About our politics.

If anyone reads this blog (and I have my doubts), I apologize for not having written anything in over a month.

There is always plenty to talk about in terms of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, but it is difficult to do so in a "blog" format.

The thing about Nigeria is very often it isn't just the issue that is a problem, but how we talk about the issue. And it isn't simply an internal problem; much of the discourse about Nigeria/Africa, too much of the discourse about Nigeria/Africa, is driven, powered, peopled and guided from outside Nigeria/Africa, by people who are not Nigerians/Africans, and their "analyses" of our problems are usually ... problematic (and rather self-serving, but that is another argument altogether).

Personally, I am not one for blaming foreigners for our problems. We are the architects of our own direction, and have a responsibility not only to work for our own good but to also work to minimize the effects of whatever it is beyond our borders that would negatively affect us.

So I am not as interested in the problematic analyses from outside our country and am more focused on the our own problematic analyses.

Per this blog, I cannot piggyback off of a consensus position and add a little varnish of my opinion. If I were to fully discuss most issues, I would have to build the argument up from scratch, taking time to argue against each of several competing existing consensus arguments related to that issue.

By way of giving an example, take the 2011 Presidential Election.  Three candidates won states. President Goodluck Jonathan won the most states, General Buhari (rtd) finished second, and Nuhu Ribadu won a single state (Osun).  You know and I know that there are reasons certain states voted for Buhari. The reasons those states voted for Buhari are also the reasons the rest of the states voted for Jonathan, except in the inverse. As for Osun, the ACN machinery in the state obviously misplaced the directives from the party's godfather-in-chief, Ahmed Bola Tinubu.

The thing is .... none of this had any relevance to the important, strategic, vital issues facing Nigeria. If I wanted to comment on the issues, I wouldn't be able to piggyback off of the candidates' campaign positions and add my own varnish.  I would instead have to start from scratch, creating an entirely new "campaign" position of my own.

And while I am on the topic, why are people acting surprised when they see our current President struggle with our problems?  Meaning no offence to anyone, the President inclusive, nobody voted for him because they thought he was capable of handling our problems. They voted for him (to the extent that the election was free and fair) because anything and anyone was preferable to them over Buhari, for exactly the reasons that other states (again, to the extent the election was free and fair) thought Buhari was the candidate for them.

And the problem of Presidents and Prime Ministers who are not necessarily able to tackle the problems is an old one.

Understand I am not trying to be insulting. I actually like Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, our first Prime Minister. When he was murdered in 1966, he left behind an estate that was about as large (or in his case, as small) as you would expect from a man who had held the occupations he had held at the times that he held them ... unlike many of our subsequent leaders who left office mysteriously and inexplicably rich, as in multi-million dollar wealthy.

In a sense, Balewa (may he Rest In Peace) was the prototype of the post-1960 Nigerian President or Prime Minister, in that he was a compromise candidate acceptable to the various political cliques and power centres across the country.  And one of the things that makes a candidate "acceptable" to these cliques and centres is that he not be the sort of the personal who tries to, or is capable of, exercising real, pseudo-dictatorial power. The preference is for someone politically weak, who cannot cause a decision to be made or enforce a decision without first having to "consult" with the powerbrokers that put him there.

General Ironsi did not make himself president; other people and other events put him there. General Gowon was not the leader or most influential man in the coalition that brought him to power. For all his fearsome reputation, Muritala Mohammed's ascent to power relied on power brokers, some of whom ended up assassinating him. Olusegun Obasanjo, in his first go-round was quite the docile figurehead, so much so that he was entrusted with figurehead duties two decades later in 1999.

Alhaji Shehu Shagari had much in common with Alhaji Tafawa Balewa. The First Republic (contrary to rose-tinted memory) and Second Republic were both known for rampant corruption, but I believe both men (Shagari relatively and Tafawa Balewa absolutely) were honest men sitting atop corrupt systems they neither controlled nor could influence even if they wanted to.

Buhari got overthrown probably for the same reason that Muritala Mohammed was assassinated.  A lot of people think Ibrahim Babangida is a political genius, but the real powerbrokers in that regime were .... well, this blog post is starting to run long, so let me just say that when Abacha felt like being president, Babangida was sensible enough to invent a way to step down.

Abacha tried to make himself into Nigeria's first true dictator .... and his subsequent death is still a matter of mystery to the Nigerian public. Then came place-holder Abdulsalami Abubakar, followed by professional figurehead Obasanjo, who tried to give himself and unconstitutional Third Term, only to realize that Nigerian powerbrokers, no matter how much he intimidated or bribed them, were not interested in the kind of 25-year and 40-year presidents the rest of Africa has "enjoyed". The Nigerian Presidency simply is not that powerful of an institution, and Obasanjo, who knew a thing or two about when and why Nigerian governments get overthrown, opted to massively, massively, massively manipulate the 2007 election in favour of the late Umaru Yar'Adua (RIP). Between the normal nature of Nigerian politics and his own ill-health, the Presidency remained what it had always been ....

.... and now we have President Goodluck Jonathan, a man who has risen through a sequence of senior political offices without once, not even once giving anyone a real reason as to why they should want him in those offices in the first place.

My point is .... the men who have occupied the position of Prime Minister or President have never been men who proved, one way or another, to Nigerians that they had some kind of a vision as to what we should do about our problems.  Whether by coup or by election, nobody, least of all themselves, had any idea what they were going to do about the issues of the day once they were in office. That they all went on to do a lot of things without actually doing anything is hardly cause for surprise.

Interestingly, we the citizens still manage to get into arguments about which one of them should or should not be our leader. A lot of times when you listen to these arguments, you note that underneath a thin veneer of "issues", a lot of the argument seems to revolve around the same kind of "reasons" that caused some people to support Buhari and others to support Buhari's opponent.

I cannot piggyback off of these sorts of arguments because I want to talk about the issues, and these arguments have nothing to do with the issues.