Time to think about 2019

Time is short, 2019 around the corner. It’s time Nigerians of developmental vision and moral acumen coalesced around a political party to ensure that the PDP and APC do not crop up as our sole default choices.

There’s something about this year’s presidential election in the US that is oddly reminiscent of Nigeria’s 2015 presidential polls. Many Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, can’t quite fathom how the country’s two main parties ended up with candidates with such significant ethical or mental deficits and who inspire little popular enthusiasm.
I remember feeling profoundly bewildered about the two candidates advertised as Nigerians’ real presidential choices in 2015.
Whatever the cause—whether he had feeble political spine or the political opposition sabotaged him at every turn—Goodluck Jonathan failed to rise to the challenge of leadership. He left the impression of a malleable man, too fickle to manipulate by some of the sinister men and women he trusted for advice.
How press a case for the reelection of a man of such meager achievements, a president whose mediocrity was writ large?
Yet, some of us also warned of the dire prospects of handing Nigeria to a man quick to appropriate the rhetoric and mantle of “change,” but slow—if not reluctant—to offer even the merest outline of his vision of change. Above all, the All Progressives Congress (APC) never persuaded me of their difference from Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). And Muhammadu Buhari of the APC struck me as a dud-in-waiting. The man seemed entirely to belong to a different time, a long vanished analog moment. Nigeria stood in need of a man able to combine deep intellectual insights with sharp political instincts. It needed somebody with the mental acumen and physical stamina to broadly envision its transformation. I had no doubt that Mr. Buhari was not that man.

Even so, when I entreated Nigerians to renounce both the PDP and APC and seek a third option, the overwhelming response was to accuse me of irresponsible idealism. Like it or not, we had to embrace the one party or the other.
We did just that. Disdaining the once imperious PDP, ignoring every other party in the race, most Nigerians cleaved to Buhari and the APC, the candidate and the party whose mantra was “change.” It didn’t matter that they hardly defined what change meant. Having put Nigeria and its affairs in their hands, many a Nigerian returned to the business of daydreaming that God—or some superhuman—would take up the task of solving the problems we collectively created.
A year-and-a-half into his administration, it is clear that Buhari is overwhelmed. He has said as much, in oblique as well as direct terms. His wife, Aisha Buhari, has joined the likes of Junaid Mohammed and Senator Bukola Saraki in proposing that some forces inimical to Nigeria’s interests have hijacked the current administration.
The immediate crisis facing the Buhari administration is a severe shortage of cash. For decades, a parade of Nigeria’s visionless leaders frittered away their country’s oil earnings. Sometimes they just stole the funds.
Those who run Nigeria, the president included, have found in the dwindled oil revenues a perfect excuse for their failure.
Cash is important for running any social community, but leadership is far more critical. And leadership has to do, above all, with vision and imagination. For a man who sought to lead Nigeria as compulsively as Buhari did, it is astonishing that he has no bold blueprint. He has no plan for addressing Nigeria’s colossal unemployment crisis. His approach to fighting corruption is shockingly ad hoc and jaded.
In her widely discussed BBC interview, Mrs. Aisha Buhari served notice that she might not support her husband to run for reelection in 2019.
Talking of visionary leadership, I am rather fond of recalling a TV programme in which Steve Kroft, a correspondent on “60 Minutes,” an American news programme, interviewed Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai. The correspondent began by asking what the sheik was trying to do. The sheik’s response was instructive in its clarity: “I want (Dubai) to be Number One—not in the region, but in the world.” Next, the reporter asked, “What do you mean by Number One?” The sheikh had a ready response: “In everything: higher education, health, housing, just (giving) my people the highest way of living. I want my people to live (a) better life now, to go to the highest schools now, to get good healthcare now—not after twenty years.”
Time is short, 2019 around the corner. It’s time Nigerians of developmental vision and moral acumen coalesced around a political party to ensure that the PDP and APC do not crop up as our sole default choices in two-and-a-half years.