Mahmood Yakubu Overthrows CBN’s Emefiele From the Line of Fire in Africa’s Limping Democratic Giant

Many readers must have come across this graphic sent to Intervention by a reader. He must have got it from Facebook, that being where the creativity of Nigerian youths is unfolding at its best.

For much of the past few months, all eyes were on the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele. He was the devil incarnate in the public eye.

Today, his place has been taken by Mahmood Yakubu, the Chairperson of the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC).  Now, Emefiele can sleep beautifully. He is no longer in the news.

How come that what should have been the Mahmood Yakubu moment is getting soiled after all the preparations? Is it a conspiracy of the politicians or just the impossible Nigerian nation or something we don’t know yet?

It is possible that, by this time tomorrow, Yakubu Mahmood may not even get one inch of news space as one gentleman or another might have imprisoned national attention.

It could be Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to whom pictures have shown some eminent persons congratulating even as protests and petition organisers are oiling their guns for a civil society showdown.

The space is likely to become a battleground of protesters and congratulators as from Wednesday, March 1^st, 2023. Who wins in that battleground is an interesting question in the circumstance but not as interesting as who is moderating the power struggle?

In a complex polity as Nigeria, the current kind of stalemate attests rather than interrogates democracy. It should be encouraged but there should be national symbols with moral authority to define the red lines. Otherwise, it will become an animalistic and an unproductive test of will.

A moderator with moral authority will constantly frame and reframe the big question until there is consensus. For instance, one such reframing could be that of which would be a lesser evil: cancelling the election or correcting the lapses? If the lapses can be identified beyond the claims of unprovoked enthusiasm and can be corrected, will it change anything fundamentally? If it will change anything fundamentally, then it MUST be done. But if it would not, then why might the question not be about how best to confront rather than run away from the more difficult task of conscientizing the citizenry against state capture? And so on and so forth!

Whichever way it goes, anybody offering violence in which his own children will not be killed should know that he or she will end up miserably at The Hague. There can be no provocation that should justify asking other people’s children to take the bullets when one’s children are far away in Europe and North America.

In any case, ability to transcend this kind of creases in national life without resorting to bloodshed is very important. Those writing violence on social media platforms should beware of the discursive implications of what they are doing. That’s what happened when editors were jailed after Rwandan genocide. ‘They’ said they were only writing and that they could not be punished for ‘mere words’. That was until the Judge made them know that words are constitutive of reality. By the time ‘they’ heard the judge making the connection between ‘mere words’ and violence, it was too late.

We didn’t go to school only to sit down and watch violent situation developing without fighting it and, by implication, become accomplices of mass atrocities. We have the right to protest but we have no control over how the protest plays out in an emotion charged atmosphere as Nigeria is today.