Can Nigeria’s February 2023 Election Survive These Six Threats?

The turbulence that, historically, characterizes every presidential election in Nigeria is in full swing. It is frightening to even the most usually unperturbed elements in the polity about such things. Surely, no one who understands how social dynamics unfolds or, to put it in a more accessible language, how the world works, would be comfortable with it. To be comfortable with it is to take too much risk because one minor incident can trigger a chain of reactions beyond the structural, institutional and even the coercive outlay that exists in Nigeria today.

CDS once spoke of attempt to lure the military

It is not for nothing that most of the security chiefs and some countries, including two great powers, have referenced intelligence reading chaos. Intelligence, like every other text, can be complicit in multiple meanings but it may also speak to processed data. But, it is one thing to fear chaos, another thing to be specific about where the threats are located, with particular reference to containment.

Disorder as a Strategy

As at today, it is difficult to know if this threat has been beaten back or if the masterminds have merely been sent on recess. That is the threat from the botched attempt by some elements in the engine room of power to use disorder to either replace the February elections with something else or block a particular candidate. To be fair to such elements, they might have bought into the earlier sentiments that the party primaries produced no one not too sullied to take over from the incumbent. And they fell back on instrumentalisation of chaos as for the national currency and fuel to be suddenly available to no one again. Above all, it played out in a way that the secret service suddenly needed to arrest the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria in spite of the president. It was so clumsy.

Now, there is a sense in which it doesn’t matter whether they are merely on recess or disorganized because they have already set in motion interpretations that can produce consequences beyond imagination. For instance, a set of pictures have surfaced on Facebook that a brilliant mischief maker can reconstruct into a quick binding narrative. It is the picture of Chief Awolowo in one political adversity or so in 1963, Chief MKO Abiola in 1993 and then Asiwaju Tinubu in 2023. Narratives are not about true or untrue. A narrative operates beyond such a binary once it becomes a winning understanding of any event. That is why language or texts, (not GSM text messages) are held to be constitutive of reality.

Asiwaju Tinubu’s kingmaker Syndrome

Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has left no one in doubt that he will not take it lying low being stabbed at the back. He argues that it is his turn to succeed President Buhari. His is the classical Kingmaker’s syndrome who believes rightly that the King should reckon with him and obey whatever contract they entered into. There is nothing wrong with this in itself but nothing is ever in itself. That expectation is, however, now a potential source of danger in so far as the Asiwaju’s hope to neutralize a real or imaginary backstabbing would have social order disheveling implications. So, unless the election is conducted and the gap between the winner (Obi or Atiku) is so wide that Asiwaju must keep quiet, then we are all in danger of another June 12. This would be so unfair on Nigeria which has declined to vote for Buhari for three times. Buharites would claim that he was rigged out in each case but they would NEVER say that a PRP person in the North was ever enthusiastic about Buhari; that there were emirs in the North that were so enthusiastic about Buhari, politically and otherwise; that there were many businessmen and women in the North who were very enthusiastic about Buhari or that there were intellectuals of Islam who were very enthusiastic about Buhari. Without any of these fractions or factions of the elite, Buhari could never win any election beyond the 12 million urban poor and the masses who saw him differently, corresponding to their own horizon of understanding.

And then the Asiwaju did his own political arithmetic and concluded that it is the same Buhari who would facilitate his own ascendancy. Buhari is certainly not a bad man as a person, however we understand bad but he is a product of a camp of reasoning about where Nigeria should be and how Nigeria might reach such point. It didn’t look like Asiwaju understood that dimension of the Buhari problem in the North before his gambit. He should, therefore, be able to nurse his loses should his arithmetic not produce the outcome he thought it produced. But, would he?

Unprecedented Mobilisation of Hatred

The threat here is the inter-group context of the elections. It is possible to argue that the social media has heightened the degree of mobilization of hatred along ethno-regional and religious fault lines beyond what actually exists. Such would not be out of sync because, in spite of the much talked division in Nigeria, Nigerians are basically at peace with each other. However, it also makes sense to say that there have been extra hours on mobilization of hatred across ethno-regional and religious lines, prompted in part by President Buhari’s rather exclusionary pattern of recruitment of state officials. Much of the mobilization along that axis have not only sedimented but must have produced consciousness that can be mobilized in the event of any crease in the course of the election. Now, who can put them back in the bags?

This Man or That Man Must Win Ultimatum

The electioneering period has served as a summoning for the issuance of threats on who should win or must lose the (presidential) election if there must be peace. The threats or those who issued them might think they were only bargaining. Brinkmanship can be a productive entry point just as it can be costly, especially in a circumstance as in Nigeria now where moral authority is nearly absent. It is one threat to watch out for because all such indirect summoning to violence can produce horrors without trace.

Presido, is your relationship with Asiwaju a case of storm in a tea cup or unfolding of danger?

Zoning as a threat

Anyone who cannot see how zoning has been securitized must either be so unsuspecting or somehow not interested. In the 2023 (presidential) election, an APC presidential candidate from the North would have been a travesty of justice just as a PDP presidential candidate from the South would have also been a travesty, the last PDP president being a Southerner. This is not the frame of intelligibility brought into the issue right now. The articulation now is that power should move to the South, irrespective of the party. That representation of the zoning in this round of election can pose its own consciousness threat to the poll, the succession project and the polity. Unfortunately, it has gone deep, without the PDP, for instance, making the clarification strongly enough to undercut the abstraction. Zoning is not such a radical formula but it is of a strategic essence at the current level of political consciousness. It is a healing consensus that can serve the purpose of confidence building till it exhausts its potentials. Being clever with its application will help nobody.

The Generalised Insecurity

There are too many spaces of violence across Nigeria. The Boko Haram insurgency in the Northeast, the banditry in the Northwest, the herdsmen and ‘herdsmen’ killing field in the Middle Belt and the Biafra rebellion are the most known ones. To that list is to be added piracy in the Niger Delta. These are the ones that we read about in the newspapers. But there are a great deal of spaces taken over by ‘baby factories’, sex slave factories, cultic violence, ritual sacrifices and domestic violence. A lot of these are going on in nearly every nook and crannies of Nigeria. If there is anything that ought to have warranted shifting of the election until there is a much more organized response, this should have been it. Unfortunately, the elite are more keen on being (s)elected than finding answers to generalized insecurity. Who can say what would happen should there be a serious flare up in any of these spaces or dimensions of insecurity, including a beef up by one dissatisfied actor or another who has got enough cash to do so?

Conclusion

The people of Nigeria have suffered far in excess of whatever quota of suffering Providence might have allotted to them. And this is just because the elite are unable and/or unwilling to work out consensus and raise the stakes in terms of the minimum standards in national life. In the absence of any fraction of the elite that can impose coherence, the polity is wobbling. And we are not seeing any serious performance of the nation by any group or coalitions in terms of framing the issues, bringing together the coalition that can create understanding and politicize the citizenry against this disarray. What a nation?