ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN FROM PUNCH
The stories that dominated the news cycle in varying degrees the past week have something in common: they reported on the true nature of our politics as an infinite cycle of warfare among combatants who do not know alternative states of existence. They cannot figure out other ways to live, move, and have their being other than an endless play of this paralysing game of politics. Whether you are looking at the example of Rivers State where Nyesom Wike (who has all but defected to the All Progressives Congress though retains a foothold in the Peoples Democratic Party) and his successor, Siminalaya Fubara, were engaged in a contest of wills, or you consider the instance of Imo State where their leaders booked up available hotel rooms ahead of the coming elections to frustrate the logistics organising of the opposition parties, you are seeing the same pattern of perpetual politicking.
We seemed permanently doomed to a fate where there is never going to be a let-up on power contention for our leaders to transition to governance. At this rate, all we will ever know will be an unending tussle for the reins of power.
This brings me to one of the biggest culprits of the practice of an all-consuming commitment to the chase of power: The PDP presidential candidate, Abubakar Atiku. Last week, he lost his presidential election litigation at the Supreme Court just like everyone—and by that I mean people who did not become Nigerians just last night—expected. Apart from a few who love histrionics and pretended to be pleasantly surprised, I do not know of anyone who imagined that a court that could remove an incumbent president in Nigeria had been composed.
The excitement of the whole certificate drama peaked at the very point where a quintessential African “big man” was forced to accountability by a court untainted by the messiness of Nigerian politics. Once that show entered the Nigerian legal landscape, some of us knew it would instantly become degraded by the uninspiring jurisprudence of judges who will plod through tedious pages of prefabricated judgment. Even Atiku himself must have known how the case would end but still went ahead anyway. As I observed in an earlier article, his mission might not have been to undertake the impossible task of getting the judges to critically reflect on the virtues expected of a president but to prepare for the next election.
His pursuit all along, as it seems to me anyway, was to delegitimise the incumbent—to give those harbouring disaffections from the last election the emotional resource to justifiably base their resentment.
So, I was entirely unsurprised when Atiku insinuated he would keep up the good fight of refurbishing the Nigerian polity. He presented his mission as service in a higher cause, but we have been Africans for long enough to know that politicians in this part of the world do not fight for the country’s sake. Nobody commits that many resources to battling incumbent power in African politics unless they seek to usurp them. Make no mistake, Atiku is not trying to “deepen our democracy and rule of law…” for “the country… to reach its true potential” as he so nobly puts it. Everything he has done is a preface to the 2027 election when he will relaunch his presidential ambition. Such perpetual politicking is why we are caught in an endless coil of mobilising disaffection, delegitimising institutions/institutional figures, unsettling the polity, and dragging out the estrangement until the next election.
While we can rightly argue that such strategies are exactly the nature of politics, and that there are no historical examples of a polity that subsists without continuous (and acrimonious) power contentions, we should also recognise that this perpetual politicking lacks statecraft. We have a set of leaders adept at battling to win elections but entirely clueless on the science and art of governance. For them, every resource of democracy—its institutions, plus even moral visions and thought—must be pimped in the service of accruing power. And by the time they eventually get that power, their heads are drained out and their souls purged of virtues. Political power then becomes a carapace for hiding the jarring emptiness within.
