Nigerians, beware of the ides of February and Auguries for 16th February, 2019

Nigerians, beware of the ides of February. In ancient Roman mythology, Februarius is the month of purification. The auguries are dire and portentous. By the time readers are reading this column next week, Nigeria would have elected its next president. Never have the circumstances been more unpropitious. Never have the political elite of this nation been this split down the line and the nation itself bitterly polarized and badly divided.

The irony of it all is that the presidential contest is taking place between two gentlemen of essentially the same ethnic extraction: the one is a Kanuri-Fulani while the other is Mumuye/Fulani. So, what is the problem with the various hired mourners and paid hacks?

Whoever wins next week has his job cut out for him of bringing solace and succour to the injured and traumatized of the land. This is not the same nation that voted for MKO Abiola in the epoch-making presidential election of June 12, 1993. That was obviously another country. The arrowheads of the unjust annulment and their conniving paterfamilias are now telling Nigerians who to vote for after suborning the electoral will of fourteen million Nigerians. Hell, they shall not pass.

Never in the history of this unfortunate country has an election taken place under such a din of hate and hysteria. The primordial frenzy is powered by out of job political jobbers and other political wannabes, fresh recruits to the lobby of ethnic supremacists who believe that Nigeria owes them a living. They do not appear to have learnt any lesson from the Rwandan holocaust.

We have said it a million times in this column that neither General Mohammadu Buhari nor Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is the best for the job at hand. But this is how structural contingency trumps human agency in a polity structurally rigged against rationality. As we have noted in this column a fortnight ago, this capillary malice of enforced choice without free choice is why the Nigerian presidency often looks like a royal infirmary of reluctant presidents, accidental presidents, accidented presidents and supine viceroys.

These are some of the indignities a people have to put up with in a society in traumatic transition from authoritarian rule to passable democracy. The alternative is anarchy and chaos until the arrival of a pan-Nigerian critical mass which can determine its own electoral fate and shape its own political future away from the anti-democratic populism which has given a section of the country the power of electoral veto over the rest of the country.

Whether this can be obtained through peaceful incremental reform and democratic evolution within the current lopsided structural context of the nation or through inevitable social convulsion in the affected areas is what should be of utmost concern to genuine patriots rather than fixation with mere elections. Fixation with election is mere electoralism, a symptom of a political class looking for quick fixes rather long-term devotion to political modernization.

There are pawns and powerbrokers in this game. This past week, the military dimension of the game surfaced with a whopping seventy one retired generals trooping to Aso Rock to pledge their loyalty. What was left unsaid is that this was a firm military riposte to the coalition of service grandees spearheading the drive to oust Buhari from power.

This the height of military war-gaming in a democracy and certainly the most portentous the nation has witnessed since the advent of the Fourth Republic. The news abroad is that Atiku Abubakar will be nothing but a naïve political neophyte if he were to take the purported endorsement of the old generals as unflinching approval.

It is said that being masters of camouflage and subterfuge, they are merely using the poor man as a cat’s paw to pull the chestnut out of fire. According to this theory, Atiku is seen by the military aurochs as the only person with the means and material to checkmate Buhari and drive the presidential elections to the perilous frontiers of inconclusiveness. That is when the real game will kick in.

There are ominous hints of a hung presidency, of a Venezuelan parallel in which central authority is grandly bifurcated between arms of government in a situation of compelling anarchy and confusion and of a sharp and surgical foreign intervention which can lead to asymmetrical civil war and the radical disintegration of Nigeria as we know it. The Onnoghen conundrum, Nasir el-Rufai brazen stitch up of western authorities this past week may well be part of the opening gambit.

We have entered injury times. The powerbrokers think they know what they are doing. The pawns do not. But in the game of post-colonial chess, not even the knight is a free agent. Its movement are ultimately constrained and restrained by the immutable structure of the game.

In the current circumstances, given the objective reality at play and despite one’s profound reservations about the primordial proclivities of the government and rumours of crippling ill-health, there are three compelling reasons why this should be called for General Mohammadu Buhari.

First is the danger of an apocalyptic security meltdown in the case of a forcible liquidation of the status quo. Second, the fact that the northern dominant establishment should be allowed to serve out its remaining four years in the way and manner it deems fit.

Thirdly, the dominant mood of antiseptic abhorrence of corruption in the old West which tends to favour an anti-corruption drive however severely flawed and partisan over laissez faire dilatoriness and soporific collusion with graft in the name of free enterprise. May the good Lord deliver the nation from its fractured essence.