By Ugo Onuoha
Let us state from the outset that this is not a road we wished to travel in the journey to 2023. Why? We are invested in the school of thought that Nigeria is now frighteningly fractured that mere cosmetics represented by personnel changes in the Presidency and in other critical centres of power will not suffice. Not even the money-guzzling and time wasting amendments or alterations of the military-imposed 1999 Constitution will spring us out of this sinking sand.
You must be an impossible fellow, I will not say felon, not to notice and then admit that Nigeria is broke and broken and the situation is tottering towards being irredeemable and irretrievable.
Whatever can go wrong has gone wrong in our ‘great country’. It may be uncharitable to blame the regime of President Muhammadu Buhari for the rot and now rapid decline in virtually all sectors and segments of society. However, what will not be wrong and uncharitable is to state that Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) political party, which acceded to the Presidency in 2015, has left this country and its citizens gasping for breath.
In a manner of speaking, the APC and Buhari have knelt on the collective neck of Nigerians and we are being choked to death.
The tragedy of the situation is that the ruling party promised so much to those who believed it in 2014/2015 but has delivered so little, if any really, in the seven years since it assumed office. We are careful not to accuse Buhari of the promises because, in truth, he did not make the promises. He merely skirted around the promises of his political party in those heady days in a non-committal manner. So, we were not shocked when Buhari, soon after winning the presidency which he ostensibly regarded as a prize, proceeded to publicly disclaim and then discard all campaign documents of the APC platform, including the party’s manifesto. Buhari’s unwary supporters and willing collaborators from other parts of Nigeria did not realise that the then candidate had only one agenda and one agenda only: HEGEMONY. I will concede that it was possible that they knew what and who they were about to foist on Nigeria and Nigerians but they were blinded by their hatred for the then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and their own selfish personal ambitions. Was the arrowhead of the coalition that toppled Jonathan, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, not reported to have said years earlier in the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables leaks that Buhari was unfit for the office of the President on account of his extremely narrow and perverted worldview and his troubling sectarian tendencies?
The result of that evil coalition is that, under seven years of Buhari’s regime, we have on our hands a Nigeria that is failing. Some would say it has already failed and they would back up their position with irrefutable evidence.
The shock of Nigeria’s situation today is that you can readily count what has not gone wrong or failed in our country on the fingers of one hand. The primary duty of any government anywhere is to secure the lives and properties of citizens. On this score, Buhari and APC have failed. To illustrate, Kaduna State, with a vulgar preponderance of military installations and formations, should be the most secure state in Nigeria. It is not. Terrorists, bandits and herdsmen have turned Kaduna to a playground and a killing field. Education, which is the bedrock for serious nation-builders, is in a shambles nationwide. Teaching and learning are hardly going on in an organised and acceptable manner. The number of out-of-school children is on the rise. And kidnappers who pluck our children from classrooms in their school uniforms and then march them hundreds of kilometres into the forests for ransom have not made the situation any better. And the government is castrated. By the way, to what end is Nigeria’s education policy? Can anyone educate (pun fully intended) me? Every day, millions of citizens drop into poverty under a regime that promised to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty within a decade. For public utilities, the performance of the ruling party is on display using public electricity supply as an indicator. The common refrain for frequent and prolonged power outages is the collapse of the national electricity grid. The sad irony is that the electricity grid moves to the south in equal proportion to the movement to the north of the greed of the ruling elite in governments and corporations.
In other climes and jurisdictions, when a country gets to the crossroads, as is the case with Nigeria right now, it begins a search for redemption. For some of us, the search for redemption has gone beyond personnel changes. There’s an urgent need for national conversation on the way forward for this country and whether indeed it should continue to remain the way it presently is. Some of the issues that should agitate us is whether the country is working and for whom. Is Nigeria, the way it is today, sustainable in the medium and long run? Are we what and who we say we are in terms of physical and fiscal federalism? Are the majority of Nigerians invested in the country? Are we sure that Nigeria has not already died in the hearts and minds of a majority or at least a substantial segment of the population? What will we lose in changing what obviously is not working?
Redirecting a country is akin to doing the same thing for an ocean liner. It’s not easy and it cannot be achieved with a snap of the fingers. But our greater problem is that we have not even started.
Right now, the country is in frenzy about who occupies Aso Rock Villa in 2023. It’s in this regard and indeed the realisation that we are yet to seriously avert our minds to discussing the fundamental and foundational problems of Nigeria that we would allow ourselves to discuss the ‘luxury’ of who Nigeria’s President should ideally be in 2023.
There are a handful of aspirants who could pass the muster in our political parties, not just the APC and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). However, one man, though not necessarily tall, stands head and shoulders above the motley crowd. He is Peter Obi. Why? In the turn-by-turn politics of Nigeria, he comes from a region that equity appears to favour to give the country its next President. But this is the most inconsequential reason for Obi’s Presidency. Peter Obi was a two-term governor of Anambra State.
And in the eight years since he had left office and lost immunity from prosecution, he has not been accused of perfidy while in office. He is reputed to have bequeathed his successor with healthy bank balances in naira and the United States dollars. He was said to have built and improved on the legacies of his predecessors. Obi had his fingerprints on virtually all sectors of Anambra State while he held sway, including health, education, and human capital.
Peter Obi’s personal qualities are ennobling. He is disciplined, focused, methodical, cosmopolitan, humane and frugal. He has brought a unique style in his quest for the presidency. For him, it is service, not ‘lifelong ambition’; a duty, not a prize; an understanding of the problems of Nigeria borne out of studies and enunciation of the solutions; an aspiration buoyed by verifiable achievements in private and public life. In saner climes, Peter Obi’s quest should ignite and coalesce into a mass movement.
In varied forms, some other aspirants have credentials that recommend them for the President, including Prof. Kingsley Moghalu, Mazi Sam Ohuabunwa, Governor of Borno State, Prof. Babagana Umara Zulum, who has not yet declared interest in the office, and a few others. If you are wondering why I did not mention aspirants in the ruling party, it’s for the simple reason that Buhari’s spectacular failure has imposed a burden on them. If they deny Buhari, they are unlikely to get the ticket and if they embrace him, they will have to own his serial failures. But there’s no suggestion that any of them cannot win the presidency. After all, this is Nigeria, and no future President could possibly be worse than Buhari in non-performance, divisiveness, nepotism and disdain for sections of the country.
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