Why Tinubu’s Policy Adventures Will Fail

 By Charles Onunaiju

President Bola Tinubu and his administration bask in the euphoria that they have taken some “tough” and “courageous” measures that would deliver prosperity to Nigerians in the future. The coordinating minister of the economy, Mr Wale Edun, recently stated that despite public uproar at the harshness of the measures and their devastating impact on the lives of Nigerians, along with the more frightening dimension of security meltdown, the administration has been receiving accolades at several international forums, including the World Bank, IMF, and the G20 meetings.

*Tinubu

However, it is not because the measures are tough, courageous, and may have attracted accolades from outside that they may fail to produce any result close to prosperity, but because they are extraneous and largely disconnected from the existential reality of the current condition of the country. The choice of the word “measures” to denote government response is deliberate, even as it is widely called policy.

Africa And the Opportunities Of BRICS

 By Charles Onunaiju

Nearly a decade and half, the BRICS platform has become a consequential and formidable multilateral international mechanism, shaping the emerging trend of inclusive global governance. Since after its first summit in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in 2009, the mechanism has phenomenally grown in consolidating its internal consultative frame work and has extended its outreach activities through the “BRICS plus” effects.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are heavy weights in their own respective rights but seized the opportunity and moment of their outstanding performances as significant emerging economies to evolve, shape and consolidate on international mechanism not only to enhance cooperation among themselves but sought to invest the trend of globalisation with the practice of multilateralism and opening new vista for inclusive and participatory global governance.

Imo State: Between The Devil And Deep Blue Sea

By Charles Onunaiju

Never  in the recent history of any  people have their prospects of been  so bleak and in dire straits as what stares the hard working people of Imo state in the face right now, starting from the debacle of Mr. Rochas Okorocha’s near eight year comic rule to the prospects of extending the governance nightmare to another four years. 

*Gov Rochas Okorocha

The recent choice of candidates for the top job in the state by the two major parties, the All Progressive Congress, APC,  and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP,  is  chillingly harrowing. The two earlier contenders in the ruling APC, Mr. Hope Uzodimma, a serving senator, who first claimed to have won the primaries has nothing in his pedigree either in business, career, profession or even politics to recommend him for the top job in the state, which for all its seeming glamour is a burden for which any worthy occupant must toil in privation and humility while radiating only uncommon ideas  with the will of steel to offend vested interest and step on big rotten  toes.

Soyinka And The Shredding Of His Green Card

By Charles Onunaiju
“Our common sense is totally lost. I am embarrassed sometimes that I occupy the same nation space with some people… what is the right of any Nigerian to challenge me on my decision? Barbarians have taken over, the country using the anonymity of the internet”.
– Prof. Wole Soyinka

*Soyinka

But didn’t an erudite professor, renowned scholar, iconic playwright and social critic, who publicly threatened to destroy his document, however way it was over the outcome of a distant periodic election he did not even vote in and for which his interest is at best marginal, brutally assault common sense, that the rest of us should be embarrassed to share the same nation space with him?

Since Professor Wole Soyinka interjected prior to the anger-driven US presidential election with a threat to shred his own green card in the event of an election victory of the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, he has set off a frenzy of activities on the social media. That such a towering figure as Soyinka who is familiar with real theatre could set off such theatrics as he did with a threat to tear his green card over an election outcome and expect nothing less that the frenzy that trailed it, is very strange indeed. He did not utter philosophy for which he should expect measured and rational response. In my part of the country, we say that when you bring home an ant infested wood, you have only invited lizards to feast. 

It is only natural and a matter of common sense that Nigerians are entitled to know how the distinguished professor has fared in his public threat to shred his card, after Donald Trump, the Republican candidate secured the requisite electoral college votes(more than 270) to win the U.S Presidential election. The anger and name calling that the professor has deployed to intimidate his interlocutors does not answer the question of his categorical statement to shred his green card in the event of Trump’s win.

If the professor had been led to believe the establishment media and polls projections of a victory for the Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton, into the volatile gamble, there is actually no big deal in a humble climbdown. Afterall, the assorted community of media and poll watchers, who predicted that Trump would be dumped in electoral humiliation, have since moved on, inventing fresh reasons for their dull binoculars that did not see more accurately the election permutations.

Trump’s meteoric rise and consequent stunning victory is not so much about him but represents a considerably prevailing social sentiment in the US, to which he masterfully aggregated and articulated. The American traditional political elite or the Washington establishment has projected power in a way, in which the country has over-reached itself and also, the brutal effects of the financialization of capitalism has taken huge toll on the working people, even as the traditional safety net has imploded. 

The Inertia Of President Buhari

By Charles Onunaiju

For more than a decade of his political odyssey in the struggle for Nigeria’s presidency, people of various political background stayed the course, not so much for his famed integrity but in the belief that President Muhammadu Buhari has the political will and grit to fundamentally shake up the country’s outlook, liberate it from conventional thinking and decisively transform the dominant mindset, which has sustained a precarious and unproductive trajectories of our post-colonial history. 

*Buhari 

However, given the inertia that has trapped the president Buhari government currently in near atrophy especially in the economic and social fronts, it is easy to forget his breakthrough in a core area of national emergency, especially in substantially degrading the nihilist and extremist insurgents that have for years ravaged the North East and existentially threatened the rest of the country. 

Critics claimed that president Buhari has only recalled his attack dogs, which he has used to undermine the regime of former president Goodluck Jonathan. However, if any one person or group of persons could orchestrate such deadly insurgency and then walk about freely, then, the government under whose watch, it happened does not deserve a day longer in office. However, while the end of Boko Haram insurgency or its considerable degradation cannot amount to the end of Nigeria’s security woes, curtailing the rebellion of the narcissistic insurgents is a bold step in ensuring national security. 

But relinquishing the lives saved from the atavistic Boko Haram and almost at the same time, surrendering it to the pangs and ravages of hunger, poverty and destitution through policy timidity on economic and social fronts by a government that seemed to be mortally afraid to rigorously exert itself on new ideas stands logic on its head. The ideological fudge and denials which has characterised successive  Nigerian governments have constantly denied them the grasp of the fundamental disconnect and the prospect of objectively and scientifically comprehending the contradictions in the country and arriving at the relevant policy instruments to address them. 

President Buhari who at earlier times appeared to have, had the political will and strength of character to break from the routine, is now boxed in, to the inertia engendered by the customary gridlock of elite trade-offs, wedded to the well travelled path of regimented neo-liberalism and the consequent unimaginative policy alternatives. While president Buhari personally indulge himself in the moral outrage of the failures, corruption and inadequacies of the previous governments, his patriotic vision of a resurgent nation is hampered by a compelling deficit of analytical insight to the objective condition of the Nigerian situation and the poverty of scientific and intellectual rigour to define alternative road map.