DESPERATION is not usually a good place to be. Not for an individual, not for a corporation and certainly not for a country. In its worst form desperation leads to a state of despair which could result in ‘rash or extreme behaviour’. This is the junction where our country has unfortunately arrived – the people and their rulers – after many years, nay decades, of sleep walking. Now something must give and whatever that thing may be will not ultimately be palatable. But for really serious entities including individuals and corporations and indeed nations, desperation could also be a spring board to turn around any situation for good. The last ditch gasp could be propelled by the realisation that there are no longer any good and rational course of action left. That otherwise desperate and seemingly reckless action could prove to be life-saving and ultimately lead to triumph. The way Nigeria’s rulers are currently carrying on, the country is incapable of fitting into the category of entities that would make a desperate last ditch effort to steer the ship away from what looks like a cataclysmic wreckage in the magnitude of that character in an English nursery rhyme, humpty dumpty. A few weeks ago we wrote in this space after analysing and interrogating some of the policies of the President, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, that with the direction Nigeria was heading that the dire and desperate situation of Nigerians would only get worse before it gets worse. It was our understanding of how this country was unravelling and an expression of lack of belief and faith in the anthem of the ruling All Progressives Congress [APC], that things would have to get worse before they will start getting better. They will not get better, certainly not in the foreseeable future. They will not simply because our rulers are already out of breath; they act before they think and we are assuming that they even think at all; they have eyes but they do not see; they have ears but they do not hear; and, they probably have emotion but they do not feel anything. They now appear like graven images. Their consciences are seared, their souls sold to demon. They package their lies as propaganda. There is no segment of the country that is not in an emergency- politics, education, security, health, economy, name it. As we make the draft of this intervention late on Saturday the news all over the mass media was that we were at it again concerning our electoral politics. There were supposed to be bye/supplementary/rerun elections in some states of the federation last Saturday. But the dominant stories were those of widespread cases of grabbing, snatching and running away with ballot boxes and filled result sheets where ballots were yet to be cast as well as the abduction of election officials and materials. The candidates in those elections have proven themselves fast learners.
Ahead of the February 25, 2023 presidential election, the now President, Bola Tinubu, had ordered his supporters and militia to ensure that he won that contest by all means foul including smashing ballot boxes and snatching election results. One other thing that the candidates learnt from the last national elections in 2023 was that what counts was being declared winners. How you do it is immaterial. After all, there is a template of how to lean on judges not to upturn election results especially if the victory is in favour of the ruling APC. The losers in last Saturday’s election, as was the case last year, would contend with the additional burden of the fact that the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] would not be obligated to prove that it conducted the elections in substantial compliance with the laws. The court rulings from litigations arising from the elections last year proved that INEC was not bound to obey its own subsidiary legislations governing the conduct of any elections. By the time you read this another sham christened elections would have been concluded or rescheduled or abandoned by an inept and corrupt INEC.
The greater worry is that what passed as an election last weekend is a precursor to what Nigeria should expect in 2027, that is, if we still have a country by then. Those who are sufficiently conscious know that a country is not just a matter of geographical space or territory. Every country begins to die first in the hearts and minds of its citizens and not necessarily by the loss of territory. Nigeria conceded parts of its territory called Bakassi to Cameroon but our country is undaunted. In 1970 the part of Nigeria that proclaimed its own republic called Biafra lost it as a territory. But that same short-lived country still lives in the hearts and minds of the children, the grand children and the great grand children of its promoters. That is the test of nations. That explains why the former President, Maj.Gen. Muhammadu Buhari will always squirm at the mention of any word that sounds like Biafra. He also becomes agitated with anything Igbo who preponderantly made up the country called Biafra. “What do the Igbos want”? was one of his refrains in the one and only media chat he held throughout his eight-year presidency. Buhari routinely gloated about how he defeated the Igbo during the civil war.
Recently some northern elements whose forebears started agitations in the 1960s for the balkanisation [Araba] of the country are back at it again. A few Muslim northern clerics have started openly calling for the division of Nigeria along the lines of the first republic. It is still under one year that their Caliph, Buhari, left office as President. In any case, they are Nigerians and so they have freedom of expression as enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution. In addition, they ostensibly represent a people and so they also have a right to self-determination as in the relevant United Nations Charter. The thinking in a very small section of the ruling elite from the Muslim north is that they have gotten enough from the spoils of the Nigerian Commonwealth, so this could be the right time for the various peoples of this stranded country to go their separate ways. There is little doubt that the leaders of the Muslim north and those of the south west have for long been planning for their independence should anything happen to Nigeria as we know it today. The strange alliance the conservative Muslim North forged with the liberal South-West in 2015 was to cement the appropriation and allocation to selves of whatever is left of
Nigeria’s common patrimony ahead of the unavoidable day of reckoning which may be nearer today than when we first started. The rebellious and dangerous South-East has since been rigged out of contention in the scramble for Nigeria. The lot of parts of the North-central is the unrelenting expropriation of their ancestral lands and the dehumanisation of their people. They are facing existential threat like never before. The inheritance of the South-South will be the massive degradation of their creeks, swamps and mangrove forests caused by a mindless exploration and extraction of hydrocarbons from their belly with the concomitant crude oil spillages. The Tinubu regime is obviously crumbling under the weight of a disastrous self-imposed twin economic policies of petrol subsidy removal and floating of the naira. The regime is in a state of confusion between continuing with the reforms or stepping on the brakes for a review. None of the option is palatable. If Tinubu continues on his chosen course, more hardships will be visited on Nigerians. It could lead to a pushback from citizens which could make the EndSARS protests during which scores of young Nigerians were killed in cold blood with hot bullets in parts of the country especially Lagos a child’s play. If he pulls back, he will lose the validation of the West which has been an obsession for him since he acceded to the Nigerian Presidency under a cloud of illegitimacy. In addition, the pains and privations he has brought on Nigerians since May 2023 would just remain those- pains and privations with no benefits whatsoever. Tinubu is stuck. And desperate. But he deserves no pity because, after all, he has achieved his ‘lifelong ambition’ to be the President of Nigeria.
A desperate man is capable of any evil. And that is the situation of President Tinubu. His regime is now likely to be seeing enemies lurking everywhere – in critics of his policies, in opposition parties, in the security agencies, in the media, in individuals who relentlessly call out his administration’s failings, and in everywhere else outside the realms of those in his government and sundry cheerleaders. There was a report on Sunday that a female vocal critic of the regime may already be in the cross hairs of the secret police. It may be the first salvo in the expected no nonsense stance of this regime to ‘destructive’ criticism. Its irritations will not be made any better by the increasing expression of dissatisfaction by elements in the northern faction of the ruling Muslim/Muslim coalition. Nigerians will need to brace up for whatever will come upon them in the months ahead. Last September in New York Nigeria told the world not to use respect for civil rights to contrain rulers in Africa. Go and carefully read Nigeria’s address to the UN. But friends of this flailing regime will do well to remind it that violence only begets violence.
