2019 presidential poll: Palladium’s endorsement

NIGERIANS have always made heavy weather of electing their leaders. There is nothing to indicate that they will discharge their civic obligations well this time as they troop to the polls on Saturday and two weeks after to crown a set of old and new leaders. There is some global attention on Nigeria, a country recognised as the most populous black nation on earth. That attention has, however, come with some concerns about whether the elections can be conducted fairly credibly without violence, and whether Nigerians can also be trusted to sensibly put the right people in office. But perhaps much more than the global community, Nigerians themselves are anxious about both electing the right leaders and avoiding violence. Of all the elections slated for this 2019 cycle, however, the most crucial and fateful is the contest between the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate and incumbent, President Muhammadu Buhari, and his main challenger, former vice president Atiku Abubakar.

Except by a miracle, no other candidate outside the two leading contenders stands a chance of winning. Nigerian and global analysts have therefore understandably limited their endorsements or predictions to the two candidates. One of them will win, and his victory will very likely create a domino effect on the rest of the polls. In 2015, this column guardedly endorsed President Buhari, but warned the country that he could only to some extent be trusted with their money, not with their freedoms. He would safeguard their purse, the column suggested, but he could not be trusted at all to nurture or promote democracy. He had a vague understanding of what it means. Four years later, his understanding of the concept has not progressed beyond the rudimentary. Former president Goodluck Jonathan made it enormously easy to pick the lesser evil in 2015, but it was hoped at the time that when duty would call a second time four years later, the agony of picking a leader would not be as acute as it was in those panicky days. Sadly, that agony has now risen ominously to the level of stroke.

Needs must when the devil drives, say the English in reference to the desperation that sometimes push people to suspend moral and legal codes in order to achieve short term goals. Next Saturday, what would voters suspend in order to be able to, once in their lifetime, elect the right leader? Their choices have been circumscribed by their history, particularly their colonial past, and by their ignorance, especially seeing that most of them are either illiterate or, if literate, very poor thinkers. They could put measures in place to transcend their appalling history, but they have chosen blissfully not to modify and reinforce their country’s superstructure. Consequently, they have deliberately exacerbated their cultural and ideological divisions, and aggravated those divisions by wilfully adding religious divisions into the abominable mix. They could invest in raising an enlightened citizenry susceptible, like the United States, to only occasional errors of judgement, but they have opted to nurture an ignorant populace as lasting fodder for their feudal and elitist pursuits. With that ignoble brew poured into their old and tattered wineskin, it is impossible for them in the foreseeable future to understand their circumstances and limitations, not to say find agreeable panaceas to ameliorate them.

It is in this confused context that Nigerians are expected to elect a president for themselves on Saturday. If they re-elect President Buhari, as they seem prepared to do regardless of the predictions to the contrary by many respected global research organisations, they will be indicating that in their general and unstructured thoughts they find him less revolting than his main challenger. They imagine they know him fairly well, and that his weaknesses and limitations can be tolerated much more than those of his opponent. They know he is unpardonably insular, infused with a provincialism that has both angered and alarmed Nigeria’s power elite, but they put his narrow-mindedness down to the political exigencies of the time. They know he presides over an economy whose major indicators show alarming regression toward anomie or even state failure, and that he can’t seem to find the rationale and presence of mind to think his way through the labyrinth, but they also excuse his failings on the mismanagement of the economy and the grand stealing perpetrated by his predecessor, ex-president Goodluck Jonathan.

More worrisomely, they know that President Buhari is uneasy about the rule of law and regrets the constitutional strictures that debar him from circumventing democratic institutions in his effort to whip the society into line, and they gleefully point to Russia’s Vladimir Putin’s deathly aphorism to the effect that a leader must sometimes go beyond the constitution to tackle lawlessness. In any case, they queried, where was democracy and the rule of law when shady characters were undermining and smothering the system? They grudgingly concede that President Buhari is really not in charge, having long abdicated control, by reason of poor health and intellectual deficit of the most severe kind, to a cabal which some say is an implacable quartet akin to the Gang of Four that plagued China after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. But they rationalise his grave leadership failing on the redemptive value of his symbolic presence in office, a languid presence they reason is nevertheless indispensable to the prosecution of the war against corruption and all other forms of indiscipline and governmental and bureaucratic excesses.

No, they do not think President Buhari can suddenly wake up on a fortuitous tomorrow to intelligently tackle a failing economy that he triggered in the first instance by his simplistic and romantic view of economics, but they are relieved that some of his bright and sprightly ministers seem to know what they are doing, and are getting things done, even if those things do not necessarily coalesce into a coherent and consistent policy framework for the president and his government. President Buhari has trodden where angels dread, for instance as far as to the insalubrious redoubts of judges, and has in his iconoclasm got away with murder as it were; but despite whatever voters say or think, his party has sworn to stick by him through thick and thin. Party leaders’ summation of the Buhari presidential bid is even more engaging. They see how hard it has been for the opposition to regain their wits after the devastating loss of 2015. President Buhari’s victory on Saturday will therefore give them time to rebuild their broken party and probably reclaim it from the hands of the feudal cabal whose main interest is running the government, not the party. Will the cabal also try to seize control of the party after their expected victory? Few think so. It requires sacrifice and discipline to run a party; the cabal loathes discipline and sacrifice. More interestingly, the ruling party thinks that even if their candidate has not done well enough in four years to win the ballot, what with the liabilities the president has both advertently and inadvertently brought upon himself and his party, the opposition has done even precious less to avoid defeat. The APC knows that victory on Saturday may be due less to what it has done than what the PDP has not done.

A few foreign powers seem not to be averse to an Atiku presidency. It is not clear whether their wish is fathered by the thoughts expressed by some of their global research organisations or not. What is clear, however, is that the PDP candidate may have discovered that no misstep or scandal appears sufficiently strong enough to scuttle the re-election bid of President Buhari, a man who has seemed to become a complex abstraction electorally unaffected by his failings. The bane of the Atiku presidential bid is that no one seems to believe that his victory would not set the country back by many decades. Former president Olusegun Obasanjo contributed substantially to the unfavourable image Alhaji Atiku was curried with among Nigerians. Damned with faint praise shortly after he won the PDP nomination at the party’s convention in Port Harcourt last October, the former vice president has struggled unsuccessfully to give sufficient traction to his bid. He is dogged by relentless questions of ethical rectitude, both private and public; and though he is more mentally alert and cosmopolitan than his opponent, and is even more tolerant, urbane and inclusive, he has been unable to project his ideals and personality as brilliantly and effectively as his candidacy demands.

Worse, his party, despite many denials, is not at one with him all the way. He has anchored his bid on splitting the votes from the North, taking the entire Southeast and South-South, and also splitting the votes from the Southwest at least narrowly, but his calculations may have gone awry right from immediately after the convention. Crowds may not be the most credible barometer for measuring a candidate’s popularity, but the Buhari crowd has appeared to be more impassioned, especially in the North. Alhaji Atiku has on the other hand struggled to unite the quarrelsome Igbo behind his banner. But many in that dispirited region, particularly some of the finicky governors, have eyed him warily, and his running mate, Peter Obi, with resentment. Buffeted by internal wrangling and external subversion, the South-South has panted for the PDP candidate from a safe and hypocritical distance. They seem willing to hang separately, if it comes to that. Alhaji Atiku may be their best bet to take the fight to the truculent and forgetful president, but his base has not been quite as energised and fired up as the PDP wants. They seem to be reserving their enthusiasm for something indescribable else.

It was necessary for Alhaji Atiku to urgently fire the imagination of Nigerians in order to make a huge and unforgettable impression on the electorate. But if he could not do that, it was necessary for his party to step in to save the day. Unfortunately for the PDP candidate, his alleged unscrupulousness and lack of ethical compass have combined lethally with his party’s slothfulness in purging and reforming itself. The PDP may not be as conflicted as the APC, but its shambolic and feeble attempt at image remediation is of little help to their sullied and wearied candidate. In short, the former vice president is on his own in the battle to win the presidency. The party has been unable to raise money as they would like, and their image and platform have not been as appealing as they had hoped at the beginning of the campaigns. If Alhaji Atiku is to win — and he still cannot be totally counted out — he will need five obscenely crazy days of hard work and pure miracle from the heavenlies. But finding out whether the heavens have invested in him or not is a tough nut to crack.

Overall, it is impossible for this column to endorse any of the two candidates, regardless of how Nigerians vote on Saturday. Neither is fit to rule, and on balance neither is better than the other. An Atiku presidency is not believed to be capable of enthroning discipline of any texture in governance. More, some six days or so to the poll, the challenger has yet to prove himself to be capable of deep thinking more than a casual exponent of pragmatism and ad hocism. Indeed, he seems precisely the kind of politician and leader who is quite determined to let things run haphazardly on their own lukewarm steam. If more than three months into his campaign he has not recovered from Chief Obasanjo’s blistering and cruel characterisation of his person and style, the six days left before the final ballot are unlikely to be of much help. He is going into the election mortally damaged; but who knows, perhaps by some celestial trickery he will steal a march on President Buhari.

A Buhari presidency, on the other hand, will not only imperil democracy, given its antecedents in the past four years, it will constitute a danger to national stability and unity through skewed appointments and pigheaded policies. The president may seem firm and incorruptible, even disguisedly radical, he is, however, failing to fight corruption methodically from the roots. His abject surrender to polarising and irredentist philosophy of governance and cabalistic rule, together with his government’s total lack of scientific understanding of how a modern government should run, are certain to also create tons of problems for Nigeria in the coming years. The country must now wait for the other shoe to drop, and drop it undoubtedly will, probably with tragic and catastrophic consequences. In other words, damned if Nigerians vote, and damned if they don’t. Worse, damned if they vote for President Buhari, and damned if they vote for Alhaji Atiku. No country must ever find itself in such a numbing dilemma, where a voter gingerly approaches the ballot box, holding his nose, searching for a candidate with a modicum of talent or enough clarity, humanism and patriotism to make a difference.