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Should Buhari Groom a Successor for 2023?

Ayo Olukotun

“Succession is very funny because if I did find anybody, I will create more problems for him or her. Let those who want to be President try as much as I did”

President Muhammadu Buhari, The Punch Wednesday, July 31, 2019

President Muhammadu Buhari’s statement, quoted above, to the effect that he has no intention whatsoever to groom a successor was made in response to a request by a group which called itself Progressives in Academics. It is not exactly clear how the body was constituted, and how representative they are of the academic community in Nigeria. By gaining the president’s attention, however, there is a hint that they possess influential political connections. They had asked Buhari what plans he has for throwing up a mentee who would succeed him as president in 2023. The idea of succession planning is better known to human resources experts in the corporate sector, where it is viewed as an overall part of talent development crucial for success.

It is often  argued that succession planning, the ladder by which most personnel reach the top  is undertaken to the extent that it enhances the intellectual capital of organizations, motivates workers to stay on in the assurance that, all being well, they can one day wear the top hat in the organization. Not just that, when Chief Executive Officers are appointed from outside the corporation, which happens sometimes in times of crisis, such appointees have a huge learning curve. Applied to politics, succession planning possesses advantages, but it is not without problems. Even in established democracies, it sometimes works but often does not, especially when it comes to the number one job. In the United States, for example, according to one report there is no example in nearly seven decades of a two term president being succeeded by a member of his own party. In other words, where the voter is king, a succession plan, however diligently undertaken may come to grief if the party is not returned to office.

Elsewhere, there are a few and isolated cases of national leaders grooming their successors and standing with them through the process of election. Often quoted in this connection are the famous words a former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who reminisced in her biography: “But there was one more duty I had to perform, and that was to ensure that John Major was my successor. I wanted to believe that he was the man to secure and safeguard my legacy and to take our policies forward”. It is remarkable that Thatcher secured her resolution, getting Major to be Prime Minister, without throwing the British Electoral System into jeopardy. Please note that, not only had Major been both Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the exchequer but was also a senior member of Thatcher’s administration, which is to say, somebody you could call a true believer in Thatcherism, attested by performance in office. Also, this was no shabby deal in which an incumbent was desperately sourcing for someone to cover her back, but a loyalist with shared vision about the future of the British State.

In more recent times, there has been much discussion about a successor to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has ruled Germany since 2005. There is talk about Ms Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, popularly known as AKK, becoming Merkel’s successor, especially after she was elected General Secretary of the ruling Christian Democratic Union, a position once held by the incumbent. Indeed, she already is being addressed as mini Merkel, notwithstanding that there are other hopefuls. Observe please that Karrenbauer has paid her dues within the ideological framework and vision jointly shared by mentor and mentee. We are also dealing, in contrast to the Nigerian situation, with a playing field, where parties are coherent, fairly stable with pronounced ideational and intellectual leanings.

Coming to the African and Nigerian contexts, grooming and succession planning will be extremely difficult, because politicians have very fickle allegiance to their parties, and are prepared to jump ship if personal gains are threatened. How do you groom a successor if you are not even sure your mentee will still be a member of your party when the next election arrives? A related point is that succession planning is meaningless when there are no shared creeds or overarching vision beyond the desire to gain and sustain office.  That is not all, the turbulence of Nigerian politics is such that a groomed successor cannot be counted upon to remain loyal once the mentor or godfather turns his back or exits office. There are several cases at the level of the states where godsons, in oedipal fights, turned on their godfathers, rubbishing all their achievements. The same scenario has also played out in other African countries, amplifying the shallowness and constantly shifting nature of allegiances, and alliances.

Let me illustrate this syndrome with reference to the anti corruption policy, considered the flagship of the current administration. You hardly find, as this columnist had repeatedly complained, state governors in the mould of Buhari, reading the riot act to commissioners when they are being sworn in. Were this to happen, it will nicely complement, perhaps even redefine Buhari’s moral reformism and the imperative to sanitize the polity. There was a time when the former Minister for Justice and Attorney General SAN, Abubakar Malami was considered a mini Buhari, in the context of the last Federal Executive Council; regrettably however, that image disappeared in the face of contradictions and omissions. At the time, he came across as a lone supporter or advocate, at the highest level of government of Buhari’s reformism. What am I driving at?

Even granting that the anti-corruption policy is itself vulnerable, hobbled by partisanship, funding matters and flagging zeal, it provides a minimal context within which we can begin to talk of succession planning in respect of Buhari’s legacy. As pointed out however, those who have bought into this vision, across the nation, are few and far between. Party loyalty is a candidate for mentoring possibilities, but even this is dodgy, in the absence of clear ideological leanings. Consequently, we are left with a situation where there are no clear or cogent premises beyond ethnicity, noise making and a deep pocket to anchor the search for a successor.

Undoubtedly, therefore, Buhari is right in disparaging the idea of political succession, given the odds against it. The odds are buttressed by the risks associated with revealing a possible successor, so early in the day, creating thereby, a setback for the named successor. As a strategist, Buhari is correct in saying that he would have created more problems for such a person, in a terrain where the presidency is a hotly contested position, and confers imperial powers on its occupants.

As an alternative to the fluid and uncertain nature of a succession plan, which may be voided if the ruling All Progressive Congress does not win the 2023 elections, we can seek to build a political leadership stratum, driven by shared concerns value creation, and social imagination, with the intention of bringing about, in broad terms, a new set of leaders, who are minded to pursue political and social changes, and to make life more meaningful for Nigerians.

Prof. Ayo Olukotun is the Oba (Dr.) Sikiru Adetona Professorial Chair of Governance, Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye.

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SOWORE AND THE SEMANTICS OF REVOLUTION

by Ayo Olukotun

 

If the practice of democracy is viewed as an extended conversation involving citizens and government on the one hand, and between competing non-governmental stakeholders on the other, then there is wide room for all manner of expressions including revolutions launched on laptops and public address systems.

A relaxed approach on the part of government to the challenge of public square demonstrations by placard carrying youths, in the name of revolution, would have allowed it to take off, employing responsible force to keep it peaceful, and within the ambit of the law. You cannot have a revolution without a revolutionary agenda, revolutionary personality, a vanguard, a rearguard and minimal capacity to enforce the revolutionary script. The demands of #RevolutionNow  include predictable stuff like the payment of the minimum wage of thirty thousand Naira, freedom for all political prisoners including El Zakyzaky, abolition of tuition fees in all secondary and tertiary institutions, stopping the killings in the country and sacking all incompetent service chiefs, employments for youths, as well as putting an end to estimated billing by the power companies, and the provision of prepaid meters for free. These are demands familiar to all who have taken part in public discourse over the last number of years, while some of them have been adopted by government, as policy.

True, one or two of them, especially that touching on security jitters, are serious with new dimensions being introduced by the day; it is doubtful however whether the implementation of these limited reforms, important as they are, can be called a revolution, which connotes a fundamental political and socioeconomic change. Up till now, it is not entirely clear why Sowore and his group chose the word – ‘revolution’, which has been capitalized on by security agencies to accuse him of treasonable felony, terrorism, and plans to effect a regime change by force. If Sowore can be validly accused of intellectual laxity or laziness, the security agencies can also be legitimately accused, as Wole Soyinka pointed out, of lavish and fearsome labelling of what may have passed off as routine political dissent by disaffected youths. No doubt, there is a certain curiosity and haziness about the timing of the protest, coming in the wake of ongoing legal challenges to President Muhammadu Buhari’s victory at the February polls, with some suggesting that the so called revolution is merely a ploy by some opposition parties, or those fronting for them, to open a theatre of conflict that would either set aside or bypass the ruling of the tribunal and courts on the elections. Be that as it may, it does not provide enough warrant to, as it were, kill a fly with a sledgehammer, through the excessive deployment of security, unless there is information that Sowore had trained guerrillas, acquired weapons to confront the Buhari administration in a fierce battle. In a sense, this kind of intensive interrogations of officialdom are little more than elite youth reaction to governance shortfalls and entrenched deficits. Recall for example, that the Yellow Vests in France, launched a revolutionary opposition and street protests in 2018 against the government of Emmanuel Macron, resulting in modulated reforms of the economy and the lessening of the gap between the rich and the poor. Some other European countries and Canada have since initiated their own Yellow Vests with demands varying according to the political economy of the country.

In Nigeria, we may contextualize the current mood as informed partly by a demographic revolution in which the youths constitute a predominant majority of Nigerians, it is also among these youths that the woes of governance such as unemployment, poor infrastructure, poor education and health bite deepest. Add to this, the fact that most of these youths never knew a better Nigeria than we currently have, not having been born, or were too young when the country was better governed and Nigerians of my generation had the benefit of quality education and better social services. Their imagination is understandably constrained by the abjection to which Nigeria has dropped in the last two decades, just as their expression of outrage is not alleviated by access to the qualitative education that once held sway in Nigeria. It is also the case that in politics, the older generation have refused to acknowledge the weight and talents of the youthful strata, despite the not-too-young-to-run campaign. As an example, it would have been refreshing if more capable youths have been appointed as members of the forthcoming federal executive council due to be sworn in a fortnight. So, what we have playing out is a conflict of generations, in which our youths are either exiting Nigeria in desperate circumstances, joining the swelling ranks of counter-culture and crime, or alternately, inviting the ruling class to a dialogue on why the blemish of Nigeria as the sick man of Africa, should persist for so long.

This columnist does not imply that the demographic bulge is the only problem out there; there are existential issues such as worsening poverty, shrinking job market, degradation in education, health and other social services, all in the midst of successive groups of politicians promising change, only to backslide on their promises or give excuses for their lack of performance. These of course are not problems that started with the Buhari administration, they have been there for decades, but there is no doubt that the economic recession and post-recession blues mean that more and more people are sinking into the bottomless pit of poverty. What the Sowore outburst has to teach us, in case we are a nation that learns, is that time may be running out for the ruling class, to make desirable changes, and to walk the talk by rescuing Nigerians out of the bind in which they find themselves.

There is also a riddle that we must take note of and redress concerning the repetitive holding of elections that do not translate to change for the general populace. To be sure, the sanctity of elections, as administered, counts, but as Dr (Mrs) Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, member of the Ghanaian parliament said on Channels television earlier this week, if the people do not see meaningful changes in their lives, election after election, they would come to see polling as a meaningless ritual indulged in by the political class to improve their own lots while the majority of the people are left in the cold. This expresses the paradox of the Nigerian predicament as it makes nonsense of electoralism and what passes as governance. I reminisce that sometime back in the 1980s, most Nigerians actually preferred the military to civilian rule on account of better performance by the military. Obviously however, the military demystified itself through a brutal form of dictatorship that delivered less and less in terms of social goods. For democracy to be consolidated in modern day Nigeria, it must move beyond the appurtenances of power change through elections, to draw more and more Nigerians into the safety net, and to alter the unhappy narrative of elections without transformation, and the wielding of power without purpose. In concrete terms, this implies that we must revisit all those abandoned or failed social and economic projects that were long on conceptualization and conferencing, but short on implementation and visible imprints. This remains the abiding challenge beyond the politics of semantics about revolution.

 

-           Prof. Ayo Olukotun is the Oba (Dr) Sikiru Adetona Chair of Governance, Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye.