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Those who said it should always be about the economy, stupid, must really be stupid if they had Nigeria and Nigerians in mind when that statement was made. Down here, whether in election season or off election season, we are perennially preoccupied with scheming and positioning to grab power and wield same from the top. It would, therefore, be foolish to expect that five months to the first round of elections in February 2023 any significant public gathering and discourse would be about anything except elections.
So, when my friend Ikechukwu Amaechi and his colleagues gathered the ancient and modern in Nigeria’s politics, academia, journalism and elsewhere for the annual lecture, which had been in hiatus in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19, the choice of the subject was given: “2023 Elections and the Future of Nigeria’s Democracy’’. Among the ancestors, respectfully speaking, were Alhaji Tanko Yakasai, a presidential liaison officer in the 1980s and founding member of the Arewa Consultative Forum, and Dr. Uma Eleazu. From the relatively young Turks were keynote speaker, Mr. Babatunde Raji Fashola, who is the minister of works; broadcaster, Ms Funke Treasure; Prof. Victor Chukwuma; former director-general of the maritime safety agency NIMASA, Dr. Dakuku Peterside. Yakasai is about 97 while Fashola is about 56 years old.
Expectedly, Yakasai was nostalgic about the parliamentary system of government, which Nigeria started off with in 1960, even if now he is only advocating for the French model in place of the British. But here we are not about Pa Yakasai or his nostalgia. Our interest is Minister Fashola, the widely adjudged successful governor of Lagos State between 2007 and 2015 and poster boy of the then opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) political party, going into the 2015 elections. As active reporters at the time, some of us were privileged to randomly interact with Gov. Fashola. He was intelligent. He was articulate. He was cerebral. He was humble and I believe empathetic. Then he spoke frequently extempore. The Fashola I saw and listened to from close range last week in Lagos was different. Almost strange. I could not help but wonder at what some Nigerians derisively say to the effect that there is nothing or person the General, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, cannot destroy.
I would be the first to admit if you reminded me that I should not expect Fashola to remain unchanged after seven years and after being a key player in the regime of Change that actually changed Nigeria for the worst. After all, he was a Super Minister or better still an undecorated prime minister between 2015 and 2019 or so, in charge of an amalgam of the perennially troubled federal ministries of power, works and housing. Even a superhuman would not come out of that assignment unscathed. And truly last Tuesday in Lagos, Fashola was a ghost in spite his best efforts. His predicament was not made any better by his self-imposed choice to not be partisan on a subject that lent itself to partisanship. How he struggled. In delivery, choice of words and illustrations. And in his body language. Fashola’s discomfort was not eased by the disposition of his audience who though appeared to admire him for what and who he had been but which could not hide its misgivings about the abject performance of the regime Fashola is serving. For a start, Fashola said democracy, counting from 1999, had delivered its dividends to Nigerians that could otherwise not have been. And to him the most important dividends of democracy were of the brick and mortar variety.
He said: “While there is still a lot of work to be done, it is proper at this point to also highlight the successes our democracy has delivered, because the democratic experience since 1999 came at a great cost…let me remind us about some of the things our democracy has delivered since 1999 so that we keep stock, and we believe and reaffirm our commitment to the choice that democracy offers us and we remain faithful to its ideals. Our democracy has delivered an inter-state train service, the first and only one since the one built by the colonial government
“Our democracy is delivering solutions to problems that seemed to have defied solutions, like a road and bridge network to Bonny Island, like the second Niger Bridge and the reconstruction of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, Enugu-Onitsha expressway, Kano-Maiduguri expressway and an extensive broadband rollout nationwide.”
The minister went on to espouse on other dividends of democracy, including provision of access to telephony and widening the tax net describing them as “building blocks of hope around which to build our prosperity” because “They represent critical items of infrastructure fiscal options about our current and future livelihoods around which to frame the issue for 2023 elections and plan the future of Nigeria’s democracy.”
I shook my head in disbelief as I sat and listened to Fashola prioritise the dividends of democracy and reduce them to rail tracks, roads and bridges. Ironically, some of the best roads and bridges we have in Nigeria today were not delivered by democracy. So, if those are key dividends of democracy, then Fashola, APC, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and politicians have conspired to give democracy a bad name. The clear and present danger is that the ruling political elite and their collaborators elsewhere will by commission or omission compel Nigerians to lose faith in democracy. Nowhere in the minister’s submission did he attempt to speak directly to how our practice of democracy in the last 23 years has lifted any segment of our population out of poverty. I would understand if he couldn’t because, on that score, it has been a tale of woes, which has been made worse in the past seven years by the regime in which Fashola serves and plays a key role. To argue that roads and bridges, on their own, will lift Nigerians out of poverty is at best to be clever by half and at worst to be out of touch with reality.
As if his misadventure in defining the dividends of democracy was not vexatious enough, Fashola ventured into the subject of how not to ‘disrobe’ and demarket Nigeria in the quest to win elections in 2023. His audience could not help but move from chuckles to derisive laughter.
How could anybody in APC keep a straight face and say such a thing to any Nigerian, not just to the opposition? How could Fashola say such a thing to an enlightened audience at the MUSON Centre? Everything negative about Nigeria was the platform on which the APC and its leading lights, including Buhari, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, its presidential candidate for the 2023 election, Information Minister Lai Mohammed, Atiku Abubakar, PDP opposition candidate in next year’s election who was in the APC then, among others campaigned on ahead of the 2015 election, which the APC won, defeating incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan.
If the APC won the 2015 election by demarketing Nigeria or ‘disrobing’ it as Fashola now frames it, some of us can live with it. But the truth is that the then opposition party fabricated and sold lies to unwary citizens. They made Nigerians promises they had neither plans nor intentions to fulfill. To make matters worse, its presidential candidate who was elected on the party’s platform disclaimed and repudiated the promises even before he was sworn into office. Brazen. And now the party that has spectacularly failed Nigerians in the last seven years and made the country poorer and disunited and despondent and insecure and ‘fantastically corrupt’ has sent its poster boy to fire the first salvo in a futile attempt to frame conversations on the forthcoming elections. It’s disingenuous. It will fail. The 2023 election is and should remain a referendum on the APC in government. The only question for determination by Nigerians in February 2023 would be whether they are better off than they were 2015 when the ruling party took office. In addition, 2023 should also be a choice between continuing with Nigeria of business as usual or making a radical break with the old and dysfunctional and decadent order.
