ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN FROM PUNCH
Every government transition begins with a week of gràgrà where the new helmsman tries to assert their power by making definitive executive decisions. The week of gràgrà is when new leaders dis-anchor from the old. This phase, where the cliches of a “new beginning” are still being belted out, is where the newly enthroned must make a show of breaking with the past. That move is necessary because power transitions are not only political-legal affairs but also ethical.
Nigeria’s brand of politics demands that such demonstration of autonomy be ostentatious. Our zero-sum politics does not afford generosity in victory; one must also obliterate the defeated. To carry over from an outgoing leader is to inherit the ghosts of their rulership. In bygone empires, such housecleaning consists of dispatching with the abobakú, the king’s surrogate, whose death eliminates as many of the vestiges of the old rule as possible.
Our modern empires run by supposedly democrats are not essentially different. People get into power not merely through a competitive election but through shadow warfare too. Because elections are the means of calibrating the worth of political actors, they cannot but be a war. Even victory itself is the beginning of another war. The defeated must not be allowed to survive; they must be destroyed politically and morally. Otherwise, one would labour under the weight of their achievements. In our clime, to complete a project your predecessor started is to risk sneers that you are incapable of generating original ideas. To abandon such projects is to be criticised for wasting the resources already invested. One way to override the conundrum of taking on usually white elephant projects started by your predecessor (and burdened by bloated receipts) is to destroy the initiator itself.
In anticipation of this bile, some outgoing politicians sow disaffection for their successors by making a trailer load of appointments right before their exit. If the successor goes forward with the stuffed payroll, they could end up accommodating their predecessor’s loyalists along with any potential for mischief. If they reverse such appointments, they would be labelled as the evil person who took food away from people’s mouths.
In 2015 when former President Muhammadu Buhari got into office, his week of gràgrà comprised of sniffing into the sewers of comatose bureaucracies to dig out cases of corruption spectacular enough to make sensational headlines but which, when stripped to details, would not implicate those whose dirty money sponsored his ride to Aso Rock. Remember, that was the season the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission turned itself into a street dancer, entertaining us with astounding discoveries of money in unusual places. For all that gràgrà, what is the anti-corruption scorecard under Buhari?
I still clearly remember where I was in July 2015 when former-labour-activist-former-governor-turned-dissembler Adams Oshiomole claimed that on a trip to the USA, some officials informed them that a single minister stole $6bn under President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch. Even for a country where people routinely pull figures out of their derriere, that amount sounded improbable and outright nonsensical. But then, those kinds of stories do not need to be factual. They only need to be believed.
For the newly inaugurated government, the week of gràgrà started with the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the uncertainty of what will become of the much-disputed subsidy. Buhari, ever an artful dodger of responsibility, left the problem for his successor to resolve (or not). Managing it will be difficult because it would also entail the question of how to properly narrate the failures of their predecessor in that regard. They will need to extricate themselves from Buhari’s baggage so they can start on a new note, and at the same time, the APC-APC transition must be seen as truly continuous.
