Politics everywhere in the world is treacherous. That’s a fact. At any level, politics throws up the worst in man; the beast in man and the many frailties that barb his essence. To mitigate this treachery, rules and laws are made to govern and guide politics and all its adjuncts including elections.
But politics in Nigeria is beyond treachery. It’s toxic and monstrously bad. True, Nigeria is full of bad politics. And where there is bad politics, there are bad manners, bad policies, bad leadership and bad governance. Bad politics breeds suspicion, nurtures bigotry – ethno-religious – and propagates the blossoming of a generation of bad guys, rebels, even secessionists.
Nigerians have been victims of bad politics. From the rebirth of democracy in 1999 till date, the nation has been fed with the noxious broth of bad politics. President Olusegun Obasanjo, the unwilling horse who was made president fresh from prison, played bad politics with his deputy, Atiku Abubakar. In their first term, Obasanjo served notice that a Daniel had at last come to judgement. There was a fresh lease for a nation held down by the jackboot. Obasanjo gave Nigerians a whimper of hope. But all too soon into his second term, he switched to bad politics. He brawled with Atiku. They fought in the secret. They jabbed in the open, washing their putrid linen in the marketplace. The good Obasanjo morphed into a bad guy, a monster of bad politics.
The nation suffered loss. The people were robbed of the good fortunes of democracy. He went into a fit of maddening rage. Under Obasanjo, a sitting governor was abducted. Nothing happened. Under him, minority overrode majority in state assemblies to impeach governors. A particular governor, Peter Obi, was even impeached at cock row outside his state by a gang of so-called lawmakers high on the opium of bad politics. Because of bad politics in his second term, Obasanjo erased most of the gains the nation made in his first term.
Recall the toxic tango between the National Assembly and Obasanjo’s Executive. A case of a president behaving in the most un-presidential manner. Bribe money walked into the National Assembly encased in Ghana-Must-Go bags. The Senate, baited with lucre, danced to the beat of a stranger, a stranger whose mission was to weaken the independence of the parliament. The music from the stranger was loud and lewd. The senators danced to the rhythm like inebriated men. In no time, they lost their mind, lost their senses and in quick succession, on two occasions, impeached their leadership at the vicarious whim of the stranger. Chuba Okadigbo and Evansville Enwerem became pawns in Obasanjo’s chess board of bad politics.
Unchallenged and emboldened, Obasanjo took his bad politics to a manic height when he foisted Umaru Yar’Adua on the nation as president. Yar’Adua was a very good man with a grand soul, a nationalist without pretence. But he had a health challenge. As governor of Katsina State, he was most times helmed in by ill-health. But Obasanjo blinded by bad politics, failed to look beyond Yar’Adua among a stellar cast of northerners who would have done better, unhinged by ill-health. The reign of Yar’Adua, signposted by ill-health paved the path to mindless looting. And all the while Yar’Adua was hospitalised in Saudi Arabia, the nation was in stasis. Yar’Adua himself played bad politics by not handing over to his deputy, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan. Pure bad politics. It created a vacuum at the passage of Yar’Adua whose ill-health became a victim of bad politics. The hawks in Aso Rock kept Nigerians in the dark about the health status of their president. More bad politics.
And when the Senate deployed Doctrine of Necessity as a masterstroke to install Jonathan as president, what ought to be a seamless transition, it was obvious that a lot of water had gone under the bridge enough to create a dam of mistrust in the polity. Jonathan, a gentleman who tried to avoid bloodshed under any guise, was himself sucked into the pit of bad politics. He promised to be a one-term president after completing about two years of the Yar’Adua tenure plus one term of four years. Yes, he did and the media elaborately reported it, with some politicians lavishing him with laudation for being a man of principle. So, what happened? Bad politics set in. Jonathan, the good-natured gentleman, reneged on his promise, swallowed his words and in full consciousness, to the consternation of the north and some southerners, rolled up his sleeves and contested for a second term. He was stopped.
Enter Muhammadu Buhari, a retired Army General sold to Nigerians as a refurbished democrat. But he was only just refurbished. The totems of a typical democrat were not ingrained in him, only just affixed on his shoulder for electoral appeal. It worked. He won. But a leopard never changes its spots. Buhari came out of his shell to manifest real bad politics. Till date, Buhari has manifested more traits of bad politics than any Nigerian leader, living or dead. Parochial, bigoted, insensitive, and incompetent, Buhari makes Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan, who were failures in their time as presidents, look like heroes of a wasteland. But don’t be deceived, these men were no heroes in office. Insecurity, corruption, infrastructure and deficit all happened in their time. It’s on record that Obasanjo himself initiated the culture of corruption in the National Assembly.
Under Obasanjo, there was Electoral Act fraud when some persons, while Nigerians slept, creepily slithered into the National Assembly to insert a toxic clause. Buhari failed to assent to an earlier Electoral Bill passed and transmitted to him. The bill sought to abolish manual collation of election results by promulgating electronic transmission of same. Withholding assent was bad politics. Any good leader should encourage electoral purity which was what the Electoral Bill intended to establish. But Buhari, just like Obasanjo and others, is not a good leader. They are all merchants of bad politics.
It gets even worse when you hear that some persons have mutilated the reworked Electoral Bill now before the National Assembly by expunging the clause encouraging electronic transmission of results. The very fact that we are even debating whether to insert or remove a clause supporting electronic transmission of election results is enough bad politics. There ought not to be a debate. The clause should be there!
Nigerians have witnessed 22 years of bad politics: The result is the insecurity, grand corruption, decayed infrastructure, disunity, nepotism, comatose economy, grossly weakened naira and other ills that assail the nation today. It’s bad politics that has reduced a top-ranking nation in crude oil production to the ignominious club of nations which spend almost all their crude oil earnings to import fuel.
But hope beckons. Nigerians must rise to the occasion. They should use the 2023 general elections and other elections before then to re-write the script. Those who have manifested elements of bad politics in their political offices and their surrogates should never be allowed to return. Vote them out. Away with bad politics. Away with nepotism and incompetence.