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Tag: Chidi Amuta

Chidi Amuta

  • Postcard from Damascus – By Chidi Amuta

    Postcard from Damascus – By Chidi Amuta

    Unlike in the last twenty four years of his power and crushing majesty, Bashar al-Assad had a decision quickly made for him. The choice between flying out of  Hmeimim air base  in his super luxury presidential jet and a rugged military version of the Russian SU 35 duty jet was quickly made for him in the thick of darkness. The special squad of military intelligence officers detailed by Vladimir Putin and the elite squad of his own intelligence service to ferret  him out of Damascus had no time for protocol niceties. Their task was simple: fly Assad and his family safely out of Syria and into Moscow where the grounds had been prepared for his life in exile. Roughly three hours of flight into uncertainty.

    With his evacuation from the Presidential fortress in Damascus, Assad’s two and half decades of tyranny over Syria was over, thus ending over fifty years draconian dominion of the Assad dynasty over Syria.  This was an exile long and well prepared for. In spite of the elaborate arrangements laid out by Putin  for his unexpected guests, the Assad family had made serious arrangements for this eventuality.

    With an estimated loot of over $2 billion tucked away in Russian and other banks, the Assad family owns a series of super luxury apartments worth over $40 million located in Moscow’s eight tallest apartment block. It is of course unlikely that the Assad clan would quarter in these luxury abodes in the immediate. For security and diplomatic reasons, they are more likely  to be housed in specially provided dachas made available by their ubiquitous host with all VIP security protection arrangements.

    Russia’s pretension as an hnest broke had collapsed. It has sustained its patronage of Assad under the guise that it could get Assad to give up its chemical weapons arsenal and neutralize elements of ISIS in Syria. All that did not happen. In the wake of the Assad overthrow, Russia has played up a narrative that it encouraged Assad to surrender to a peaceful transfer of power. That, too, is a bogus lie concocted in case Syria becomes ungovernable, necessitating an Assad return.

    Back in Damascus, a virtual street carnival  and mob sight-seeing has gone on for over a week and half. The mob is out on a a tour of the places that up until last week were hallowed ground of a despicable   and dreaded tyrant. Fear is gone with the tyrant and left in  its place the dread of uncertain freedom. Common folk have gone sight-seeing and treasure- hunting in Assad’s palace. Common people are looting treasured art pieces, venturing into presidential bedrooms, savoring the remnant aroma from what used to be the presidential cuisine with alluring menus on wall display. On the streets, irate mobs have torn down huge posters and billboards of the fallen dictator.  Poor people and plain street urchins are trampling on Assad posters and even urinating on them!

    More tellingly, the Assad prison cells have been thrown open. People who have been in detention for decades are being released for the first time. Some can hardly remember ther own names or their precise identity. Even their relations can hardly recognize them. Taken together, the Damascus postcards are quite familiar in all places where history overturns the bastions of autocracy and power absolutism.

    The images and footages are familiar. Images of tumbling statues and opened up palaces: The Caecescus in Romania. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcus in the Philippines,  Haille Mengistu Mariam in Ethiopia, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The postcards from the palaces of fleeing tyrants and triumphant street mobs carry a uniform imprint.

    With the coordinated and mass supported rebel overrun of Damascus and the sacking of the Assad regime, the long drawn  Syrian revolutionary flourish that gathered momentum following the Arab Spring of 2011 has made land fall. The Arab Spring was a spontaneous street based revolt against authoritarian rulers in most of the Arab world. The revolt brought about varying degrees of political change and even regime changes in countries as diverse as Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain. In Syria, the revolt was beaten down with maximum ferocity by Bashar al-Assad following in the footsteps of his late father. Multiple faction rebellion followed and a bloody civil war ensued.

    Dissidents and rebels were hunted down, rounded up and killed, jailed, tortured or chased into exile. Those who survived organized into factional rebel groups parading diverse ideologies and waging mostly religious fundamentalist crusades.  But they all had one enemy- Assad and his autocratic regime.  He in turn dug in  and entrenched his dictatorship.  He reinforced his military strength,  tightened the levers of repression, and reduced the democratic freedoms of Syrians.

    He reached out to Iran, Russia and Turkey as well as extremist terrorist groups in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories  adjoining Israel. Assad alienated moderate Arab countries like Jordan which was presided over by his childhood palace friend, now King Abdallah, son of the late King Hussein.

    Of course, Syria was a fertile ground for all manner of fringe religious  fundamentalist terrorists. All manner of international interests were aligned with the various rebel factions. ISIS found a safe haven in parts of Syria. The over 13 rebel groups opposed to Assad were supported by powerful local and international  power interests: The US was poised against ISIS remnants. Turkey was pitched to the north in support of separatist Kurds seeking  autonomy to the north of Syria. Iran, Saudi Arabia were digging for support and foothold in a regional power bazaar.  Israel has remained fixated on the Golasn Heights. A multi pronged civil war erupted and  raged since the Arab Spring.

    Syria’s economy which had before  the revolt boasted one of the highest GDP per capita in the region was plunger into chaos and crisis. Poverty and mismanagement followed. The only feature of the Syrian  state alive was the Assad presidency and its supporting military infrastructure.

    What has united the rebel groups that have finally toppled and sacked the Assad regime is a simplistic hunger for a civil, inclusive, sovereign and peaceful Syria. From their pronouncements so far, this hunger is above their sectarian differences. They have to fight to restore Syria, to ensure the return of normal social services and to mend the broken heart of a nation that was once a promising destination in the Middle East.

    Of all the rebel groups, HTS is easily the most prominent from the perspective of political influence. Led by Sharaa (Al-Jolani), a known terrorist on whose head the US has placed a bounty of $10 million. In the civil war years, HTS,b supported by Turkey,  was in power in the Idlib province where the imprints of his more liberal governance was in evidence.

    There is evidence that he ran a more liberal version of Islamic fundamentalism. Some women were allowed not to wear hijab. Men did not have to wear overgrown beards while professional women ran social services in health and education. Leading Western powers like the US and the UK who maintained a hard posture towards HTS and its leader now have to watch and see to what extent the moderation of factional leaders like Jolani can pervade the future government of Syria.

    The defeat of the Assad regime has literally reduced Syria into a carcass for the hounds of international power. In a purported chase after remnants of ISIS and other trouble makers,  the United States has not let off in its serial bombardment and strikes targeted at ISIS related rebel forces still operating in Syria.

    Israel is feverishly pursuing its own national security interests by exploiting the period of statelessness in Syria to weaken a resurgent Syria as a staging post for hostile activity against the state of Israel.  It  is targeting chemical and biological weapons sites as well as military hardware locations. Israel is exploiting this period of vacuum to destroy whatever is left of the military capability of the Syrian state. It is carrying out multiple strikes per day. The strategic objective of these strikes is to weaken Syria and make it an unattractive destination for hostile actions against Israel. These actions are also aimed at whittling down the influence of Iran in the neighborhood.

    The neutralization of  a humbled Syria can only add to Israel’s depletion of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the virtual devastation of Hamas in Gaza to create a more quiet neighbourhood for Israel. Unfortunately, these developments can hardly advance the cause of Palestinian statehood. Whatever negotiations take place  now on the matter will only have the Arabs and Palestinians  negotiating from a position of  demonstrable weakness.

    As a strategic influence in the region, Russia has paid a price for its war against Ukraine. Clearly, the sacking of Assad is an indirect defeat of Russian influence in the region. Russia had lost the capacity to protect Assad regime in Syria given  its exhaustion in Ukraine. With a casualty of over 350,000 dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine and the raging costs of the war on its economy with crippling sanctions, Putin had no difficulty reaching the inevitable conclusion that Syria was no longer worth the trouble. Continued Russian involvement in Syria would impress no one in particular and be of no immediate strategic or economic interest. It is better off negotiating with whoever comes to rule Syria to protect whatever is left of Russian military hardware in Syria.

    In every place where power places itself above responsible governance and the pursuit of the common good, the collapse of the Assad dynasty holds lessons. It is at once the lesson of absolutism as a temptation of power. It is also the lesson of the narrow pursuit of self -interest over and above the common interest and the collective good.

    The transience of power is the most obvious lesson that has since been learnt by even the most pedestrian Banana Republic autocrat. They know power is transient  hence they spend their days in office preparing for the decades they will spend after office. They know the things they  are likely to miss out of office hence they spirit those things away to their retirement hideouts.

    Above everything and relevant to every clime, the destruction of Syria and the eventual collapse of the Assad dynasty shows how the prospects and promise of a nation can be destroyed by the limitless power appetite of one family and one man.

    For the Nigerian state in its present state of creaking disrepair, the fall of Assad’s tenuous autocracy demonstrates how easily a state besieged by multiple threats can eventually fall apart. For those in doubt, the threats that confront and could fell the Nigerian state are not far too different from the ones that afflicted Syria and led to the recent collapse.

    These include: spiraling insecurity,  random and casual violations of human and citizen rights, unchecked sectarian divisions, unbridled corruption among political leaders and increasing regionalism of political discourse and contest.

    The Syrian postcard is specific. But its images are universal and apply in every  nation where power gravitates towards absolutism.

  • Beyond a fake agenda for 2027 – By Chidi Amuta

    Beyond a fake agenda for 2027 – By Chidi Amuta

    President Tinubu may have stumbled on a sustaining logic and viable mission for his political future. Prior to last fortnight, I was among those who were doubting what narrative or political argument could  sustain Mr. Tinubu’s interest in a 2027 run. Now, there seems to be something in the works. It is the fickle and belated argument that Nigerians had lived a fake life of petro consumerism before last May’s removal of petroleum subsidy. Prior to then, we all had lived a ‘fake life’ of prodigal waste.

    We were splurging on our oil wealth through unlimited burning of cheap fuel. We were owning and driving fleets of multiple cars. We were often going to nowhere in particular in these cars. Those with no cars or rickshaws were using cheap gasoline to powered noisy ‘I pass my Neighbour’ generators to power homes,  run tiny businesses or just pollute the air in order to charge their phones for gossiping on social media.

    In other cases, we  were watching helplessly as greedy smugglers trucked loads of cheap gasoline across the borders and hauling in stashes of cheap cash. Oil oligarchs were fleecing the state through opaque and dubious oil subsidy scams. The annual national budget was being manipulated and padded to provide and pay for dubious subsidy provisions.

    Then came a savior, so the new narrative goes. On May 29th 2023, an elected messiah strolled in with a message of salvation casually delivered: “oil subsidy is gone!”. Mr. Tinubu casually commanded an end to the bazaar of fake life. No systematic thinking followed the policy jolt. No measures to protect us from this casual cruelty. Only hints from the IMF suggested an informed policy. But the public cruelty was unmistakable, total  and instant. The mass suffering was undisguised. Living costs shot through the roof. Transportation costs sent every other cost upwards till now. As it were, the whole society was being compelled to do penance for a past life of wasteful oil consumption. A fake and indulgent past life was bound to end as a new sheriff swept into town. This seems to  be the new narrative.

    This thoughtless policy announcement is now being painted as a messianic intervention of epic proportions. Tinubu has come to save us from our past prodigality. What has so far been an accidental presidency is now being rebranded into a salvation mission.  A squad of clueless political jobbers hurriedly assembled as a government is now being cast as an army of reformers out to save an economy  and punish  a wasteful society for its past sins. A  basically clueless president now wants to be greeted as a crusading messianic figure who came to end a culture of fake wasteful  consumption of the nation’s oil resources in the form of cheap gasoline.

    Tinubu was speaking recently through a surrogate at the graduation ceremony of a University in Kwara state. Nigerians are enamored of fake things, quacks  and false prophets and politicians that parade fake credentials and false promises.

    The pronouncement went viral. In a nation that is instinctively religious in its understanding of public issues, the accusation of a past fake life of unthinking consumption caught on. Nigerians had sinned in the oast and are now paying for their past sins. The president was accusing the Nigerian populace of the sin of past gluttony and waste. The president is now a messiah with an implicit mandate to end the fake life and replace it with one of prudence and frugality. The higher pump peroces and mass pauperization are aspects of the penance that we all have to poay for our past sins. The removal of oil subsidy is now presented as a much deserved act of  expiation for past sins. Our people are being punished to do penance for a past life of prodigal waste and reckless indulgence.

    To the best of my knowledge, the Tinubu presidency has so far not come up with a strong enough argument that could necessitate a 2027 run for a second term. Yet the machinery for a second term run is everywhere in evidence. Pressure groups are springinh up in all corners of the nation. Carefully nominated spokespersons are making coordinated noises. Yet, the public has not quite seen in the episodic style of governance anything that should support lacks an argument. Its programs lack a consistency. It’s achievement remain scanty and eclectic. It has not articulated a systematic programme that could sustain government for four years. And yet, the administration is nearly halfway through its tenure. How to find justification for the remaining time and onwards to 2027 remains the lingering political problem of the administration. Therefore, stumbling on this messianic streak could be a saving grace. Clearly, the magnitude of national problems that remain unaddressed is a mountain. It is easier  to replace the multitude of probems with a single messianic salvation mission.

    Couched in terms of saving us all from a sinful fake life, the mandate of the Tinubu presidency becomes both a moral and economic crusade. Coupled with foreign exchange and other economic policy crises, the fuel subsidy removal salvation mandate can stand as a national economic reform measure. But taken together, their negative impacts cannot market them politically for another presidential term. But dressed in moral garb, a mission to encourage an end to a fake life could pass for a crusade for a review of our moral values.

    Tinubu wants to migrate from an economic reformer to a moral crusader for a new economic order. But in order to make that somersault, Mr. Tinubu will need a total makeover. He needs to revamp and come clean on his personal credentials.  He needs to rejig his team by replacing fellow travelers and debt collectors with technocrats. He needs to revise his priorities and revise or even review the agenda of his creaky party.

    Those expensive real estate renovations in his previous budgets need urgent review. Those new executive jets,  fleets of SUVs and those lengthy motorcades and yachts etc do not quite fit into any reformist moral agenda. You need to save yourself before setting out to save others! The question remains this: does Mr. Tinubu have the moral credentials to navigate Nigeria from an assumed sinful past?

    It is politically unwise in any case for a leader to set himself above the people. It is erroneous to posit the people as sinners and the leader as a saint. The consumption of subsidized petroleum products is the result of past government policies. Tinubu was here with us through the various dispensations that instituted the subsidized petrol prizes. He and his numerous businesses was a beneficiary of the subsidized prices. It is doubtful whether he and his relations and associates were totally innocent of the wheeling and dealing in petroleum products imports that sustained the subsidy regime.

    The most important requirement of credible political leadership is to rise above a messianic posturing and immerse oneself in the crises and problems in which the people find themselves. The challenge of credible political leadership is to face the problems of a tenure and seek to resolve them by uplifting the people from the challenges that torment them. To distance oneself from the challenges and posit oneself above the people is false consciousness which can at best convert the leader into an aloof and distant messianic figure far removed from the realities that define general social existence.

    If 2027 is the issue on hand, then the Tinubu government must face up to the challenge of that our current problems are largely the result of both its inherited and self-created policy quagmire. Tinubu created the subsidy removal and its serial conseqences. He created the consequences of the foreign exchange merger. He imposed the myriad taxes, levies, tariffs, charges that have joiied forces to make life unlivable for most Nigerians. Hunger became a national feature under his watch just as suicide became an option for a lot of Nigerians seeking to escape from the harrowing realities of the present time.

    The road to escape from these consequences of present day policies should be the basis of  whatever new thinking the president and his team want to advance for a possible 2027 run. Better solutions to the problems already created by the Tinubu government should be the basis of any credible opposition to the Tinubu incumbency.

    There is no need to negatively brand all Nigerians or consign us all into a tribe of sinners just to find a narrative to ennoble Mr. Tinubu’s rudderless stewardship find an excuse for its elongation. We are already suffering enough of the consequences of bad governance. There is no need to call us names, insult us further or, for that matter, burden us with guilt just to sit comfortably on its bruised backs.

  • Our ‘One Party’ Democracy – By Chidi Amuta

    Our ‘One Party’ Democracy – By Chidi Amuta

    Of all the ills that afflict a democracy, a stubborn virus in the party system is the most lethal. Where politicians treat the party system

    as their exclusive preserve, to do as they wish, it is hard for the system to self- correct let alone see that there is anything wrong. It could be worse when parties become like rickety “molues’ merely meant to convey political passengers to their next election destination irrespective of their belief, aim and purpose for seeking power.

    Where  political parties degenerate into  cultic monopolies  reserved for a few anointed chieftains and their select acolytes, the party system festers to infect the overall polity with its own infirmities. A corrupt political party system can only lead to a devious mangling of democracy itself. It ss easy for a liberal multi party democracy to degenerate into a cultic autocracy manipulated by a select minority for state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. A devious manipulation of the political party system is the commonest source of authoritarian rule in most of Africa.

    To a great extent, all the present hue and cry about the trouble with democracy in Nigeria begins and ends with the ills of the party system. There is of course a ruling party, the APC. I have lost count of the number of other parties in the system,  about 80, I understand! But of  the multitude, only two other parties, namely the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party are most prominent. At least, this is the number that made themselves heard from the results of the 2023 presidential elections. Ideally, then, the APC as the ruling party should be feeling the heat of the other two major parties as ‘opposition parties’.  By the nature of democracy, the Nigerian public should get a constant feel of an effective policy alternative to the ruling party from the body of opposition parties. Yes indeed, from the general trend of discourse in our polity, there is indeed a ruling party from the perspective of governance and dominance of the political space. But no one seems to hear the concerted voice of an opposition set of parties. Both Mr. Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi as individual political leaders are consistent in criticizing the policies and programmes of the ruling party. It is doubtful if the parties they lead are acting and speaking like opposition parties rightly regarded and properly defined.

    In Nigeria, once parties  are formed and registered, they are left to guide and guard the political process on the basis of their independence.  But our parties also use their independence to cultivate the ingredients of their own decay and even death. The concept of party supremacy is often invoked to insulate and protect the internal weaknesses and deficiencies of the parties themselves. The supremacy of  defective parties is the engine room of misrule and the decay of democracy.

    In Nigeria’s tradition of multiparty democracy, it is common for the ruling party to predominate the political space with a myth of infallibility. Winner takes all. Other parties exist in name and skeleton, not in substance. The ruling party systematically swallows the others in bits and pieces, literally cannibalizing them.

    Therefore, although many parties exist on the INEC register, there is only one effective party. That party is the ruling prty, the one that won the last election and controls the majority of the political space. In between elections, our system operates like a one party state except where the next most popular party controls a sizeable chunk of the political space. Thus, our political culture has tended to produce a pseudo one party system after each national election.

    The tendency is for party members from the losing parties to seek to migrate to the winning side. Even as a deliberate ploy, the ruling party seeks to harvest or poach members from the opposition in order to maintain its ruling hegemony or whittle down the power of the opposition.

    In recent times, concern has arisen within the political class over the aggressive expansion of the APC into territories ruled by the opposition parties. After the 2023 general elections, the winning APC dominates the political space: majority in the National Assembly; majority of state governors; majority in state legislatures as well as control of federal executive power. Correspondingly, control of the national economy and the power of patronage follow logically. In the process of wielding majoritarian power and influence, the ruling party acquires the swagger of one party.

    Recently, chieftains of the other parties have cried out in protest that the APC, in its rapacious hunger for membership, seems to be gearing towards swallowing other parties and therefore laying the foundations  for a one party Nigeria. Alhaji Atiku, presidential candidate of the PDP in the last election, has openly leveled this charge. So have other party leaders and key politicians.

    Vicariously, the opposition parties seem to be lending support to this trend.. They have failed to manage their affairs in a manner that should make them stronger as opposition platforms.

    The PDP is caught in an existential factional fight between the disciples of FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and those of Alhaji Atiku. The party has no consensual executive. Similarly, the Labour Party with control of only one state governorship but victory in 12 states in the 2023 presidential race is torn in litigations. Mr. Peter Obi , the party’s presidential candidate in the last election along with Alex Otti, Abia State Governor are pitted in legal battle with the party executive, led by the disputed chairman, Mr. Abure. Mr. Abure has been contesting leadership of the party in court and has infact won pending appeal. Most of the other parties are not faring any better.

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

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

    Effectively, then, we are in a practical one party situation: the ruling party and literally no opposition parties. Intrinsically, there is no difference between all the major parties in contention in this democracy, whether ruling or not. There are no ideological or value differences among our parties. They are all acronyms, colourful flags and emblems with little intrinsic meaning. They have different names.

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

    So, effectively, we have a political canvas populated by practically the same tribe of political animals. They are at best hunting for a party label to wear around their necks for the purpose of qualifying to contest the next election or being enrolledinto the next power grab assemblage.

    Anyone interested  in testing this assumption should point out any differences in policies and programmes among the states on the basis of the parties in power in each state. Oyo state has been ruled by a PDP government for almost 6 years while its neighbour Osun has been ruled by the APC. What is the difference in style of governance, policy thrust or vision?

    The common origins of the parties is best dramatized by the manner in which the former ruling party, the PDP, split up and eventually gave birth to the APC and others. Differences within the ruling PDP between incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and the more progressive governors in the Nigerian Governors Forum had become intractable by 2013. While the PDP convention was going on at Abuja’s Eagle Square, The renegade faction of the party staged a walk out from the party at Eagle Square and trooped to the Yar’dua Centre where they birthed the New PDP (N-PDP) as an official faction of the party under the leadership of  politicians like Atiku Abubakar, Rotimi Amaechi and the inspiration of Muhammadu Buhari behind the scene. Politicians who went to  aprty convention in the morning as PDP returned home in the evening as N-PDP!

    Subsequent political machinations culminated in the coalition of opposition parties that became the APC under which Mr. Buhari ran and won the 2015 election that brought the APC to power. Yet in spite of its origins, the APC which remains Nigeria’s ruling party has neither evolved a unifying identity nor a defining legacy of program in power to earn an identity.

    But our system is only a one party arrangement by default. By strict definition, a multi party system in which one ruling party gobbles up others is not by technical definition a one party system. That terminology is still the preserve of authoritarian systems as the ones operating in China, North Korea and, to a large extent, Russia. The attributes of one party authoritarian systems are well known. Nigeria is far from that rigid formality. What we have is merley evidence of the lack of the discipline to practice multi party democracy in its ideal form. It is that ideal that needs to be revamped and strengthened.

    Penalties for cross-carpeting need to be tighter. Opposition parties need to imbibe the culture of methodical and systematic opposition. Politicians need to understand how to lose elections and remain party members through a power tenure. Party membership ought to outlast one election cycle, Most importantly,  our parties need to spend time to evolve into embodiments of ideals and values. Those who sign up for party membership ought to subscribe to the ideas and ideals of these parties. The work of opposition parties ought to be as serious and rigorous as that of the ruling party.

    The alternative to the ideas of a ruling party should be no less rigorous and credible than the prevailing ideas of the dominant ruling party. In the United States, when a Republican president is in the White House, the Democrats in Congress or governing individual states are no less rigorous and serious. Similarly, when in the United Kingdom a Labour Prime Minister is at 10 Downing, the Tories do not go to sleep or fall apart. They quickly rouse into an alternative government. If the opposition caves in or succumbs, liberal democracy risks degenerating into one party authoritarianism.

  • Democracy as Minority Rule – By Chidi Amuta

    Democracy as Minority Rule – By Chidi Amuta

    There is a shrinking feeling about it all. With each off -season election that is conducted and results announced, we feel smaller and more unfree as a polity. Our elections bring about more insecurity; unpopular electoral outcomes require goons and thugs to protect illicit incumbents.  And of course a larger number of  election related court cases spring up to create work and money for an army of lawyers and judges. The state of alienation of the majority of the people is palpable. The elation and celebration is mostly among the minority of those who happen to have ‘won’ in this particular election. For the rest, the majority of consequential electorate, it is an overwhelming sense of betrayal, of being hoodwinked and ousted from what was meant to be a general celebration of democracy and collective empowerment.

    As we conduct more elections, the size of our voter population seems to be shrinking. In fact, it seems to be running in inverse relation to the longevity of our democracy. The more the number of years we celebrate as a “democracy”, the smaller the voter population seems to be running. After 25 years of unbroken democracy, our sense of democratic participation and involvement seems to be thinning out, shrinking as we conduct more ‘successful’ elections. In short, many more Nigerians now feel excluded from the process of leadership selection than they did in 1999.

    It is worse. In order to guarantee more security on election day, the population of policemen, soldiers, State Security Service personnel, civil defense personnel and other para military personnel swamp voters, candidates and election officials. The atmosphere is one of a garrison event. Voting venues sometimes look more like  mini garrisons with uniformed personnel in full battle gear menacingly on patrol in election venues. You wonder who the “enemy” is really as these personnel brandish assault rifles and handguns. . These scenes hardly remind you of  a ritual in praise of freedom to choose leaders. People are frightened. Sensible people either stay away to be safe or avoid these scenes of undeclared war. In any case, more often than not, the end results that are declared often run counter to the real expressions of the wishes of the people. Even if peoples’ express  wishes are reflected in the results, those ‘elected’ do whatever they wish, not what the people voted for.

    The frightening prospect about Nigerian democracy is that fewer and fewer people are coming out to vote. People register and obtain voters cards for identification purposes, not necessarily for voting. You never know which bank or government office might need a voters card for identification! Otherwise, people register as voters and prefer to stay home  and safe on election days!

    Recently, in rapid succession, off -season governorship elections have successfully held in Edo and Ondo states . In spite of charges of rampant vote trading and other minor familiar bad behavior among political mobs, the elections largely testified to a degree of democratic commitment. The announced results have since formed the basis for a peaceful transfer of power from one gubernatorial dispensation to its successor. The aggrieved have since proceeded to courts and tribunals in a shameful tradition that only castigates the sorry quality of our elections. To that extent. democracy can be said to be alive and well in Nigeria. We hold periodic elections. Elaborate logisitics are laid out. Big money is often wasted. Results are announced. Election officials and political hacks cash out and go home richer from a season of harvest. Some even build new houses.

    Yet for all the appearance of democratic progress, Nigeria may be sliding more into minority rule than progressing with democracy as majority rule. The most classic definition of democracy is the rule and triumph of the majority as a result of credible elections. Yes, the majority is a statistical dominance which overwhelms the minority. It presupposes that those qualified to vote participate in the ballot and overwhelm the minority in a triumph of the majority. Majoritarian prevalence is the essence of democratic rule. If however, the reverse obtains, a situation in which the minority prevails over the majority and their electoral verdict comes to determine who rules, then we may have enthroned a curious  minority rule. Something  is wrong when an exercise that was intended to serve majority rule ends up repeatedly enthroning minority rule.

    In both Edo and Ondo, the new governors were elected by less than 25% of the registered voters. In Edo, only 24.49% of the 2.6 million registered voters cast their votes. Similarly in Ondo, less than 500, 000 or 25% of the registered 2 million voters cast votes. Other registered voters either stayed away or could not be bothered that something important was taking place in their states on the election days. This trend merely accentuates a trend that had gathered steam in the 2023 presidential election.

    In the 2023 presidential elections,  only 26.72% of registered voters cast their votes mostly for the three main candidates with a smattering of votes for the other numerous candidates of the nearly 80 parties. That dismal turnout and the overall result cast a pall over the election and its confusing nature has lingered and tormented the incumbency of Mr. Bola Tinubu as president till date. For good reason, Mr. Tinubu is viewed more as a ”minority” leader on account of being sworn into office on the basis of less than 9 million votes in a population of over 80 million registered voters and a national population of 200 million odd people.

    Literally about 24.9 million voted in that presidential election in what is a 44 year low in voter turnout. Tinubu got 8.8 million votes to be sworn to rule over a nation of over 200 million with over 80 million registered voters!

    The conventional wisdom in established democracies is to reduce low voter statistics to low voter turnout. Thereafter, all manner of explanations and academic explanations are sought for low voter turnout. What  however is breeding in Nigeria is not just low voter turnout in an established democracy. It is a deepening malaise.  It is a progressive mass apathy, a turning away from democracy. It is a vote of no confidence in democracy and  its serial disappointments over the years.  People have been losing interest over time to elections and their efficacy as instruments for democratic change.

    An election may change the personae that drives a democratic government. But elections in Nigeria have failed serially in improving the quality of governance, the quality of live of the people. If we reduce the essence of democratic governance to   the qualitative change in the lives of the people, then elections must mean more than periodic rituals. They must mean the use  of elections to replace  a less effective an ineffective government with a more effective one. In it all, democracy and the elections that power it must be a change mechanism  to empower a more effective governance in the delivery of good governance. If periodic elections fail to empower leadership that brings about positive change in the life of the people, then elections begin to lose their import and meaning.

    In recent years, people are more excited by the entertainment value of the ritual of election season.  There are the massive campaigns, mass movements, the garish party -inspired costumes and of course the gifts, cash handouts, items of “stomach infrastructure” and other inducements to drive partisan followership. Outside these fleeting elements, the actual ritual of voting means nothing. Most people have already  concluded that  the elections will not fundamentally change their lives from the perspective of real governance action.

    At best, the ritual of democracy and elections becomes a class thing. The elite tend to see elections as the business of the lower classes, those who are gullible, who can be enticed with petty cash inducement, small gifts, and empty promises . These are people who can afford the time and inconvenience to go out and wait endlessly in the elements to cast a vote and justify their petty inducement packages. The elite are too busy with other important things and cannot afford the inconvenience. In any case, their existential conveniences have been guaranteed by their social and occupational entitlements and position. They reduce good governance to material good things. Why queue to vote if you have water, electricity, a car, personal security guards or some left over cash to send junior to a nice school? Active political choice at election time is therefore left to active party members, the few that can be mobilized, induced or bought to vote for chosen candidates.

    On election day, the elite wait in the comfort of their cosy homes while their servants, gatemen, divers, cooks, stewards, nannies and other menial and servile dependents troop out to vote and decide on who rules the next dispensation.  When subsequently the governance process goes awry and society fares poorly, the elite leads in the criticism and complaints. This is the contradiction of Nigerian democracy.

    The vast majority of people , namely, the elite, the rural and urban majority are alienated from the electoral process. People spend years going through a democratic ritual of elections without seeing any positive changes in their life circumstances. Nothing changes. Therefor, over time, the majority of people see little or no point in subsequent elections. The outcome is a succession of  ‘minority’ governments over time.  This is the underlying logic of the recent results that we have seen in recent times. Our low voter turnout means the prevalence of minority rule, government by the minority over the majority.

    Yet, it is the verdict of this  statistical minority that goes to determine the outcome of our elections. This minority elects the next president, the next set of governors, legislators , local government officials etc.  In effect, we have a democracy controlled by a statistical minority left to rule the lives of the majority. The result is a succession of minority governments with the majority of the populace left to grumble and complain for the next four or so years.

    A statistical minority government does not exactly fit the conventional definition of  “minority “ rule. We are used to minority rule by minorities defined in terms of ethnicity, race, caste or class. That is usually a political ruse  deliberately foisted by a political elite that wants to dominate power as in Apartheid old South Africa or America before universal suffrage and the end of slavery.

    Statistical minority rule such as we are witnessing recently in Nigeria is something else. It is the result of  the disfigurement of  democracy by political and social manipulation and usurpation. In an assumed democracy, if a ruling elite is empowered by a demographic minority to rule over the majority, it is the fault of democracy itself. If democracy fails to deliver good governance, the life of the people worsens over time and democracy itself is endangered. The minority can be manipulated to commandeer the electoral process to produce  results that place minority governments in place.

    But these minority governments cannot in themselves guarantee or protect democracy as a value system. It is the delivery  of good governance alone that can ensure majority participation and mass election participation. Democracy can only mean majoriy rule when governance guarantees good governance for the majority. It becomes the business of the majority to troop out to protect and defend democracy with their votes.

  • “Renewed Hope”, Failing Expectations – By Chidi Amuta

    “Renewed Hope”, Failing Expectations – By Chidi Amuta

    Politics is in many ways like religion. It thrives on a foolish expectation of paradise perennially approaching but forever elusive.  Take away the promise and prospect of eventual heaven and paradise and all religion falls flat. You dare not tell a devotee that heaven may not come or that the promised virgins may not be delivered as promised!

    Politicians on their part are the eternal purveyors  of  an earthly  paradise. The promised land of every political manifesto is  a sort of fulfilled state, an ideal of the nation state only imagined by John Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. It is  a place where all the yearnings, desires wishes and needs of the ideal citizenry are met by an ever compassionate state ruled by good men and women. That is why every political realm quickly finds a slogan for its own definition of heaven on earth. Every active party man or woman is somehow an apostle of a new faith carrying the pocket book of a new theology, ready to recite you the catechism of the new Jerusalem.

    The arrival time of a political paradise used to be long.  It is now shorter because the electorate have become inpatient in a digital sense. People now want the fulfillment of political promises in real time which means almost instantly. Forget the election cycle. Forget the generational vision and legacy crap. Bring us the goodies now now! Palliative rice and Indomie Noodles for all now. Helicopter cash transfers for millions right away. Money for one good pot of soup for today in exchange for our votes today. Keep your highways and flyovers for later. Give us ‘stomach infrastructure’ now now!.

    Even religious paradise has shortened its delivery and expectation time. Paradise is no longer only for the patient. Now, new generation pastors and transactional gospellers fast track things somehow. Prosperity and abundance of wealth must come now now! The microwave has entered the world of miracles and divine expectations. Youtube gathers the flock in one place at the push of a button on the keyboard and spreads the gospel worldwide while those at the receiving end just click and collect in millions of dollars.  Instant salvation. Immediate paradise and gratification delivered via your bank account!

    In today’s Nigeria, President Tinubu and his APC friends are the merchants of the new wonder product called the “Renewed Hope Agenda”. It is the hope of an abundance of life and goodness to be delivered by the Tinubu government in the fullness of its time. We are told that the “Renewed Hope” Franchise belongs to the APC as a party. But the party manifesto makes no mention of this ‘renewed hope’ agenda. We are not told what it is. No one has yet unwrapped the package. Party people and regime friends just talk glibly about it. At other times, the ‘renewed hope’ is merely suggested in shy chants when the President is likely to be present. At such occasions, ‘renewed hope’ agenda spontaneously graduates into a song directed at the President: “On your mandate we shall stand…!” Once the President departs the venue, the chant is over, the choir dissolves and disperses into the anonymity of the rented crowd of political jobbers.

    When you ask the lead choristers the content of the ‘renewed hope’ they just sang about, you are left empty-handed. No one seems to know what it is all about but everyone is expected to expect it! You ask endlessly from the marketers of the new gospel to be told what this ‘renewed hope’ is all about. There is no document that describes it or itemizes what we as an electorate should expect from this ‘renewed hope’ thing. We are just expected to believe and trudge along. A theology without a creed. Faith in things unseen and unknown!

    Every respectable gospel builds an attractive paradise for its followers to aspire to: a garden of respite from our earthly toils, a place where there is no more sorrow, toil or even death. Every common person shall summon enough courage to look death in the face and ask: “Death, where is thy sting?” Believers  shall play and enjoy endlessly. Political utopias are similarly constructed as a combination of imagination and the wishful thinking of hapless voters. Since we are supposed to look forward to the arrival of “renewed hope” as a political utopia and kingdom, one should expect to learn its outlines. How many poor housing units will be delivered per state by ‘renewed hope’? How many new classrooms? How many new health centres? How many free bus rides to and from work? Will there be free food at feeding centres?  Will public schools be free of charge for the poor? Will bandits disappear from our highways? Will there be special prisons for kidnappers? Just what goodness will descend on us all courtesy of the “Renewed Hope Agenda?” Mr. “Renewed Hope”,  when shall be taste the next good soup?

    In the absence of any of these concrete ‘better life’ prospects, to just promise us ‘renewed hope’ as a source of universal sweetness is somewhat suspicious and even fraudulent. Hope is not a place of succor. Hope is not a policy. It is not measurable Hope is not a destination of goodness nor is it a policy. Hope is a never never land, an empty longing for things unseen and untouchable. Hope is a dream, a promise, a delusion of emptiness to feed the minds of the ignorant and foolish mob.

    Every serious APC follower is now a “Renewed Hope Agenda” disciple and marketer..  The prime pontiffs are very loquacious, enviable and considerably wealthy citizens placed in strategic gate -keeper locations in the present order.  Mr. Godswill Akpabio is Senate President with one of the longest convoys around. Mr. Nyesom Wike is Minister of the Federal Capital Territory with a fleet of demolition bulldozers at his beck and call. Mr. Dave Umahi is Minister of Works with Alaskan highway projects that literally traverse the entire length of the country. My former friend Dele Alake has been catapulted from near destitute joblessness to Minister of Solid Minerals negotiating mining rights with Chinese mineral thieves and bandits all over the country. A man who looks permanently surprised and always clad in oversize suits in Minister of Finance.  In turn, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu is National Security Adviser who seems lately to be jostling for the job of minister of information by constantly singing the praise of the president at every stop. He was recently quoted as advocating national prayers to help chase away squads of bandits tormenting him and his men in waves of insecurity.

    The better informed apostles of “Renewed Hope” have enough common sense to direct you to the policies of the Tinubu administration. We are told that the hardship spinoffs of the present policies are the vehicles of the “Renewed Hope Agenda”. The higher fuel prices, the astronomical exchange rates, the endless multiple taxes, the bandits and killers at every road junction and the high costs of basic food and sustenance items are meant to prepare us for life in the land of renewed hope. The few Nigerians who survive these hard times will be the ‘strong breed’ that will inhabit the place of ‘renewed hop’.

    There may even be a religious angle to it all. Maybe after this period of famine and suffering shall follow a season of endless plenty! By a flip of divine intervention, all these agonies and suffering shall somehow end in praise. This may be the reason why recently, there was a rumoured plan to hold a nationwide prayer festival for divine intervention to alleviate the suffering in the land and turn it all into plenty,  abundance and praise.

    No one can say convincingly that the president does not love Nigeria. He is working on the job he applied for. While we cannot deny the prevalence of hardship all over the land, there is also a need to acknowledge that this government has been quite busy doing the ordinary things that governments in these parts do.

    Meetings are being held in Abuja every day on virtually every subject under the sun. The President has been setting up committees of all hues to seek for solutions to our economic problems as they rear their heads.  The big men and women of officialdom are perennially on the move in and around the country attending to busy schedules, arriving in very large shiny black SUVs carrying the same files that their predecessors clutched before they were recently sacked. The communiqués summarizing the results of the meetings are sometimes issued before the meetings take place!

    Undeniably, some things have been achieved under this ‘ “Renewed Hope Agenda’ regime. We have reverted to the 1960 national anthem from the new one. We even got the entire National Assembly to convert into a choir that learnt and sang the old “new” anthem with microwave speed. The president has acquired a fresh ‘tokunbo’ luxury jet for his many trips abroad. In less than 18 months into his tenure, President Tinubu has thrown  out half a dozen of his lack lustre ministers and replaced them with another seven anonymous and even invisible ones. Hardly any day passes without the presidency announcing fresh high profile appointments by the president predictably from mostly one corner of the country.

    In less than 18 months in office, this president has clocked more air miles than his predecessors even in the absence of a definite foreign policy direction.

    On matters of hardship, the government has made noises in the direction of alleviating high food prices. Bags of rice and other grains have been ferried around the country to alleviate hunger but the masses still deny that they saw any rice. A few ministers and government big people have since set up rice warehouses and shops which are now doing lucrative business.

    In some rice and palliative distribution centres, those who went out to scramble for rice and noodles to feed their families have ended up returning in body bags. The lucky ones returned with broken skulls from the scramble only to be told by the First Aid hospitals that basic medications are “out of stock”. Wise people no longer troop out to scramble for palliative rice or cash from big men. Please avoid dangerous rice and bad cash!

    A plan to import food items at reduced tariffs is expected to begin yielding fruits soon. But the exchange rate of the Naira to the dollar to pay for the food import has worsened since the policy was announced. Worse still, the Central Bsnk has since jacked up interest rates so high that those who borrowed money to import low duty food items to fight hunger are themselves held to ransom by the banks. As a result, the envisaged relief of the imported food will be wiped off by the exchange rate  and high interest rates.

    In the interim, hapless and impoverished citizens are being constantly enjoined to await the coming of the Tinubu “Renewed Hope” kingdom.

    In recent weeks, APC pundits and chieftains have been trumpeting that things are getting better. For them, the ‘renewed hope’ agenda has begun to yield fruits. Tinubu is now “performing” even in the absence of any supporting data. Tinubu is just happening in spite of worsening inflation, more depressing living costs and worsening insecurity.

    While the chosen few of the APC high priesthood are wallowing in opulent excess, the chorus out on the streets in all parts of the nation is a desperate cry of anguish . People are asking when and how the nation can get out of the present excruciating hardship. “Renewed Hope Agenda” is fast turning into an anthem of paradise for a few chosen apostles and a dirge or requiem for the majority.  Yet the dominant discourse and question out on the streets  is an open question:  when will the economy improve?

    In politics, the approach of good times is signaled by the approach of the next election. As we inch towards 2027, there is bound to be an increase in the number of APC party faithful chanting the success of Tinubu’s policies. A great deal of these chants are based on political impulse rather than verifiable indicators in reality. Tinubu came to power with petrol pump price at less than N200. Renewed Hope agenda has hiked it to over N1,000. The Naira was exchanging for less than N500 to the dollar when Tinubu was sworn in last May. It is now hovering at over N1,700. Same degree of astronomical increases  apply to electricity tariff, the cost of every food item, basic drugs, cost of ground transportation, domestic and international  air fares.

    Something new crept in from the recent campaigns of the American presidential election. Let us call it the Optimism Index. Simply put, it measures the degree to which the citizenry are optimistic that the nation is going in the right direction.  Throughout the length and breadth of the country, you hardly encounter any one who is ready to risk asserting that any aspect of life in today’s Nigeria is going in the right direction. The readiest response of people to government is a torrent of curses and abuses. It has become so bad that important traditional rulers ands religious leaders have appealed to citizens to stop cursing the nation’s leaders. The Ooni of Ife a fortnight ago appealed to citizens to desist from cursing our leaders. The Sultan of Sokoto followed the same pattern of appeal. Some religious leaders have sent out the same appeal.

    We cannot content ourselves with either a sea of curses and abuses or a baseless insistence on progress with ‘renewed hope agenda’. Those interested in knowing when the economy will improve need to take a closer look at what has befallen us in just a little over a year of this ‘renewed hope’ administration. In principle, a reform policy is all well and good. No serious country can go on the way we have been. You could not sustain an economy on subsidies in most important sectors. But at the same time, no sensible government can afford to take off all of subsidies in so many diverse areas of essential goods and services simultaneously. To take off all subsidies at once and increase taxes, rates, tariffs  and charges on everything essential at once is like declaring a war on all the people. If they cannot protest and revolt, they will live a life of perennial curses on those who rule them.

    I do not belong among those who insist that the “Renewed Hope Agenda” cannot and will not yid recovery and goodness. But our present  hardship did not come as a result of divine punishment. It is man made. It is the result of a reckless combination of thoughtless reflexes mistaken for policies. Any group of people who casually inflict this untidy cocktail of harsh measures on the same people within such a short space of time in the name of governance need to have their identity and sanity double checked.

    Maybe, INEC should incorporate comprehensive mental health screening as part of the qualification for electoral offices.

  • For Mr. Trump, maybe good night at last – By Chidi Amuta

    For Mr. Trump, maybe good night at last – By Chidi Amuta

    In a matter of days, America’s democracy might self -correct and present a rough and bulky casualty. Mr. Donald  Trump’s presidency is unlikely to be revalidated for a second term. As the various polls indicate once again, the American electorate seems poised to deal the disruptive Mr. Trump a merited ‘F’ grade. Forget about dead heat. The only heat in America’s political kitchen can only smoke out Mr. Trump and bid him final good night.

    Trump’s imminent calamity is unlike 2016 when Mr. Trump defied the projections of most pollsters to clinch an electoral college based victory over Hilary Clinton. Then, he was untested and something of a fresh vacation from the humdrum predictability and boring correctness of political Washington. For most of the rural populace and the unschooled artisans and calloused work hands in rusty industrial cities, he represented something of a hope for the renascence of classic America as it once was. Now is different. He is a tried and tested political toxin.

    In many ways, Mr. Trump’s imminent humbling is more than a personal travail. Democracy itself is on trial. So are the many issues that define its credibility and global preference. Even Alexis De Tocqueville, the French writer and definitive authority on American democracy (Democracy in America) did not foresee the aberration that periodically, democracy will present a defective outcome. The people will go out to elect a leader who ends up as the opposite of their best intentions. Ironically, only democracy can correct its own mistakes at the next election. In many ways then, this US election is a classic test of democracy’s self -correcting capacity. The imminent election of Kamala Harris as the next US President is a fitting self -correction of a democratic error by democracy itself by the very people of the United States.

    In  the four years of his first tenure, Mr. Trump literally subverted the most powerful political office on earth. He did and stood for the fine virtues of everything democratic. American history and the electoral process produced in Trump a president who was a highbred of leadership negativity. Trump was a cross between a Third World Banana republic autocrat and a 19th century European fascist dictator. Thank God his fascist credentials have once again resurfaced in this campaign. While Trump held sway, the world held its breadth out of the fear that a highly unstable deviant genius in the White House could press the wrong button on the nuclear code with dire consequences for mankind. Every moment of the Trump presidency was minimally nightmarish and sometimes apocalyptic.

    In his ill-digested bid to ‘make America great again’, Mr. Trump spent a whole four years regaling his countrymen and women and indeed the whole world with glimpses of his troubled mind and arguably demented vision. It was a tragedy foretold and a disaster perennially in the making.

    For four years under the first Trump presidency, the world was  treated to a quaint mixture of adolescent bluster and crude reality television. Where his support base and the rest of America expected purposeful conservative leadership, Mr. Trump offered an overdose of unthinking posturing and showmanship. In a country where fact and statistics constitute the bedrock of governance and public policy, Mr. Trump offered an unrelenting cascade of lies, half truths and false figures to back up claims fueled more by a bloated ego than realities on the ground.

    To Trump’s curious credit is the emergence of the novel concepts of ‘alternate truth’ and ‘fake news’. Under Trump, fiction came to compete with fact as the currency of public affairs. The credibility of the media as an institution of free democratic society came under systematic and unrelenting assault. Not even the American political establishment was spared the scalding marks of the Trumpian blitzkrieg. Evden as he heads to lose this election, Trump willgo down with the carcass of the Republican party. The party of Ronald Reagan had shrunk to the party of the Trump family. Over 70% of speakers at the convention were either members of Mr. Trump’s family or his direct cronies and quizlings.

    Yet it is in terms of serial policy failures and administrative incoherence and mayhem that Mr. Trump is most likely to be remembered.  In four years, he failed to fill more than 60% of jobs in the US government system. He hired and fired key White House appointees with the regularity of underpants. Renowned professionals, decorated generals and other persons of high repute who came to serve under his administration either left in frustrated anger or were unceremoniously humiliated out by the temperamental fits of an egotistic president. Most formerTrum appointees have recently returned to haunt him all throuogh this current campaign as someone to be barred from re-entry into the White House.

    In his current campaign, Trump ended up as a moreundisguised advocate of anarchy and hate than the first time around. His campaign promises ended up more as advertisement pay off lines than well thought out policy propositions. He woud carry out the largest immigrant deportation in US hisptry. To him, every illegal immigrant is a criminal. Immigrants were eating up pets and committing too many crimes in US border cities.

    Mr. Trump’s disruptive value internationally was endless. For a nation whose history is rooted in a network of alliances and alignments across the globe, Trump ended up converting more US allies into potential adversaries in four years than American has known in 75 years after World War II. His personalization of foreign policy was bound to escalate global tension.

    In his first term, Mr. Trump failed to realize that as US president, he was the inheritor of the historic burden of sustaining global order and security after the Second World War.By rolling back the bulwark of US security guarantees to its allies in Europe especially, Trump was literally permitting nuclear capable and wealthy nations like South Korea, Germany, Japan and perhaps Saudi Arabia to develop the appetite to acquire and use nuclear weapons. He has over these years made no secret of his admiration for all manner of tin can autocrats and dictators to the discomfiture of time honoured American values. He openly admires and worships Vladimir Putin, Xi Jiping, Kim Jung Un, Viktor Orban and Mohammed Bin Salman.

    It is true that US foreign policy has often had a destabilizing effect on parts of the world. It has felled bloody dictators only to allow the rise of dangerous armed factions in Iraq, Libya and parts of Syria. It has destabilized whole regions (the Middle East) and upset traditional balances of power in Latin America (Venezuela, Cuba) while problematizing territorial disputes like in Yemen and over the South China Sea. Mr. Trump’s temperamental diplomacy in his first term merely exacerbated these trends and made the world a more dangerous place.

    On the domestic front, Trump may have had a few disjointed welcoming sound bites during his first term. He then spoke about bringing back American jobs from Mexico and China. He probably forgot that US manufacturers shipped their operations abroad in search of cheaper labour and lower production costs following the aggressive unionization of US labour in the Ronald Reagan days. He could be excused for appealing to the popular sentiments of America’s rural folk, farmers, rust belt technicians and non -college majority for political advantage. But Biden and Kamala Harris have since brought about a cooling off of the economy, bring down inflation to a historic 2% with millions of new jobs created in the last four years.

    Trump’s habitual appeal to base instincts of racism and white supremacy weaponized American society against itself. He inherited a relatively united country and a healthy economy from Barack Obama but ended up creating a divided nation in which skin colour and systemic racism ignited a series of clashes and civil protests. In a belated attempt to appear like an advocate of law and order, Mr. Trump employed the strong arm tactics of autocratic dictators to quell the very riots and protests that his divisiveness had ignited.

    In the last four years, America’s investigative and judicial machinery have revealed Mr. Trump’s moral deficits especially in his relationship with women. Nearly every high profile defendant in cases involving sexual offences and financial crookedness in America in the last four years either involved a Trump associate or made mention of Trump’s links with the accused. Mr. Trump’s all too frequent flirtations with all manner of criminal schemes ended up sending more than half a dozen of his associates to jail for offences ranging from perjury, forgery, money laundering to multiple campaign fund infractions. Mr. Trump’s closeness to these convicts was sometimes so close that only the weight of his of his previous high office kept him out of jail.

    Mr. Trump’s singular qualification for seeking to return to the White House is to wage retributive crusades against his political enemies. He wants to fire the judges that presided over his myriad criminal and civil infractions. He wants to release all the criminals jailed for the January 6 riots at the US Capitol. In addition, he wants to complete his unfinished dinners with  Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Victor Orban. For him, the job of US president is not bigger than that of a successful real estate merchant.

    This, after all, is the nation of Sam Walton, founder of the Wal-Mart behemoth whose choice work location was behind the shop cash till and whose favourite transportation was a pickup truck. It is the nation of Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest single individuals who still drives himself to work and resisted for a long time that Microsoft should buy him a business jet to ferry him to and from meetings around the world. Not to talk of the great Warren Buffet who has lived in the same modest apartment almost all his life. Let us not talk of younger really wealthy Americans like Mark Zuckerberg with his over $60 billion net worth, who is so enamoured of his jeans and t-shirts that he hardly varies their colours!

    In a nation that has long been greeted as the bastion of global capitalism, the minimum expectation is that anyone who hoists a business credential would at least pass the minimal tests of compliance and relative transparency. Not for Trump. He refused to disclose his tax returns and the brief details that the media sneaked out indicated that the man had not paid personal income tax for close to two decades while the maids and janitors in his gleaming high rise hotels sweated to pay personal income tax from their starvation wages.

    Mr. Trump brought into the White House his personal creed of ‘transactional everything’. Not for him the nuanced refinement of political rhetoric. Not for him the candour and modesty of high office and immense power. Not for him the depth of knowledge on policy issues that should guide the business of governance let alone the higher requirements of diplomatic candour needed in managing the world’s most powerful office. NATO should pay its bills irrespective of the strategic import of the trans Atlantic alliance. Mexico should pay for a border wall with the US to keep its citizens from migrating to America.

    In spite of  his own humongous fortunes, I doubt that Mr. Trump understands  the higher need to protect capitalism from its own excesses. Instead, he proceeds to champion policies of protectionism, steep tariff barriers , isolationism and shutting out of immigrants and competitive trade arrangements with other countries. Some of the agreements that he cancelled in his first term had enabled American business to embrace global competitiveness. He would erect trade and tariff barriers against China, South Korea, Japan, Mexico and even Canada only to replace them with unworkable lopsided transient arrangements. For the United States, this meant a recourse to the early 19th century populism of Andrew Jackson who appealed to ‘the common man’ or the protectionist isolationism of the 1930s associated with men like Smoot-Hawley and Charles Lindbergh.

    Of course Trumpism as a decadent and illiterate iteration of illiberal democracy and mob populist conservatism has had its followership not just in the United States but elsewhere by other names. Its primary appeal is the urge to constrict national spaces and resources to a native square. For Trump and his kind, the nation state becomes more or less a tribe of narrow-minded demagogues, a playground for opportunistic troublemakers and part time political rascals intent on hacking down long standing institutions of state. The rhetoric is a drive for ‘change’ from politics as usual to transactional politics, a shorthand for political anarchism. It is an autocratic populism that demolishes but hardly has a plan to reconstruct. Trumpism is not a theology of construction but rather one of destruction, division and antagonism both within the United States and among the nations of the world. It has no message for inclusion but rather for exclusion and barricades, border walls and mass deportation..

    In the case of Trump and the United States, however, the pursuit of policies and rhetoric that promotes isolationism and shrinkage run counter to the bedrock of the founding vision of America, a robust civilization founded by immigrants with a global world historic mission and vision. Trump represents a lethal erosion of the creedal essence of the United States as a bastion of freedom and gathering point of global democracy. America was founded as a nation of immigrants, a place of great diversity and immense opportunity for those ready to work. Its strength and purpose derive from these fundamental values, which have catapulted it in these many years from an experimental creedal nation into a global civilization. It was designed as diverse, expansive and inclusive force for global good, not the bastion of smallness and divisive meanness that Trump’s narrow vision has reduced it to.

    In America’s presidential system, the title of  “Commander in Chief” has more than a ceremonial purely military meaning. It places on the shoulder of the president the burden of defending and protecting the nation from every threat: military, climatic, epidemiological and even doctrinal. Unfortunately for Trump, he has spent the last four years out of the White House retooling his essnetail divisiveness and nastiness. He has more insuts for his opponents, more threats for immigrants and more frightful words for Americans who are opposed to his extremist perspectives. He now calls them “:enemies within” against who he has threatened to deploy America’s armed forces.

    There is therefore a larger sense in which the imminent US Presidential election is a referendum on the return of Trumpism. The imminent rejection of Mr. Trump at the polls would be a loud rejection not only of his decadent brand of conservatism but also of his embarrassing incompetence and divisiveness. It is the fitting punishment for a commander in chief who could not protect himself, his family and the White House from Covid 19, or indeed protect America from its own better forgotten divisions and hidden ugliness.

    From the myriad negatives of the Trump Presidency the road map for the first term of the imminent Harris presidency may have been sketched. Even if Kamala Harris needs to tighten her stance on some issues, just the fact of her not being as nasty and toxic as Mr. Trump is victory enough for a new day in America.

  • Moghalu scores for Nigeria – By Chidi Amuta

    Moghalu scores for Nigeria – By Chidi Amuta

    Those in search of the human asset to help salvage our country have one major place to look these days: the departure lounge of the international airports. Some of the best minds of the nation are either on their way out of the country to assume leading positions or are returning to their international duty posts in major centres of the world. Hardly any day goes by without an outstanding Nigerian making the headline in some news paper somewhere in the world. Our exceptional citizens are making the news waves with stories of achievements that should make us proud.

    Our citizens are being elevated to and celebrated in strategic positions around the world. Some are scoring unusual goals in ground breaking research or scoring the best marks in universities all over the world. Our star footballers and athletes are household names around the world. A select few are occupying cardinal positions in apex global public and private organizations.

    Ngozi Okonjo Iweala has held fort at the World Trade Organization (WTO), using the instrument f trade to help redefine the world. Professor Akinwumi Adesina has maintained an enviable lead at the AFDB since his appointment and has continued to lead that bank as a leading global engine of development for Africa. Mr. Adebayo Ogunlesi has, since acquiring the airport, resurrected Britain’s Gatwick Airport into a major global hub. The current Deputy Treasury Secretary of the United States, Mr. Adewale Adeyemo, fondly called “Wally” at the highest levels of the US government is a major force in Washington’s power circles. The examples and instances are multiple and ever expanding.

    We can of course not ignore the nuisance of the ugly Nigerians: cyber criminals, scam artists, rough and random street cultists and other ugly Nigerians who also make news headlines that taint our green passport. Every great nation has them in all shades but are are better judged by their brighter shades than by their brackish dregs.

    Earlier in the week, yet another significant Nigerian has joined the elongating line up of ambassadors of excellence flying Nigeria’s flag in the places that matter. Kingsley Chiedu Moghalu, former Deputy Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank and international economics scholar has just been appointed the founding President of the new African leadership University, the African School of Governance (ASG) based in Kigali, Rwanda. The ASG is a tertiary level institution deliberately established by significant African leaders and statesmen to promote the cause of enhancing Africa’s leadership culture at a time of grave challenge.

    The ASG comes on stream as a continental training ground for a new generation of leaders especially from among the youth. The institution is target specific; it aims to train and provide leadership human resorces for the entire continent. It is the brainchild of a select group of outstanding African statesmen and world class technocrats who have themselves been shining examples in the transformation of their own countries in the modern world.

    The founders are led by Rwanda’s poster kid President, Paul Kagame, Ethiopia’s former Prime Minister, Hallemariam Dessalegn. Others include Mr. Mekhtar Diop, Managing Director of the International Finance Corporation and Senegal’s former Minister of Finance and Economic Cooperation as well as Dr. Donald Kaberuka, former president of the African Development Bank, Professor Hajer Gueldisch , former professor at the University of Carthage, Kishore Mahbubani, Former Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy are also among the founders and board of the new school.

    African School for Governance will offer a broad range of services and programmes directly related to the enhancement of public policy leadership in Africa. For training programs it will offer short term programmes leading to post graduate degrees in public policy. It will also offer short term on –the- job training for African policy and government operatives as well as render services to African governments and public institutions on a continent wide basis. All these activities will be managed and coordinated from the school’s base in Kigali, Rwanda. ASG comes as a fully loaded package of progammes, services and collaborations of a scope and spread that is unprecedented in Africa to date..

    The mission and vision of ASG are honed at today’s Africa where a deficit of appropriate public policy leadership summarizes the current crisis of development on the continent. It has come to be acknowledged that the critical deficit in Africa’s development and progress is a certain embarassing paucity of knowledgeable leadership. Most African leaders are politicians who have not undergone much formal education on modern public leadership. The result is that while Africa’s challenges have grown in scope and complexity, the manpower resources to address them at the level of leadership has remained undeveloped. Yet the world cannot wait for Africa to catch up or bridge the yawning knowledge gap that currently separates Africa from the rest of the world. This broad challenge is the definition of Prof. Moghalu’s new assisgnment which makes it both grueling and unique in Africa.

    Moghalu comes to his new position very well equipped. With a rich and brilliant academic background in international economics and copious practical experience working with the World Bank and other leading financial institutions around the world. Moghalu has in addition considerable experience working in multilateral institutions like the United Nations where he was mentored by such illustrious diplomats as the late Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General of the UN.

    Thereafter, he was appointed Deputy Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank where he worked under Lamido Sanusi Lamido, Emir of Kano during the tenure of President Goodluck Jonathan. The Central Bank under Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was essentially a reformist institution. It introduced a number of innovations in Nigeria’s banking sector including the Bank Verification Numbers(BVN) to identify all account holders as part of an anti -graft measure to reduce abuses in the Nigerian banking system.

    After his tenure as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Moghalu was appointed professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University in 2015. s.

    In the 2019 presidential contest, he ran unsuccessfully as the presidential candidate of the Young Peoples Party (YPP). His manifesto was typically idealistic and a bit academic. After the political adventure, he returned once again to the world of academics. In 20021, he was appointed Visiting Fellow by Oxford University.

    In the 2023 contest, he made yet another unsuccessful attempt at the presidency with little success. This second time, he fared worse than he did in the first attempt at partisan politics. It was an experience where he came face to face with the murkiness of Nigerian politics. He encountered subterfuge, corruption and nastiness as we have come to know them as trademarks of Nigerian politics. He did not need any further disincentives to know that it was time to bow out of partisan politics. He had no alternative than to return to his forte of academia, research and consulting especially in especially in the areas of international finance and economics. He was back to his Washington based consultancy from where he was appointed the President of ASG.

    Moghalu took to his political journey a predictable idealistic obsession to make Nigeria work for the people. His vision was to work towards a functional state with institutions that work efficiently in the service of the people. His informing national aspiration was a medium income and medium power nation that would stand shoulder to shoulder with its peers in the shortest possible time. He wanted to harness and deploy the best energies of the nation to this end. In his mind, he was the candidate of the youth. But he was to discover differently to his utter chagrin.

    He took to his brief political foray his energy and habitual dedication to mission. He travelled the nation, met and mixed with the political high and mighty. He touched base with the shakers and movers of political Nigeria , paid homage to the main shapers of national political opinion. Understandably, he was accepted and endorsed by all those he paid homage to. Quite significantly, he was endorsed by Nobel laureate Wole Soyhinka who used to wield considerable political heft at the levelof opnion and ideas.

    His mission was easy since he carried no major political baggage. His politics was one of ideas and values. No one could pin him down to the fixed verities of Nigeria’s sectional and hegemonic politics. Though a man of Igbo descent, his politics was essentially a nationalistic one predicated mostly on the evolution of a modern institution- based Nigerian state that would work for its citizens and compete with its peers in the new modern world. He belongs to a post war less ethnocentric Nigeria which equipped him with a more nationalistic sense of the Nigerian nation.

    Here then is a man with a rounded background in academics, public service, a bit of politics and international affairs. At a personal level, he is laser focused and avidly result oriented. Therefor, Moghalu brings to his new position as President of ASG a rich background that should enrich his career and glorify the objectives of the new institution. One quality that marks out Prof. Moghalu for his new role is his fervent commitment to African modernity. For him, a modern and progressive Africa is an urgent possibility that can no longer wait.

    Our eyes are on Kigali where one of the jewels of Nigeria’s intellectual property reservoir is now on loan to the rest of Africa.

    Peter Obi and the Yakubu Gowon conundrum

    The social media and the streets found a bit of excitement in the past fortnight. The 90th birthday events of Nigeria’s war time leader, General Yakubu Gowon, provided an opening for the older generation of Nigerians to reflect on aspects of Nigerian history especially the civil war. Gowon’s birthday provided an avenue for interactions among historical personages alive , young and ageing. It was especially an opportunity for younger Nigerians to learn snippets of national history.

    Understandably, the politics of the moment was not immune from that past. Mr. Peter Obi, easily the most visible image and audible voice of what may be described as the present Nigerian political opposition, felt a duty to join the long queue of Nigerian political heavies and significant others to salute General Gowon. As a politician, Obi could not but greet Gowon whose political symbolism remains strong. By the nature of his historical being, Gowon can only be greeted in the language of politics. Peter Obi knows that too well and his congratulatory tweet was in line.

    Fire from the pit of hell was let loose. Mr. Obi’s swarm of social media acolytes, perhaps for the first time, disagreed with their icon and said so. In the view of most of them, General Gowon remains a villain who presided over a war time killing machine that claimed over 3 million Nigerians in the civil war of 1967-70. He does not therefore qualify to be greeted by Obi.

    Most of those on social media today have come to see Mr. Peter Obi as a symbol of a new, more innocent Nigeria who needs to keep his distance from the rotten pillars of old Nigeria. Running through the bulk of the social media posts that greeted Obi’s Gowon tweet is a stubborn sense of hurt especially among the youth of South Eastern extraction.

    This unexpected outrage forced Mr. Obi into the difficulty of ‘explaining’ himself using mostly moral grounds to justify the Gowon tribute. As a Christian, he felt a compulsion to forgive “an enemy” even in the context of national politics. Moreover, as a politician, he cannot afford to harbor ill will for longer than necessary.

    Some followers have forgiven Obi. Others have shown understanding of his position. The more ethnocentric few have swallowed hard, insisting that Gowon remains a war ‘criminal’ who is undeserving of forgiveness by those who feel the hurt of the civil war most. The most interesting thing about this exchange is that we are over 60 years from the end of the civil war and the majority of those who are bitter on the social media were hardly born even a decade after the end of the war. Yet the bitterness endures.

    Peter Obi’s mini cyber travail over the Yakubu Gowon birthday tweet has exposed certain problems in Nigeria’s current political thinking. In a political culture rooted in regionalism and ethnocentrism, politicians and their followers seem to have a problem defining themselves in plain national colours. Peter Obi who was hardly ten years old when the war ended. Yet he is having difficulty defining himself free from the labels of that hostility. Though his political identity is rooted in the new post-1970 federalist Nigeria, many of his followers would want him to identify himself primarily as an Igbo pro-Biafran politician. That would be futile.

    On the contrary, Mr. Obi’s aspiration is for the leadership of a united Nigeria. He is not traversing the length and bread of Nigeria seeking to avenge the Nigerian civil war or the millions of Igbos killed in that war. His mission is not one of ethnic revenge. Rather, I see him as an apostle of new Nigeria, freed at last from the contagion of ethnicity and regionalism. Obi is, in my view, an apostle of a new modern, detribalized Nigeria led by the youth, a nation state that works for all Nigerians in a truly democratic context.

    As a serious apprentice statesman, Peter Obi needs to see more in Gowon than the blood letting in the war years. Gowon means the state structure. He means the National Youth Service Corp, the Unity Schools, driving your car on the right hand side of theroad like the rest of West Africa and the establishment of ECOWAS. These items f nation building cannot be reduced to simplistic and emotional binary categories of hero and villain or saint and sinner.

    Even with their individual failings as mortals, leading national figures like Emeka Ojukwu, Yakubu Gowon and Olusegun Obasanjo tried, through visits and photo opportunities, to reach across the divides of war to send the message of peace, forgiveness and reconciliation.

    Given the ethnic basis of our political culture, hardly anyone emerges on the national political scene without carrying the baggage of an originating ethnicity (the state of origin syndrome!). There may be nothing wrong with that. Every politics is primarily local and ethnic in the end. What matters however is where the politician in question pitches the beacons of his/her consciousness. The politician who places the imperatives of the nation over and above those of his ethnicity is the truly national leader. The opposite is the definition of the ethnic politician in national political costume. We have them in abundance.

    And in any event, the national political leader who does not feel the historic wounds of his own people is counterfeit. Still, the aspirant to national leadership who wears the historic injury of his people as a signpost on his political forehead should not be trusted with the fate of a multi ethnic nation like Nigeria.

    The Peter Obi and Gowon conundrum raises larger questions of political leadership typology. Specifically, on Gowon, the question is a complex one: Can one man be both hero and villain simultaneously? To the advocates of a united Nigeria, General Gowon as the leader of the Nigerian war of unification, was an undisputable hero who won the war.

    But for the predominantly Igbo population of defunct Biafra, Gowon was and remains an unmitigated villain. They hold him responsible for the collective evil of the war and the massive loss of lives. The passage of time and all the political whitewash of peace, reconciliation and national unity cannot wipe away the hurt of war and the loss of kith and kin.

  • Tinubu: Hints of a failing mission – By Chidi Amuta

    Tinubu: Hints of a failing mission – By Chidi Amuta

    The current mood of the nation is defined by a question mark.  Most people are not quite sure where the Tinubu presidency is leading us. You hear it in the market place, at airport lounges, on the streets and in boardrooms. At first there was an optimism founded on the newness of the tenure. After all an election had taken place and expectations were high that the new thing would  yield new beginnings and imbue new hope. The new administration even borrowed a name and a slogan from the prevailing air. Tinubu and his acolytes called their agenda: “Renewed Hope”!

    These days, the name tag is won mostly by minions on the corridors of Aso Villa and straggling jobless party men and women who cannot find a better job out there. Everywhere else, the mood is bleak. The cult of optimists is dwindling. Those who feel that the Tinubu presidency will yield some smiles are getting fewer or going into hiding. Regime economists are falling back to the conditionalities economists usually attach to: “all things being equal”, knowing that in the real world of economic utopia, all things can never be equal.

    Only some global economists lead the chorus of optimists about Nigeria’s prospects. The World Bank knows that election cycles and four year terms define our policy environment. They are saying Nigerian’s current reforms will yield positive results if sustained for long enough. In fact, the Bank has determined that Nigeria needs to sustain the Tinubu reforms for upwards of fifteen years to see results! No one knows where Tinubu would be in fifteen years time.

    We only know that even  with the best of electoral fortunes, there would be no Tinubu administration in fifteen years. And for certain, whatever administrations  succeed Tinubu would look back at the man and his baggage as bad history or just not want to touch him with a long pole.

    Nigerian political animals that support Tinubu nonetheless are less definitive than the World Bank or the Central Bank of Nigeria. Of course the apostolic certainty of the Central Bank is founded on matters of job security and tenure assurance. So no one shuld blame the CBN for being the most optimistic apostles of Tinubu’s reforms.

    Nigerian political believers in the Tinubu reform are being politically correct. Their nuances are diverse. Tinubu needs time to deliver. Less than two years is nothing in the life of an administration. There is still time. The man needs more time to deliver. Give the man a break….

    Tinubu’s foreign affairs minister, Mr. Tuggar has appealed for patience from Nigerians, insisting that Tinubu would deliver. He falls back to the usual lazy self assurance that Nigeria is after all not alone in passing through hard times in today’s world. He even attributes current hardships to past policy missteps ranging from the 2008 global financial crisis and Nigeria’s failure to invest in more refineries to  the 2020 Covid-19 emergency.

    Vice President Shettima has been understandably vociferous in defending his administration’s policies and of course urging hope in the prospects of current policies. Mr. Shettima insists he is aware of the hardship all over the country but says that there are no alternatives to the draconian policies if the nation must return to the ‘path of growth’. He does not of course go beyond platitudes to identify the indices of the growth that his administration’s policies are aiming at returning us to.

    Closer home, the sound bytes are a bit more realistic. Mrs. Remi Tinubu is First Lady and a politician. She is nearest the temple. She has protested aloud that the problems of our current hardship were not caused by her husband. The problems have always been there. Her husband only came to help alleviate a bad situation. And he is doing it as a patriotic duty, not for financial returns. She has repeatedly reminded us all that her family  has always been a wealthy family, not needing to fiddle with the national till.

    There has been a more overtly political  appeal for understandng on the Tinubu plight and the clear and present possibility that it could fail. My very good and respected friend, former Ogun state governor, Chief Olusegun Osoba, is not a frivolous man. He is a serious political voice whose views weigh heavily in the nation and in the South West in particular. Chief Osoba recently vowed that South West politicians will defend and protect the Tinubu presidency through two four-year terms as a Yoruba son.

    For , Tinubu is first and foremost a Yoruba president deployed to serve Nigeria. Osoba is not so concerned about Tinubu’s competence, effectiveness or policy relevance. For him, the equation is simple. Tinubu is a Yoruba son at the helm of national power. He must be supported to succeed. He has to be a successful Yoruba president even if he turns out a woeful national leader.  This is perhaps the closest we get to a tacit admission and hint that the Tinubu presidency might fail as a national institution.

    Other South West leaders like Obasanjo and Bode George have found alternative dialects for communicating the looming Tinubu disaster. Obasanjo has opted for silence and generalizations and a bit of symbolism. Earlier, he had donned the Tinubu trade mark cap and innocuously visited Tinubu under the First Lady’s escort. Thereafter, he went silent on criticism of Tinubu’s policies. Mr. Bode George is in a class of his own. At some point, he was an arch PDP stalwart. At other times, he was full of bile for Tinubu and the APC. At other times, he harbours some hope in Tinubu and his presidency.

    What runs through all these conflicting hints of trouble at the altar of the Tinubu presidency is a worrisome admission that the optimism that greeted the onset of the administration may be heading to a bad place. The two cardinal policies of the administration – fuel subsidy removal and currency liberalization -have literally overturned the fragile economy. Inflation is through the roof. Living costs are insane. In less than 18 months, what used to look like the semblance of a middle class has been wiped off. An atmosphere of insecurity that first fed on hardship and poverty has been aggravated by worsening hardship. Hunger has joined general poverty to expand the confines of hell.

    Let us not make any mistakes about where this administration has landed us. It has set precedents in our national economic history. We have the highest rate of inflation at over 33%. We have the worst exchange rate in history at over N1,700  to a dollar. We now rank as one of the worst performing currencies in the world. We have the highest percentage of poor population in excess of 78 million. We now have the highest electricity tariff in our history. Our streets and highways are at their most frightful in history as we inhabit one of the half dozen most dangerous countries in the world.

    The clear question that haunts the nation is a simple one: Can the policy thrust of the Tinubu presidency produce a positive reversal of its corrosive effects? In other words, can we witness a reversal of the bad exchange rate? Will we return to an era of more affordable gasoline at the pumps? Will food affordability replace the present virtual famine? Will things get better or worse still?

    There is an even larger question: has this administration’s tinkering with policy and a rudderless governance style plunged the nation into an even deeper ditch than it was in May, 2023? And why

    Judgments and verdicts on the Tinubu presidency are wrong headed in my view. We cannot judge what we do not know or cannot characterize. No one has as yet told  us what  this presidency was all about in the first place. What were the policy objectives of the administration? What kind of society did the new administration aim at? What vision has fuelled Tinubu’s long term political hunger and aspiration?

    It is important to raise these basic questions in order to understand what vision Tinubu shared with his team at inception and on the basis of which he can possibly evaluate their performance. In terms of style, values, goals, performance targets and national character, what kind of nation did Tinubu aim at? The remarkable leader is that one who wakes up his nation and takes it along an unfamiliar road to that place where they have never been before but have been longing  to go. Even in modern democracies  with well established presidential or parliamentary traditions, successive leaders come to power with the aim of re-creating the nation along definable lines.

    Is Tinubu a visionary leader? In other words, has his political career been in pursuit of a vision of Nigeria that is yet unachieved? Is Tinubu a restorative leader? In other words, does he aim at recreating a glorious chapter of the Nigerian past  and make it his? Is he, for instance, obsessed with the idea of nationalizing the Awo legacy and making it a Nigerian template? Is Tinubu a transformational leader? In other words, has he set out to transform Nigeria from static primordiality into bubbling modernity? Does he aim to change our ways and bring the nation up to the modern ways of nations of our age, and resource status?

    A traveller who does not know where he set out to go cannot be accused of getting to nowhere!

  • Rivers: An Emperor’s road to Harakiri – By Chidi Amuta

    Rivers: An Emperor’s road to Harakiri – By Chidi Amuta

    On May 17th 2024, this column published a piece with the tittle “An Emperor and His Nemesis”. It was a prognostic analysis of the impending political crisis in Rivers State because of the suffocating hold of ex-governor Wike on his surrogate, Siminalayi Fubara,  the incumbent governor of the state. Recent events in the politics of the state,  especially the just concluded successful local government election coup by the governor, indicate an inevitable nasty end to Mr. Wike’s untidy career as an overbearing political god father. We may indeed be witnessing Mr. Wike’s speedy race into political irrelevance and inevitable Harakiri.

    The drama of unrelenting political bad behaviour in Rivers State has entered  a decisive street corner. Incumbent governor Mr. Siminalayi Fubara has dealt what looks like a killer blow on his principal political adversary god father.  The Governor, pushed to the wall for most of his one and half year tenure, has managed to survive on political life support. It has been a combination of legal somersaults and  political gymnastics.

    Conflicting court orders and judgments have climbed on each other just as political strategems have wrestled with each other. But last weekend, Governor Fubara’s latest political ingenuity paid off. He organized a local government election with all candidates for the 23 local governments drawn from a strange APP –All Peoples Party. In a political quicksand, all but one of the local government council chairmanships were won by candidates of the strange party. By this masterstroke, Governor Fubara has further spinned the ever turning political wheel on his chief adversary, FCT minister, Nyesom Wike. This outcomes means that the grassroot political machinery of the state is now squarely in the hands of the embattled governor.

    In the interim, all the political outcomes seem to favour the governor even though the aftershocks are still gathering storm.  But most of the significant political voices in the state and around the country have come out openly to condemn Mr. Wike’s long standing nuisance value in the politics of the state. While the Rivers storm continues to blow, most speculations are that Mr. Wike’s imperial reign over Rivers politics seems to be entering its final days.

    No one can ignore the tragic aftermath of the recent local government elections either. At least three local government secretariats have been razed. Property has been destroyed while some lives have been lost. The credibility of the Nigeria police as an agent of law and order has been badly degraded as accusations of partisanship fly around. Predictably, the judicial battles are far from over. The Abuja Federal High Court has ruled in favour of the legitimacy of the pro-Wike opposition House of Assembly. Governor Fubara has since rushed to the Supreme Court  to challenge this ruling.

    In the aftermath of the post-Local government election agitations and violence, the partisans have reverted to their expected recourse. Governor Fubara has taken recourse to government’s responsibility to investigate the violent reactions and identify their authors. On their part, the disaffected partisans have continued to protest and prepare for further disorder and court mischief.

    The Rivers political crisis is far from over. At best, the grassroots will be dominated by governor Fubara while the legislative power in Port Harcourt may be shared between the governor’s loyalists and his opposition legislators. The rest is a matter for political navigation.

    Unfortunately, as the unfolding drama goes on, there is very little real governance going on in the state. If this turf war goes on and worsens, Rivers state may be another sad case of a state with immense resources but an arrested development. The ordinary people of the state may end up as the ultimate losers in this drama of an emperor with his ultimate nemesis.

    The nasty wrestle between Governor Fubara and his mentor reveals the full gamut of intrigues that usually characterize the relationship between political god fathers and their surrogates. Mr. Wike did an untidy job of handing the baton of state governorship to his former state Accountant General. The illicit logic was perhaps that the critical challenge of all former governors in Nigeria is the extent to which they control the bag of nasty tricks played with public money while they were in office. Who better to guard your money secrets when you leave office than the chief book keeper of the state? That thinking seems to be what fueled the emergence of Mr. Fubara. The childish logic behind that calculation seems to have gone  up in smoke now that governor Fubara, has rediscovered that he is first and foremost a state governor and not an errand boy of a departed emperor. His recognition seems to be that  he needs to be in both office and in power in order to command credibility no matter how they got to office.

    The trouble is perhaps that Mr. Wike schemed to put Fubara in office and not in power from the beginning. The governor  seems to have realized that the opposite is what he needs. He needs to be in both power and in political office.  The key hubris committed by Mr. Wike is that he did  not allow Fubara to be  minimally in office. He therefore reportedly surrounded the new governor with commissioners whom he himself chose. He reportedly dictated the portfolios, reporting line and created a separate line of reporting which ultimately ended with him in far away Abuja. Most importantly, all the state legislators were sponsored and loyal to Mr. Wike.

    As it were, Wike was also to informally run Rivers State from his duty post in Abuja. He also put in place a coterie of local government chairpersons in all 23 local governments. Effectively, the entire political structure of Rivers state was in Mr. Wike’s back pocket. He himself openly boasted that he had paid the nomination fees of all political office holders in the state.

    In order to keep his home base in tact politically, Wike maintained an eagle eyed watch over the state as an extension of his political manor. He had while in office either alienated or marginalized all major political voices in the state. An army of political jobbers and handpicked war lords maintained surveillance for Mr. Wike from inside the governor’s office,  the state assembly and the local governments. An imperial rule was put in place over an entire state and has lasted for nearly 9 years.

    But in pursuit of his imperial oversight  over the state, Mr. Wike forgot a few rules of power incumbency. A man in a powerful political office such as that of a state governorship would want to be seen to wield the power of his office. Secondly, there can be only one captain on board a ship of state.  The commissioners were either serving Wike or Fubara. Similarly, the state legislators could not afford to be at variance with the governor who pays their salaries, allowances and sundry costs. Most importantly, the rule that governs the relationship of a political god father and his surrogate is ruled by distance. The political god father must keep his distance .

    A god father who insists on having overriding influence over  his surrogate and also sharing political visibility  and the limelight with the surrogate is preparing for suicide. Wike wanted both control, influence and visibility. At the slightest opportunity, he was present in Rivers state, attending church events, child naming ceremonies and inconsequential political hangouts. He readily converted them into childish political sermons and an opportunity to visit key constituencies and holding sundry political meetings.  Confronted with such a god- father, the incumbent who wants to survive in office has only one choice: commit political regicide in order to regain his freedom and realize the object of his ascendancy.

    Ordinarily, President Tinubu should have intervened to ease the political tension. Instead, the role of President Tinubu in the crisis is  a bit more problematic. He had a primary responsibility to ensure peace and security in Rivers state failing which he would be confronted with an impossible national security challenge. He needed to protect Wike who had become his political axe man in Rivers in order to use him to guarantee APC support in the strategic state.

    Ostensibly , Wike had risked his political neck in order to guarantee both electoral victory and political support for Tinubu and the APC in Rivers. The President needed to play multiple impossible roles: impartial political arbiter as head of state, interested political leader of an embattled APC in Rivers, the protector of the political interest of his minister  of the strategic FCT. That was the source of the early agreement that restored minimal co-operation between Wike and Fubara. But that respite evaporated soon enough because it was untenable and not founded in any sensible appreciation of the realities of Rivers politics. Tinubu’s earlier intervention was too heavily weighted in favour of Wike to be tenable.

    But the grounds of that agreement were precarious and tenuous. It did not have understanding or control of the crucial factors that determine what happens in Rivers politics. The flow of money to oil the machinery of support cannot be controlled from Abuja at this point. There is no open campaign and so ‘political money’ cannot be used to buy support in the state. There is a limit to Wike’s personal war chest. He is not contesting an election in the state and cannot run riot with FCT resources as he probably could with state resources as Rivers state governor. Only Mr. Fubara has control over the money and power required to keep political support in Rivers State.

    Most importantly, time has passed in favour of the governor and his consolidation of power. He has reached out to his Ijaw  roots. They in turn have taken possession of their son in power. Fubara’s governorship is no longer a private arrangement between him and Wike. It is now an Ijaw governorship pitted against an upland conspiracy symbolized by Wike.

    In recent times, Ijaw nationalism has acquired an unmistakable militancy  which it has weaponized in pursuit of resource control at  national and international  levels. Niger Delta nationalism in pursuit of resource equity in Nigeria has become part of the international vocabulary about minority rights in the new world. The ability of the Ijaw to make life impossible for the rest of Nigeria is no longer in doubt. That capacity is even more enlarged in the context of states like Rivers, Bayelsa and Delta especially.

    Therefore, Mr. Wike’s open threats to Fubara’s governorship reminded the governor that he is primarily an Ijaw son. As the political table seems to have turned in favour of Fubara, Tinubu has no choice than to retreat and find cover under the fire power of the changed canvas of the confrontation. He cannot afford to endanger the national oil and gas golden goose of the Niger Delta. He cannot also afford to back a minister who seems to be losing his support base very fast. It is safer to play and sound neutral and statesmanlike. This is why Tinubu has retracted to the “law and order” safe trench while leaving Wike to fend for himself.

    Meanwhile, the crisis has altered the politicallandscape of partisan alliances in Rivers state. Key political heavy weights of the old PDP in Rivers have repositioned on the side of the governor and away from the ever belligerent Wike. Key political figures like Odili, Secondus, Opara, Omehia and some in the Amaechi APC have swung towards the governor. Unfortunately, there is no end to the number of political enemies that Wike made during his imperial overlordship of the state as governor. These have now become natural allies of the governor. Inside his own party, the PDP, Mr. Wike may not find the support to fight a local battle in the state. A state that had previously been celebrated as a PDP state is now so badly shaken that it is neither a PDP state nor an APC state. Wike has himself become something of a political bat, neither a bird nor a mammal. He is neither APC nor PDP.

    At the national level, he is tolerated by the APC hierarchy as the president’s hatchet man  and ‘friend’ but a risky political capital. If Tinubu admits him into APC, it will be a risk he took alone and may have to pay for later. The PDP at the national level cannot re-embrace Wike because he is a divisive figure who has grossly damaged the party and literally neutralized its national and state chances.

    The interesting political spectacle that lies ahead in Rivers State is not the plight of Fubara. The governor has finally dug into the essential power nexus of the state and also eroded the grassroot power base of his traducer.

    What lies ahead is the fate that lies ahead of Mr. Wike. His home base is degraded. His political solidarity in the state is splintered. What remains of it are merely mendicants and lightweights, peoplewho rely on Wike for handouts to keep afloat. Most politically consequential Rivers people have moved on away from Wike.

    His national partisan affiliation is doubtful. His continued political relevance now hands mostly on his relationdhip with President Tinubu and and his nussance presence as FCT minister. If he loses the confidence of Tinubu or loses his portfolio as FCT minister, he might as well find himself an exile home in Abuja. What remains of it are merely mendicants and lightweights, peoplewho rely on Wike for handouts to keep afloat. Most politically consequential Rivers people have moved on away from Wike.

    He has to face the many tragic possibilities that await a political god father when they run out of relevance and options.  First, he could be chased into involuntary exile by his erstwhile surrogate. The man he created and installed could make life impossible for him by eroding all his leverage on resources and patronage. He might even need the written permission of the incumbent to visit his home village in extreme cases. The god father could be literally “killed” politically by being denied political followership and relevance in his erstwhile power base.

    In all these gruesome possibilities, what we witness is the previous man of power, a deserted emperor  walking towards a deserved Harakiri.

  • With neither fanfare nor flourish: For Yakubu Gowon at 90 – By Chidi Amuta

    With neither fanfare nor flourish: For Yakubu Gowon at 90 – By Chidi Amuta

    Between 1967 and 1970, Nigeria narrowly escaped the misfortune of going into oblivion. An unnecessary war was raging here. People were dying on an industrial scale, from bullets and hunger. Most of the deaths were unaccounted for. Some inconsequential people emerged from the mayhem as war heroes and illustrious generals. What the British cobbled together in 1914 stood a clear chance of unraveling through the recklessness of politicians and the crass indiscipline and rascality of ambitious young army officers.

    Above it all, one man literally stood between a nation and its demise. General Yakubu Gowon stood sentry between the demise of a nation and its survival and reinvention into a new reality. On the 19th  of this month, General Yakubu Gowon turns 90, an occasion that deserves both personal and national celebration. It is also a milestone for recalling, especially to younger generations,  General Gowon’s often forgotten historical significance in our nation.

    Nigerian history suffers a habitual amnesia. We tend to forget important things and celebrate the ephemeral and inconsequential. For some reason, General Gowon has not been sufficiently acknowledged or sufficiently celebrated.  This great statesman and exemplary African soldier has neither been sufficiently acknowledged nor adequately celebrated. The Nigerian military institution which produced him has not sufficiently memorialized him. The civil populace has not quite adopted him as a Nigerin equivalent of America’s Abraham Lincoln.

    Instead, it is those officers who came into national prominence and leadership under his command that have assumed colossal national political leadership since the end of the war. In the post civil war era, the trend of political succession tempted many to think that the return of Nigerian democracy was all about using political leadership to express gratitude to war time generals. Obasanjo returned to power as an elected president. Buhari did the same. Babangida almost did. Many others aspired but did not quite get there. Among political pundits, there was an emerging postulation that the war time general was a new typology of political leadership in Africa’s quest for democratic leadership in the post military era.

    In this tradition, Gowon never featured as a favourite possibility.  He has also not been acknowledged by corporate Nigeria either even as a honorary member of a blue chip company. Even in a nation where religion has become an industry and prayer a cure-all, none of the nation’s industrial Pentecostal conglomerates has adopted Gowon as either a mascot or figurative inspiration.

    Somehow, in a society that erects past leaders into social icons and living deities, Gowon has hardly featured either as a media favourite nor as a political mascot. The reasons may be implicit in the man’s very character. Gowon is not even a “Chief” in a nation where chieftaincy titles are lavishly dished out to miscreants by equally vagrant vagabonds! Gowon has not been seen taking to the dance floor to dance and entertain. His modest personal home in Plateau state has hardly been mentioned as an architectural landmark on any scale. It is on record that the house is a donation, made possible by the charity of associates and friends who were ashamed on his behalf many years ago. He has not been seen receiving political pilgrims as a political oracle. He has not featured profusely on the board list of blue chip companies. Nor has he been mentioned as a recipient of many oil wells. Even in the realm of his more serious carriage, I am not yet aware of too many universities named after Yakubu Gowon. Even though he went ahead to cap his political and historical achievement with a doctorate degree after office, Gowon has not been traversing the globe lecturing everyone else on nation building, leadership and post war reconciliation, areas in which he is eminently super qualified.

    In all fairness, General Gowon has not quite made himself available for popular adoption as either a political, social or economic icon. To the best of my knowledge, Gowon has neither formed nor joined any political party. He had not even advocated or canvassed any known political viewpoint in our noisy national supermarket of changing political standpoints. Somehow, he has managed to stay above the fray of political regionalism and partisan … Yet, the theology of national unity on which he led the nation and prosecuted the civil war remains the most unassailable political idea that should power a truly nationalist political party or movement.

    On the contrary, General Gowon has chosen the path of genteel honour in the classic  tradition of the ‘officer and gentleman’. More the statesman and nationalist than a partisan figure, he has reached out to his civil war adversaries- Ojukwu before his death, Wole Soyinka etc.- while maintaining his dignified distance from his more controversial former subordinates.

    More importantly, General Gowon has played above the fray of Nigeria’s rough and tumble political partisanship. In a period of all manner of extremism, Gowon has remained the eternal moderate. Instead, General Gowon  has remained above the kind of rabid partisan political alignment that has torn the nation apart in recent times.  He has remained more of the balanced non- partisan , and calming statesman who is respected and revered all over the country.

    General Gowon answered the call of the nation when we needed him most. Our fate was hanging on a delicate balance. Our unity in diversity was in peril. The institutions of our nationhood and cohesion were threatened to breaking point by the vicious forces of sectionalism and bad politics. The forces of division overwhelmed those of cohesion. Tragedy beckoned. Conflicting allegiances broke into open conflict. Blood flowed across the land. Above the carnage  of war and the booms of the guns of clashing armies, the nation was in dire need of  restorative leadership.

    Historic necessity and circumstantial providence chose him as a vehicle for the restoration of national unity and healing. As Head of State and Commander in Chief of the armed forces of a war-torn Nigeria, General Gowon rose to the occasion of the historic challenges of the moment.

    The soldier in him had to fight a war to save his nation. As a statesman, he had to reunite a nation that was unraveling under his watch. As the leader of a nation engulfed by the flames of war and the fire of hate, General Yakubu Gowon’s tasks were defined by the moment. He had to mend the broken bonds of neighbourliness and communal harmony.

    Over and above the clashing weapons of war and the raging cries of agony, over and above the bleeding wounds of conflict and the breakdown of communal harmony, General Gowon’s voice rose with a clarion call: “To Keep Nigeria One is a Task that Must be Done.” The world heard him. His field commanders obeyed his order. The combatants saw reason and heeded his call.

    In January 1970, the combatants in our civil war bent their swords towards peace and were swayed by Gowon’s logic. Warriors on both sides sheathed their swords and calm returned to our troubled land. The broken bonds of national unity began to mend. Reconciliation replaced animosity as adversaries reunited as neighbours. General Gowon had scored a historic vindication. His leadership doctrine of the pursuit of peace and harmony through necessary means prevailed.

    It is a tribute to General Gowon that Nigeria was rescued from the brinks of disintegration and returned to the path of unity and nation building. An atmosphere of mutual respect and true reconciliation in  peace returned. For this great achievement, General Gowon ranks highly among the great war leaders and peace builders of the world like Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. He replaced tears with smiles of survival, hate receded and yielded for reconclilation.

    It is to Yakubu Gowon’s credit that the Nigerian civil war ended without leaving a bloody trail of residual armed conflict, lingering bitterness and pockets of hate. Under his post war policy of Reconciliation, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, a nation previously torn by the devastation of conflict and the tragic loss of lives embraced national unity and the restoration of harmonious communal living.  The world has since acknowledged the management of the  end of the Nigerian civil war as a global example of conflict resolution and post war healing.

    It remains remarkable that even after the civil war, General Gowon did not see the end of the war as the end of the unfinished task of nation building. He instead resumed the uncompleted task of nation building from where our founding fathers left off. There was the urgent necessity to redress the structural imbalance of our federation which had bred the regional inequities that helped to produce the subsequent civil war. He adopted the state structure as a cardinal innovation to realign the federation by diminishing the power of regions.

    Beyond this urgent political imperative, General Gowon realized that post -war Nigeria was a ‘new’ nation that needed to be prepared for new roles in a new and fast changing world. To strengthen the bonds of national unity, General Gowon initiated some national unity programmes some of which have remained part of the architecture of our nationhood till today. These include the introduction of the National Your Service Corp (NYSC) Scheme, the Unity Schools system, the Federal Character principle and the unified national command for the national military and the police.

    Above all else, General Gowon was a visionary leader. He saw Nigeria beyond the resolution of the war. In preparation for a new, more modern nation, General Gowon introduced an indigenous national currency, the Naira to replace the colonial relic of the British Pound. To bring Nigeria in line with its regional socio economic environment, he initiated the switch of Nigeria from left hand drive to right hand drive which brought the country in line with the trend among its Franco-phone neighbours. To crown his efforts of regional integration in West Africa, General Gowon  was one of the pioneer leaders that established the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 1973.

    General Gowon, even out of office, has remained a committed leader and statesman. Out of office, he has spent decades as an agent of peace and harmony. His prayer movement “Nigeria Prays” has continued to inspire Nigerian Christians, irrespective of ethnicity and region , to see the power of prayer in guiding human affairs. He has gone about this endeavour without  the fanatical sectarianism that has come to characterize the faith sector of Nigerian social life.

    It is a testimony to the impeccable credibility of this remarkable citizen that his name still continues to evoke respect across generations and sections of Nigerians. As a result, he has escaped the hostile branding and extremist  perceptions that greet most Nigerians leaders of his age and generation.  He has no labels or badges except those of honour as a leader who is acknowledged as the father of a reunified Nigeria. It is generally acknowledged that without his statesmanship and remarkable leadership, Nigeria would have been a different and perhaps worse place than the nation we know today.

    Or, worse still, there would have been no Nigeria today as we have come to know it. Therefore, as he turns 90, we need to welcome General Yakubu Gowon into the pantheon of those human deities that have made Nigeria possible and enduring even with its imperfections.