A Biden presidency – SWOT analysis for Nigeria (I)

“Hello. Today I want to speak directly to you; the people of Nigeria. Nigeria is a great nation, and you can be proud of the progress you’ve made. Together you’ve won independence, emerged from military rule and strengthened democratic institutions. You’ve strived to overcome divisions, and turned Nigeria’s diversity into a source of strength. You’ve […]

“Hello. Today I want to speak directly to you; the people of Nigeria. Nigeria is a great nation, and you can be proud of the progress you’ve made. Together you’ve won independence, emerged from military rule and strengthened democratic institutions. You’ve strived to overcome divisions, and turned Nigeria’s diversity into a source of strength. You’ve worked hard to improve your families and to build the largest economy in Africa. Now you have a historic opportunity to help write the next chapter in Nigeria’s progress by voting in the upcoming elections. For elections to be credible, they must be free, fair and peaceful. All Nigerians must be able to cast their votes without intimidation, or fear. So I call on all leaders and candidates to make it clear to their supporters that violence has no place in democratic elections and that they will not incite, support or engage in any sort of violence, before, during and after the votes are counted. I call on all Nigerians to peacefully express your views, and to reject the voices of those who call for violence. And when elections are free and fair, it is the responsibility of all citizens to help keep the peace no matter who wins. Successful elections and democratic progress will help Nigeria meet the urgent challenges you face today. Boko Haram, a brutal terrorist group that kills innocent men, women and children must be stopped. Hundreds of kidnapped children deserve to be returned to their families. Nigerians who have been forced to flee must return to their homes. Boko Haram wants to destroy Nigeria and all that you have built. By casting your ballot, you can help secure your nation’s progress. I’m told that there is a saying in the country, “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done”. Today I urge all Nigerians from all religious or ethnic groups and all regions, to come together and keep Nigeria one. And in this task of advancing the security, prosperity and human rights of all Nigerians, you will continue to have a friend and partner in the United States of America.”

 

With the above words, spoken on the cusp of Nigeria’s 2015 presidential elections, precisely on the 23rd of March, 2015 (the elections will be held just 5 days later), President Barack Obama basically sealed the fate of President Goodluck Jonathan, at least in the international community.

The statement by Obama, who never visited chaotic Nigeria in his eight years tenure, was also a strong indicator to middle-class people and opinion molders in and out of Nigeria and was, therefore, very instrumental to the ouster of Jonathan at the polls. As a Buhari supporter then, but a perennially suspicious person when it comes to the contact sport of global geopolitics, I recall feeling wary about this open American support for Buhari.

I felt the Americans are always too cold and calculated when it comes to protecting their own short, medium and long-term interests, and would usually not necessarily think about Nigeria’s profound advancement especially as we often pose to be the giant of Africa. As a country formed and built upon intelligence and intellectual capital, the USA does not act without thinking, and their thoughts are always very profound. It was not so much wonder for me when after Buhari was sworn-in on May 29, 2015, he promptly went to sleep. That was an Aha! moment for me.  These Americans must have known something was amiss about the man, after all, they interacted with him very closely towards the elections. Nigeria still remains an important country at least in Africa, that any serious world power makes a point of duty to keep watch over. The rest is history.

Those who understand the language called diplomatese will know, that the operative phrase in Obama’s short speech was ‘to write the next chapter’. What was so significant about the 2015 elections that it should be equated to ‘writing a next chapter’?  And where has that got Nigeria today?  All the other jive about ensuring free, fair and violence-free elections were just fillers, after all even the USA can hardly call her 2020 elections free, fair and violence-free.

Sometimes in November 2008, I was woken up from sleep at 3am by a friend from London. Bayo was a cabman I met on one of my journeys to the UK. He called that night and was weeping profusely over the phone. The sleep cleared quickly from my head. “What was the matter?” I asked cautiously.  “Egbon, Obama is President! A black man is President! It had never happened before”. And on and on. I seem to always have a crowded schedule such that I cannot stay glued to the TV monitoring any election; not even Nigeria’s election in which I had contested in 2019.

In 2015, when Buhari won the elections, a number of friends in my circle then had gone into a frenzy, obtaining invites to Eagle Square for the inauguration. Since it was not an easy document to obtain, I never bothered. In no time, many of them started complaining about the same government. Lesson; I think we get too excited too soon about many things political as a people in this country, and our excitements are usually short-lived, resulting in a vicious cycle of regrets. Perhaps my sojourn in politics, apart from my training as an economist with a strong leaning towards understanding the psychology of human beings and societies, has made me even more coldly calculating in these matters. The key question in matters of geopolitics should always be; what is in it for us?

Biden Presidency

What have I not seen in the last few days? Owambe parties where Christian and Nigerian songs are converted into something about Biden winning over Trump, Nigerian women dancing their lives away at the news, men crying their hearts out, children and adults mocking, insulting Trump, write-ups upon write-ups claiming good riddance to bad rubbish. Is this a repeat of the Obama victory that did not particularly augur good for Nigeria and indeed Africa as a whole? Or another Buhari win that turned out to be anticlimactic? Let’s look at it from a SWOT kind of analysis.

What did Obama do for Nigeria? Hardly  anything. But his government went after Libya as had been earlier revealed by General Wesley Clark of the US Army. In taking out Muammar Ghaddafi, the route for the influx of all sorts of ammunition was opened for Boko Haram, and today Libya is left with four governments and permanent terrorism – a nation, which used to have the best human development index in Africa!

Of course, with Boko Haram, Nigeria lost her innocence. We had thought we could never be a terrorist country but in no time, we became world Numero Uno. What else did Obama do for us? He tried to barrage us with a culture that the majority of Nigerians say is foreign to us; the idea of same-sex marriage. Many believe that Jonathan’s greatest sin was the signing of the Act that criminalises same-sex marriage. I sometimes wonder at the obsession with sex by these foreign superpower nations. For me, what a man does sexually is his own business – so long as they don’t prey on children who cannot take decisions on their own – and indeed in general, open display of affection in an excessive manner is not our thing. Look, we have many basic problems to deal with here – economy, health, education for our children, our environment, security, infrastructure, productivity, etc – than to spend most of our time bothering about who someone is sleeping with and how. But these issues are very serious according to the leaders of the world.