Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

By Olufemi Taiwo

What follow are reflections on the recently concluded [if, indeed, they are] elections in Nigeria. As the title indicates, I was not physically present in the country either during the electioneering campaign or the elections that took place in its aftermath. Yet, from my considerable geographical distance, I was a keen student of the goings-on while the campaign lasted. And the distance from the scene of the action was abridged by the availability of virtual connections and the all-important live streaming of news and events from Nigeria as they unfolded, often in real time. Notwithstanding this resource, the analyst’s purview is limited by the lack of access to public opinion, to the unfiltered expressions of ordinary people in everyday conversations on air, at beer parlours, in neighbourhoods, at work, in public transit, at private parties, prayer meetings and motley other religious gatherings, and so on.

Whatever defects attach to considering issues from a distance must affect my reflections in this piece. But it is to be hoped that the proverbial advantages that accrue to detachment secured by distance would also be afforded the piece.
From a distance, there was a lot of violence associated with Nigeria’s elections. Yes, it is easy to see the violence as a mere extension to the electioneering season of a phenomenon that has wracked ordinary living in Nigeria in recent years. Yet, one must wonder why, after almost two decades of elections being conducted, won and lost, we have not lost our penchant for self-help motivated by a fundamental distrust in our regime of rules and procedures, that is, in the integrity and efficacy of process. There is a simple explanation for this sad situation. No, our people are not congenitally bound to violence. But if you are going to have humans behave in fit and proper ways, you must humanize the structures within which their lives unfold. One way in which this is done in the modern era is to create an impartial, impersonal, violence-monopolizing third-party institutions endowed with final jurisdiction in the adjudication of social conflicts among individuals. The state generally has this charge but the specific responsibility for adjudicating conflicts rests squarely on the shoulders of the personnel of the judiciary.

Unfortunately, no thanks to our collective inattention, we did not take seriously the degradation, in the present case, of the judiciary enacted by our erstwhile military misrulers. We have persisted in mistaking the hood for the monk. We keep thinking that the requisite temperament for impartiality, professional pride, independence, and a fierce commitment to the cause of justice inheres still in the robes worn by our judges. We did not reckon with the fact that a cancer had been injected into our legal system that makes the bar, the bench, and other law enforcement agents partisans of graft, impunity and the subversion of process. The people did not fail to take notice. Once people no longer trust that their hurt would be ameliorated in a timely, orderly, fair and just manner, the door to self-help and instant, on-the-street justice is left ajar.

The purge of the judiciary has not been undertaken; on the contrary, the judiciary is now an emporium of impunity where permanent injunctions against investigation, not to talk of arrest and prosecution, are readily available for purchase and the rule of law has become denuded of all nobility and reduced, instead, to an empty shell of malodorous legality.

There is a dimension to the saturation of the Nigerian society by violence that calls for additional remark. In the past, a fraction of the violence and associated disorder that pervaded the country would have been the pretext for some military adventurers to insinuate themselves into the political system presumably to correct the ills in the polity and restore order. It is a mark of the political maturation of our polity and the no less significant change abroad in the world respecting the unacceptability of extra-constitutional rule that, with all its pitfalls, our democracy, flawed but steady, has endured and not even a certified insurgency, including momentary loss of territory, has evoked any suggestions of extra-constitutional intervention by the military. We should never lose sight of this nor should we make light of it. All the hiccups in our democracy will eventually be contained and a commitment to empaneling a proper judiciary will, once accomplished, reduce the lure of self-help.

Let us turn to the elections themselves. It may not be obvious now but for the near future of Nigerian politics, especially at the federal level, the re-election of Muhammadu Buhari augurs well. Had Atiku Abubakar won, one unsavoury consequence would have been the resurrection—I chose that word deliberately—of the dead and buried political godfather+pretendstatesmen+elders-to-hearken-to careers of the likes of Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, Theophilus Danjuma, and their ilk across the country. Abubakar’s eagerness to bow to the wills of those principal architects of Nigeria’s prostrate position in the world, who, by the way, are yet to be held accountable for their misdeeds and who, in decent societies—which ours is not by any stretch of the imagination—would be spending their twilight years in jail, must have terrified all who desire to have a clear path to a great future for the country. An Abubakar victory would have delayed that opening for, at least, another four years.

From a distance, I watched the vice-presidential debate and the town hall conversations with the top of the tickets of the select five parties that were anointed by the Broadcasting Organization of Nigeria and the debates group as worthy participants in those events. Let me be clear; not since 1983 have we had elections that had any intellectual edge to them or were marked by debates about ideas or, with M.K.O. Abiola’s campaign in 1993 being the sole exception, vision.

So, there was no reason for me to expect that the recently concluded campaign would be different. But, then, Peter Obi was chosen as Abubakar’s running mate. His strongest selling point was his “intellectual attainments and professional successes” attested by all the sterling schools he garnered credentials from, his business and economic management acumen as well as his being savvy with the ways of the world at the present time that neither Buhari nor his stuffy law professor running mate could match. There is a personal dimension to my reaction to Obi’s credentials and performance: he is a philosophy graduate from what, at least when he graduated, was one of our top philosophy departments in Nigeria, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, no less.

Let me just say that I was quite underwhelmed by Obi’s intellectual articulations and his public presentations that I saw—from a distance, of course. His repetition, ad nauseam, of India and China as his models of what an administration of which he would be a part would do to lift Nigeria out of its economic doldrums betrayed a fundamental lack of intellectual engagement with the history of those two countries and the motivating factors behind their spectacular advances in the last forty years. Truth be told, both countries’ stupendous attainments were jumpstarted by the kind of intellectual engagements that only one politician to date in Nigeria remains the sole instance: Obafemi Awolowo. Neither Abubakar whose claim to capacity to restructure Nigeria boiled down, for some of his vociferous supporters, to the inane fact that he married into different geopolitical zones in the country, nor Obi whose ease at invoking China and India provoked Adams Oshiomole’s wicked but spot-on humorous riposte, coupled with his penchant for glibness, especially when it comes to substituting dubious statistics for serious argumentation, gave the slightest hint that they were denizens of this universe marked by intellectual curiousity and solutions based on serious study. Finally, on this score, collecting certificates from institutions even if your attendance is for in-service/refresher course equivalents does not equate to claiming them as alma maters. Even if you could, it does not indicate that you got an education. Remember I am writing this from a base led at the present time by a president who never tires of reminding everybody of his “Ivy League” credentials! Enough said. Nothing in Obi’s pronouncements would have led me to believe that he had four years of tuition at a top-flight philosophy department such as Nsukka was when he graduated from there in 1984.

Let us go back to 2010 and the electoral landscape at the time. Goodluck Jonathan was the PDP candidate who was still in in the good graces of his sponsor, Obasanjo. The opposition was badly split. Buhari was at the head of his CPC. The then Action Congress of Nigeria was looking to break out the southwest and was shopping for a candidate at the national level.

There was something about that historical conjuncture that many, politicians and commentators alike, may have failed to apprehend and appreciate. With the conclusion of Obasanjo’s presidency, there was, for the first time in post-military rule Nigeria, no single personality that loomed large in, much less be said to dominate, the national political scene. That meant that the road was clear to fresh faces, new ideas, and novel coalitions in Nigerian politics. Jonathan had neither a constituency nor the kind of personality marked by charisma or intellectual gravitas to dominate the scene. It was obvious that Buhari had no national profile when it came to his leadership and political bona fides. The ACN, moved more by the ambitions of its leaders and the usual short-term calculus limited to the elections at hand, after dilly dallying on what to do with the presidential elections, ended up instructing its voters to vote Jonathan at the center and their party candidates at the other levels. Talk about writing the book on political myopia, if not bankruptcy!

Doubtless, this set the stage for the emergence of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and that of Buhari as their flagbearer in the 2015 elections. It quickly became clear that though the APC had a plan for winning the elections, it had no blueprint for governing. The lack of a governing blueprint was the bitter fruit of the cynical preoccupation with winning power with absolutely no vision for what to do with power or a long-term plan for steering the country to a more desirable future.

Unfortunately, this chronic absence was not limited to the two major parties. Because we are a country with a fire-brigade culture dominated by a sprint mentality but bereft of the planning and pacing required of the distance runner, other parties and constituencies, too, were not in any better shape. This became clear in the frenetic pace at which new parties and coalitions mushroomed in the run-up to the recent elections. Absent long-term planning, even the new parties were all fluff and little substance. Just as with the “success” of “Occupy Nigeria”—remember it?—many were those who mistook virtual popularity for real electoral support; the Nigerian penchant for loquaciousness on the web and the ephemeral, almost instinctive “likes” and “dislikes” on social media for real political movement.

From a distance, I would like to suggest that the re-election of Buhari is the end of an era in which our national politics has been dominated by retired military misrulers and their accomplices in mufti. With Obasanjo finally unmasking himself as the self-preferring, faux statesman some of us have always known him to be, with the rump of the retired generals with any semblance of national presence having shown their hands and having them badly scalded, with Abubakar left with no other party to which to defect, and various potentates like Bukola Saraki and AbiolaAjimobi being disgraced off their pedestals in public life, we, once again, have a clear stage for the emergence of a better future dominated by ideas, integrity and, most of all, vision.

This is the object lesson of the last elections for all who deign to “save Nigeria”, “take Nigeria back” or build “a new Nigeria”. I will put it bluntly. Movements don’t run for elections: they generate the ferment and the requisite momentum that propel parties and other organs to sign on to their programmes. Movements don’t mushroom overnight, especially in a terrain where there are significant cleavages that are not seriously addressed and have always managed to fracture and doom previous ones.

Here is an example of what movements do. Those who want a different future can now turn their energies to creating the kind of public opinion that would force the National Assembly to take seriously, on pain of its members losing their political future, the issue of remuneration of its members, greater accountability for public spending, and suchlike.

Given my contention that Buhari’s re-election represents the twilight of a certain dominant pedigree in our politics, nothing except our lack of imagination or our penchant for short-term fixes stands in the way of our settling on a vision and agenda that would ignite the imagination and enthusiasm of ordinary Nigerians across our diverse cleavages for a better outcome four years hence.

Along the way, from a distance, I offer a few pointers for our collective consideration. No liberal representative democratic regime worth its salt would rest on a shaky and shady judiciary as is the case in Nigeria right now. What is required is radical surgery that will make it over completely. How we do it should be the matter of a debate in the national assembly and the public at large. But a judiciary that sanctifies with the force and legitimacy of law the rule of license and impunity by distorting the law to disable the investigation and trial of wrongdoing has not merely lost its reason for being. It is an existential threat to the polity, tout court.

Additionally, the need for throwing out the present Constitution is underscored every day. This is not hyperbole. A constitution that you cite for mundane administrative and pedestrian legal issues is no longer worthy of the appellation. Every time I see our “learned friends” trot out provisions of the constitutions to clarify electoral issues, I marvel at their lack of self-awareness that, in so doing, they are reducing the constitution to statute, administrative law, even, and divesting it of the majesty that befits the founding document of our polity and its vision of itself as a moral entity. Constitutions that answer the name are brought in as a last resort; constitutions are not the first authority you fish out to litigate issues in politics. There is a reason why constitutional challenges are not a first recourse in political and other issues in a polity.

Next, we must confront the issue of restructuring. There is the candidate who styled himself a “nation-builder” with barely any evidence of an intellectual engagement with the idea and no hint of his being a latter-day Ataturk. Anyone in Nigeria who expects to be taken seriously by any but illiterates and conmen when (s)he talks about federalism must engage and argue with Awolowo. During the electioneering campaign, the refrain for the Abubakar campaign was that he would start restructuring the day after his inauguration on May 29th. I am sure that with his loss, both he and his party, PDP, have parked the restructuring bus not to have its engine fired till the next campaign comes around. This is the opportunity for public opinion to mobilize and ask him and his party to show their good faith by introducing proper instruments in the National Assembly to show up the APC and its allies as bulwarks against restructuring. It would be a good basis for selling the idea the next time around.

The discourse must not be limited to the gross aspects of our polity like geographical boundaries or distribution of largesse. There should be no all-seeing INEC in a proper federal structure. They should only run federal elections and even those with locally sourced functionaries. Nor should there be any one of the centralized but misbegotten relics bequeathed by our military misrulers like NYSC, FRSC, UBEC, JAMB and NUC. This is the opportunity for our smaller parties that pretend to being rare oases of ideas for the future to show their hands, work quietly to spread those ideas, secure more buy-in from the populace rather than berate the electorate for being stupid, addicted to stomach infrastructure, or preferring misrule of the corrupt to the rule of the clean and enlightened, and begin to move the dial ever more slowly but surely to a more clement future for us all.

I am acutely conscious of the usual refrain that greets calls like I just made. For instance, many argue that state police would quickly become the security arms of their respective state governors. Or that not having an NUC would leave the task of quality control of our tertiary education hanging in the balance. Unfortunately, these are the alibis of a people and their intellectuals who have given up on their imagination. They are driven by fear that they would not be able to handle new problems even if the solutions to the old problems are not working. Fear-driven choices do not ever release our imagination to think up new and better ways of doing things nor do they enable us to set about building resilient institutions through the true and tested practice of trial and error as is done in all human settings. We often grant that existing arrangements are not working but we are petrified by the idea of substituting new ones. How a people can make progress this way passes my understanding.

What is worse is that our proclivity to short-term thinking about perennial problems makes us to embrace the immediate while ensuring thereby that upcoming generations would forever operate in what is a perpetual holding pattern. Our people deserve better and can work for it, given the proper intellectual and ideological leadership.
I hope that the preceding reflections aid the illumination of my readers. If not, here is my caveat: I am talking from a distance.

-Professor Femi Taiwo was Secretary General of Student Union of the University of Ife. He has taught Philosophy in Ife and universities in America and Asia. He is the Chair of the Africana and Research Centre, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.