PUNCH EDITORIAL
AFTER several decades of navigating the country’s predatory political waters, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, 71, attained his lifelong ambition with his inauguration on Monday as Nigeria’s sixth civilian Executive President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. But be careful what you wish for, goes an ancient Chinese proverb. After bruising political battles, including a highly contested and narrow election victory, allegations of graft and ethical deficits, and doubts over his health and fitness for the office, Tinubu takes charge of a fractured polity, wracked by insecurity, a broken economy, and a population of over 200 million persons, divided and seething with discontent. Do not envy him.
Nigeria is indeed troubled; a tottering giant, the world’s largest agglomeration of Blacks, Africa’s largest population and biggest economy, and ranked by the World Bank as the 32nd largest economy in the world by GDP.
The country is insecure, more than at any other time in its history, the Nigerian Civil War 1967-70 inclusive. The economy is reeling, headlined by N77 trillion debt, a collapsing currency, and record inflation, unemployment, and revenue shortfalls. Infrastructure is shabby and grossly inadequate. The education and health systems are in crises, and human capital is fleeing abroad. It is ranked 16th of 179 countries in the 2022 Fragile States Index of the Fund for Peace.
Much worse, the country is deeply divided. All its fault lines, ever present right from amalgamation, have widened. Mutual suspicion and animosity between the ethnic nationalities, faiths and regions have spiked, exacerbated by the exclusionary and sectional policies of his immediate predecessor and ally, Muhammadu Buhari and of the ruling All Progressive Congress. National cohesion is at its lowest ebb, and the unity necessary to jointly confront the existential problems facing the country is glaringly absent.
Elections further divide, rather than unite Nigerians. The one that brought him to power even more so, influenced by the trauma of the Buhari years, and the emotional investment in it by significant sections of the polity.
The country’s administrative structure is dysfunctional. A natural federation of over 250 ethnic nationalities, diverse cultures, world views and aspirations, is constrained by a centralising constitution that over-empowers the centre, weakens the component states that lack the authority to control their own resources, or secure lives and property within their territories.
The PUNCH is from today running a six-part series of editorials setting a broad agenda of national survival and recovery for the President based on current challenges and his own campaign promises.
