Atiku

“An elephant never fails to carry its tusk.” South African Proverb. 

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar just turned 67. Naturally, friends and well-wishers, employees and political associates rolled out the drums and took volumes of pages in newspapers to remind the nation that he is still in the market, calling on Nigerians to come forward for service. The nation will take note, in the same manner it will note the rather abject prayers for forgiveness from chieftains of the All Progressives Congress (APC) from former governor of Sokoto State Attahiru Batarawa for a seeming slight. The same nation will note that a huge crowd of assorted elite had attended the installation of General T.Y. Danjuma as the Gam Gbaro Douga a few days in his native Taraba State. It will be the same nation which is watching the unfolding drama over the prospects of a Jonathan candidature in 2015; the possibility that General Muhammadu Buhari may fly APC’s flag in 2015, and the alarming lessons being drawn from the furore in the elections in Anambra State. 

Atiku deserves his day in the sun. He is, by any standard, a veteran with the deep scars to show for it. He never really left the trenches, and it is quite possible that he wouldn’t know where to go outside it. He is not the last man standing, but he is standing with the best of them. At 67, with an enviable warchest to deploy and an ambition burning as hot as ever, Atiku is not easy to ignore. He represents the best and the worst faces of Nigerian politics, but he has many people who will contest this.

Here is a man that has earned his stripes by taking huge risks, often coming unstuck. He cut his teeth playing the awesome game orchestrated by late Shehu Yar’Adua which was designed to show that Nigerians can emerge as leaders enjoying nation-wide support if they deploy intelligence and resources all over the place in equal measure. His boss paid the supreme sacrifice when he dared too far, and left behind a veritable machine that showed all the promises of providing a solid pan-Nigeria leadership. Come 1999, it made the fatal mistake of succumbing to the temptations to submit to a resurgent PDP, a party made up of people the late Yar’Adua barely tolerated. Elected as Governor in Adamawa State, he was tempted to play second fiddle to Obasanjo rather than stay and build a model state in Adamawa. As Vice President, he started with the image of the man who pulled Obasanjo’s strings; the politician who brought politics into governance in a presidency of an ex-military leader who was initially unsure over how deep he can go. The more Obasanjo gained confidence and space, the more Atiku lost that grip. By the end of his first term, Obasanjo had come to the realization that he needed to build his own political base and his own warchest to create autonomy from Atiku, PDM, PDP and Northern politicians. The botched attempt to abandon Obasanjo and his ambitions to run again in 2003 was visited on Atiku, and while many attempts were made to reconcile the two, there was too much suspicion and bitterness on all sides to engineer a real and lasting reconciliation.

Obasanjo started his second term with a Vice President he did not trust, a realization that real power cannot be shared, and a worrying perception that he alone represented the key to building a nation that will meet the minimum standards of Nigerians and the global community. The routine business of governance was basically run without Atiku. New Ministers with technocratic backgrounds ignored him. There was more than a word around town that he was out of favour. He began to have state anti-corruption agencies sniffing around him and his business affairs. Any association with Atiku by businessmen was guarantee that they will not receive any more patronage from federal government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I) poured over evidence of links between him and an indicted congressman. Banks with known associations with him were raided for evidence. A sitting Vice President had everything thrown at him, and you just wondered how much he could take. To leave the Vice Presidency would have been suicidal. To stay was to make himself available for more humiliation. He stayed.

Atiku says he tried to warn Obasanjo against attempting to engineer a third term for himself, for which he invoked all the wrath. Since Obasanjo has not given his own version of the third term fiasco, we should believe Atiku, although it is difficult to accept that the falling out over Obasanjo’s ambition was the trigger to the spectacular collapse of a relationship that began as if it was made in heaven. 

In any case, Obasanjo completed his second term without Atiku even as a spare tyre. You will think a man who went through the type of experience Atiku went through will think many times over before seeking another elective office. You will be wrong. Atiku dusted himself up and went to the Action Congress looking for a ticket. He had to run against a virtual younger brother, the late Umaru Yar’Adua, with substantial push from many former PDM allies such as Tinubu. He lost to Obasanjo’s hand-picked man, and went through another search for entry points.

This was where Atiku made one of his many questionable decisions. Abandoning the ACN and returning to the PDP suggested that he was merely looking for opportunities to become president and realize a desperate, personal ambition. The ACN had nothing to lose, but the PDP saw the opportunity to close the door in the face of a politician whose personal desire to be president, driven by huge wealth was likely to be disruptive and a threat to others. Atiku spent a considerable amount of time fighting for space in his state with minions who wouldn’t pick his shoes at a wedding ceremony in his home state, and leaders of the PDP in Abuja who had deep-rooted issues to settle with him.

When in 2010 leading PDP politicians from the North saw an opportunity to challenge Jonathan’s insistence at violating the party’s zoning policy by agreeing on a Northern candidate to run against him, Atiku saw his chance once again. The conclave picked him out as the best Northerner to take on Jonathan. By the time it made that decision, the damage had been done. Jonathan was portrayed as an underdog; a victim of a Northern gang-up who needed every ounce of sympathy from all non-Northerners and Christians to defeat Atiku. The North also had another candidate in General Muhammadu Buhari, so the space available to Atiku in a region he could lay claim to was extremely tight. Most people in the North knew that it was going to be a Buhari – Jonathan fight. Atiku was taken to the cleaners at the Convention, and retreated into potential oblivion again.

Since then, he had expanded his business empire. He has one of the best private universities in the country. He is quite possibly the wealthiest of all the prospective presidential candidates from the North. He started hobnobbing with the rebel PDP governors, but between his deep animosity with Governor Nyako and Obasano’s nightmare over an Atiku ascendancy, he appears to have been dropped along the way. When the PDM was registered, people thought Atiku was building a plan B. PDP field commanders therefore turned their sights on demolition it as a party. It is still there as a party, fighting to stay afloat in the face of massive assaults at its foundations. Atiku is still in the PDP, a party we says he founded, and will not leave.

Perhaps Atiku sees himself again as the best PDP Northern response to Jonathan’s provocations, and waiting in the wings in the event that all the nPDP governors would have been too badly-damaged to take on Jonathan in 2015. Perhaps he has plans to run on another platform in the event that he and the nPDP would have damaged PDP beyond repairs in the North by 2015. Perhaps he has plans to convince APC to give him a chance, in case General Buhari chooses not to run. Perhaps he has deeper knowledge of the terrain, the type that lets you hedge your bets, keep your head visible above water, and strike at the right moment.

Whatever his plans are, Atiku represents the best and worst of Nigerian politics. The best because few people have remained in the bruising arena showing faith that the democratic process is worth fighting for. The worst because he stands essentially to realize a personal ambition, in a nation desperate to have a new generation of leaders with fresh vision to give it a new lease of life.

National Dialogue: A quiet word.

“People should not talk while they are eating or pepper may go down the wrong way.” Nigerian Proverb.

The public hearings conducted by the Advisory Committee on National Dialogue which came to an end almost two weeks ago must have left members of the Committee with a crises of choice. Just about every idea, suggestions, proposal, demands, criticism, grievance and advice on what should be the agenda of the Dialogue have been given in public. There must also be loads of written submission waiting to be examined. Nigerians found a new platform to expose old issues. Some think their voices will be heard this time. Others raised theirs because everyone else is raising his. The nation was reminded of many fora such as 1978 Constitutional Conference, the Oputa Panel, Obasanjo’s Political Conference and many panels on security set up in the last two decades. People looking for new angles into old problems must have been disappointed.

The hearings were to provide popular inputs into the committees’ Terms of Reference. Many of the presentations attempted to operate within the mandate of the committee, but the opportunity was too tempting to let go without treating it as if it is the real Dialogue. Politicians tore the idea of the Dialogue to pieces in the face of the committee, the public and the media. Others offered their views privately, fearing that they could pay unaffordable prices with their electorates and powers if they spoke openly. Knowledgeable and pedestrian opinions, articles and paid adverts were published on what the conference is not, or should be. Many leaders who shaped public opinion chose to walk a fight rope: not condemning the idea of the Dialogue, and not exactly embracing it with open arms either.

President Jonathan said that the Dialogue is intended as “a National Project, a sincere and fundamental undertaking aimed at realistically examining and genuinely resolving long-standing impediments to our cohesion and harmonious development as a truly united Nation”. He charged the committee to “consult widely before sitting down to develop the framework that will guide and guard the proceedings of the discussion.” Emphasising the plebian value of inputs, he told the committee to ensure that “no voice is too small and no opinion is irrelevant. Thus, the views of the sceptics and those of the enthusiasts must be accommodated as you formulate this all important framework. This conversation is a People’s Conversation, and I urge you to formulate an all-inclusive process that protects people’s interest.” 

Perhaps Professor Ben Nwabueze was unable to read the President’s speech while he was away in London. Or, more plausibly, he had settled on the idea that the entire process was his brainchild, and he has the exclusive and personal franchise to see it through from start to finish. In any case, he rained on the Dialogue parade in a manner guaranteed to throw it into deeper levels of despair. Just when his infamous opus titled “North-South Divide” which was rumoured to have formed the basis of the decision to set up an Advisory Committee on National Dialogue was being consigned to dustbins across the nation as a delusional output from a man whose distinguished past was coming to a most inglorious end, his leaked letter to President Jonathan requesting approval to produce an alternative constitution which should form the focus of a Constitutional Conference appears to be putting the final seal of non-credibility of the whole idea. The long line of critics, including many who thought the Dialogue idea should be given the benefit of doubt is growing by the day. The idea that a new or alternative constitution can be privately produced in Nwabueze’s living room and then legalized in a manner that makes it the issue before the forum is offending large segments of public opinion. Even making allowances for President Jonathan’s poor public relations record, the failure to distance the administration from Nwabueze’s increasingly leprous influence on the Dialogue idea is incredible.

The Dialogue idea, in the first place, was born with massive congenital defects. Its champions had taken up permanent positions in the fringes of the political process for a long time. Its timing was suspect. The sudden conversion of a self-confessed sceptical President to the idea was not credible. Influential political leaders shot it down before it even had a chance to fly. All Progressives Congress (APC) decided to have nothing to do with it. A major player who could have underpinned Jonathan’s vision within the committee quarrelled himself out of it. The zonal junketing revealed nothing new: Nigerians have the same ideas, issues and grievances about their nation as they had in the last twenty years. 

The issues raised at the public hearings substantially mirrored the issues which the Senate and the Representatives sent out their members at great cost to seek Nigerians’ views on. Those responses are either still being processed, or they have been filed away until the next time the National Assembly asks for more founds for constitutional review again. Then the same issues will come up again, and very little will be done about them. Although there is a serving Senator on the Dialogue Committee, the national assembly must be watching all these developments with some amusement. It knows that it holds the trump card, or at least it thinks it does. The output of the Dialogue or Conference will have to come to it. There will be nothing to compel it to act on it, unless some extraordinary inducement is provided that will encompass political ambitions and fat accounts. It is difficult to see how Jonathan will find that type of inducement under the present circumstances. Some elements in the legislature may be worrying over the possibility that political and security challenges may be contrived to railroad the national assembly into adopting another legal gymnastic posture akin to the Doctrine of Necessity to give substantial space to the outcome of the National Conference. This type of thinking is already gaining ground around people who cannot see through to the value of a National Conference at this time.

With just a few days before the Advisory Committee submits its suggestions to the President, it will be helpful if its members read the speech he read at its inauguration again, particularly the part which urged it to not only “be alive to the expectations of our people, but to bear in mind, that what we desire is what can work for the good of our people and country. The goal is to bequeath a better and greater Nigeria to the present and the generation that is to come.” If the committee will do justice to these demands by the President, it will need courage and wisdom. It will need courage to advise him that the timing and current political circumstances are not going to help in creating a genuine and all-inclusive national dialogue. It needs wisdom not to suggest that the entire idea is abandoned. It should advise President Jonathan to encourage Nigerians to engage in a National Conference after the 2015 elections. If he is still the President then, that will be even better for his project. If he is not, Nigerians may then choose to demand for the opportunity to have the Conference from whoever is the President.

Crunch time for Jega’s INEC

“He is a fool whose sheep run away twice.” Ashanti proverb.

Funny thing about time. It changes everything, and it lets everything stay the same. When Professor Attahiru jega was appointed chairman of INEC, he received quite possibly the most genuine and widespread demonstranstions of acclaim and support. Coming from the spectacularly unspeakable performance of Professor Manrice Iwu, anyone in that position was bound to be a huge improvement on the standards set by the 2007 elections. But Jega came in with a solid image of an activist with an independent mind and a clean record. Civil society and labour led the chorus line to announce him as one of their own, and sold him to Nigerians as a new face that will bring integrity and competence into the electoral process. The media lined up behind a familiar face who had a reputation that was strong enough to belie being seen as Jonathan’s errand boy. Even President Jonathan had his day over Jega, and to date, he constantly reminds the world that Jega's and his victory are evidence that our elections are better managed under him.

No chairman of INEC started with stronger support and goodwill than Jega. That popular acclaim gave Jega huge powers and leverage within INEC and in his relations with political parties and government. He got virtually everything he wanted, but most important of all, he got trust and funding. His colleagues in the Commission showed glimpses of integrity and sound records of achievement, the type you could rely on to build strong bonds at the very top to withstand mischief and greed. Everything, it appeared, was available to Jega to lead the commission in conducting the best elections in 2011. A nation which expected so much had little appetite for failure or excuses, so a few organizational hiccups and demands for more funds were treated as evidence that the new leadership wanted to get everything right.

It must have taken Jega only a few weeks to discover that there was a lot more to INEC than its leadership. Elections are planned, but not conducted by INEC leaders in Abuja. Regular and ad hoc staff basically determined the quality of elections, and these have long been meticulously studied and compromised long before Jega and his team at the top came on board. A most vital component of the election process, the voters’ register, has long been pocketed by staff who know all about its weaknesses. Every stage of the election process is vulnerable to manipulation, and the staff of the Commission and politicians with specialized and intimate relationships with them have a very detailed knowledge of where to tweak it. 

People who live just for and around elections are bound to have deep and exclusive knowledge around logistics, sensitive materials, deployment of staff, distribution of materials, relations with security personnel, time management and abuse, manipulation of the polling and collation stages and post-election litigations. They will not be too eager to hand this over to leaders who will be there for an election or two. They will be particularly reluctant to roll over and give up lucrative and rare opportunities to make hay by changing attitudes and dispositions to meet standards of new leaders with transparent commitment to conduct credible elections. These were Jega’s first albatross, and he still carries them around in spite of commendable efforts to affect internal changes to improve quality, competence and integrity. 

It also may have downed on him not long after he embarked on the mission to change the way elections are conducted that his team of National and Resident Electoral Commissioners are substantially part of his problem. Political appointees that they are, many have deeply – embedded partisan interests and dubious personal credentials. Elections provide rare opportunities to return favours and make huge amounts of money, and Commissioners exercise massive powers to procure materials, hire and deploy staff and determine outcomes of elections.

It is, to say the least, foolhardy, and at worst dangerous, to antagonize both colleagues at the very top and regular staff of the Commission by creating the impression that you can conduct elections without their usual pivotal roles. This is not saying that it should not, or cannot be done. Indeed, the attempts made by Jega in bringing in senior academics to serve as Returning officers was an effort in that direction, but a wholesale assault on entrenched and institutionalized corruption require a lot more than tinkering with a few personnel in the heat of elections. Significantly, you need the solid support of your colleagues at the top to deal with mischief and machinations of staff. You also need access and effective control over key elements such as the voters register and all sensitive election materials. Too much centralization alienates too many people and creates a wider pool of hostility. Delegation without an effective monitoring system defeats the whole purpose of the attempt to change.

At the most intense moments in the planning and conduct of election, the most lonely soul must belong to chairmen of INEC. Jega must have gone through just about every tribulation anyone can go through. Elections were poorly organized by people he relied on to improve them. He postponed elections because printers failed to meet deadlines. Massive grievances around results and the worst post-election riots in the history of the nation left Jega and the Commission virtually in the same spot they were before the 2011 election: the midwives of elections which deepened the crises of democracy in Nigeria since 1999.

Jega has the unprecedented opportunity, protected by the constitution,  to conduct two general elections. Ordinarily, he would have learned all the right lessons, and in between the two elections, he would have fixed most of the inadequacies of the   first so that the second will be markedly better. Even his worst critics will not say he did not try. He put the Commission through some of its most comprehensive internal changes, affecting personnel, processes and attitudes. He stepped on sacred toes and made old enemies at the top even more bitter. He attempted to demonstrate his independence and the Commission’s capacity to take difficult decisions in the manner the APC merger was affected, and PDM emerged as a party. He used every opportunity to remind the nation that politicians, not INEC, determined the quality of elections.

But Jega’s most ardent loyalists will also acknowledge that he has failed to deliver where it mattered most: in the conduct of elections. Key elections in Ondo and Edo States were more about the staying power of incumbents than about significant variations in performance levels. Where flashes of progress were seen, they are swallowed by spectacularly poor outings: in Imo, Delta and most recently, Anambra.

Those who wonder whether Jega is progressing or regressing will be pardoned for their confusion, but that question alone is worrying. Should Jega’s INEC in 2013 be conducting the type of election which it admits has been compromised in part by its own staff? Should we have the type of uproar which is trailing the Anambra elections this close to critical timelines in the planning for the 2015 elections? Are politicians getting worse and INEC getting better, are we witnessing a degeneration in the levels and standards of conduct of both politicians and INEC? Is it even possible to fall below the standards set by the on-going drama in the PDP and the quarrels which trail Anambra?

It is fair to warn Jega that he is setting off the alarms even among his friends. The nation cannot continue to tolerate and overlook the failings of his Commission on the grounds that it is being led by a good man with his heart in the right place. The 2015 elections are quite possibly the most crucial this nation will go through, given unfolding circumstances and events. They will push our democratic system to dangerous breaking points, and only the manner INEC manages the elections will determine whether we lose it all, or recover massive amounts of lost ground. Jega has three options: resign, allow himself to be impeached or fix INEC. Failure to radically improve the manner INEC manages elections is not an option.

Anambra: Its 2015!

“Politics is so corrupt, even the dishonest get screwed.” George Carlin

By the time you read this, INEC would have returned the APGA candidate as winner in the Anambra Gubernatorial elections held on Saturday, 16^th November. The APC, PDP and Labour Party candidates would have rejected the results outrightly. The tens of thousands of policemen and soldiers and INEC officials would be leaving. Many citizens of Anambra would be wondering whether they will live under a genuinely – elected governor or a fraud. They may spend the next four years never knowing the truth. Some would say that is how it has always been. Others will curse, grumble and more ominously, wait for the next elections, with bitterness and the wrong lessons learnt. 

There is still a long way to go before the final word is heard on the election. Going by tradition, the battle will now move to the courts. Lawyers and judges will now make fortunes, but a governor will be sworn in to exercise a questionable mandate. Part of the resources of the state will be used to pay for legal expenses, of course, although the books will not reflect this. The courts will rely heavily on INEC to provide evidence against allegations that the elections it conducted were not free and fair. INEC will defend itself with everything at its disposal, which is considerably more than all the defeated candidates can muster. It will be a miracle if Ngige or Nwoye will become governors of Anambra State before 2017.

Now Anambra may be just another mark in an institutionalized parody of a democratic system that prevents Nigerians from ever knowing if they have elected leaders, or people who govern because every rule in the book was broken to install them into elective offices. As is to be expected, INEC is in the eye of the storm. After the embarrassingly low-quality of elections for the Delta Central Senatorial seat last month (even by INEC’s standards of conducting elections in that region), many people expected that INEC will raise its standards dramatically. After all, this is Anambra State, where everything is both possible and beyond the ordinary. People thought the charade which passed for the bye election of a seat in Oguta, Imo State House of Assembly a few months back was the forgivable type of election, and challengers can should go and spend new fortunes in the courts, in vain.

You know that Anambra is a major benchmark when the candidates of the PDP and APC find themselves in the same boat. Ngige thought the mere presence of soldiers would guarantee a free and fair election. What the soldiers and policemen did was to provide the appearance of a peaceful atmosphere, in the event that anyone wanted to snatch ballot boxes or break a few heads or chase away voters or opponents’ agents. You can have the most rigged election being conducted under the safest and most secure environment. Politicians in fact now understand that militarizing the electoral process is a vital requirement for rigging elections. Such is the sophistication of the rigging process now that the crude old methods of snatching ballots and scaring away voters are limited only to areas where you are worried that opponents’ strongholds may embarrass you.

Anambra last week exposed a vision for the future. The elections are won beforehand because INEC chooses to exploit all the weaknesses of the system. Voters’ registers are tampered with on a large scale, but specifically in a manner which guarantees that registered voters in particular areas have their names missing. This takes considerable local level knowledge which a display of voters register could mitigate. So you skip this stage for any number of reasons, but principally on the grounds that voters do not bother to check their names, or time does not allow you to do this.

Then you mix up registers and lose considerable amount of time sorting them out. By the time you put together registers, ballot papers, result sheets and all electoral materials, it is 4pm or 5pm. Elections then go into the nights, when people are afraid, or are not sure what is being done at voting or collation centers.

While people wait, agents are threatened, bought over or chased away. Security agents look the other way, or concentrate on the security of polling officials, not the sanctity of the voting process. Agents cannot complain over abuse of excess ballots, voting by unaccredited voters who turn up with cards, or being prevented from observing. But foreign observers are allowed a carefully-choreographed access to a few selected polling and collation centers. Their opinions are important, particularly since they have been made to believe that any election conducted in Nigeria without massive violence is virtually free and fair. Local observers are treated with scorn and contempt because INEC and politicians all know that most of them have long been bought and paid for.

Naturally, the major parties which thought they had a fighting chance will reject the results. Even the PDP candidate who was in the unusual position of rejecting the result while his party went to town praising President Jonathan for facilitating a peaceful environment had to share a common platform with Dr Ubah and Dr Ngige to reject the results. Even without the formal declaration of the results, APGA’s candidate Victor Umeh claimed victory which he said was well-deserved. The quarrels will continue all the way to the highest courts, and even then, Anambra will be governed by people who may largely be seen as stealing mandates.

APGA had to fight fair and dirty to retain Anambra. It did, and got it. The new opposition APC thought it had a good candidate and a good chance to make a loud statement that it is the future. It fought hard, and will now have to learn a bitter lesson: every party will protect his turf with every weapon at its disposal, including INEC. If APC does not have much turf to protect in 2015, it will fight many fruitless battles. The PDP will lick its wounds, and regret that others are fast waking up to its old tricks. Its candidate may have to come to terms with the bitter truth that he will be sacrificed to the imperatives of limiting the spread of the APC, and striking unstable alliances between factions of the APGA and Jonathan’s PDP.

Everyone will study Anambra very closely and improve strategies from lessons learnt from it. INEC may come to the painful conclusion that it cannot conduct free and fair elections in most parts of the country, no matter how sincere and well-meaning Jega is. But it wont tell anyone of this. It will sit on its weaknesses and inadequacies, promising to improve. Very few people will believe it, although most Nigerians will hope it can. Depending on how the damaging fights within the PDP play out, the 2015 elections could represent the tipping point for the nation. If the split in the PDP boosts the opposition APC, Jonathan’s presidential ambitions may have to be realized or damaged on the back of massive security challenges and a near-total loss of credibility by INEC. If the PDP heals itself, it will face massive opposition in most parts of the North and South West, and bitter competition will deprive elections of any semblance of credibility.

Still, only INEC will conduct all these elections. The political context of the elections will of course substantially determine their credibility. The more bitter the campaigns and the higher the stakes in terms of political ambitions, the more INEC will be compromised. There is no better time to pray that INEC will find the will and the capacity to conduct credible elections in 2015. While the nation prays, INEC needs to undertake a very painful soul search: the entire survival of a democratic Nigeria depends on it.