Change is Necessary

Presidents are not judged simply by what they do but by how adroitly they respond to the peculiar exigencies of their time. It was always going to be the case that President Goodluck Jonathan would be judged by his handling of Nigeria’s national security crisis. Considering the tragic routinization of death and destruction and the privatization of violence by non-state actors, the commander-in-chief could not have expected any less. 

The constitution states that, “The security and welfare of the Nigerian people shall be the primary purpose of government.” The sequence is significant. Security is the basic condition of society without which there can be no welfare. Under Jonathan’s administration we have witnessed the mass murder of conservatively over ten thousand Nigerians, the displacement of 1.5 million people by terrorists, the dislodgement of 3.3 million people – the highest number of internally displaced people in Africa – and the loss of some 20, 000 square kilometers of sovereign Nigerian territory to insurgents.

While Jonathan points to his accomplishments (and they do exist) in agriculture and infrastructure, it is his miserable handling of the security crisis that will likely define his presidential legacy. His campaign ads may flaunt pictures of newly installed trains and highways but dead people cannot ride trains or appreciate macroeconomic abstractions. Undoubtedly, the Chibok girls and their grief-stricken parents – tragic symbols of Jonathan’s indifferent leadership – are unenthused by his administration’s infrastructural gains. Most Nigerians just want to regain a sense that their lives are worth protecting.          

Nigerians may have been willing to forgive Jonathan’s fatal dereliction of his duties as commander-in-chief had his responses to incidents like the Chibok abductions, the Nyanya bombings last year and the more recent slaughter in Baga not displayed such a blatant indifference to the plight of his compatriots. If the Chibok debacle witnessed his government responding with the haste of a paraplegic tortoise and the Nyanya bombings formed the morbid backdrop for a political rally the following day in Kano, where he bizarrely chose to dance on stage; observers were genuinely mystified when in the aftermath of the recent Baga massacres, Jonathan kept silent but swiftly sent a solidarity message to France over terror attacks in Paris.

Jonathan has been defended as a well-meaning neophyte in security matters, heavily reliant on his defence chiefs and security czars. However, the national security crisis has exposed much more than his lack of pedigree in security issues; it has highlighted a basic emotional unintelligence and an appalling failure to appreciate the crowd-pleasing optics and sonics that citizens expect of the man sworn to protect them.

The president has contrived to miss several opportunities to demonstrate executive resolve. Abba Moro, the Interior Minister who oversaw the fraudulent recruitment exercise into the immigration service that cost twenty young Nigerian lives in stampedes remains in the cabinet. Jonathan remains bafflingly beholden to the defence chiefs under whose tenure the insurgency metastasized into a programme of jihadist colonization. Vital national security functions such as maritime policing have been outsourced to a presidential crony – a transaction that has coincided with a spike in oil theft and piracy.

Whether through deliberate maleficence or involuntary incompetence or both, Jonathan’s abysmal statecraft is eroding Nigeria’s national security with an unacceptably heavy cost in Nigerian lives. The impression that this president was promoted beyond his competence by serendipity is unavoidable. In 2011, an unsuspecting electorate mistook his mild manners and self-effacement for virtues but the presidency demands far more than an avuncular disposition.  

An election is typically a referendum on the incumbent. Aware that their principal’s record cannot bear clear-eyed electoral scrutiny, Team Jonathan has tried to focus attention on the challenger. However the question is not whether Muhammadu Buhari is qualified for high office (which he undeniably is) but whether Jonathan deserves a second term. The Jonathan campaign has deployed libelous innuendo, ethno-religious chauvinism and character assassination – all vain but understandably necessitous diversions from the real issues such as the incipient economic crisis, the imminence of austerity measures, the administration’s dire financial stewardship, the promised forensic and evidently phantom audit of the opaque Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, his sanguine tolerance of high level graft, serial failed promises to end the insurgency and the unforced errors that have made Nigeria a global punch line.  

Jonathan has failed to weave his few modest achievements into a winsome narrative. A campaign which should have rebooted his presidency has instead yielded more counterproductive soundbites. Having criticized some politicians for sounding like touts, Jonathan’s campaign has itself frequently peddled the indecent and the indecorous. From Ayo Fayose’s repulsive death wish ad to Vice President Namadi Sambo’s abhorrent invocation of religious hatred, Jonathan’s men are plumbing the sewers for campaign material.

The most troubling aspect of Jonathan’s campaign is its cynical exploitation of our religious and ethnic fault lines to set Nigerians against each other – a ploy that detracts from the president’s already diminished stature. The ironic result is that the supposedly archaic opposition challenger has run the more issues-driven campaign while the incumbent traffics in disinformation, distractions and distortions. Thus, all that a purportedly transformative five-year presidency can offer is the backhanded argument that Jonathan is the certified devil to Buhari’s unknown angel. The leadership of the world’s sixth largest democracy deserves more edifying campaign rhetoric but Jonathan is clearly needs the debate mired in the gutter. This readiness to polarize the country and to appeal to our basest instincts rather than the better angels of our nature is one more reason why Jonathan does not deserve a second term.

Image sourced from www.pointblanknews.com               

Buharism and Its Discontents

Muhammadu Buhari’s emergence as the opposition challenger ahead of next year’s polls has set the stage for a keen contest. Buoyed by a morale-boosting primary win, and with his street popularity now hitched to a well-oiled political machine, Buhari has a firm base upon which to mount his fourth presidential bid.

For sheer persistence, Buhari most resembles Obafemi Awolowo, who also serially sought national leadership unsuccessfully. Like Buhari, Awolowo was of somewhat ascetic bearing, Spartan self-discipline, inflexible will and dogged conviction in his worthiness for high office. However, despite his intellectual and administrative acumen, aspects of Awolowo’s political record undermined his chances of national leadership. His political platform was deemed too provincial to generate a national following. A similar limitation arguably accounted for Buhari’s previous electoral failures.

Unable to gainsay Buhari’s reputation for honesty, his adversaries have resorted to the favoured tactic of smearing him as an ethnic and a religious extremist – a bogus charge which endures because of some of Buhari’s own inopportune gaffes. This time though, the politics of smear and fear is of limited utility. The incumbent is running not only against Buhari but also against his own dismal presidential record.

The allegation that Buhari is a closet ethno-religious bigot is simply not borne out by his record as Head of State. Though he and his deputy, Major General Tunde Idiagbon, were both Muslims, they were favourably perceived by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). In his book, A Dangerous Awakening: The Politicization of Religion in Nigeria, Catholic priest and scholar, Iheanyi Enwerem cites a 1988 publication by CAN’s northern zonal chapter which hailed Buhari’s regime as the first to acknowledge “that the North was not predominantly Islamic.” It also expressed satisfaction with the fairness of Buhari’s political appointments and praised him for carrying out his war against indiscipline “without fear or favour.”

Ironically, Buhari’s most implacable opponent from the religious fold was the influential Islamic cleric Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, who earned the regime’s wrath for opposing its draconian punishment of Second Republic politicians. Arguably, the two principal victims of Buhari’s ascent to power were northern Muslims – the deposed President Shehu Shagari and his ally, Umaru Dikko, who very narrowly escaped being abducted from Britain by the regime’s agents to stand trial at home.    

Unlike Awolowo who wrote prolifically, Buhari’s decades-long public career has yielded little literature in his name outlining his ideas, convictions and policy preferences. This literary deficit has aided the character assassins and libelous hacks commissioned to defame him. But this gap is offset by the fact that Buhari’s opponent is by no means a fecund intellectual colossus.

In a 2002 essay, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi coined the term “Buharism” to capture the ideals extrapolated from Buhari’s time as Head of State and argued that Buharism is an ideology of bourgeois nationalism that aims to replace a political economy dominated by parasitic elites beholden to global capital with a new order in which a nationalist and productive class gains ascendancy. Buhari certainly has the credentials to tackle elite impunity and the rent-seeking political culture that is now in kleptomaniacal overdrive. Indeed, the persistent slandering of Buhari as a bigot stems less from his occasional tin ear for Nigeria’s polyphonic diversity than from kleptocrats’ fears of a certain reckoning for their crimes should he clinch the presidency.  

As a battle-tested infantry corps veteran, Buhari will surely frontally confront the terrorist insurgency that has killed conservatively over 9, 000 Nigerians, displaced over 1.5 million more and claimed vast swathes of Nigerian territory. As an officer who famously led a military incursion into Chad in pursuit of rebels, he will be especially concerned by the institutional weaknesses that have brought the armed forces into disrepute. Having crushed the Maitatsine insurgency as Head of State, he will certainly bring a warrior’s resolve to the office of the commander-in-chief. Regarding the key issues of security and corruption, Buhari’s record is compelling.                     

Buhari’s near obsessive focus on graft may be an insufficient critique of all that ails Nigeria but his unequivocal anti-corruption stance is a welcome departure from the incumbent’s bizarre insistence that corruption is not Nigeria’s problem or his much lampooned attempt to articulate a little known distinction between corruption and stealing. Buhari’s policy-lite deportment suggests that his main interest is cleansing the Augean stables. Restoring propriety to public life is vital. But his party has an impressive cast of policy wonks and its campaign battle cry of security and jobs is gratifyingly current.             

Buhari’s support is more pan-Nigerian than in previous campaigns. Popular disgust with the incumbent’s ineptitude competes favourably with whatever phobia for Buhari that the ruling party can marshal. Opposing partisans have taken to feverishly reminding Nigerians of Buhari’s previous failed candidacies. Their frenzied negative attacks are telling. Rarely have so much time and effort been expended to convince an electorate that an aged “serial loser” that supposedly has no chance will lose again.

Those who argued before the primaries for a younger opposition candidate than Buhari (as I did) had a point. But clearly the incumbent is not an advertisement of the radiant possibilities of youth. Given the available options, Buhari, warts and all, is the viable alternative. The resort to a figure who last led Nigeria thirty years ago indicates the scale of our predicament. That liberal elites who ordinarily should be opposed to an ex-dictator have made common cause with him suggests that we have reached that nadir at which extreme necessity sires creative expediency. This may not be the contest we want but it is the contest we deserve.

Images sourced from premiumtimesng.com and bellanaija.com.   

No Country For Young Men

It is difficult to argue that the potential choice of Muhammadu Buhari as the presidential candidate of the All Progressives’ Congress in next year’s polls signifies “progressive change.” A 72 year-old ex-military dictator that seized power in 1983 hardly evokes a sense of forward thinking dynamism. There is something retrograde about seeking the leadership of a septuagenarian in a youthful country where well over half the population is under 40 years.  

It is also unfair to ask eminently qualified politicians currently in their forties and fifties to “wait their turn” in favour of a veteran who had his turn in the early 1980s and who has since had three unsuccessful presidential bids. It is a sordid indication of how the political elite stagnates this country. This is not about ageism. In 1996, U.S. president Bill Clinton was challenged by the septuagenarian Republican, Bob Dole. Much was made of the challenger’s age but Clinton simply said, “I don’t think Bob Dole is too old to be president. It’s the age of his ideas that I question.” Societies rejuvenate themselves with fresh ideas and the idealism of youth.

Whereas Olusegun Obasanjo was elected in 1999, twenty years after handing over to President Shehu Shagari, Buhari is seeking the presidency three decades after his stint as military head of state and is thirty years out of date. That Buhari, who has already had three failed presidential campaigns, evidently cannot perceive a non-aspirational role for himself as an elder statesman and a mentor to a new generation of leaders does him little credit. He fleetingly considered this role when he announced his retirement from politics in 2011 but apparently found it unappealing.

Consider that Nuhu Ribadu spent his national youth service year interning at Dodan Barracks while Buhari was head of state. At the time, Babatunde Fashola was a student at the University of Benin, Rabiu Kwankwaso was already a working class professional and Rotimi Amaechi was a student at the University of Port Harcourt. Adams Oshiomhole was already a frontline labour activist leading the 75, 000-strong textiles and tailoring workers union while Nasir El-Rufai was running his own quantity surveying practice.

It would have been drummed into these men that they were the leaders of tomorrow. Thirty years later, their generation is being enjoined to postpone their aspirations and accommodate Buhari yet again. Indeed, in 2011, the Action Congress literally sabotaged its own presidential candidate, Ribadu, so as to enable an alliance with Buhari. The leaders of tomorrow have become the leaders of next tomorrow. Fashola and company would have to be in their late sixties or seventies before their “turn” finally arrives.

The insinuation is that Nigeria is a gerontocracy and young minds are being inseminated with the pernicious idea that leadership is the preserve of the elderly and that youth, rather than being a time of visionary derring-do, is a period of indentured servitude to living fossils in public life. The result is the permanent infantilization syndrome which sees middle aged men proudly posturing as “boys” or “yoots” and serving as hangers-on, man-Fridays, pimps and court jesters to geriatric power-mongers.

Strangely, Buhari belongs to a generation that did not practise the same fawning veneration of aged predecessors that it now demands from the rest of us. It was Buhari’s generation that forcibly retired the founding nationalist patriarchs from politics by terminating the First and Second Republics. The “labours of our heroes past” commemorated in our national anthem refers to the patriotic exploits wrought by the nationalist generation in their youth. Indeed, the leading anti-colonial political party was appropriately called the Nigerian Youth Movement formed in 1933. Our most epochal acts of political deliverance have been prosecuted by youthful Nigerians whether it is the nationalists that earned our independence or the pro-democracy movement that terminated the military era. Visionaries, not veterans, will propel us to the next stage of our national evolution.      

The not entirely unfair portrait of today’s young Nigerians as politically neutered, demobilized and “deconscientized” hustlers who hire themselves out to vested interests as brigands, laptop-wielding character assassins and mercenary mudslingers is duly noted; but the fruit does not fall far from the tree. The state of the youth is also the result of the deliberate sabotage of the civil society institutions where civic consciousness is nurtured – an act of social subversion for which the military regimes of the 1980s, including Buhari’s, are responsible. 

Considering the generally agreed upon narrative that Nigeria has been done in by past leaders, especially its military dictators, it is difficult to see how Buhari can escape some indictment. But poor leadership is not merely about abuse of office or corrupt enrichment; it is also the inability to resist the siren songs of Messianism and popular idolatry that tempt vulnerable egos into the prideful belief that they alone are infallible and incorruptible enough to wield power. Leadership requires the willingness to pave way for others by embracing obsolescence as part of the natural sociopolitical continuum. Great leaders are willing to become non-essential. In this regard, the cardinal flaw of those that Wole Soyinka famously referred to as “the wasted generation” is not that they failed; it is that they remain stridently committed to reenacting those failures and have refused to go quietly into the night.

Tam David-West has cited Nelson Mandela who became president at 76 and a host of other septuagenarian and octogenarian African leaders including autocrats as proof that Buhari’s age should not be a factor. This is absurd. Buhari is not Mandela and surely these sit-tight gerontocrats are one reason why Africa is embattled. He mentioned Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, 78, whose Liberian compatriots are being decimated by the Ebola plague (which Fashola’s leadership was instrumental in curbing in Nigeria), Jacob Zuma, 72, who is presiding over South Africa’s socioeconomic decline and Malawi’s Peter Mutharika, 74, whose country depends on foreign aid for 40 percent of its national budget. In fact, none of the African countries cited by David-West is doing better than Nigeria. He ignored the younger leaders that are running success stories like Ghana, Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. It is preposterous to suggest that Nigeria’s leadership pool is as thin as Liberia’s or Malawi’s. The notion that in 2014, Nigeria’s only hope is a man who ruled the country thirty years ago is galling.

On April 30, 2006, Thisday published a cover feature titled, “Beyond Obasanjo, Atiku, IBB [and] Buhari: 60 Nigerians that can take the Presidency in 2007.” Goodluck Jonathan was not even on that list although Umar Musa Yar’Adua was on it as were El-Rufai and Oshiomhole. If El Rufai and Oshiomhole were deemed worthy of national leadership eight years ago, why are they not today? If such a feature was published now, there would be even more entrants on that list. This country has options for smart leadership. We need not denigrate ourselves through a lack of political imagination or courage. In that Thisday piece, Segun Adeniyi observed that “the kind of reasoning that ties the fate of the nation to one man is self-serving, shortsighted and insults the sensibilities of most Nigerians.” He was referring to Obasanjo but the same words could be applied justifiably to Buhari’s presidential bid. 

The cause of progressive change is best served by Buhari endorsing a younger candidate thereby placing his followership at the disposal of someone more nationally acceptable. Buhari’s now much celebrated 12 million-vote haul from 2011 and his street level popularity make him a force. But since his followership is largely restricted to the far north by a mixture of prejudicial perceptions, opponents’ smear campaigns, the genuine grievances of those who suffered during his draconian military reign and his own serial PR blunders, he is effectively only a regional force. Endorsing a younger candidate would enable the APC field a challenger with Buhari’s following but none of his baggage.

If the APC was truly trying to make a real statement of “progressive change” with its presidential ticket, it would look no further than its capable cast of governors such as Fashola, Kwankwaso and Oshiomhole (and to stalwarts like El-Rufai) and make a strong argument for competence in our public life. Fashola has run arguably Nigeria’s most complex state and the jewel in the APC’s crown creditably as Kwankwaso has done in Kano, another challenging locale. Any of these gentlemen would enter the presidential race with far more gubernatorial and administrative accomplishments than Jonathan did in 2011. Cynics may contend that these hypothetical candidacies are more daydream than dream team. But it is the very paradigms that make their presidential bids seem quixotic that have to be discarded to enable national progress.



(Images sourced in order of appearance from abiyamo.com, muhdlawal.wordpress.com, famouspeoplenews.wordpress.com and bizwatchnigeria.ng) 

The Opposition's Dilemma

The APC confronts a significant dilemma as it weighs its options and nominates its presidential flag-bearer for next year’s polls. Thus far, the primaries look to be a three horse-race between Muhammadu Buhari, Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso. These three contenders bring formidable strengths as well as weaknesses to the table.

Buhari commands the allegiance of the northern street and the fanatical adulation of millions who see him as the only one courageous and incorruptible enough to slay the dragon of official graft. A septuagenarian and a former Head of State, Buhari is experienced and also enjoys the peculiar benefit of having a public record that has been burnished by the passage of time. A significant percentage of the electorate were either too young or had not even been born when he was a military ruler. This “demographic dividend”, in addition to a national amnesia about our collective history, has aided his remarkable transformation from dictator to democrat.

Atiku Abubakar is a former Vice President, an experienced and thoroughbred politician with a formidable national political machine oiled by his savvy for wheeling and dealing and his immense wealth. Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso comes to the table with youth on his side, and more importantly, a very impressive stint as governor of Kano, one of Nigeria’s complex and most volatile states. Kwankwaso has shown himself to be both an adept administrator and an adroit politician – a very useful combination in a clime in which governance and politics exist in an uneasy tension.

In an ideal world, the APC would blend Buhari’s popularity, Atiku’s political savvy and machine with Kwankwaso’s progressive energy and drive to create its perfect flag-bearer. It is precisely because it cannot do this that it must reconcile the weaknesses and strengths of these contenders and ensure that its primaries are not so fractious that they fatally damage whoever emerges as the winner.

At 72, this is clearly Buhari’s swan song in elective politics after three previous unsuccessful presidential bids. Elements within the APC leadership favour him because his haul of 12 million votes in the 2011 polls make him a bankable vote magnet particularly in the far north. But there are two problems here. Buhari, for all his popularity in the north, has found it difficult to become a national brand. The manual for defeating him was written in 2003 when President Olusegun Obasanjo’s campaign successfully tarred him as a religious extremist and ethnic bigot. It was slanderous nonsense but the charge has proven potent in our polarized times not least because of Buhari’s occasional flair for untimely verbal own goals and self-subverting soundbytes. It did not help matters that in 2003 and 2007, his party, the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party campaigned as an “Islamic” party in the North.

Secondly, Buhari has never actually won an open and fair presidential primary contest. In 2003 and 2007, he was virtually muscled in as a consensus candidate by ANPP apparatchiks which alienated influential party operatives on both occasions. In 2011, the Congress for Progressive Change which was practically set up as a vehicle for his presidential ambition floundered because it was manifestly a personality cult and lacked the organizational acumen as well as the fiscal and human resources to mount an effective national campaign.

Primary contests are not about popularity. Rather, they test a candidate’s ability to rally party delegates. Buhari disdains the sort of wheeling and dealing that characterizes a nomination process. He perceives himself as being above politics and is frequently condescending to politicians. Thus, he has never been able to win over the political operatives that can secure party tickets in an open contest and has instead typically relied on the anointment of party elders. The fact that his military regime jailed many Second Republic politicians has fuelled a residual elite suspicion of his agenda. The APC’s adoption of a modified direct system for its primaries will allow 300, 000 delegates to participate and this widening of the pool could enable Buhari be more competitive than he might ordinarily have been.

Atiku, on the other hand, is an adept veteran of primary contests since 1993 and is endowed with the sort of personal and political diplomacy that sways delegates. His accessibility is in contrast to Buhari’s aloofness. Kwankwaso also has keen political instincts in this terrain. Both Atiku and Kwankwaso would be far more comfortable in this arena than Buhari but neither of them possesses Buhari’s name recognition or that bankable fund of fanatical devotion that would be crucial in the general election.

It is quite the conundrum. Buhari may be a fairly competitive brand for national elections but lacks the transactional skills for primary contests. Atiku and Kwankwaso have what it takes to fare well in the primaries but do not have Buhari’s following which would be crucial for the national polls. Atiku lacks Buhari’s reputation for incorruptibility and Kwankwaso, despite his impressive work in Kano, must work hard to stamp himself in the national consciousness. In truth, none of these candidates is certain to defeat the incumbent president next year.  

Buhari’s partisans will argue that the party leadership ought to do all it can to ensure Buhari clinches the ticket since he can pull in the numbers. But Atiku and Kwankwaso could counter that the ability to sway delegates in the primaries is not to be scoffed at. It is, after all, a predictor of the ability to mobilize the ground troops for the general elections. They will also point at the rather limited geography of Buhari’s appeal. Having 12 million votes is of no consequence if they are sequestered almost entirely in one region. They will observe that Buhari, despite his adoring legions, has lost thrice to three different ruling party candidates in a decade, and quite rightly suggest that a persistent defect in his brand, whether perceptual or actual, makes him nationally unelectable.

Certain actors within the APC would prefer a “bloodless” non-acrimonious primary process in which Atiku and Kwankwaso step down for Buhari. This is unlikely and Kwankwaso has already reportedly rebuffed overtures to concede the ticket to Buhari. This is fair. The APC needs an open primary contest if it is to avoid self-destructive internecine recrimination afterwards and its leadership will have to avoid the temptation to stage a victory for a favoured contender. From all indications, the primaries will be keenly contested. What happens next will be interesting. 







  Images sourced from  (in order of appearance)
www.today.ng 
www.ynaija.com 
www.dailypost.ng
www.kanopillars.com