The Verdit By Olusegun Adeniyi, Email:
olusegun.adeniyi@thisdaylive.com
Incumbent presidential elections are usually framed as a
referendum on stewardship. But where the opposition is either weak
or running a less than coordinated campaign, power holders have
been known to turn the narrative into one of choice. The electorate
is then presented with this kind of proposition: ‘You may not like
me, but can you trust my opponent?’ With little over a month to the
presidential election, that exactly is what we are faced with in
our country today.
Aside Tolu Ogunlesi who has been using his Twitter handle to
showcase what the current administration has done in the area of
infrastructure and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo who is hopping from
one market to another and visiting families and communities, the
campaign of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) is
essentially targeted at the person of the former Vice President
Atiku Abubakar and what they believe to be his character
weaknesses. With the inability of the Peoples Democratic Party
(PDP) to launch a serious counter-offensive beyond releasing a
series of audio tapes, the APC strategy to present the main
opposition candidate as unworthy seems to be working. It is
therefore no surprise that President Muhammadu Buhari is playing
the same game, except where his party operatives attack Atiku, he
focuses his darts at the PDP. That much was evident during his
interview with THISDAY last Sunday, https://bit.ly/2HcCVt0.
Although ARISE Television was initially billed to be part of the
session, the Villa had by Sunday afternoon restricted it only to
THISDAY with a proviso that NTA would record proceedings and hand
us the tape afterwards. I was not part of the negotiation between
THISDAY Managing Director, Mr Eniola Bello and the Special Adviser
on Media to the President, Mr Femi Adesina. With my own experience
of that delicate terrain, I have nothing but tremendous respect for
Adesina and his colleague, Mallam Garba Shehu for giving us the raw
video tape which is the exact copy of our own audio recording.
I leave the judgement of the content to viewers, but there are a
few issues that should be considered. One, whatever the merit of
the president’s position on the minimum wage controversy, the view
canvassed in his engagement with us cannot be helpful to ongoing
negotiations with Labour. Two, appointing as Nigerian ambassador to
the United States a man who was considered unfit by the Senate—due
to poor health and advanced age—just because he once gave a
judgement in his favour is a clear abuse of power. Three, finding a
ready excuse to every national problem in the “16 years of PDP” is
not only hollow, it betrays a lack of ideas. These, aside the
insecurity challenge, growing poverty in the land and whether or
not the president has a grasp of issues, are what you might expect
the main opposition to focus on. But all we get are audio
tapes.
However, the president may be carrying his luck too far by
outsourcing his campaign to Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, a throwback to
2015 when the APC propaganda machine was running at full throttle,
though not in this brazen manner. At that period, Buhari allowed so
many of the top party members to make all manner of promises before
the story changed the moment he got to power. For those who may
have forgotten, on 29th August 2015, Garba Shehu issued a statement
to distance the president from two popular pre-election documents
containing promises as to what he would achieve in his first 100
days in office. He claimed they emanated from the party’s “many
centres of public communication which, for whatever reason, were on
the loose.”
As a consequence of these publications, all of which bore the
party logo but were declared not ‘authorised’ once the election was
over, expectations were “raised unreasonably that, as president,
Muhammadu Buhari will wave his hand and all the problems that the
country faces — insecurity, corruption, unemployment, poor
infrastructure would go away” said Garba Shehu who then added
rather sensationally: “He (Buhari) didn’t put a Kobo to finance the
power sector. Yet, reading his body language alone and knowing that
there are things you cannot do and get away with under Buhari,
electricity supply all over the country has risen to unprecedented
heights. In this period of three months, government certainly
deserves a pat on the back for improved power, reform in the energy
sector, foreign relations, fight against corruption and insurgency
and the fact of Nigerians being at peace, not only among
themselves, but with their neighbours and the rest of the
world.”
The jury is now out on those initial ‘accomplishments’ that were
based on body language but we cannot forget that Garba Shehu
concluded his treatise by promising that President Buhari “will
turn out to be a leader in the tradition of Lee Kuan Yew and
India’s current reform-minded Prime Minister Modi with strong and
clear emphasis on detail and execution. He may, however, differ
with them by not micro-managing things.”
While I subscribe to the view that micro-managing is bad for a
president, outsourcing responsibility is far worse and that is
perhaps the most egregious charge against President Buhari, even by
his wife. Ceding his campaign to Tinubu falls into the same
pattern. Unfortunately, Atiku is neither offering anything
different nor challenging what is going on beyond some occasional
tepid statements from his campaign office. And no matter how
damaging the contents of audio tapes may be, those are not things
that sway Nigerian voters one way or another. The sooner PDP
strategists realise that and get serious, the better.
That I have never been as unexcited about a presidential
election in Nigeria as I am about the coming one is both sad and
ironic considering that under the current dispensation which
started in 1999, we have also never had as many interesting
candidates as we have today. But I understand the Nigerian
political terrain enough to know that the February election is
principally between Buhari and Atiku. This much was confirmed in
the latest report by the Eurasia Group, regarded globally as number
one in the field of political risk assessment. ‘Top Risks for 2019’
highlights how “risks created by bad actors inflicting damage”
could engender an unprecedented escalatory cycle this year in many
countries but of greater interest is the analysis of the coming
presidential election in Nigeria which it also describes as a
straight contest between Buhari and Atiku.
A second term for the incumbent president, according to the
report, “would mean the country at best muddles through the next
four years, with little progress on critical policy priorities like
tax reform or a restructuring of the energy sector”; stating
further that a re-elected “Buhari would be a lame duck from day
one, with powerbrokers in his own party quickly shifting their
focus to the next electoral cycle in 2023.” On the other hand,
while an Atiku victory could “create a brief, superficial boost to
the country’s image”, according to the report, the former vice
president is also not likely to undertake “the difficult and
politically unpopular tasks necessary for reform” and may in fact
return the nation to the path of “an even more rent-seeking
governing style.”
Both prospects offer no comfort at a period our nation is
confronted by pressing issues that this election should be about.
How do we resolve, once and for all, the problem of funding our
public universities and restore a measure of sanity to our
education sector? Does it make sense to continue to budget hundreds
of billions of Naira every year to subsidize a consumption item
with all the corruption associated with it? Is the current
political structure which devotes substantial resources to
servicing a largely unproductive public service sustainable? How do
we revamp the security architecture in such a manner as to
successfully tackle the insurgency in the North-east and restore
law and order across other parts of the country? How do we get
millions of our children that are out of school enrolled by
providing the necessary incentives? These are some of the issues
you expect would be engaged in a campaign season but the only
candidates offering any sensible ideas are those who do not have
credible structures to support their aspirations and may have
unwittingly already been schemed out of reckoning by the unwritten
ethno-religious cum geo-political consensus that defines Nigerian
elections.
Meanwhile, I am disappointed in the PDP that has refused to
learn from its own experience. Having spent the 2010/2011 academic
session researching incumbent presidential elections across the
world, my finding
(https://scholarsprogram.wcfia.harvard.edu/publications/divided-opposition-boon-african-incumbents)
is that the odds are usually against the opposition, including in
the United States where the rules of engagement dictate a more
level-playing field. History, according to Ross Baker in a piece
titled “Beware of the incumbent advantage”, published in USA Today,
“demonstrates that it is a dauntingly difficult job to unseat an
incumbent president who is seeking a second term. Indeed, the
number of presidents who have won a second term is almost twice the
number of those who have failed to gain the favour of voters a
second time.”
Throughout the 19th century in the United States, as I once
explained on this page, only five incumbents failed to secure
second term in office. John Adams was defeated by Thomas Jefferson
in 1800; John Quincy Adams lost to Andrew Jackson in 1828 while
Martin Van Buren was ousted by William Henry Harrison in 1840.
Incidentally, Grover Cleveland who lost to Benjamin Harrison in
1888 went on to defeat his successor four years later in 1892.
Being the only man elected twice with another president in-between,
Cleveland was 22nd and 24th presidents and this accounts for why Mr
Donald Trump is the 44th American to be president yet officially
recognised as the 45th president.
In the 20th century, there were only four incumbents who failed
in their bids for second term: William Taft was defeated by Woodrow
Wilson in 1916 while Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Carter himself was defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the second
term aspiration of George H.W. Bush was derailed in 1992 by Bill
Clinton. There were of course incumbent presidents who failed to
secure their parties’ nomination for a second term. They included
John Tyler (1844); Millard Fillmore (1852); Franklin Pierce (1856);
James Buchanan (1860); Andrew Johnson (1868) and Chester Alan
Arthur (1884). Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson
were among the six presidents who did not seek second term.
While the Nigerian and the American political circumstances are
markedly different, the odds are even more daunting for the
opposition in our country where the incumbent is usually more
powerful, controls all the resources, has the heads of security
agencies at his beck and call and is not bound by strict rules to
which his opponents are subjected. Therefore, whatever may be the
failings of Buhari in the past four years, both the PDP and Atiku
have to do more in the coming days and weeks. Otherwise, they are
setting themselves up for a big disappointment at the polls.
Lifting The Siege on Daily Trust
For years, there has been a tension between the military and the
media over the prosecution of the war against Boko Haram,
essentially because of the mindset by the former that it has a
monopoly on patriotism. But what the military authorities fail to
understand is that they cannot win a war, especially one against
insurgency, without the support and collaboration of the media.
Besides, those who carry arms on behalf of the state cannot act
above the law, no matter what they consider the rightness of their
cause. It is within this context that the unfortunate development
at Daily Trust newspaper stands condemned.
Yes, there was an error of judgement on the part of Daily Trust
last Sunday because the story which irked the military ought not to
have been published, in the interest of national security. So, it
was a big goof for the editor to have run such a story. But the
response by the military is not only unhelpful, it is
counter-productive. If they are to succeed in the war against Boko
Haram, they need the media on their side, not against them. In the
age of terror, it is a necessity that the media and military
embrace cooperative form of engagement and that is what obtains in
other countries where there are threats to national security such
as we have in Nigeria today.
The Chief Executive Officer/Editor-in-Chief of Daily Trust,
Mannir Dan Ali is my very good friend and I felt sad on Tuesday
when he recounted to me their experience since Sunday. It is even
more shocking that despite all the talk about ‘resolving the crisis
through dialogue’ nobody in either the military or within
government has reached out to him or other management staff of the
media house. Several of their computers carted away by the military
have also not been returned nor the phones of some of their staff
that were seized handed back.
While the anger of the military is justified given the
sensitivity of the report, I believe they went about it the wrong
way. Daily Trust is not, and cannot be, an enemy of the military in
the prosecution of the war against Boko Haram, it is a partner in
the efforts to rid our country of terrorism. A mistake was made
from which lessons will be learned. But it does not warrant the
excessive use of force that was on display last Sunday. There is
therefore an urgent need for the military leadership to have a
session with the Daily Trust management and resolve whatever
misgivings there are. It is in the interest of both parties to do
that.
• You can follow me on my Twitter handle, @Olusegunverdict and
on www.olusegunadeniyi.com
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