Former Vice President Atiku has been in the power fulcrum. He knows how the presidency works… There is a valid point for Nigerians going for an old man.
Sam Nwokoro
The reason why Nigerians end up choosing leaders they would a few months later regret electing is because we have a very poor sense of appraisal. And the reason why most informed Nigerians are calling for restructuring of the polity is because it is simply impossible to build a national value ethos as Nigeria is today. This is because the little fissures in our social architecture have over the years been allowed to snowball into deeper national malaise that has now virtually broken — in fact erased any semblance of nationhood in the normal sense of the word. And that is why our appraisal of leadership suitability in this country is always often colored by some queer and mundane parameters that make you wonder the type of people we are in this century.
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Virtues such as consistency, focus, expressiveness, forthrightness, do not count. You must bend like everyone else. You must be a follow-follow even when it does not serve any useful purpose. You must not ‘rock the boat’. Everything is right provided you agree with everything, even if everything is wrong. You must not hold contrary views. You must view the small circle in which you found yourself as the end of it all. It is there that the world ends. And if the prevailing order could not succeed in manipulating or bending you to sacrifice some in-born principles, you are called names and profiled as the rebellious one.
Over the years, in fact since after the first Republic, Nigeria has been regaled by what has become the tradition of impunity and vagueness as the shining prerequisite for national leadership. Here, if you are a humble unassuming president or boss, your simplicity or meekness is taken for weakness and you are trampled upon and insulted. But if you are the haughty and notoriously arrogant type, you are idolized and profiled “powerful”. We venerate those who take joy in helping and degrading us because we feel they are invincible or by one hook or crook, they found themselves into positions of relevance. If you insist things be one as agreed, you are profiled as disloyal, judas etc as if holding contrary opinion is not the bedrock of democracy in the first place. But if you are the type who knows how to breach agreements, or you are master of the art of deception which Nigerians describe as “use and dump”, you are idolized as a smart and intelligent one.If you know how to cause confusion in the party and unleash its disintegration, you are rated as “indispensable”, a “crowd puller” and the only one who can supervise election rigging and fix in a “win” result flawlessly. Your ability to execute aberrant behaviors is the degree of your relevance in the power system. All these malfeasance has hindered Nigeria from electing good leaders.
Of all the pack of the presidential aspirants in Nigeria’s political landscape today, I have not been able to find one that Nigerians can confidently trust will confront Nigeria’s problems in a holistic manner as Atiku has all these while been laboring to espouse to whoever cares to listen. Even outside Nigeria, the man has been courageous enough to tell the world unpretentiously that he is willing to throw his heart into the rings to wrestle against Nigeria’s troublesome structure, the landmine they call “political restructuring”.
For all the thousands and one amendment which the present APC-led Federal Government has been sneaking into the 1999 constitution in a half-hearted effort to dampen the call for political restructuring, no serious punch has actually been given to those craw-craw and chicken pox parts of our body polity—issues of return to regional structure, reduction of the size of the central governance structure, effective deleting on the exclusive legislative list and rebooting of the concurrent list for effective grassroots impact. None of the current presidential aspirants has mooted anything about how he or she would deal with the issue of resource control militancy, of herdsmen menace, of Boko Haram inscrutability or of the money-guzzling drain-pipe called NNPC and other public institutions doing over-lapping, confusing works, and creating more problems than solutions in those areas of our national life for which they were created to improve on in the first place. None of them has been able to tell Nigerians how they intend to run Nigeria. They cleverly dodge questions on the vexed issue of political restructuring. They don’t want to talk about the knotty issue of deregulating the downstream sector completely or about the issue of single term. They are not even sure of whether their parties trust them or whether their constituencies approve of their ambitions.
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But Atiku right from day one has told the world what he is going to do. Some seers say they see him in dreams and visions carrying a briefcase and sauntering into presidential office while the one sitting there was stepping out. That to me means that the briefcase he was carrying by interpretation translates to the agenda he has already espoused he would execute if elected — restructuring Nigeria. That is the stuff a focused reformist leader is made of. He is never afraid to speak on issues. Those deriding the Turaki that he is a serial contestant or that he is always jumping from one party to another miss the point. They forgot that someone’s attitude is influenced by the manifest elements of his social environment. So anyone judging politicians on the basis of defection to parties is at loss with the peculiar characteristics and dynamics of Nigeria’s political environment—a polity where there are yet no strong principles or discernible ideologies underpinning the manifestoes and behavior of existing political parties—talk less leadership.
Former Vice President Atiku has been in the power fulcrum. He knows how the presidency works, and if there is need for reform for better service delivery, he would not waste much time in doing so, than a new comer who had never known the bureaucratic structure and other nuances of the presidency or where the Aso Rock kitchen is located. There is a valid point for Nigerians going for an old man. Age confers some level of wisdom and tactical know-how when it comes to political leadership, especially a knowledgeable one. That is why President Trump at 71 did not spend too long time after election to know which policy serves Americas’ best interest — whether it is on foreign trade, armament issue or regional politics of North America.
In a similar vein, Atiku has prowled the political spectrum in and out—and even the corporate world.So he would not need a battalion of advisers on how to deal with Boko Haram or herdsmen or Niger Delta militants or Nigeria’s greedy and ever complaining teachers, doctors, carpenters, policemen and agberos.
If those who count Atiku an unstable politician do so because he opposed some gods who think Nigeria cannot define herself without their input, they should know that in this life, political power, and even the fate of any nation are in the hands of ethereal forces quite outside the command and manipulations of mortal men. Whether the incumbent power holders want to believe it or not, every indicator points to the fact that divine interventions rather than mortal man’s prompting will play crucial roles pre and post 2019 elections which would affect the current political and social structures for good, we should pray.
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Nwokor writes via Starconnect.com