The 2023 Election Season will be a long one

 I am both surprised and also not surprised that I haven't posted here in more than 3 years. A recurring theme on this blog has been my acknowledgement that what I write here doesn't change anything in the real world, so there isn't really a concrete "reason" to keep writing.

That said, we Nigerians find ourselves, as we've often done since the 1950s, facing a federal election in which the three leading candidates hail from the three legs of the so-called tripod. As is usual with our polls, the supporters of each candidate are saying unrealistic about their favourite candidates, preparing for their future role in defending him (if he wins) against the inevitable criticism that he is not doing any of the things his supporters claimed he would do.

Maybe we should talk about the Fourth Republic in its entirety so far, since all three major candidates have been part of the political class that has ruled (not governed) the federal republic, the states and the local governments for more than twenty-three years.

Maybe we should ask if Nigeria's issues can be resolved through elections, or whether we need something altogether more fundamentally and substantively different than the 1999 Constitution, the present political class, and any likely replacement constitution this political class would come up with .... because as much as I agree that our constitution is problematic (as is the fact that we still don't have a mutually agreed-upon social contract or compact), the main reason we keep having problematic constitutions is our constitutions continue to be written by problematic politicians and militicians .... and when people suggest we ditch the 1999 Constitution for a new one, they invariably (when you get past their rhetoric flourishes) intend for the new constitution to be written by the same types of person who were in charge of writing every other problematic constitution.

 Which would take us back to square one. And in a way, the launch of each of our civilian-led "Republics" and the start of each of our military-led "Republics" has been a square-one moment that could notionally have lead to the necessary reforms, restructuring and transformation, but which always lead in practice to more of the same style of (mis)governance, except with a bit more atomization of the states and local governments .... and in the case of the Fourth Republic, a gigantic amount of debt .... and insecurity.