How 2023 Will Affect Nigeria’s Political Stability For Decades

By Olu Fasan

Nigerians, it seems, have moved on from the political events of 2023. Some are already talking about, others planning for, 2027. But the thoughtful and perceptive will not easily forget 2023. For the events of that year will have far-reaching consequences that could unsettle Nigeria for decades. As someone who is heavily invested in Nigeria’s political development, my concern here is how the events of 2023 could deepen Nigeria’s instability, while hoping an alternative aftermath would avert that dreadful political trajectory. 

For a start, following the Supreme Court verdict, Bola Tinubu is now the de facto and de jure president of Nigeria, leaving aside the philosophical question about the nature of his mandate. However, his presidency sets Nigeria on an unstable political future on two key fronts, both regarding the management of Nigeria’s diversity. This may not matter now, it will at some point. But before we come to that, there’s the more imminent problem of the 2027 presidential election. In one sense, 2027 will be like 2015; in another, it won’t. In both senses, 2027 will be acutely challenging. Here’s why.

Nigeria Tripped In 2015, Then Stumbled For Eight Years

 By Owei Lakemfa

Today, Nigeria stands ragged and worn out on the global highway. Should it look back at the last eight years and try to make sense of the rough road it had been dragged through? Or simply pick itself up and face the future?

*Buhari 

The misfortune of the last eight years that was the Buhari regime was foretold. No, not by a fortune teller who might have degrees of in-exactitude. But by the exactitude of lived history. A history that opened the book of remembrance reminding us that this taciturn general who was being propped up on stilts of profane propaganda, wrapped in the borrowed robes of a democrat and falsely presented as an unmatched fighter against corruption, is the same man who for 20 months from 1984 subjected the country to terrors of military misrule.

The Battles Between Young General Buhari And Retired Teacher, Ajasin

 By Owei Lakemfa

The battles I describe, took place four decades ago. They speak to character and governance; some of the problems we have today and why the country is in turmoil. They were between a then 42-year-old General Muhammadu Buhari and  76-year-old Michael Adekunle Ajasin who had retired after 54 years of teaching from July 1921 to August 1975.

*Adekunle Ajasin

Both men represented different values: one relying on coercion and the other on persuasion and reliance on the intellect. Ajasin had been admitted into the Fourah Bay College for a Bachelor Programme in English, Modern History and Economics in 1943, that is one year after Buhari was born.

University Teachers' Strike: Why Nigerian Govt Is Not Perturbed

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

Now, let’s face it: there can only be one reason why the industrial action embarked upon by the teachers of Nigeria’s public universities since February 14 has been allowed to waste a whole seven months of the academic pursuit of many youths, and, indeed, their very lives. Truth is, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find the children of key members of the General Muhammadu Buhari regime in any Nigerian public university.

*Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye 

If the reverse was the case, every effort would certainly have been deftly deployed to avert the strike, or, at least, drastically shorten its duration.

And because the children of the ruling elite are far removed from the avoidable lingering crisis distorting and mortgaging the future of hapless Nigerian youths, the Neros at Nigeria’s seat of power are merely looking at the problem with cold, callous detachment.

Babangida And Recent Nigerian History

 By Dan Amor

To live on this sinful earth for 80 years (whether it is original or official age) is no mean achievement, especially in these terrible times when conditions have sapped real life out of comparative existence leaving the average lifespan of a Nigerian at just 55. 

*Babangida

But here is General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (retd.) celebrating 80 years with pomp and pageantry in the midst of family members, friends, associates, former colleagues and country men and women. Since Tuesday August 17, his date of birth, Nigerians from all walks of life have paid tributes to this former military President, from varied perspectives. 

Why Nigerians Are Flocking To Peter Obi

 By Luke Onyekakeyah

The burning desire by Nigerians to see a turnaround in the country underscores the reason why Nigerians are flocking to Peter Obi and the Labour Party.

There is an urgent expectation for a new dawn to manifest in Nigeria without delay to give Nigerians a new lease of life. People are fed up with the status quo. Any political platform that could guarantee the desired rebirth becomes the centre of attraction.

*Peter Obi 

As it were, Nigerians have suffered untold hardship, pain and anguish brought by selfish and greedy politicians. The political and economic system has been ruined. Long-suffering is a norm in Nigeria as people bear the burden of misrule. The virtue of patience has been overstretched beyond the limit and this is understandable.

Understandable in the sense that the country has been raped and bastardised and Nigerians denied the good things of life since independence. The desire for a productive country started on October 1, 1960. That desire did not materialise. Barely six years into independence the country was plunged into a fierce fratricidal civil war that claimed over a million lives and truncated the political and economic trajectory.

Buhari Presidency: Insecurity ‘Dividend’ For Everybody?

 By Bisi Olawunmi

Flash back to May 29, 2015 when General Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in as president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. A nation, anticipating a redemptive government, waited with baited breath for the inaugural speech of the former military dictator, now a rebranded, born-again democrat. And President Buhari spoke.

It was neither a flowery nor a fire-spitting speech but what rang out and got stamped in the consciousness of the people was his declaration that he belongs to everybody and belongs to nobody, implying that he is for everybody and will not be held hostage by anybody. The general interpretation then was that he was declaring his independence of the political sorcerer at Bourdillon Street, Ikoyi, Lagos who willed the genie of his presidency to life. He was going to be his own man. Malevolent haters had gleefully greeted Buhari’s declaration of his independence as putting the sorcerer ‘in his place, clipping his wings’.

Babangida Should Just Apologise To Nigerians

 By Charles Okoh

For about two weeks, the nation has witnessed the activities around the 80th birthday of former military president, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. For some, especially those who have had direct dealings with him, it has been a flurry of praises for the man whom many have come to know as the Maradona and affectionately referred to also as IBB or the evil genius. 

Babangida has the unenviable record of aborting what everybody has come to accept as the best thing to happen to our electoral evolution as a nation. He scuttled the June 12, 1993, presidential election which he midwifed and for which he received accolades for organizing the best election ever held in the country. 

*Babangida 

First, it was Babangida in an interview with Arise TV, where he clearly spoke like the intelligent man that he is. He also showed that apart from the troublesome leg which has practically left him immobile, he did not disappoint with his intelligent responses to questions put before him. His ability to vividly recall all events around his life as a soldier and a military president even at age 80 stands him out as a brilliant officer. He clearly stands out among his peers and his understanding of issues within and outside the country you can hardly find that with many of our leaders today. 

Babangida And Recent Nigerian History

 By Dan Amor

To live on this sinful earth for 80 years (whether it is original or official age) is no mean achievement, especially in these terrible times when conditions have sapped real life out of comparative existence leaving the average lifespan of a Nigerian at just 55. But here is General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (retd.) celebrating 80 years with pomp and pageantry in the midst of family members, friends, associates, former colleagues and country men and women. Since Tuesday August 17, his date of birth, Nigerians from all walks of life have paid tributes to this former military President, from varied perspectives. 

*Babangida 

It is only natural that we greet such a human dynamo with overwhelming gusto. Happy 80th birthday anniversary to General Babangida. I have read big, meaty, skillfully conceived and carefully executed tributes to the gap-toothed former maximum ruler, constantly relating them to the larger story. Some have treated his story with compassion and with a critical probing pen and have achieved brilliantly their aim of following Babangida’s long journey out of the innocence of his turbulent years. Yet, since men must do their work in warmer temperatures, cold light may not be a sufficient condition for the study of men’s lives. 

Nigeria: Abubakar Malami's Incredible Faux Pas

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

The best value sincere friends and associates of the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Mr. Abubakar Malami, can inject in his career now would be to ensure that he schools himself to always speak sparingly and recognise the need to regularly deploy more time and effort to benefit from informed legal inputs before responding to very serious issues. The office he occupies is such an important and strategic one whose submissions on legal controversies Nigerians can confidently rely upon. It is always very disheartening whenever his interventions on very weighty national affairs are easily faulted by Nigerians, including even street traders and roadside mechanics. 

  *Malami with the British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing

When the 17 Southern governors met in Asaba on May 11, 2021, and   announced a ban on open grazing behind which gun-wielding Fulani herdsmen had for several years now hidden to commit various atrocities like brutal rapes of women and daughters, wanton destructions of crops, maiming or killing of farmers and the invasion and razing of communities, AGF Malami had rushed out to describe the governors’ resolution as “unconstitutional” and “dangerous.”

On Channels TV, Malami pronounced: “It is about constitutionality within the context of the freedoms expressed in our constitution…For example, it is as good as saying, perhaps, maybe, the northern governors coming together to say they prohibit spare parts trading in the north.”

The magisterial carriage with which this obviously very pedestrian and preposterous intervention was delivered must have deepened the astonishment of many Nigerians. How can a “learned gentleman” (least of all the AGF) compare violent herdsmen who appear to derive hideous animation from wantonly destroying farmlands and visiting their owners with diverse destructions and violations to motor spare parts traders who peacefully hire shops from their owners, pay taxes to government and undertake their business in ways that do not inflict any harm on anyone?

Whither Nigeria?

 By Odia Ofeimun

Each time it was discovered that the ship of state was foundering, without compass, and no one seemed to have a handle on how to navigate with a proper goal-orientation, the question, Whither Nigeria?, has been asked as a way of giving expression to where we are as a country, where we are going or where we should be going. Mostly, the issues have emerged from trying to think beyond the scramble by the various nationalities in the country. In a multi-ethnic society, reality tends to be resolved around levels of perception in the practice of governance.  

                *Odia Ofeimun 

I am interested in how we’ve been fixed by history, and how we’ve always managed to have so many unresolved issues, so embarrassingly many, even now, when the most intense marker of dissension in the Nigerian firmament is the Boko Haram Insurgency in the North-East which has sought many times, unsuccessfully, to declare a Caliphate over parts of the country. Take the other issue around MASSOB (Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra) and the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). They have raised the Biafran secessionist flag contentiously and ambitiously over what used to be the Eastern Region. Successive Federal Governments have pursued them with punitive measures as if the civil war of 1967-70 did not quite come to an end. Now, look, the clouds are gathering, as fractions of the Yoruba, at home and in the Diaspora, are angling for a secessionist binge of their own, unless, as it is stressed, ethnic nationalities are allowed to become self-governing within the Nigerian Federation.

Making Nigeria Work Again

 By DAN AMOR

There is a lamentable and disturbing magnitude of violence in Nigeria. So is crime. The country is constantly on the boil. The atmosphere in the country has been nothing but a tawny volcano. The situation conveys at once the chief features of the Nigerian spirit: it is vertical, spontaneous, immaterial, upward. It is ardent. And even as tongues of fire do, it turns into fire everything it touches. What we are experiencing today is induced by poverty, hunger, frustration, apathy and desperation. 

                                                                  *Buhari 

There is no more thermometer to measure the degree of frustration and desperation in the land than the long closure of our tertiary institutions, especially our universities due to strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) since the past eight months. 

Third Term Agenda And The Buhari We Don’t Know

By Banji Ojewale

Some compatriots say we wouldn’t know the real man we have as our president until the chickens come home to roost in 2023. In that year, would President Muhammadu Buhari have removed the veil to succumb to the current sacrilegious clamour to go for a fatal tenure extension? Would he have given in to calls to trash the Constitution so he can walk on the slippery ground euphemistically termed third term? Would he be the Buhari of the wailers? Or of the hailers?

*Buhari 

In 2023, is Buhari going to remain the man we’ve always known as our beloved president? Or a stranger foisted on us? Would he be the bride we didn’t pay our dowry for? Would the husband discover he’d been shortchanged at the point where only God would be the Unseen and Silent Onlooker? Would there be a supplanter at work?

Nigeria: Salute To Our Troops

By Tony Afejuku

The grand finale of the 2019 Army Day Celebration and Combat Support Arms Training Week (ADC-CSATNW – my abbreviation) ended last week. Not being a soldier, I will not pretend that I understood/understand in toto what our Army did or did not do throughout the long week of the combat training and re-training of our soldiers who have done the little or the much they have done (and are still doing) for our country. No matter the havoc our Army chaps have caused us we cannot say without qualms that they have not done more than several good things for us and on behalf of us all.

Of course, as a boy who was reaching adolescence and who was trying to understand his surroundings and his Nigerian landscape, I did not have a glimpse of any Nigerian soldier until the early nineteen-seventies when our civil war broke out. No. I think I am wrong.

Buhari And The Enduring Hate Narrative

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

In the buildup to the 2015 elections, the wild, uproarious promotion of General Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the man with the panacea for   Nigeria’s myriad of problems wasted no time in saturating the air.

*President Buhari 

This was sloppily packaged with a strange, aggressive refusal to give the slightest consideration for any voice of caution, any alternative opinion no matter how sound and redemptive. You either joined the rowdy herd or you are a “hater” of the “messiah.” 

Dapchi Girls: Of Sham Release And Cynical Citizenry

By Sufuyan Ojeifo

Between February 19, 2018 when the Dapchi schoolgirls were abducted by supposed Boko Haram insurgents and Wednesday, March 21, 2018, when the news broke that 101 of them had been released, I had offered perspectives on the incident in two articles. The first was titled: “Chibok and Dapchi girls: The whoredom of Karma” while the second was titled: “Gbomogbomo as metaphor.”

The second article, in particular, provides the take-off point for the current intervention. Therein, I had expressed a concern at the role abductions of schoolgirls play in our presidential politics.  My thesis was that our abducted schoolgirls in the northeast zone have become objects of political bargain in the hands of our modern day real or prearranged gbomogbomo, a Yoruba word transliterated as stealer of children.

'Mainagate'And The Hypocrisy Of The Buhari Regime

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

The hypocrisy of the General Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) government is nauseating. The behaviour of some of its officials is childish, to say the least. They probably think Nigerians are idiots who don't have the capacity to reason.

*Buhari 

Take for instance this Abdulrasheed Maina fiasco. The Ibrahim Magu-led Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is now jumping up and down claiming to be seizing Maina's properties in Kaduna and Abuja and they have journalists to video it and write the stories and create the impression that, indeed, Magu, like his Oga, Buhari, is an anti-corruption czar. And you ask, why now?

Is President Buhari’s Integrity Overrated?

By Martins Oloja

This thing called integrity is the most powerful weapon of mass distraction General Muhammadu Buhari’s point men used to win most supporters’ hearts in 2015. Yes, their intangible but lethal missile got us at our very point of our need as a nation. We had then really needed a man of integrity, a good Nigerian indeed in whom there was no guile. We wanted a clean and strong vessel who could rescue us from the years the locusts had eaten at least up to that point. And most of us found a man we could trust in the lanky General from Daura. And in March, 2015, the election agency we all believed said he (PMB) defeated the then incumbent President, Goodluck Jonathan, who also meekly joined the nation in congratulating Mr. Integrity who trounced him to the delight of many.

*Buhari 

But is appears that barely two and half years after the election, the arrogant illiterate of the 21st century around ‘the man of integrity’ are making most of us to have a rethink that the integrity of the taciturn former head of state may have been massively overrated after all, just as Collin J. Browne, an organisational culture expert, noted in a 2015 classic titled, “Integrity is massively overrated”.

Meanwhile, the concept of “the illiterate of the 21st century” is not original to me too. It is to Alvin Toffler I have quoted several times here. The sociologist and writer on organization development and leadership says, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn”.

Buhari: Worst President Nigeria Ever Had?

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

***This article was first published in my column, Candour's Niche, September last year, about the same time Nasir el-Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State wrote his secret "love letter" to Buhari which has now been leaked to the media by the Aso Rock cabal.

Is anybody still in doubt that General Muhammadu Buhari was grossly overrated? Is anybody still in doubt that the man who was elected Nigeria's president in 2015 lacks the capacity to be even a local government chairman? If you are, please read this article once again.

*Buhari

I have two confessions to make from the outset.

I am an incurable optimist. I am a firm believer in the maxim that no matter how dark a tunnel may appear to be, there will always be some ray of light at the end.

Of course, this presupposes that for you to encounter this light, you must not stand still at the darkest end of the tunnel. Therefore, the philosophy underpinning this belief is that for you to get to the bright end, you must keep moving away from the darkest end.

You must stay the course; perseverance is the watchword. Don’t quit because quitters never win. Here, pragmatism is an inevitable companion.

This conviction also informed my reaction to the socio-political and economic developments in our country in recent times.

I strongly believed that no matter how starkly the national augury may seem to tilt south, we shall overcome as long as we have a leadership that is prepared to put on its thinking cap, prepared to listen, be pragmatic and innovative in handling the myriad of problems confronting the nation.

A Peep Into Osinbajo’s Presidency

By Ochereome Nnanna

Within these twenty months of  the regime of President Muhammadu Buhari, we have been privileged to see two “faces” of his presidency. The first face is the General Muhammadu Buhari character of it, while the second is the Professor Yemi Osinbajo coloration. These two faces are dramatically different.

 

*Buhari and Osinbajo

Let us look at them briefly. Muhammadu Buhari, being the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is the man majority of the Nigerian electorate gave their votes to as the flag bearer of the All Progressives Congress, APC. Many Nigerians saw him as an experienced leader; a man of integrity who would fight corruption and secure the nation from Boko Haram and other security threats, thereby, giving the sluggish economy the impetus to jumpstart itself back to buoyancy.

At least, that was the logic his promoters from the Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu presented before Nigerians. He looked very tailor-made to deliver the “change” the party promised Nigerians. Some of us had our reservations because we had seen the other side of him which did not recommend him as the person to lead the country at this juncture of her march to nationhood.

But when he assumed the mantle of power, Buhari started confirming our fears about him, rather than justifying the confidence of his supporters and other unbiased onlookers. He was slow and sloppy in putting his government together, very much unlike the experienced leader whom we all expected to swing into action immediately after being sworn-in. It took him six months to put together his Federal Executive Council, unlike the new American President, Donald J. Trump, whose cabinet was already in place as he started work.

Up till today, Buhari has not fully constituted his government. One of the most perplexing of Buhari’s failings when it comes to the appointment of people to crucial positions is the Chief Justice of Nigeria, (CJN) saga. When the former CJN, Mahmud Mohammed retired in November last year, the National Judicial Council, NJC, recommended Hon. Justice Walter Nkanu Onnoghen to Buhari for onward transmission to the Senate for confirmation.

Rather than doing so, Buhari swore Onnoghen in as Acting CJN. It was a queer move which the President, up till today when he is away on medical tourism abroad, has refused to explain his motive for it. He left us all guessing. Some of us guessed, against the background of his ethnic and sectional predilections in loading up the commanding points of the Federal Government with Northern Muslims, that Buhari did not want a Southerner as CJN.

Perhaps, he was waiting for three months to elapse, hoping that Onnoghen would retire and the NJC would cave in and nominate the next in line, Justice Tanko Mohammed from Bauchi. That would effectively put the leadership of the Legislative, Executive and Judiciary back in Northern Muslim hands in line with Buhari’s preferred, nepotism-fed governing template which is against the demands of the constitution that top positions in government must be shared to reflect the Federal Character and give all sections a sense of belonging.