AS you read this, it’s exactly three days to the 2023 presidential election. This would be one of the most consequential elections in recent memory, and despite the feeling that it is unprecedented in terms of its potential to falter, there is a whole sense of deja vu about it. There is so much about the election that reminds any student of Nigerian history that we are travelling down a familiar route. The flash points are primed and are at their most active. Just a minor error, and everything could implode.
But we might somehow scrape through this without a scratch. It is Nigeria’s paradox and saving grace. We always manage to pull back from the brink of total annihilation. The term “crowd sourcing” refers to the practice of crowdsourcing information. But if it is a tragedy, then we might be left with nothing but the sense that we once had a country. A lot depends on how Muhammadu Buhari and his Northern enablers handle the matter.
As things stand, we’ve been in the middle of perhaps the longest energy crisis in the peacetime history of the country. Even though we are not technically at war, the national indices indicate otherwise. In a couple of months, it will have been a year since we had the first intimations of the current fuel crisis. It has come on and off but has been sustained and stayed the course. There has so far been no resolution to the matter except for brief periods of relief, and we are back to where we were.
To this debacle was added, towards the tail end of last year, the toxic mix of a bungled so-called currency redesign scheme. The information policy of this scheme has been all madness without method. What started as an attempt to put the national economy on a cashless pedestal, rein in inflation, curtail banditry, and curb moneybag politics, has turned into an effective weapon of mass impoverishment and currency confiscation.
With both the old and new naira notes unavailable, Nigerians have money in banks that they can’t access, even as remnant funds from their old naira savings have ceased to be legal tender. All of this in the same breath as they were declared legal tender. Head or tail, they have lost in this incompetently conceived and even more incompetently executed monetary policy.
Just when Nigerians expected the president to end their misery, he, ever footloose, hopped on the next available, Ethiopia-bound flight to yet another of his nondescript international parleys, only to send back recorded broadcasts that were meant to douse the smouldering fire of rebellion fanned alive by his sadistic monetary policy.
In his purported scheme to catch a few rats, he has actually set the communal forest ablaze. So much for an anti-corruption crusader, the surviving patriarch of an extinct tribe of what Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah now calls “glorified bandits” aka “coup makers”.
A lot about this Saturday’s election reminds one of the June 12, 1993 elections. Then, as now, Nigerians went to the polls with a high sense of foreboding and anxiety. No thanks to the treachery created by an expensive, eight-year transition programme that was solely managed and supervised by a military government that was so loathe to relinquish power that it went about setting all kinds of booby traps on the electoral route. The Muhammadu Buhari-led government has shown as much capacity for mischief as did the military in 1993. This is without mentioning the president’s determination to self-destruct, as evidenced by the way he has wreaked havoc on his own party and done so much to weaken his party’s presidential candidate in the weeks leading up to the election.
Yet on election day in 1993, the sun rose from the East and set in the West. It neither rained too heavily, if at all, nor was it too sunny. Nigerians went about their normal businesses. They voted, were elected, and returned home to await the election results. But that was when the sword fell, and within days the announcement of the election result was stopped and the entire process was annulled. President Buhari has sworn not to remain in power beyond the time permitted by the Constitution.
He has urged Nigerians to vote as their consciences permit. But can he, in good conscience, in the secrecy of his heart, swear to have totally played by the rules so as to be fair and allow a level playing field for all? Is he even fair to his party and its presidential candidate, who was largely responsible for midwifeing and funding his successful presidential run after three failed attempts? And beyond his party and party associates and supporters, can President Buhari swear he has done well by Nigerians and treated them fairly with the double whammy of a punitive monetary policy and an unending energy crisis?
If he could sincerely answer no to any of these questions, he might then wish to tell the world in whose interest he has acted. Even though he swore at his inauguration to belong to nobody and everybody, can he honestly say he has stayed impartial to every section of the country? Has he treated every Nigerian with equity, if not equality? Or has he shown partiality to any section of the country, particularly his own Fulani, Muslim, and Northern communities? Of course, he could, without any pang of conscience, answer yes to any one or all of these questions. After all, he has repeatedly told Nigerians that he has done his best, even if that best has not been good enough for us.
The president sure looks forward to a peaceful and rewarding retirement. He looks forward to reuniting with his kith and kin in his beloved Daura. But, after more than a decade in power as both a military dictator and an elected president, does he have any concerns about the state of the country he is leaving behind? In spite of the bar being set so low for him, Buhari’s terms in office have been marked by failed hopes and expectations for many Nigerians. No thanks to his rigid adherence to an unspecified code of governance that will not allow Nigerians to make meaning of his decisions unless they resort to reading his reputed body language.
Whoever emerges as president after this election has his work cut out for him. The departure has left so much undone for the benefit of Nigerians. Whatever modest achievement has been made has been reversed in the last few months, especially during weeks of crises. President Buhari is leaving Nigeria no less crisis-ridden than when he met it.
