21st June, 2023
By Olakunle Abimbola
Hardly a secret: the failed conspiracy to scupper the last general election and foist an interim national government (IMG), that Prof. Wole Soyinka just spoke of.
What might not be so clear — at least to the undiscerning, among whom many count — is a new but vile generation of “owners of Nigeria”, sprouting under our very noses.
The good news, though: the old “owners” appear losing grip, while their new wannabe cousins are making a hash of their gambit — from the result of their many wild machinations during the last cycle of elections.
Nigeria’s democracy is the better — and stronger — for it.
While the old “owners” of Nigeria — discredited military-era rulers and allies — use thunder-and-bluster, their new kith-and-kin apply under-your-skin stealth: cynically mouthing the law; or shuffling some clever religious cards.
That makes them all the more noxious, for they hide behind some phoney moral force.
Kongi warned of populist symbolism as crass opportunism, which could set voters on a joy ride to nowhere, and ultimately end in tears.
“Revolution is not about lining up behind nearest available symbol,” he stressed on June 16 in Lagos, while unveiling the latest work in his Interventionist series, The Putin Files: Excursion Around The Ideology Of Pain. “When a symbol does emerge, however, we are obliged to examine every aspect of what is fortuitously an offer, and continue to guard our freedoms every inch of the way.”
On Nigeria and how to run it, a Babel of voices blared before the polls, professing newfound patriotism, pointing to their preferred candidates as sacred actualizers.
To that, WS just added a famous ambivalence, but in support of no one in particular.
“Project Nigeria, I must confess, has become near terminally soul-searing. Do I still believe in it?” he teased. “I’m no longer certain, but first we must rid ourselves of the tyranny of the ignorant and the opportunism of time-servers.”
Tyranny of the ignorant and the opportunism of time-servers! That hoopla has defined the 2023 electioneering, the election proper and even this post-poll era; with plots and counter-plots to tip the scale by hook or by crook.
Indeed, it has been a season of ceaseless drama: the election itself; the disputation, fair or foul; and contrived ”uncertainty” — the vile plot that plagued President Bola Tinubu’s inauguration till the virtual last second, though former President Muhammadu Buhari had worked out a most seamless hand-over that Nigeria ever saw.
Folks can figure out which candidate best approximated the babble of the ignorant and the rank opportunism by time-servers.
Still, a perceptive profiling of three candidates, to see how each fits in, will do.
Where does former Vice President Atiku Abubakar belong? For starters, he was the PDP candidate. To be sure, the PDP of 1999 (that swept Atiku and former President Olusegun Obasanjo into power) is different from the PDP of 2023, that now languishes in the wilderness.
Still, to the extent that PDP was the the “Army Arrangement” (to borrow the title of one of Fela’s iconic releases) that gifted mainly conservative forces power in 1999 — many of them anti-democratic elements — it’s reasonable to project Atiku would be comfy with this old power bloc.
But as the PDP appears progressively weaker since losing power in 2015, so would the old “owners” of Nigeria: frailer they get, as Nigeria’s democracy gains extra years. About time too!
President Bola Tinubu (then the All Progressives Congress candidate) is the direct opposite of Atiku — if not the outright nemesis of the power ancien regime that Atiku so exemplifies.
Tinubu’s trajectory, from 1999, says it all. From the sole surviving Alliance for Democracy (AD) governor in 2003, he galvanized a South West progressives power reclaim, starting from 2007, first under Action Congress (AC); then from 2011, under the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN).
By 2014, Tinubu’s ACN had inspired a new opposition alliance: APC. APC, in 2015, would flash PDP the red card, though with the help of some PDP elements, who joined the other APC legacy partners: Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and Rochas Okorocha’s All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) rump and Vice President Kashim Shettima’s All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP).
So, might the old conservative bloc be hostile to Tinubu as they are warm to Atiku? Not that clear-cut: Tinubu is a practical (not dogmatic) progressive that boasts friends in the conservative camp, just as Atiku too could posture as some liberal conservative.
It’s that seeming mishmash that the new “owners” hoped to crush, with Obasanjo, living to the full his post-power role as gadfly, anointing Peter Obi as new messiah.
But both Obasanjo and Obi were old PDP hierarchs, very much part of the old rot they now railed against. Still, their holy rage was sweet music to the band of frustrated youths, blissfully ignorant of their country’s history, and the pair’s roles in the debacle.
But even if you could see through Obasanjo and Obi, it was harder seeing through the motives of lawyers and priests, flying new kites, carefully veiling their partisan blights.
One top lawyer created a controversy out of a hitherto settled matter in law: the place of Abuja, the federal capital, in determining a presidential candidate’s win or loss.
A bevy of priests, orthodox and Pentecostal, turned their pulpits into subversive platforms, pumping captive congregation full of partisan bile; turning the church into a partisan camp, restive and radicalized, on account of the so-called “Muslim-Muslim” ticket.
As the result hit the polity, and the “wrong” candidate had won, some Catholic priests staked their integrity on bad-mouthing the polls; and after, pushing strange legal theories of holding up inauguration, until legal challenges were completed, all in clear breach of the Constitution.
But if all else failed, the clamour for “interim national government” wouldn’t — they must have thought — not with after suffusing the polity with Armageddon tales.
All hail — or nail — the new owners of Nigeria!
As it happened, that plot also crumbled, with a new government in place and doing the work of state. Still, the strategy of sacred deceit has hardly changed.
As white lies choked the media space during electioneering, so have some litigants been dishing out flowery stories, flattering badly faltering court procedures, just to game gullible partisans.
But good news: so far, democracy is holding its own against the new wannabe, as it has wrestled, to a halt, the old “owners” of Nigeria. That is heart-warming.