Our country surely heaved a heavy sigh of relief with the affirmation of the election of President Bola Tinubu by the Supreme Court of Nigeria on October 26. The tension has gone the way of a pierced balloon; the anxiety on his part and on the part of his challengers, has similarly evaporated, leaving the victor to savour his victory and the losers to bite their nails, wondering what is left of their war chest. It is life imitating life, of course.
All the drama has ended. The swords, I should hope, have been sheathed; the tsunami of public sentiments has been downgraded to a cool flood; the lucky lawyers have put their law books back on the shelves and are doing what comes naturally to the suddenly loaded, to wit, laugh all the way to the banks. It had been high drama since Tinubu’s nomination as the APC presidential candidate last year; what with the absurd drama of shopping for the support of Christians for his Muslim-Muslim ticket with some wretched and unholy men gathered from an Abuja motor park and attired in the borrowed robes of bishops for a fee.
The president must now face the mountain, alone, all alone, in trying to remake our country in a new image of focused and purposeful leadership and show that he has the capacity to tame our unruly economy, bring urgent succour to the people to quieten their rumbling stomachs, untie our national currency to the apron strings of the dollar, put the cost of fuel within our reach and make us all safe wherever we may be in our dear country. For his sake, for our sake and for the sake of our country, we should not just wish him well but more importantly heed his call to join him in the task ahead of him and of our country. Our country deserves a break.
Of course, the 2023 presidential election will, for the foreseeable future, cast a long shadow on what our political leaders have made of the simple civic duty performed by the people in participating in the process of instituting a government of their choice. They have complicated it and made nonsense of our participatory democracy in law, in spirit and in practice. In the high drama of the most contested presidential election so far, all our dirty clothes as a nation were taken to the public laundry. The rest of the world beheld it and were revulsed by the sight of so much dirty clothes in one nation. It could not but leave ashes in our mouths. There has been no presidential contest like it since the generals hit on the wisdom of giving to their lordships the power to determine the choice of the people expressed with their ballot papers through legal technicalities.
A whole new approach to our elections
UN Day 2023: Does the world need a United Nations?
In the Supreme Court, the contest shifted from what happened or did not happen in the presidential election that gave one of the three men the long end of the stick and the other two the short end of the stick. The drama shifted to the alleged forgeries and the missing links in the president’s educational career. The opponents piled it on to damage his character as an unfit person to be entrusted with the leadership of our country for ever casting about for the leader it deserves. It was their right to do this but in doing so, the country will now reap and live with the unintended consequences of their determination to pale the president on the spike of politics absent of good sportsmanship.
Our country needs a break. The past five months of his administration have had unsalutary effect on the Tinubu presidency. If the challenges to his election were part of the problem, then it should no longer be so because the highest court in the land has said he won the election. The country must urgently rise from its current confusion. Every national election in our country leaves either the trails of new challenges or a compelling re-statement of old and lingering problems. It is no less so for this administration. We continue to ignore them at our collective peril.
At least two things continue to drive our national politics towards the blight of negativism. One is the trust deficit. We do not trust one another. It is a consuming problem that, like corruption, affects everything we do. Whatever a Nigerian does is suspect in the eyes of another. We no longer believe that people can do whatever they are officially required to do without being induced by money or the promise of other rewards. We believe that every Nigerian is crooked and crookedly does he perform his official duties by bending the arc of public service towards his personal or group interests.
Two, the politicians have systematically corrupted the system and our public institutions at all levels. There is no major public institution today with its integrity intact. Our religious leaders are of no help because the politicians have induced them to compromise themselves and assist the politicians with faux prophecies that only encourage them to do bad by the people.
They have corrupted the electoral umpire by inducing their lesser officials to serve them – fair, free and credible elections be damned. They have impugned and continue to impugn the integrity of the commission and reduced its performance at every election to this: we win, good; we lose, bad. They put a question mark on the integrity of the commission to weaken it. The large number of election petitions arising from the conduct of every election point to the hands of the politicians at work here.
I thought the judiciary would be the last public institution standing, able to withstand the onslaught of the politicians; the one institution we could run to because it enjoys a large measure of our trust as citizens. After all, it is the only public institution recognised as the refuge of the common man. We forgot to reckon with the capacity of the politicians to recruit public sentiments to their own cause. In the just ended fireworks in both the court of appeal and the supreme court, the politicians tried to hijack the job of the justices and force them to bend the arc of the law from the law but towards public sentiments and decide matters of law by uninformed public opinions and sentiments.
Still, there is no denying that our judiciary increasingly shows evidence of its inclination to interpret the law to serve these gods strutting the stage with spindly feet of clay. Senior lawyers excoriate the bench and invariably invite the rest of us to be warry of their capacity for impartiality in serving the cause of justice. The judiciary going the way of the other institutions leaves the common man without refuge and thus at the mercy of their oppressors.
Our country needs a break. The ball is now in Tinubu’s court. How he serves it from now will determine the present and the future of a country. He may choose to be Buhari or he may choose to be Tinubu. The choice is his but the verdict of history will not be his.
