The storm clouds are gathering: Towards a totalitarian state? (2), By Jideofor Adibe

Beyond the protests, there are a number of issues the government should pay attention to:

One, though the protesters might have different motives, they seem all united by alienation from the government and even the state system. Rather than use blackmail and strong arm tactics, the government should use credible opinion polls to articulate and aggregate the various grievances against it and the state – and then evolve sustainable strategies on how to address as many of them as it can. Boxing shadows or creating enemies where they do not exist will only exacerbate the legitimacy crisis around the government. It will be a mistake for the government to believe that it can successfully stifle speech using intimidation and blackmail. Our history shows that such a strategy has a very short shelf life – as Buhari in his first coming as a military dictator and Abacha – can testify to. In his second coming – as a civilian President- a coalition of those Buhari disdained as a dot in a circle and those Femi Adesina called ‘wailing wailers’, fought back in their own ways such that even before Buhari completed his eight year tenure, he openly complained that he was tired, and would, on leaving office, want to be as far away as possible from Abuja and politics. The truth is that citizens, in the face of oppression by those who wield state power, often adopt asymmetric strategies to fight back. This can range from misinformation, caricature and outright fake news. In this age of social media where anyone who owns a mobile phone can be a publisher, citizens are especially empowered to fight back oppression.  I believe that for a government which currently has a  low social capital owing to the harsh effects of its economic policies, its policy somersaults, propaganda and non-inclusive style of governance, what it needs is more friends and less enemies. It needs to find a way of winning over the hearts and minds of as many Nigerians as possible.

Two, while it is not unusual for a relatively new government to start on a wobbly note, the government, for now at least, seems confused on what it wants to achieve.  For instance, while it said it wanted to implement the Orosoanya report (which recommended the merging of ministries and departments and abrogation of some) it also runs the largest cabinet of 48 Ministries and recently created another – the Ministry of Livestock Development. Similarly, while the Tinubu government initially seemed desirous of moving away from the cantankerous mode of public communication of the Buhari era, by appointing the very urbane and affable Mohamed Idris as the Minister of Information and Chief Ajuri Ngelari as the government’s Spokesman, it also contradicted this by appointing the vile and self-confessed ethnic irredentist Bayo Onanuga as Special Adviser on information and strategy. By so doing, it t negated  what would have been a new and courteous approach to public communication  to complement the commendable bridge-building efforts by the wife of the President, Senator Remi Tinubu   and a few others in the government. Similarly, some of the policies of the government raise confusion on whether Tinubu wants to be remembered as a great Nigerian President or simply wants to be more popular than the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo in Yorubaland.

Three, President Tinubu should be mindful of two key features of Nigeria’s democracy since 1999 which has always backfired but which our politicians remain funnily crazily attracted to: these are god-fatherism and clannishness. With the exception of Tinubu in Lagos, nearly all political godfathers invariably fall out with their political godsons, raising questions of why politicians remain fixated on selecting and bankrolling their successors. For clannishness and ethnocentrism which Buhari took to a previously unseen level, and which Tinubu seems eager to match, if not better in the negative, this also usually boomerangs. For instance, some of the most vicious critics of the Buhari government were Northern Muslims who were supposed to be the beneficiaries of his clannishness. Similarly, even before the protests started on August 1, many Yorubas, openly say the clannishness in Tinubu’s mode of appointments and governance  “does not represent who we are”. In fact, that many of the faces of the protests are from the Yoruba ethnic extraction is enough to warn the government that Yorubanization of political life will not be enough to buy Yoruba adulation.  If anything, it will likely backfire because there is a spark of the divine in all of us which makes most people to abhor injustice.  Besides, clannishness attracts odium to innocent members of an ethnic in-group even when they are opposed to the leader’s nepotism.

Four, the protest has now shown that no part of this country has a monopoly of providing poor leadership to the country. In fact, that the protest was organized under the banner of #EndBadGovernance is instructive. At least for now, there seems to be a consensus that the Tinubu government is grossly underperforming. And since most Nigerians appear to believe that the fundamental problem of the country is “squarely that of leadership” (apologies to Achebe), the use of innuendo to blame the North (which has produced most of the country’s leaders), has now come under critical scrutiny. In this thinking, there is always the unproven assumption that the leadership problem of the country would be solved when the South, in particular, the “progressives” (a moniker appropriated by South-West politicians when they were in the opposition) come to power. So far it has not happened under the Tinubu presidency. Even the “reforms” embarked by the Tinubu government are mere uncritical rehash of the policies implemented by the Babangida government between 1986 and 1993 when the country adopted the IMF/World Bank supported structural Adjustment Programme, and which only succeeded in further impoverishing the country and emasculating the middle class. Alan Greenspan, who served for five terms as chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve Bank (August 11 1987 to January 31 2006)   – the equivalent of our Central Bank- was famously quoted as saying that he owed his success during his tenure to the fact that he always did the opposite of the advice he received from the two Bretton Woods institutions (i.e. the IMF and the World Bank). President Tinubu should seriously consider that approach. It may amount to committing class suicide for him. But that would be the surest way of putting himself on the path of being a great Nigerian President.

Jideofor Adibe is a professor of Political Science at Nasarawa State University, Keffi and founder of Adonis & Abbey Publishers. He can be reached at: pcjadibe@yahoo.com  or 07058078841 (WhatsApp or text messages only).