In his dying moments, trapped and ensnared in a maze of intrigues and subterfuges he has woven round himself and his people, Simon Bolivar, the great Latin American revolutionary hero aka the liberator, was known to have exclaimed: “How am I ever going to get out of this labyrinth?”. So close to his chest did the liberator play his cards that nobody could predict his next move or military gamble. One of his aides was known to have quipped: “only my master knows what my master is thinking about.”
In a brilliant fictional recreation titled The General in his Labyrinth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the late Colombian master of magical realism, has done gripping justice to the last days of Simon Bolivar. What is important is to note that there are labyrinths and there are labyrinths. For the trapped it is mandatory to find a way out of them. But while some labyrinths are entirely self-made or self-spun, a case of the trapper being entrapped by his own wiles and subterfuges or being finally manipulated by his own manipulations, some labyrinths are woven by a constellation of political forces in their economic, spiritual and structural malevolence which leaves the entrapped floundering in hopeless and futile audacity.
General Mohammadu Buhari is trapped in their labyrinth. It is a severe, mortal maze which is not entirely of his own making, but one to which his political failings have contributed significantly. This is how the Nigerian presidency must appear to clinical and dispassionate onlookers at the moment. It is obviously easier to find your way out of a labyrinth of your own making, but certainly not out of a maze unfurled by others. To start with, the initiative is not yours. You are merely reacting to forces that may be one or two steps ahead. The Buhari presidency has already lost one or two of these epic battles of will and wits. But how did we get to this sorry pass in an atmosphere of revolutionary clamour for change?
It is obvious that the nation is going through a very difficult phase and nothing is guaranteed, not even deep, enduring institutional change. As the first anniversary of the Buhari administration stole upon the country last week, it was obvious that all was not well. There was an atmosphere of dolorous dismay and quiet desperation. Even the much awaited presidential speech, if it was not exactly a damp squib, did not do much to galvanize the nation into greater resolve or mend its broken spirit.
As the harsh and hostile economic realities finally dissolve and evaporate the remnants of the old Nigerian middle class and its lower substratum, there is much bitterness and anger in the land while the old lower classes welcome back their absconding siblings with open smiling arms. The child who says his father did not take his chance will soon find out that there are no chances left to be taken but an illusionist fantasia in the cannibal casino.
But in our misdirected anger and the orchestrated vendetta against the Buhari administration, it is important to keep our eyes focused on the ball. There are two articles of faith on which this column still stands. First is that regime change for the nation was mandatory in the context of the kleptomaniac flailing and floundering of the Jonathan administration. Second is that owing to the structural contingency imposed on the nation, there was no one else to turn to in the circumstances we found ourselves except the retired general from Daura.
Anybody who believes otherwise no matter the highfalutin rhetoric is a purveyor of ethnic, religious and economic irrationality and an enemy of political rationality and the immanent logic that undergirds the development of human society. But this being a democratic set up, everybody is entitled to his opinion. The only thing is that you cannot win back what you lost in the arena of democratic contention by a resort to violent demonstration and the minatory blackmail of other groups.
Nigerians may bemoan the electoral fate which has foisted a seventy four year old retired general who may well be past his prime and who ruled last about thirty years earlier on them, but this is a question for the Nigerian selectorate. The selectorate select and the electorate elect willy-nilly. Thrice in his younger and more vibrant prime, Buhari offered himself for national services and thrice the Nigerian selectorate checkmated him. It was only when they had their back to the wall and revolutionary anarchy beckoned that they relented just like they did with him thirty three years earlier. But on both occasions, they made sure they put the politically challenged general in their labyrinth. It is not a long leash.
What Nigerians should bemoan is the contradiction between structural contingency and human agency which has made it possible for a few individuals to determine the political destiny of the nation. Oligopolistic politics is the politics of oligarchies and not meant for average folks who are nothing but spectators at a play of giants. In the process of misruling and misdirecting the nation, the political oligarchs have acquired enormous economic clout, and they are not going to let go easily.
Such has been the epic structural gridlock that by the time the political divinations and anti-democractic diviners come up with their short list, the best and the brightest, the most qualified to rule Nigeria in the age of rampaging globalization and knowledge explosion, would have been casually eliminated. And those who are left, haunted by the trauma of ancestral memory or the pathology of personal suffering can only rule with a persecution complex so bitter and damaging that it must affect their judgement.
The structural constraints and contingency which put a president in an iron labyrinth can also be seen in the existing dominant party formations in the country. These political agglomerations are not parties in the real organic sense of the word but special project platforms in power formation. But they often work. This is the reality since the advent of the military. Thus in the Second Republic the NPN was formed as a broad national coalition to ease off the military from power.
Once the NPN briskly unraveled, its military patrons stepped in to prevent a bloody challenge to the dominant power formation in all its dire consequences. The clairvoyant Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye could not have put it better when he noted that there were only two parties in the country: the military and their civilian subalterns. General Babangida’s Transition Parties, SDP and NRC, brilliantly dismissed as government parastatals by Chief Anthony Enahoro, perished with the transition programme after acquiescing in the annulment of the best presidential election ever held in the nation.
In the case of General Abacha’s transition, the parties famously described as the five fingers from a leprous hand did not even make any pretence to neutrality and independence. They existed at the mercy of the prickly despot and were there merely to facilitate his metamorphosis into civilian dictator. They died with the despot and when General Abdulsalaam Abubakar tried to resuscitate them in his maiden broadcast to the nation, he was swiftly countermanded by those who put him there and he changed tack accordingly.
Consequently, the PDP was conceived like its old forebear the NPN: a broad coalition of Nigerian political heavyweights that could guarantee post-military stability and peace even at the expense genuine democracy and development. For some time, the PDP stayed the course, relentlessly chopping off the head of their party chairmen until they lost concentration and forgot why they were there. In a self-deluding tip at political equity they brought a power neophyte who brought the house crashing on everybody.
Regime change became inevitable. In the past, it was through the mechanism of military intervention. But since military rule was no longer feasible, a coalition of contraries had to be cobbled together to ease the PDP out of power. Unlike the PDP which is an organic formation of the ruling class, the APC is an antagonistic platform of mutually exclusive political tendencies brought together for the purpose of regime change. Once that purpose is achieved, there is no unifying vision or bonding experience to fall back upon. If care is not taken, the party’s tenure in federal power may be much shorter than imagined. Perhaps that is the whole idea, anyway.
General Buhari may be finding out to his peril that unlike military rule in which command and authority are clearly delineated, civilian rule is a different kettle of fish. Khaki no be Guinea brocade or Atiku fabric for that matter. In the military, you know where the enemy is or where he is likely to come from. But in the cloak and dagger world of real political war, the enemy is in bed and already embedded. Having failed to stamp his authority on the centrifugal forces in his party early enough and having lost the senate to contrary forces, the president has found himself in the labyrinth of intimate adversaries.
Last week, the Turaki of Adamawa, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, opened another front for the president by lending his considerable weight to the clamour for an urgent restructuring of the country. It is easy and tempting to dismiss these increasingly strident calls as mere red-herring or opportunistic political gaming. But they find resonance in an increasing number of Nigerians who believe that this is the only solution to the political shenanigans which have hobbled Nigeria’s development and stifled the diverse energies and creative spirit of its diverse people.
President Buhari appears to be unmoved and unimpressed by the cheek of it all. While he should be commended for heroically battling the scourge of corruption and for restoring the sanity of the Nigerian state, the reality on ground shows that the unease in at least two significant sections of the country coupled with the international and local conspiracy to defang his economic nationalism are beginning to chip away at his statist and commandist escutcheon. If these loud rumblings were to find traction in a Yoruba middle class already embittered by the prospects of economic vaporization, it may put the entire change project and its south West phalanx in acute political jeopardy indeed.
Going forward, the president needs to go back to the drawing board. The creeping militarization of the polity draws the army into needless and unwise civil commotions. This is the time for the president to commence a rigorous study of this difficult country in its political minutiae and economic, religious and ethnic particularities and peculiarities. For starters, rather than throw the last conference into the archives as he vowed to do, the president should gather a group of wise citizens who will study all the conferences and advise him on the way forward accordingly.
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