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. Source: The Atlantic.
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