Bola Ahmed Tinubu, 71, realised his lifelong dream on Monday with his inauguration as Nigeria’s sixth civilian Executive President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, after decades of navigating the nation’s predatory political waters. But as the old Chinese saying goes, be careful what you wish for. In charge of a fractured polity, plagued by insecurity, a broken economy, and a population of more than 200 million people who are divided and seething with discontent, Tinubu takes office after bitter political battles, including a closely contested and narrow election victory, accusations of graft and ethical failings, and questions about his health and fitness for the job. Do not be jealous of him.
Nigeria is a troubled nation with the largest population and economy in Africa, the largest concentration of Black people in the world, and the 32nd-largest GDP in the world, according to the World Bank.
More than at any other time during its history, including the Nigerian Civil War from 1967 to 1970, the nation is uneasy. The N77 trillion debt, the depreciating currency, record inflation, unemployment, and revenue shortfalls are all contributing to the economy’s collapse. The infrastructure is poor and woefully insufficient. Human capital is fleeing to other countries as the health and education systems are in crisis. According to the Fund for Peace’s 2022 Fragile States Index, it is ranked 16th out of 179 nations.
Even worse, there is a severe rift in the nation. All of its fault lines, which were present since amalgamation, have gotten wider. The exclusionary and sectional policies of his immediate predecessor and ally, Muhammadu Buhari, and of the ruling All Progressive Congress have increased mutual mistrust and hostility between the ethnic nationalities, faiths, and regions. National cohesion is at an all-time low, and there is a glaring lack of the unity required to jointly address the existential issues the nation faces.
Instead of bringing Nigerians together, elections deepen divisions. even more so because of the trauma of the Buhari years and the emotional investment made in it by sizable portions of the political system.
The government’s organisational structure is broken. A centralising constitution that over-empowers the centre and weakens the component states, which lack the authority to control their own resources or secure lives and property within their territories, restrains a natural federation of more than 250 ethnic nationalities, diverse cultures, and world views.
According to a report from today, a six-part editorial series is currently running and lays out a broad agenda for the President’s national survival and recovery based on current challenges and his own campaign promises.
National cohesion and restructuring come first. Buhari exacerbated the rifts that already existed in Nigeria’s complex social and political landscape. He alienated sizable portions of the population, particularly Christians, Southern states, and Northern Minority Ethnic Nationalities.
His overt favouritism encouraged the ruthless Fulani militants and herders to intensify a campaign of mass killings, violent land grabbing, and ethnic cleansing. The Fulani marauders, who were formerly concentrated in the North-Central states, southern Kaduna in the North-West, and Taraba in the North-East, have now spread to the South. With the covert assistance of the federal security agencies, their culture of entitlement has widened the gap between the nation’s ethnic groups.
A Belgian researcher discovered that in 654 attacks between 2017 and May 2020, Fulani herders killed 2,539 people and abducted 253 more. According to the Global Terrorism Index, the majority of the 1,158 deaths attributable to terrorism that year were committed by Fulani militants, who were also the primary cause of the rise in terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa in 2018.
Buhari, his staff, and the security services displayed open partisanship the entire time. The Federal Government and the security agencies bullied the state rather than putting an end to the carnage in Benue, where the state government reported that 6,000 indigenous people had been killed and two million others displaced by Fulani herders, and in Plateau, where locals claim 102 communities have been forcibly occupied and its residents have been evicted. Buhari spent eight years finding justifications for the herders’ heinous crimes.
Buhari set all previous records for sectionalism, religious particularism, and nepotism in terms of appointments. He alienated other nations, religions, and ethnic groups.
The APC strengthened these exclusionary tendencies by defying the unwritten rule that public office appointments should reflect the diversity of the nation’s units and faiths.
To mend the wounds and rally the nation behind him, Tinubu will need to use his renown network of contacts. It’s a difficult task. He ran on a same-faith ticket, further alienating Christians and the North-Central, in an attempt to persuade the ascendant Northern establishment to support his ambition.
South-East hostility is reminiscent of the unrest that existed prior to the civil war in 1967. The majority of South-Easterners invested a lot of their emotional capital in Labour Party candidate Peter Obi because he represented a new face in politics and attracted widespread support. His defeat in third place in a divisive election stoked old resentments, separatist agitation, and propaganda to discredit the entire election.
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In an election where racial and religious tensions were at their highest, Tinubu received only 37% of the vote. He performed poorly in some areas, reflecting the divisions and hostility that exist towards him and his party. His authority is definitely limited.
He should start making changes to the electoral process as soon as he takes office. When elections and their results are not widely embraced, democracy is hollow.
His administration must be inclusive in both appointments and policies. He must reassure those who have felt excluded over the past eight years that they share a stake in the nation. The political group that supported him in winning office and whose sense of entitlement has grown stronger will react violently to this and may follow him around for the duration of his term.
The South-East, South-South, and North-Central regions must be carried by him. The Christian community needs assurance because it has been traumatised by killings and has been terrorised by Sharia states, bandits, Islamic jihadists, and mobs. The appointment of minor aides won’t ease the anger over the APC’s insistence on a Muslim-Muslim ticket. More extensive outreach and engagement will be required.
He needs to put a stop to the Fulani militia’s rampage in this. According to the Open Doors World Watch List 2023, 5,014 out of 5,621 Christians who died for their faith in the year up to October 2022 in Nigeria accounted for 89 percent of all such deaths.ACI Africa, a news source, adds that in the first 200 days of 2021, at least 3,462 people were killed, including 10 priests and pastors, which works out to 17 murders per day.
The criminal must be swiftly punished. Separatists have started a terror campaign in the South-East, and the security strategy there needs to change from one of heavy-handed profiling to one of balanced law enforcement, engagement with key stakeholders and communities, respect for the law, and community policing.
However, restoring the nation to its true federalist contours will require a strong, immediate commitment if national cohesion is to be fully achieved. Nigeria’s continued existence is in doubt under the current situation, as this newspaper has repeatedly argued. The 1999 Constitution must be completely abandoned in favour of a practical people’s constitution that is crafted along the general lines of the 1963 constitution, with the 36 states serving as the federating units. Tinubu must break from the inertia and brinkmanship of the Buhari era.
The need for a return to sub-national autonomy has recently been reemphasized by Nasir el-Rufai, the recently-retired governor of Kaduna State who served as the chairman of the APC’s restructuring committee in support of the party’s unfulfilled 2015 commitment to restructuring. The “concentration of everything at the centre” was correctly identified by Chukwuma Soludo, the governor of Anambra State, as the main issue in Nigeria. Wole Soyinka, a Nobel laureate, was more direct than usual when he advised Tinubu to heed the call because “otherwise, even your economic policies will fail, your infrastructure and transformation will fail.” We’ll merely return to threading the same old spur.
Priority one: Tinubu must urge the federal and state legislatures to use the “doctrine of necessity” right away to support state policing. Numerous Nigerians are losing their lives as criminals of all colours rampage through the nation, overwhelming the already overburdened federal police force. Between May 29, 2015 and mid-May 2023, non-state and state actors were responsible for the deaths of 63,111 people, according to the Nigerian Security Tracker of the Council on Foreign Relations. 4,545 people were killed and 4,611 others were abducted in 2022.
The lone police structure is ineffective. Instead of opposing regional security personnel and their arming, Tinubu ought to support every effort to give the states more control over their own affairs.
He fought hard in court to advance state sovereignty and federalism while serving as governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007. He ought to pick up where he left off in his defence of federalism out of political expediency.
Nationalities have the fundamental right to voluntarily organise themselves however they see fit. Everything should be done to make it possible to renegotiate a union that was compelled by an outside colonial power.
Federalism, which aims to manage diversity and control power “in a way that guarantees freedom and efficiency, unity and plurality, autonomy and coordination,” is referred to as “one of the most pressing challenges in the history of mankind.” According to the Federalism Index, 22 countries adopted or modified federal systems in the 20th century, compared to only four countries that did so in the 19th.
