[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1999, the military coupists who had ruled Nigeria for decades introduced a brand of democracy designed to keep the military in power for decades to come. And they’ve succeeded.
Following intense internal unrest and international pressure to return Nigeria to a democratic form of government, in 1998, General Abdulsalami Abubakar presented a blueprint for a return to civilian rule. Along with a problematic unitarian document he adopted as the Nigerian Constitution, the then-retiring military ruler also instituted a political system modelled after America’s democracy.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, America’s political system was concretised as a two-party system dominated by the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Historically, the two parties have been ideologically distinguished. But there’s always been room for the independents to find political expression. There are at least 38 minor and 46 regional political parties in the United States.
The American two-party system makes the chances of any other party appear hopeless. Independent thinkers in the US who don’t feel comfortable voting for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party tend to abstain from voting or place a protest vote for a 3rd party or an independent candidate. For instance, Democrats argue that Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, was a factor in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 electoral defeat to Republican Donald Trump.
Independents, the voters who are not pledged to either party, who could be swayed based on a single issue or set of issues or by the general disposition of a candidate, are aggressively wooed by Republicans and Democrats. They make a difference in profound ways, and they determine who wins an election if a critical mass of them vote in favour of one candidate.
But there’s the dark side of being an independent voter. They often face bullying from political activists in the dominant political spectrum in their communities. They are often told that abstaining or voting for a 3rd candidate is helping “the other side” to win. And the intimidation intensifies in proportion to the tension in the elections.
The same dynamics play out in Nigeria. With a borrowed political system, comes a borrowed culture of browbeating independent thinkers into joining the bandwagon. Since 2017, I have had my fair share of attempts of emotional blackmail and intimidation tactics to get me to support the main opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party.
The Rejected President
Nothing under God’s blue skies would make me support a Muhammadu Buhari candidacy. In 2015, when my newspaper’s Editorial Board warned Nigerians of the dangers of a Buhari Presidency, we cited “his low understanding of the economy, his poor administrative and interpersonal skills, his many comments and actions that portray him as a religious extremist and ethnic supremacist, his low education and feared lack of stamina required of a president of a diverse country like Nigeria”. The gravest warning, then (and now), was of the threat to Nigeria’s national security if “a man who has shown sympathies for terrorists in the past and is on record as sharing a twin ideology with Boko Haram is given access to the machinery of government”. We cautioned that terrorists must not come under federal protection in Nigeria.
Despite our intervention, Buhari was declared the winner of the flawed elections in which close to 20 million registered voters were deliberately denied their voting rights by the Attahiru Jega-led national electoral body. I believe it was by design that a disproportionate number of those people were from the Southern part of Nigeria, a region more likely to vote for Buhari’s opponent, the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan.
Tragically, my Editorial Board has been proven right.
The first thing General Buhari did when he took office was to practically shut down the federal government in a vain attempt to demonstrate absolute control over the country’s affairs. Thanks to Buhari’s ill-advised and ill-timed decision to move all public funds out of the commercial banking system to a ‘vault’ in the Central Bank, the Nigerian economy went into recession, solidifying his position as the only two-time ‘recessionist’ head of state in Nigeria’s history.
Buhari is known for his divisive disposition, marked by an overt intolerance of anybody who is not his native Fulani tribe or does not share his religious beliefs, political views, or stunted worldview. This president’s disdain for “the other” has pushed Nigeria further along the path of disintegration than any single leader before him.
President Buhari has also turned out to be a notable modern-day human rights abuser. The International Criminal Court has at least two active investigations of ethnic and religious cleansing carried out by the Nigerian Army under his command. Human rights organisations like Amnesty International and Intersociety report that the terrorist groups Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen militia have killed more Nigerians under Buhari’s watch between June 2015 and October 2018 than the total killed between May 1999 and May 2015. Nigeria’s borders have never been more open to invasion by foreign terrorists than it is today.
There’s no doubt that Nigeria is worse off, in every fundamental way, under President Buhari. I, therefore, outrightly reject the continuation of this failure in leadership. Buhari’s atrocities, however, do not beautify his main challenger, Atiku Abubakar. At face value, Buhari and the presidential flagbearer of the opposition People’s Democratic Party appear to be two pieces of the same corrupt pie. Contrasting the two septuagenarians, in principle, is a strenuous exercise.
Whoever wishes to take Buhari’s place in 2019 has to convince Nigerians of how they intend to address our concerns for a more just, secure, and progressive country. We must be convinced that the leader we choose to steer the ship of Nigeria has the character, competence, and temperament to navigate us out of these troubled waters.
For instance, I don’t think Nigerians should fire one ethnic supremacist and hire another ethnic supremacist. I don’t think Nigerians should trade an intellectually-challenged president for another mumbling desperate power seeker. That would be like staying in the same nightmare, just a different dream.
What do we need to do?
This is the time to wake up; raise the level of our political consciousness; and take steps to deliver our future from the leaders of the past who have destroyed our present. The age-long challenges facing Nigeria and the complex mix that created most of them require a leader with steady hands, an active intellect, and a progressive approach to governance.
We need a leader with the intellectual capacity to go through the minefield of ethnic distrust, religious intolerance, failed economic policies, lopsided trade agreements, divestment in education, and unimaginable corruption that have stolen the possibilities of this great nation. We need a leader who has not lost his humanity and has respect and compassion for all Nigerians, irrespective of their tribe, gender, religion, and political position.
We need a leader who has the moral centre to raise our nation’s consciousness to a new mind of possibilities, who has the courage to free our country from the chains of our past, and who has the vision to open the doors to a new future for Nigerian children.
In this election cycle, an effective test for those vying for office against an incumbent will be how they conduct their campaigns. A candidate who surrounds himself predominantly with those of his tribe, his age group, or his gender is sending a signal as to what kind of presidency he would run. Donald Trump has demonstrated that a bullying, racist, out-of-control candidate becomes a bullying, racist, out-of-control president. You can only give what you have.
We don’t need to embrace candidates who elevate tribe above talent in their campaign organisations. We don’t need to embrace candidates who celebrate flash over substance. And we certainly don’t need candidates who have no demonstrated results in excellence. As Nigerians reject President Buhari, they also have to reject unfit candidates. They are the lot that landed us in this mess in the first place.
A presidential candidate who is incoherent about his economic, healthcare, and education plans will preside over a government with no clear direction. A candidate who doesn’t arouse genuine interest and grassroots support is unlikely to rally Nigerians behind a defined agenda if he becomes president. A presidential candidate, who jets out of Nigeria frequently, under any guise, will undoubtedly be an absentee president if he is elected.
I expect Nigerians to hold all the presidential candidates, especially the incumbent and his main challenger, Atiku Abubakar, to a higher standard than I have observed thus far. We should accept one-liners or campaign slogans in place of defined policy prescriptions.
Former Vice President Atiku shouldn’t expect to be the beneficiary of the political mob action that produced Buhari. History has shown that “the anybody but…” template throws up a weak leader who rides on the back of ethnic, religious, or regional privilege and offers nothing tangible to the electorate; and If elected, he delivers even less.
We must demand better, and we must stop trying to intimidate independent-minded Nigerians to go with the bandwagon. Groupthink has never advanced the destiny of nations; if anything, it produces dysfunctional decision-making that leads to peril.
Aziza Uko is a Nigerian publisher serving as the President and Executive Editor of The Trent (www.thetrentonline.com), an award-winning online news platform, one of Nigeria’s most influential online newspapers. She is a communications professional, political consultant, and media entrepreneur with over fifteen years of experience in media, marketing communications, corporate communications, brand strategy, political strategy, electioneering, public policy, philanthropy, writing, editing, and banking. She can be reached via email HERE.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
