza. On his much trumpeted bluster to end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day, he has scorched the snake of Russia’s authoritarian Putin. It seems that he has just reminded Messrs Xi Jiping and Vladimir Puutin that they are at the helm of an authoritarian counter weight to the West. He is likely to hit a brick wall of resistance to his absolutism posturing if he fails to embrace diplomacy and tact over the Ukraine war.

    Taken together, the utterances and actions of the comeback Trump clearly indicate a clear absolutist slant which will put democracy to test and also place the new global order under a severe stress test.

    Inside America itself, his stiff position against illegal immigration has already kicked off with raids on illegal immigrants in major cities. His executive order banning birther rights for children born in the United States has already been blocked by a judge as a violation of the constitution. The possibility that more court actions will challenge a number of his executive orders that touch on citizens rights is clear and present. The judiciary is more likely to temper Trump’s bravado and absolutist adolescence.

    Either in terms of his domestic or foreign policy  activism, everything about the new Donald Trump  rings of power absolutism. He is proceeding as though the electoral mandate that returned him to the White House is a blank cheque to carry on in office as he alone deems fit. That would be putting his new mandate to too much test.

    On the domestic front, the powers which American democracy confer on a president are every inch subject to the limits placed by the US constitution and the institutional guardrails of American democracy: the judiciary, the media, popular pressure etc. Even when a president’s party has an overwhelming majority in Congress as Trump indeed now has, the responsibility of Congress to curtail and limit the absolutism of the president is what has prevented the United states from degenerating into an absolutist monarchy in the last over 200 years.

    The institutions of American democracy may sometimes be tortured by changing political exigencies but they remain in place as checks and balances for those who may want to usurp the advantages of electoral superiority to disfigure the liberal democratic essence of the republic.

    Even though it is still quite early in the day, Trump seems poised to twist the American presidency in illiberal directions. He may want to arm twist his partisan majority to derive advantages that may force those who do not belong to or believe in the ideas of his party. Yet the freedom of Americans to disagree with the president and his party cannot be eroded to the extent of what obtains in illiberal democracies like Russia, Turkey, Rwanda or Hungary.

    Perhaps the strongest guardrail against the rise of presidential absolutism in today’s America is the sanctity of the constitution and the power of the Supreme Court to uphold the constitution against the absolutist ambitions of an individual president no matter how popular he may be. Mr. Trump’s personal idiosyncracies may tempt him towards absolutist and authoritarian flirtations but the powers of the constitution, the Supreme Court and Congress remain as perennial barriers to extremes of power absolutism.

    On the international plane, the global order in the post Second World war era is a complex of interconnected international relations held together by a network of alliances, alignments and interests. No nation, no matter how strong its military and economic power, can pursue its interests in random violation of the interests of other nations. Therefore, when Mr. Trump adopts a rhetoric that appears to threaten other nations in the international community, he risks alienating America’s allies. Worse still, the powers of any one nation cannot block the ability of other nations to enter into and pursue fresh alliances in order to protect and advance their own national interests.

    In the post Cold War era, the world has rapidly shifted from a unipolar world to one in which the polarity of international power is now scattered among centres of power both old and new. Broadly, we are now looking at a new world order in which the triumphant Western bloc is being actively counter balanced by a new authoritarian centre of power led by China and Russia with nations like North Korea, Iran, Hungary and Turkey in fellowship. In addition, other minor coalitions and blocs have risen as we see with the birth BRICS  nations. Therefore, the possibility of Individual national leaders emerging as absolutism leaders has been reduced to nearly nil. More impossible is the prospect of absolutist nations to lord it over other nations. Over time, Mr. Trump will come to a realization of the naked reality of the new world order and the limits it poses to absolute unilateral power.

    Beyond the limitations of power and politics at the individual national level and even among nations, a new determinant of power has emerged. Technology has emerged in recent times as a major determinant of national power and precedence. Information technology was until very lately the major determinant of gradations of power among nations. Even that has now been superseded by the graduation into Artificial Intelligence –AI. The race among great nations is going to be a race to lead the AI race in the next few years. It is perhaps beneficial that Mr. Trump has gathered the world’s most powerful technology oligarchs into a future AI conglomerate. Whether his rowdy personal ego will allow him to maintain the harmony among the tech oligarchs to work harmoniously for America’s global superiority is going to be the determinant of the road ahead. It can only be hoped that Mr. Trump does not mistake his transient enabling political advantage for a blank cheque to absolutism.  He must not allow this political moment to blind him to the contradictory nature of power absolutism in a fast changing world. Economic reality and diplomatic compulsion are likely to work together to tame Trump’s present idealism and absolutism illusions.

  • “Haba! President Tinubu is building a lasting legacy” – A Reader Writes Back

    “Haba! President Tinubu is building a lasting legacy” – A Reader Writes Back

    Last week, this column was dedicated to a speculative projection of where the Tinubu administration might be by next May when it strikes mid term. My contention was essentially that the administration has literally squandered most of the last one and half years in failing to put an effective administration in place. It has as yet no defining policy identity. It has no character, thrust or direction. To that extent, I contended that the administration will hit the mid term mark still groping for direction with heaps of issues and problems waiting to be addressed.  Worse still, the administration may just be grappling with the problems it has deliberately created in search of a policy identity: inflation, high energy prices, spiraling inflation, expending poverty, unprecedented hunger, violence and insecurity etc. The concluding contention was that next May will only activate the beginnings of the 2027 political campaigns instead of an improvement in the present desperate conditions. It is looking more like a wasted  first term, preparatory for a second term that will resemble a war.

    The butt of my contention was that the four-year presidential tenure imposes a time limitation on every incumbent  president to work and achieve a definite identity within a restricted time frame. The first year is time to set up an administration,  set a tone and define a character. The second and third years are for effective governance and establishment of an identifiable policy identity and defining character. The fourth year is for re-election campaign and the ‘warfare’ of political  succession. The gavel of the argument was that a situation where only one and half years is left for governance  constricts the time left for solving mounting national problems most of which were created by the very administration.

    One of my readers vehemently disagreed.  On the contrary, he argues that what President Tinubu has set in motion is in fact a tectonic policy ‘revolution’ comparable to those initiated by the late Obafemi Awolowo in the old Western Region. The full implications of the present policies are so far reaching and fundamental that the present tenure may as well qualify as the beginning of another  ‘golden age’ of a new Nigeria. The present hardship and difficulties will pass away and those who are strong enough to survive them will enter the new paradise of a better Nigeria. Beyond reforming Nigeria for good, Tinubu is also gradually restructuring the nation in ways that may be more far reaching that many political pundits are advocating or even dreamt of. The full impacts will only be appreciated long after the Tinubu presidency has ended and passed away. Excerpts:

    ————–

    Tinubu has roughly six months to provide tangible evidence of progress and  he may be able to produce it by stating that petrol subsidy removal has ramped up petrol refining locally and the  devaluation of the Naira is boosting diaspora investments in Nigeria, just as the proposed tax reforms when approved will be a game changer that will augur well for income redistribution and as such boost the rapid development of our dear nation.

    But the benefits of Tinubu’s reforms which, in my view, tend to reflect the belief in some quarters that he is restructuring Nigeria in  piecemeal as opposed to Goodluck Jonathan’s one fell swoop restructuring driven by his failed 2014  national confab initiative. Tinubu is systematically restructuring Nigeria layer by layer in the manner an onion is peeled off, layer by layer.

    Tinubu, in my view, will be celebrated long after he has left office because the policies he is introducing and implementing now have a long gestation period, usually beyond the two  terms tenure of elected office holders in Nigeria’s presidential system. But in due course, they will mature like the proverbial old wine and Tinubu may be remembered like the sage Obafemi Awolowo whose policies of free education in the South West and the establishment of Oodua Group that invested the revenue generated from the then highest income generating resource-(Cocoa)- in strategic assets that are till date still yielding income bountifully for the Yoruba nation.

    My prediction is that while Awo’s veneration is only by Yoruba people, eulogies for Tinubu in another decade or two may cut across all tribes, creeds, and cultures in Nigeria…

    We may not all survive the current hardships. But such is life.  China needed electricity to power her communism crippled economy and had to dam the Three Gorges River which environmentalists objected to owing to the catastrophic environmental consequences that would arise there. But China did it and it leaped forward and became the largest manufacturer in the world, beating fellow Asian country- Japan- and all the European countries and only becoming the second largest economy after the USA.

    It took the guts of a leader to damn the consequences of a few lives being lost for others to survive. It is like going to war and a few soldiers dying to liberate a nation or community. Those who die in the war attain the status of heroes.

    In my view, those who do not make it through the current turbulent times should be immortalized as heroes as we do our fallen soldiers.

    Of course,  these views may not command popular acclaim by some, who may deem them nihilistic. But it is what it is. Leaders in war or peacetime sometimes have to make decisions that may seem foolish to some onlookers but which the leader sees as necessary and inevitable to bring about positive change or for the greater good of the majority.

    I am an optimist to the core. In fact, if you read my past media interventions, you will see that l supported Gen Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program, SAP. If IBB had pressed ahead as Tinubu is doing right now against all odds, l believe Nigeria would have by now been amongst the comity of prosperous and great nations in the world.

    Clearly, president Tinubu does not seem to have a sufficiently credible or even competent team to articulate his vision hence it is in bits and pieces as you made clear in your piece.

    When l mentioned that the ice seemed to be thawing in the Nigerian economy in a piece l wrote about a month ago, some pundits hastily called me uncomplimentary  names without critically interrogating my point. Then it dawned on them that l was correct in my assessment when the price of petrol started dropping. 

    Although it is not being reflected in the inflation rates yet, in due course the gains in petrol price reduction and Naira devaluation will kick in via a drop in the Naira-Dollar exchange rate. 

    We recently saw in December how a devaluing of the naira boosted homebound investments by diaspora Nigerians as amplified  Detty December activities showed. I know a friend in the USA who bought a maisonette in highbrow Parkview Estate ikoyi for $200,000 which is equivalent to N320m. For a professional who has a practice in the USA, $200,000 is not so much. But in the US, he can only purchase a flat for that sum which he applied to purchase a four (4)bedroom maisonette in lkoyi, an exclusive neighborhood in Nigeria principally because Tinubu’s reform policies led to a devaluation of the Naira.

    Contrast that with the messaging under Gen. Ibrahim Babangida who introduced SAP which had similar harsh effects on the Nigerian masses. The messaging then led by Prof Jerry Gana first as MAMSA Director-General was convincing enough for Nigerians to accept SAP as an alternative to taking an IMF loan with its draconian conditionalities considered obnoxious by most Nigerians. 

    But change is usually initially resisted and only lion-hearted leaders survive. After a barrage of attacks from critics, disappointingly , Gen. Babangida under pressure caved in by reversing himself after embarking on the reform path before finally stepping aside with the mission unaccomplished.

    Tinubu has faced similar pushbacks to the changes he is currently making. Although a civilian, as opposed to being a soldier like lBB and Buhari, Tinubu has soldiered on with steely determination to pull through the reforms. With another chance on the horizon of successfully pushing through the proposed tax reforms which will give his reform agenda a more holistic character as it will bolster the other policy changes such as petrol subsidy removal and naira devaluation as well as local government autonomy.  Tinubu is on the cusp of making history in the leadership of Nigeria through his reform initiatives which in my view will have a profound effect on Nigeria and Nigerians in due course. 

    Of course, I am open to your offering me some sort of right of reply  in your next column. l can bet that anti-Tinubu sentiment will dominate the minds of respondents simply because they are currently feeling the pangs of the harsh fallout of the ongoing reform policies. But posterity will remember Tinubu like the sage  Awolowo.

    Magnus Onyibe

  • What will May bring? – By Chidi Amuta

    What will May bring? – By Chidi Amuta

    Our presidential political calendar indicates May 2025 as the mid term of the current presidential tenure. Every May 29th is some form of birthday for our democracy. Next May is mid term. Mid term is wake up time, a rude reminder that time is ticking and that what began as a ceremony of innocence will soon turn into a mixture of  ommissions and commissions with far reaching consequences.  In school calendar, mid term presages the outcomes of the year end.

    Ordinary Nigerians ended the year 2024 with an unusual sense of equanimity and even optimism. There was even a seeming understanding across the populace that people seem  to appreciate the difficulties of a new government trying so hard to find its way around a maze of obstacles and difficulties. In spite of severe hardship, people plodded on. In spite of extreme deprivations, people refused to explode into spontaneous revolt. What Nigerians have been through inn the last ne year would send most other nations into endless revolts and street uprising. But our people have understood and endured. When you ask them: “how country?”, they shake their heads, look up in the sky and just manage to hold back the tears! Hunger rumbles in their stomachs as they trek unimaginable distances to nowhere in particular. They are not even sure they will get to their uncertain destination as danger now lurks in every street corner. But our people still keep enduring the bad days.

    Even a nationwide mobilization for a mass protest against hardship and grinding poverty did not quite garner the kind of incendiary groundswell apocalypse that was feared.  Instead, only a handful of miscreants and urchins and destitutes gathered in a few places to mouth predictable abuses at officialdom. They were quickly dispersed by the goons of state. The police did the predictable. They dispensed already issued teargas and bullets. Many fell. There were arrests of under age kids and hungry homeless people found loitering around. Those arrested were herded into detention and subsequently arraigned before jobless magistrates and confused judges.

    But overall, the generality of Nigerians ushered in 2025 with uncharacteristic hope and optimism. It is not an indication of love at first sight for Tinubu and his gang. Rather, it is a growing understanding by our populace that democracy takes time to deliver its dividends. In effect, the Tinubu government would seem to have gotten more than usual tacit support from Nigerians than most of its predecessors. May be, our people are beginning to understand the sluggish pace of democratic fulfillment!

    At the beginning of the new year, there were prayers and loud supplications for some reprieve from the prevailing hardship in the new year. If anything, there would indeed seem to be a worrisome national consensus that the Tinubu government was yet to indicate a justification for coming to power. Nigerians were united in expressing the verdict that the government had infact merely succeeded in creating more problems than it could possibly hope to solve. Buhari flogged us with the kobo of hardship and ignored us while we wept in pain. Mr. Tinubu has brought  scorpions and poisoned darts!

    However, underneath the many wishes for better conditions in the new year was an expectation that the ruling politicians would at last begin to govern and begin addressing the urgent human welfare issues that beset us instead of playing more politics.

    Unfortunately, the political class seems to have lost the message in the equanimity and calm of the populace. They seem to be used to politics as a full time game and not a means to the end of solving human problems. Both the means and the end of politics are in the back pocket of the politicians.

    The majority of our politicians in both the ruling party and the scattered opposition, are beginning to sound as if the 2027 campaigns have already begun.  The government of the day has been most untidy in its policies and programmes.  It has mistaken uncoordinated and sporadic measures for a reform programme. Incoherent pronouncements on nearly every subject are being mistaken for the expression of the collective will of a determined government. The president has made it a point of duty to be present at nearly every Boys Scout meeting around the world. People doubt whether he in fact has a Minister of External Affairs. Tinubu has accumulated more air miles than his immediate predecessor who himself attended quite a few unnecessary meetings where he hardly knew what the hell was on the agenda.

    While the May Mid term remains far, politicians are busy with politics as if 2027 is by the door. Alliances and alignments are being floated and speculated. Politicians are criss -crossing the country in search of allies and alliances. Most of them  are already rehearsing their campaign themes for 2027. The vast majority of utterances and pronouncements by major politicians since the last quarter of 2024 have sounded more like campaign preps for 2027. It is as though the war has begun.

    The ruling party is ramping up political promises, sounding apologetic for its serial failures  to fulfill too many promises. The fractured opposition is aiming barbs at the ruling party’s rudderless governance and confused policy medley. The alternative perspective being offered by the opposition parties sounds more like cries of the mortally injured. In a political landscape with over 80 registered political parties, the one ruling party , the APC, is only being meekly countered by only two parties, the PDP and Labour Party. Even the Labour Party which is present in one miserable state house has been reduced to the flurry of tweets by its presidential candidate in the 2023 Presidential  election, Mr. Peter Obi. In due credit to him, Mr. Obi is perhaps the only opposition figure in the political landscape in terms of his consistently serious attacks of the serial profligacy of the ruling government.

    From the content and temper of  the major political actors, the campaigns for the 2027 elections may have indeed started. Mouthpieces of the incumbent have begun to dig in into an aggressively defensive position. The hardship all over the land is being deferred to a future date that is politically convenient. The possibility of reprieve is in turn being outsourced to divine intervention. At some point recently, the idea of a nationwide prayer crusade was floated to enable Nigerians refer their predicaments to the divine. Promises that were made during the 2023 elections are now being reviewed  to see which ones can be amended or deferred.

    The administration’s ‘renewed hope’ agenda is itself being reviewed and renewed. A series of policy stumbles that remain uncoordinated and incoherent are being mischievously called an ‘economic reform agenda’. In the interim, a litany of hellish consequences are daily being visited on the people.  Hunger is pervasive all over the land just as the sheer cost of daily living  has for many shot through the roof. A barrage f taxes, tariff hikes, charges, levies and price increases have reduced the national economy into a playground of free for all price increases, a war of everyone against everybody.

    We are waiting for May and for a mid term report. It is in the nature of the four -year presidential tenure that we will soon approach the mid term break signaled by the month of May. Like in a school calendar, Mid term is a time for assessments and re-assessments.  It is a time to be graded but also to grade our leaders in the polity at both national and state levels. In the realm of politics, mid term is a season of rehearsals of the politics next term.

    Already, Governors elected in regular term are dissolving their cabinets and making fresh appointments from the pool of party faithful who can no longer wait for their turn at the gravy queue. The president had since rejigged his own inchoate collective of ministers and sundry appointees.

    By the nature of the four -year presidential term, the assumption is that half the promises that were made in the 2023 campaigns should have been delivered by now. By all accounts, we ought by now to have begun to have a foretaste of the goodness that was promised us. Or, better still, a good number of the ills and headaches that afflicted us under Mr. Buhari should by now have started receding.

    For good or for ill, the Tinubu government is literally two and half years away from its terminal date. By its very nature, a four -year presidential term has its schedule of expectations and possible attainments clearly established. The first year is time to set up an administration and set in motion a credible agenda of governance. The second and third years are for operationalizing the administration so that its definitive character is known. That is when the identity of an administration is stamped and the foundations for its possible legacy are laid. The fourth and final year is time for waging a succession campaign and winning or losing a re-election campaign. This is the year of political battles.If the administration secures a second term, it is a tenure for legacy consolidation.

    By this political calendar progression, Mr. Tinubu and his gang have a little over one year to deal with the many real issues of governance and development that assail today’s Nigeria. It is a year and half to resolve so many issues that presently haunt most Nigerians. In effect, the president has a little over one year to restore a sensible exchange rate, to chase down inflation, drive away hunger from most homes, to reduce the unemployment queues, resolve a rampaging insecurity and restore the hope of Nigerians in the future of our country. Forget affordable petrol at the pump. That has gone with the wind.

    My fear is that so much time has been lost in the brick bat between the ruling party and regime opponents. As we speak, the nation is yet to appoint envoys to all countries where we are represented. A number of strategic government departments are yet to be filled. The administration does not as yet have a defined foreign policy thrust. There are too many states that are yet to be visited by the president or key ministers. The economic policy and programmes of the administration are still a patchwork of borrowings, interest rate jockeying , taxation gambles and tariff hikes.

    In all this, there are too many new worrisome questions that Nigerians are struggling to find answers to. What does the Tinubu presidency stand for? What will this president be remembered for? What is the defining character of this presidency?

    What will the month of May bring for Nigerians?

  • West Africa’s season of farewells and question marks – By Chidi Amuta

    West Africa’s season of farewells and question marks – By Chidi Amuta

    Frances’s major military base in Cote d’Ivoire is billed to close down at the end of this month. The long -standing base, Port Bouet, is to be rid of its French troop occupants and is to be renamed General Quattara Thomas d’Aquinn base after an indigenous military figure. No one knows whether the French were pushed or are voluntarily fleeing. The latter possibility makes more sense in the context of recent developments in relations between Paris and its many West African client states.

    Prior to now, the string of  French speaking West African countries : Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad- had severed military and even diplomatic links with France.  It is the culmination of lingering colonial economic encumbrances and France’s own domestic political and economic contradictions.

    In the aftermath of these departures, a vortex of diplomatic and strategic waves have been unleashed. Jihadist military pressure from the northern parts of the Sahel have increased , leading to avoidable mounting casualties especially in Burkina Faso. Domestic political pressure has increased the demand for democratic rule as defined by new economic hardships occasioned by the bungling of the presiding military authorities. New national security arrangements masterminded by an increased presence of Russian troops in the region have crept in as well. New economic and diplomatic imperatives have been inaugurated as the military regimes struggle to adapt to new diplomatic and international realities.

    Initially, the impulse of non-French West African countries led by Nigeria was to impose sanctions on the countries that fell under military coups. The UN concurred as a reflex. Threats to air links and border closures however did little to discourage the new military juntas. The willingness of black markets and other rogue financial arrangements  insulated the new military regimes from the more adverse effects of regional sanctions.

    One of the far reaching responses of the more daring military regimes has been to threaten the cohesion of ECOWAS, the regional economic integration  bloc. An initial threat by ECOWAS to use military force to enforce compliance collapsed due to an obvious lack of military capacity and the cash poverty of most of the bloc’s member countries.  In the intervening period, the military juntas have waxed stronger and become more a daring hreat to the survival of ECOWAS itself.

    At the present moment, the three leading states-Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have threatened to pull their countries out of ECOWAS. It is not just a threat but one backed by a deadline of end of January 2025. Nothing has happened so far that indicates a determination to save the 50-year old regional bloc.

    Many argue that there is little or nothing in the achievements of ECOWAS that deserves to be saved.  West African economies have hardly grown, leaving little or nothing to integrate. The free movement of persons in and across the region has mostly translated into the freedom of impoverished “others” to travel into and out of Nigeria in search of opportunities that are hardly there. Otherwise, the free movement of persons has meant the free movement of jihadist insurgents and their black market arms or the migration of scraggy livestock across badly manned borders

    For Nigeria, the near total evacuation of French military, diplomatic and economic presence from West Africa poses  huge foreign policy challenges.  First, the imminent loss of ECOWAS is a major historical  setback. Our clout as a regional leader is on its way home. The gains made in the days of ECOMOG and the restoration of peace and democracy in Liberia and Sierra Leone are about to be consigned to the dustbin of history. It must concern Presdient Tinubu that this historic diplomatic setback will be happening under his watch as President of Nigeria.

    At a time when the interest of major Western powers in Africa has been in decline for years, Nigeria stands the risk of being the remaining major Western ally in a region of global economic interest  but now beset with strategic security threats of a global scope.

    The Gulf of Guinea corridor linking Angola to Brazil in the Atlantic remains a zone of great importance and interest both for global maritime traffic and oil and gas energy security.

    Nigeria’s geographical location places us in direct line of fire of the rampaging jihadist  insurgency in the north. We share a common extensive border stretch with major theatres of jihadist threat: Niger, Chad with proximal reach with Burkina Faso and the others.

    The departure of the French from these countries means that Nigeria’s northern border is now open to direct jihadist  presence and influence. We have this proximity to hold responsible for our decades long incessant insecurity from movements like Boko Haram, ISWAP and other fringe fundamentalist groups of diverse names and iterations mostly inspired by Al Queda, ISIS and their other successor groups.

    Nigeria’s geo-cultural configuration with a dominantly northern Moslem and southern Christian population reinforces the strategic security threat of the present situation.  Yet the reality of the situation is one in which two major threats to global security lie at the doorsteps of Nigeria. Beside the well known jihadist threat from the Sahel, it is significant to note that in all the countries from which the French have recently exited and the military have taken over power, the civil populace have been manipulated into waving Russian flags in the streets while jubilating to welcome military coup leaders. As recently as the late 2024 hunger protests in Nigeria, some youth were arrested for brandishing Russian flags in the streets of Kano!

    The presence of Russian troops and political interest groups was heightened in the days of the Yevgeny Prikozym and his Wagner Group of mercenaries in West and Central Africa. Wagner was a combined economic extraction  and military  venture. African countries were offered security assistance in return for contracts and mining rights . Over time, Wagner became an extension of Moscow’s territorial interst in Africa. Declining Western interest in parts of Africa attracted the attention of an ambitious Vladimir Putin whose escapades in Europe have been blocked in Ukraine. The attraction to Putin was heightened by the declining capacity of  African military forces to protect their countries from Sahelian jihadist forces armed and funded from international terrorist sources.

    Effectively then, with the departure of the French from a country as close as  Niger, Nigeria now has at its immediate northern border two unfriendly influences with active forces: Islamic jihadist ISIS affiliates  and Russian occupation forces.

    In recent weeks, the military government in Niger has accused Nigeria of plotting to overthrow it. This has partly prompted recent debates as to whether Nigeria should host Western military presence in its northern states is redundant.  What we have at stake in Niger is both a national territorial integrity issue and a global sphere of influence contest.  Both pressures are essentially and urgently military before they are diplomatic in nature.   A nation must be capable of effectively protecting and defending its territorial integrity in military terms. In concert with larger interests, a nation located along a sphere of influence fault line must also be capable of collaborating with other interested parties to house an effective base for the defense of the sphere of influence. This is the effective backdrop for making sense of the foreign military base debate among Nigerian politicians.

    Unfortunately, contributions to this debate from our professional military have been less than informed. It is hard for the current military establishment to argue against foreign military bases. Our professional military establishment has failed woefully to assure both Nigerians and the world that it has the capacity and integrity to  protect and defend Nigeria from the twin forces of jihadist terrorism and insurgency let alone guaranteeing a hemispheric sphere of influence contest.

    In the coming months, it is a season of goings and comings in Nigeria’s immediate international relations. Our domestic political challenges may be somewhat diminished by headaches from the immediate neighbourhood.

  • Merry Whatsapp Christmas – By Chidi Amuta

    Merry Whatsapp Christmas – By Chidi Amuta

    The same old “Jingle bells! Jingle bells!! Jingle all the way!!!” is  again uniting Christians and non-Christians in the ancient ritual of Christmas.  Ordinarily, Christmas has become synonymous with happiness and family reunion. Kith and kin come together. Food and drinks flow in households and the grueling grind of the passing year give way, temporarily, to a short period of rest and leisure. Yet some years in the history of nations have been hard and harsh. 

    No wonder Charles Dickens, wrote Bleak Christmas in early industrial England,  a period of hard economic life and unrelieved bleakness. Industrial sooth filled the atmosphere and the  classic indictment of the age was captured in the images of under aged children working in factories covered in sooth in  industrial chimneys. These were literally the archetypal images of the devil of the industrial age. Dark devils sent to earth to curse industry captains and the rulers of the day!

    Many Nigerians will swear that 2024 would easily pass as Nigeria’s anno Horribilis, our worst year in recent memory. Life has been hard for many. Living costs have escalated, making basic food a luxury for the rich. Even those who would have loved to get away from their usual abodes to the relative peace of the rural areas and countryside can either not afford to go there or are too afraid of the dangers on most routes.  

    But Christmas has since deviated from its ritual spiritual essence. It is now part of the commercial heart of the industrial and post industrial age. The current commercial and mercantile essence of Christmas is ironically an aberration, an act of disobedience and defiance of an early injunction from the Messiah himself. Those familiar with the biblical chronicles will recall the image of a young swash buckling Christ on horseback who rode in anger to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem to disperse traders and gamblers who had made the Temple their shop floor. Ostensibly with horse whip in hand, he scattered their wares, upset their trading tables and in anger whipped them as they scampered in different directions. 

    He charged them with defilement of a holy place by converting the temple into a ‘den of thieves’ and a haven of iniquity. He left them with a permanent sense of guilt and an eternal injunction that the temple was never intended as a place of commerce. It was an act of defilement to convert the place of worship into a place of trade. In other words, the work of God and its holy places was never to be degraded through commercialism and the drive for profit. That was perhaps a rather simplistic interpretation of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism. 

    By an irony of history, after several centuries of that mass flogging and original injunction, humanity has become curiously united in the global retail frenzy and annual ritual of consumerism of the season of Christmas. Capitalist multiplication of profit is in fact a glorification of Christian doctrine. He who has, more will be added unto him. From those who have little, even that which they have will be taken from them and added to the rich man’s trove. The rich get richer and the poor even poorer! It is written. 

    The familiar tunes of Christmas – ‘Jingle Bells!’, ‘Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer!!’, “Noel Noel!!!”, “Silent Nights, Holy Nights!” now openly clash with the clanging of tills and cash registers in mega retail shops as millions of shoppers get immersed in orgies of Christmas shopping all over the world. Walmart and Shoprite play the familiar tunes of Christmas to drown out the harsh metallic ringing of cash tills that must take in returns from your purchases!

    Soon after Christmas day, it has become customary for retail business managers, accountants and executives to tally their sales figures and sum up their books as the best way to terminate the monotony of  the ‘’jingle bells” season. They grin and dance ‘all the way’ to the banks. 

    The profit creed of retail consumer executives the world over has now overwhelmed the sober celebration of the birth of a sectarian messiah. Gold versus God has become the summation of the phenomenon of Christmas. Body over spirit.

    Largely stripped of its original religious essence, Christmas has since degenerated into more of a fixture in the revenue calendar of  retail giants worldwide. It is estimated that retail vendors of apparel, grocery, decorations, costumes and allied seasonal wares and accessories expect over 65% of their annual turnover to happen over the Christmas season alone. Christmas has become a holy birthday seized by the frenzy of a global market place. In the developed industrial world, retail sales figures over Christmas have become a credible source of statistics for economic well being. In good climes, Christmas retail figures climb high to indicate  healthy purchasing power. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Nigeria’s political economist had better take a closer look at the sales volumes in markets, shots and malls this Christmas to determine if Mr. Tinubu’s economic policies are working.

    We can sum up the present realities of our nation in this Christmas season in the  idiom of the great novelist Chinua Achebe.  As he lamented, “things have fallen apart”. There is no longer a center let alone one that can hold a nation or a people together. The “arrows” of a bad god have felled many good people and the nation is “no longer at ease”. Our presidential elections have now come down to a frantic and desperate search for “a man of the people”!