A perfect storm

As the presidential primaries unfold and refold, the Jagaban Borgu is leading a fractured

It’s the last days of 2022, a year and half from now. The campaigns to succeed PMB, who is retiring after the constitutionally sanctioned two terms in office, are in the umpteenth gear. Voters are angrier than ever – at politicians, at the system, at themselves too. The two parties are unravelling at their seams; the heavyweights and moneybags can no longer keep up the charade with a straight face. Party elders have given up all pretence of being more than spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretence of party loyalty. Everyone has long given up on working together on anything, even when their interests align like the APC composites did in 2015. In the media, and everywhere else, anything goes. Sunset is dead-set on the horizon and everyone is off to their fathers’ tents. With government business at a standstill, and outgoing PMB’s increased and forceful use of executive authority to beat the nick of time and write his name in the good part of the book even when severely bogged down by the surgical focus he must maintain lest he forgets that one singlet we now all know every Nigerian president forgets in the presidential closet and must spend more than they can afford in making their way back for it, it might be a looong night.

Beyond Aso Rock and its sprawling apron strings, life isn’t getting any better for the common folk. The agitations, the constructive and destructive opposition to the reigning administration is at fever pitch.

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As the presidential primaries unfold and refold, the Jagaban Borgu is leading a fractured field of APC stalwarts that are bent on eating themselves alive. And yes, two can play that game – the demand for power-shift to the South is the new anthem on twitterverse as well as on NTA.

In their various ways, Atiku, Kwankwaso, Saraki – the usual suspects, are demonstrating an unspoken principle of the Fourth Republic political order: political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable values, and, as a result, renegade and fair-weather political behaviour pays.

Political disintegration has plagued the 9th NASS in its last days too. The House APC Caucus was barely able to keep the speakership through last year. It did manage to pass a budget however, in line with another new tradition of the Buhari administration, the January-December-budget-cycle. The Senate, meanwhile, is also tied in knots by wannabe governors and sectional spokespersons, who use the chamber to build their brands by obstructing – well, everything. I could go on and on, but you get the drift. Yes, the political future I’ve described is unreal. But it is also a linear extrapolation of several trends on vivid display right now.

And here is the still bigger point: the very term ‘party leader’ has become an anachronism. Although Aso Rock and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own interests and ideological objectives willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.

No wonder Femi Gbajabiamilla, reluctantly retaking the gavel 13 days after being deposed as House speaker in November last year, complained that the Nigerian people take one look at Abuja, and all they see is an amoral toilet-bowl that needs a good flushing. And fast.

In an op-ed penned for the Punch under the strapline: “Apres Moi le Deluge,” someone who may or may not be Saraki’s spokesman argued that Buhari and APC are one and the same thing, elaborating that given his age, astounding administrative incompetence, political malfeasance, tactless jackboot nature, Buhari could give a rat’s ass what becomes of good old Naija beyond May 29, 2023.

Since 2003, we have heard every reason why Buhari is bad news; that he is an ultra-ethnic nationalist who will not belong to everyone but absolutely belong to someone. Unfortunately for the PDP and those who smelled like it, Buhari’s supporters didn’t mind that. They even liked that about him – that he was hated by the PDP. You have to be a special kind of good if you’re hated by evil with that much devotion. Buhari, however, didn’t cause this new low. The low caused Buhari. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in a political system’s capacity for self-organization. It began during military rule with the atrophying of key state institutions and their brokers – parties, politicians, dynamic parliaments which have historically provided broad-based representation for all interests and held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time or one section of the country’s geography lording it on another.

As these institutions, their brokers or in broad terms the ethical principles they all represent faded, politicians, activists, and voters all became more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomized in a freak storm. Chaos became the new normal – both in the electoral process and in the government itself.

Our intricate system of federalism did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. During the First Republic, well-meaning political reformers especially from the South attacked the governance framework because ‘it was ineffective, unfair, corrupt, unsustainable’, or (usually) all of the above. They really went to town, demonising and eventually disemboweling local establishments – and this could have been likened to spending so much energy abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick. It was long coming – the military came in. We know the rest.

Nature abhors vacuum and will not tolerate it. Just think of the possibilities. I know enough about entropy to understand that storms are actually good. If this one helps in heralding a new order and systemic dynamic that cures this syndrome of chaos, it would have been a perfect storm.

 

Huzaifa Jega, a management consultant lives in Abuja