By Niyi Osundare

Too Big to Fail
No national election in Nigeria’s notoriously chequered history has commanded the kind of widespread and nervous international attention that characterized the March 28, 2015 Presidential polls. At the continental level I daresay that only the South African election of April 1994, the very first democratically arranged election that signaled that country’s liberation from the odious Apartheid stranglehold and ensured her membership of the civilized human community, had enjoyed the kind of feverish apprehension and anxiety that the world lavished on the Giant of Africa in the first three months of this year. The fears were profoundly genuine, for the consequences of failure were too grim to contemplate.

As early as the last four weeks before the polls, Nigeria had become a Mecca for international crisis-prevention/control diplomacy, with the streets of Abuja quaking under the powerful weight of some of the world’s most significant figures. Kofi Anan, former Secretary of the United Nations, joined hands with Emeka Anyaokwu, former Secretary of the Commonwealth, to broker a ‘Peace Deal’ between the two gladiators in Nigeria’s electoral battle: the incumbent President Jonathan and his never-say-die opponent General Muhammadu Buhari. None of us ordinary folks could say for sure what went on behind the proverbial closed doors, but the picture of smiling gladiators locked in ostentatious embrace exacted front-page prominence in Nigerian newspapers and hit the electronic media with viral alacrity.

Prominent ex-Presidents from Africa were not left behind: the cerebral Thabo Mbeki from South Africa; the avuncular John Kufuor from Ghana. Nor must we forget our own Abdusalam Abubakar, Nigeria’s former head of state whose suave and smooth operation and shuttle diplomacy were conspicuously registered in the traffic between Aso Rock and the rest of the world throughout the election period – and after. Then came John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, who voiced his own concern and concluded his brief with a telling warning: any Nigerian politician seen to have contributed to the frustration/disruption of the electoral process should count themselves thereafter unfit for the American visa. Some observers might have considered Mr. Kerry’s warning threatening, even patronizing in its chilling import, but the American statesman knew what he was talking about, and was sure his target audience, the thieving, greedy Nigerian political gang, knew what the denial of such a valuable visa portended for their access to those foreign bank accounts which thrive on their loot from the Nigerian treasury.

Mr. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, registered his own concern; the European Union was not silent, while Mr. Bank Ki Moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, cabled across the anxiety of the world community. A few hours to the election, President Obama broadcast his own message by video to the Nigerian people and their rulers. The burden of his broadcast was so urgent, his tone so affective that I was afraid he might slip into ‘My fellow Americans’ in the course of his address. But he never did, though he reminded Nigeria its preeminent place in the world, its fabulously endowed people, and the reason it cannot afford to fail.

Yes, too big to fail. I hope we still remember that phrase which crashed into American parlance about seven years ago as rationalization for rescuing the leviathan banks and corporations whose outrageously criminal practices plunged the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, into the kind of economic recession never seen since the Great Depression of the early 1930’s. Just as those Oligarchs of Global High Finance capital could not fall without taking the rest of the global economy with it, so Nigeria could not unravel without overwhelming the rest of Africa with its debris. And who wants another Ivory Coast, another Sudan, another Rwanda on a continent noted for its sanguinary saga. Who wants another flashpoint in a world still choking from the heat of the conflagration coming out Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Israel/Palestinian Middle East? Thus the world rallied to douse the embers of the ‘Nigerian problem’ before it flared into a blaze. So what ensued was a running mix of global altruism and the age-old protocol of enlightened self interest.

Prof. Niyi Osundare delivering his lecture at the event

Slowly but steadily, the countries of the world, especially the most powerful and arrogant among them, are beginning to realize more than ever before, that nations bleed into one another; and that a mild sneeze in a remote corner of the planet could eventuate a global influenza. As the Yoruba say, ti aladugbo re ban je kokoro buburu to o o soro, here huru ofun re ko nii je korun d’ojuu re (When you see your neighbor swallowing an itchy insect and you pretend not to know, the nuisance of his cough will prevent sleep from coming near your eyes). As Sami Disu said so succinctly in his piece in Saharareporters, ‘Nigeria’s politics is every African’s business’.

A logical question to ask at this juncture is this: why is the March 28 election regarded with such trepidation by Nigerians themselves and other people from the rest of the world? The answers to this question are as Nigerian as the Niger which lends the country its name. Here is a country inhabited by about 180 million people with over three hundred contending ‘tongues and tribes’, each insisting on its own share of the national cake which none of them is inclined to bake; a country where the surest route to personal wealth and influence is the possession of political power; where that power is characterized by absolutism and impunity; a country in which what you need to hold on to power indefinitely is the possession of more power; a country where power comes without responsibility, control without restraint; a country where the rulers are thieves who live beyond the law; a country where the ruled are too ignorant, too poor, too disunited to kick and too ready to connive in their own abasement; a country, in short, where power is not just the ultimate aphrodisiac, it is also the wine of absolute forgetfulness.

Any wonder, then, that in this country elections are a do-or-die (or, better still, do-and-die) affair, a case of boo ba, pa; boo ba buu lese (if you catch up with him, kill him; if you cannot, poison his footprints). In Nigeria, politics is a winner-take-all arrangement; the possession of power is the beginning and the end. Incumbency is a lifelong endowment, something which, like the traditional Kabiyesi, you hold until you die in your ripe old age, and then pass on to your children. Only fools and weaklings allow themselves to be beaten at the polls. Incumbency is the surest source and guarantee of further/longer incumbency. When a chieftain of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, boasted a couple of years ago that his party was set to rule Nigeria for 60 years, he intended no exaggeration and he sensed no misnomer. He was just being a representative inmate of Nigeria’s political asylum and successful student of Nigerian history. By his party’s ‘mission and vision’ (to quote that tirelessly Nigerian cliché), his ambition was Lilliputian , his vison egregiously myopic; for their party, the PDP, was bound to rule for ever (did I hear someone add ‘and a day’?). And the crooked logic of Nigeria’s political history was on their side; for until the miracle of March 28, 2015, no incumbent Nigerian government had ever been unseated/defeated at the polls. In other words, since independence in 1960, Nigeria had never achieved a peaceful transfer of power.

Which was why Nigerians were scared and the world was frightened. On the one hand, you had a thoroughly dysfunctional, roundly disaffected ruling party bent on fulfilling its ever-ever mandate and holding on to power by all means. On the other, you had an opposition party that emerged from a mongrel conglomeration of competing interests just months before, emerging as a cohesive, well- articulated political machine ready to lock horns with the hysterically hyped ‘largest political party in Africa’. You just cannot help remembering Duro Ladipo in the legendary Oba Ko So: Ogun ree o/Ogun repete (War has come/War, war plenty). The world saw the potentially disastrous disconnect between the PDP’s desperate bid to hold on to power and the opposition party’s resolve to wrest it from them. Every thinking and feeling human being knew for sure that four more years of the PDP government would reduce Nigeria to a state more horrifying than the one the world had ever witnessed in the failed states that litter the African landscape.

But the largest party in Africa was so sure of victory, relying on its absolute control of all the armed and security agencies and the petrodollar-saturated treasury of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as source of endless bribes. Like its ignoble forebears, the Nigerian National Democratic Party (DEMO) of the sixties and the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) of the eighties, the PDP scoffed at Nigerian people’s impertinence, believing as was the wont of its predecessors whose thrasonical bragging was ‘e se tiwa, e o se tiwa, a ti wole’ (whether you vote for us or not, we are already in). You had the typical case of a party whose unprecedented corruption and ineptitude had already damaged the destiny of the country, but which lived under the perilous illusion of its indispensability, even inevitability. How do you evacuate this fat jigger stubbornly lodged in the nation’s flesh without a bloody collateral damage to the body-politic?