The Character of Nigeria's Politics

Nation in dire need of ideological direction

Nigeria’s political and military leaders...

I had an occasion recently to have a tete a tete with a group of about 20 youths in Ibadan. I had planned to start meeting with youths generally when I got to Ibadan to study the high scale of youth violence and deaths in the ancient city as a way of finding out the root of the violence and proposing solutions to it but I was warned by family members not to try it as I would be putting my life in danger. Those family members were not just scaring me, I myself had witnessed death and destruction.

I had heard of three youths and an elderly nightguard and another old woman killed. I had also witnessed large scale destruction that took place at night where shops of petty traders were looted and burnt and a house razed; in that house an old woman who was said to be the grandmother of one of the hoodlums’ whom they had come for in a reprisal attack was shot in her armpit, killed and thrown down from the first floor of the house. In the same house, a boy of thirteen years roused from slumber by the smoke from the burning house ran for his dear life but was pursued, shot, and killed. I didn't agree with these family members but nevertheless refrained, if only for a time.

My conviction is that things like that should be studied by our sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, and economists. Except for a lecturer in Uthman Dan Fodio University, Sokoto who took the bull by the horn and has been visiting the bandits in their dens in the last ten years studying them, nobody that I know has made any effort to study the youth problem in the country. That is why our solutions to our problems do not work because they are not from well-planned study. Instead solutions are provided top-bottom.

While Sheikh Gumi was proposing solutions to the bandits question from direct contact with them and from his religious persuasion, the federal government was only acting according to scripts of fiction writers in the security apparatus and jejune civil servants and political advisers. In my view, as a nation we lack intellectual orientation and we miss it, most often designing ill-conceived and illiterate solutions to vital problems. How well can it be when those who rule over us are poorly educated.

My opportunity came when I saw a poster pasted by the boys asking people to sign in to pressure to organize a referendum in the South West for restructuring the nation in which the West will form a region. I took it as an opportunity to educate the youths on the deception that goes on in Nigerian politics. We fixed 4 pm for the meeting and my team of my wife and me got there promptly but my guests were not ready, some were still sleeping at 4 pm in their very dilapidated house.

Another time between 5 and 5:30 pm was fixed. At about 5:30, to my surprise, they were fully ready. How they were able to mobilize that huge number was amazing to me. I think it speaks to the latent ability of these youths that the leaders of Nigeria are allowing to waste away. Sitting with my wife and me in that forum are youths fully drugged as evidenced by their looks; some of them still held their wraps of marijuana and puffed away at it. In my days as a youth, marijuana was smoked in hiding places, today it is smoked in the open. A friend told me he saw in Ibadan a youth smoking marijuana right before his father. Nobody is ashamed to smoke it any longer.

Talking with these boys, one of them was a girl who listened to me attentively, was exciting. It reveals many things about the character of Nigeria’s politics and the unpreparedness and gaping failure of Nigeria's political class. If there must be a people-centered change in Nigeria, the current leadership must be swept off either by a political upheaval or hurricane, as it were. There is a generational disconnect. Whatever Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Sir Ahmadu Bello, or Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe built or did not build is totally lost on this generation of youth. I was sitting before youths who were fully Yoruba but none knows the legend of Yoruba politics, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. They have not heard of him. Yet some in the political arena kept using Awolowo's name to rape these youths. When a generation is disconnected from a founding generation, values are not transmitted. That’s why the current generation behaves anyhow it feels. I saw a value disconnect from parents and from the political class. And this is the reason these youths are easily deceived. They are not value-driven, but rather rudderless.

Nothing shows this value and political disconnect than the ongoing discordance in the APC, that is, the sudden betrayal in that party that came together strongly in 2015 to upstage PDP's 16 years of inglorious rule. What is being revealed to the nation now is that what kept the party together was not the interest of the nation which they presented as 'change' but some individual ambitions which have nothing to do with the nation's interest.

For example, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu had a lifelong ambition that must be fulfilled no matter what happened; Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, two-time governor of Osun state, turned to the State of Osun, for reasons unknown, want to be a kingmaker in Osun State. Also, Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, the current governor of Osun state became governor because he is a close relative of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. By all account, Bola Tinubu will still swear till tomorrow that he is from the popular Tinubu family in Lagos and that the late icon of trade in Lagos, Abibatu Mogaji was his mother. What link Oyetola has with Abibatu Mogaji is undefinable and unknowable but we now know that Oyetola is related to Tinubu from the mother's side. Oyetola is from Iragbiji in Osun state.

Femi Ojudu, the journalist turned senator and now a special adviser in the presidency has turned against his political mentor and promoter, Bola Tinubu. He has declared that he won't vote for Tinubu in the party’s primaries and instead will cast his vote for Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, the new darling on the political turf.

I think the lies and the deceptions are gradually crawling out of the can. With leaders who are solely interested in themselves, solely interested in spewing lies to secure power, and this is the reason why what is happening at the level of the succeeding youth generation is hardly monitored. The youths are left to flounder and wander. Even though money for their terminal examinations is paid in the South and by the states in the North but it does not bother the political leaders whether the youths have teachers or not. It does not bother the political class whether the youths pass their examinations or not. What is the rationale for paying for examinations that will be written but not passed? A political class that does not bother about the quality of education will not bother about jobs for the youth. So each year the youth keep failing the examinations only to join the burgeoning army of the unemployed.

Politics in Nigeria is in dire need of ideological direction. There are politicians who have moved through all the political parties in Nigeria. A clear example is Alhaji Atiku Abubakar who moved from PDP to AC and then APC and now back to PDP. He has traversed the major parties in a space of twenty years all in an attempt to fulfill his lifelong ambition to become president. There is an allegation that he is behind almost all other smaller political parties. It is said that these smaller parties are registered so that if his ambition is not realized in the big parties, the smaller ones will be ready for use by him and his supporters. Sure enough, if Tinubu does not realize his lifelong ambition of becoming the president in APC, and it does not seem to me that he will, the APC will splinter to its former legacy parties because Tinubu has resolved to contest for president in 2023. In the same vein, the Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola will continue to be in APC, only if the party does not field Tinubu. He might migrate to PDP to join forces with Senator Ademola Adeleke to scuttle the second term bid of Governor Oyetola.

Such lack of ideological direction smacks of political prostitution and is the reason for the absence of moral and political values in Nigeria and also the reason for youth disorientation. Things will not heal until a new constitution emerges that will impose political ideology that all parties must subscribe to and implement when they come to power. The only difference will be in the style and method of implementation. How can a nation’s law impose a method of choice on candidates through a system of 'internal democracy' that has always provided the ugliest and rogue candidates that we have presently everywhere? Back in 2015, APC sold the mantra of change to Nigerians but ethnic agenda and religious fundamentalism, and nepotism are the hallmarks of the current administration, all because ideology was not constitutionally imposed.

Guest Writer:

Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Masters degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.