A Nation Under Security Stress

Persistent opposition of the OBIdients to the victory of Bola Tinubu is putting the nation under pressure, writes Segun James

How do you solve a problem like insecurity in a nation under stress? We are living in an age of insecurity, where increasingly, the value of liberal democracy based on the international rule system is being repudiated even though they have delivered progress in the last 20 years.

Over the course of a few weeks, some persons have perpetrated the big lie that the last presidential election in the country was stolen from a third-placed loser and that his supposed “mandate” could be restored by violence.

Tripoli, Mogadishu, Monrovia, and Freetown are some cities in Africa that have made history by being destroyed due to political disagreements among the political leadership of the countries.

Not too long ago in Ivory Coast, a political disagreement over who won the presidential election between Alassane Quattera and President Laurent Gbagbo snowballed into a war but for the quick intervention of the international community, the ECOWAS and the African Union that nation may still be at war today. All these have to do with the refusal of the loser, President Gbagbo to accept the outcome of the election. Today, Gbagbo is back in the country after serving some jail time abroad and he’s back in the country he once ruled and loved. He has not only apologized to President Quattera who has since pardoned him, he has begged the people of Ivory Coast for forgiveness.

Economic stress in recent times in Nigeria has contributed to the rising call from some sections for change in the belief that the problems in the nation are due to the activities of some old men who have refused to quit the political stage for younger people and are out of tune with the reality of recent times. These frustrated Nigerians pushed former Governor Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), into believing that he won an election he lost. They made him believe that he is the Messiah Nigeria needed at this critical period and that he must save the nation from the evils of the past.

But the reality is different. When Nigerians voted, they voted for one of the “old schools” of Nigerian politics, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress as president. This did not go down well with them and the false picture that the pushers of Obi have painted in their mind. That was where the problem began.

Democracy in Nigeria is under intense security threat. No thanks to the activities of a new political terror group called the Obidients. In politics, the future is open to suggestions. You hear voices, and you notice movements, but are you open to communication?

It is hard not to be moved by the sight of Mr. Peter Obi crying on live television, lamenting how his victory and that of the people have been stolen and how the people are the worse for this dastardly act.

Although Obi never explicitly say it, his theatrics is a call to arms to his supporters. He evinced an air of a man of the people whose true vision for the development of the nation has been truncated by mindless opposition and enemies of progress.

With their odd mix of insecurity and overconfidence, the Obidients are today drumming for war.

Almost 60 years ago, Nigeria fought a fratricidal war that left over two million citizens dead. The wound of that war is yet to be completely healed.  The descendants of the citizens that make up the Biafra axis of the war still feel that they are excluded from the most prestigious prize in any nation’s politics – the presidency.

Political history is sometimes written like an account of a game of chess, each move met by a countermove in a cerebral process removed from human passions. Alternatively, it could be a soap opera in which everything is reduced to petty spite and furtive liaisons. It may sound like a badly produced Nollywood movie.

A group of impressionable young men had ventured to the Ship House building of the Federal Ministry of Defense in Abuja, FCT, to demand that the military should take over the government. Their reason: the declared winner of the presidential election, in their opinion, did not win and to prevent President Buhari from handing power over to him, the military should take over.

As outrageous and outlandish as this may sound, this is the demand of a section of the Obidient Movement headed by Obi, yet the defeated presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) has never condemned it or called them to order. He seemed to have forgotten that such an action is an indictment of the nation’s nascent democracy.

Barely a few days after the February 25th election, a handful of protesters marched on to the Ministry of Defense demanding President Muhammadu Buhari set up an Interim National Government to take over from him. Their reason: anyone as the next president but not Tinubu the winner of the election. That they were not arrested and charged with treason or shot for venturing into a restricted high-security military facility remains a mystery.

That action is the prelude to the desperation of some Nigerians to scuttle the nation’s democracy simply because their preferred candidate lost. While some people are busy trying to foment trouble and stir up crisis, Nigerians have majorly remained uninterested and to some extent, moot on the seed of discord that is being planted.

For far longer than most Nigerians have been alive, security has been the bane at the bottom of every issue in the polity.

Although militancy and insurgency have plagued the nation in the eight years of Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, none has threatened to derail the nation’s democracy as that in the political sphere right now.

The APC’s winning of the presidential election in the face of many profound odds in the polity and the economy may have surprised some Nigeria. But it happened.        They say that life is the best teacher, and that we never stop learning; that every experience we go through teaches us something new. But that is not to say that every lesson learned is of a life-changing variety.

Welcome to the reality of our times.