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.   

The Meaning of Occupy Nigeria

When Nigerians stormed the streets protesting the federal government’s removal of the subsidy on petrol, they detonated the myth that Nigerians are docile. In reality, the subsidy removal only served to ignite pent-up frustrations with a derelict government into a campaign against the reigning kleptocracy. Nigerians’ tolerance of governmental abuse has long been mistaken for cowardly passivity. In fact, the plain truth is that government is irrelevant to most Nigerians – whether to those who live in what Stanley Macebuh called “categorical poverty” whose material conditions have not changed in decades and will almost certainly not change for their children’s children; or to the embattled Nigerian middle class who have become micro-municipalities providing their own social services; and matters only slightly more to the rich who have fashioned their exit strategies to foreign lands in the event of a long overdue uprising.

In the absence of government, Nigerians have embraced the chore of survival while leaving the reigning kleptocrats to otherworldly judgment, their only caveat being that ‘if the government will not work for us, it shouldn’t impede us.’ The thieves may carry on thieving so long as their thievery does not appear on our front door demanding tribute. This is the understanding that has informed the much cited Nigerian “docility.” By eliminating the subsidy, and effectively imposing higher taxes on Nigerians, the government broke this accord, and provoked the citizens into protest.

In a larger sense, the Occupy Nigeria protests were about a generation which has long been characterized by apathy finally snapping into an awareness of its citizenship. Suddenly, Nigerians were asking serious questions and demanding answers. The awakening started in 2010 when protesters marched on Abuja demonstrating against the government’s hijack by a “cabal” in President Umar Yar’Adua’s absence through ill-health. They demanded compliance with the constitution and the transference of power to the then Vice President Goodluck Jonathan. The momentum was sustained for the 2011 polls which starred an unprecedented level of youth involvement and sparked off talk of a “youth vote.”

The spirit of activism that recently gripped young Nigerians, as well as the volcanic rumbling of dissent on the streets and in cyberspace all signify the coming of age of a generation. This generation, born between 1975 and 1990, has no memory of a Nigeria that once worked; no rosy recollection of an oil boom-fuelled era of prosperity. Its experience of Nigeria has been one of misery and disillusionment conditioned by economic recession and political repression. It is the first generation that has had to consider exile as a path to self-actualization. Raised during the era of military dictatorship, it understood Nigerian existence as a condition of servitude, of recourse to the heavens in the face of oppression and of gratitude to “benign” authoritarians for the small crumbs of their inheritance grudgingly delivered as privileges. That generation has finally decided to snap off the psychic bonds of subjection and fully assume their mantle as citizens.

For the first time in a very long time, Nigerians microscopically scrutinized a government policy to its entrails, traded obscure policy data on social media and debated the fine points of deregulation. We became emergency technocrats and cyber-parliamentarians, but it is really more accurate to say that we became “active citizens” invigilating political conduct and demanding accountability from our leaders.

To be sure, a week of protests, of cathartic expressions of rage online and on the streets, will not dislodge an entrenched culture of dysfunctional governance. But it can begin to lay the foundations of an authentic citizen-led democracy. Going forward, we can take stock of what we have learned and gained.

Occupy Nigeria showed us glimpses of what our generation can achieve. In Kano, Minna and elsewhere, Muslim and Christian protesters protected each other – a powerful gesture at a time that sectarian violence poses serious questions of our union – showing that it is entirely possible to rise above religious differences. Across the land, Nigerians of different ethnicities, classes and creeds assembled in the name of their nation. Such transcendent solidarity genuinely frightens Nigerian elites who have traditionally used “divide and rule” to sow discord and subvert the emergence of a pan-Nigerian movement. Their panic was evident in the Jonathan’s administration’s shameful frenzied efforts to ethnicize the protest movement, indicating that in almost a hundred years, from the colonial masters to military dictators to the current kleptocrats, the establishment has not changed its tactics and indeed, is incapable of developing new ones.   

The perceived failure of organized labour to be steadfast is symptomatic of the absence of an intelligent principled opposition. In the end, labour was being asked to drive a revolution for which it has neither the moral nor intellectual vision. The muffled protestations of the nominal opposition, indeed, their complicity in the kleptocracy in Abuja suggests strongly that the great divide in Nigeria today is between the powerful and the powerless. The powerful have the means to portray their lusts in sectarian colours as the interests of some religious or ethnic group. The powerless are anonymous and voiceless. Being the voice of the powerless and restoring to them both their voices and their power is the great political task of our time.   

It is easier to be united against something than to be united for something. We must balance our unified opposition to bad government with an equally unanimous proposition of an alternative ethic to govern the Nigeria that we want. This is a harder, though achievable, task but it is not executed in the streets. It is conducted in hidden sanctums where thinkers harness rage into ideology, tears into theology and radical energy into political strategy.

Perhaps, this generation which was born after the civil war will be less susceptible to the spirit of sectarian discord than its forebears. And if we can overcome the burden of inherited prejudice and bigotry, and transform our chains of subjection into bonds of solidarity, we can renew this nation.

Nigeria has experienced civic awakenings before. In the 1930s and 1940s, nationalists rode on such tides of discontent to mount the campaign for independence. Among the nationalist avatars are names that have passed into heroic legend – Azikiwe, Aminu Kano, Raji Abdallah, Sa’ad Zungur, and Mokwugo Okoye among others. During the 1980s and 1990s, pro-democracy groups used the growing disenchantment with the failed economic policies of the military to champion democracy. We remember Ken Saro-Wiwa, Bala Usman, Beko Ransome-Kuti, Gani Fawehinmi etc as icons of this struggle and honour their still living cohorts such as Soyinka, Shehu Sani and Femi Falana. Because nation-building is a generational endeavour, these movements achieved only partial fulfillment. Occupy Nigeria is a link in the chain of a democratic tradition seeking to extend the work of the patriarchs. The living icons of the struggle against militarism are lions in winter. Even as we drink of their wisdom, a new generation must call forth its own prophets and revolutionaries to interpret its possibilities. The consummation of this nascent movement will come not in the form of a few exalted paragons but of heroic multitudes, a critical mass of active citizens who bring to bear upon small and great tasks, a consciousness of their responsibility to God and posterity. The journey of national redemption is long and arduous but if we can overcome our chronic pessimism about ourselves, we can inherit a new dawn.

It would be a mistake to see Occupy Nigeria as a fluke. To do so is to miss the dynamics at work. Nigeria’s most globalized generation has been inspired by the televised revolutions of the Arab world and the “Occupy” protests in the west against capitalism’s inequities. Following the contraction of western economies, many of Nigeria’s exiles are coming back home from the diaspora with the righteous ire of heirs returning to reclaim their inheritance from usurpers. There is a realization that Nigeria is the only country that we have. Their return will not be without incident. Thirdly, there is new and gratifying desire to question authority, whether those of sleazy politicians, irresolute labour leaders or corruptible clergy. This is especially positive given our history of paternalistic authoritarianism.  Every revolution requires some iconoclasm; the destruction of the old idols and symbols of the status quo.  

Simply because the streets have fallen silent does not mean that the spirit of protest has been bound. For now, our placards are in our hearts. The genie of discontent is well and truly out of the lamp. Radical energies have been released and are crackling about us. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be converted from one form to another. Similarly, the energy that animated those protests has simply shifted phase, and remains intangibly in the ether, proclaiming the inevitability of change.  

(All Pictures Sourced From Google Images).

Terrorism, Myth and Propaganda

Terrorists use narratives and myths to justify their acts of mass murder and to create enabling psychological environments for their campaigns. They do this frequently by couching their criminal acts in revolutionary or revivalist rhetoric. The effect of this is to create a permissive climate of moral ambiguity around them.

During the 1980s, Lawrence Anini’s gang robbed banks and distributed the loot to Benin City market women creating a diversionary debate as to whether Anini was a modern day Robin Hood provoked into a life of violent crime when the police extra-judicially killed his brother or whether he was a narcissistic gangster who wrote letters to the press and reveled in his notoriety. In the same way, gangs in the Niger Delta, less interested in resource control than in cashing in on oil bunkering and piracy, were romanticized as militants in some sections of the media.  

In weaving mythical narratives, criminals undermine official resolve by leveraging psychological capital in the form of public sympathy. A lack of moral clarity clouds our interpretation of obvious crimes. We begin to ask whether we are dealing with terrorists or freedom fighters; mass murderers or rebels with a cause; homicidal nihilists or overzealous activists that just need lessons in anger management. Between each definition is a patina of myth that serves to rationalize the devaluation of human life.

Boko Haram’s narrative in the last two years has been one of grievance. In June 2009, seventeen of its members in a funeral procession were shot by highway policemen allegedly because they were not wearing regulation motorcycle helmets. Its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, and scores of sect members were later extra-judicially executed by the police. This narrative of unprovoked injustice and justifiable vengeance has been used by some to explain Boko Haram’s terror campaign. There is also a grander narrative in which the sect seeks to establish an Islamic state.

These narratives are false. Assuredly, Boko Haram was destined to wage war on the federal government and serve as a proxy for Al Qaeda. The caliber of weaponry that the security services unearthed in the group’s hideouts before and during the 2009 confrontation did not suggest a passive posture awaiting circumstantial provocation. Boko Haram at the time was already radicalized and militarized. As at 2004, a group called the Black Taliban, thought to be an affiliate or prototype of Boko Haram was already staging blitz attacks on police stations and local government secretariats in Yobe state. Boko Haram’s battle readiness suggested a prior intent to levy war on the state and the killing of its members, while heinous, was not the catalyst for its uprising. It simply pre-empted the sect, causing them to launch their war earlier than originally planned.

Boko Haram casts itself as a sort of Islamic revivalist vanguard when, in fact, it is a fringe movement espousing a neo-Wahhabi theology which many Muslims find repulsive. That a Muslim wants to live under Sharia does not mean that he wants to live under the Taliban-esque rule of Boko Haram. But because Nigeria is a religious country, evenly split between Christians and Muslims, with a high degree of ignorance about both faiths, the danger is that Boko Haram’s narrow quest could be interpreted by the uninformed as being synonymous with the Islamic faith thereby escalating the group’s agenda into a broader sectarian conflict. Boko Haram will surely benefit from the larger chaos and strengthen itself even as security forces are stretched thin.

The federal government has been slow thus far to undertake the rhetorical aspects of its combat with Boko Haram. It must distinguish the group from mainstream Islam in the public mind by emphasizing its extremist psycho-pathologies. It must distinguish between Islamism which is a political ideology and the religion of Islam. These distinctions might sound academic or over-intellectual but terrorism is now part of the fabric of our social reality and it is prudent for us to understand the nature of this threat.

The federal government must make much more of the brave Islamic clerics that have been killed by the sect for opposing it. The sect’s indiscriminate murder of Muslims and Christians makes it a peculiar threat to national security. The federal government must also counter the stereotypical reporting in the local and international media that often forces every incident of unrest into the silly “Muslim north versus Christian south” cliché. Muslims are not at war with Nigeria; Boko Haram is.

Boko Haram’s immediate goal seems to be to perpetuate itself in Maiduguri but a larger consequence is the poisoning of public life with fear, paranoia and anti-Muslim hysteria. When all Christians and Muslims view each other through lenses of mutual suspicion, the extremists would have won an even greater victory. The group does not have the numbers to militarily challenge the state but it does not need them; it can spread hate, bigotry and fear and watch the country unravel as its fault lines are inflamed.

This is why the government and civil society must work to create forums for inter-faith dialogue where voices of reason rather than extremists shape the conversation. The media can aid this effort by avoiding sensationalism in its reportage and seriously moderating its online platforms where vile hate speech, Islamophobic slander and rumours are circulating virtually uninhibited. It is also important to avoid conflating different conflict scenarios thereby creating artificial correspondences. For example, the conflicts in Plateau State and Borno State are rooted in distinct factors. It is unhelpful to conflate both and suggest connections where none exist. In this regard, politicians, religious leaders and the rest of us should be more circumspect in our comments.

But it is not enough to simply counter Boko Haram’s propaganda. The Nigerian state must create a superior narrative. A nation is a moral consciousness, an idea and a myth of human community actualized by the state. The purpose of governance is to give material meaning to the intangible property of national identity by providing tangible social goods – healthcare, security, education, employment and all other means of self-actualization. In the absence of a grand national myth to accommodate the breadth of our aspirations, people are taking refuge in the most powerful myth of all – that supplied by religion. This is the basis of religious extremism which evolves when religion increasingly explains and compensates for the failures of the nation-state. It does so by offering a more coherent narrative with which young people especially make sense of their dire existential conditions. Religious extremism offers the meaning that Nigerian citizenship has failed to provide for its teeming youths. This is also why terrorism thrives in failed or weak states.

Accordingly, we must see the fight against terror as an ideological conflict. Hence, the necessity of crafting a national myth that gives renewed meaning to Nigerian citizenship in the 21^st century. In this regard, the government’s vast broadcast infrastructure and agencies like the National Orientation Agency could be put to better use.

A new mythos requires that we exorcise the colonial instinct and the culture of violence that characterizes relations between the citizenry and the state’s security forces. The extra-judicial killing of Yusuf and his cohorts was not only wrong; it was short-sighted and foolish.  It created a martyr and transfigured a fringe sect into a movement convinced that its cause had been validated by the martyrdom of its founder. The culture of thoughtless police brutality played into the terrorists’ psychology by creating for them an inspirational figure immortalized by an early death.

From the northeast to the Niger Delta, insurgencies have sprouted wherever security forces have acted like lawless bandits thereby providing facile justification for the democratization of violence. In this respect, the behaviour of the state is itself often a threat to national security.

This brings us to a philosophical yet fundamental point. Governance is largely represented in the 

Nigerian imagination as the exhibition of raw power dramatized by the sirened convoys and motorcades that frequently intimidate other road users. Public insecurity actually increases whenever a VIP is on the road. These negative atmospherics of official terrorism brutalize the Nigerian psyche. Therefore, the anti-terror campaign must include changing the visuals and the language of officialdom from that of vulgar belligerence to one of reverence for life and public safety. One does not need to be a terrorist sympathizer to understand that violence, even if only symbolic, begets violence.    

Presidential Power and Its Discontents I

Goodluck Jonathan won the presidency chiefly on the strength of three things: an engaging narrative, the vast resources that inhered in his incumbency and a genial non-threatening persona that endeared him to far more Nigerians than his rivals could manage. Jonathan’s feel-good “anyone can be president” narrative mattered. His implausible ascent from bureaucratic anonymity to the political pinnacle in just over a decade marked with preternatural good fortune resonated in a society that loves miracles. In recent times, only Olusegun Obasanjo’s march from prison to presidency in the space of a year offered similar thrills.

However the skills required for a successful presidential campaign are acutely different from those necessary for a successful presidency. The shape-shifting equivocations, chameleonic posturing, intentional vagueness, expansive accommodation of all interests and infinite promises that pave the path to the presidency are actually incompatible with running the office. The president cannot long remain “all things to all men” as in the campaign. In time, his actions must reveal where the needle of his internal compass is pointing. The presidency itself calls for decisiveness, clarity, single-minded focus, and the distillation of broad, imprecise agendas into specific deliverables. The transition from campaigning to governing has to be swift and seamless.  

Jonathan’s challenges are equal parts personal as well as systemic. His public career yields no oral or written records of strongly and consistently held positions on the pressing national issues he must now contend with. Jonathan was picked as Vice President to President Umar Musa Yar’Adua because as an Ijaw, it was presumed that his presence on the ticket would placate the restive youths of the Niger Delta. But his thoughts on the great cause célèbre of Niger Delta militancy – resource control, and its ancillary concept, fiscal federalism – are cloudy at best.

His ideological and philosophical orientations, if any, are unclear. He comes across less as a person of conviction than as an opportunist whose ethics are entirely situational, contingent upon circumstances, and directed by expediency rather than conscience. During his campaign, Jonathan vowed to transform Nigeria but transformative leadership is enabled by deeply held political convictions of which Jonathan appears genuinely bereft.

As far back as the 1980s, Olusegun Obasanjo had advocated a one-party system for Nigeria and argued its advantages in writing and in lectures. Thus, the way he ran both the presidency and his party reflected his core belief in the efficacy of a one-party state. The moral credentials of the belief itself are inconsequential to our inquiry. The point is that Obasanjo came to the office with some convictions and they shaped the way he wielded the presidency.

In Jonathan, we have a president who might have to hurriedly and belatedly develop core beliefs. When a leader has no convictions, it typically indicates either a lack of prior intellectual investment in grasping national issues or a congenital infidelity to principle – neither of which can possibly generate transformative outcomes. At best, he could be a pragmatist.       

This is surely not an unfair assessment. Jonathan had effectively been president for over a year before his own inauguration. His ideological vagueness has already created the first signs of policy incoherence. Weeks after his inauguration, he ordered cement manufacturers to reduce their prices or face unspecified sanctions. That decree would seem to indicate a preference for bold governmental activism to modulate the interplay of market forces. Yet, it conflicts with a liberalized economic regime in which the government plays no role, let alone setting commodity prices by fiat.

Jonathan has previously indicated that his administration will pursue a private sector-led free market order. He is currently overseeing the privatization of the power sector and at the January PDP convention promised that the establishment of forty new federal universities would be primarily private sector-driven. To seal his fidelity to markets, he has penciled down Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the internationally reputed neoliberal economic technician for a second tour of duty as finance minister after her first stint during the Obasanjo years. In a recent speech in which Jonathan asked Nigerians to brace themselves for tough economic measures, he managed to sound both protectionist and liberal at the same time. 

The question of the president’s true ideological colours inevitably arises. Is he a free market enthusiast, a believer in state economic activism or something in between? If he subscribes to a third way doctrine, some kind of “Jonathanomics,” it is yet to be articulated. Is it possible also that he has no preferences at all and acts out of convenience, out of a sense of the moment? These questions matter because they will affect the tone of his government and policy-making. In the absence of any discernible core values, politicians tend to dance between crass opportunism and fickle populism. But a serious government simply cannot function this way.

The evidence thus far suggests that the president lacks the intellectual and emotional commitment to his own economic agenda required to sell it to the public and to engage the special interests that oppose liberalization. They also predict a scenario in which the president either stalls his economic agenda at the first sign of serious opposition or simply cedes full control (and culpability) over economic matters to his finance minister as a means of evading executive responsibility.

The president’s shape-shifting has already resulted in an early political defeat. In repudiating the PDP’s power rotation (“zoning”) arrangement to run for the presidency, Jonathan hinged his candidacy on constitutionalism as well as the need to overcome divisive ethnic politics and entrench merit in leadership selection. He struck patriotic high notes implying that his presidency signaled the beginning of a new nationalistic and post-sectarian meritocracy in our politics. But after his inauguration, Jonathan reaffirmed zoning while trying to engineer the election of his favourites in the House of Representatives. The move failed. The representatives rebuffed the president’s overtures and elected leaders of their choice. The episode left the president looking like an opportunist who had abandoned zoning when it suited him only to resurrect it for his own selfish purposes. His blatant interference in the internal workings of the house carried out through the instrumentality of the party violated the national assembly’s autonomy and the principle of checks and balances. Its defeat has left him smaller in stature.

Presidential stature is important. Jonathan faces a host of adversaries including a coterie of implacable northern elites who see his presidency as an usurpation of their right to rule and an anarchist terrorist group, Boko Haram, which has declared war on the federal government. To adequately combat these onerous challenges, he has to look to a moral compass rather than the weathervane of expediency. Strength will come from conviction and conscience, rather than convenience. The president must choose his political battles carefully so as to avoid further diminution of his stature. His opponents are sure to quickly capitalize on any signs of weakness on his part.

Jonathan’s understated personality already invites underestimation by political adversaries. Ordinarily, this assessment of a politician who has just clinched the presidency ought to go down as a fatal miscalculation. But because his understated personality evidently does not mask any cast iron principles or keenly held ideas, he is all the more likely to be accurately adjudged as weak. Encouraged by this, special interests are sure to launch niggling nuisance assaults on his presidency in a bid to extract concessions from him. Indeed, extremist groups like Boko Haram will feel emboldened to continue their campaign of terror by what they will see as the president’s lack of resolve (not to mention the government’s lack of adequate armaments).

After the post-election violence in April, Jonathan gave one of his best speeches and among other sterling pronouncements, declared, “Nobody’s political ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian.” But such lofty rhetoric has not been used to craft a new national security doctrine although it should have been obvious since the October 1, 2010 bombings in Abuja that our most urgent national security threat comes from non-state actors. 

All this predicts an embattled presidency besieged by ravenous lobbyists and assailed by cold-hearted opponents; one that will more often than not be on the defensive and more consumed with putting out fires rather than actually getting things done. Jonathan can prevent this quagmire by defining a set of minimum non-negotiable core values that will undergird his administration. These are the values which he must expend political capital to promote and by which he will consistently assert his leadership.  It is necessary but it will not be easy. The presidential virtues of strength and resolve can only be constructed on prior foundational convictions.

By electing Jonathan, it may be said that Nigerians voted for symbolic change, choosing the cosmetic novelty of the fedora hat over the tiresome familiarity of the Shagari cap. Whether Jonathan can transform the symbolism of his presidency into real systemic changes is another matter.

The Future of Progressives

The most urgent question in Nigerian politics at the moment is not the outcome of the 2011 elections. It is the possibility of forging a viable progressive alternative to the extant political order. Several analysts interpret Nigerian politics as a Manichean drama between the “evil” ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party and an angelic opposition. This portrait is simplistic to the point of silliness. What ails Nigerian politics is bigger than a single political party; it is a militarized and parasitic political culture of which the PDP is only the most obvious example. It is a system, poisoned by the long years of military dictatorship, which cuts across party lines. The PDP is its most visible manifestation because it is the dominant party. Therefore, it would be a mistake to reduce political change to simply changing parties in power. Ejecting the ruling party will count for nothing if we do not change the reigning ideas.

A second view of Nigerian politics shared by many of its practitioners and analysts is that ideology is inconsequential; that tags such as ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ are passé. Again, this is a legacy of military rule which virtually eliminated ideas from politics and redefined it as a contest of cash and brigandage. It is true that Nigerian politicians mostly do not reckon with ideology. Indeed, to the extent to which political parties are ideological communities, we do not have authentic parties at the moment; only protean constellations of interests ever changing in accord with personal fortunes. The PDP is thus the biggest and the most successful congregation of strange bedfellows in the field. But ideology does matter. Over the past two decades, governance has been shaped by what can only be described as a free market kleptocracy entrenched by a raft of neo-liberal reforms that emphasizes untrammeled liberalization, huge cuts in social spending, privatization and the devaluation of the naira.

These measures are consistent with the structural adjustment programmes that were promoted by western governments and Bretton Woods Institutions during the 1980s and were discredited by the 1990s. General Ibrahim Babangida fundamentally altered the fabric of state-society relations by imposing SAP in 1986. Within the context of military dictatorships and our quasi-militarized illiberal democracy, and in the absence of regulatory inhibitions, these measures amount to simply vandalizing the state, cannibalizing federal assets and sharing them among cronies. The contradictions inherent in effecting a radical shift in socio-economic priorities under a totalitarian regime was glossed over by architects of SAP. In effect, even though, it affected a consistency with capitalism, what emerged can only be called a kleptocracy or more charitably, crony capitalism or predatory capitalism.

To be sure, Nigeria’s economic woes predated Babangida, but his socio-economic engineering deepened the consumerist maladies of the society, accentuated social injustice and corruption, and destroyed civic trust in government. The perverse neo-liberalism that generated these dysfunctions remains the dominant philosophy of government. The state has lost its meaning as a provider of public goods – social infrastructure, roads, bridges, education and healthcare etc. Government’s responsibilities have shrunk dramatically, while it has tightened its grip on national resources and redefined itself as a profit machine for its operators. For the vast majority of our compatriots, governance is denoted by its absence except for the nuisance value of sirened motorcades and allied formats of reprobate pageantry. It is this culture of predation for which a progressive alternative must be found.

In the quest for a progressive alternative today, it is sensible to look back and to reclaim the vision of the progressive patriarchs of yore. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Aminu Kano were the leading luminaries of the progressive tradition in the fifties and sixties. It may be argued that their inability to win power, due to British colonial intrigues, internecine squabbling and ethnic mistrust, was the most significant political mishap in the early stages of the Nigerian project. For without a doubt, the course of Nigerian history would have turned out very differently if they had directed it. Zik, Awo, Aminu and their cohorts were not doctrinaire socialists despite their left-leaning rhetoric. British colonialists saw them through the blinkers of the cold war and deemed them to be a “red danger” but they were nothing of the sort. Rather they were “third way progressives” who envisioned a synthesis of an enterprise economy and a welfare state.

Their ardent advocacy of universal public education reflected their belief in the moral purpose of the state as an enabler of human potential and national prosperity. They were welfarists who were as interested in wealth creation as they were in social justice. The philosopher, Chinweizu has characterized their ideology as “communalism” rooted less in Marx than in the communal ethos of African society which emphasizes inclusion and collectivity. It is a vision of the responsible society that leaves no one behind in the quest for moral and material progress. The state is thus necessary to underwrite the mutual wellbeing of the citizenry while reining in the inequities and inequalities that result from unbridled capitalism. Certainly, surrendering society to the caprices of market forces would have been anathema to the patriarchs.

Nigerian progressives today are suffering from a number of plagues. The ascendancy of right wing military regimes throughout our history severely limited progressive fortunes. It also meant that right wing politicians were the favoured parties in military-sponsored transition programmes. Babangida’s particular persecution of so-called “radicals” nearly destroyed the progressives and left them too exhausted to mount a feasible challenge for power in 1999. Thirdly, the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of communism in 1989, unleashed a sense of ideological bankruptcy which buffeted the Nigerian left. The left has long supplied the moral energy of progressivism and with their weakening the progressive community also atrophied.

But the progressives are also reeling from self-inflicted woes, chiefly, their congenital inability to build a truly national movement. Progressive forces have been undermined by factional infighting, bigotry and sectarian prejudices. Progressivism is not synonymous with any ethnic nationality even though some politicians and commentators of the south west persist in making this unfortunate assertion. Their potential for a national victory has been nullified often enough by the irredentist reduction of progressivism to an ethnic enclave. In his seminal book, Africa in Ebullition, Adegoke Adelabu argued that the Action Group was limited by its “self-imposed provincialism and its petticoat of shabby parochialism.” The same criticism is valid today against those who deem themselves heirs of the A.G., and its later incarnation, the U.P.N. For years, an odious narrative has made the rounds casting the south (and the southwest in particular) as the bastion of progressivism and the north as the seat of feudal conservatism. This bogus narrative assisted by bigoted and ignorant commentators has long prevented progressives on both sides of the Niger from linking hands and rising to the defence of their constituency – poor, disillusioned Nigerians who are in the majority.

Secondly, progressives seem incapable of subsuming ego and personal ambition in the quest for greater collective victories. Internecine dogfights splintered the Peoples Redemption Party and reduced a potential national progressive movement to a skeletal organization located entirely in Kano. Too often, progressives prefer to operate as lone-rangers so convinced in the justice of their own cause that they wind up in a cul de sac of their self-righteousness, high on puritanical fervor but electorally impotent. This is a shame because when they make their case rightly, the progressives have the most compelling vision for Nigeria; one which should enjoy greater mass appeal but which for these reasons does not.

Of late, progressive ideals have disappeared from the public square. We live in an age of intellectual famine and ideas are rarely given space to manifest. Militarized politics ensures that public debate is frequently “won” by the hecklers and those who make the loudest noise. Reasoned, sober voices are drowned out. The triumph of cash and carry politics has sapped progressives of their confidence. There is presently no recognizable progressive party. Creating a national movement calls for progressives to rediscover their political identity and re-establish their pavilion in the marketplace of ideas. If they can regain their faith in themselves and in their values, overcome expired prejudices and provincialisms and find new young and energetic leaders, Nigeria could very well experience a national renaissance.