Tsiyar Nasara

When you look at someone like you would a monkey, and unbeknownst to you that monkey was all along looking at you like it would a banana, no one would win. But someone will have the last laugh.  

The past few weeks in Nigeria have been one hell of a sleigh ride. No matter how one looks at it, President Buhari’s time in Aso Rock will be counted as some of the most interesting times Nigeria has had to pass through on its journey to uhuru.  

A news headline on Tuesday quoted the Igbo statesman, Arthur Ezeife, saying that 2023 is the make or break moment of Nigeria and I couldn’t agree more. Incredibly, the presidential contest is once more wide open – between the candidates of the APC and PDP. Just a few months back, the PDP was all but already beaten. Owing to the epic fallout of the naira crisis, APC has lost a lot of mileage and it isn’t only because the long suffering masses will count this as another sadistic screwball thrown their way and will have to take their own pound of flesh this Saturday – but because, apparently, not many votes will be up for sale, because there is no means to pay for them anymore. The grapevine has it their irresistible war chests have been knocked out completely in one fell swoop. A very big edge the APC has  suddenly disappears – most people in the North will vote for Tinubu only if he will pay. You can hardly find two people in a sample of ten who profess their readiness to vote for the APC’s candidate with no inducement. But very possibly, that is an opinion based on the thin circle I move around.  

The suit against the FG by a number of APC governors might well be decided in their favour – but that case is already lost. It was said that the FG offered a compromise that would see the return of N200 note to legal tender status until April, because the N500 and N1000 notes mopped up had already been destroyed. The offer was rejected and that claim was disputed by el-Rufa’i, who said he had evidence that not a single note had been destroyed. That was about a week ago, and that evidence is very unlikely to still stand today. Should the Supreme Court order the CBN to return the old notes to circulation, it could insist that it would comply if it could but it just cannot. I don’t think it would take more than a week to destroy a trillion naira in N1000 and N500 notes if you are determined enough. Indeed, the subsisting Supreme Court order el-Rufa’i and some of his peers have made attempts to leverage in their favour has clearly proved useless. I was in Kaduna on Tuesday, and in all the places I’ve been to, no business accepted old N1000 and N500 notes. Not even in Zaria, his hometown. 

If 2023 goes like 2015, and the purported desire of Buhari to deal a knock-out punch on our cash-and-carry democratic culture, then the system would have been reengineered for the cultivation of actual leaders, not the blind, deaf and dumb carpetbaggers running the show. It is good that there is now an institutional acknowledgment of the fact that the poor man does not sell his vote and conscience for no better than a pot of porridge only because he lacked the strategic depth that lets him know that he can do better for himself and his future. After all, the hare in hand is worth more than the ten you can also catch. If anything, the eight years since 2015 are the greatest argument against the fantasy of that ‘strategic depth’.   

The news also reported comments made by the dethroned emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, supporting the policy’s implementation but his angle was that it will hurt politicians more – but that is in the long run. Yes, that is true. But how can the common man who does not know how to count that far, and has every reason on earth not to believe that anyone in Aso Rock or anywhere around it has any interest in their welfare ever be convinced that this indeed will be to their own advantage against the wolves? Everyone knows that there is no gain without pain, but if his choices are restricted to the devil and the deep blue sea – any choice is therefore just as good as the other and no one should judge him/her for making a choice they think is wrong.  

Clearly, Buhari, at least from the way he probably sees it, has been suffering in silence all these years. Rumour has it that an attempt was even made on his life, and nothing happened. Of course, all that could be just idle rumours. But what is a fact is that for eight years, Buhari has been pushed around, bullied and managed by party interests and the fabled Aso Rock kitchen cabinet. Maybe the latter is still managing the president, and for once, their own interests align with the long term interests of our democracy. On this, it appears that Buhari will not budge – because he is really not the clueless caricature they always thought of him as, and if anything he had also been plotting all this while, like a monkey would plot against a tyrannical banana.  

Some of the governors question why this, Buhari’s last laugh, has to be now – and the answer is simple. The Hausa have a saying: “tsiyar nasara sai zashi gida”. The closest translation I can come up with is – “the worst of the white man comes when he readies to go home”. That is when his checkmate will stand, and cannot be countered. That is when you have nothing on him. That is when you have already lost the game. 

The problem, however, is that should APC lose, no force on earth will convince the millions who would vote for its candidate that it was a free and fair contest. They would go to town with a narrative on how it was in fact systematically rigged in favour of the PDP and the perpetuation of the northern monopoly on political power.  

That could be a very big wahala.