From all indications, the coming year 2022, promises to be a pressure cooker for Nigeria. All the contradictions and issues we have glossed over as a people either as a result of incompetence to resolve them or deliberate failure to apply the necessary political will are going to come to a head stretching the tensile fabric of the country to a dangerous make or mar point.
I am not a scaremonger, neither am I clairvoyance. I am also not a pessimist because life generally is both a risk and a continuous trial which tests our endurance and ability to surmount existential challenges for which our ever benevolent and merciful Creator equips us generously with faculties to cope.
In the coming year 2022 major issues and developments in the political, economic and social spheres of our country will require the firm political will and statesmanship that nations like ours in search of essence will have to come to terms with.
What are these issues and developments and how will they manifest?
First, the polity.
The elaborate shadow boxing within and between the two major political parties – the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – will inevitably come out in the open.
In the PDP, the issue of who emerges the party’s presidential candidate will be highly contentious and may lead to the party imploding to smithereens. This much, Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State admitted recently. “The process of the emergence of our party’s (PDP, that is) presidential flag bearer is going to cause problem’,’ he remarked. “But we will overcome it eventually and move ahead to defeat the APC whose process will lead to the breakdown of the party,’’ he offered rather gratuitously.
Many believe Wike was engaging in the sort of garrulous, self-glorifying statements typical of Nigerian politicians that tend to make their political causes larger than what they really are. In the case of the PDP, Nigerians know that it is a party that is on its last legs on account of the irreconcilable contradictions within it. There will be a major revolt if the party in its South East and South South strongholds gives its ticket to a northerner. Wike is sounding the way he is because he is angling to be either the party’s presidential flag-bearer or a running mate to whoever emerges. Against the overwhelming opinion within the party, he is willing to support a northern candidate in order to be the running mate.
This certainly is a recipe for chaos as many in the party will stoutly resist these manoeuvres by Wike leading inevitably to its implosion.
The APC faces a similar but more dangerous situation. On paper it looks like a walk in the park for Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to pick up the presidential ticket of the party. If as expected, the party decides to turn to the southern part of the country for its presidential flag-bearer then for all practical purposes there is none more well positioned than Bola Tinubu both for the purposes of having the realistic chances winning the 2023 elections and also for the political correctness of rewarding Tinubu and the South West for aiding the APC to come to power in 2015.
But there are powerful, well-positioned personalities within the APC who regard it as an anathema to allow Tinubu pick the party’s presidential ticket. Aside from Tinubu’s well-known political baggage, he is considered by these APC grandees as being too powerful politically and resource wise to be amenable for political puppeteering.
Tinubu’s containment within the APC has been an on-going project which began manifesting since the first Ondo State election through to the ouster of his hand-picked protégé Adams Oshiomhole as party chair, the appointment and retention of a caretaker committee to run the party, the contrived shifting and failure to organise a national convention and the series of crises within the party at the local, state and national levels.
All these will come to a head in 2022 as the underground game plans going on within the party to deny Tinubu the party ticket finally manifest. The APC convention scheduled for February 2022 will be a litmus test for the survival of the party or not.
While the political arena will be in a state of flux, the economy will continue to head south. In the midst of the prevailing harsh economic conditions in the country, perhaps potentially the most dangerous situation that will confront us as a nation will be the impending increase in the price of petroleum products. As the government cannot but implement this measure which is part of the conditionalities by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this will inevitably bring it into a collision course with the populace.
Then there is the National Census. With much of the country in the throes of insecurity and with contentious issues from the last census yet to be resolved, can we expect the 2022 census to be successfully conducted to the satisfaction of all Nigerians?
Then of course the ever present factor of insecurity. It must be admitted that of late, our gallant armed forces have made some appreciable gains in the fight against terrorism, insurgency, banditry, kidnapping and violent secessionist tendencies in the country. But from our experience these issues are hydra headed and asymmetrical in nature. They are essentially products of our socio-economic contradictions and our dysfunctional society. In the expected combustible political and economic situation of 2022, they are likely to exacerbate to the point where they will tax all the abilities and resources of our security institutions.
The scenario I have painted of Nigeria in 2022 is not intended to alarm. It is my objective reading of the prevailing situation of the country and the likely trajectory they will take in the critical year we are about to enter.
The nexus of the problem has to do fundamentally with the unresolved issue of leadership and power relations in Nigeria. The Nigerian leadership elite have remained fractured along mutually conflicting issues such that they have not been able to come together to forge a consensus on facing up to the challenges of building a nation out of this country. Indeed they have tended to find comfort in resisting and reinforcing the diversities in the country for the temporary gains it brings to their political aspirations. But all that will come to a decisive situation in 2022 where continuing with it will cause them and the nation more grief.
Nations must necessarily go through challenges which most times require anticipation and creativity to resolve. The role of national leadership in such circumstances is not to abdicate responsibility or seek personal or group convenience at the expense of the nation. It is all about having the political will to rise above attachments to primordial cleavages and cutting a pathway to national redemption and rejuvenation.
In 2022 the Nigerian leadership elite will face the sternest political, economic and social test yet of their ability and commitment not just to hold the country together but also to chart a new pathway for its future. How they handle this challenge will determine and justify their relevance and survival and that of the country.
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