Managing the Post-Election Nigeria

At no other time and on no other issue has punditry become such a dangerous pursuit as on the outcome of the recent presidential poll in Nigeria. The danger of being (mis)read either as an ‘enemy’ or a ‘friend’ in each and every contending quarter is tremendous. The risks are not worth it. Yet, the Nigerian society has, in the profound words of the late Ibrahim Tahir, been one of a tremendous pressure in the tunnel from which there is no escape route and in which “the ordinary person is getting angrier and angrier. So much so that the primary reaction to any disagreement is violence”.

Democracy must be constantly reconstructed at every moment to serve a national purpose

At the time Dr. Tahir was giving this warning as a resource person at the Second seminar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) organized by the National Democratic Institute in Abuja early into the Fourth Republic, the level of tension in the society was not this high. Today, it is much, much higher. The cumulative poverty of statecraft, implementation of ruinous economic policies, the tradition of recruiting the most ill-prepared elements into power through a culture of problematic elections since 1999 have now combined to produce a time – bomb. To the list must be added a terrible elite fragmentation and anger from below.

The lesson of history is the vulnerability of every polity experiencing this level of decay. In all such societies, anything can trigger a logjam. It cannot be that the Romans were not wise as to have experienced collapse. The society was already vulnerable to being overtaken. It would be so great if the Nigerian polity could be transformed through a radical surgery. Intervention does not think that the current level of political education of the average citizen can support such transformation without the process of change being appropriated and misdirected by conflict entrepreneurs into violence of ethnic, regional and religious character. We see this every day.

It bears echoing what the late Prof Claude Ake often said about Nigeria not being a polity which should ever experience a breakdown. He argued that the level of suffering and subsequent misery should such happen would be an embarrassment the black world would never be able to overcome. This must be the basis of the recent aversion to anything like a spectre of fire and brimstone during the announcement of the presidential election. That spectre might have been nipped in the bud but it doesn’t appear Nigeria is totally out of the woods. Every other day, the outcome of the presidential poll acquires a new interpretation which is seeping and sedimenting in popular consciousness.

For these reasons, the Nigerian elite collectively needs to find a much quicker and more creative ways of reconciling itself and healing the wounds of the presidential election. The elite in Nigeria has a history of unbelievable recklessness but it also has an incredible capacity for bewildering and sophisticated formula for healing internal injury to itself. Who could have thought that they would decide that the answer to the June 12-logjam lay in bringing out a Chief Olusegun Obasanjo from the jail house, cleanse him of any political uncleanliness and invest him with presidential power? Who would have thought that less than a decade after the Biafran War, the Vice-President of the Federal Republic would be an Igbo man?

It remains unimaginable that even in the tension ahead of the war and after all the shootings, the idea of ‘fighting as brothers’ was codified into the epitaph to the war in the ‘No victor, No vanquished’ rhetoric.  The image-schema of ‘No victor, No vanquished’ is no empty rhetoric. It might not have produced the literary meaning because people thought rhetoric or metaphors come with their meaning when actually the meaning of any such expression and the practices they invoke always have to be argued out to create the reality they ever became.

In other words, the elite can defuse the overhang today. But defusing this time – bomb requires more than the genius of any single party or a fraction of the ruling elite. Rather, it calls for a profoundly critical collectivity although this is not an argument for a Government of National Unity. The kind of unity required now will not come from a Government of National Unity but a truly negotiated accommodation, considering the factor of anger from below at a time of incredible elite fragmentation and election related grumblings. How the elite gets at it after the elections is what they alone can fathom. Perhaps, the answer lies in what Asiwaju Tinubu has called a Government of National Competence. Other crack elite members might have started exploring and putting other options on the table beyond a good versus bad guy reasoning. In a conflict situation – angry versus the contented Others; young versus old; protagonist versus antagonist, etc -the way forward always lies somewhere in-between.