Just days before Christmas, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tweeted that he had chatted with executives of America’s major banks and they all assured him that they had excess liquidity to keep lending to businesses and consumers. The objective was to create assurances amidst a downward trend in the stock market. But rather than assure, the tweet rattled investors and the stock market plummeted.
I tend to have the same reaction when I read certain assurances about Nigeria’s political future, especially the 2019 elections. Rather than feeling assured, for example, I was jolted by this headline in The PUNCH two days before Christmas: “Nigeria will survive 2019 election – CAN President.”
“The apprehension before 2015 general election was much higher than this; even the international community said Nigeria would scatter after the election but God took control,” Rev. Samson Ayokunle, the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, is quoted as saying.
“So for me whatever the devil may be doing, Nigeria would survive the next election.” The assurance is an unsettling reminder of how far we need to go as a democracy. Or it could be an indication of our underestimation of the forces that bind Nigeria.
Of course, the signs of trouble are all over. But the troubles result less from Nigerians’ inherent disunity than from the greed and self-centeredness of individuals. A sampling of some the headlines in 2018 on arms proliferation is enough to make the point: “Influx of illegal arms ahead of 2019 elections,”“Politicians stockpiling arms in Niger Delta – Militants,” “Arms proliferation: Senate summons NSA, service chiefs, DSS DG,” “Proliferation of illegal arms: A time bomb awaiting explosion,” “Lagos convenes security summit to tackle arms proliferation, crimes, others.” And so on and so forth.
Mudiaga Affe sums up the substance in the story with the first headline above: “Recently, the United Nations raised concern over the proliferation of illicit small arms and light weapons in Nigeria. The UN said there were over 350 million illegal arms domiciled in Nigeria, which amounts to 70 per cent of estimated 500 million illegal weapons believed to be circulating in West Africa.”
These are disquieting statistics, indeed. Even then, the imports are much less about splitting Nigeria as they are about presiding over it. Surely, as Mashood Erubami, the president of Nigeria Voters Assembly, has said, they are bad omens for a violence-free election. “The 2019 elections to the politicians … is a year that cannot be joked with,” Affe quotes Erubami as saying. “Some of them feel it is only through do-or-die politics that their ambition can be achieved.”
That’s the sad part. The good part is that Nigerians have become so resilient to these machinations that they are unlikely to let any outcome derail the country. While the politicians may use terror to scuttle or compromise this or that election, the country as a whole seems firmly set on the democratic experience.
And unlike during “June 12”era, when the courts allowed themselves to be made instruments for truncating the transition to democracy, the courts today seem more keen to preserve it. They have upheld those elections that were reasonably clean and vacated those that were manifestly compromised. And the operative phrase is “reasonably clean,” for it will be a long time before Nigeria’s elections get higher marks.
But the overall trajectory is a hopeful one. For one thing, we have never witnessed the kind of mayhem that led to a coup and a civil war in the mid-1960s. By contrast, the 2015 election — the last national election — is deemed the cleanest of all and resulted in Nigeria’s first transition from an incumbent president to an opposition candidate.
As the beneficiary of that historic moment, President Muhammadu Buhari has to be feeling morally and civically obligated to ensure that the 2019 election is as clean, if not cleaner than, that of 2015.
Buhari campaigned on the platform of becoming a better president than his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan. The verdict is mixed on that. A cursory sampling of public opinion would suggest that a majority of Nigerians disagree. As a military head of state, Buhari similarly left a checkered record. On the one hand, he will always be remembered for bringing a measure of discipline to public life. On the other hand, his draconian decrees, the jailing of journalists and critics, and his soldiers’ whipping of people in public places all left dark memories.
Ensuring a fair and free election in 2019 is an opportunity for Buhari to leave a positive legacy that will be beyond dispute.
Alas, his No. 1 rival, PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar, doesn’t think Buhari is so inclined. In press briefings on the Sunday before Christmas, Atiku’s spokesmen cited the president’s refusal to sign the electoral reform bill and his intent to extend the tenure of the Inspector-General of Police Ibrahim Idris, as evidence of his lack of interest in a fair election.
It is puzzling that a president who came to power on promises of reform would refuse to sign a bipartisan electoral bill that would reduce the opportunity for rigging. But then that’s just one more action/inaction of this administration that is puzzling.
As to the case against retaining the IG, the implicit argument is that Idris is too closely tethered to Buhari and the APC to provide impartial policing of the elections. “We reject any extension of service for the IG. We in PDP reject this,” the National Publicity Secretary, Mr Kola Ologbondiyan, said. “We know what the President is planning to do by the extension of service is to use the IG to perpetrate his rigging plan.”
Ologbondiyan noted that at this juncture in the Jonathan administration, he replaced the incumbent police chief. But while that was an assuring gesture, Buhari is not obligated to follow the example. In any case, he has not shown such an inclination in making appointments. It is wise then that Ologbondiyan implicitly conceded that reality by saying, “We want to appeal to the IG to insulate Nigeria Police from partisan politics.”
Ordinarily, such an appeal shouldn’t be necessary. After all, the police are supposed to be a non-partisan professional body. The frequent breach of that obligation is one reason that politicians recruit and arm thugs with illegally imported weapons.
While on that—and back to the central point of this column—it is both assuring and disquieting that the Nigerian military have had to issue warnings to soldiers to remain apolitical. The Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, did so in a Christmas Eve message to troops, as have a number of regional commanders. It shouldn’t be too far away when such warnings become unnecessary, when Nigerians don’t have to fret about the future of their country every time there is an election.
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