Buhari, Violence, And Distractions By Okey Ndibe

Last week, General Muhammadu Buhari (ret.) set off a
typically Nigerian kind of storm when he reportedly
asserted that Nigerians are bound to react violently to the
rigging of the 2015 general elections. Mr. Buhari’s
stipulation triggered verbal exchanges that pitted him (as
well as several opposition parties) against the – many
would argue – misruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Several officials of the PDP charged Mr. Buhari with that
vague indictment of Nigerian politics: seeking to “overheat
the polity.” They accused the lanky retired general of an
unpatriotic scheme to foment a bloodbath in Nigeria. Not
to be outdone, Mr. Buhari’s apologists accused President
Goodluck Jonathan of running the most corrupt political
shop in Nigeria’s history. As if not to be sidelined, the
Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and its main man,
former Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State, sought to
put on record their opinion that last year’s elections –
including the presidential polls that enthroned Mr.
Jonathan – were marred by fraud.
In a sense, the brouhaha that Buhari set off is, in the final
reckoning, empty. It was sheer political theater, an
exercise in distraction. There was a lot of fury, but little
illumination.
Buhari’s prediction of violence should the 2015 elections
be subjected to mindless manipulation amounts, I
suggest, to an over-optimistic, sanguine perception of
Nigeria. First, there is no question that the country’s
political players are determined to do the usual in 2015 –
rig. Nigeria’s political parties, especially (but not limited
to) the PDP, have fashioned no alternative to electoral
fraud. The country’s electoral culture is fertilized to serve
as a rigger’s paradise. From (harsh) experience, we must
now own up that Nigeria’s electoral umpire, INEC, has
witnessed little or no qualitative evolution since Maurice
Iwu’s shameless era came to an end. Under current
chairman, Attahiru Jega, INEC has displayed with stubborn
consistency a pattern of ineptitude and incompetence. In
fact, Mr. Jega’s elevation has hardly witnessed any wrinkle
in the PDP’s (and, to a lesser extent, other parties’) rigging
genius.
Add to the mix the fact that the Nigerian judiciary’s image
is in tatters, that too many of the country’s magistrates,
judges and justices are ethical paperweights, men and
women susceptible to inducement, willing (for a mess of
porridge) to authenticate daylight electoral robbery – once
one adds that factor to the mix, then one is bound to
conclude that the season of rigging isn’t about to
disappear in 2015. And rigging certainly won’t go away
simply on account of Buhari’s grim, bloody prognosis.
Nigeria is designed and run as a criminal enterprise, an
entity where crime thrives. And those who run the
machinery of the polity must prove themselves, first and
foremost, as adept, intrepid riggers – or, at the very least,
loyal believers in the culture of vote theft. That explains
why rigging is hardly punished. On the rare occasion that
cheated candidates establish in court that their opponents
rigged, no sanction is ever stipulated against the
beneficiaries of electoral crime. Or against the electoral
officials as well as law enforcement and security agents
(the police, the military and the SSS) whose conspiracy
facilitates rigging.
The practice is for the courts to order a re-run. As a rule,
the proven riggers are permitted to remain on the ballot.
These riggers also often retain all their illicit advantages,
including access to public funds with which to re-bribe
INEC officials, the police, and judges. A culture of impunity
does not reform itself without some compulsion. For now,
that compulsive element is absent. Buhari’s warning of
violence hardly rises to a deterrent.
And here’s why: Nigeria is already mired in a veritable
state of war; it’s a space besieged by violence. Yet, the
political class – from the Presidency to the municipality –
remains far from concerned. In any settled country, the
savage quality of armed robbery, kidnappings and
terrorist acts that prevail in Nigeria would have
occasioned direct, alert responses. In Nigeria, the
deterioration of life and the rampancy of violence have
triggered desperate levels of accumulation in government
and corporate officials. The climate is one of cynicism. As
Nigeria totters on its way to “somalia-nization,”
those who hold political and corporate power appear
bent, not on steadying the ship, but picking it clean of any
nuts and bolts (and then bolting) before it sinks.
On their part, dispossessed Nigerians seem sunk to new
depths of fear – and to a concomitant cleaving to the idea
that God is going to emerge to save us all from the
consequences of our human-made disasters.
Last week, President Jonathan proclaimed to Nigerians
that Nigeria’s manifold crises did not begin with him. Only
a fool with no sense of history would contest the
president’s claim. Nigeria did not take the wrong path last
year – or the year before – when Mr. Jonathan found
himself in the position of undertaker-in-chief. It’s fair to
argue, in fact, that the edifice called Nigeria was always
defective from the moment of British conception, and that
its maladies have progressively worsened since birth. No,
Mr. Jonathan did not create the mess that’s Nigeria. It’s
also true that he’s done nothing to ameliorate the mess.
It’s not farfetched to propose that he can do nothing
about the mess – in part, because he is part and parcel of
(to use the title of Chinua Achebe’s booklet) the trouble
with Nigeria.
Nigeria’s leaders (who should really never be called
leaders) do little more than occupy space, aggrandize, and
loot. Their approach to governance has brought us all to
the present pass where many – perhaps most – Nigerians
now openly suggest that Nigeria’s dismemberment is the
only way to go, with the amorphous organism called Boko
Haram doing its bloody best to achieve that end. Boko
Haram is not the first group to use militant means to
challenge the idea of Nigeria. It’s simply the group that’s
doing the job with awful confidence and sophistication.
There’s little evidence that Nigeria’s security apparatus
understands the nature of the group, much less that the
machinery of law enforcement and state security is
equipped to curtail Boko Haram’s spree of destruction and
death. Jonathan’s administration has fought the BK
scourge with two ineffectual tools: on the one hand,
issuing an ill-conceived, questionable summons to
negotiation, on the other hand, deploying facile, fire-
breathing speeches.
Nigeria is in a bad, bad place – and getting worse by the
day. And the trouble with Nigeria is not only the Boko
Haram fanatic whose body or car is rigged with
explosives. The bigger enemy, I suggest, are the
presidents, past and present, who acquired hilltop
mansions, private jets, billions of naira in looted assets
even as most Nigerians couldn’t find a good meal to eat in
a day. The bigger enemies are state governors who steal
their way into office, and then commence to steal security
votes and to guzzle contract sums as if money were going
out of style. The more unconscionable enemies are
members of the National and state assemblies who amass
millions of dollars in salaries and allowances without
passing a single law in more than twelve years of a
nascent, nasty “democracy” to improve the lot of
Nigerians.
Seen in this context, then, the debate over Buhari’s
prognosis must be seen for what it is: a distraction. The
2015 elections will be rigged, with or without Buhari’s
jeremiads. In the hysteria created by Buhari’s statement,
Nigerians paid scant attention to two scandalous news
items. One was a revelation – by Petroleum Minister
Diezani Alison-Madueke – that Nigeria loses an estimated
180,000 barrels of oil daily (or the equivalent of $7 billion
yearly) in stolen crude oil. The other is that Nigeria, which
may be flirting with a serious cash flow crisis, is on the
cusp of borrowing $7.9 billion.
It all goes to prove the point that Nigeria is a carefully
designed scam, a space run by criminals for the benefit of
criminals. Look at it this way: those who run Nigeria
permit themselves and their cronies – in other words,
“steakholders” – to steal $7 billion worth of crude oil per
year. Nobody is ever arrested, much less prosecuted, for
this grand crime. Instead, the same set of men and
women who misgovern Nigeria arrange to borrow from
international banks – at usurious rates – approximately
the sum that their fellows steal in broad daylight! Few are
asking the hard questions that ought to be raised. Only a
few years ago, Ms. Okonjo-Iweala (then President
Obasanjo’s economic guru) declared “eureka!” after she
and the former president negotiated to hand over some
$20 billion to Nigeria’s creditors. Some of us argued then
that a country that had no roads, no hospitals, no
universities worthy of the name, little electric power and
stratospheric rates of poverty and unemployment – that
such a country could not justify doling out such princely
sums to questionable creditors.
Today, the same woman who trumpeted the great wisdom
of paying off the country’s debt is cheerleader for
embarking on a borrowing bonanza. They’re happy we’re
talking about Buhari and 2015, instead of focusing on how
we are being screwed today.
Please follow me on twitter @ okeyndibe
Email: (okeyndibe@gmail.com )

#CONSENSUS 2015