Category: Opinion

Fellow Nigerians, let me say categorically and emphatically that our dear beloved country is dangerously haemorrhaging again and this perfidious drift must be halted urgently before we all end up in perdition. Anyone telling President Muhammadu Buhari that all is well or that his government is moving in the right direction is either lying or pretending like a rattlesnake. And there are many scorpions around ready to mislead every government and move on effortlessly when things fall apart. For sure President Buhari possesses the ability to move this country in the right direction and lead us to where we want to be but right now it is not happening and the soul of the people palpitates! I’ve been on several television and radio interviews in the past one week and the commonest question is on the performance of our President. The general perception is that the change mantra seems not to be working and the world is worried because of the importance of Nigeria in the comity of nations.
I hope our President will get to see this piece, read it and ruminate on the points I will raise. The Buhari government has lost a substantial equity in just one year as I will try to explain in the next few paragraphs. It must be noted that Nigerians were happy with the election that ushered in President Buhari. Even those who did not vote for him accepted him with unusual equanimity. Those we expected to fight and throw tantrums simply vamoosed into their bunkers. The expectations were high then but I doubt if enough effort was put into seizing the momentum and translating it into a mass movement that would have stood the test of time. It is not too late to reclaim the moment.

The faith Nigerians had in the abilities and incorruptibility of Buhari is mighty enough to move mountains. But unfortunately, I think the government took many things for granted once it took over the reins of power. The government mistakenly believed that the support of the people was like several blank cheques which it could cash at any point in time. The general impatience of Nigerians and their desire for progressive action were never put into consideration. I remember writing two memos to our President in quick successions, when I realised that Nigerians were getting restless and restive, one of which was the desperate memo that earned me an invitation to the Presidential Villa for which I am so honoured and proud.

Still the government did not respond appropriately to the yearnings of the populace. The major problem is that the priorities of Buhari were never palpable to the general public as everything seemed to operate in utmost secrecy. This is probably a relic of the military days when surprise and spontaneity achieved more. However, democracy is an open book and it has become even more so since the internet turned the world into a global information minefield. I’m sure it was assumed that the people would never doubt or query the sincerity of a messiah. So there was no need to provide any real information about the activities of government. That was the first fallacy.

The second fallacy is that people would give the President plenty of time to unfold his change agenda. One year on, it is obvious that this has not been the case. President Buhari should have moved faster once the people started grumbling about the apparent sluggishness of his administration. The selection of his cabinet was annoyingly slow and by the time it eventually came it had evaporated into a deja vu. There was no element of surprise to elicit major excitement. In fact, most people wondered why it took so long to assemble his present team most of whom he could have picked in two weeks or even before he was sworn in. The demystification of Buhari became manifest from that moment not because the team he picked is not worthy or creditable but because the interminable delay in making the choices cost the nation dearly.

The next problem was that the President should have moved to unite and unify the country immediately. It was clear that the previous administrations had riven great division into the Nigerian polity. A new beginning seeking to heal the ulcerous, cancerous wounds of religious and ethnic disunity and disaffection was required. However, starting with a war of attrition, it was obvious our President would soon have his hands full. Not that some of the wars were unnecessary but the timing and methodology should have been meticulously weighed and analysed before launching into the requisite offensive. There was a lot to learn from our nascent democracy. It would have been easier to embark on some of these wars as a military ruler that the President formerly was but not as a civilian leader which the President now is. That realisation appears to have been missed by some of our President Buhari’s advisers.

For example, while the war against corruption was desperately urgent, it ought to have been known that it was intricately and delicately tied to the economy. The need to recover the looted funds as quickly as possible and use them to reinvigorate the economy needed to be balanced by the need to do so expeditiously and tactfully so that the main objective would be fulfilled. My humble opinion and advice would have been to use the carrot and stick method rather than the kill and go style that has now exposed our economy to grave danger and imminent collapse. The angry mob of Nigerians goading on our President has blatantly refused to assimilate the magnitude of the resultant repercussions. But it should be noted that those who feel frustrated about a rotten system can never be bothered if the entire structure collapses. It is such acute disillusionment that gave rise to the ascendancy of a Donald Trump in America. It is the duty and responsibility of leadership to wear its thinking cap well and rise above the giddiness of the baying crowd who have nothing to lose and only wish to see the spectacle of blood flowing without any degree of humanity or compassion for the impoverished masses that they claim to represent. The same people who hailed Buhari yesterday are the ones denigrating him today.

Once it was impossible to generalise the war against corruption to engulf all politicians tainted with corruption no matter their affiliation the government should have requested for a blanket return of government booty via negotiation with all public office holders. Those who failed to take up this generous offer of recovery could then be visited with the might and power of retributive justice. An example of when this great opportunity was missed was when government unreasonably told Nigerians they could no longer pay foreign currencies in cash into their accounts. Perhaps government in its naivety did not remember that politicians had prosecuted the last election through the almighty dollar because it reduced the bulkiness of gratifications. Government should have patiently waited for the dollars to come in, whether in cash or not, before pouncing on the owners. Once that opportunity was missed, the next was to discreetly stretch its tentacles across the world in search of thieves and money launderers. Assets at home and abroad should have been quietly traced for possible confiscation. This could have been done without all the present grandstanding and hullabaloo. When you hear the elephant stomping the ground behind you in a one directional manner, you know it is time to run and hide. In this period when we are celebrating the life and times of Mohammed Ali perhaps it is poignant to say that you do not telegraph your punches rather you “rope a dope”!

Also, the moment our President chose a military style of operation he should have known that corruption would fight back with ferocity and velocity. For example, once it seemed the former President, Dr Goodluck Jonathan had been marked for humiliation even demolition, I knew our President was playing with the tiger’s tail and I sounded my note of warning. Before we could say Jack Robinson, the Niger Delta avengers returned with a vengeance and brought us back to our knees. Today our oil production has plunged to an all-time low even when we had been grappling with the nightmare of low crude oil prices. The Niger Delta Avengers army seems ready to make Boko Haram look like child’s play as they strangulate the economy, degrade the environment and decimate the local population that they claim to be fighting for. Is this what we need to add to our plethora of problems at this time? The answer is a big NO.

The militarisation of Nigeria has become very suffocating. Shiites are being killed in droves in the North West. Mass graves have been identified and uncovered. The Biafra agitators are being massacred in broad-day light and its leaders detained indefinitely. Boko Haram remains a monumental menace to society despite the extra-ordinary efforts of our military and Intelligence agencies. The Fulani and or Libyan herdsmen have added to the conundrum out of the blues. Different militant groups are now armed to the teeth. Trust me these guys don’t look like they are joking. Nobody fights on as many fronts as this government now seems to be fighting without risking it all.

Many have argued that Nigeria should be restructured. It is believed that its present configuration is too artificial. Most of the States are no longer viable while some fringe or full-blown eccentrics are asking for more. It is interesting that in the build up to independence our leaders from the North, Southwest and East were saying the same thing in different words. Nigeria is peopled by diverse nationalities and any nation must recognise this diversity and give it voice and room to flourish. A continuous denial of this fact can only lead to self-destruction. One of our erstwhile leaders in his wisdom foisted unitary system on us when we had successfully thrived under true federalism. That was a mark of courage notwithstanding that it was a totally flawed decision. Our President must find a similar kind of courage to find and examine all the previous recommendations made during different and various constitutional conferences and implement the universal clamour for true federalism. There is nothing new under the sun, as they say, our President already has a rich reservoir of knowledge deposited in some government archives to reach the best decision and modality that will achieve this end. My simple solution, Nigeria must return to and embrace and practise true Federalism. Not doing so is like pushing our luck too far and postponing doomsday.

What is of utmost importance in calling for a political configuration that will meet the yearnings of our people is the state of the economy. My submission is that the economy will never recover in an atmosphere of tension, uncertainty and panic. The Federal Government needs to tone down the negative rhetoric about our country. That unfortunate moniker of a corrupt nation that has been hung round our necks is dragging us down and denying Nigeria the investment in its future that it requires. Our President must make it clear that he is not the only saint in Nigeria but that the majority of Nigerians are saints and he is the leader who epitomises that. This is why he was chosen by the majority of good and well-meaning Nigerians who want someone that would demonstrate to the world that the generality of Nigerians are decent, hardworking and honest and that it is a small minority of Nigerians that are crooks. We must begin to walk away from our ugly past and work assiduously for a beautiful future.

Every nation has lived through its terrible moments but none ever cuddled the past forever as we now seem to be doing. Nigeria is richly blessed with human and natural resources. There is always a new dawn tomorrow and we must get ready for it, embrace it and by so doing seize the initiative. There would always be criminals in every society but we must never allow them to steal our future or still dominate our narrative when we have so many great men and women we can be proud of. Fortunately, we have a President that stands head and shoulders above all else and he clearly leads the way. He must now show it by moving at the fast pace that his country desires, nay demands!

In his dying moments, trapped and ensnared in a maze of intrigues and subterfuges he has woven round himself and his people, Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American revolutionary hero aka the liberator, was known to have exclaimed: “How am I ever going to get out of this labyrinth?”. So close to his chest did the liberator play his cards that nobody could predict his next move or military gamble. One of his aides was known to have quipped: “only my master knows what my master is thinking about.”

In a brilliant fictional recreation titled The General in his Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Colombian master of magical realism, has done gripping justice to the last days of Simon Bolivar. What is important is to note that there are labyrinths and there are labyrinths. For the trapped it is mandatory to find a way out of them. But while some labyrinths are entirely self-made or self-spun, a case of the trapper being entrapped by his own wiles and subterfuges or being finally manipulated by his own manipulations, some labyrinths are woven by a constellation of political forces in their economic, spiritual and structural malevolence which leaves the entrapped floundering in hopeless and futile audacity.

General Mohammadu Buhari is trapped in their labyrinth. It is a severe, mortal maze which is not entirely of his own making, but one to which his political failings have contributed significantly. This is how the Nigerian presidency must appear to clinical and dispassionate onlookers at the moment. It is obviously easier to find your way out of a labyrinth of your own making, but certainly not out of a maze unfurled by others. To start with, the initiative is not yours. You are merely reacting to forces that may be one or two steps ahead. The Buhari presidency has already lost one or two of these epic battles of will and wits. But how did we get to this sorry pass in an atmosphere of revolutionary clamour for change?

It is obvious that the nation is going through a very difficult phase and nothing is guaranteed, not even deep, enduring institutional change. As the first anniversary of the Buhari administration stole upon the country last week, it was obvious that all was not well. There was an atmosphere of dolorous dismay and quiet desperation. Even the much awaited presidential speech, if it was not exactly a damp squib, did not do much to galvanize the nation into greater resolve or mend its broken spirit.

As the harsh and hostile economic realities finally dissolve and evaporate the remnants of the old Nigerian middle class and its lower substratum, there is much bitterness and anger in the land while the old lower classes welcome back their absconding siblings with open smiling arms. The child who says his father did not take his chance will soon find out that there are no chances left to be taken but an illusionist fantasia in the cannibal casino.

But in our misdirected anger and the orchestrated vendetta against the Buhari administration, it is important to keep our eyes focused on the ball. There are two articles of faith on which this column still stands. First is that regime change for the nation was mandatory in the context of the kleptomaniac flailing and floundering of the Jonathan administration. Second is that owing to the structural contingency imposed on the nation, there was no one else to turn to in the circumstances we found ourselves except the retired general from Daura.

Anybody who believes otherwise no matter the highfalutin rhetoric is a purveyor of ethnic, religious and economic irrationality and an enemy of political rationality and the immanent logic that undergirds the development of human society. But this being a democratic set up, everybody is entitled to his opinion. The only thing is that you cannot win back what you lost in the arena of democratic contention by a resort to violent demonstration and the minatory blackmail of other groups.

Nigerians may bemoan the electoral fate which has foisted a seventy four year old retired general who may well be past his prime and who ruled last about thirty years earlier on them, but this is a question for the Nigerian selectorate. The selectorate select and the electorate elect willy-nilly. Thrice in his younger and more vibrant prime, Buhari offered himself for national services and thrice the Nigerian selectorate checkmated him. It was only when they had their back to the wall and revolutionary anarchy beckoned that they relented just like they did with him thirty three years earlier. But on both occasions, they made sure they put the politically challenged general in their labyrinth. It is not a long leash.

What Nigerians should bemoan is the contradiction between structural contingency and human agency which has made it possible for a few individuals to determine the political destiny of the nation. Oligopolistic politics is the politics of oligarchies and not meant for average folks who are nothing but spectators at a play of giants. In the process of misruling and misdirecting the nation, the political oligarchs have acquired enormous economic clout, and they are not going to let go easily.

Such has been the epic structural gridlock that by the time the political divinations and anti-democractic diviners come up with their short list, the best and the brightest, the most qualified to rule Nigeria in the age of rampaging globalization and knowledge explosion, would have been casually eliminated. And those who are left, haunted by the trauma of ancestral memory or the pathology of personal suffering can only rule with a persecution complex so bitter and damaging that it must affect their judgement.

The structural constraints and contingency which put a president in an iron labyrinth can also be seen in the existing dominant party formations in the country. These political agglomerations are not parties in the real organic sense of the word but special project platforms in power formation. But they often work. This is the reality since the advent of the military. Thus in the Second Republic the NPN was formed as a broad national coalition to ease off the military from power.

Once the NPN briskly unraveled, its military patrons stepped in to prevent a bloody challenge to the dominant power formation in all its dire consequences. The clairvoyant Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye could not have put it better when he noted that there were only two parties in the country: the military and their civilian subalterns. General Babangida’s Transition Parties, SDP and NRC, brilliantly dismissed as government parastatals by Chief Anthony Enahoro, perished with the transition programme after acquiescing in the annulment of the best presidential election ever held in the nation.

In the case of General Abacha’s transition, the parties famously described as the five fingers from a leprous hand did not even make any pretence to neutrality and independence. They existed at the mercy of the prickly despot and were there merely to facilitate his metamorphosis into civilian dictator. They died with the despot and when General Abdulsalaam Abubakar tried to resuscitate them in his maiden broadcast to the nation, he was swiftly countermanded by those who put him there and he changed tack accordingly.

Consequently, the PDP was conceived like its old forebear the NPN: a broad coalition of Nigerian political heavyweights that could guarantee post-military stability and peace even at the expense genuine democracy and development. For some time, the PDP stayed the course, relentlessly chopping off the head of their party chairmen until they lost concentration and forgot why they were there. In a self-deluding tip at political equity they brought a power neophyte who brought the house crashing on everybody.

Regime change became inevitable. In the past, it was through the mechanism of military intervention. But since military rule was no longer feasible, a coalition of contraries had to be cobbled together to ease the PDP out of power. Unlike the PDP which is an organic formation of the ruling class, the APC is an antagonistic platform of mutually exclusive political tendencies brought together for the purpose of regime change. Once that purpose is achieved, there is no unifying vision or bonding experience to fall back upon. If care is not taken, the party’s tenure in federal power may be much shorter than imagined. Perhaps that is the whole idea, anyway.

General Buhari may be finding out to his peril that unlike military rule in which command and authority are clearly delineated, civilian rule is a different kettle of fish. Khaki no be Guinea brocade or Atiku fabric for that matter. In the military, you know where the enemy is or where he is likely to come from. But in the cloak and dagger world of real political war, the enemy is in bed and already embedded. Having failed to stamp his authority on the centrifugal forces in his party early enough and having lost the senate to contrary forces, the president has found himself in the labyrinth of intimate adversaries.

Last week, the Turaki of Adamawa, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, opened another front for the president by lending his considerable weight to the clamour for an urgent restructuring of the country. It is easy and tempting to dismiss these increasingly strident calls as mere red-herring or opportunistic political gaming. But they find resonance in an increasing number of Nigerians who believe that this is the only solution to the political shenanigans which have hobbled Nigeria’s development and stifled the diverse energies and creative spirit of its diverse people.

President Buhari appears to be unmoved and unimpressed by the cheek of it all. While he should be commended for heroically battling the scourge of corruption and for restoring the sanity of the Nigerian state, the reality on ground shows that the unease in at least two significant sections of the country coupled with the international and local conspiracy to defang his economic nationalism are beginning to chip away at his statist and commandist escutcheon. If these loud rumblings were to find traction in a Yoruba middle class already embittered by the prospects of economic vaporization, it may put the entire change project and its south West phalanx in acute political jeopardy indeed.

Going forward, the president needs to go back to the drawing board. The creeping militarization of the polity draws the army into needless and unwise civil commotions. This is the time for the president to commence a rigorous study of this difficult country in its political minutiae and economic, religious and ethnic particularities and peculiarities. For starters, rather than throw the last conference into the archives as he vowed to do, the president should gather a group of wise citizens who will study all the conferences and advise him on the way forward accordingly.

1. Introit
On May 29, 2016, I found it expedient to buy a VIP ticket and watch two unfortunate extremities struggle to overreach, over-exert, and out-shout each other to exhaustion. On the one hand were the inconsolable losers of a bygone corrupt and derelict era for whom the idea that there is anything, anything at all, that you might have gotten right in one year is sacrilege. I will return to their matter presently. On the other hand is the swelling rank of your fundamentalist supporters, a dangerous breed of personality cultists who present a clear and present danger to our democracy insofar as they criminalize as high treason the slightest entertainment of the thought that there are things, plenty of things, that you got wrong in the first year of your presidency. For this category, to even say that there are things you could have done better is a crime deserving of capital punishment.
Now that both camps have exhausted themselves in the destructive and counter-productive venture of screaming themselves hoarse to demonize or deify you yesterday, those of us with a pan-Nigerian agenda beyond your person to think and worry about can essay a few reflections for your consideration above these two fundamentalisms. I will cut to the chase.
2. A Divided Country
I read your speech. I was very pleased to note that it passed the hubris test. You elected the tack of humility in presenting your case to the people. This is encouraging. There is so much arrogance of power in Nigeria. Our national history is such that power has never ever had to respect the dignity of the people. Power has always towered above them, separated from them. This has damaged the psychology of power as it has damaged the psychology of the people. Power needs to be patiently retrained to understand who the master is: the people. The people also need psychological retraining for they have come to naturalize the idea of power as their lord and master. They are the first to defend power’s “right” to talk at them and not talk to them. They are programmed to be hostile to whoever tells them that this needs to change – especially if they have constructed a personality cult around the incumbent holder of power as is your case. Furthermore, your communication team is so hubristic, its leader so arrogant, that your own contrast with them is always soothing.
Beyond the humble tone of that speech, my assessment is that you continue to grossly underestimate the problem posed by the widening bitter divisions in the country. At no time in my entire adult life have our traditional fault lines of ethnicity, religion, and political affiliation been this nakedly poisonous and fratricidal. There is so much hate across the land it corrodes critical intelligence and saps valuable energies Nigeria could use for development. Your government needs to understand that nothing can be achieved in this kind of wounded and injured context. It is true that there is little you can do about what is really feeding a great deal of this hate: the original sin of your ethnicity, your religion, and your geopolitical origin. However, it would be deadly to mobilize these as the only catalysts of the division and bitterness. There are layers and layers of historical injustice and essential unfairness going back to the very foundation of Nigeria. Nigeria is one of the most unfair nations on the face of the earth. You must never give up trying to heal the country at a fundamental level.
As citizen Adesanmi, I don’t give a rat’s ass about those who hate you because you are Fulani, because you are a Moslem, because you are a northerner. I kick their sorry asses whenever it tickles my fancy. Other times, I just mostly ignore and watch them choke on their own hatred on my Facebook Wall because I am immune to their insults and perennial callow carping. I can do this because I am just citizen Adesanmi. Citizen Buhari and his government do not have this choice. You have to own them and their hatred. All your symbolic gestures must constantly engage them with humility.
You can learn from President Obama here. He has spent the last eight years reaching out to the American right, especially the far rightwing of the Republican Party and the Tea Party. They hate and disrespect him because of his race. But he is their President and never stops trying.
Furthermore, you must not allow your fundamentalist supporters to convince you that the hatred and intense dislike are fed only by ethnic, religious and political animus. There are serious issues of economic and social disempowerment feeding the disenchantment against you. There are serious legitimate issues with how you have run Nigeria on the economic front so far. These frustrations also feed into the animus against you. We need a comprehensive vision on how you plan to heal these injuries.
3. Security
Thank you for the comprehensive listing of your government’s efforts against Boko Haram in your first year in office. We are pleased to hear the gains recorded as well as the dividends of your hands-on approach at the domestic, regional, and international levels.
However, I was mildly irritated not to have heard a whimper from you about the widening terrorism of nomadic herdsmen. If it was in the speech and I missed it, forgive me. You have had Agatu and Enugu under your watch, just to mention those two instances. This makes the nomadic herdsmen the most democratic of all the terrorists we have currently operating in Nigeria. Other spectres of terrorism are contained and localized. We have only one that is roaming all over the country, leaving sorrow, tears and blood in its trail. The attention paid to Boko Haram and the Niger Delta Avengers needs to be paid to these nomadic terrorists. In your own case, you need to be seen to be paying serious attention to this problem. I believe the reason is obvious to you.
Listen to me, Mr. President: you may throw all the money in this world into our security challenges, you may run from pillar to post in West Africa, Europe, and America building coalitions to help us secure life and property in Nigeria, you will not succeed if there is not a pan-Nigerian buy-in into your security policies. The people must be mobilized to support you across the country. This cannot be done if you continue to feed perceptions that some terrorists are more equal than others in your book. If you need a concrete example of the destructive power of bitterness and how it could hamper your security efforts, I will give you one. It was recently announced that the clean-up of Ogoni land would start. I read people with names from that area on social media saying to hell with your attempt to clean-up their own immediate environment! That is the power of bitterness. How do you want to effectively move soldiers to such neighbourhoods to take care of the Avengers while we hear no similar plans to take care of the nomadic herdsmen? You must invest more in symbolic legitimacy for your security agenda Mr. President.
4. Corruption
This continues to remain your strongest suit in my estimation. This is where you continue to enjoy the widest support across the country. You also have considerable opposition because corruption does fight back and is fighting back in very desperate and dirty ways in Nigeria. Personally, I have no patience with the opponents of your anti-corruption efforts. Many have lost their regular source of yams from the goats and yams era and have become very vocal critics of the anti-corruption war. Many still cannot get over sore loserhood from the 2015 Presidential election and have been demonizing the anti-corruption war. Only the establishment of a National Centre for the Treatment of Post-Electoral Loss Disorder can help them.
However, you must not make the mistake of thinking that every critique of the anti-corruption effort is a product of malice. Some have complained about the showy and red-carpetish nature of the whole thing. High-profile arrests, detention, and endless adjournments. It is true that the same people asking you to intervene and accelerate the trials would be the first to demonize you as a dictator interfering with the judicial process in a democracy. However, there should be a way for your Justice Ministry to assign more resources to the courts and tribunals as a way of speeding up the process.
There is also the question of the campaign funds of APC. Chief Odigie Oyegun haughtily dismissed calls for a public disclosure of how these fund were sourced and how they have been retired. Sometimes, I don’t know which planet Nigerian politicians come from. They just jump up and insult the intelligence of our people. Where has he ever heard that only the party in power needs to retire her campaign funds? Mr. President, we need to hear from your party. We are waiting.
The inclination is strong to dismiss those calling for an equal searchlight to be beamed on the Big Men in your party. After all, their party had sixteen years to fight corruption and did nothing. Their hero had five years to go after APC big wigs and did nothing. As long as the yams were flowing, those who have now suddenly become apostles of good governance said nothing about the corrupt people they are now asking you to go after. You need a lot of leadership mojo to overlook this level of hypocrisy and recognize the fact that they do have a point no matter how ill-motivated. The EFCC needs to look into the dossiers of the politicians surrounding you with as much zeal as she is looking into the dossiers of the PDP folks.
We equally need to urgently unlearn our conceptualizations of corruption. The focus on politicians, albeit very necessary, makes us lose sight of the fact that we now have a society in which corruption is indissociable from the right to life and the right to survive. There is no legitimate way to live honestly in Nigeria without bending the rules a little bit here and there. Forget the N18,000 minimum wage and try to wrap your mind around how a Nigerian making even N60,000 per month can survive honestly on that salary without stealing from his employer or from the Nigerian state. For the 1% who are looting billions, corruption is choice. For the 99% we have created a society of compulsory corruption where the choice before the citizen is steal and live or be honest and die. Professor Itse Sagay and his committee have an additional responsibility to help you think beyond narrow views of corruption. You cannot successfully fight corruption if the majority of your people have no choice but corruption.
5. Democracy
What I am looking at here is actually our report card since 1999. We have fared badly. We have not deepened democracy. From administration to administration, we are stifling democracy and shrinking the space of democratic ethos. This has as much to do with leadership as with Nigeria’s terrible record with followership. I’d thought I’d seen the worst of followership with the sort of robotic herdishness that destroyed your predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
Alas, there is a strand of your own followership that has become a very real danger to democracy in Nigeria. Democratic practices and ethos have suffered terribly. Democracy is not just about strengthening the familiar institutions and pillars we associate with it. Democracy is not just about the struggle for free and fair elections. It is about constantly expanding the space of critique and constructive dissent.
I have no evidence that you are personally encouraging this sort of personality cultism which stifles the democratic space when supporters of a deified figure begin to behave like subjects in a theocracy. Under the past dispensation, personality cultism was subsidized by the state insofar as somebody was hired by the Presidency to manufacture consent and criminalize dissent online. I am yet to see that sort of behavior from the successor of Pastor Wendel Simlin. Consequently, I can only guess that what is fueling this dangerous personality cult is the sacraclization of your integrity narrative by the fundamentalist wing of your support base.
The consequence is a tragic restriction of democracy. Thus, even the right to protest is being criminalized in 21st-century democratic Nigeria. I do not support your fuel pricing policy. I also did not support the labour unions’ call to strike. My reason: ever since they betrayed the first Occupy Nigeria, they have not done enough to atone for their sins and become worthy of the people’s confidence anew. But it is one thing not to support their strike action and another thing to indulge in the sort of widespread criminalization of the very idea of protest against your administration like we witnessed recently. I have lived in Canada and the United States continuously since 1998. I don’t think there is a day when a group is not protesting against the Federal Government in front of Parliament Hill (Ottawa) or Congress (Washington). That is democracy. The perceived integrity of a leader is no immunity against protest.
I admit that you are not the one criminalizing protest and dissent. It is the intolerant fringe of your support base. You can help reduce the damage that these fundamentalists are doing to our democratic ethos by finding the space in your speeches to the nation to constantly include a few lines about growing our democracy and what this entails.
Where possible, you should hold out the current Governor of Lagos state as an example to the fanatical wing of your followership. In Ambode, they can learn that vigilance and conscientious critique by citizens can help a leader get his act together and begin to deliver brilliantly. Ambode was at the receiving end of severe criticisms in the early months of his administration. Luckily for him, no army of fundamentalist supporters arose to declare him above criticism. Today, we are witnessing the results in Lagos. Ambode is succeeding because he was criticized in a democratic setting. If you succeed with Nigeria sir, it will not be a consequence of the hosanna in the highest choruses of the fundamentalists. It will be due to the vigilance of those who will not accept or explain away half measures for you.
6. Your Team
There should have been a rejig of your team, especially your cabinet. You asked the public to help you rate your cabinet. Have you been listening to the report card, sir? There are too many deadweights and too many overwhelmed people in your cabinet. I don’t know the name of your FCT Minister because he is invisible. I have no idea what Chris Ngige is still hanging around for. Babatunde Raji Fashola is clearly overwhelmed and should be given only one of his current three portfolios. You need a more dynamic team for what clearly is your last year in office. By the end of 2016, the race for 2019 would have begun in earnest. 2016 is the last real year you have to make a difference.
As for your communication team, the least said about her the better but I am happy that the Vice President in his own interaction with social media influencers acknowledged the problem and promised improvement. We cannot have a communication team whose leader responds to calls to up his game by sponsoring hack writers to malign people’s integrity with barefaced lies from the pit of hell.
Pius Adesanmi is not beholden to you or anybody in the political field. I do not write proposals. I do not seek contracts from government people. If your communication team thinks that sponsoring lies that I sought a contract with you or submitted a proposal to write your biography is what will keep me quiet, they have another think coming. The sad thing about this sponsored lie is that they forgot that they are supposed to be change. It used to be that Pastor Wendell Simlin manufactured these kinds of lies in the goats and yam dispensation, forging papers and documents in the attempt to implicate the future Emir of Kano. Now the head of your communication team is sponsoring lies that I submitted a proposal I never even wrote. Where is the change?
I wish you more success in the service of our Fatherland in 2016.