Presidential Abracadabra!
“…In nearly every one of these gatherings across the length and breadth of this vast, impossible country, active open dissections, and excoriations of the government of the day is on rowdy display, capped often by all manner of hare-brained solutions and scenarios on how best to govern and impose order on one of the world’s most problematic federations. I call this place ‘the land of a hundred million presidents’ without an authentic sovereign because everyone other than the elected president knows what is to be done. In trying to process this cacophony, nothing tangible ever gets done…”
The foregoing excerpts from Dr Chidi Amuta’s foreword to my 2017 book, ‘Against the Run of Play: How an incumbent president was defeated in Nigeria’, could not have been more apt. In the past few days, Nigeria has witnessed an epidemic of presidential declarations. In the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), where nomination forms cost a whopping sum of N100 million, the question is no longer who has declared but who has not. The outrageous (more than $2 million) fee meant to ‘deter’ politicians has become the main attraction and perhaps explains why some insist that the APC nomination process is a not-so-disguised money laundering enterprise. This is perhaps the only plausible explanation for a situation in which ‘anonymous’ groups would pay scandalous amounts of money to procure nomination forms for ‘disinterested’ aspirants. Of course there are also those who argue that the incumbent has so lowered the bar that almost every Nigerian now believes he could be president.
Bill Schneider, a former CNN senior political analyst who is currently Senior Fellow & Resident Scholar at Third Way (a Washington think tank) and Professor at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, once argued that United States citizens choose their presidents like spoiled kids choose Christmas presents. “Americans usually get what they want in a president, but then after a while they discover they want something else,” Schneider quipped. Most Nigerians, as I also argued in the past, would count Americans lucky. In our clime, as Christmas presents go, parents who do the pickings are not as benevolent as to consider the preferences of their kids. That is also the way it goes for the choice of presidents in Nigeria.
Since I can remember, the election of our number one citizen has been the prerogative of a few power brokers who first make their permutations, leaving the electorate to simply provide their seal of approval. And since those preferences are made more to conform to the predilections of such power conclaves, public interest is never part of the equation. If the morning therefore shows the day, as conventional wisdom teaches, things might not be different this time around. From my reading, it is obvious that some clever jugglers have already thrown several balls into the air and may just be waiting for the right moment to show their hand.
Ordinarily, open-seat presidential elections attract a deluge of aspirants, but we have never experienced anything like this under the current democratic dispensation. We hear of unregistered associations of hungry Nigerians buying N100 million nomination forms for political fat cats. We are also learning that APC is operating like a secret society with closet members in very high places, including those hiding behind one finger—desperate and ambitious men with no courage of conviction. Although with yesterday’s decision that presidential aspirants should quit the federal cabinet, the men will now be separated from the boys. Even at that, the lack of transparency and accountability in the ruling party’s nomination process is such that a friend told me yesterday that members of the Association of Nigerian Bandits (please don’t ask me for their operational address) collected and took the APC presidential nomination form to their
supremo, Bello Turji in Tozai Forest!
I am aware that right from the inception of the Fourth Republic in 1999, money has been an influential factor in our electoral politics and governance. But never have we witnessed this kind of brazen bazaar in which the two leading parties are practically hawking tickets to the highest bidders. That the APC has taken the excesses of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from which it took power in 2015 to postgraduate levels is what concerns Nigerians. With contestation for power reduced to a financial shoot-out and sinister behind-closed-doors deals rather than open debates about ideas and proposals for addressing challenges that plague the nation, the foundation for the next government is already on shaky ground.
There is no longer any debate about the fact that Nigeria is today in a very bad place across all sectors. I may be an illiterate in economic matters, but it must mean something that JPMorgan has “removed Nigeria from its list of emerging market sovereign recommendations that investors should be ‘overweight’ in”. Yet, despite the challenges ahead, the presidency is still seen largely as a big (and glamorous) prize to be won rather than a call to serve the public good. I fail to understand why our entitled politicians cannot see beyond their privileges even when our Titanic may be sinking.
Last Friday night, dozens of gunmen on motorcycles invaded Sabon Garin Damri and Kalahe villages in Bakura Local Government Area of Zamfara State, killing and maiming all within sight. Hospitals and houses were razed and at least 63 villagers were fatally shot in broad daylight. “In Sabon Garin Damri, they killed at least 26. Thereafter, the armed men moved to Kalahe village where they killed more than 10 persons. In between these two communities, at least 40 bodies were recovered,” a resident identified as Aminu Yusuf, reportedly told Daily Trust. Incidentally, a former governor of the state who spent eight years in power before joining colleagues in the Senate that has become their ‘retirement home’ and whose administration planted the root of the current crisis, also wants to be president of Nigeria under the APC platform!