It is distressing trying to rationalise the federal government’s paralysis in the face of the Plateau and Benue killings last weekend. About 130 people died from the twin invasions, probably perpetrated by bandits, herdsmen and other ethnic militias. The killings served as a context for the Northern Elders Forum’s call on President Muhammadu Buhari to resign. The call is justified, even legal; but it may not be expedient. This was not the first time the exasperated leaders of the Forum, speaking through its spokesman, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, would be asking the president to resign. Dr Baba-Ahmed had repeatedly voiced the concerns of the Forum, concluding that the president had displayed no initiative in combating the massive breakdown of law and order in many parts of the country, particularly the North. The train attacks of recent months, the last of which turned bloody last month, not to say wholesale abductions of Nigerians carried out by bandits in the Northwest and other freelance criminal elements in Southern Nigeria, underscored the justness of the call despite the presidency repeatedly taking umbrage.
Still, Dr Baba-Ahmed explained why the Forum had to repeat its call to the president to step aside. Said he: “The administration of President Muhammadu Buhari does not appear to have answers to the challenges of security to which we are exposed. We cannot continue to live and die under the dictates of killers, kidnappers, rapists and sundry criminal groups that have deprived us of our rights to live in peace and security. Our constitution has provisions for leaders to voluntarily step down if they are challenged by personal reasons or they prove incapable of leading. It is now time for President Buhari to seriously consider that option since his leadership has proven spectacularly incapable of providing security over Nigerians. Our forum is aware of the weight of this advice and it is also aware that we cannot continue to live under these conditions until 2023 when President Buhari’s term ends. Killers and other criminals appear to have sensed a paralysing vacuum at the highest levels of leadership and they grow more confident and acquire more competence in subverting the state and our security. Nigerians have shed enough tears and blood without appropriate response from those with responsibilities to protect us.”
The Buhari presidency is nearly seven years old. Within that time, it had failed to demonstrate competence in managing conflicts of all kinds, whether they are interethnic, religious, or even political. The gains in the battle against insurgents in the Northeast have seemed to come from internal schisms within insurgent groups, between Boko Haram and Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP). The Nigerian military, however, suggests the gains result from their pressures on the insurgents. Whatever the reasons, such gains have not been replicated against the bandits in the Northwest, leading to speculations of official complicity propped up by ethnic affiliations or significant security collaborations. The NEF does not concern itself with what the reasons are for governmental failing. To the group, it is sufficient that the Buhari presidency has seemed incapable of responding to the killings in various parts of the country, including in the Southeast where chaos seems to be simmering.
NEF is not the sole representative of northern opinion on any issue, let alone on the Buhari presidency. What is more, southerners also sometimes find it hard to distinguish between Dr Baba-Ahmed’s personal opinions, though he takes care to identify them as such, and the Forum’s considered and endorsed opinions. Often, however, his views have seldom deviated from the Forum’s, and have in fact mostly lent credence to the body’s generally progressive perspectives on national issues. Asking President Buhari to resign, as sensible and justified as that is, may not be representative of the North. The call should be taken as symbolic, to underscore the group’s pained impression of the president’s failings and declining effectiveness. The call, above all, is an indication of the Forum’s frustrations with the presidency’s flatfootedness, indeed a final indication of their despair that the Buhari government can be redeemed. After years of failing to respond appropriately to crises, preferring to propound excuses upon excuses, and justifications after justifications, the presidency had finally, it seems to the Forum, shown clearly that it had no further idea what to do to stanch the flow of blood all over Nigeria. The Forum appears scared that the country could in fact be tipping over to the abyss. Other groups also nurse such fear.
Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether President Buhari’s resignation can obviate the impending apocalypse. He is not the only problem with a truly and obviously dysfunctional presidency; the problem is more accurately located in the ideas and machinations of a cavalcade of gross opportunists who seized control of the nerve centre of the presidency in 2015 but knew little what to do with the immense monarchical powers they inherited by default. The president may embody the problem, and may also be a significant contributor and amplifier of the decay and paralysis in government, but the problem is in fact far more transcendent, structural and foundational than NEF or many aggrieved Nigerians seem to suggest. Briefly speaking, the problem is outside the framework of the presidency’s architectural composition, and is located within the country’s religious and ethnic milieu. In addition, until a significant restructuring of the country is undertaken, with substantial power devolved to the country’s constituent parts, running the country along the jaded unity which the country’s many presidents have heedlessly espoused for decades will always end in fiasco. Indeed, had the president founded his government on sound philosophical, ethical and inclusive principles, contending with and resolving banditry and insurgency, in the unlikely event they arose, would be far easier than the heavy weather he has made of it.
In 2015, the country drove a soft bargain to secure the services of a president they genuinely thought had not transmogrified as his detractors warned. Since winning the poll, however, he had embarked on proving his haters right. Contrary to the suggestions of NEF, the country will have to manage him till next year. Having spent almost seven years belaboured by the president’s strange political and administrative orthodoxies, Nigerians can afford to have him for a few more months, as precarious as those ominous months might be. President Buhari will of course ignore NEF’s call, as one of his spokesmen signposted last week; but should he heed them, he would not depart with his vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, the less emboldened, less resolute and more uninitiated politician from the South. The country remembers the political complications President Umaru Yar’Adua’s death in 2010 caused Nigeria; no one is prepared for that sort of thing anymore, not even by Doctrine of Necessity or, in 1960s parlance, acts of omission. Instead of calling for the president’s resignation, NEF should pressure him to do what is right, even if he would not listen.
The National Council of State on Thursday decided, among other things, to okay a national census for April 2023 after the general election. Before then, explained the National Population Commission (NPC) director-general, Nasir Isa-Kwara, a pilot census would be conducted in June this year. The last census was conducted in 2006, suggesting that the country had been relying on projections for national planning. Preaching to the converted, Mr Isa-Kwara adumbrated reasons a census was indispensable to planning. He was theoretically right.
But for the Council of State to suggest a census for April 2023, immediately after what is certain to be a contentious election, must be really bold, optimistic and reckless. There has been no census that was not controversial, and rather than be used for planning, a noble aim that is nevertheless often defeated by the shenanigans that accompany it, it had been deployed for political purposes, to shore up ethnic exceptionalism and electoral advantage. Census needs to be conducted periodically; but if at the best of times that could not be done without bitterness and acrimony, why is the Council fishing in troubled waters, especially at a time of dire national financial predicament, unmanageable insecurity and collapsing economy?
Firstly, the sting needs to be taken out of the census before it can be conducted successfully without rancour. To accomplish that goal, it is necessary to remake the country in such a way that politics, resource allocation and elections would not be about dominance, ethnic or religious. Given how badly the economy has tanked, and the people deeply impoverished, of what use was the disputed 2006 census to a profligate and clueless political leadership? Nigerians had remonstrated with the Buhari presidency, in light of the goodwill that accompanied it into office, to boldly redo the country. Instead, it stuck fanatically to the disused and futile template that has coaxed the country to the precipice. One prediction can be ventured: the census, if it holds, would be wasteful and end in controversy.
