If it were in Nigeria

An exciting and excitable discussion has been going on since last Thursday. That was the day Joe Biden and Donald Trump squared up in a CNN-organized presidential debate. The story is that Biden, the seating President of the United States, was a shadow of his old, good self. His performance has been widely adjudged to be below expectations.

Former President Donald Trump, who was ousted in a hotly contested presidential election in 2020, is jibing freely at Biden’s lackluster performance. He said Biden’s feeble outing was not a factor of age. Trump attributes it instead to performance. For him, Biden is crassly incompetent.

Beyond Trump’s jibes, many watchers of American presidency are expressing concerns about the suitability of Biden for the November 2024 presidential election. Not a few feel that the Democrats should drop him in favour of someone who has the gravitas to carry on with the policy thrust of the Democratic Party.

Back home in Nigeria, armchair analysts and critics have seized the stage. They have been telling us what was what; why things were what they were.

Unlike Trump who holds that Biden’s problem had nothing to do with age, many of our homegrown analysts place Biden’s disability roundly and squarely on the altar of age. Only three years separate the two presidential contenders. While Biden is 81, Trump is 78. This means that both of them belong to the same age bracket. Trump is still looking strong for his age. But not so with Biden. The problem here may not be the number. It may have more to do with physical and mental health. Different human beings are differently endowed. Joe Biden, you would say, does not have the boisterousness of a Donald Trump.

But the heart of the matter is not our excitable disposition to the issue at stake. Rather, it is the fact that we (Nigerians) hardly put ourselves in the picture when we are discussing developments in other lands. Rather than domesticate the issues with a view to knowing how they affect us a people or a country, we behave as if we are inhabitants of Mars. Otherwise, why will Nigerians pay so much heed to presidential debates in America when such a practice is scarcely existent in their own clime?

Biden is a seating President of the United States, yet he presented himself for a presidential debate. American democratic culture demands that. You cannot aspire to lead the people if you are not ready for public scrutiny and inquiry. Debates of presidential variety are one such way of doing that. To shy away from it is to tell the people that you do not need their votes. Today, Biden is the focus of attention because he made himself available for the presidential debate. He could not have done otherwise. The American system makes such participation mandatory.

What has taken place in America stands in contradistinction with what obtains here in Nigeria. When Muhammadu Buhari was running as President, he never made himself available for presidential debates. In the 2019 election season, for instance, Buhari as Nigeria’s President shunned every suggestion that bordered on presidential debates. He never participated in any and Nigerians did not bat an eyelid over that. In the same vein, Bola Tinubu, in the 2023 presidential run, never participated in any presidential debate, be it of town hall or village square variety. He carried on as if the people’s interest in the matter did not matter. He shied away from all the invitations for presidential debates extended to him.

The problem with Tinubu, as it was with Buhari, was that of questionable competence. Neither Buhari nor Tinubu had confidence in their ability to face their fellow candidates as well as the generality of Nigerians on any issue that would put them on the spot. The 2023 election season was even tougher for presidential candidates who had no clear idea about what they would bring to the table as President because of the presence of Peter Obi. With his good grasp of governance issues, Obi was a nightmare to those who ran the race with him. He would easily have stolen the show in any public debate with any of the other presidential candidates. Tinubu, particularly, was well aware of this . He was afraid of the Peter Obi persona. He did not want to give Obi the opportunity to make a mincemeat of him.

This is where the real problem about the way we function as a people lies. When Buhari and Tinubu refused to participate in presidential debates, it did not matter to us. We did not hold them to account. We did not question the choice they made for themselves and for Nigerians. We moved on as if nothing had taken place. Buhari and Tinubu were not willing to present themselves to Nigerians through presidential debates, yet Nigerians accepted or were cajoled into accepting them as candidates for the country’s leadership. If ours were a clime where the people matter, Buhari and Tinubu would have been held down for their refusal to participate in presidential debates. But Nigerians said nothing and did nothing because impunity is a way of life in their land.

In Nigeria, nothing really matters. Those who aspire to lead or actually lead can do anything and get away with it. We were all here when Tinubu stepped in as President and turned our country upside down. Things went haywire before our very eyes. Nigerians moaned and groaned. In the end, they did nothing. They relapsed into ignoble ease.

But we saw a contrary situation on African soil just a few weeks ago. William Ruto, the Kenyan President, had pushed for a bill that would raise $2.7 billion in additional taxes to reduce the country’s budget deficit and borrowing. Kenya’s public debt stands at 68 percent of GDP higher than the 55 percent of GDP recommended by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). But the people rebuffed the move. They poured into the streets in their numbers, rejecting their government’s plan to make that concession to the Bretton Woods sisters. The people said they needed good living conditions and playing the slave to the IMF and World Bank would not guarantee them that. After days of riots, President Ruto buckled under pressure. He gave up the plan. The people have won. That is government of the people, by the people and for the people. If it were to be in Nigeria, government would have had its way because Nigerians will say nothing and do nothing.

Recent happenings in Kenya and the United States should get Nigerians thinking. When will the people and their institutions reign supreme in their own country? When will the people’s self-immolation end?