The stories that dominated the news cycle in varying degrees the past week have something in common: they reported on the true nature of our politics as an infinite cycle of warfare among combatants who do not know alternative states of existence. They cannot figure out other ways to live, move, and have their being other than an endless play of this paralysing game of politics. Whether you are looking at the example of Rivers State where Nyesom Wike (who has all but defected to the All Progressives Congress though retains a foothold in the Peoples Democratic Party) and his successor, Siminalaya Fubara, were engaged in a contest of wills, or you consider the instance of Imo State where their leaders booked up available hotel rooms ahead of the coming elections to frustrate the logistics organising of the opposition parties, you are seeing the same pattern of perpetual politicking.
We seemed permanently doomed to a fate where there is never going to be a let-up on power contention for our leaders to transition to governance. At this rate, all we will ever know will be an unending tussle for the reins of power.
This brings me to one of the biggest culprits of the practice of an all-consuming commitment to the chase of power: The PDP presidential candidate, Abubakar Atiku. Last week, he lost his presidential election litigation at the Supreme Court just like everyone—and by that I mean people who did not become Nigerians just last night—expected. Apart from a few who love histrionics and pretended to be pleasantly surprised, I do not know of anyone who imagined that a court that could remove an incumbent president in Nigeria had been composed.
The excitement of the whole certificate drama peaked at the very point where a quintessential African “big man” was forced to accountability by a court untainted by the messiness of Nigerian politics. Once that show entered the Nigerian legal landscape, some of us knew it would instantly become degraded by the uninspiring jurisprudence of judges who will plod through tedious pages of prefabricated judgment. Even Atiku himself must have known how the case would end but still went ahead anyway. As I observed in an earlier article, his mission might not have been to undertake the impossible task of getting the judges to critically reflect on the virtues expected of a president but to prepare for the next election.
His pursuit all along, as it seems to me anyway, was to delegitimise the incumbent—to give those harbouring disaffections from the last election the emotional resource to justifiably base their resentment.
So, I was entirely unsurprised when Atiku insinuated he would keep up the good fight of refurbishing the Nigerian polity. He presented his mission as service in a higher cause, but we have been Africans for long enough to know that politicians in this part of the world do not fight for the country’s sake. Nobody commits that many resources to battling incumbent power in African politics unless they seek to usurp them. Make no mistake, Atiku is not trying to “deepen our democracy and rule of law…” for “the country… to reach its true potential” as he so nobly puts it. Everything he has done is a preface to the 2027 election when he will relaunch his presidential ambition. Such perpetual politicking is why we are caught in an endless coil of mobilising disaffection, delegitimising institutions/institutional figures, unsettling the polity, and dragging out the estrangement until the next election.
While we can rightly argue that such strategies are exactly the nature of politics, and that there are no historical examples of a polity that subsists without continuous (and acrimonious) power contentions, we should also recognise that this perpetual politicking lacks statecraft. We have a set of leaders adept at battling to win elections but entirely clueless on the science and art of governance. For them, every resource of democracy—its institutions, plus even moral visions and thought—must be pimped in the service of accruing power. And by the time they eventually get that power, their heads are drained out and their souls purged of virtues. Political power then becomes a carapace for hiding the jarring emptiness within.
I should note that Atiku is not the only one with eyes set on the next election. A couple of weeks ago, I started receiving emails from a Yoruba parapo list server already mobilising efforts for Bola Tinubu 2027. The man has not even identified his mandate let alone deliver on it, but his parochial kinsmen are already strategising his tenure extension to, of course, retain their benefits. “Awa lokan” politics has morphed into an “awa nikan ni” entitlement mindset. Yoruba elites and intellectuals have revealed themselves to be the tortoise in the fable who took the name “All of You” so he could amass what belonged to the collective. Beyond their audacity of mobilising for their poorly performing tribesman for the next election is the massive insensitivity to the feelings of non-Yoruba Nigerians.
But that is precisely the kind of moral blind spot one gets from a society where all politicking has become destiny. They expend every resource on winning and retaining power, but never get around to the most important part of it all: building the skills to meaningfully govern. That is why former President Muhammadu Buhari spent 12 years seeking power, finally got it, and did nothing useful with it for eight years! The present administration too has started on the same path of fighting tenaciously for power, winning it, and demystifying themselves because of it. Their case is even worse than that of their predecessor(s) because they were the loudmouths who had all the bold ideas of what the nation ought to do. Now that they oversee the nation, it starts to unfold that the grand visions they shared while playing opposition politics were all just talk. They never developed the skills necessary to craft a viable state, and they are not about to start.
We are now trapped in this perpetual cycle where, by the nature of our politics of perpetually fighting for power, the possibilities of social progress are severely limited. We cannot plan for the long term because all available resources must be drafted toward preparing for the next election. To be a politician in Nigeria means nothing more than being positioned to legitimately rob. You rob to get into power, rob to stay in power, and still rob to remain politically relevant even after your serial tenure in power expires.
That is also why Nigeria cannot build a country for its young ones. All the resources that should go into developing the infrastructure that should help its youths flourish must be expended on politicking. Our politics of power encourages people to produce children, but also has no agenda for their future other than mobilise them as voters right from the moment they can stand on their feet and walk.
We cannot take care of any of the infrastructure of healthcare, education, public facilities, and so on. All those urgent interests must be relegated so we can prepare for the next election. Politics is a deity with expensive and insatiable tastes; it cannot gulp enough of our flesh and blood.
Not only does politics consume our future, but it also robs us of our past. We also cannot look back into our history to learn anything about ourselves other than how the last election was lost and won. Our society is jinxed with leaders who do not know anything other than contending for power; we are doomed to perpetual politicking. Without an insightful understanding of the past nor a resolve toward the future, we are condemned to wallow in an eternal dystopic loop of nowness.
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun