Nine stitches

Nigerian politics today shows the truism in the saying, ‘a stitch in time saves nine’. It seems all the major characters in this rapidly developing drama had ignored to make use of a vital ingredient in politics: timing. Now everyone is scrambling to gain the upper hand, reclaim lost territory, control damage or throw wild punches hoping that they will hit the right target. In the next few months, Nigerian voters will be asked to decide who made the right moves, who took the sensible risks or who made lifetime blunders. What happens between now and then will be determined by political intelligence, huge resources and the disposition of agents of the Nigerian state.

It now seems clear that Saraki’s side had delayed bolting out of the APC until the fear of the Buhari mystique and the EFCC had decimated its ranks of the big names that were its natural first eleven. Now Saraki’s side is out, but not out of danger. Until the National Assembly resumes in September, they will have to fight for their political lives to improve their ranks and acceptance as the side that decides Buhari’s political future. Buhari himself had to be vigorously awakened by a handful of governors and a new party chairman to the reality that politics is all about protecting and expanding turfs. By the time he descended into the real world of deals, pleas and huge doses of humility, a big chunk of his turf had drifted away. The subjects and objects of this huge tussle themselves were so engrossed in the search for options that they left all their flanks exposed. It was not a question of if, but when they would leave the party, a situation that left little room for unanticipated maneuvers. The major receptacle of the outpouring of APC’s losses, the PDP, was poorly prepared to handle the largess, or it couldnt believe its luck. It may now find that it has too little room for the defectors, or it may fail to unseat Buhari because it is unable to digest much of its old and fairly new ambitions.

All this frenzy will be amusing if it were not seriously about the nation’s future. Buhari will now have to carefully count, almost on a daily basis, how many of the satellites that revolved around him are still there. This will be very stressful for a politician who had routinely ignored too many turning points. The strategy of denouncing all the defectors as worthless and irredeemably corrupt will have many blunt edges. These were the people who made a major contribution to his electoral success, the same people his corruption-fighting government co-habited with for three years. He is left with a rump of loyalists that bear a disturbing resemblance to those who defected, people with cases before the EFCC who may be holding on only out of fear or the hope that he still has some capacity to help them win elections. He has highly elusive numbers, but not the quality he needs to say his camp is better qualified to fight corruption, fix the economy and secure large populations. When he takes stock, he will find in his camp deeply unpopular governors, incompetent ministers, handpicked party leaders, senators that could be in jail next week if the judiciary and the EFCC do their jobs. He may yet find that many of them are greek gifts when he attempts to create harmony out of bitter enemies, such as el-Rufai and Shehu Sani.

The Saraki camp must be involved in critical damage assessment, and how much political asset it needs to make it feel secure. The challenges it has before it are mind-boggling: managing ambitions of returnees and traditional presidential flag-seekers; creating room for Kwankwaso in Kano without offending hostile interests; balancing the gain in Tambuwal against hostility from Wammako, Aliero and Yarima in the strategic north west; making full use of the outing of Speaker Dogara from the APC among northern Christians; eroding the remnants of Buhari’s support in the middle belt without risking a backlash from poor handling of religious politics; deepening the divide around Tinubu in the south west; consolidating strong resistance against Buhari in the south east and the south south even in the face the fear of persecution of powerful politicians by the federal government; and above all, demystifying Buhari’s infallibility among millions of northern voters.

They will have to do all these with very little time; while fighting a regime desperate to retain power, and in a party which may still prove a serious hard sell in many parts of the country. Its considerable numbers of defectors must make immediate and pronounced impact by squeezing APC’s space. Their biggest liability is the good case to be made that they are all about getting more power than they had under the Buhari administration. The Buhari camp will twist the knife with propaganda that they merely want to return the nation to the Jonathan-type kleptocracy.

The nation will be challenged to choose between politicians who will fight for new mandates with old, tired weapons. President Buhari’s depleted camp will be hesitant to campaign around security in a nation that gave it full endorsement mainly to secure citizens. These days, in its stronghold of the north, death and destruction stalk communities that were substantially spared the ravages of Boko Haram before the Buhari presidency. The Boko Haram epicenter is not out of the woods yet, and terrorists remind the nation of this every once in a while with suicide bombs and audacious assaults on communities and the military. Buhari’s fight against corruption is visible only in the number of court cases against a handful of politicians, many of them filed long before he became president. Figures from sales of crude oil represent the only changes in an economy that does not create new jobs or opportunities. The assault against a resurgent opposition will be led by a president in his 70s whose vision is still as unclear as the state of his health.

The job of his opposition is no less daunting. It will have to prove that it is more than a combination of the left-over of the discredited PDP and defectors whose only political goals are to recapture and abuse power. It will have to resolve major tussles between those who think its future requires new vision, new faces and a new brand against those who believe that its traditional reliance on big, familiar names and tons and tons of money is the way to go. It may have too little time to convince enough Nigerians that it wants to do more than just replace the Buhari administration. Can it sell new ideas and strategies on security, job creation and building new foundations for a nation in search of a future?

If we stay awake until end of September, we may very well witness a desperate dash in place of a long distance race.

Jamila Abubakar wrote from Abuja this piece