Last week, Victor, a
carpenter, came to my Lagos home to fix a broken chair. I asked him whom he
preferred as Nigeria’s next president: the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, or his
challenger, Muhammadu Buhari.
“I don’t have a voter’s card,
but if I did, I would vote for somebody I don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like
Buhari. But Jonathan is not performing.”
Victor sounded like many
people I know: utterly unenthusiastic about the two major candidates in our
upcoming election.
Were Nigerians to vote on
likeability alone, Jonathan would win. He is mild-mannered and genially
unsophisticated, with a conventional sense of humor. Buhari has a severe,
ascetic air about him, a rigid uprightness; it is easy to imagine him in 1984,
leading a military government whose soldiers routinely beat up civil servants.
Neither candidate is articulate. Jonathan is given to rambling; his unscripted
speeches leave listeners vaguely confused. Buhari is thick-tongued, his words
difficult to decipher. In public appearances, he seems uncomfortable not only
with the melodrama of campaigning but also with the very idea of it. To be a
democratic candidate is to implore and persuade, and his demeanor suggests a man
who is not at ease with amiable consensus. Still, he is no stranger to
campaigns. This is his third run as a presidential candidate; the last time, in
2011, he lost to Jonathan.
This time, Buhari’s prospects
are better. Jonathan is widely perceived as ineffectual, and the clearest
example, which has eclipsed his entire presidency, is his response to Boko
Haram. Such a barbaric Islamist insurgency would challenge any government. But
while Boko Haram bombed and butchered, Jonathan seemed frozen in a confused,
tone-deaf inaction. Conflicting stories emerged of an ill-equipped army, of a
corrupt military leadership, of northern elites sponsoring Boko Haram, and even
of the government itself sponsoring Boko Haram.
Jonathan floated to power,
unprepared, on a serendipitous cloud. He was a deputy governor of Bayelsa state
who became governor when his corrupt boss was forced to quit. Chosen as vice
president because powerbrokers considered him the most harmless option from
southern Nigeria, he became president when his northern boss died in office.
Nigerians gave him their goodwill—he seemed refreshingly unassuming—but there
were powerful forces who wanted him out, largely because he was a southerner,
and it was supposed to be the north’s ‘turn’ to occupy the presidential office.
And so the provincial outsider
suddenly thrust onto the throne, blinking in the chaotic glare of competing
interests, surrounded by a small band of sycophants, startled by the hostility
of his traducers, became paranoid. He was slow to act, distrustful and
diffident. His mildness came across as cluelessness. His response to criticism
calcified to a single theme: His enemies were out to get him. When the Chibok
girls were kidnapped, he and his team seemed at first to believe that it was a
fraud organized by his enemies to embarrass him. His politics of defensiveness
made it difficult to sell his genuine successes, such as his focus on the
long-neglected agricultural sector and infrastructure projects. His
spokespeople alleged endless conspiracy theories, compared him to Jesus Christ,
and generally kept him entombed in his own sense of victimhood.
The delusions of Buhari’s
spokespeople are better packaged, and obviously free of incumbency’s crippling
weight. They blame Jonathan for everything that is wrong with Nigeria, even the
most multifarious, ancient knots. They dismiss references to Buhari’s past
military leadership, and couch their willful refusal in the language of
‘change,’ as though Buhari, by representing change from Jonathan, has
also taken on an ahistorical saintliness.
I remember the Buhari years as
a blur of bleakness. I remember my mother bringing home sad rations of tinned
milk, otherwise known as "essential commodities"—the consequences of
Buhari’s economic policy. I remember air thick with fear, civil servants made
to do frog jumps for being late to work, journalists imprisoned, Nigerians
flogged for not standing in line, a political vision that cast citizens as
recalcitrant beasts to be whipped into shape.
Buhari’s greatest source of
appeal is that he is widely perceived as non-corrupt. Nigerians have been told
how little money he has, how spare his lifestyle is. But to sell the idea of an
incorruptible candidate who will fight corruption is to rely on the
disingenuous trope that Buhari is not his party. Like Jonathan’s People’s
Democratic Party, Buhari’s All Progressives Congress is stained with
corruption, and its patrons have a checkered history of exploitative
participation in governance. Buhari’s team is counting on the strength of his
perceived personal integrity: his image as a good guy forced by realpolitik to
hold hands with the bad guys, who will be shaken off after his victory.
In my ancestral home state of
Anambra, where Jonathan is generally liked, the stronger force at play is a
distrust of Buhari, partly borne of memories of his military rule, and partly
borne of his reputation, among some Christians, as a Muslim fundamentalist.
When I asked a relative whom she would vote for, she said, “Jonathan of course.
Am I crazy to vote for Buhari so that Nigeria will become a sharia country?”
Nigeria has predictable voting
patterns, as all democratic countries do. Buhari can expect support from large
swaths of the core north, and Jonathan from southern states. Region and religion
are potent forces here. Vice presidents are carefully picked with these factors
in mind: Buhari’s is a southwestern Christian and Jonathan’s is a northern
Muslim. But it is not so simple. There are non-northerners who would ordinarily
balk at voting for a ‘northerner’ but who support Buhari because he can
presumably fight corruption. There are northern supporters of Jonathan who are
not part of the region's Christian minorities.
Last week, I was indifferent
about the elections, tired of television commercials and contrived
controversies. There were rumors that the election, which was scheduled for
February 14, would be postponed, but there always are; our political space is a
lair of conspiracies. I was uninterested in the apocalyptic predictions. Nigeria
was not imploding. We had crossed this crossroads before, we were merely
electing a president in an election bereft of inspiration. And the
existence of a real opposition party that might very well win was a sign of
progress in our young democracy.
Then, on Saturday, the
elections were delayed
for six weeks. Nigeria’s security agencies, we were told, would not be
available to secure the elections because they would be fighting Boko Haram and
needed at least another month and a half to do so. (Nigeria has been fighting
Boko Haram for five years, and military leaders recently claimed to be ready
for the elections.)
Even if the reason were not so
absurd, Nigerians are politically astute enough to know that the postponement
has nothing to do with security. It is a flailing act of desperation from an
incumbent terrified of losing. There are fears of further postponements, of
ploys to illegally extend Jonathan’s term. In a country with the specter of a
military coup always hanging over it, the consequences could be dangerous. My
indifference has turned to anger. What a staggeringly self-serving act of
contempt for Nigerians. It has cast, at least for the next six weeks, the
darkest possible shroud over our democracy: uncertainty.
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