Ranked in terms of its endowment with drama and intrigues, the ongoing round of presidential primary elections, must qualify as perhaps the most disturbing for manifesting some of the extremely deviant tendencies, in comparison with previous exercises. This is in spite of the recent coming of the amended Electoral Act 2022, which aims at taming shrewd electoral malpractices. However, it needs to be appreciated that electoral malpractices in Nigeria, are so hydra-headed that the more you trim the ones you see, the more fresh angles emerge. Hence to its demerit, the presidential primaries exercise has not failed to throw up surprising twists and turns, at every corner in its course of providing the country with political party candidates to vie as successors to President Muhamadu, come March 2023 presidential polls.
In the first instance was the recent outing by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for its presidential primaries which reportedly featured among other bizarre tendencies, open bribing of delegates with hundreds of millions of US dollars, in a dispensation that shot up the open market price of that currency to an unprecedented value of one dollar being exchanged for over N600. Needless to state that the country is still reeling from the impact of such outrage, which has imposed a most deleterious effect on the import dependent Nigerian economy.
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As if the PDP outrage was not enough for the country, feelers around the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) indicate that the party’s presidential primaries is likely coming with a dispensation that may not only outdo the PDP in terms of a cash rain, but is working by fiat to install a personal choice of President Muhamadu Buhari as its candidate for the 2023 polls. According to media reports, the President had while leaving the country on official trip to Spain, directed the leadership of the party to ensure that his personal nominee clinches the ticket of the party unfailingly. From the body language of the leadership of the APC, the prospects of disobeying his order may not exist, with the implication that whoever emerges from the APC primaries, will be a Buhari anointed. And if the APC wins the 2023 polls, there is the likelihood that the legacies of the Buhari Presidency will continue to guide or haunt the country even after he leaves office, depending on which side of the divide the observer stands.
Ordinarily, in any leadership environment, it is not only normal for a retiring leader to be interested in a successor, but even on the fortunes of his or her legacies. Hence a successor chosen personally by Buhari may for all intents and purposes be an acolyte, who will be trusted to further his style of leadership, while in office as President. And this is where the crux of the matter lies.
The vital questions here include the following. Firstly, is the APC primaries election intended to select a candidate to contest the office of Nigeria’s President come 2023 general polls, as provided for in the Constitution, or a process of assuaging President Muhamadu Buhari over an inalienable, divine right of choice of successor? Secondly, what legacies from Buhari should be continued by executive fiat, after his tenure as President? Thirdly, do Nigerians no more have the inalienable right to decide freely on who should lead the country, without being subjected to the whims and caprices of an individual no matter how highly placed?
Along with several other questions that may be raised over this dispensation lies, the fact that if Buhari’s insistence on personally picking his successor is not the height of impunity, then that word has lost its meaning in ordinary usage. Here is a man who providence had blessed to rank as one of only two individuals (Olusegun Obasanjo is the other one), to rule the country for a second time after coming in from the cold, but who allowed his tenure to record perhaps the darkest days in the life of this country. Even with the most liberal endowment of charity, it is difficult not to list among his positive and negative legacies, the dip of the country into some of the most horrendous instances of unprecedented savagery in humanity as insecurity and other heinous crimes have become the order of the day, in a country where such tendencies were unimaginable in recent past. Nigeria of today under Buhari is a living hell, where bandits and terrorists operate openly in broad daylight, mount checkpoints on popular highways, attack military bases to kill and kidnap personnel, raid villages and install leaders who collect taxes and even rename such locations. It is in the great Shakespearean play ‘Julius Ceaser’ where Mark Anthony mused that “the evil that men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones…”. The moral here is that whatever good people do during their lifetime may not be easily remembered as the evil and pain that are associated with them. In that context therefore, is Buhari really wishing that Nigerians should continue with his negative legacies even after he has left office?
In any case, seen from the perspective of history, the President should not carry the blame alone for his insistence on choosing his successor all by himself, as all along the tenure of his Presidency, there have been several instances when he embarked on policy positions and actions that clearly breached the Constitution, and was allowed to have his way. Why then should he be denied this ‘little’ favour, he could be considering.
The entire spectacle brings to mind the classic story of the Arab traveler and his camel – both of whom got stranded on a cold and freezing night in the desert. The Arab traveler had only one tent that could accommodate just himself and no one else. However, out of pity for the camel which was sneezing badly from the cold and dust of the night, the Arab camel owner asked the beast to tuck in only its neck. As the night wore on, the camel – with the acquiescance of its master, gradually dragged its entire body into the tent and eventually pushed its master out, claiming that the tent was too small to contain both of them.
Simple as it may be, this story qualifies as a metaphor depicting the game which President Muhamadu Buhari may have been playing with the Nigerian state, all through his tenure. His recent request is only a latest gambit that must be resisted, by the APC leadership.
That is, if the future of the country matters to them.
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