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Chidi Amuta

  • After judgment day – By Chidi Amuta

    After judgment day – By Chidi Amuta

    The subdued public anxiety over the final outcome of the 2023 presidential election petitions has ended. Predictably, the Supreme Court has acted faithful to what has become its extant tradition. It has done the obvious and predictable. It simply just turned its back on the minutiae of evidence and went straight to ultimate classical jurisprudence. It simply avoided waste of time and reaffirmed the legitimacy of the incumbent sovereign order. While democracy feeds on the rule of law, order precedes law. The state must exist as an orderly sovereignty before we can all step forward to assert and claim our legal rights and citizen entitlements. So, the argument goes, guarantee the legitimacy of the existing sovereignty according to law and let the nation move on.

    Therefore, in affirming Mr. Bola Tinubu’s electoral victory, the Supreme Court side-stepped all the political and legal booby traps. In order to arrive at its verdict, it went the lazy route. It did not need to wade through a deluge of facts and figures all over again. The lower court has done that heavy lifting. Supreme Courts are about the absolute principles of the law and justice.  It is fair to assume that the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal (PEPT) has done all that. It just went straight to the domain of ultimate justice and constitutional finality.

    In keeping with what has become its extant tradition, the Supreme Court, like all Supreme Courts,  was doing the duty of national preservation. Any outcome that could undermine the incumbent order would inaugurate instant anarchy. No need to go that route. Instead, it is safer to protect the fragile state and its democratic promise so that the aggrieved can fight another day in the future. Implicit in that verdict, the Court had done some of the homework for Mr. Tinubu himself.

    It would be foolish for him to ignore the contents of his opponents’ contentions. There was a bus load of problems with the 25th February presidential elections. Yes, there was rigging in abundance. There was voter intimidation. There was , in places, the invocation of primordial divisions to profile voters and deny them the franchise. INEC betrayed public confidence in its own impartiality. As an institution, it eroded its own confidence in its adopted BVAS technology. The technology itself exposed INEC’s own human frailties. There was complicity on the part of some INEC and security agencies. Some vote counts were dodgy at best just as the IREV reportedly uploaded pornographic images in place of election results in a few places! Admittedly, these grainy details were beneath the remit of a Supreme Court properly defined.

    Mr. Tinubu would be missing the boat if he allows the euphoria and triumphalism of his judicial victory to shut his eyes to these pitfalls. They are the hard work that he needs to do in order to strengthen the foundations of Nigeria’s creaky democracy. His responsibility in that higher regard is above his own immediate personal benfit from the verdict of the Supreme Coiurt.

    Above all, the aftermath of the Supreme Court verdict places a reorientation burden on the Tinubu administration. The president must quickly retire and restrain his campaign ‘attack dogs’.  People like Fani-Kayode, having earned their copious keep, should go home and remain silent or only speak if they have something sensible to say. Similarly, Mr. Festus Keyamo should face the many challenges of our dying aviation sector and quit his insulting habit of abusing his superiors. The Minister of Information and presidential spokespersons should now step forward and be the ones speaking for the government and the president.

    Government must quickly exit the campaign propaganda mode and slide into a factual strict governance and accountability mode. Partisan affray is over. Responsible governance is in. The nation is no longer a political battlefield but an inclusive and united nation. We are all Nigerians now, not APC, PDP or Labour or whatever other partisan acronym there may be out there.

    In a fragile polity such as ours, a hard fought and vicious presidential election campaign divides the nation. The mob sees political partisanship as warfare. In the aftermath, the task in hand is to reunite the nation through acts of supreme statesmanship. That is Tinubu’s task and the hour is now.

    Above all else, Mr. Tinubu and his team have a nation to govern. That nation is broken and bruised all over. Our nation is in economic ruin and social desperation. Our people are in the depths of poverty and the edges of desperation and unparalleled distress. The poor are merely holding on to a thin thread of survival. A bad economy is at the risk of upturning the nation in violent protests. If the dam breaks, it will not be because of political differences but a desperate urge to live. Our insecurity remains unaddressed. In the words of Mr. Tinubu himself, “let the poor (majority) breathe.”

    The task of rescuing the economy from collapse is urgent and demands our very best. Propaganda is no substitute for sound economic policy making. The current flip flop approach will not help. Serious thinking by experts needs to replace sporadic guesswork and knee jerk actions. Sustainable social alleviation policies and sustainable programmes must now replace populist palliatives.

    There is an obvious slide that Mr. Tinubu must halt. In the choice between running a slimmer government and a large one, our current situation should have dictated a choice for reduced government. Tinubu seems to have opted for a large government. A cabinet of 48 ministers with a reckless splintering up of ministries is hardly the way to go. Already the cost of government has been compounded by the inflationary trend sparked off by the devaluation of the Naira. Legislators and cabinet ministers are spending billions of Naira in new SUVs priced at stratospheric costs. Other costs are bound to ensue. Foreign travels with large entourages of officialdom have taken place and may continue.

    Most importantly, the politics of incumbency should not be used to undermine opposition political parties. Political parties are institutions of the democratic state. Their health and competitive presence and virile existence is the highest indication that a democracy is alive and well. President Tinubu must resist the pressure from the hawks in his ruling party and h is government to weaken or ‘kill’ the main opposition parties to strengthen his ruling party. A predominance of an all conquering ruling party is a route to autocracy and absolutism. That will endanger democracy and further divide the nation along dangerous lines.

    INEC must now discharge its constitutional responsibilities to the parties. It needs to review their internal mechanisms and levels of compliance with the requirements of the electoral law. It must hold the parties to accountability for  failings experienced during the last election season.

    More crucially, the president must enlarge and expand his conception of the diversity of the nation. Reservations are currently being expressed about the increasing lopsidedness of his key appointments. That is negative and must stop and be quickly remedied. He must reach out and feel the pains of all sections and segments of the nation. Acts of inclusive statesmanship have become imperative and urgent.

    Although the apex court has ruled on the contentious presidential election, that verdict merely helps to calm the nerves of a troubled  nation. It does not wipe away some of the reservations that informed the challenges of Tinubu’s election by the opposing parties. This is the time to soberly reflect on the pitfalls of that election. We need to see the task of perfecting our democracy as a national priority, one that transcends individual incumbents and their partisan affiliations. This is the hour to heal the nation. Nigerians are easily the best followers if they can find a capable, credible and visionary leadership. Reuniting the nation and giving it direction is a service to the nation as a perpetual patrimony.

    The two most important contenders, Mr. Atiku Abubakar Our public deserves

    The two most important contenders in this race, Mr. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), have earned commendation as mature politicians and exemplary citizens. They followed the path of legal redress in line with the laws of the land and the dictates of the rule of law. They meticulously followed due process and eschewed a recourse to violent alternatives in spite of public pressure from their followers and partisans. No one can underestimate their restraint on their followers in the aftermath of an election that was closely fought and fraught with heightened emotions. Their resolute commitment to democracy must be saluted and recommended to future aspirants to high public office.

    In the overall calm disposition of our public to the verdict of the Supreme Court, we may be witnessing a gradual maturation of our public in their response to democratic outcomes. The implicit respect for judicial outcomes indicates a gradual absorption of the finer points of democratic culture. No effort should be spared in strengthening our fledgling democratic culture.

    In a way, last Thursday was Judgment Day for Nigeria in many ways. For the political gladiators, it was judgment day as the end of their quest for legal justice over the 2023 presidential election. The road ends there. It time dust up and hang your gloves to fight another day perhaps in another four years. For the Nigerian judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, it was another judgment day, perhaps another squandered opportunity to assert some independence and reclaim its credibility in the eyes of the ordinary people.  For the masses of ordinary Nigerians, this Judgment Day was yet another day to reconfirm our faith in our nation as a resilient and indestructible patrimony.

  • Achebe’s message from beyond – By Chidi Amuta

    Achebe’s message from beyond – By Chidi Amuta

    Between the 29th and 30th of September 2023, Princeton University hosted a memorial symposium to mark the10th anniversary of the passing of Chinua Achebe. Simultaneously, the occasion coincided with the 30th anniversary of the publication of Achebe’s seminal and perennially topical pamphlet on Nigeria’s enduring leadership crisis, The Trouble With Nigeria. 

    Ten years after Achebe went to join his ancestors is a most fitting occasion first to reflect on what this great Nigerian left us as a legacy. Most importantly, our current crisis of national leadership compels a reflection of what message Achebe left us on the matter of leadership  in the life of the nation as a community. In most of his life and career, Achebe resisted the tendency to be cast in the pigeon hole of just a writer. Not for him the luxury of art as an isolated occult preoccupation. Not for him the concept of art as the private communication of the artistic genius to a select audience of initiates. 

    Instead, he saw himself first and foremost as an active communicator and participant in the life of his community. He therefore defined for himself a clear communal and social function for the writer as a social being. Therefore, throughout Achebe’s literary works, essays and political statements, there remains a consistent preoccupation with the health of society. His focus was insistently on the role of the hero as a leader whose actions have benefits or repercussions for his society. For Achebe, the burden of heroism is the plight of the community.

    It is wrong to confine Achebe’s consciousness exclusively to the historical. True of course, Chinua Achebe was a writer with an unmistakably historical consciousness. His works span the entire gamut of African history, socio cultural and political evolution up to the dawn of the 21st century. His works and consciousness span from Africa’s first encounters with colonialism through the emergence of independent African nation states. He engages with the politics of modern Africa and the dire consequences of a new society and a new political dispensation. 

    A remarkable feature of the nationalistic essence of Achebe’s art and consciousness is the primacy that he accords the hero as a leader of his community. Throughout Achebe’s literary works, we are constantly coming to grips with the struggles of individual heroes challenged to defend and protect their communities from unwholesome influences and to make difficult choices for the sake of the common good. 

    It could be the towering figure of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart who personifies the identity of his assaulted people and would rather sacrifice himself than see his people and their values toppled by an alien dispensation and culture. It could be the high priest Ezeulu in Arrow of God who struggles to reconcile between the will of the community and his personal burden as the custodian of the spiritual sovereignty of his people. 

    Not to talk of the dilemma of Obi Okonkwo, the European educated civil servant in No Longer at Ease who has to struggle between the dictates of his personal morality and the expectations of a society in transition which expects him to abuse his office to please the expectations of the cargo mentality of a new materialistic society. Matters come to a head in the political world of A Man of the People where the politician Chief Nanga reminds us all of the present state of African politics where public office is a license to primitive accumulation, unchecked corruption, unbridled materialism and betrayal of the people by Africa’s “Big Men “ politicians. In all of these portrayals, Achebe’s preoccupation remains the health of the community and the need for the individual hero as a leadership figure to function as a measure of the fate of his community. 

    However, it is perhaps in his various polemical essays and speeches that the political Achebe comes across in digital clarity. Consistently, Achebe never tired of directly expressing his social commitment and desire for a better society in Nigeria in particular. He was relentless in calling out the worst examples of post -colonial African leadership. It did not matter whether the reference was to Nigeria’s pageant of military dictators or the interjecting civilian despots. He never tired of pointing out where leaders were going wrong and interrogating the serial betrayal of our hapless citizenry. 

    In terms of speaking truth to power at every opportunity, Achebe remained unsparing. For instance, during the Obasanjo civilian administration in Nigeria(1999-2007), he rejected a national honour because he was less than impressed with the conduct of state affairs under the administration. In rejecting national honours whether under President Obasanjo or President Jonathan after him, Achebe was unambiguous  and strident. 

    Towards the end of his life and career, Achebe came to terms with the reality that Nigeria’s initial national purpose and mission had fatally derailed from  the ideals at independence. He could no longer hide his sense of disappointment at Nigeria’s utter failure to realize the original ideals and hopes of nationhood raised at independence. 

    This note of crashed hope and amputated dreams is the entire purpose of his last autobiographical book as captured in its apt title: There Was a Country. The obvious note of that valedictory work is one of despair, regret and even outright lamentation of the squandering of Nigeria’s initial potentials and promise of illustrious nationhood. By the time of Achebe’s demise a decade ago, Nigeria was hovering at the brinks of tragic unraveling, a course that has remained irreversible up to the present time. 

    However, what is more poignant about this year’s celebration of Achebe’s legacy is that it marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of his  explosive and powerful political pamphlet, The Trouble With Nigeria. Instructively, the booklet was released in the midst of Shehu Shagari’s Second Republic political bazaar.

    The pamphlet was unabashed and unmistakable in identifying the crisis of leadership as Nigeria’s most enduring headache. That simple straightforward little handbook has remained a classic whether we were under a military or an ‘elected’ civil democratic dispensation. Nigeria’s leadership crisis has defied the costume of politicians. In The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe brutally and bluntly narrowed the central problem of Nigeria to the crisis of leadership: 

          The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely leadership. 

          There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. 

          There is nothing wrong with the land or climate or water or

          air or anything else. The problem is the unwillingness of its

          leaders to rise to the responsibility, the challenges of 

          personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.

    That crisis has lingered and endured. We must all be prepared to accept the sad, humiliating and inconvenient truth that all our present challenges as a nation are simply the consequences and costs of the protracted failure of leadership in our nation.

    Thirty years after Achebe’s powerful definition of “the trouble with Nigeria”, the consequences of a succession of bad leaderships are now lodged with us. Whether they have been soldiers or civilians, the leadership culture of Nigeria has remained substantially the same. We have come to accept, as it were, a leadership culture whose tenure in power never alters the living circumstances of the people.  On nearly all the indices of national development, Nigeria has continued to lag behind its peers.

    As the world prepares to say goodbye to the age of hydrocarbons and fossil fuels, Nigerians can hardly point at any sustainable gains from trillions of petro dollars earned from 1959 to the present moment. Our corruption culture has become so endemic that we have graduated in the tallying of our stolen wealth from millions, hundreds of millions, then billions and now trillions of Naira. Not content with the Naira which our leaders have reduced to mere waste paper (N1,140 to USD $1), our political leaders now count their loot in billions of US dollars which has become the currency of Nigeria’s underground economy. 

    Our people have watched helplessly as the privatization of public wealth has graduated into an art. Agencies established to check graft have themselves become assembly lines of monumental graft and systematic fraud. Our judiciary has made a fanfare of convicting small criminals while letting loose those whose greed has impoverished millions of Nigerians and crippled the national economy to its present sorry state.  Government itself has become a gigantic criminal enterprise with multiple centers located at the 36 state capitals and the Federal Capital Territory with repeater stations in the 774 local government headquarters across the nation. 

    The consequences of our serial bad leadership culture are everywhere in evidence. Observers of Nigeria since after independence will have made a disturbing discovery. Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world that grows and develops only in reverse. The quality of life of our people today is worse than it was in 1965. Our schools and hospitals today are more miserable than they were soon after independence. Our currency now buys less than it did only eight years ago. Inflation is currently at 28-29% and still galloping. Food inflation is currently at 30%. Our highways are today more dangerous than they were eight years ago. We now rank among the top 5 most dangerous countries in the world in the company of Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Libya. Our police force is ranked among the worst in the world. The chronicle of infamy is almost limitless.

    Nigeria now has an estimated 130 million poor people, qualifying as the uncontested ‘poverty capital’ of the world ahead of India with over five times our population. Our unemployment figures are above 40% of the employable population mostly youth. The average time it takes for a university graduate to find employment in Nigeria is about 10 years. We have an estimated 20 -22 million out of school children, the highest in the world and still counting. 

    Our economic statistics are no less frightening and depressing. Our external reserves are at an all time low of less than $20 billion, barely enough to pay for three months of imports. We are currently spending nearly 100% of our revenue in debt servicing as Nigeria has an external debt burden of nearly $100 billion not to talk of trillions of Naira in domestic debts. 

    On nearly a daily basis, droves of young qualified and talented Nigerians are trooping out to Canada, United Kingdom, the Gulf states, Australia, South Africa and now even Rwanda for opportunities that they cannot find at home. Among the many unemployed but unskilled youth, the dangerous Mediterranean crossing  or the hazardous Sahara desert crossing to get to Europe are considered risks less dreadful than life in a country they call theirs. These perilous journeys have claimed several lives in capsized migrant boats, dehydration in the Sahara desert or torture in holding cells in Libya and other dangerous destinations in the hope of crossing into Europe for menial jobs or degrading prostitution. 

    Our ancestors who were sold into slavery during the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade went mostly as unwilling conscripts and traded wares. Today, our youth are submitting themselves willingly to death by drowning or dehydration as they try to escape the inhospitable conditions at home to go into virtual willful slavery in Europe.

    At home, new forms of criminality have emerged. Oil theft, bold illegal mining, banditry, transactional kidnapping, cattle rustling, ritual killing, trade in human body parts and cyber crimes have become rampant. Hitherto unknown crimes and deviations have taken hold of a society of many mentally distressed citizens.  Abuses like pedophilia, abuse of minors, rape, incest and racketeering in sex videos have become the new normal in a nation where prayer is the most widespread social ritual. 

    Terrorists and casual killers are on the prowl in many states of the federation forcing the nation to deploy combat troops into internal security duties in 34 of our 36 states. More dangerously, all manner of non- state armed groups ranging from Boko Haram in the North East and North West to ESN in the South East and many militant groups in the Niger Delta continue to engage the attention of our security forces. In some cases, they have outgunned the official security forces.

    In spite of this cocktail of bad news, the vast majority of our people remain attached to the promise of Nigeria. Wherever in the world Nigerians find themselves, they bond in solidarity and remain hungry and nostalgic for home because they realize that ours is a beautiful country, a place like no other for our boisterous Nigerian spirit. They remain optimistic that Nigeria has the resources to give them a good life if only we could find good leadership to harness the resources for the common good. Our ordinary citizens believe in the nation, not in particular leaders. Our leaders do not believe in or love Nigeria. They are however attached to what they are stealing from Nigeria.  

    Our ordinary citizens crave no alternative nationality than this. But our citizens have developed a strong skepticism about our leadership prospects. Because of repeated betrayals and disappointments, our people have gotten used to a permanent distrust of government and changing leaderships. Here lies the crisis of democracy in our land: how can citizens vote for leaders they do not trust? And how can leaders aspire to rule over people they do not feel for? 

    In spite of our current dismal national picture, I would be the first to admit that our leadership story has not been all an unbroken negative picture. There have indeed been brief episodes, rare flashes of courageous and patriotic leadership. But these episodes have been either too brief or unsustained to make any significant difference. Even Achebe in The Trouble with Nigeria conceded that Murtala Mohammed passed by here. In just 180 days, Murtala left a permanent imprint of patriotism, selflessness and personal discipline. Nor can anyone deny that both presidents Ibrahim Babangida and Olusegun Obasanjo showed examples of nation building, respect for merit and made commendable investment in national infrastructure. Nor can we deny Umaru Yardua the promise which he held out for selfless, courageous leadership and true patriotism before the cold hands of death snatched him away. 

    Like all writers, Chinua Achebe was a visionary and perhaps too much of an idealist. But the paradise we seek often lies hidden in the dreams and visions of our most talented citizens. Cursed is the nation that is not blessed with poets and prophets. On the matter of leadership as the core problem with Nigeria, therefore, Chinua Achebe was not only right. He was even prophetic. On the matter of the mission and necessity for good leadership, Achebe remains our greatest visionary writer to date. But perhaps he never imagined the full extent of how far down bad leadership could drag Nigeria.

  • Tinubu’s politics of identity wars – By Chidi Amuta

    Tinubu’s politics of identity wars – By Chidi Amuta

    President Bola Tinubu is confronted with two identity fights united by politics. His political opponents have kept him busy with matters of personal identity and paper qualifications. Everything from his parentage, educational background, university records, work and career trajectory to his National Youth Service record is up for hostile scrutiny. No one knows how the politics of that basic personal identity will end. Once infected with politics, even the most basic issues acquire toxins.

    In recent months, the politics of Tinubu’s personal identity has taken on the form of a travelling circus. Mr. Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party  (PDP) in the last election,  took the crusade to an American courtroom, challenging the United States judiciary to take a closer look at Tinubu’s undergraduate career and the quality of paper on which his diploma was printed. Added to the accompanying media blitzkrieg has of course been the long standing multiple identity issues around Mr. Tinubu. He may win his identity wars in the courts up to the Nigerian Supreme Court. His political devotees and megaphones will keep up the defensive high wall with attack dogs and baboons.

    But the doubts will linger. The questions will remain. The reservations about everything about this president’s background and latest doctor’s reports will not go away easily. Even after his presidency, there will remain a sizeable body of Nigerians who will insist that the man was a forger and illegitimate occupant of the presidential mansion. That will be well after the event because by then, the man will have presided over the rest  of us with known classmates and fancy multiple degrees for four or eight years as the case may be. In Nigerian politics, once tainted, leaders carry their reputational albatross almost indefinitely.

    On the other hand, Mr. Tinubu is winning a different war of political identity. He and his two major rivals for the 2023 presidential contest somehow represented the traditional Nigerian tripod. It may have been unintended and definitely unstated but widely perceived as such. Atiku was unmistakably perceived as the Hausa –Fulani candidate. Peter Obi later came to be perceived as the Igbo man daring the odds to seek to become president of Nigeria. Bola Tinubu was the undoubted Yoruba son seeking the prime office. For full effect, he staked his claim to the top job in plain Yoruba: “Emi lokan”- It is my turn!

    Of course, they all campaigned as national candidates. They paraded the obvious gamut of national problems- insecurity, mass poverty, divisiveness- as key national concerns and marketing points.  In all fairness, they lost or won first as national candidates on the platforms of political parties that met all requirements of national presence and appeal. Tinubu was declared winner and has been in office and power for the past four months plus. Beyond battling political opponents who insist that his paper identity is dodgy and that he is not who he says he is. However, Tinubu has had no trouble defining his ethnic identity. He is a Yoruba Muslim man from the South West zone, married to a Christian woman. That much can be taken to the bank. All else is infested with Nigerian politics and media cannibalism.

    Since taking office four months ago, President Tinubu has unmistakably stamp his more authentic identity on the nation and his office. Opponents and critics may jive and howl about his paper qualifications.  But no one in their right mind can still question Tinubu’s Yoruba nationality.  He has etched it unmistakably in our national mind that he is perhaps first and foremost a true son of the Yoruba nation.  It does not matter which hamlet in Lagos, Osun or Oyo state his ancestry is traced to. He has literally run Mr. Sunday Igboho of the Yoruba Nation Movement out of job and relevance. When Mr. Igboho returns to Nigeria, he will smile in satisfaction that Tinubu has achieved beyond his wildest dreams.

    Tinubu has moved swiftly to set up a government whose commanding heights and strategic appointments are squarely in the hands of mostly Yoruba sounding names. Those of us who used to scream and kick that Mr. Buhari’s appointments were lopsided have since gone stone quiet. Mr. Buhari with his hordes of Sahelian appointees and enabling armed herdsmen may now look like a band of saints.

    See the telephone book of our new government in terms of strategic ministries and departments of state. Petroleum, Finance, Central Bank of Nigeria, Federal Inland Revenue Service, Police, Army, Justice, EFCC, Customs, Internal Affairs, Ports and Marine Economy, Solid Minerals etc.  For the second tier ministries like Agriculture, Water Resources, Defence, Police Affairs, Education and Health, Tinubu has done something deviously ingenious and unparalleled. Both the Minister and Minister of State in each case is drawn from the northern hemisphere of the nation. It looks like a rather cynical way of isolating the problems that mostly bedevil the northern half of the country and passing them back to the political elite of the region and saying: “Go deal with it”!

    Following this primitive logic of this geo- ethnic apportionment of the national bounty, whatever is left in the scrap heap of the national resource bazaar is left for the remaining states and regions. Labour, Youth and Sports, Science and Technology, Environment, Information, Post Master General, Federal Fire Service, Navy- just name it.

    In a more monolithic and less diverse national space, no one would grudge the Yorubas their preponderance at the heights of state power. In all fairness, the Yorubas as a people are easily on of the most illustrious of our ethnic nationalities. Politically sophisticated, socially cohesive, content at home and conscious abroad, supremely educated and professionally accomplished, they remain the foremost Nigerian group in terms of enlightened self interest. But this is a diverse republic with a presidential constitution.

    In the context of our presidential system, for as long as a president’s appointment of ministers satisfies the basic constitutional requirement of nationwide representation of states in political office distribution, he cannot be accused of breaching the law. After all, the argument would go, all ministries are equal!  But we know what we know especially when it comes to the control of the commanding heights of the national economy and major levers of state power and authority. When the strategic locations and vantage points are dominated or monopolized by any one ethnic group, we leave the remaining 349 odd ethnic groups in the lurch.

    Nigeria may not be a federation of ethnic nationalities but the requirement of diversity management means that the president has a moral responsibility to govern in a manner that does not overtly announce his ethnic preference or leave most ethnic nationalities in mere janitorial presence. Each time Nigeria is governed in a lopsided manner as we are seeing, we lose a bit more of our unity and create more enclaves of exclusion and “otherness”.

    I would ordinarily not be found where people are arguing about the villages from where key officials emanate. I would instead insist that those appointed to key public positions should be the best that can  rescue our people from the long night of misrule and political rascality that has reduced life in this country into a nightmare. I am also ready to argue that Nigeria has come to that stage where literally every corner of the nation can produce the best possible manpower to man the affairs of state. Of course, political office appointments do not necessarily adhere to meritocratic criteria. But no cloak can hide an unfair arrangement.

    Yet it is a disservice to the elementary requirements of diversity management for a president to make key political appointments in a manner that deepens the sense of national division along regional, ethnic, religious or any other lines. After the Buhari political holocaust, Tinubu’s present posture,  as far as these appointments are  concerned, can only further divide the country and create intractable political headaches for him and his party in the months ahead.

    The impression that has gone out is that Tinubu’s election is nothing more than a voracious power grab on behalf of his South West primary constituency. I feel reduced and my essential humanity shredded to be witnessing what is unfolding before our very eyes.  For the avoidance of doubt and the interest of the ignorant, I have spent most of my life on the platform of a united Nigeria. I have always believed in the possibilities open to a united and fair Nigeria. I have spent most of my life in parts of Nigeria away from my ancestry. Most of my children bear Yoruba middle names and feel at home in every part of Nigeria with no neither attachment nor bias based on ‘state of origin’, ethnic group or direction on the national compass.

    I therefore feel reduced by this descent into a discourse on tribal allocation of political offices. Worse still, it is debilitating to expend useful energy on the interrogation of tribalism than on contributing ideas towards the uplift of the nation that has given us so much. But this is where Nigerian politics has brought us at the moment.

    Let us make no mistake about it. Those of us who are privileged to argue about Nigeria on the pages of newspapers or on television screens are an elite. Elite contests for prime positioning is a healthy feature of a democratic polity in a diverse and plural polity. As elite, we are bound to quarrel about who occupies what positions and who decides what matters about our lives and those of the people that look up to us. Yes, we are an elite. No need to apologize about that. No need to shy away from facing up to elite competition in the national space. This nation belongs to all of us.

    Minimally, however, we ought to be striving for a nationwide elite consensus on the best way forward for a nation that lost the race for the 20th century and is fast losing the 21st. We cannot achieve an elite consensus if there is a glaring lopsidedness emanating from a power grab and vicious hijacking of the political space resulting in open inequities in access to opportunities and proximity to power and resources.

    As a nation, we are still in a deep ditch full of problems that should not be there. It ought to concern President Tinubu and his advisers that not a single one of his xenophobic appointees has elicited any national excitement to date. For the most part, most of these appointees are remembered for having featured prominently in Tinubu’s earlier outing as Lagos State governor many years ago. Nigerians have been quick to point out that Nigeria is greater than Lagos and that, on closer examination, no miracles took place in Lagos under Tinubu. Those who hold these reservations are also entitled to their views.

    So far, the noises coming out of Tinubu’s cabinet and the inner recesses of state power are yet to justify the overt ethnic slant of the appointments so far made or even the basic criteria for these appointments. The views of some of these appointees are too pedestrian and ordinary to ignite any excitement or hope for a better future. We listen in vain for that groundbreaking  idea or solution that can free Nigeria from the present brink but are hit by a brick wall of silence or boring rehash of worn out cliches and roadside views.

    On balance, President Tinubu has courted an unnecessary trouble for himself. The nepotism and lopsidedness of his appointments so far could go with little qualms if his government delivers on Nigeria’s pressing problems. But if in the next two and half years, the nation remains mired in bad governance, corruption and incompetence, the conclusion would be that Tinubu and the Yorubas completed the final ruin of the faulty tower that Buhari and his locusts left behind. The King would go down with his horsemen and his nationality.

  • Tinubu’s Buhari burden – By Chidi Amuta

    Tinubu’s Buhari burden – By Chidi Amuta

    President Bola Tinubu’s success or failure in office may not be the result of his own making. It would be the weight of a political burden he is so far carrying apparently quite willingly. Every policy pronouncement he has so far made and measures he has hinted at taking is an inherited yoke from the immediate past Buhari presidency. In a sense, Tinubu’s presidency so far is looking more like a reactive incumbency. He has merely been reacting to what his predecessor left in the in-tray at the Aso Villa office. Insecurity. Monumental poverty. Economic hopelessness. Subsidies and entitlements. A critically divided nation. Unprecedented corruption. Name it. It is all inherited from Mr. Buhari. But Tinubu and his cohorts seem reluctant to say so.

    The most elementary lesson of the presidential systems and indeed every democratic succession is that the new leader is elected not just to clean up the mess made by his predecessor but also to leave room to make his own peculiar mess. So far, Mr. Tinubu seems too preoccupied with the baggage left by his Daura friend instead of getting ready to make his own mess or landmarks.

    In some sense, president Tinubu has carried on literally like a beast of burden. He has not complained to the nation about the burden he inherited nor the extent of the mess on his plate. One or two random arrests have been made and a probe of the Central Bank has been instituted. It is of course true that government is a continuum. Each new leaders is chosen to deal with the trouble he finds on the plate. Leaders are elected to lead, not to lament or offer excuses on behalf of those gone by especially when the past and the present are born of the same party. But it is also an elementary responsibility of leadership to name the source of present headaches so that the public can minimally understand and empathize.

    And this is where Tinubu’s publicity machinery is failing. They are busy constructing political enemies from among the opposition of Atiku Abubakar’s PDP and Peter Obi’s Labour Party. This is quite excusable. But it is lazy public relations. Tinubu’s existential adversaries are not the current opposition. They are not yet a full blown opposition figures since they are still in court. His most consequential political enemies might lie in his ruling party and the devotees of his predecessor. His greatest enemy is to be found in the inner cultic followership of his immediate predecessor. It is Mr. Buhari that laid all the booby traps that are likely to fell Tinubu or keep him busy for the next four years. The best test of party solidarity would be to try and upset Buhari’s apple cart. The political fangs and jack knives will come out.

    And yet so far, the Daura general is comfortably savouring his cosy retirement in his ranch. He has even had the temerity to unleash his megaphones on the public to justify his actions in office. The most disastrous leader in the whole of Nigerian history is being revised as a man without regrets and who took the best decisions in the best interest of the nation. It is either being trumpeted that he has no regrets for the disaster he unleashed on the nation. And because we live in a nation where leaders face no consequences for their actions in office, Buhari is sufficiently shameless and immune as to use every occasion to preach to or lecture Nigerians on patriotism, good governance and the value of good leadership. In every other self respecting republic, a man with Buhari’s record in office should either be in jail, facing trial at the Hague or quarantined in disgraceful internal exile for the rest of his life. And here is just a tip of why.

    Under Mr. Buhari’s eight years, close to 90,000 citizens were killed by bandits or kidnappers. Fewer than 100 known bandits and kidnappers were were either arrested or brought to book for these crimes. Any number of our young daughters, wives or female relations were abducted, raped, abused, carted off  into forceful  matrimony or sold off into direct slavery. Under Buhari’s watch, insecurity forced an estimated 7 million Nigerians to become Internally Displaced Persons, sequestered from home, kith and kin  and livelihood for an indefinite period.

    In this period, Nigeria climbed up the global insecurity index. We became among the top five most dangerous nations of the world in the league of Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan while our police force is now grouped among the worst in the world.

    Under this illustrious Daura general, the national economy was literally eviscerated.  Arguably, we have been set back a good three decades in economic terms. An external debt of anywhere between $80 billion and $100 billion hangs over our collective neck with over N30 trillion in domestic debts. Our external reserves, long brandished as $34-$37 billion was surreptitiously used to leverage clandestine external loans from American banks to the extent of over $18 billion with neither parliamentary approval nor other statutory due processes. We are now spending over 98% of our total revenue on debt servicing. Only this week, the World Bank designated the Nigerian Naira as one  of the worst currencies in sub Saharan Africa. As we speak, over N1000 is equivalent to $1 USD!

    Not long before the 2023 presidential elections, a dubious Nair re-design project was suddenly unleashed on Nigerians by the duo of Presdient Buhari and his Central Bank Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele. People’s bank deposits were literally confiscated by the government. An unanticipated cash crunch hit the nation. People could not access their own hard earned money. Others went through untold hardship to  get into banks that had no money- ether new or old currencies- to dispense. People died of poverty, disease and hardship. Up to this moment, hardly more than a trickle of the new currencies on which huge public expenditure had been incurred is in circulation. And no questions are being asked.

    Still on money matters, close to N29.3 trillion of worthless currency was printed and pumped into the economy by a colluding Central Bank through a dubious Ways and Means mechanism, thereby fueling further runaway inflation which today hovers above 27%.

    Under Buhari’s eight years, Nigeria witnessed the largest migration of citizens into multidimensional poverty than at any other time in our history. An estimated over 130 million Nigerians now live in poverty being the largest ‘poverty republic’ in the world, more than India with a population of over 1.4 billion people.

    As Petroleum Minister, Mr. Buhari presided over the emergence of oil theft, illegal bunkering and illicit refineries as an industry and a sector of Nigeria’s expanding insecurity sub sector. At its worst moments, close to 30% of Nigeria’s daily oil production was being creamed off by oil thieves often with official and security knowledge and enablement.

    Under Buhari, the nation witnessed the institutionalization of corruption. The leadership of the very agencies established to fight corruption (EFCC and ICPC) were themselves investigated and found culpable of condoning high level corruption and there were no consequences. No arrests. No prosecutions.  No recoveries. No reasonable forfeitures.

    Mr. Buhari presided over a deliberate and reckless mismanagement of our national diversity through aggressive nepotism, nativism and divisive politics.

    In response to irritations from secessionist movements in the South East, Buhari could not hide his allergy to the Igbos as a nationality. He threatened on Twitter to unleash genocidal violence on them by speaking to them “in a language they understand from the civil war years.” He capped this xenophobic vituperation by describing the igbos as a mere ‘dot’ surrounded by ‘a circle’ of Nigerian security viciousness. Twitter scrubbed this twit as ‘hate speech’ for which Twitter was banned from the Nigerian web space for close to a year!

    Back to Tinubu’s self -imposed Buhari burden. It is true that faithfulness to party demands that Tinubu should remain silent on the culpability of Mr. Buhari for the myriad burdens he has to contend with. Faithfulness to party perhaps dictates that he should gloss over some of Mr. Buhari’s excusable lapses. But we are not dealing with casual lapses but fundamental acts of epic incompetence or deliberate misdeed occasioned by ignorance or patent wickedness and insensitivity. We are dealing with acts and policies that have literally destroyed the nation we all call home.

    Within the rubrics of faithfulness to party solidarity and policy continuity, it is perhaps understandable that President Tinubu has continued to own the highpoints of his predecessor’s infamous rule. He may have been emboldened in this regard by the outcome of the 2023 presidential elections. After all, he ran under the platform of the APC and was declared winner. This may indicate that the Nigerian populace saw nothing wrong with Buhari’s or the APC’s rule. That would be a conventional democratic wisdom. Ordinarily, the electorate should ‘punish’ a party with a defective performance record at the next election. The controversial result of the 2023 presidential election indicates widespread public hesitation to endorse the return of the APC after the Buhari infamy. It stops short of a wholesale rejection of the APC. A vote tally of less than 9 million in a registered voter population of over 83 million and a population of over 200 million cannot by any stretch be described as an endorsement of a ruling party.

    Even at that, President Tinubu needs to understand the dividing line between faithfulness to party solidarity and his own political self interest. While party solidarity dictates a rhetorical commitment to continuing with the Buhari legacy, real politik dictates that he distances himself, as much as possible, from the worst of Buhari.

    As Buhari and his jaded acolytes continue to bring him out for occasional airing, his plight reminds me of Joseph Stalin win his last days. Towards the end, he was adjudged as somewhat unhinged by the public and his close lieutenants. But he insisted that he was acting rationally and in the best interests of the nation. Somehow, his  derangement had progressed so far that he could not distinguished between illusion and reality. He mistook each act of deluded autocracy as illustrious service to the nation.

    He noticed that the attendance at his weekend garden parties was getting  unusually scanty. On one occasion, when he made his usual grand entrance, he asked aloud: ‘Where have all my friends gone?’ An aide leaned over and whispered into his ears: ‘All gone, all purged…’ Stalin, in his delusion, failed to see that his sweeping purges of ‘anti revolutionary elements’ had also wiped out majority of his friends and allies. Close to 6 million had perished on Stalin’s orders. The man of power had eroded and destroyed the very nation in whose name he was wielding the power of the state. But the suffering and death of the masses meant little to him. As he famously said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. But the death of many is statistics…”

    To Buhari in is final days in power, Nigerians were no more than mre subjects and statistics. The nation was a playground. The nation of his legacy is best described as a field after a locust invasion. For President Tinubu to see his presidency as a continuation of this legacy is political hara-kiri. He needs to choose now.

  • The Owerri Consensus – By Chidi Amuta

    The Owerri Consensus – By Chidi Amuta

    On a number of occasions, I have felt the irresistible pull of homeland. Maybe it is the subliminal summons of my ancestors or the pull of my birth chord long buried beneath that immortal kola nut tree at the backyard of what used to be my mother’s hut. When in Nigeria and I feel that homeward call, it is time to head east and reconnect with the unconscious urging of ancestry. The departure of loved ones has made that homeward visitation fewer in recent years.

    I am a Nigerian by nationality. My deep green passport says it all to outsiders. Once out there, I take the humiliations that passport attracts with dignified forbearance. (“Please step aside; this way, please!”). But I am originally Igbo. Since I am seven years older than independent Nigeria, I am Igbo before I became a Nigerian. My order of belongings follows that logic.

    As I keep telling younger fellow Nigerians and my children, I belong to a lucky minority of Nigerians who have borne the citizenship of many countries while living in one. I have been a British colonial subject, citizen of independent Federation of Nigeria, citizen of Federal Republic of Nigeria (1963 onwards), citizen of Republic of Biafra (1967-70) and back to citizen of Federal Republic of Nigeria. I and my generation have been ferretted back and forth by the dizzying frenzy of Nigerian history up to this point of habitual regrets and nostalgic reflections in old age.

    This past week, homeland called. I answered unconditionally along with an impressive array of home based and diaspora Igbos from as far afield as Australia, United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and even unlikely places like the Pacific Island of Fiji. We gathered in Owerri for a Summit of the peoples of the South East of Nigeria. I do not like the description of South East. It is a geo location, a direction on the Nigerian national compass. Maybe a dog tag to identify a known Nigerian sub- set.

    Since everyone from the Nigerian South East happens to be Igbo, I prefer to say that the Owerri Summit was a homecoming of Igbo sons and daughters for an urgent purpose. Our ancient wisdom holds that it is the unusual that forces nocturnal animals to scamper in a hurry by day time. And when the unusual happens and tragic stampede engulfs the village square, people of the same kindred flee together to their own homestead to review the situation and plot collective survival. And so to Owerri we all went in response to a matter of group survival in the increasing inferno of the Nigerian town square.

    All five governors of the zone were present. All traditional rulers from the states as well led by the Obi of Onitsha, Alfred Achebe. I was meeting him for the first time in life and blood. By a strange coincidence, we sat next to each other on the flight from Lagos to Owerri. I met a perfect gentleman, devoid of the pomposity of artificial royalty and conferred importance. There were opinion leaders as well as women leaders, youth representatives, town unions, market associations, the clergy and a surfeit of the Nigerian political and security apparatus. Chair Person of the Summit team was my friend and sister, Senator Chris Anyanwu, ever sure-footed, confident and crisp in mind and body.

    Literally, Nigerian history and politics ‘chased’ us home. I prefer to see the Owerri Summit on Security, Economy and Politics in the South East as a forced response of desperate exiles to come home and reassess their collective survival in the Nigerian market place. Arguably, there probably would have been no reason to organize this elaborate event if indeed all was well with the people of the South East in the Nigerian homestead.

    Recent Nigerian history has centralized the South East in Nigeria’s social and political consciousness and discourse. The plight of the Igbos is not just on the agenda. It is now the agenda. The emphasis has ranged from the question of the possibility of an Igbo president to matters of clear and urgent security and economic survival of the entire region. Since the end of the civil war over half a century ago, never has the very survival of a vital geo political section of the Nigerian federation come under such severe existential threat as the South East now. The reasons are well known.

    A homegrown nostalgic micro insurgency has bred a sense of unease. Out of a desperate quest to cling on to something identifying and historically identifiable. The youth of the region bought into the myth of Biafra as a symbol of an illustrious past. Out of a national security panic, the Nigerian state has categorized the IPOB pro-Biafran secessionist pressure group as a terrorist organization. In turn, the group has been driven to the extreme of tinkering with violent challenges to the Nigerian state. Sundry militia groups tied to the larger secessionist impulse have sprang up. Sporadic militancy and a scourge of violent criminality has been unleashed in the entire region. A cocktail of criminal gangs and violent cartels ranging from the infamous ‘unknown gunmen’ to armed political thugs, suspected rogue agents of the state and free lance armed gangs and contract killers seem to be in open competition for supremacy in the zone.

    Along the line, the Nigerian security establishment has responded predictably in kind, citing national security concerns as a basis for an intensification of the reign of terror. For some years, it used to be the Nigerian Army. In a rash of annual security showmanship exercises, the Army literally exhausted the names of animals in the national fauna to code-name its security operations in the region. “Operation Python Dance”, “Operation Crocodile Smile”, “Operation Eye”etc.

    Then the system graduated into a combined security task force comprising of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Police and Department of State Security. It became a free for all as these official bodies were joined by gangs of free lance criminals. Since some of the security forces preferred to operate in mufti, it was hard to distinguish between brash criminals and those licensed by the state to impose law and order through state coercion. It has become hard to apportion responsibility for the industrial scale killings and mayhem haunting the region.

    As a direct consequence, domestic and foreign investment has been frightened off the region by the specter of violence and instability. The insurgency itself has virtually supplanted the elected governments of states in the region by handing out orders to the populace for the now famous weekly ‘sit at home’ misadventure. In the process, the economy of the very region has been in recess and decline for the better part of the last eight years. Estimates of economic losses to date hover around a few trillion Naira and still counting.

    In all of this, fixation with national security in the abstract has tended to blind federal officialdom to the historical causes of the looming anarchy in the South East. A mechanical concern with security as the absence of violent disruptions has cluded the political causes of the trouble.

    The realities are a combination of historic injustice, political and economic marginalization and half a century of psychological exclusion of the people of the South East from the Nigerian enterprise. For the avoidance of doubt, let us rehash the realities.

    There was a civil war in this space. More than two million of these people were killed by the guns of war or deliberate weaponization of starvation and disease. This small geographical space was devastated and rendered waste. Lives were either lost, badly devastated or put on compulsory hold or reset. An unscripted exclusionist policy kept the regional elite out of the strategic heights of the national political and technocratic power house. The anger of exclusion and alienation over this half a century has bred a sense of ‘otherness’ among this people. A fierce sense of separate identity within Nigeria has now replaced rhetorical Nigerianness here. This is further effective backdrop to why we are here today.

    In suddenly turning into a national killing field, the South East has become a virtual wasteland. It is a homeland of nostalgic ancestry but now deserted by its own sons and daughters. Those living away from the homeland either within Nigeria or in the international diaspora are afraid to embark on the ritual of periodic return home for fear of being kidnapped and traumatized or murdered for no reason in particular.

    The Owerri Summit was a quest for solutions. It was not just limited to the prevailing insecurity. It was about charting a new economic and political road map. The politics was somewhat understandably subdued. Politics is not in season. The security and economics are now paramount.

    In my view, the real novelty was the emphasis on security. The prevailing securiity situation in the nation and the South East in particular is a function of the disrepair in the sovereign status of the Nigerian federation. The most elementary requirement of the nation state is the protection of the lives and property of the citizenry. A situation in which sections of the polity now have to strategize and fend for themselves on matters of security of lives and property indicates a fatal rupture in the architecture of the state. The Owerri summit was to that extent a loud verdict on the state of health of the Nigerian leviathan.

    The speeches were made and loud ovations rent the air as speaker after speaker underlined the need for greater economic self determination and integration among the states of the region. The presence and concurrence of the state governors signaled a quantum departure from previous understandings.

    The underlying understanding was that the root of the decay of security and economy of the South East is the political sidetracking of the Igbos for the better part of the last half a century after the war. The marginalization of the Igbos is not just about infrastructure neglect or denial of prominent political appointments to fulfill cosmetic constitutional requirements. We need to state it clearly that a sense of real belonging in a nation is not reducible to highways, bridges and railway lines. There is a deeper and more consequential meaning of belonging in a national community. It is a psychological state of assumed inclusion, a sense of co-ownership of the national patrimony and space. It describes the psychological entitlement to own and be owned by one’s nation.

    National history has a moral arc. It bends perennially in the direction of justice no matter how long it takes. The Nigerian situation is peculiar in many ways especially in the mechanisms that have kept the nation afloat to date in spite of its inherent injustices. Nigeria is unique in being a nation conceived in compromise, nurtured in geo -ethnic competition and sustained by hegemonic blackmail and systemic injustices. The new identity politics of the Igbos of the South East is therefore an a rejection of the immorality of the Nigerian state.

    No nation is an immaculate conception. Nations come into being and progress sometimes by willfully or inadvertently hurting sections of their populace. Communal clashes, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, slavery, genocide, pogroms, insurgency, foolish mass killings and reprisals thereof are part of national history. When the hour of sadness passes, a nation so afflicted incurs moral debts to those sections of their community that have been hurt. That is the general origin of the politics of moral consequence.

    It was understaood in Owerri that the agitation for Biafra is the direct consequence of Nigeria’s politics of bad behavior in the last over fifty years. The solution is first to treat the region like other parts of the federation. Militant struggle for justice in the Niger Delta was resolved through the Amnesty programme which has become a permanent structure with a direct charge on the national budget.

    In recent times, we have watched as thousands of repentant Boko Haram and other fundamentalist trouble makers in the Northern hemisphere of the country are resettled with cash payments, entrepreneurial assistance and even more decent clothing.

    The question remains: why has no one from within the federal government or from the region advocated for amnesty for IPOB militants? And yet we are in area where some of the youth followers of IPOB are merely looking for start -up capital to activate their latent entrepreneurial capacity. Why not set up a South East Business Development Fund as an Amnesty and investment fund to assist repentant IPOB militants with entrepreneurial capital?

    Throughout the discussion leg of the Summit, the question of the plight of Mr. Nnamdi Kanu ignited raw sentiments. People agreed that the man has made his point but that the loss of control over his followers has led to moinumental loss of lives and great economic losses. The sentiment was that the man should be freed in the interest of peace. He should be treated more like a political prisoner than either a war prisoner or law and order detainee.

    The most strategic asset of the South East in Nigeria is of course the vast and expansive entrepreneurial presence of the Igbos all over the country. Therefore, more than most other ethnic nationalities in the country, the Igbos have an inbuilt stake in the unity, peace and harmony of Nigeria both as a patrimony and as a market. This truism is inherent in the ancestral wisdom that no trader likes commotion or a fire outbreak in a market place.

    The effective management of the Nigerian diversity is in the interest of the Igbos because of their nature and livelihood. The constitutional guarantee that all Nigerians as citizens are free to reside and own property in every part of the federation is perhaps to the utmost advantage of the Igbo people.

    Surprisingly, however, the fullest effect of this guarantee has not been pushed by politicians from the region. Ordinarily, our legislators at the National Assembly ought to be in the forefront of a crusade to ensure that all Nigerian citizens are guaranteed the fullest rights of citizenship in every part of the federation.
    Over and above pressing for full economic rights all over the country, there needs to be more concerted effort to develop and grow the economies of states within the zone as a homeland fo the Igbos. Here, the five state governments of the region have failed woefully so far in evolving a regional economic development template.

    At the end of two days of unprecedented kinship and frank exchanges, some consensus emerged from Owerri. It was agreed that Nigerians have come a long way together. Our road only leads from and to Nigeria. The destiny and future of the Igbos lies in a more inclusive, more unified, fairer , more equitable and democratic Nigeria.

    Furthermore, the best Nigeria for the Igbos is a free market diverse nation. For the Igbos as a people, the best way to realize their long term strategic destiny is to ‘lose’ themselves in the Nigerian diversity and big market place.

    As an itinerant people, let us respect and embrace every language and every culture wherever we find ourselves in and outside Nigeria. Shun hate, violence and reprisal but stand firm and resolute in defense of our rights as guaranteed by law. By permeating every part of Nigeria and every aspect of its economic life, the Igbos will ultimately realise themselves as full Nigerian citizens.

  • The Supreme Court on trial – By Chidi Amuta

    The Supreme Court on trial – By Chidi Amuta

    The Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal has since reaffirmed the declaration of Mr. Bola Tinubu as our duly elected president. In response, the two major contenders Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar of the Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party respectively have scaled up their legal objections to the Supreme Court. It is more like a slovenly walk up the ladder of judicial correctness, not a legal battle to assert a right or claim an entitlement. The opposition politicians are probably more preoccupied with adherence to the rule of law and a commitment to order and due judicial process. That is a minimum requirement of responsible democratic conduct.

    Without prejudice to the wisdom of the Supreme Court, the high possibility is that they are likely to affirm the ruling of the Tribunal, It will do so for a different set of reasons that run contrary to conventional street wisdom.  It will not be because the judges are under corrupt influence. It will not be because the judges are compromised or cowardly. On the contrary, it will be because the existing laws leave them no room for escape.

    Understandably, the incumbent does not seem perturbed by the judicial rituals. He is digging in in terms of ruling Nigeria, making a litany of strategic appointments and flip flopping through a barrage of key policy decisions. The law gives him the head start of waging his legal defenses of his much contested mandate from the comfort place of power incumbency. The other contestants are merely throwing legal stones at the glass house of power from the external wilderness of forlon hope.

    On its part, the public is less impressed by the legal drama. The finality of a Supreme Court verdict has since lost its celestial awe. Most Nigerians doubt that the Supreme Court will ever upturn Mr. Tinubu’s incumbency. Public doubt about a judicial outcome from the Supreme Court is embedded in the tradition of skepticism that has come to surround the reputation of the Supreme Court and the Nigerian judiciary in general in recent years.

    Rightly or wrongly, ordinary Nigerians doubt the integrity of the Supreme Court let alone expect that it can possibly rule an incumbent out of office at any time in the near future. Common people believe the judges are corrupt, compromised and cowardly. In other words, there is an overwhelming public verdict that neither Peter Obi nor Atiku Abubakar will secure the reliefs they are seeking from the apex court.

    People have already concluded that the Supreme Court will merely reaffirm the verdict of the PEPT.

    To buttress their skepticism and general distrust of the Supreme Court, people cite a string of such verdicts in recent times. Challenges to presidential election outcomes from 1979 to the present have returned verdicts in favour of the incumbent. No one believes this instance will be different. In a few state governorship cases that went up to the Supreme Court, the verdicts have followed the same pattern. It has either been an affirmation of the incumbent or a toppling of the existing order based on disguised  partisan pandering. Easily the most embarrassing instance cases is the Supreme Court judgment that chaperoned Mr. Hope Uzodinma into the Government House in Owerri while returning Mr. Emeka Ihedioha to the pool of unemployed privileged citizens.

    The adverse estimation of the Supreme Court by the Nigerian public is not necessarily informed by any understanding of the fine points of legality that inform the court’s judgments. It is instead a value judgment by a perceptive and politically conscious pubic on cases that touch on the wider democratic implications of our elections. More often than not, assessments of the judgments of the Supreme Court are value judgments that are mere spillovers of Nigeria’s pervasive corruption rhetoric. A pervasively corrupt culture has bred perennial distrust about the conduct of public officers and functionaries. There is a conventional wisdom out on the streets that the quality of judgment available to those who approach our courts is a function of the quantum of money and other material inducement on offer by litigants.

    In this regard, people point to the many cases in which under the Buhari presidency, a number of judges homes were seaarched and huge troves of cash found. Security agencies went after some judges and traced huge sums of money to their bank accounts  which could not be accounted for. In other words a trail of corruption follows our judges like their politician patrons who in any case are the financiers of the wealthy judges. In going after the corrupt judges, political leaders were merely seeking to retrieve part of their loot doled out to some judges.

    Therefore, the general doubt as to whether the Supreme Court will deliver a contrary verdict from the Presidential Election Tribunal  has a constitutional and legislative basis. The Supreme Court and indeed all the courts in the post election court processes have been caged by the existing constitutional stipulations and applicable Electoral law on the matter of post election petitions.

    Here is the Constitution: Section 285 (6) of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (as amended) states that “an election tribunal shall deliver its judgement in writing within 180 days from the date of the filing of the petition”. Meanwhile, the petitioners have 21 days after the date of the declaration of the result of elections to file. The law further provides that “an appeal from the decision of an election tribunal or Court of Appeal in an election matter shall be heard and disposed of within 60 days from the date of delivery of judgment of the tribunal or Court of Appeal”. This means that the declared winner would have spent no less than six months in office before the case is concluded.

    Since judicial systems hardly rule in favour of potential anarchy, the time lag makes it difficult to upturn a presidential election in which the incumbent has already spent months in office. For as long as this aberration persists, there can hardly be judgments that run counter to the interests of the incumbent at the presidential level at least.

    The present aberration plays in favour of the belief that order precedes law. You must have an orderly society that exists in stability before individuals can successfully pursue their legal rights. So in most cases involving the security of the sovereign at the apex level, most Supreme Courts are more likely to rule in favour of an incumbent already in power. The desirable ideal is therefore a situation in which electoral petitions are concluded before the swearing-in of winners as obtains in many African countries.

    In Kenya, for instance, the time allowed between the date of declaration of presidential election result and the decision of the Supreme Court on a petition is only three weeks. Article 140 of the 2010  Kenya Constitution provides that the petition should be filed within seven days after the result is declared and “within fourteen days after the filing of a petition, the Supreme Court shall hear and determine the petition and its decision shall be final”.

    Over and above technical constitutional and legalistic issues, there is a more fundamental aspect of the reliance on the courts to determine electoral outcomes. An aberration seems to have been accepted as the norm. In a democracy, the essence of periodic judicial interventions in election matters is to promote democratic culture especially the primacy of the rule of law. It is also designed to strengthen the confidence of the people in the process and instill accountability in the political leadership. Reducing our courts, including the Supreme Court, to vote counting stations with Judges now deciding the outcome of elections, allegations of election fixing, deal-making and corruption have become rife.

    The increased prominence of and recourse to judicial outcomes in election matters is a dangerous omen for Nigeria’s democracy. Politicians now go into electoral contests  uncertain that the electoral body (INEC) will return a free and fair verdict. They therefore prepare to duel in court, believing that tribunals and courts will give them the fairness and justice denied by the electoral body, namely INEC.

    It has therefore become axiomatic that INEC declared results will be defective and unfair. Even INEC itself has become content with the recourse to the courts to complete their job, hence the refrain of ‘Go to court”. INEC seems to have transferred confidence in its own technical capacity to the judgment of courts. A democracy in which the umpire or electoral body lacks confidence in its own integrity and technical efficiency and instead transfers the burden of its fairness and integrity to the judiciary has serious fundamental problems.

    The virtual transfer of the burden of determining electoral outcomes to the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, has encumbered it with a political responsibility and a moral burden. No one knows what code of conduct regulates the conduct of our Supreme Court judges these days. It remains uncertain whether our Supreme Court judges are barred from receiving material favours from individuals or corporations even where the givers have no case before the affected judge. This is made more problematic by the civil service fixed tenure if our Supreme Court judges. They are appointed and serve according to a pecking at the behest of the president. Their conduct is subject to a loose regulation by the National Judicial Council.

    Whatever the latitudes in the present environment, the Judges of Nigerian’s Supreme Court and indeed the entire judiciary establishment now have a huge moral burden. They must first admit that there has been a major erosion of the ethical and professional standards in their fold. Nigerians continue to search in vain for judges of stiff moral and ethical standards who also embodied brilliant professional standards and intellect to earn the epithet “learned”. Nigeria once had Justices Danley Alexander, Kayode Esho, Chukwudifu Oputa, T.S. Elias, Ayo Irikefe, Karibi White etc. These were men of solid conviction, profound intellect and impeccable character and commitment to the highest ethical standards. In their days, Nigerians could swear by the judgments of the Supreme Court. Even the military stood in awe of the moral stature and intellectual sagacity of these men of law and letters. As Chinua Achebe lamented shortly before he passed on, “there was once a nation.”

    Our situation contrasts with the United States. Supreme Court judges serve a life tenure. They either sit till they die or voluntarily opt to retire. Every vacancy on the US Supreme Court is filled by a nominee of the president subject to Senate confirmation. More often than not, presidents nominate judges to the Supreme Court based on a combination of professional track record in the field and ideological leaning. You are either a liberal judge or a conservative. This connotes  implicit partisanship  in broad terms as conservative judges tend to be Republicans and liberal judges are essentially Democrats in tendency. Racial diversity has recently been thrown in as a factor that influences presidential nominations to the Supreme Court. There is no civil service pecking order to observe. It is a meritocratic system.

    Given the life tenure of US Supreme Court judges, their ethical code is more or less left to their individual moral judgments as well as the perception of the public. Generally, the system frowns at Supreme Court Judges hitching a free ride in a private jet owned by a party financier or Wall Street influencer. Even enjoying a courtesy vacation or renting property as a favour from individuals or corporations with known political or business clout in Washington poses serious ethical problems.

    Currently, the only black judge on the Supreme Court, Mr. Clarence Thomas, is under serious ethical scrutiny.  Mr. Harlan Crow, a friend of his and Republican party funder bought a house from justice Thomas and flew him on a private jet and also took him on a cruise. Similarly, Justice Samuel Alito took a ride in a private jet paid for by another Republican donor. Though there is no requirement under US law for these judges to report or disclose these private favours, there  has been a public backlash about their conduct. This is against the background of the code of ethics in the US pubic service which bars public servants from receiving gifts in excess of $20!

    In contrast, Nigerian Supreme Court judges are known to routinely receive huge gifts from business and political ‘friends’. Some of them have influenced choice public appointments for their family members and wards. Others have reportedly received holiday flight tickets and luxury hotel bookings from political and business figures in return for undisclosed judicial favours. It was rumoured that a Chief Justice of the federation was retired prematurely for fiddling with official funds to the tune of billions of Naira.

    Another was similarly investigated, briefly prosecuted and then compulsorily retired because officialdom found an incredible balance in his personal bank account. One judge who became Chief Justice of the federation was so much in the back pocket of a former Governor that the governor would travel and bring back for the judge several suitcases full of shoes of different colours. While the judge was entitled to have friends, the problem was that the governor in question had numerous requests for judicial intervention for which he demanded the help of the shoe -loving judge. In an ecosystem where the definition of corruption is rather elastic, it becomes even harder to exonerate our judges from charges of possible graft.

    On these post election cases, there is a need to urgently rescue  the Supreme Court from imminent irrelevance and oblivion. The challenge is to unfetter the courts by reviewing the constitutional provisions and legislative enablement that relate to the timing and completion of post election petitions. Once we can free post election judicial processes from the burden of incumbency, then the judiciary will be free to dispense justice according to law and in pursuit of natural justice and fairness to all. Thus freed from the encumbrance and blackmail of incumbent power, all aggrieved contestants can approach the law in meekness as equal seekers for justice.

    But the most important route to save the judiciary from being killed by politics is to focus attention on evolving a foolproof electoral system. When election outcomes determined by INEC become imopeccably reliable, there will be little or need for recourse to judicial absolutism. The judges will regain their integrity and the Supreme Court will reclaim its faded glory.

  • Palliatives, politics and SAP 2 – By Chidi Amuta

    Palliatives, politics and SAP 2 – By Chidi Amuta

    My brother and friend, Kayode Komolafe (the man we all call KK) is an uncommon patriot. With an unassuming depth as a public intellectual, KK is equally disarming in his witty humour, a matter to which I shall return some day in the future. But he is unfailingly felicitous in his approach to national issues. In one of our a recent conversation about national affairs in general, he drew my attention to what I seemed to have overlooked. The two key economic policies of the hundred-day old Bola Tinubu administration may, in a limited sense, represent a second phase of the Structural Adjustment Programme in Nigeria.

    Even Mr. Tinubu’s most ardent critics have since admitted that on the twin issues of fuel subsidy removal and unification of the exchange rate of the Naira, the new President had little or no choice. He had to take those decisions if indeed he was to have a country to preside over. The decisions were existential in essence.

    Predictably, the prime pontiffs of international free market capitalism have hailed him. The IMF and the World Bank have since variously endorsed Mr. Tinubu’s boldness in these policies. Key Western governments like those in Washington and London have , with measured optimism, welcomed these policy shifts as positive for Nigeri in the long run. In turn, the Nigerian business community has conditionally applauded the president while of course warning about high costs of doing business and the jobs that may be lost if costs continue to rise. But by and large, through the stock market’s initial positive response, corporate Nigeria has positively welcomed the policies as evidenced in an upward trend in market capitalization and volume of trade on the floor of the Lagos exchange. Nigerian Bankers, those hydra headed parasites are smiling or grumbling depending on the games they like playing with the foreign exchange market.

    The huge proceeds of the fuel subsidy removal mean that governments at all levels are hugging huge troves of cash. It ought to mean that  they can find cash to fund infrastructure and social investment programmes.  And a massively devalued Naira now fetches huge baskets of relatively worthless Naira notes for government to pay its huge recurrent costs and may be fund a few capital projects. What is going on is a fundamental structural adjustment of the economy away from the subsidized regime of he immediate past Buhari profligacy to a market driven terrain. Government and its friends in pin stripe suits in the boardrooms of Lagos and Abuja may be smiling. Not quite so the vast majority of ordinary Nigerians and what used to be the now vastly pauperized middle class.

    On the streets, the agonies, pains and pangs are becoming unbearable. Jobs are being lost as businesses contract or shut down because of impossible operational costs and tanking demand. Transportation costs for people and goods have shot through the roof in urban and rural areas. Costs in education, healthcare and basic living have skyrocketed as proprietors struggle to adjust operational costs to catch up with rapid inflation. Food inflation is sky high. In Lagos, a loaf of bread now goes for as much as N1.300, thereby limiting those who can fall back to the staple of white bread and akara balls for breakfast.

    While the NNPC has been crowing that national consumption of premium motor sprit is down by 30%, the number of vehicles on the roads has shrunk by about that percentage. Freer traffic in the streets of places like Lagos also means a shrunken level of economic and a looming potential of lost income, joblessness and potentially more crime statistics.

    The instant early warning of the coming crisis has come in the form of repeated labour wild cat strikes and threats thereof. Literally all unions are up in arms. So also are students unions protesting sharp increases in fees and living costs. Government’s response to these many streams of hardship has been a mixture of knee jerk reflexes, hasty panic reactions and astonishing confusion. Initially, a hasty proposal to dole out N8,000 to families of the poorest was dropped quickly as it had no reliable statistical basis nor was it well thought out. As it turns out, previous social alleviation efforts under Mr. Buhari were based on dodgy statistics and phoney data on the basis of which billions of Naira disappeared into the back pockets government officials who seemed more interested in alleviating their own personal circumstances.

    The admission by governments that these policies have triggered massive hardship has now popularized ‘palliatives’ as a new catch phrase of political correctness. It is one that has quickly been bastardized and trivialized by politicians. Government has been stampeded by the newly inaugurated state governors into signing off N5 billion to each state  and the FCT  to provide palliatives to desperate citizens. It does not matter if the state in question is Kano or Lagos with teeming populations or the FCT with a miserable demographics.

    In line with Nigeria’s lazy school of governance, nearly all state governments have invaded the markets to buy up bags of rice for distribution to the poor and vulnerable as palliatives. It is uncertain how much the states are prepared to spend on this rice jamboree. Dangerous scrambles have ensued at the palliatives distribution centres, leading to a few broken heads and many other injuries requiring first aid that is hardly available in public clinics and hospitals. We are yet to hear the last from this new palliatives racket.

    In the interim, there is as yet no comprehensive national policy on how best to alleviate the spiraling impacts of policies that are designed to fundamentally alter the way Nigerians live and pay their bills. You do not inflict fundamental structural changes in an economy and then address the consequences with stop gap and flip flop measures.

    What is clear is that the twin policies of the Tinubu administration amount to a limited edition of the infamous Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) of the mid 1980s. At that earlier stage, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) designed and inflicted the same set of adjustment economic policies on nearly all distressed Third World countries. The elements included an end to subsidies and entitlement programmes, privatization of government enterprises, commercialization, import restrictions and the adoption of market determined exchange rates etc. The Structural Adjusrtment (SAP) produced protests and dislocations in many countries as these policies imposed severe hardship on the lower segments of the populace.

    Many adult Nigerians will recall the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme(SAP) by the Ibrahim Babangida military administration. The nation was in a bad place economically and faced the option of accepting a killer loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The terms and conditions of the loan were considered rather stifling and Babangida threw the matter to a public debate. Nigerians rejected the option of an IMF loan but felt the government should accept the ‘conditionalities’ as self imposed package  for a homegrown programme of economic recovery.

    It meant  the immediate adoption of free market principles in most areas of the national economy. The exchange rate was freed from official controls. Government enterprises were being privatized or commercialized. A previously planned and government controlled economy was jolted into an overnight transition into a free market economy. Aggressive competition and entrepreneurship replaced the entitlement state. Private enterprise was encouraged. In the process, living conditions hardened. The general cost of goods and services sky- rocketed.  While opportunities opened up for the elite to venture into new enterprises, the broad majority of urban and rural masses were being left behind by the rumbling train of the new market economy.

    A military government that came to power to alleviate conditions found that SAP was crushing the very people. Something needed to be done to re-establish the compassionate basis of government and cushion the people from the adverse consequences of economic structural adjustment.

    In what has now become the most far reaching programme of systemic palliatives and hardship alleviation programme, the then military administration introduced a slew of poverty alleviation and palliative policies. An aggressive programme of rural development under the defunct DFRRI was introduced to incorporate the rural majority into the national economy through access rural roads, water supply, agricultural extension services , primary healthcare and public enlightenment.

    To extend access to credit to the poor, a Peoples Bank was established. To further penetrate the rural communities with access to credit, a series of community banks were established. To accelerate job creation, a national employment agency, the NDE was established in the Ministry of Labour to facilitate job creation and access to job opportunities. An accessible venture capital mini credit scheme called National Economic Recovery Fund (NERFUND) was established to afford funding to bright ideas of youth who had no tangible collaterals other than their certificates. To address the public transportation needs of the masses, a Mass Transit scheme was established in collaboration with Labour unions to provide quick affordable transportation to the masses.

    This entire gamut of palliative and ameliorative policies, programmes and institutions were all rolled out within a short space of time and even the harshest critics of the military conceded that these were well thought out and bold measures towards the creation of a fair society for Nigerians.

    The significant feature of the palliative regime of the Babangida military administration is that there was a deliberate institutionalization of the structures of alleviation. They were not random or subject to the whims of individual state governors. Most of them birthed national institutions with state components following well thought out national guidelines.

    In plain language, what the nation is going through are the pains and repercussions of a new phase of SAP, SAP 2 for short. It is therefore astonishing that the new Tinubu administration is going about the matter of palliatives as if it was a transient political contingency rather than a deep structural realignment of the economy.  It is as though there are no extant pre-existing institutions, organizations and structures that have survived the passage of time on which we can build present efforts. The National Directorate of Employment is still in existence. A company called Labour Mass Transit Limited partly owned by the NLC is still alive. The federal Urban Mass Transit programme survived up to the Obasanjo presidency and bequeathed the ubiquitous Keke NAPEP rickshaws that are still active all over the country.

    The urgent challenge of the moment is therefore how to identify the existing instruments and institutions of palliative, compassion and socio economic alleviation that have survive up to the present and deploy the proceeds of the fuel subsidy removal to reactivate them.

    The present approach seems to be heavily weighted on the usual Nigerian politics of sharing. We now need to go beyond the degrading sharing of miserable bags of rice and boxes of Indonesian noodles to more lasting structured legacies of a fair society. Nor should we resort to random cash handouts that can neither alleviate suffering nor poverty but instead create and deepen an entitlement syndrome which could further deepen poverty.

    If we are serious about alleviating poverty and ameliorating the impacts of recent policy adjustments, we must rise above silly tokenism and learn from the examples of countries that have embarked on genuine poverty alleviation and deliberate policies of addressing inequality in a sustainable way. I would recommend the examples of Brazil, India and China.

  • Politics in wig and gown – By Chidi Amuta

    Politics in wig and gown – By Chidi Amuta

    Ordinarily, it would be hazardous to judge the judgment of five eminent Federal judges over an issue as life threatening as the results of a Nigerian presidential election.  Apex power is involved. Big money is at stake. Livelihoods are up on the hoist. The instruments of state and non-state violence are at the disposal of those whose interests are most troubled. It is a zone where even the angels will tread very cautiously. But once the judges wisely permitted their ruling on the February 25th presidential election to be televised and broadcast live, they admitted we regular mortals into the legitimate sphere of public theatre and drama. As a television mass audience and a public of voting citizens, we automatically acquired the right to judge the judgment of the learned judges. After all, it is all about us and how we are likely to be governed or misgoverned in the next four years at least.

    The 13 hour- long theatre of a sea of wigs and gowns in Abuja made impressive spectacle but depressing television. But it may not have been that humorous to too many ordinary Nigerians who had so much at stake. Yet there was still something quite remarkable. A largely lawless and inherently unjust  nation parading such a copious population of lawyers is in itself anachronistic.  But the ‘show’ failed on many other scores. It was not public entertainment. It was boringly long. As mass legal education, it was a disaster as well as no systematic legal lessons were on offer.

    The decision to televise and broadcast live the proceedings of the judgment of the 2023 Presidential Election and Petitions Tribunal may have been well intentioned. After all, democracy ought to be an open festival, more so in the age of instant internet and universal digital television. After 13 hours of boring caterwauling of legalese and motionless suspense, the predictable verdict is out. Spending 13 whole hours to rehearse and restate a forgone outcome is yet another Nigerian first in what is essentially a political conquest of the judiciary.

    Yet on closer examination, there was something about the judgment session that was a bit ominously disturbing. The lengthy presentation was perhaps intentional and dubiously strategic. Under normal circumstances, the attention span of a normal listening audience is not beyond three to four hours. To put up a 13 -hour ‘show’ on a matter of supreme public interest on national television was rather cruel but perhaps intentional.

    There is perhaps a sense in which that judgment session was a carefully rehearsed public torture designed by people who know a bit more about these matters.  You can torture with a long steady beam of light on a subject. You can torture with music at an unusual decibel beamed at a subject in isolation for too long. You can torture with a steady jet of water directed at a subject’s face for long enough to make them confess to a crime they probably did not commit (Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib!). You can even torture with silence in isolation for too long a time to drive your subject crazy. The possibilities are limitless.

    For a public television audience, you can torture with a long boring session full of incoherent inanities and legalistic jargon, beamed at an entrapped audience held spellbound by their common interest in the subject. That was what happened on Wednesday, 6th September. Nigerians were hooked in anxiety for an outcome that means something to nearly everyone. It dragged on endlessly but many dared not leave. The political animals in the immediate courtroom were bored and 30% of them were fast asleep and snoring most of the time. Most lawyers in the pack managed to keep half awake for professional reasons.

    The five judges presiding over the Tribunal may have fared better as they divided the 800 page judgment into segments among themselves to alleviate their own boredom. At some point, some of the judges fared poorly as they seemed to be reading a pre-written text of doubtful authorship. Like conscripts in a bad drama cast, maybe they did not rehearse enough!

    To the perceptive, the prelude was sufficient indication of the forgone outcome. The president jetted off to the G-20 meeting in India, seemingly oblivious of what was in the offing. A date for the judgment was carefully chosen to come a day after the 100 day mark of the Tinubu presidency. The ingenuity of that schedule is that most public discussion will be on the emotional matter of the tribunal verdict, thus crowding out whatever discourse there may be on the chaotic first hundred days of a flip flop presidency from the media space. The DSS predictably warned of opposition plans to protest the tribunal verdict. That was enough indication that the verdict will reaffirm the victory of the incumbent. An incumbent could not possibly be mobilizing to protest against its own victory! Unexpectedly, the Court of Appeal, in an unprecedented gesture, joined the DSS in the scare mongering, cautioning the public to stay home on Judgment Day. They all knew what we did not know. But the ultimate credit must go to President Tinubu for a masterful arrangement!

    The verdict of the tribunal has come. It has been greeted by a mix of understandable triumphalism and despair depending on where Nigerians stand on the political spectrum. Among Mr. Tinubu’s immediate political family of party devotees and ethnic cheer mongers, the talking drums and trumpets are out. On the other side, especially among the youth and ‘Obidients’, followers of Mr. Peter Obi and the Labour Party, it is an extended period of virtual mourning. Mr. Atiku Abubakar’s followership is more amorphous and a bit confused and muffled. It is to the eternal credit of the political leaders especially the opposition that the hell predicted by the DSS and other merchants of fear have come to nothing.

    Prior to the tribunal verdict, however, there was this stubborn hope among Mr. Obi’s nationwide throng of followers especially that, somehow, the judiciary could restore some justice to a system in which the presidential elections of February 25th was universally adjudged to be seriously flawed.  In the minds of this group, the Nigerian judiciary could do one of two things: right what they perceived as an electoral wrong or reaffirm an unpopular status quo in line with its tradition of delivering judgments without justice.

    Yet the skepticism remained strong that a judiciary with a strong reputation for corruption and compromise would predictably reaffirm the victory of the incumbent Bola Tinubu. The skeptics have carried the day. After a hundred days of what promises to be a turbulent and bumbling presidency, Mr. Bola Tinubu seems secure in power to begin navigating his way and his country out of very troubled waters.

    The actual substance and body of the tribunal judgment proceedings  was quite interesting even if long drawn out and spectacularly boring. Many principal actors were asleep half of the time! At some point, the tribunal judges began to sound more like an aggressive band of defense attorneys out to defend the incumbent at all costs. Most of the evidence adduced by the opposition petitioners , Peter Obi and Mr. Atiku Abubakar, were either dismissed as untenable or routinely demolished.  Most of the witnesses of the petititoners were equally dismissed, discredited or simply rule out on grounds of personal interest or identity conflict. In all, the tribunal was quite dutiful in throwing out what it did not like and selecting what would not hurt a seemingly preconceived verdict.

    Interestingly, all witnesses called by the opposition that had any suggestion of technical expertise and competence were all casually dismissed as either lacking merit or relevance to the issues on hand.  The witnesses themselves were cast as persons with either personal pecuniary or other hidden interests or parading expertise that the tribunal said it did not need!

    Clearly, the Tribunal was averse to witnesses with a technological bent as they were likely to punch holes in INEC’s leaky armour of technological sophistication. The tribunal simply kept everything at the analogue level as it was in no mood to engage witnesses that would goad them into exposing their own technological deficits. No need to expose the relative ignorance of the learned judges on complex matters of information technology, digital communication or the combustible possibilities of the social media.

    Quite conveniently, on the substantive issues of the eligibility of the APC candidate, the Tribunal took recourse to technical conveniences. Questions about Mr. Tinubu’s qualifications were rightly adjudged pre-election matters that ought to have been brought up in the appropriate lower courts and disposed of 180 days before the elections.

    But in demolishing most of the grounds of substantive preliminary objections that would have weakened Tinubu’s and INEC’s postions, the Tribunal cleared the pathway for the material evidence in the various petitions. The Tribunal may have staged a valiant legal battle but thrown logic, common sense and national morality to the dogs. So, Tinubu’s refund of $460,000 to the US government had no criminal infraction component. We were however not told what type of transaction the money came from. Was it just a routine errant financial transaction alert that found this huge trove of cash enter Mr. Tinubu’s US account? Maybe, the money was not even connected to him. Maybe, it was an accidental transfer from an unknown vendor of questionable merchandise. Just leave a cloud of doubt in order to degrade the weight of this allegation!

    Another curious legal disclosure is that candidates in an election do not have a right to question the eligibility of the candidate of another party for the same election. In other words, it is a fair contest if the other party decides to send in either a Sumo wrestler or killer hulk to duel my frail structure in a wrestling match up!

    Strict evidence -based legal outcomes may serve the needs of legal justice. But it often flies in the face of common sense, natural Justice and ignores some of the things that worry ordinary people. These include issues of public morality and the common sense behavior of public institutions. So, the culpability of INEC in the various infractions and irregularities of the election are left to the petitioners to prove beyond reasonable doubt.

    As far as the Tribukan was concerned, for as long as petitioners could not discharge the onus of proof of allegations against INEC, the agency is beyond reproach. Worse still, INEC’s own commitments as spelt out in the Electoral Law are conveniently waived, So, INEC did not have to transmit any results electronically or otherwise. It could decide to transmit either electronically or manually or deploy a hybrid system of result transmission.  Yet the same INEC paraded the use of BVAS technology and the transmission of results via its IREV portals as the unique selling points of the last elections. The pubic bought into this hoax since these technologies had worked in state governorship elections inAnambra, Edo, Osun and Ekiti states.

    Furthermore, the onus of proving an electoral irregularity at a polling station is that of the petitioners with no bounding obligation on the part of INEC to account for the processes at the said polling station. If a petitioner’s agent has evidence of INEC facilitating the thrashing or falsification of election results, the onus of ultimate proof is still the petitioner. The Tribunal cannot even compel INEC to authenticate the processes at that polling centre.

    Matters of general abuse and the use of violence, intimidation and profiling to influence the voting process in different parts of the country did not quite qualify for the attention of the Tribunal. Even the rather incisive on –the- spot report of European Union (EU) observers during the elections was rejected by the Tribunal as immaterial to its verdict and  beneath its purview. In short, the Tribunal gaove out the overall impression that nothing went wrong on 25th February, 2023. All was smooth, free and fair. It was the opposition, the social media, the EU and other international observers that raked up all this unfounded noise! There is nothing to fix about INEC’s processes, protocols and performance. There was no need to adjust the vote tally since the petitioners could not prove either over voting, rigging, under counting etc anywhere in the country! Therefore, the vote scores of the three principal contestants as declared by INEC remain sacrosanct!

    In reaffirming the victory of the incumbent over the claims of the opposition petitioners, the Tribunal was replaying the familiar path of jurisprudence in all matters where the order and peace of the state are challenged. Even ahead of the verdict of the tribunal and those of a possible Supreme Court outing, it is obvious that a reaffirmation of the sovereignty of the incumbent is the easiest option for the judiciary.

    The logic is simple , elementary and ancient, deriving from early political philosophies from Thomas Hobbes to John Locke and even Machievelli. Going to the Tribunal or the Supreme Court is a quest for justice according to law. But justice is only possible when law and order prevail in an orderly state. In an anarchy, neither law nor order are possible. Therefore, every judiciary, in matters that challenge the stability of the state and the legitimacy of the sovereign, will always rule in favour of the incumbent order. That is the only guarantee that unites all citizens. The state must exist as an orderly whole in order to make the pursuit of our individual rights, freedoms and quest for justice possible in the first place.

    But once an ultimate political consideration such as the survival of the state overrides specific legal arguments in determining a judicial outcome, judges unconsciously don the garb of political partisanship. The lawyers’ wig and gown become part of the costume of political actors and the citizens begin to see judicial outcomes as an extension of the partisan fray.

    When politics invades the behaviour of judges, something often goes horribly wrong. In a democracy, the high command of the executive (mostly politicians) invade and even gobble up the judicial branch. The acquiescence of the legislature follows naturally. Authoritarianism becomes a ready temptation. In these parts, nothing touched by politics remains the same. Worse still, anything embraced by politicians gets terminally deformed. This is the terminal risk that the Presidential election Tribunal ran earlier in the week. In stepping beyond law towards ultimate politics, the Tribunal may have usurped the role of the Supreme Court as the ultimate guarantor of the state according to constitution as the final law of the land.

    As the haze over the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal (PEPT) clears in favor of the incumbent, fewer Nigerians now look up to the Supreme Court to make any difference in outcomes. Nigeria’s murky gangster politics seems to have prevailed once again even as the public reservation lingers that Mr. Tinubu’s mandate is based on a flawed election.

    In the ensuing months, most Nigerians are more likely to be concerned about where the next meal will come from rather than what the next presidential election holds in store. In this regard, Mr. Tinubu and his team have their task now better defined by that sea of wigs and gowns at the Tribunal.

  • From Libreville, an ugly postcard – By Chidi Amuta

    From Libreville, an ugly postcard – By Chidi Amuta

    The immediate past president of Gabon, Mr. Ali Bongo Ondimbo, has joined the new crop of video -posting toppled rulers. The luxurious expanse of his gold plated presidential mansion in Libreville has shrunk into a tiny sitting space surrounded by book shelves and inconsequential furniture.  From here, he has posted an online video that casually urged the world to ‘make some noise’ to draw attention to his altered circumstances. He of course pretends to be unaware of what is happening around him as he admits he is confined to a room while the whereabouts of his wife and family are yet uncertain.

    In the last couple of months, some of the footages of Mr. Ali Bongo’s public appearances before the coup showed an infirm man recovering from a debilitating stroke but still firmly in power as the c heir to a family political dynasty that has presided over Gabon for the last 55 years.  The younger Bongo is the son of former President, Omar Bongo who often wore high wedge shoes covered by a baggy James Brown -style ‘bongo’ trousers to enhance his dimunitive proportions.

    In spite of his personal infirmity and the obviously dysfunctional state of Gabon, Mr. Bongo went ahead to prepare for last weekend’s presidential election. He predictably ‘won’ the election. Opposition parties and groups throughout Gabon  however dismissed the election as a fraudulent sham. Mr. Bongo clung to his victory and power  nonetheless but was quickly toppled in a palace military coup, barely four days after. The election would have given him a third term in an office he assumed in 2009. He had tweaked the constitution to give himself room for a third presidential term.

    Soon after the election of last weekend, it was predictable that his party, the Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG) which he inherited from his late father would win. With a time tested combination of rigging, violence and official intimidation, the perpetual victory of the ruling party was fairly much guaranteed.  But opposition forces had of late increased in strength and been joined by masses of disenchanted youth and the urban poor. Gabon, a nation of a little over 2.4 million people has the fourth highest GDP per head in sub Saharan Africa but lately wracked by unemployment and poverty.

    Mounting political opposition led to a belated coalition of 16 opposition parties into an electoral alliance that presented a joint candidate to challenge Mr. Bongo at last weekend’s presidential election. That did not alter what was a foregone outcome in what has become a typical African sit -tight tradition of democratic persistence disguised as succession.

    In continuation of a recent fashion among French speaking African countries, Gabon has fallen to the new coup contagion. The military struck barely four days after the election results were announced. In a televised photo opportunity that has become typical of the recent Franco-phone coups, a group of soldiers appeared on Gabonese national television to announce that they had decided to topple the democratic order ‘in the name of the Gabonese people’.

    Predictably, they declared last weekend’s presidential elections as flawed, dubious and therefore annulled. Typically, the soldiers have suspended the constitution and all institutions of the state. They have also placed the ousted president under house arrest while taking in one of his sons on a charge of ‘high treason.’ As it turns out, the cop leader and transitional president is Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, commander  of the  presidential guards and a cousin of Ali Bongo.

    The coup in Gabon comes barely two months after that in Niger which is still the centre of feverish activity within ECOWAS and the African Union. The Gabon coup merely increases the tally of a series of coups that have ravaged Franco-phone Africa. In quick succession,  Sudan, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and now Gabon have all literally fallen onto the sword. Previous coups in the countries under review have been advanced and marketed as the result of a series of identical causes ranging from insecurity caused by Sahelian jihadist terrorists to economic adversity and political misrule by leaders enthroned by democratic elections.

    The Gabonese coup has pointedly indicated an open political dimension. The Gabonese military has added its voice to that of African opposition parties who have of late decried abuses in recent African democratic elections. The Gabonese coup makers have been clear and direct in joining their voice to that of opposition parties and groups. They have openly rejected the conduct and outcome of last weekend’s presidential election in Gabon as well as the long misrule under the Bongo dynasty.

    Without doubt, all the coup makers in French -speaking West and Central Africa have acquired their audacity as a result of one single factor: the reduction and even outright decline in French presence and influence in the region. The disengagement of France from its former African coloniesis is the direct result of a latter day revolt by African countries against certain extant exploitative colonial era arrangements  between France and its former African colonies. This arrangement which has gained recent currency defines an essentially exploitative economic relationship between France and its former African colonies.

    According to the outlines of the arrangement, France has retained tight control over the international financial transactions of these former colonies as well as curtailed the autonomy of their central banks. This has made these countries subject to French supervision and ultimate financial authority.  Therefore, the political storm at the bottom of these recent coups seems to be a general revolt of former African French colonies against the last vestiges of a colonial relationship that has left these countries politically independent but financially and economically dependent on Paris.

    The progressive French disengagement from Africa has also removed the safety switch of ready French intervention and stabilization forces which used to be the guarantee against instability and wider insecurity in these countries. In the absence of standby French intervention and stabilization forces, the frail armies of these countries have taken to an easier recourse to coups to assert some authority.

    The frenzy of coups in West and Central Africa will destabilize the region strategically in the near term. It may end up destabilizing not just the region but also upsetting an already stressed global order. The decline of French influence and military presence in the region exposes Western oriented countries in West and Central Africa to direct  jihadist terrorist threat. More dangerously, West and Central Africa are now under the direct threat of recent Russian ambition and influence through the conspicuous presence and activities of the Wagner Group of mercenaries in the region.

    For Africa, the recent spate of coups challenges our leaders to increase confidence in democracy by ensuring that the processes and practice of democracy meet the hopes of the people. But this is not just an African challenge. For the free world, there is a clear and urgent task of restoring confidence in democracy by using diplomatic pressure to roll back the specter of coups in Central and West Africa.

    For the West, there is an immediate issue of defending a vital sphere of western influence from the ills of authoritarian rule and potential Russian influence.  The ultimate question for the West is not merely diplomacy as usual. It is also an overarching  moral burden. When and where does democracy deserve and qualify to be defended by its global champions? There must be a clear indication that global democracy has a guarantor that will stoutly defend it whenever and wherever it is under threat. Democracy is clearly under threat in Africa today. How the West responds will determine whether the forces of authoritarianism championed by China and Russia will prevail in the contest for a new world order or beat a retreat.

    From Abuja, Fanfare of Ministerial Bluster

    The great national festival of the last fortnight was the swearing in and deployment of Tinubu’s mammoth ministerial assembly. The event was preceded by the comedy of curious confirmations. While the nominees were facing the Senate, no one knew what portfolios they were being processed for. So, a blindfolded Senate was interviewing a series of equally blindfolded ministerial nominees in a charade that served mostly an entertainment function for Nigerians who watched on television.

    The poor senators were in no position to ask any pointed or specific questions. For the more familiar faces among the nominees,  especially those who had served as state governors, it was the usual “Bow and Go!” comedy. No questions asked. No answers required. Just show up and proceed. For the less known ones, there were no challenging probes. Just show face and mutter something,  Confirmed! Go onto the mountain and proclaim thyself: Distinguished Honourable Minister!

    On first appearance, some of the more anonymous nominees seemed somewhat like sorry shy creatures. Imagine an innocuous fellow appearing in blindfold in front of the hallowed  chambers of the Senate full of strangers with arrows and darts aimed at you. In the end, it was a typical Nigerian ‘mass promotion’ oral examination. Everybody passed including the gentleman prodigy who completed secondary school by age nine and an ingenious young lady who got appointed minister as a serving NYSC member!

    After last Monday’s swearing in ceremony, however, something novel happened among the new ministers. As if by consensus, straight from the inauguration hall, most of the ministers addressed the media at their disposal on their mission. You would think the feverish campaigns of the 2023 elections were still raging.  Promises and commitments came tumbling over one another.

    Each new minister, as if on a prompt, addressed the media to market their priorities and advertise their unique selling points. It was like an advertising contest for self -promotion. It ended up a day of hyper bluster, mostly a fanfare of ministerial fantasies.  Some of the ministers sounded more like politicians on the soap box all over again than as prospective departmental chief executives of government. Just a sample from the copious parade.

    The new Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Betta Edu, boasted that the federal government is poised to migrate 136 million Nigerians out of poverty in a short time. I guess she needed to be reminded that even the worst estimates of Nigeria’s poverty population has put the figure at no more than 130 million people. By this ministerial bluster, before she leaves office, there will be no more poor people in Nigeria. On the more immediate matter of equitable distribution of hunger palliatives among Nigerians, she even surpassed herself . She promised that government will deploy GPS for the distribution of bags of rice and packs of Indomie noodles. No reporter had the presence of mind to ask her the meaning of GPS!

    Not to be outdone, the new Minister of Information who has just succeeded the ubiquitous Lai Mohammed promised that henceforth, government will stop lying  to Nigerians. As it were, this minister will reinvent government publicity and communication. If government were to stop lying to us, what other business will be left for government?

    Yet another Minister, Mr. Adebayo Adelabu, who is Minister for Power promised uninterrupted power to all Nigerian homes and businesses within the shortest time, precisely within one year. Many Nigerians recall that a similar promise was made immediately on assumption of office by President Obasanjo’s  then new minister of power, the late Bola Ige who probably did not quite know the difference between an electric pole and a transformer. He promised uninterrupted power supply in six months in 1999! We are still waiting.

    On his part, Mr. Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, the new Minister of Budget and National Economic Planning used the occasion to promise that he will “unlock the vast economic potentials of the nation” through his ministry. It is hard to decipher what a minister locked away in  an office with a pile of statistics and Power point projections of government’s economic scenarios will have to do to ‘unlock’ the nation’s prosperity in the midst of an army of economists, central bankers and drivers economic drivers. There is information on good authority that Mr. Bagudu has a key to free some long missing resources!

    Not one to be left out of a bluster festival, my friend, Mr. Dele Alake, the journalist turned Minister of Solid Minerals, used the opportunity to rationalize his new role. For a man who in less than 90 days of the Tinubu administration has rapidly exchanged choice roles with fancy titles so many times, it was pretty easy to market his new role. He predictably praised the wisdom of the president in recognizing his genius and universal versatility by sending him to help diversify the nation’s revenue and foreign exchange sources through the Solid Minerals sector as an alternative to the long standing dependence on hydrocarbons.

    Similarly, the Minister for Steel Development, Mr. Shuaibu Audu, committed to the completion of the moribund Ajaokuta Steel Mill which was started by the Shagari administration since the 1980s. There is no indication of where Nigeria ranks among steel producing countries today and where we fit into the global steel market today.

    Not to be sidelined by his colleagues, the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yusuf Tigard promised to initiate what he called a foreign policy of 4-Ds: Development, Democracy, Demographics and Diaspora. He was wise enough to leave his policy initiative at the level of just those four key words. In the context of the mass emigration of Nigerians to Canada, United Kingdom, Rwanda and other places, the nation awaits the unfolding of this word based foreign policy against the background of the Buhari administration which uttered not a single word on foreign policy in all of eight years.

    Predictably the most dramatic and boisterous of the lot was the new Minister of the FCT, former Rivers Governor Mr. Nyesom Wike. In his characteristic disruptive boisterousness, Wike promised to demolish as many buildings as possible in Abuja for as long as they violate planning approval in strict compliance with the original Abuja master plan. Of all the ministers, Wike has been the first to move into an ‘action’ phase. He has already demolished some fancy mansions and ordered their owners arrested. He has indicated a desire to complete the long abandoned Abuja light rail project. He has ordered all FCT contractors back to site and promised to pay indigenous land owners nearly a trillion Naira in compensation for a 4 kilometer new runway at the Abuja airport.

    It is yet uncertain what King Wike will do about minor issues like urban sanitation, public health, the FCT public school system and the quality of the Abuja environment which is incrementally being degraded by basic urban challenges like traffic congestion and  creeping overcrowding of the suburbs. It needs to occur to the bi partisan minister that Abuja has long ceased to be a construction site but is now a thriving urban city with all its implicit challenges.

    There is nothing wrong with ministers stating a diversity of aims and aspirations. What is yet uncertain is whether in fact there is a unifying vision that runs through this cacophony of voices and fantasies. May be the mantra of the Tinubu administration of “Renewed Hope” after the hopelessness of the Buhari interregnum could provide a binding theme for this season of bluster.

    There is something deserving of the excitement that has produced this burst of bluster among the new ministers. Some analysts have insisted that becoming a minister of the federal republic of Nigeria is an opportunity to ‘serve and to chop’. No doubt an opportunity that transforms mendicants of yesterday into islands of prosperity deserves the unguarded bluster and bragging that has featured among our new ministers. In a vastly religious society, to become a minister is seen by some as an earthly embrace of salvation, the arrival of some pilgrims at the place of their eternal quest. For some of them, it is an opportunity to serve and make a difference. In real terms then, the ministerial term is a race to separate those who came to serve from those who are here to ‘chop’.

    Taken together, there is something refreshing about the season of ministerial bluster that is now graduating into a period of activity for the new men and women of power.  The tenure of each of this motley assembly of ministers will be determined by how faithful they remain to some of the boasts and noises that heralded their emergence.

  • The APC beyond Buhari – By Chidi Amuta

    The APC beyond Buhari – By Chidi Amuta

    The APC was birthed out of Mr. Buhari’s resilient appetite for presidential power. Its victory in the 2015 presidential election satisfied that hunger and lavishly fed it for eight years. His victory then was a product of both his northern regional cultic followership and a nationwide rejection of Mr. Jonathan’s bumbling presidency. Eight years afterwards, Buhari’s appetite for apex power has been fulfilled, richly rewarded and arguably squandered in terms of a credible legacy. His pet nativist hegemony project came full cycle and even overreached itself. With a largely expired national relevance, Buhari has since gathered his belongings and returned to the pastoral anonymity of his native Daura.

    Looking back, the coalition of parties that gave birth to the APC was an inconvenient marriage of political convenience. There was nothing in common among them. There was a pseudo social democratic CAN. There was an ultra conservative CPC literally owned by Buhari himself. There was also a nationalist right wing ANPP, and an ethno nationalist APGA. To complete the picture was a renegade and opportunistic centrist NPDP made up of a faction of governors who broke off from Jonathan’s PDP .

    The cardinal objective was to cobble together a workable electoral  coalition to wrest power from the PDP after 16 monotonous years. The idea of a multiparty coalition eventually gave way to the even better idea of a single opposition party. A unified party was required to win an election if the hegemony of the PDP was to be toppled. The nation was hungry for a change from the PDP whatever the name of a viable and credible opposition.

    Mr. Buhari facilitated and galvanized the marriage. He provided the amalgamation with a presidential mascot albeit one with a national name recognition and leadership mythology. He also came dressed in an untested mythic garb of leadership prowess, governance prudence, barrack discipline and a reasonable level of personal integrity and austerity. Above all, he had managed over the years to build up a huge cultic following among the northern mob of rough uneducated and unemployed youth and regional power fanatics. Part of the motor park fable around Mr. Buhari was the infantile notion that once elected president, he would jail all the corrupt former government officials, recover the ill- gotten wealth and redistribute same among the poor masses. His political salesmen required no better set of unique selling points.

    Thus was born the APC, a party tailored more towards wresting power from an effete incumbent than for the effective governance of a country in desperate need for responsible leadership.  Given the tenacity of African power incumbents, the APC was more honed for the task of contesting the outcome of the 2015 presidential election possibly up to the Supreme Court. It spared little time rehearsing a governance nad leadership model for the nation. “Anything but Jonathan” was the slogan in town!

    But when the results tumbled in mostly in favour of the APC and Mr. Jonathan conceded defeat to Mr. Buhari, it was an overrated and unprepared APC that had to set up a government and ascend the pinnacle of national power. Victory came as a rude surprise with power as an unanticipated burden. Time has passed. Buhari has fulfilled his long standing ambition of wearing the toga of President and gone home after completing two terms of eight wasted years . It is now time for the party to take stock of its stewardship and contemplate its future as a ruling party.

    With the benefit of hindsight, the emergence of the APC reinforced Nigeria’s historic tendency towards a credible two party architecture as previously recognized by the military administration of General Ibrahim Babangida. To that extent, the emergence and electoral victory of the APC as and when they occurred was a positive political outcome, one which promised a great dividend for Nigeria’s democracy and future political party architecture. The new party came to power on the wave of expectations greater than its capacity and preparedness.

    Even then, having successfully hounded the PDP out of power at the national level, the APC had two tasks. First, it had to develop into a party with a national membership spread, credible internal democratic structure and a definable ideology to anchor its policies on. It had a mandate to rule and to govern more creditably than the party it ousted. But beyond its logo and Buhari as electoral mascot, there was nothing substantial about the APC.

    Regrettably, however, the APC has not grown beyond the logic of its incoherent origins. It has turned out to be just merely a ballot paper alternative to the PDP. After close to a decade in existence, it has no ideological identity, no policy coherence, no record of sensible governance at the federal level and state levels. Admittedly, an isolated number of APC ruled states (Kaduna and Lagos especially) have managed to show signs of some progressive policy direction and arguably a bit of good governance. But the party has hardly tried to galvanize an effective grassroots membership to consolidate over eight years of power dominance at the center.

    From the very top, the APC remains an embarrassing ideological proposition and oddity. I doubt that from Mr. Tinubu to the most mundane foot soldiers out there, that  word ideology ever comes up even in casual conversations. I doubt that most o fthe party faithful have ever bothered about the meaning of the word “ideology”! But as a political organization, we need to dress up the APC and its leading lights in some ideological garb in order to make sense of their quarrels or at least give the party a reason to exist. As my friend George F. Will would insist, “We can dignify …disputes among small persons of little learning by connecting them with great debates about fundamental things.”

    Let us therefore confront the ideological curiosity of the APC. Here is a so- called  ‘progressive’ party led by an unabashed arch- conservative in the person of former president Buhari and now a bucaneer social democrat in the person of Mr. Bola Tinubu. This is one of the greatest ironies of recent political theory and history. Ordinarily, progressivism indicates a bias for social democracy in its dynamic context. It should signal a commitment to continuous social and economic democracy and change along progressive lines. Progressivism is decidedly partisan on the side of the masses while acknowledging the entrepreneurial class as an engine of growth and wealth creation. Instead, Nigeria’s “progressives” are a loose collection of free wheeling brief case capitalists, commission agents, primitive accumulators and racketeers in every imaginable merchandize.

    The party previously led by the diehard conservative Buhari is now under the wings of Bola Tinubu. He may be sympathetic towards the plight of the masses  in whose name he is mouthing incoherent policies while they bear the early brunt of his IMF-style policies. Buahri was a confused advocate of Medieval economic fundamentalism of controls and over regulation of nearly everything from domiciliation of government bank accounts to the distribution of fertilizers to peasants.

    In spite of its abysmal performance in government for over eight years, the APC predictably “captured” power in the still contentious February 2023 presidential elections.  Mr. Bola Tinubu, Buhari’s effective political ‘God Father’ is now incumbent president. He has accordingly, moved to rejig the leadership of the party to serve his own power ends. He has quickly hand picked a new party Chairman in the person of the former dollar-hugging Kano governor, Mr. Ganduje . He has also ousted Mr. Omisore as party Secretary.

    A preliminary view of the political calculus of the party going forward indicates an entrenchment of interest in the basic regional and sectarian equations that handed power to Mr. Tinubu. The initial changes in the leadership architecture of the party indicate a reinforcement of the South-West, North East and North Western  power base of the party. There also seems to be an incremental confidence in the effectiveness of a predominantly Muslim orientation of the  party leadership. This much can be gleaned from the initial skirmishes around the party headquarters .

    In spite of its victory and electoral majority in the number of governorships and a clear parliamentary majority after the 2023 elections, however, Mr. Tinubu now recognizes that he cannot take the pre eminence of the APC for granted. He needs to strengthen the party in order to govern and also maintain a basic continuity of political authority. He cannot easily forget so easily that the pre-eminence of the party in the present political spectacle remains tenuous. The party was substantially challenged at the February 2023 election as may become more evident when the tribunal and court challenges of the outcome are concluded.  A 36% voter score of less than 8 million votes out of less than 20 million total votes cast at the presidential election out of a registered voter population of 80 million plus cannot give a ruling party comfort.

    In addition, between the two opposition parties – the PDP and the Labour Party- there is enough groundswell of popular support  especially Mr. Peter Obi’s Obidients to keep the APC awake for the foreseeable future. As things stand, the APC still has an existential challenge: how does it survive in and of itself as a political party? How will it persist as a ruling party in and of itself given its regional incoherence?  Above all, how will it survive as a strategic national institution of democratic stability if its existence is dogged by far reaching but latent regional and sectarian under currents?

    Even now on the eve of Mr. Tinubu’s first 100 days in office, there is a palpable fear that the future of the party is headed into turbulent clouds. A few prominent party faithful have resigned in protest to the recent leadership changes. Of course, the party could somehow tinker its way through this initial immediate post election patronage  and pork barrel stretch of the new administration. Mr. Tinubu can expect to enjoy some party solidarity and superficial unity in these honeymoon days of anticipation of patronage and appointments by party people.

    Beyond the appointment of ministers, there are still numerous boards of federal parastatals, ambassadorial positions and sundry sweetheart contracts to be dispensed. But when that is over, it will be clear that the majority of party members will have been left out in the cold. They may go shopping for other party umbrellas well ahead of the next election season.

    In spite of the present appearance of camaraderie, the APC cannot hide its  many headaches and underlying troubles. But in whichever direction we look, the party is threatened by internal contradictions and gaping cracks that lie deep in its very foundations.

    The APC was born out of a private political ambition. It prevailed for 8 years only because it won the presidential election in 2015 against a leaderless former ruling party. Having repeated that feat in 2023 in spite of its dismal performance in government under Mr. Buhari, it is only likely to survive in power if it can transform itself from an African “Big Man” party to a broad based grassroots party. Otherwise, the future political landscape of Nigeria belongs squarely to youth based populist movements like Peter Obi’s Labour Party and its Obidients or others in that mould.  The real terminal danger for the APC is in the future fights among its many ambitious contenders for Mr. Tinubu’s throne if he falters. The even greater danger to the hegemony of the APC lies in the massive discontent of the youth followership of its opponent parties.