Beyond Tinubu, Atiku and Obi
Okey Ikechukwu
Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has walked into a minefield with which he is very familiar. He had his own mines in the field, of course. They had been well laid out for over two decades, and with verifiable results. Many of his former opponents are either flat on their backs, are nursing injuries, or are queued up behind him in diligent subservience. Some of his co-contestants who are in court have the right to the line of action they have chosen. They must, however, abide by whatever decision the courts come up with. But the forgoing is not really our concern here today at all.
The issues facing the federal republic of Nigeria today go far beyond some of the questionable expectations of many of the critics, observers and admirers of Bola Tinubu, Atiku Atiku and Peter Obi. A nation with a fundamentally disoriented political, economic, political and traditional leadership elite cannot become Eldorado in a hurry. The decades-long convoluted conspiracies within, and around, this confederacy is responsible for the Nigeria we have today. So, let’s get real. The dominant interests are not about to turn in their retirement papers. The renewed struggle for the soul of Nigeria will either lead to a rebirth, or a strangulation.
The point made on this page some seven years ago, under the title “Nigeria: Beyond Buhari and Jonathan”, still stands today, namely: “It is not right that a nation should be undergirded by untruth. It is also not right that a nation should be under a political economy of decay and corruption, warehoused and propagated by a business and political elite that lives in denial. When old lies are told afresh by those who know they are lying, a time comes when even the liars themselves won’t be sure whether they are lying anymore. Reason? Others would be repeating the same lies with great aplomb everywhere”.
None of the actors in our crisis-ridden political environment is solely responsible for our present national problems. The PDP, the APC, and several other combinations of political and economic forces put together, bear responsibility for everything that is wrong with Nigeria today. We are seeing the products of generations of leaders and followers who were nurtured on a diet of impunity, inattention to service delivery, consumption and arbitrary use of state power.
Tinubu, like all previous leaders before him, belongs to that tradition; but in a way that must be properly understood in order to avoid confusion. He is an inheritor as well as a patient and calculating investor in the Nigeria of today. He has demonstrated a great capacity for outwitting, outmaneuvering and outsmarting most of his adversaries in the power game. He is good at paying for political services and his peculiar approach to managing the political environment, shorn of strong concerns about morality, has been one of his strengths. And that is part of the problem at the moment.
Asiwaju Tinubu is now managing a nation that has moved from the lofty concept of “citizenship” in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s to the less inclusive notion of “indigeneship”. As observed in the aforementioned article: “We have been building a mansion on quicksand and with pillars of straw. The soil, quicksand as it is, is further infested with two species of ants, called presumption and nepotism. These ants, which feed exclusively on straw, have been nibbling away for decades. They have left us with a hollow and painted frame that conceals a lie. This lie has been on parade for decades. It is described as an architectural masterpiece by casual observers. An architectural masterpiece that is not designed to withstand the wind”?
The article continued: “Now that we have brought up children who have seen shielded criminality as leadership, we have a nation wherein hiding under the instruments of state to violate natural justice, equity and good conscience makes you not guilty of any crime. Look at Nigeria today, … The dominant motifs are (1) skewed values, (2) a flawed national psyche and (3) an aberrant leadership recruitment process. These motifs have given us several national ‘leadership pseudopodia’, or “false feet”.
Just as happens with Amoeba, the jelly-like microorganism that pops out part of its shapeless body in any direction it wants to move, Nigeria’s leadership pseudopodia (or new regimes with insular notions about nation building) usually spring new agenda, new national ideals and new aspirations on everyone without warning and without consultation. They have since replaced National Development Plans with limited regime goals, and often without plans or strategy. And it all vanishes without trace with the demise of each regime”.
The Kaduna Nzeogwu coup détat of January 15, 1966, for instance, was a very important step in the misdirection of the Nigerian state. That coup saw a junior officer issuing instructions to his superiors from a radio station. “It saw an officer peremptorily informing the nation (by mere announcement about ‘Extraordinary Orders’) that all local administration in the country was now under the ‘local military commander’, who would mete out any punishment he ‘deemed appropriate’ to anyone who disobeyed him”. How? Where on earth, and why?
That unfortunate incident put the concepts of right and wrong in the hands of individuals of, sometimes questionable antecedents, for the first time in Nigeria. It violated Service Discipline, and set new paradigms for the collapse of esprit de corps in the armed forces. It also created a dilemma in diplomatic circles, for which even Ambassador Jolaosho’s experience as a diplomat did not prepare him when the Germans asked: “Why did your people kill your prime Minister, instead of voting him out of office”?
But the damage was far more more fundamental, because it “…side-tracked the existing crop of leaders and their ‘replacement generation’. A generation groomed along ideological lines in leadership recruitment stagnated for 12 years, until 1979. The trio of Zik, Awo and Aminu Kano, who would since given way to the likes of Tafawa Balewa, Michael Okpara, Bola Ige and others before 1979, turned up as presidential candidates, because of the 1966 coup. This created the backlog of two generations of leaders that we are still unable to deal with today. The average age of party youth leaders, the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) and the Nigerian Youth Movement (NYM) says it all”.
Did that first murder of 1966 not lay the foundation for subsequent murders and abominations? Did it not set the tone for the eventual replacement of professional military service and responsible national leadership with personal and ethnocentric desires, misuse of office, political illiteracy and petulant idealism and exuberance? Has this murk not produced many “Excellencies” and filled our post-1966 nationhood with sporadic and spasmodic declarations of new national goals, new federating units and much more? Have we not been “moving forward” in the wrong direction as a nation; sometimes at the whims of persons without deep personal maturity, a grand vision, real wisdom or even enlightened patriotism?
Does the Armed Forces Remembrance Day we celebrate every 15th January not affronts us all? It bears repetition to say here gain, as said seven years ago, that: “That date bespeaks impropriety and is inappropriate for accolades”. We need not have the date of the cheerful murder of some of our fellow countrymen as a day of celebration. Nigeria has a catalogue of prematurely retired military officers and a long list of frustrated and unfulfilled professionals because of the events of 1966. Many who joined the armed forces as military professionals have since been replaced others who joined in the years of military regimes – as a short cut to wealth.
Should we be celebrating Armed Forces Remembrance Day on the day families of some of Nigeria’s greatest leaders are in mourning? Tinubu should ask, as I asked seven years ago, whether “…we do not have several military exploits, including the final triumph of ECOMOG, or the day Buhari rallied the Nigerian military to route Chadian incursion during the Shagari Presidency, to make our Armed Forces Remembrance Day. That will save us from holding up a day that blights our collective dignity as decent people to salute the gallantry of our armed forces”.
A day that reminds us that a civil war ended in Nigeria with the complete economic disenfranchisement of a section of the country need not be so cheerfully projected. The South East was arguably not really rehabilitated, reconstructed and reconciled to the rest of the country after the civil war. It is open to question whether, even now, it has been reintegrated. As a Lagos lawmaker called, last week, for land revocations, to ensure land allocation to only indigenes, we should ask ourselves why a place where the late Chief Adeniran Ogunsanya and others protected properties of Igbos in Lagos while the civil war lasted and returned same to the owners after the war should be so poised today.
Is Nigeria really going anywhere if, after 52 years, the same Igbos who lost their belongings in another part of the country as “abandoned property” to their fellow countrymen, are to face the same fate once again? To whom were they they allegedly reconciled after the war, and even now?
Tinubu, Atiku and Obi should look around them and ask the following questions: (1) It it true that our 23 years old democracy has produced leaders with sudden stupendous wealth, amidst grinding mass poverty? (2) Is it true that their wealth has impacted less than 15 persons? (3) Is it true that their local communities, members of their religious congregations, most of their friends, some members of their extended families who knew how poor they were a few years earlier only chuckle and regard them as lucky thieves? (4) Is it true that many priests, traditional rulers and other supposed custodians of public conscience who should ask questions are on their payroll?
Truth is: the nation is reeling piteously. A criticism of Tinubu does not automatically translate into an endorsement of Obi or Atiku; and vice versa. Hunger, banditry, skyrocketing prices and much more are here. We need the following to move forward: Truth, competent leaders, the right sense of responsibility, propriety in public office, service delivery and inclusivity in policy making and resource allocation. Yes, beyond Tinubu, Atiku and Peter Obi.
