Last week, Victor, a carpenter, came to my Lagos home to fix a broken chair. I asked him whom he preferred as Nigeria’s next president: the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, or his challenger, Muhammadu Buhari. "I don’t have a voter’s card, but if I did, I would vote for somebody I don’t like,” he said. 'I don’t like Buhari but Jonathan is not performing.”
Victor sounded like many people I know: utterly unenthusiastic about the two major candidates in our upcoming election.
Were
Nigerians to vote on likeability alone, Jonathan would win. He is
mild-mannered and genially unsophisticated, with a conventional sense of
humor. Buhari has a severe, ascetic air about him, a rigid uprightness;
it is easy to imagine him in 1984, leading a military government whose
soldiers routinely beat up civil servants. Neither candidate is
articulate. Jonathan is given to rambling; his unscripted speeches leave
listeners vaguely confused. Buhari is thick-tongued, his words
difficult to decipher. In public appearances, he seems uncomfortable not
only with the melodrama of campaigning but also with the very idea of
it. To be a democratic candidate is to implore and persuade, and his
demeanor suggests a man who is not at ease with amiable consensus.
Still, he is no stranger to campaigns. This is his third run as a
presidential candidate; the last time, in 2011, he lost to Jonathan.
This
time, Buhari’s prospects are better. Jonathan is widely perceived as
ineffectual, and the clearest example, which has eclipsed his entire
presidency, is his response to Boko Haram. Such a barbaric Islamist
insurgency would challenge any government. But while Boko Haram bombed
and butchered, Jonathan seemed frozen in a confused, tone-deaf inaction.
Conflicting stories emerged of an ill-equipped army, of a corrupt
military leadership, of northern elites sponsoring Boko Haram, and even
of the government itself sponsoring Boko Haram.
Jonathan
floated to power, unprepared, on a serendipitous cloud. He was a deputy
governor of Bayelsa state who became governor when his corrupt boss was
forced to quit. Chosen as vice president because powerbrokers
considered him the most harmless option from southern Nigeria, he became
president when his northern boss died in office. Nigerians gave him
their goodwill—he seemed refreshingly unassuming—but there were powerful
forces who wanted him out, largely because he was a southerner, and it
was supposed to be the north’s ‘turn’ to occupy the presidential office.
And
so the provincial outsider suddenly thrust onto the throne, blinking in
the chaotic glare of competing interests, surrounded by a small band of
sycophants, startled by the hostility of his traducers, became
paranoid. He was slow to act, distrustful and diffident. His mildness
came across as cluelessness. His response to criticism calcified to a
single theme: His enemies were out to get him. When the Chibok girls
were kidnapped, he and his team seemed at first to believe that it was a
fraud organized by his enemies to embarrass him. His politics of
defensiveness made it difficult to sell his genuine successes, such as
his focus on the long-neglected agricultural sector and infrastructure
projects. His spokespeople alleged endless conspiracy theories, compared
him to Jesus Christ, and generally kept him entombed in his own sense
of victimhood.
The
delusions of Buhari’s spokespeople are better packaged, and obviously
free of incumbency’s crippling weight. They blame Jonathan for
everything that is wrong with Nigeria, even the most multifarious,
ancient knots. They dismiss references to Buhari’s past military
leadership, and couch their willful refusal in the language of ‘change,’
as though Buhari, by representing change from Jonathan, has also taken
on an ahistorical saintliness.
I
remember the Buhari years as a blur of bleakness. I remember my mother
bringing home sad rations of tinned milk, otherwise known as “essential
commodities”—the consequences of Buhari’s economic policy. I remember
air thick with fear, civil servants made to do frog jumps for being late
to work, journalists imprisoned, Nigerians flogged for not standing in
line, a political vision that cast citizens as recalcitrant beasts to be
whipped into shape.
Buhari’s
greatest source of appeal is that he is widely perceived as
non-corrupt. Nigerians have been told how little money he has, how spare
his lifestyle is. But to sell the idea of an incorruptible candidate
who will fight corruption is to rely on the disingenuous trope that
Buhari is not his party. Like Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party,
Buhari’s All Progressives Congress is stained with corruption, and its
patrons have a checkered history of exploitative participation in
governance. Buhari’s team is counting on the strength of his perceived
personal integrity: his image as a good guy forced by realpolitik to
hold hands with the bad guys, who will be shaken off after his victory.
In
my ancestral home state of Anambra, where Jonathan is generally liked,
the stronger force at play is a distrust of Buhari, partly borne of
memories of his military rule, and partly borne of his reputation, among
some Christians, as a Muslim fundamentalist. When I asked a relative
whom she would vote for, she said, “Jonathan of course. Am I crazy to
vote for Buhari so that Nigeria will become a sharia country?”
Nigeria
has predictable voting patterns, as all democratic countries do. Buhari
can expect support from large swaths of the core north, and Jonathan
from southern states. Region and religion are potent forces here. Vice
presidents are carefully picked with these factors in mind: Buhari’s is a
southwestern Christian and Jonathan’s is a northern Muslim. But it is
not so simple. There are non-northerners who would ordinarily balk at
voting for a ‘northerner’ but who support Buhari because he can
presumably fight corruption. There are northern supporters of Jonathan
who are not part of the region’s Christian minorities.
Delaying the elections is a staggeringly self-serving act of contempt for Nigerians.
Last week, I was indifferent about the elections, tired of television commercials and contrived controversies. There were rumors that the election, which was scheduled for February 14, would be postponed, but there always are; our political space is a lair of conspiracies. I was uninterested in the apocalyptic predictions. Nigeria was not imploding. We had crossed this crossroads before, we were merely electing a president in an election bereft of inspiration. And the existence of a real opposition party that might very well win was a sign of progress in our young democracy
Then, on Saturday,
the elections were delayed for six weeks. Nigeria’s security agencies,
we were told, would not be available to secure the elections because
they would be fighting Boko Haram and needed at least another month and a
half to do so. (Nigeria has been fighting Boko Haram for five years,
and military leaders recently claimed to be ready for the elections.)
Even
if the reason were not so absurd, Nigerians are politically astute
enough to know that the postponement has nothing to do with security. It
is a flailing act of desperation from an incumbent terrified of losing.
There are fears of further postponements, of ploys to illegally extend
Jonathan’s term. In a country with the specter of a military coup always
hanging over it, the consequences could be dangerous. My indifference
has turned to anger. What a staggeringly self-serving act of contempt
for Nigerians. It has cast, at least for the next six weeks, the darkest
possible shroud over our democracy: uncertainty.
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