Memo to the Duke Initiative

ENGAGEMENTS BY Chidi Amuta

It is boom season for Abuja’s dominant industry: politics. A late flight arrival means a drive along the neon drenched boulevard into city centre. This futuristic highway from the airport is illuminated by billboards and myriad neon displays announcing that politics is in season. Africa’s most expensive piece of real estate is aglow with expensive high tower billboards of advertisements of merchandise ranging from detergents to high rise apartment blocks. Most of all, you are greeted by advertisements of the only product this city has to offer in abundance: power and its diverse seekers and mongers.

Abuja is power city. Its suffocatingly prosperous landscape is fed by wheeling and dealing in an intangible commodities – power, influence, networks, cartels and brackish linkages. In Nigeria, politics is about persons, mostly the African big men type. Bold, brash and extravagant displays and messages announce one Chief seeking to become a future king after the other. Ambitious men and women are on display pretty much like new brands of toothpaste, food seasoning or instant cure- all concoctions.

One aspirant wants to rule the ruling party. Someone else wants to chair the opposition party. So many are waiting in the wings to rescue the nation, the Federal Capital Territory or some distant state. In this land of many aspiring presidents, the heavier the embroidery on the aspirant’s tunic, the louder the claims on his billboard. I am reminded that INEC, the electoral umpire, is yet to open the floodgate for overt political campaigns. So, the messages are still a bit muted or nuanced and mostly suggestive images. When the floodgate finally opens, it will be hard to keep pace with the deluge of messiahs, leaders and dealers in the merchandise of power.

For someone who is at best an incidental ‘power technician’ and information mechanic, a working visit to Abuja last weekend was a journey into possibilities. The most refreshing consequential event for me was a night meeting of consequential elite power merchants from all over the country. The informal gathering at a private residence was at the instance of my brother and friend, Nduka Obaigbena, publisher extraordinaire, serial media entrepreneur, creative maverick and l’enfant terrible of Nigerian journalism. The man we like to call the Duke is also a skilled navigator of the murky waters of Nigerian power and politics. I was not invited to the meeting but a few of my friends were there and so I had to feed on second hand reports.

In attendance were many governors, mostly from the ruling APC. There were ambassadors of corporate Nigeria, guardians of the commanding heights of business and money. The recurrent deities of corporate Nigeria were escorted by the Governor of the Central Bank. There were prominent chamber politicians, influencers of power as well as practiced and habitual investors in the political unknown. There were also some significant aspirants to the presidential contest of 2023 from both major parties. There were of course some shadowy figures of state power, very visible in the anonymity of their bad suits, predictable ties, scruffy shirts and unnecessary dark glasses at night.

The grand objective of what I choose to call the Duke’s Initiative is how to fix Nigeria going forward, using the opportunity of the 2023 presidential elections and transfer of power. The major item on the agenda was how to galvanize the national elite towards achieving a consensus on national leadership in 2023. At the back of the initiative is an admission that the nation is in a bad shape and needs a different leadership framework if the slide towards state failure is to be averted. There was of course a tacit admission among members of the group that a national consensus that would shape the leadership change will have to be national in outlook.

There was a further narrowing of the focus to the burden of the ‘independence generation’, those born in the midst of the optimism of Nigeria’s independence in 1960. Going by the average age of those present at the meeting, the independence generation is being challenged to produce a new national leadership because it is their collective dream of a good nation that is at stake.

The targeting of the independence generation is refreshingly strategic and emotionally significant. Those in their late fifties and early sixties were born in the context of the euphoria of independence. The hope of freedom and nationhood were integral to their growing up process. They were brought up to anticipate good schools, decent healthcare, working utilities and a functional public service. They were a generation of hope. They were born in hope and raised in promise and now face the danger of dying in despair at old age. They have seen the best of Nigeria –scholarships, positions of power and responsibility, infrastructure development, national integration etc. They have also lived through the worst of Nigeria – war and bloodshed, decay of infrastructure, degeneration of governance, pessimism and despair. It is now largely under their watch that the nation is faced with an existential threat of state collapse and anarchic implosion.

More significantly, the independence generation are the ones standing between the long reign of the old and the emerging dominance of the surging youth majority. The leadership envisaged by the Duke Initiative is therefore both transitional, futuristic and ultimately transformational. This for me is the great import of the Duke Initiative.

Beyond the friendly banter and endless flow of free champagne and cognac, the Abuja late night meeting has stoked the embers of what is clearly a raging national concern. Nigerians are today concerned about national unity, security, economic well being and want a leadership that resonates with the vast majority of the populace. The majority of our people share are lingering distrust of politicians and the political parties that account for our leadership selection process. The majority of Nigerians are now more than ever before conscious of the connection between the quality of apex national leadership and the prospects of national stability at home and esteem abroad.

The Duke Initiative’s is therefore an informal mechanism of elite intervention to guide the political process towards an enlightened consensus on the ideal leadership for the future we seek. This is quite an ambitious project, requiring further engagements and deeper deliberation than just one night of free cognac and flow of champagne. It requires further work. On this basis, the meeting adjourned to reconvene this weekend in Lagos. It is to that follow up effort that these modest thoughts are entered as both a theoretical intervention and a memo of desirable practical possibilities.

While the broad objectives of the Duke Initiative are laudable and patriotic, it raises so many practical questions in the context of a democratic polity. First, in a multiparty democracy, is it possible to achieve a non partisan elite consensus on leadership choice with a shared vision? More pointedly, in a landscape dominated by two dominant parties, is a bipartisan elite accord on national leadership remotely possible? Can an unelected national elite of diverse elements acting outside the ambit of political parties bring about a consensual democratic leadership change that would be acceptable to all? Can the conspiracy of an elite special interest group held together by obviously common economic and political interests eventually override the choices which mobs of common voters make through the ballot box?

The contest for a leadership change is first and foremost a partisan political confrontation. It is almost a war by other means. Political parties will spare no effort in outdoing each other to emerge victorious in the forthcoming presidential election. The computations on the basis of which they choose their presidential candidates often have nothing to do with the ideals and wishes of the elite. That imperative is more urgent in a society where those who are unaware of ideals outnumber the elite. The elite in Nigeria by their value orientation and life style hardly come out to vote at elections. Even if they do, their vote is overwhelmed by the turnout of the common people in the urban and rural areas. In a democracy dominated by illiterate and politically unconscious mobs, the choice of leadership often defies the ideals of the elite.

However, the category of elite gathered by the Duke Initiative cannot be dismissed so casually. They are a power elite. They have the capacity to mobilize vast influence and resources to get the parties to drift in the direction of their wishes. This optimism is still a bit far fetched. It fails to acknowledge the real forces that determine the choices made by the arties and ultimately how the rural and urban mobs vote.

The political leadership of the parties consists mostly of a different sub set of the elite. These are mostly of the gangster variety, a mixed bag of failed professionals, high school dropouts, professional thugs and desperate power hustlers. They are largely amoral, indifferent to ideals, impervious to reasoned discourse and crave power for its own sake and for the sake of rabid and primitive economic advancement and crude arrival. They are unlikely to be invited to gatherings such as those of the Duke Initiative. They just wait for us all at the voting stations and collation centers armed with bales of cash or armed uniformed thugs.

Ultimately, our electoral outcomes are the product of the political machinations and rough tactics of this gangster elite and the verdict of the mobs they control. It is not the fine idealistic wishes of wings like the Duke Initiative collective that determines electoral outcomes. This is what got us to the present sorry pass. The lesson of the moment is that a cultic followership of mobs can supply the electoral majority to emplace a virtual idiot in the presidential palace to the consternation of the elite and their fine intentions.

Irrespective of the job approval rating of an incumbent president in Nigeria, it is hard to conceive of a succession that ignores him. There can be no effective elite consensus on leadership choice in the 2023 election without the tacit nod of Mr.Buhari and his courtiers. In order to have consequence, therefore, a national elite consensus on the next leadership must begin by recruiting the incumbent power structure to at least understand the logic of a managed transition of power. No external interest group, no matter the nobility of its cause and the depth of its patriotism, can choose for Mr. Buhari who succeeds him. A consequential leadership change can only come about either as a result of the force of an overwhelming opposition party victory or a carefully managed consensus within the ruling party.

For the avoidance of doubt, the structures of state power remain in the hands of the incumbent up to 11 am on 29th May 2023. This implies that any non-partisan initiative must of necessity secure the support and understanding of the incumbent. By the nature of the present stage of African democracy, even an outright opposition party victory at the polls can be vitiated by an uncooperative incumbent. Imagine what could have happened in 2015 if Mr. Jonathan decided that Buhari did not defeat him at the polls!

In pursuit of its objectives, nonetheless, the Duke Initiative has to take certain presumptions as given. Part of the existing bedrock of the projected national consensus on leadership is the strategic imperative that the next president has to come from the broad southern zones of the country. However, implicit in that presumption is the pragmatic realization that political power and the patronage and pork that goes with it have become instrument of survival, in fact an industry, among the northern power elite. The implication of this reality is that a North to South power shift, though expedient and inevitable, has to be based on a negotiated compromise rather than a winner take all proposition. Incidentally, national unity and stability remain contingent on a deft management of this historic balance of power between the two cultural and geo political poles of the nation. Even when the north felt entitled to presidential power in the run up to the Buhari contest in 2015, the northern political elite engaged with elements of Southern politicians to obtain the substantial South West and South South buy -in that made the project a success.

Yet the Duke Initiative cannot be overly optimistic about its potentials as a galvanizing force. Political parties and their own intrinsic elite remain the pillars in the architecture of democracy. As state recognized power factions, the parties have their own interests and goals which are bound to override the interests of special interest elites and groups. At a practical level then, the participants in the Duke Initiative must fan out into partisan formations. The lofty goal of a consensual leadership change can only come about if the elite of both major parties push for the same caliber of leadership candidates in each party. In other words, the ideas behind the Duke Initiative have to be shared by all participating political parties in the 2023 contest.

The significance of efforts like the Duke Initiative is to set the wagon of dialogue of national restoration and leadership invigoration in motion. Through such efforts, we can help the political parties by streamlining for them the entry requirements for the leadership Nigeria deserves and desires from 2023. We may in the process be rendering a much needed patriotic service of ridding the imminent presidential race of the present baggage of circus clowns and power scavengers.