Mallam Al-Bishak (MON), a social commentator, is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of English, Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria. In this encounter with Chinedu Aroh, he speaks on the lessons of the just-concluded general elections in Nigeria.
What is your reaction to the victory of the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) in the March 28 presidential elections in Nigeria?
My immediate reaction is that it is good that the opposition has, for the first time in Nigeria’s history, dislodged the ruling party. It means that henceforth the electorate can use its power to change an unpopular government.
That will instill the culture of meaningful rivalry in our polity, whereby the political parties will always compete to come up with the best programmes for the electorate instead of a party imposing itself on the electorate willy-nilly.
However, it must be pointed out that the victory of APC wasn’t because of a better ideological template than the PDP. That is because APC is a party of strange bed fellows. The huge defections into the party from especially the PDP so far have shown that there is absence of ideology in the party even though APC may be said to promote benevolent or welfarist capitalism while PDP promotes malignant or oppressive capitalism. Nonetheless, the APC was smart enough to pick a candidate like Buhari, who has a cult following in the North, and is sellable to some parts of the South. If APC had floated another General or politician from the North, the people of the North wouldn’t have backed him, and certainly APC wouldn’t have defeated the PDP. Buhari’s case is different, and is an easy sell because of his symbolism. That is, those cherished values that Buhari truly symbolizes, which are honesty, tenacity of purpose, incorruptibility, strength of character, unwavering principles, stoicism, visionary leadership, etc. In fact, his antecedents as Nigeria’s former military Head of State showed him as a disciplined, incorruptible and principled person who lives a barely Spartan life. Buhari’s recent election victory wasn’t because of the ‘Change’ campaign of the APC, as opposed to the ‘Continuity’ or ‘Transformation’ slogan of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). His election as civilian President gave Nigerians a ray of hope that a messiah had arrived to right the wrongs, and shepherd Nigeria to the ‘Promised Land’. The few years that he was the military Head of State saw him demonstrate moral rectitude. He also demonstrated courage in terms of economic decisions. I remember when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave him conditionalities to take a loan, he rejected both the conditionalities and the loan but, looked inward, and came up with a home-grown policy such ‘belt-tightening’, a euphemism for austerity measures. Further, he devised an economic policy called ‘counter trade’ where our crude oil was traded for essential commodities which were imported from abroad so that the masses would have a better lease of life. In addition, he refused to devalue the Naira, but kept it at par with the U.S. dollar.
When the APC held its conventions in Lagos last December, and Buhari won overwhelmingly, it quickly sent warning signals to the PDP. The APC stakeholders knew that Buhari was able to get over twelve million votes under his Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) in 2011 within six months. From then till now, one sees consistency. He got twelve million in 2011 and this year, he got 15.7 million votes, an addition of over three million votes. The people in the North knew the frustration they faced under PDP, which includes Boko Haram. Some people say that Boko Haram was created by the Northerners to frustrate Jonathan, which is not true. The North has always had a problem of religious ‘extremism’ since the time of Usman Dan Fodio who waged his own Jihad against the prevailing Islamic tendencies of the emirs in the then Hausa States in the late 18th century to the early 19th century of the Common Era (C.E.). Further, different groups have come up with different Islamic ideologies, trying to supplant one another. The Shi’ites under Sheikh El-Zakzaky in Zaria created problems for the Murtala/ Obasanjo military regime in the 1980s. The Maitatsine uprising in Kano and later parts of the North took place under President Shehu Shagari in the 1990s. Boko Haram came up in the North-East in the 2010s with its challenges under President Umaru Musa ‘Yar Adua. President Goodluck Jonathan merely inherited the problem from ‘Yar Adua, which he unfortunately failed to contain for the most part of his six-year tenure. The Northerners were killed in their tens of thousands including both Muslims and Christians. It may interest you to know that my own wife, a Muslim, was a victim of such bomb attack in Jos though, thank God, she didn’t lose her life but sustained serious injuries. So there was no way Northerners would create a problem that would affect them simply because they didn’t like a sitting President. If Boko Haram had been attacking only Southerners, the conspiracy theory might be said to work. But, it wasn’t so.
In all, Buhari, as a symbol, propelled the APC to victory. That was why all the propaganda made against him failed woefully. Look at the issue that he did not have a secondary school certificate, and just when he won the elections, they said that they found it in a certain file that they had forgotten to search! They also brought a fake medical certificate claiming that he had cancer. Those were ploys to distract him. Another reason the APC won was because Jonathan’s performance was woeful. There was massive corruption in the system; the economy was down. Forget the propaganda about rebasing the economy. Rebasing the economy does not imply that the economy is productive. It is just changing the rules by broadening the economic scope to include new areas hitherto not reckoned with. It is mere paper success about the economy. The earning power of the people has depreciated. There is poverty everywhere.
Can you project Nigeria under Buhari in the next four years?
It is difficult to say, ‘Buhari will succeed or fail’. One can only advise him. However, going by his antecedents, one may say that he will succeed. But this is democracy and not military rule, whereby the Head of State can have his say without following due process. One can only advise him on certain things he can do which will make him to succeed. Number one is Boko Haram. Buhari has to meet with his military service chiefs and security operatives to study the real situation on ground. He has to adopt a four-pronged approach, which includes sustaining the military onslaught against the insurgents in the North-East by better equipping and motivating the Nigerian soldiers. The second approach is to manage success by opening the door for dialogue with those insurgents amenable to it. Third, is to create a cerebral team of Muslim clerics or scholars who can intellectually engage the Boko Haram clerics on the motives of the insurgency with a view to deconstructing their minds on their false Islamic ideology. Finally, the government should create jobs for both the insurgents and non-insurgents alike to forestall the maxim that “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop”. Only an idle mind will easily agree to offend Allah (God) by mindlessly taking his own life in the false hope of entering Paradise, and compound his sin by taking the lives of hundred innocent souls who themselves have been oppressed by the society! The other issue is corruption. No matter what people may say about President Olusegun Obasanjo, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission under Obasanjo did very well. A lot of high-profile individuals were arrested and prosecuted, including former police Inspector General Tafa Balogun. But, since Jonathan came on board, the trend has died down. Definitely Buhari has to look for a more committed leadership for the EFCC and other anti-corruption agencies in this fight, and give them the free hand to do their jobs professionally. He has said that all his ministers would declare their assets; however, I will suggest that it should not just be his ministers, but anybody that is going to associate with the Buhari government. They must be honest and transparent. And the usually moribund Code of Conduct Bureau must swing into action, and do its work effectively and efficiently. Then the issue of electric power supply has to be tackled; once there is power stability, there will be massive industrial growth, a booming manufacturing and cheaper costs of goods and services. The multiplier effect will be massive job creation.
How can he fight war against corruption when the people surrounding him seem to be corrupt?
Perception, they say, is reality. Many people believe that Buhari is surrounded by corrupt people especially his financial backers in APC. Whether it is true or not, it is the reality. So to give Buhari’s government a measure of respectability and acceptability, he must distance themselves from those people perceived to be corrupt. Therefore he should assemble a bipartisan team of incorruptible professionals to work with, while the politicians should be kept at bay, and may operate as members of his kitchen cabinet who may do government contracts but must follow due process. I pray that APC should realize this, and cooperate with Buhari if it wants to be the ruling party for some time. Otherwise, Buhari’s first team will attract praise or condemnation from Nigerians, and instill hope or despondency among them. Any corrupt person should not openly identify with his government. He should go for people that have clean records, and will sanitize the system.
He may have problems with the legislature. Luckily, his party has the majority in the national legislature. He has to sit down and work with his party to agree on zero tolerance for corruption. If his anti-corruption crusade is ingrained in the mentality of the lawmakers, it will surely influence the kind of laws they will pass, and make them less rapacious in the kind of jumbo salaries and allowances they take; or what they get when exercising their oversight functions, or when budgets are presented to them for approval. It is also important that given the precarious nature of the economy, Buhari should cut down on even his salary and feeding budget, and live like the President of America whereby the government does not pay for his feeding and those of his private guests. The Nigerian President earns more than the American President figuratively speaking. When Jonathan was defeated, he said he was living in a cage for sixteen years because he has moved from one government house to another. The major cause of his defeat was the deceit by those people that surrounded him in the cage they had put him, and misinformed as well as misled him. He did not know the reality of what was happening. It was towards the end when the PDP began to experience massive decamping that he began to realize that he had false advisers. He found it difficult to remove some bigwigs fingered to be corrupt in his government. Buhari should also ensure that the National Assembly members live by their salaries alone, instead of the wastage associated with them. Good enough, he has said that he would cut down his recurrent expenditure and devote more money to capital projects. He has to stop the culture of a government official having a fleet of official cars and retinue of aides maintained at government expense. Some reformist policies of President Obasanjo have to be revived. Buhari should stop contracting militants to guard oil pipelines but engage the armed forces; as well as work towards revitalizing the existing local refineries, and build more refineries to stem the tide of oil theft and the oil subsidy scam. With that, Nigerians will expect a drastic cut in the pump price of petroleum, and thereafter cheaper transportation costs.
What is your scorecard on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) using the just-concluded general elections as the basis?
INEC’s performance on a large scale was good. But, there were areas that it failed. For instance, while the introduction of the permanent voter’s card (PVC) was good, INEC did not ensure that the original result sheets abounded in all the polling units, and results were counted and announced at the polling units. Besides, some desperate politicians ensured that the card reader machines did not work so as to resort to manual clearance to vote. That gave rise to massive rigging. Another area is the detachment of the INEC national headquarters from the happenings at the state, council and ward levels. The State Resident Electoral Commissioners were given enormous powers to operate, and thus succumbed to the wheeling-dealing of politicians and the security operatives. There should have been a system of checks and balances at all levels. RECs should not have been allowed to do whatever they wanted because it would appear that any governor could decide to pocket the state REC to perpetrate any untoward act to win election in as much as it was believed that the headquarters would simply accept the outcome. INEC headquarters advised any aggrieved politician to go to court. But, it appears that the courts and tribunals only work according to the wishes of the Chief Justice of the Federation. It was only at the time of Chief Justice Belgore that people who won elections through foul means were sacked. The present chief justice has been alleged to have said that the courts would not overturn elections won at the polls. If it is true, it is wrong to allow people who manipulate the polls to get and power to stay in office. INEC should also ensure that no political party use money as a major yardstick for political participation. It is another way of encouraging corruption. Let there be a level playing field for anybody. Honesty and good leadership vision should be the criteria for gunning for any elective posts rather than being a moneybag.
Don’t you think Jonathan was magnanimous in accepting defeat?
I feel that he had no option given the close marking put by the international community on the national polls. Recall the peace accord signed months earlier between Jonathan and Buhari in the presence of former United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and another signed at the behest of the National Peace Committee led by General Abdulsalami Abubakar (retd) almost on the eve of the presidential elections. Further, US President Barrack Obama kept talking with both the major contestants to accept defeat, and keep the peace. There was also the warning that perpetrators of any post-election crises would be arraigned by the International Court of Criminal Justice. Given the scenario of things, it would have been difficult for either of them not to accept defeat. With all these, I don’t see how any loser would have rejected the results. The whole world watched keenly and vigilantly. But that is not to say that we cannot praise Jonathan for displaying the spirit of sportsmanship by conceding defeat and congratulating the winner ahead of the formal announcement of the official results. His timely concession of defeat saved the country from the ill-motives of political opportunists who wanted to plunge this country into unmitigated crisis.
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