The President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio, just had a Freudian slip without knowing it. He told Nigerians a few days ago that nobody would recognize Nigeria by the time Bola Tinubu completes the remaining seven years left for him to govern Nigeria.
Akpabio’s statement is, without doubt, protean in all its connotations. For him, probably, he meant to say that Tinubu would transform Nigeria so richly that his reign, at the end of the day, could come to be regarded as the golden era of Nigerian statehood. But for Nigerians who are not seeing their country with glassy eyes like Akpabio, his statement carries a ring of truism. Rather than see Akpabio’s imaginary Nigeria, what they see instead is a Nigeria that has been so misgoverned in just one year that an extension of seven years could knoll the death knell for the country.
We will return to this reading of Akpabio’s statement shortly. But before we do that, let us put the statement under consideration in certain other perspectives.
First is that Akpabio’s declaration presupposes that Tinubu will spend eight years as President of Nigeria. In other words, it is taken for granted that he will win his second term re-election bid. Another way of putting it is to say that a second term for Tinubu is a forgone conclusion.
The second is that the assumptions inherent in the statement are too heavy to be overlooked. Did Akpabio mean to say that Tinubu’s reign will be transformative? If he did, the best response he should get is to dismiss him as an interested party whose assessment of the Nigerian condition is tragically limited by self-interest. But if the president of the Senate meant what he said, then it will be taken that he has a perverse sense of history. He is not painting the true picture of the Nigeria that we have before us.
However, whatever may have informed Akpabio’s declaration, the fact of the matter is that Nigerians did not take him seriously. If anything, they are amused that someone is still thinking that the people can be led by the nose, just like that. The truth is that no one is taken in by what looks like a devious attempt by a Tinubu ally to pool the wool over the people’s eyes.
But if we were just saying before now that Tinubu’s administration has disrupted life and living in Nigeria, Akpabio just drew our attention to what the next seven years holds for Nigeria. The country, he has alerted us, will be unrecognizable by the time Tinubu will be leaving office in seven years to come, that is assuming, but without conceding, that Tinubu would spend eight years in office. So, what do we do with this doleful alert?
Something readily comes to mind as we struggle to make sense out of Akpabio’s unflattering declaration. Nigerians of all shades are already reacting to the bad situation in various ways. While some have chosen the path of passive resignation, others have gone to the back room to strategize on how to ensure that Tinubu’s 2027 ambition kisses the dust.
Following the cataclysm that has been visited on Nigeria in the last one year in the name of governance, the traditionally resilient Nigerian has been broken. Those who decided long ago that they would swim and sink with Nigeria are having a rethink. If they ever saw hope on the horizon, the present Nigerian situation seems to have convinced them that there is no light at the end of the long, dark tunnel. This realization has given rise to some spasmodic moves that will only stifle the country the more. The most telling of these is the hemorrhage that the rank of the Nigerian youth population is going through. They are leaving the country in droves, and this is traceable to the fact that they have lost faith in their country. But that is at the level of individuals. Groups and other collectives are responding in their own ways.
But what appears most telling in the ongoing distemper is the emerging scheme from the North. Having watched Tinubu for one year after his ascension to the presidential seat, the northern establishment feels thoroughly disappointed. They feel betrayed. They feel that the man they helped to climb to power is looking at them like some fools. Those who hold the formula to the power equation in the North will have none of that. They have begun to aggregate, and the whole idea is to cut Tinubu’s reign short. The scheme is getting more biting, especially now that Akpabio has given Nigerians a hint of what is to come.
So far, Tinubu has given major political blocs of Nigeria other his own something to worry about. He has, for a start, diminished the political reach of the East. The Igbo-dominated bloc is being systematically weakened through his policy of exclusion. The core East is practically absent in Tinubu’s administration. He is doing so to spite the Igbo for their role in the 2023 presidential election. But as Tinubu does this, the Igbo do not look bothered. As a people, the Igbo do not care a hoot about government patronage. And so they are moving on without a whimper
But the same thing is not true of the North. There are certain power apparatchik that the North hold dear. To take that from them will amount to draining life out of them. One of such is appointments into strategic security positions. Here, the North has lost it. The President has taken all the meat to his Yoruba kinsmen. This situation, as disturbing as it is to the North, is very temporary. What the North is truly worried about is the fear of the unknown. The President’s body language is very suggestive. He is behaving like someone who wants to cut a huge slice out of Nigeria. What can this be?
Those who are looking beyond the surface are suspecting that the President may tamper with the present structure of Nigeria. This is what the North is most ill at ease with. The region is afraid that a restructured Nigeria could take away all the advantages it enjoys from Nigeria. This possibility, for it, is too grave to contemplate. If the present structure of the country is changed, certainly it will be difficult to recognize Nigeria again. But then, that will depend on the content of the restructuring. The North’s loss in this regard may well be another region’s gain. But in whatever way it comes, Akpabio has sounded the alarm bell early enough. He may well be right that Nigerians may no longer recognize their country by the time Tinubu is through with them.