Tinubu and Matters of Urgent National Importance
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will take charge as the 16th President of Nigeria from tomorrow. Except and until the courts decide otherwise, he will, for the next four years, be the leader of Africa’s most populous country and largest economy. Tinubu has made no secret of the fact that occupying the highest office in the land is his life-long ambition. Though his name did not get on the ballot until the 2023 electoral cycle and he did not even feature once as an aspirant until last year, Tinubu has reportedly been on this presidency project since 2007. Sixteen years after, he now has his coveted prize, but clearly in challenging economic, social and political circumstances that many would not have imagined when he started dreaming years ago.
He wanted the job badly, now he has it. Now, he has to show that he is up to the task and that the 16-year quest was not solely driven by personal ambition. It is setting up to be a turbulent period. And he should expect no understanding or sympathy. He is not likely to get any. In fact, he should expect strong and sustained hostility in some quarters, given the temper and the outcome of the 2023 polls. His administration may not even have a honeymoon period, or may have the shortest ever. So, he should brace himself for a cold reception. Yet, he should be ready to give the game of his life. Nothing short of an A-Game will do for this period.
Tinubu has no option but to hit the ground running. He doesn’t have the luxury of time that others had. He needs to announce his major decisions quickly and clearly. He needs to name his cabinet and other key appointees with despatch, and give his team members clear deliverables and timelines. Leaders are as good as their teams. Tinubu’s capacity to move the needle in these challenging times will depend largely on the competence and credibility of his key appointees. The team also needs to be inclusive to ensure proper reflection of our plurality. There would be pressure to give priority in appointments to people from his ethnic stock or from his party or to people who helped him to power. That is the road to ruins. He should avoid it like a plague. He should go for the best hands available not just within his party but also across and beyond party lines.
As president, he has his job well cut out for him. There is a lot to do, and there will be the temptation to want to do so much at once. This is another trap that he should resist. He will need to prioritise, and not spread too thin. While not ignoring other areas, he will need to identify three to five key sectors that his administration wants to focus intensely on. His choice of the priority areas should be guided by the potential to address key and multiple national challenges.
The ultimate decision is his, but I will reiterate here three areas that I had highlighted in previous interventions on this page.
The first is the need to prioritise national healing. Over the last few decades, Nigeria has become an increasingly divided country. This is largely due to the failure to embrace and sustain healing as an urgent national priority and to stick to equity as an abiding article of faith. Also implicated here is the unchecked machination of those who manufacture, magnify, manipulate and mobilise identities for narrow ends. Electoral contests provide one of the biggest playgrounds for identity entrepreneurs, especially in electoral cycles that expose our natural and manufactured cleavages.
The 2023 electoral cycle was a classic testcase, and as feared, it exposed our paperedover divisions. The same-faith ticket of the ruling party (which cannot be divorced from Tinubu’s ambition) triggered the open and secret mobilisation of religious identities for electoral purposes. Regional, ethnic and generational identities were also thrown in the mix, highlighting various shades of entitlement mentalities and elevating the electoral value of combustible identities.
Stripped of some remarkable surprises/ exceptions that should be held up as markers of progress, the outcome of the 2023 presidential poll largely exposes how our politics is still wedded to primordial sentiments. Apart from regional bloc votes in most of the north east, south east and south west, there were dangerous campaigns about: ‘your own is your own’; ‘two Muslims are better than one’; and the candidate of the church. This is bad news for a country still struggling with managing its diversity. The post-election phase remains one of the most toxic ever.
The climate is complicated by the fact that for the first time in the 4th Republic, the winner of the presidential election did not poll up to 50% of the valid votes cast. Two things must be emphasised here: one, scoring more than 50% of the votes cast is not a constitutional requirement—what is required is to score the highest number of votes and to meet the spread requirement, which is at issue for the first time in this republic; two, a winning candidate securing less than 50% will always be a probability once the election is very competitive, as we had in 1979 when Alhaji Shehu Shagari polled only 33.77% of the votes cast and still became the president. By comparison, Tinubu scored 36.61% of the valid votes cast in 2023. Had any of the other