By Odia Ofeimun
PREAMBLE
I have been asked to engage the theme of elites and their impact on public policy in the context of a political economy of identity politics. Let me be upfront with it: that I don’t want to make any meal out of definitional fiats or disquisitions. I follow the usual presumption in the literatures which see elites as the best of, or the most representative of, people in different walks of life; motivators of social organizations and political entrepreneurs who make things happen, even if this is only as a matter of reputational casting. Of course, the effectiveness of their roles is most tested in the determination of public policy; whether in terms of the design, articulation and implementation or re-assessment of collective goals. In a society that is stratified between classes and fractionized between regional and ethnic groups, the core issue and, in my view, the most rounded way to engage the theme, is to look at the capacity of elites to design a lasting and coverall agenda that they can be held accountable for. An agenda is not only to be seen as a plan of action that mobilizes a population but, a broad strategy in the sense in which organization theorists like Henry Mintzberg talk about a pattern in a stream of decisions. That is why in my title I have emphasized not a political economy which deals with power in resource management but a cultural economy; because we are dealing with acquired ways of doing things, or to which people are habituated after some time. The pattern that is discerned may or may not be free of hidden polemics that are partisan, idiosyncratic, and impressionistic, but a rooting in scientific veracity can be secured, I propose, by a sequential presentation of events which shows how an agenda, a map of the future emerges and meets, or does not meet, a declared goal.
I have chosen to adopt a narrative tack which takes ethnicity or issues concerning the national question and problems of identity as mere datum; that is, as part of the building blocks of everyday organized behaviour which may be pictured in the old way as deriving from false consciousness; and which could be wished away or driven out of contention in the public space by a presumed development of modernity. I simply take it as a factor of human need which, poorly met, or un-assuaged, gets corrosive. Its manipulation by elites, I suggest, may arise from whimsy, a hurt, or a form of manufactured charisma, that could be deployed to attract affection, dissuade hostility, or project disaffection, for the purpose of achieving goals. The staple or novel pattern that emerges is of interest because it presents a useable picture of the present and offers a map of the future, an agenda, the creation of which, or deviation from which, may indicate the next stage of a country’s odyssey. No shaking about this! My purpose is to challenge: raise questions, and propose alternative perspectives about misdirected narratives of our contemporary times which invest more on lampooning rather than effectively, efficiently, describing situations to enable people get a good grasp of social reality in order to be able to live with the way things are or to change them aright.
A NARRATIVE OF NOW.
I have set out to engage the question of an agenda – a map of the future – for Nigeria through a narrative of the boundless feeling of euphoria that greeted the end of the 2015 General Elections. The euphoria came with the last gasp of President Goodluck Jonathan’s Presidency and the coming of President Muhammadu Buhari to power. Not to forget: it gushed from sheer happenstance: the fact that the pockets of violence that marred the electoral process did not rise to the foul level of an end-game for the country as the doomsday prophets had predicted. The prophets had said, in agreement with a decades-old Report of the United States National Intelligence Council, that 2015 was going to be the last year of the Nigerian Federation. As the Elections approached, pundits and commentators across the media concentrated upon, and whipped up a frenzy of discussions around the expectation of terminal violence across the country. Remember, that this is a country long considered unviable by cynics who ritually overplay the existence of ethnic and religious differences as seeds of the inevitable dissolution of Africa’s most populous country!
As the electioneering progressed, tension was built up and heightened viscerally by political opposition groups that played up the imminence of chaos as a reason for the rest of the world to side with their insistence on a change of government. As they claimed, if the election was rigged, that is, unless they won, the world was bargaining for an upheaval that was bound to unsettle the whole continent. Speculation in the media had it that warships of the United States were on standby in neighbouring Ghana ready to intervene in the assured expectation of crisis. This was not only a warning off of those who might have dared to rig the elections; it intimated the reality that the world, meaning, the United States, Britain and other Western countries, had taken sides with the opposition as partisans in the impending Nigerian imbroglio. Diplomats from these countries threw caution to the winds and were heard too often intervening to push for their preferred ends in the course of the electioneering. Many Nigerians were preparing for the worst to happen. Fortunately, the worst did not happen.
The general consensus is that the expected or feared disaster was avoided, and all tension dispelled, because of the pre-emptive concession of defeat that President Goodluck Jonathan made in a phone-call to the winner, General Muhammadu Buhari of the All-Progressive Congress, APC, before the formal announcement of results. Although the President-elect, on CNN, accounted it an act induced by outsiders, Jonathan’s concession of defeat, on the grounds that his ambition was not worth shedding anybody’s blood for, opened sesame to an epidemic of proactive concession-making by other failed candidates in the General Elections. It gave Nigerian politics a somatic tonal lift akin to a change of political culture. The sudden, pervasive feeling of relief that ensued drowned out those who had argued that President Jonathan had no choice but to concede defeat unless he was determined to instigate a civil war that would have proved the doomsday prophets right. Millions of Nigerians who had been badgered by years and months of hair-raising talk about imminent chaos, were immensely relieved by President Jonathan’s offer of a balm, no matter what or who induced it.
One consequence of the tonal lift is that it widened the space for a form of political behaviour that had been quite a definer of preceding partisan politics in Nigeria. The relief it offered was matched in conviviality only by the gales of decamping to the winning All-Progressive Congress by members of President Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party. All those practiced at not wanting to be excluded from any government in power simply made a Gadarene rush to decamp. It became, at least, momentarily, an embarrassment to the winners. It was as if they were not being allowed to forget that de-campings had been the very building blocks with which the APC was built up almost from scratch against the PDP. Again, not to forget: in its heyday as a ruling party, in sheer commitment to a norm-less politics, the PDP had set up decamping as a wild fashion show. The godfathers of the party impugned constitutional provisions which required carpet-crossers to resign once they moved to a political party different from the one on the platform of which they got their mandates. Decampees were supposed to go back to the electorate for re-authentication, as it were, in a bye-election. But this was never allowed to happen. Stalwarts of the PDP, bragging a divine 60-year futuristic lease, made meals out of inducing members of the opposition into the biggest political party in Africa. Decamping and carpet-crossing on the floor of parliament and in government houses were encouraged as norm. The godfathers were so averse to dragging offenders to judicial accounting that, unconstitutional as it was, the culprits were enabled by ruling party ‘cheek’ to continue in office as a means of sustaining the ruling party’s status as a behemoth. Understandably, therefore, when the tide began to turn, and the carpet crossing went in the opposite direction, that is, at their expense, PDP members appeared too dazed to do anything about it. As the trickle became a flood, the APC made a virtue out of the constitutional indecorum. It proved to be quite some kind of poetic justice in the sense that, soon enough, winners and losers in the General Election became veritable look-alikes; if not Siamese twins.
So let us face it: for anyone wishing to draw up an agenda for Nigeria, it is well to begin by taking on this baggage: that the two political parties, the prime decision-makers in the system, and the means for fixing agendas, are closer than the brickbats of the electioneering have given room for. Grasp it from any angle! Problems of leadership, organizational disposition, and the actual physics of behaviour as they relate to effectiveness of policies and programmes! There is proof positive that the two political parties are truly Siamese. Remove the fantasy-besotted nature of one party grafting messianism upon one candidate and placing opprobrium upon the other! What is hidden from view, and a factor of the sheer incapacity of many commentators to appreciate the core dilemma of the nation, is that, although a distinction in leadership disposition looks apparent between the parties, their modalities and circumstances are brutally similar. What appears to be most different between them, especially in the face of truculent disputations on the rostrum, is actually where to discover their most unguent similarity.
Strictly, the unwisdom of distancing the two parties from one another, is proved by the fact that the ACN, the more progressive of the two ground zero formations that linked several mushrooming sorties to form the APC, began to tone down ideologically, once it settled for a fusion. The common drive for raw power, unmediated by any ideological propositions, overtook all sides to the bargain. The first sign of movement towards near-convergence was that the ACN weaned itself off pursuit of political restructuring of the Federation in order to make a pitch for change of government simplicita. The party became hostage to the very political environment it was supposed to question and change. So to say, it fitted itself into a mobilization binge based on calling for all-round carpet-crossing to form a catch-all mega political party with hardly a thought beyond electoral victory. This got it trapped in a frame of shared personnel: as many bigwigs in the APC were former stalwarts of the PDP who had crossed carpet. Hence, to emerge as a mega-party, the APC had to do what most political parties do when their opponents enact a culture that they cannot outsmart: they jump into the pool as siblings. The party simply adopted the very zoning formula that made the PDP a party of ethnic and regional arithmetic rather than a futuristic movement capable of addressing serious problems of national development. Rather than redress the North/South divide that had been an albatross around governance across the Nigerian firmament, the party literally collapsed into its maws. It angled for a candidate of the North rather than a candidate from the North. The ACN jettisoned the selling point of many of its stalwarts in the Southwest of the country who saw restructuring as actually a means of dealing with the problems of inequality and poverty, corruption and lack of democracy, core issues in Nigerian politics. In a country in which ethno-regional banding had been such a critical factor in the holding and general dispensation of power, it was a source of grave hiatus between the Niger Delta and the Southwest of Nigeria. Many discerning analysts who considered it a quixotic abandonment of the goal of political restructuring by the Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN, were concerned about its rather short-sighted, if momentarily satisfying, pursuit of a larger say in the mainstream hegemonic politics of the country. But, craftily and masterfully was it clinched by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, leader of the ACN, who had caused the official PDP candidate for the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mrs Mulikat Akande, a South Westerner like himself, to be dumped in favour of Aminu Tambuwal, the PDP member for Sokoto in the 7th House of Representatives. The seed of a future coalition was being sown.
Before going any further, let the point be stressed: that it was a master-stroke! No matter how much of a blind choice it turned out, it was a blow for cross-national alliances. The underside is that it was not only a wispy taste of power above the more fundamental struggle to change the grounds of Nigerian politics through political restructuring, it amounted to backing out from the social welfare programmes that were the means that federalists had always proposed for ensuring that, no matter the differences across the Federation, there would have to be commonly shared social welfare programmes to drive movement to some form of national coalescence. As such, the ACN, was engaged in an evident political deviation. Especially so in the negotiations for fusion between Tinubu’s ACN and Buhari’s CPC: no formal agreement appeared to have been reached as to where to go and who shall go for us as was normal for other coalition-builders known to our history. It was as if pitching for raw power, merely to dislodge the government in power, was enough to fuse the parties together. This explains the shady circumstances after the 2015 elections, which saw the emergence of an unofficial APC stalwart, Senator Bukola Saraki as President of the Senate while Ike Ekweremadu, a regular PDP member became his Deputy. It happened that the old PDP members in the APC had met and wheedled an agreement from regular PDP members before the inaugural Senate. They voted against the supposed official candidates of the winning party. It was the kind of collaboration that two evenly matched parties in opposition in any normal parliament could arrange, officially or unofficially, if they wished to move the nation forward rather than create immobilism as code. It took on a rather sinister visage however because, outside the Senate, a congruent coup in the House of Representatives made Mallam Yakubu Dogara the Speaker against the dictates of the APC party heirarchs. This was the proof, if any was needed, that, not just party but ethno-regional power, was at stake. It was a case of Northern regional power exacting the price of victory above the idealism of distracted Southwesterners. Straightaway, it hacked back to that seemingly little matter of the ambush mounted by the ACN leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu to put Alhaji Aminu Tambuwal as speaker of the House of Representative against the PDP official candidate in 2011. After Tinubu achieved that feat to wrest the speakership of the 7th House of Representatives, he set in place a rogue tradition that simply awaited re-enactment by the defeated PDP. It was sweet victory for them. But, frankly, from the standpoint of national interest, it ought to have yielded a calmer view and the crafting of a new convention for purposes of stability such that the party with the largest number in the house would always choose the principal officers. Unless the winning party got to its niche by traducing the rules, rigging, and making a show of an unfree and unfair election, as could be argued as the case with the 2015 election, parliamentary decorum ought to have suggested that such craftiness as displayed by the ACN in 2011 spoils the civility and calm atmosphere needed for serious cross-party work in an evenly matched situation. No doubt about it, if this had been conceded, the post-election search for a national agenda in 2015 would have fallen in place almost as a routine building of camaraderie for the purpose of putting national problems under close marking.
Instead, what has emerged is a division within the ranks of the APC along what some commentators regard as an ideological line and others regard as an ethno-regional divide, putting Buhari’s aloofness as a major source of crisis in his party. Whichever is the case, and in spite of the effort being made to distinguish old PDP members in the APC from their more “progressive” ACN/APC members, the reality is that all of them have been trapped into sharing common features at the level of organizational culture. This fact must be faced if only in order to pre-empt over-presumption of difference beyond the superficiality of work-a-day disagreements on the hoisting.
A SHARED ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Speaking of organizational culture, I see the most striking aspect of the relationship between the two political parties in the context of their convergence in matters of finance! I wish to place this at the centre of this narrative especially as it provides a means of understanding normal everyday programming of events in relation to mobilizing men and materials for the goals of the political parties. Accordingly, I want to stress the commonplace reality: that all the political parties in the system have been locked into the same conundrum in relation to what stasiologists (students of political organizations) of the Maurice Duverger school describe as sinews of war. To start with, membership subscriptions have never played a significant role in their affairs. And since ruling parties have always managed to prevail on electoral commissions not to follow constitutional requirements for statutory subventions to political parties, all of them have been obliged to follow common approaches which make all rooftops look the same. They all happen to be financed by sheer hauls of money from the coffers of local, state and Federal governments; with percentiles taken from contracts inflated for that purpose; monies taken directly from state coffers through security votes; monies from check-offs from political appointees; donations from well-to-do individuals and companies for eventual recompense; and straight-forward extortion or tithes from outfits set up either by party leaders or their cronies. Except for subscriptions by members, check-offs and donations, the grand means of funding the parties have bordered on pure kleptocracy. Which makes it wishful thinking to seek to distinguish the political parties or their fractions, along the lines of which is or is not corrupt.
In effect, as a matter of the organizational culture which supervenes over the political parties, corruption is certainly not just a stray wolf that slunk into national spaces overnight and snatched one of the parties. It is the trough in which both political parties wallow. While hunting and hounding it off may be an issue in both parties, the fact remains that in a circumstance of governments roaded into existence through fraud, vile impunity and violence, the political parties are embroiled in all the forms of corruption and insecurities that afflict our society. They have followed the same pattern of appropriation of resources since the military era, which can be safely described as kleptocratic. Arguably, up to sixty percent of the means of defending healthy living in our society have tended to be expended, not as prescribed by law but always outside statutory requirements. The sensationalism that may be dredged from this in the era of anti-corruption campaigns should not delay us. Although, exposing the robberies, looting, wastefulness and social dissonance buried in the mere statistics may be good propaganda for soldiers who want to take over power or political parties seeking to unseat opponents, the reality is that the more the exposures, the clearer it gets that we are dealing with wonky and spooky expenditures that have characterized all the political parties in power at Federal, state and local levels. Since similar patterns also characterized spending in the preceding military eras when the need to overcome civilian dissension was clamant, it proves it a national characteristic or culture crying for redress. So to say, one set of corrupt activities may be more humungous in size but not necessarily more heinous. The proof of it all is the estimated five hundred billion dollars that Nigerians have stashed away abroad and of which President Buhari says he is merely wishing to get back one hundred and fifty billion dollars looted during Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. True, the fear of opening a can of worms may have prescribed the concentration on the immediately preceding administration. But it seems more a matter of sheer prudence, to latch upon and seize the loot that took place more recently rather than enter the endless hole of the big sharks with hydra heads that have taken successive governments to the cleaners and may have managed, as the saying goes, to clean their mouths. In effect, where perpetration of loot-sharing by earlier governments provide the context and the spur for the more recent forms of corruption, it leaves room for curiosity as to how to achieve reform in the present without adverting attention to the institutionalized bracket of corrupt propensities already in existence.
At any rate, what counts for now is that, among the five major political parties which linked several mushrooming sorties to form the APC, the behavioural dispositions they shared with the PDP became quite the assured equipment for political survival. Both the ACN and CPC, before the fusion into APC; and then the PDP in terms of the split between its Northern catchment and its Southern pitch into power at the centre, are functioning as inveterate siblings. Both political parties have behaved as such even when they appeared, for instance, to differ on the issue of constitutional change in the country. Indeed, after President Jonathan’s yeoman’s effort in organizing the much-haggled but unstoppable National Conference, the political parties were as one in turning their backs on the recommendations. The PDP, which should have become the driver of constitutional change, made it appear more of a project of its leader rather than the party. Especially after the old ACN turned coat on the matter, all the political parties, as parties, became equally distracted on the question of making the issues raised at the National Conference a part of the 2015 campaigns. They exhibited sameness by showing no interest in how to move beyond acquiring power at the centre. This informed the bullish hyper-inflation of promises they were making during the campaigns. With only superficial differences between them, their campaigns resorted to a mess of personality diatribes aimed at upstaging one another by emphasizing the supposedly unique attributes of one leader over the other. The truth, as I shall show presently, is that there wasn’t much difference even between the leaders. Nor have the circumstances and context changed enough between them to allow for a radically different behaviour.
One feature of similarity or convergence between them, which deserves to be stressed, is that the North/South divide in the PDP was simply replicated in the APC and not just as a matter of happenstance but a defining factor. Rather than any talk of ideological differences, it is this factor that has been, very critically, the motor of evolution and crisis in both parties. It has engaged, as much as it has been, the very albatross around the neck of all attempts to picture or run the parties or the country as a common culture or circumstance. Although the APC pitched straightway for a fusion to avoid the usual hiatus between North and South that prevented past attempts at coalition from arriving at coalescence, and, yes, although this made it a very unique political party in the annals of party organization in Nigeria’s history, it could not manage to escape the fault-line that the North/South divide represents. As a factor of the serendipity that has flavoured every narration of Nigeria’s history, it has implicated every attempt at moving Nigeria forward and every pursuit requiring a concerted move as one country. It is often not remarked enough; but it has provided the primary basis for the disunity that is often credited to the country, a country in which the common people interact and laugh at each others jokes and self-descriptions but their leaders have to function within deaf walls that make concerted decision-making almost a forced-draft affair. The subtext, which deserves keen attention, is that the culture within which the political parties subsist tends not only to determine their viability but prescribes for them the necessity to seek to enact alternative situations that are more in their interests. Since, neither of the two major political parties in the country has been able to create such alternative situations, they have been obliged to function within the existing constraints. In essence, the North/South divide at the heart of national affairs is insinuated into something of a traditional culture imputing some form of customary law inside every pact, instrument or charter pursued in every attempt at mobilization of the people. The implication is that, having been overtaken by the divide, the afflicted organizations are obliged to accept zoning as a format of leadership recruitment. By the same token, they are induced to observe the application of different moralities to different zones; just as they succumb to the heinous logic that, as Zaria Group/Bala Usman, one of the most radical presenters of this logic once argued, the North is so different from the South that (even) a common socialist ‘revolution’ is not possible between North and South, The crux of this psuedo-radical logic was presented in a form that still rankles: to the effect that there are more workers, classically defined, in the South than in the North; and because there are more peasants in the North than in the South, never the twain shall meet. A common organizational format, it was argued, would be unfair to the North. Even a common free education policy for North and South that could wipe out illiteracy across the country was rejected on the grounds that Southerners, with already more children at school, would take more, or too much, at the beginning from revenue allocation. Inherently, this allowed for different standards of educational attainment for admission into schools and entry into employments; it has enabled bids for sharing of revenue at a common table (in order for the North to benefit from the richer South) but occasioning rejection of a common approach to solving common problems at any other level – in culture, politics, religion and media. In bare terms, this has allowed for strategic offices at the Federal level to be reserved for the North with rituals of power that have emplaced a virtual code of separation, a form of apartheid, dis-allowing Southerners, beyond a certain Sabongari syndrome, from being domiciled in the same residential or ideological neighbourhood with Northerners. Thus, the draw-line between strangers and indigenes, sharpened on all sides, assumes the status of an imperative: for indigenes to pay higher school fees than non-indigenes and for states which share from the proceeds of oil from the Niger Delta (as it should be for people from the same country) to impose higher school fees on children from outside the states including children from the Niger Delta. What is surprising if not shocking is that, in the general discussion of Nigerian politics, political parties which should be haggling over the most efficient and nation-oriented solution to these problems, have made an issue of them only as shadow-boxing. The result is that the North/South divide remains, in every situation, the most basic creator of incompatible moralities, a benign one for self and a pernicious one for others. Nor is it properly considered that the divide is a highly bullish and original creator of corruption upon which all other forms of corruption in the Nigerian society thrives. Within the political parties, it is acknowledged as a foundation of sorts to be pampered by zoning, which serves as a feature of the ascribed customary law and therefore makes it commonplace for criminals from one part or other of the country to claim immunity from prosecution for wrong-doing or to be promoted above liability in the case of malfeasance. The truth of the matter is that this artificially created divide, promoted and insinuated into every Nigerian organization, not only frustrates application of common morality and shared rules of organizations but hinders the pursuit of common goals. Once entrenched, it configures all the moves that a Nigerian can or might make. Except, to some extent, in organizations, such as the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, which has managed to transcend it through a certain rigour of organization in the face of dirty tricks by successive governments, the divide becomes super-ordinate.
The short of it is that with the North/South divide as a plain traditional culture behind or within organizational moves, the two political parties have had divided souls. Specific to the 2015 Elections, both the PDP and the APC, have been kindred, and very similar parties being presented in diametrical opposition. The electorate has had no clear choice. In a rather complicated kind of way, in spite of odious informalities such as the ritual lying accompanied by the fretworks of dirty jobbing that crystallized between the two political parties, there has been no hiding the fact that the two leaders were equally distant from their own political parties. A shorthand way of putting this, before a fuller elaboration, is to note that whereas Goodluck Jonathan was abandoned by his political party from the moment he became President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, as if to turn mimickry into style, virtually abandoned his party even before he became President of Nigeria. The popular image crafted for both men, in this regard, is that they were and are not in charge of their political parties. If President Jonathan was considered not in control, Buhari, as kitted out by even his most fervent admirers, is a star cowboy riding into the sunset, leaving his party behind, with a coterie of personal aides, to clear the bootleggers and criminals and all the ragamuffins from the Town Hall. In essence, both leaders, to put it bluntly, have had no proper relationships with their own political parties, no proper means of articulating and aggregating values for implementation. Both of them, sentenced, from Day One, to some form of extra-institutional accounting, have had to make do with transcending a common organizational disability by deploying the party apparatus more as back-up than the operational system. In order to be able to exercise self-will in the face of the coteries and intimidating cabals running the roost around them, each of the leaders, having no clean slate to take off from, really has had only the option of trying to re-invent the wheel. Doing strategic thinking, through technocrats and special commissions as in the case of President Jonathan, or strategizing with cronies and coteries as with Muhammadu Buhari, has exposed an action set wrong-footed, on all sides, by corrupt cabals. Priming up an action set, through coteries, without good grounding in strategic thinking, as Buhari’s administration has so far proved to be, reduces matters to how much force, corruption or moral suasion to deploy in order to have space for governance. With an aloof successor hamstrung by having to depend upon the strategic thinking already done but, largely, not acted upon by a supposedly clueless predecessor, we are confronted by a political system in which talking about what each of the leaders stands for or can do, does not imply that their political parties are necessarily with them! Neither party, clearly, has had the time, inclination, nor the room to synergize before landing the gravity of incumbency. They are. equally, victims of a culture of incompatible moralities. A paradox!
THE CASE OF GOODLUCK JONATHAN
In the specific case of President Goodluck Jonathan at the point of the 2015 Elections, the paradox, appraised in real terms rather than idealistically, reveals a candidate with a peculiar distance from the political party that brought him to power. He came into office through a supposed doctrine of necessity after the death of President Umaru Yar’adua to whom he had become Vice President only two years before. It completely changed the chemistry of the PDP as a party. He was not only not a child of the bride’s chamber in his party, he was elevated in a circumstance that created unbridgeable division in the party. Based on a prior agreement between President Olusegun Obasanjo and a shadowy group of Northern (Arewa) actualizers, the Presidential slot was supposed to remain in the North after Yar’adua. It led to a crisis because the Nigerian Constitution could not be changed at short notice to make sure that the PDP’s private arrangement became the nation’s grundnorm. Predictably, the defeat of those who wanted the nation’s Constitution to remain a mere handmaiden of their geo-ethnic convenience, gave the party a virtual unravelling. Goodluck Jonathan became effectively the de jure leader; but in a party whose generally troubled cohesiveness was now in tatters; worse than the poor patchwork of mutually predatory interest groups that it had always been. Sabotage of his tenure was soon boldly written into the DNA of his party. It flowered in the form of a pooled northern agenda that soon became a cross-party phenomenon marked by the intra and extra party activism of former President Olusegun Obasanjo who, until he dropped out as the Chairman of the PDP Board of Trustees, became an invidious wheedler insisting on a northerner as President in accordance with the agreement that he was a part of. His bid to rein in his supposed protege who was expected to be quite amenable and beholding to him, was thwarted by President Goodluck Jonathan’s bidding to be, and the nation’s expectation of his being, his own man. Evidently, the supposed neophyte in the game had opted to learn the ropes by seeking to achieve an alternative programme from that of the hegemonic ethno-regional cabals in his party. This yielded two interwoven assault groups out to take on the Jonathan phenomenon.
The first assault group came within the division between Northern and Southern interests in the PDP which led, eventually, to six of the PDP Northern Governors and one Southern Governor threatening, and five of the Northern Governors and the Southern Governor, decamping from the party. The most grating aspect of it thereafter came with Boko Haram terrorism in the North East, whose sponsorship by Northern Governors had been stymied by President Umaru Yar’adua before he practically decapitated the sect. Quite foolishly, some circles in the North had regarded it as the Northern answer to the Niger Delta militancy which insinuated a minority Vice President into Aso Rock in the first place. The hard reality however, is that as a President of minority extraction, the first in Nigeria’s history to have it by constitutional freak and electoral fluke, Jonathan became the quarry of a national lynch squad powered by two ethno-regional behemoths in Nigeria’s tripodal political arrangement: the Arewa North and the ACN Southwest. This set the stage for a gruelling denouement that was being perfected by the second assault group, made up of organized politico-economic cabals also coordinated by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who was described, for the purpose, as navigator by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, his former nemesis turned celebrant. This group, of organized interests in the oil industry and across the economy, saw Jonathan’s tenure as a disruption of their wonted control of the national economy. Some analysts believed they were looking with panic at the imminence of a re-drawing of terms in 2015, the year in which the re-issuing of new oil blocks would take place. As far as they were concerned, the Elections of the year were no more than skirmishing for who would determine the new take in the oil industry. This was how come all of Nigeria’s former Heads of state pulled together at the Council of state in support of the option of denying a third of the electorate their permanent voter’s cards, disenfranchising and excluding them from the electoral process, rather than have a situation that could make continuity a possibility at Aso Rock.
One reality that was central to this opposition to Jonathan’s Presidency, but denied by most of the normally perceptive commentators on the Nigerian scene, is that as a President of minority ethnic provenance, Jonathan was expected, and in the view of many, he was bound to do something, to alter the sub-citizen status of ethnic minorities across the country. It happened that Jonathan was quiet but unwavering about it. As I have argued in my book, This Conference Must be Different, one man who appeared to follow Jonathan quite closely on this, was Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, ACN leader, and de facto leader of the Southwest, who has admitted that President Jonathan set out from very early in his tenure to bid for a change in the Constitution of Nigeria. Although he has led national opinion, arguing in the manner of the columnist, Mohammed Haruna, that “Jonathan’s constitutional conference was …fire brigade convened” and “an emergency decision”, his narrative belies the point. In his words, President Jonathan opted for the “wiser and more cost-effective line of action when, in November 2011, he inaugurated the Justice Belgore Presidential committee on the Review of Oustanding Issues from Recent Constitutional conferences”. The President, according to him, appointed many eminent personalities to the Committee. After the Committee’s report on July 11, 2012, the President constituted a Cabinet committee, with the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, as the Chairman, to report within three weeks. Then: “Under the President’s watch and directive, a presidential retreat was held for Civil society organizations and professional groups at the Banquet Hall, of the State House, Abuja”. The Deputy Speaker of the house of Representatives, Mr. Emeka Ihedioha, the Chairman of the House Committee on Constitution Review, stressed the fact, at that retreat, and in the presence of President Goodluck Jonathan, “that the target of the legislature was to complete the constitution amendment process by June 2013.” When that process was actually completed, all the principal drivers in the National Assembly began to deliver reports to the public in a way that was, agreeably, parliamentary. This means that even while so many were talking about the cluelessness of the President, so much was actually happening that was being kept at arms length by those who should have been most enthused by, even if critical of, the process. Their lack of interest merely explained why many were shocked, surprised or scandalized when Jonathan eventually announced that there would be a National Conference to re-examine the constitutional question. One reason for his being so miscast and misunderstood, apart from the angst of opponents who irked at not being able to control the President, is that leaders like Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, were not only too conscious of Jonathan’s minority status and were sure that he was doing something about it, they simply could not appreciate the level of spoken and unspoken opposition that Jonathan needed to douse or side-step in order to achieve a positive outcome. In essence, while supposed supporters of political restructuring were relegating it to second order in their politics, or turning against it, the core problem for President Jonathan was that of broadening the base of his decision making to accommodate it. As the split in his schizoid PDP could no longer be patched, the stiff opposition provided by an ACN that was openly calling on the champions of hegemonic Northern politics to help remove him from power, created problems for the drive to change the Constitution. How take in stride the two antipodes, Arewa North and Southwest, against his position in a tripodal Federation which he, Jonathan apparently wished to turn into a quadri-podal and stable set by adding a proper fourth leg to the Nigerian Federal system.
In short, rather than being clueless, what became the more active decider of Jonathan’s position was diffidence. It partly explains why he would set up many commissions and national committees that finished their allotted tasks only for their reports to be consigned to the shelf as if the government had no interest in them or was forever waiting for the right time to act on them. Having so much intelligence being governmentalized without serious party involvement indicated the insecurity of a President who could not trust either his party or the opposition but needed to enact a circumstance that was all-inclusively right for the implementation of the various propositions emanating from the special commissions. In essence, Jonathan’s government was in the invidious position of carrying out many projects, a good number of which amounted to lighting lanterns and putting them under the table, waiting for the right time that hardly came, to air them. It was as if the purpose was to hide his brilliant projects from powerful forces that had objections to their implementation. As was, indeed, the case. By the same token, the waiting for the fullness of time or whatever may have caused the delay in completing many of the projects, also induced public ignorance of their existence. With poor media savvy, which added credence to what was seen as the cluelessness of the President and his government, several Presidential gaffes in public virtually authorized a rationale for the opposition to fail to educate itself on what was going on in the country. Even the restraint with which Jonathan exercised power, being liberal to a fault, and granting a feeling of entitlement to Northern hold on strategic offices, gave the impression that he indeed had no clue as to how the gargantuan resources available in Aso Rock had always been used and could be fostered in the face of the forces ranged against him across the political spectrum. Hence, in the name of allowing freedom of speech and association, especially given his ability to stand up to the brickbats and rough tackles of the opposition without losing his cool, he humoured, so to say, the use of unfair methods by groups determined to achieve the purpose of removing him from office in ways quite at variance with constitutional requirements. His democratic credentials were perceived as part of his incapacity to take decisions. The expansive freedom in the country which he could claim as the product of his liberal handling of affairs and his wont to suffer public discomfiture rather than exercise draconian power, was under-valued in the face of the many problems that were felt to need the kind of grand tackle that only a strongman could offer. In the face of rampart insecurity across the country, his declared wish never to act the strongman was not a good cover. At any rate, it did not prevent him from being confronted by two ploys that were potent in the eventual dismantling of his Presidency: The first was the role of external intervention in the Nigerian political space and, the second was the media that turned fantasy reportage into a means of denying the evidence of contemporary history as part of the campaign to dislodge him from power.
On the role of external intervention, the list of issues on which President Goodluck Jonathan had a disturbance of the peace relationship with many Western countries is long enough for it to be accounted among the deciders of the end of his Presidency. They include
1. The laiser fare approach to corruption inherited from the preceding administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo which resulted in the failure to bring to justice the Nigerians who were named among the perpetrators of fraud in the Siemens and Halliburton cases. This ramified with the rumoured, now confirmed, re-looting of the returned Abacha loot by President Jonathan’s aides either under his watch, command, or indifference. It was not designed to win friends among the countries that had worked so hard to return the loot to Nigeria, whatever other implications there were to the return of the loot.
2. President Goodluck Jonathan’s under-reported bid to eliminate malaria, the biggest killer in our climes, from Nigeria’s ecosystem counted against him in the eyes of the West. It was a right foot forward on Jonathan’s part, beyond what was dictated by European traders in search of a dumping ground for mosquito nets, insecticides and vaccines. Its obverse was the more thoroughgoing bid to eliminate mosquitoes from the eco-system for which a factory was being built by the Cubans, against EU suasion. The EU having spent close to 850 000 Euro on vaccine research was confronted by the Cuban solution aimed at wiping out the anopheles mosquito rather than merely treating its impact. It truly outclassed what the EU had in stock and was threatening to give Nigeria a success rating at a time the administration was celebrating a polio-free Nigeria that had just eliminated the near scourge of Ebola.
3. The refusal, or full-term delay, by President Jonathan to sign a European Union Economic Partnership Agreement, EPA, which required Nigeria, like 18 other African countries to merely borrow money from Europe to buy from Europe. The refusal remains a necessary prescription for a Nigeria that must seek to industrialize. It happened that the Jonathan Presidency was standing by the principled stand of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria on this matter. The Lagos Chamber of Commerce has reckoned that signing the EPA was capable of losing Nigeria 1.7 trillion Naira in five years; a possibility which cannot be simply brushed aside as an inconsequential issue. It is certainly in Nigeria’s interest for another President to risk being pilloried as clueless rather than allow the calamity which the EPA implies.
4. .Of the many furores that blighted Nigeria/US relations under President Goodluck Jonathan easily the most unusual was the threat that the United States and other Western countries would stop all economic aid to Nigeria if President Jonathan signed the anti-gay rights law. Popular opinion in Nigeria was scandalized by this sheer booboo of the western countries’ rapping of Jonathan’s knuckles over the signing of the anti-gay rights law that most Nigerians could well have skinned or roasted him for, if he signed. Apart from the religious and moral reasons that many Nigerians had for goading the President to sign the anti-gay rights bill, the big offense was the Western disrespect for Nigeria’s sovereignty; as if Nigerians would drown themselves in the nearest pond once western dictation said it was the right thing to do.
5. A refusal by Jonathan to devalue the Naira, as required by the IMF is merely another small chop in this equation. The sheer manipulation of the value of the Naira outside market forces and dictation of prices by virtual IMF imperatives has become part of the legacy of the economic crisis in Nigeria . The issue is that many Nigerians of a younger generation have heard it said that those who disagree with the imperatives are risking what was once called an IMF coup. The point however is that an IMF coup yields an undertaker economy as assuredly as bowing to the IMF imperatives which could add three fifths to the price of a litre of fuel or devalue the Naira by its equivalence. Same ten and ten pence, as the street trader knows.
6. To be sure, devaluation of the Naira stands together with the oil subsidy war that had raged since President Olusegun Obasanjo decided to open the down-stream sector to a competitive stream of oil merchants that quickly self-multiplied and became cabals with distinctive interests, before his exit from power. Once the rise of the oil mercantilists overtook the more correct solution that would have required state-sourced direct country-to-country purchase of oil in the international market, it was impossible to drive the even more correct application of a war-type effort to build not one gargantuan refinery but literal suit-case projects across the board which would have ensured that oil for the domestic market was not only being refined in Nigeria but sequestered from the imposition of international cost patterns. The bid to refine for local consumption became an a ambition of the Jonathan administration that never enjoyed the support of the foreign friends who merely wished that no special rate for domestic consumption be fixed.
7. President Jonathan’s resistance to the idea of having foreign troops stamping foot on Nigerian soil, or on West African soil for that matter, belonged to a long-standing strategic pillar in Nigerian foreign policy. Even under the unstoppable threat of Boko Haram, many Nigerians thought it anathema that foreigners should be invited to help overcome the terrorists. The fiasco that got the United States to withdraw its promised support may harbour unexplained mysteries. But it certainly added up to presenting President Jonathan as a friend the US could not do strategic business with. That this has been changed, with the entrance of British soldiers, under President Muhammadu Buhari is part of the Change that has taken place in Nigeria.
8. Even with attacks from Boko Haram increasing at a rate that made the Nigerian military appear jejune the United States refused to sell ammunition to Nigeria. What ever the reasons, it was certainly a serious enough matter for attempts by Nigeria to buy ammunition from Isreal to be blocked by the United States. This landed Nigeria in the mess of literally carrying cash to South Africa in a chattered plane, ostensibly to buy arms in the open, or underground market. South African seizure of the undeclared dollars merely set the stage for a future scuffle suited to a retaliatory diplomacy
9. As the United States would not agree to help Nigeria to establish another refinery in the wake of fuel shortages becoming quite frequent, Nigeria had to look towards China which was responsible for helping to repair damaged refineries and building railway lines, refineries and electricity power stations. Jonathan’s bids outside western arrangements was not a plus for old friendship
10. In the course of the electioneering, there was open identification with the opposition by British and US diplomats in Nigeria. They were more interested in not shifting the dates of the elections than upholding the principle that it would make the election unfree and unfair if a third of registered voters were not given their permanent voters cards so that they could vote. Up till the last moment this was the clincher that proved the point that the United States and Britain had taken a position on who should win the elections and muzzling for it even before President Muhammadu Buhari began to thank “our foreign friends” for the support that ousted President Goodluck Jonathan.
It is of interest that, while in office, President Goodluck Jonathan took a stand on each of these issue areas in an environment of virtual lack of engagement between the two major parties on the relationship between Nigeria and externalities. The indifference of the APC to the provably more activist positioning by the Goodluck Administration was a political ploy that panned into a life of its own in the hands of organic columnists in the newspapers, the “progressive” newspapers which openly proposed and acted out untoward methods for emasculating and overwhelming the administration with falsehoods and glorification of anarchy which were passion-sized not to give any credence to the Jonathan Administration.
In the wake of post-election revelations, it may now be stated without sounding partisan, that it was not a matter of sheer happenstance. It was a concerted affair, with dirty-jobbing and engineered falsehoods that refused to register the reality, for instance, that refineries were actually being repaired, new roads and railways were being built, the electricity sector was being studiously revamped, not just unbundled, and that motor manufacturing was going on apace while exportation of cement had become part of the new deal in national development. Also, the building of so many schools and universities, a fit response to zanny violent groups in the North East opposed to western education, seemed like empty projecteering. There was a strain of media power so fixed on emphasizing the corruption which was indeed the Achilles Heel of PDP politics that it tended to be forgotten that corruption was the trough in which all the political parties wallowed. As such, the electorate was confronted by an incumbent in office whose better leg forward in terms of policies and programmes executed or undergoing execution, was wrong-footed by a well-orchestrated inflation of 16 years of PDP’s boundless corruption, skull-duggery and poor handling or even pampering of terrorism in the face of poverty and insecurity. Even where it could be argued that the opposition was creating much of the very disorder that it complained about, it made sense to wonder what Jonathan’s government was actually doing to stem the consequent incivilities in the public space. Ultimately, it was the matter of corruption, too odiously indulged in by the PDP, although powering the organizational format of every political party in charge of a government at local, state and national levels, that offered the coup de grace in the campaign to remove the party from power.
The key issue here is that whereas no political party was there at the thinking post to draw up a serious agenda for the country, as no party could offer an alternative format of policies to reduce or eliminate perceived social problems, the bid to remove the too evidently corrupt government, made up of provably impervious looting mobs, wallowing in the all-pervasive corruption, helped the opposition APC to get away with the fact that it lacked a proper sense of alternatives, lacked an agenda for dealing with it, and was as clueless if not more so than the government it wished to remove. The APC, for that matter, waged the Elections with a manifesto that had a tenuous relationship to actual plans and programmes. All the issues were reduced to propaganda ploys and media coups such as materialized with the abduction of the Chibok girls around which a highly successful national and international campaign was launched that was roundly discrediting Jonathan’s government. Poorly responded to by Government media spokespersons, a thoroughly bemused and brow-beaten citizenry was left naked before the tricknology of a determined opposition which created a false picture of the state of the nation, shredding the image of the country into fragments that only the messianism contrived for retired General Muhammadu Buhari could change for the better. It has made an understanding of the Buhari mission a way of looking at the complexities of crafting an agenda for the country.
THE BUHARI MISSION
On his part, General Muhammadu Buhari was an opposition candidate whose dictatorial and sectarian past needed to be forgiven for his much-vaunted integrity to shine through. A much scarred integrity was his rating, with enormous grey areas inevitable in a national circumstance of pure undiluted kleptocracy that afflicted virtually every organization. As it happened, the fear that he could not manage a modern state, because he had little respect for the rule of law and was strapped to an old neo-feudal Arewa code in the grip of a fraction of the Kaduna Mafia, was made up for by a strident anti-corruption platform that took the pursuit of national security as an imperative in the face of rampaging Boko Haram terrorrism in the North East. It was a great plus for him; as it hacked back to the strong will he had demonstrated in his first coming as a military dictator in 1984 when he and his deputy Brigadier General Tunde Idiagbon sought to effect social changes, so jejunely, ‘with immediate effect’. They gave draconian jail terms to politicians accused of funding their personal affairs or the affairs of their political parties from state coffers. They deployed retroactive decrees to deal with crimes, and generally exhibited intolerance towards liberal democratic culture. With a decree 2, they could jail without trial. With a decree 4, they could imprison people for telling even the truth if it embarrassed the government. At any rate, although accused of dealing in nepotism of a high stretch and of being incapable of fairness in handling people who were not northerners, it showed how much frustration there had been with the PDP incumbent in office that Buhari’s campaigners were able to graft upon him the image of a Born Again democrat. Especially in the light of his three former strikes at winning the Presidency, his democratic credentials were made better with the re-assessment by the ACN leader, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the endorsement, after an initial put down, by such authority figures as Wole Soyinka, the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature. It made Buhari appear a credible candidate above the sassy charge once made by Nasir El Rufai, before he became co-organizer of the same party, that Buhari was unelectable.
All the same, it remained rather intriguing that even as a presumed Born Again democrat, what was most emphasized in the 2015 General election was the wont of the old military dictator to get things done with immediate effect. It yielded, quite frankly, the basis of the fantasy reportage that followed the campaigns. So much was credited to the expeditionary, almost messianic power of Buhari’s personality that his party publicists structured a rather wild manufactory of promises upon it. His firm stand on eradicating corruption and priming national security were very roundly bounced against the presumed fluffiness and assumed cluelessness of the incumbent President. Against the poorly presented and diffidently advertised performances of the ruling PDP under President Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari was being primed to bring back the kidnapped Chibok girls within a month or three, wipe out the Boko Haram insurgency in three months, later increased to six months, declare his assets in the open and cause his ministers to do the same; make electricity work; eliminate fuel shortages by removing fuel subsidy; and keep the refineries working! Change, said the publicists, was not only about removing President Jonathan from power but wiping out corruption and insecurity. Although without a rational-legal definition that could tell the difference between mere stealing and institutional decay, the anti-corruption platform held together. Other promises included halting economic decline in a virtual jiffy, recovering stolen monies; providing a monthly of N5000 for those in the pension bracket, and N5,000 for the 23 million graduates awaiting post-graduation employment. Of course, these would take away more than a third of the national budget if rigorously executed. But it was all a case of ‘carry-go’ by those who had hazy or no memories of the days when, in General Muhammadu Buhari’s first coming as a head of state, the Idiagbon predisposition of doing everything by immediate effect was raised above so-called civilian dithering.
Quite frankly, the APC position in the 2015 elections was a mix of the imponderably unrealistic and highfalutin; that is, even where it was not pedestrian and jejune. By the time victory came, the carping unrealism of the electioneering campaigns had begun to elicit serious doubts and withdrawals of enthusiasm. No coherence could be discerned in the pursuits of the APC as a party. Or as a government! With time, incompetence and fraud such as the addition of more than 40% of padding to the 2016 budget, proved the point of those making a most strident, almost panicky search for a national agenda. Too evidently, a strong case needed to be made for taking campaign fantasies in hand and sidelining them before they became disturbers of the peace. And this was what President Buhari tried to do when he caused his publicists to disavow some of the more hare-brained aspects of the electioneering campaigns. Although he was very roundly grafted with a messianic visage, thrust upon him by a well-oiled propaganda machine to which David Axelrod of the Obama Campaign Trail in the United States was a presumed contributor, it was quite evident that there was a humungous gap between the fashioned glee of propaganda and the reality of genuine think-through that was needed to actualize the Change promised.
For one thing, nothing could hide the reality that the regional ambitions which motivated the involvement of many stalwarts in APC politics, was more important for them than national salvation. So to say, even more than Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari was cast adrift from his supposed party moorings from the very beginning. Unlike his predecessor, who grew within his party but from an underside of relegated minority politics, Buhari, always the Party at the centre of the party, was literally struggling not to be a bystander in his own cause. He had left the APP, which had become simply a sectarian outfit of Arewa politics to form the Congress of Progressive Change CPC which had clearly more of a chance of forming cross-regional alliances, before the welter of alliances and coalitions that became the APC. CPC was upgrading to broaden its base as the ACN had down-graded to do the same in favour of the APC as a mega party. As the mega-party emerged, the first party of its kind in Nigerian politics, playing the old game of coalitioning into a fusion, its originating partners, laboured to tone down extant ideological presumptions. Backing away from restructuring of the Nigerian Federation, the ACN leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had requested the country to go back to the suasions of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s failed Political Reform Conference of 2005. The sheer unreality of the proposition was matched in distractedness only by the need to create a catch-all organization that would be different, not really because it had different programmes and policies, but because it had a potential Presidential candidate with instant will-power based on his reputation as a prime member of the old militariat able to carry through a course of action with immediate effect. Rather than being mired in the dithering that was the wont of the PDP, Buhari’s strait-laced cut was presented as enough to hold together the patchy motley being cobbled together into a winning fusion. For good folklore, it may be recalled that former President Olusegun Obasanjo whom his former nemesis, Asiwaju Tinubu, named as navigator, played a towncrier’s role for the standing of Buhari as a virtual John Wain, the cowboy who comes into town to rid it of ragamuffins.
From the standpoint of appraising the capacity to design a new agenda for the country, it is important to grasp the reality: that the APC was so hung up about removing President Goodluck Jonathan from power that it did not appear to have prepared for the day after victory. Nor did the stalwarts appear to mind that the party was as equally hemmed in by cabals created in the past four decades by regimes of dicta and military overlords who had been active designers of civilian cabals and mafiosi. In effect, it was replicating the multiple splits and schizoid character of the PDP in power. Standing on so much far-fetching and propaganda, it could not lay out the expected programmes of action when it came to giving the new President something to run with. Which made it quite understandable that during the electioneering, Buhari, unwittingly self-deprecating, had often admitted that he would consult widely, on coming to power, in order to find a headway for solving crying national problems. Well, the situation was not made any better by the spectacle of the President ele