Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

May 29, 2019 will go in the record books as the day Nigeria formally adopted, institutionalized, and inaugurated rigocracy as a system of government. In my March 2, 2019 column titled “This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy,”I defined a rigocracy as a system of government which owes its existence not to the votes of the electorates of a country, but to audaciously violent, in-your-face, state-sponsored rigging.

 The new Buhari regime isn’t just a rigocracy; it’s a rigocracy wrapped in multiple layers of brazen-faced illegitimacy. An illegitimate, ethically stained Chief Justice of Nigeria inaugurated an illegitimate president who unashamedly stole someone else’s electoral mandate in broad daylight.  This reality puts Nigeria’s democracy in double jeopardy.

Buhari (whom people on social media now call “Buharig” because of the unprecedentedly crude electoral heist he perpetrated in February) and the cabal of corrupt, indolent, and unconscionable provincials who rule on his behalf instructed their minions to rig the last presidential election because they knew Buhari had not a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

The assault on the integrity of the electoral process actually started way before the election took place. The president was told to decline assent to a revised electoral bill that would have made rigging impossible. Then the president’s villainous fixers circumvented the law, and even the conventions of basic decency, to remove the Chief Justice of Nigeria and replace him with a malleable, compromised dissembler from his geo-cultural backyard so that any judicial challenge to their planned rigging would be ineffectual.

In spite of their rigging, however, Buhari still came up short on Election Day. He lost to Atiku by nearly 2 million votes, according to figures on INEC’s own server, which they have been unable to refute with the resources of logic and evidence. So Buhari ordered INEC to invent arbitrary figures and proclaim him “winner.” And degenerate, unprincipled, and morally compromised Mahmood Yakubu who has gone down in the annals as the absolute worst and most detestable INEC chairman Nigeria has ever had obliged dutifully.

 That’s why more than months after the election, INEC has not had the courage to share the raw data of the election with the public. It’s because the numbers won’t add up. The numbers won’t add up because they are not even remotely faithful to the outcome of the votes cast on Election Day. Mahmood Yakubu’s venal, purchasable INEC is still frantically fudging the figures to justify the fraudulent figures they assigned to presidential candidates.

To be sure, this isn’t the first time elections were rigged in Nigeria. In fact, all previous elections have been rigged. Nevertheless, in past rigged presidential elections, the winners would still have won even if the elections were free and fair. It was often overzealousness and the absence of restraining mechanisms—and legal consequences— against electoral manipulation that enabled their rigging.

For example, in 1999 Olusegun Obasanjo enjoyed the support of every electoral bloc except the Southwest. His minders didn’t need to rig to win. In 2003, he had the support of every voting bloc except the Northwest and the Northeast. That was enough to hand him a handy victory.

In 2007, the late Musa Umaru Yar’adua, whom I refused to address as “president” because of the intolerable magnitude of rigging that brought him to power, would have easily defeated Buhari without the need to rig. Buhari, after all, only campaigned in the Muslim north, which was also Yar’adua’s natal region. The rest of the country saw Buhari for what he was (and is): a violent, closed-minded, malicious religious and ethnic bigot. So no one outside his primordial cocoon wanted to touch him with a barge pole.

Buhari’s public perception as the personification of spiteful religious and ethnic bigotry was unaltered in 2011 when he ran against Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan also didn’t need to rig to defeat him. In an October 10, 2010 article, even Nasir El-Rufai, who later became his most important political asset, rightly characterized him as “perpetually unelectable because his record as military head of state and [his]insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus.”

In 2014, Buhari had a total makeover, thanks to the same Nasir El-Rufai who reached out to his allies in the southwest. He was dressed in borrowed robes—both metaphorically and literally. Jonathan’s own unacceptable incompetence, which we thought was the worst we had witnessed until Buhari came and shattered his record, made Buhari an option. In other words, unvarnished, un-deodorized Buhari was no electoral threat to anyone, so rigging to defeat him was purposeless overkill.  

 It is also true that Atiku rigged in his strongholds in the last election. I’ve also seen firm videographic evidence to suggest that Atiku’s supporters in the southeast and in the deep south rigged on his behalf, although Atiku’s rigging in his strongholds couldn’t cancel out the magnitude of Buhari’s rigging in the Northwest, the Northeast, and in Lagos.

 Nevertheless, the rigging that ultimately determined the outcome of the presidential election this year wasn’t the rigging that took place at polling booths. If it had been limited to that, Buhari would have lost. INEC outright ignored the record of the election stored in its system and plucked grotesque, fantastical numbers out of thin air. It is the first time since 1999 that a presidential candidate who lost an election by a massive margin, even after rigging, has been declared winner. It’s an outrage.

From May 29, I took a decision to stop calling Buhari Nigeria’s president because he is NOT. He is a shameless mandate thief, the face of a fascist rigocracy, and a dreadful reminder of the collapse of all pretenses to democracy in Nigeria. Even the president’s minders know this. That is why they couldn’t summon the courage to write an inaugural address for him, making him probably the first president in the world to ever be inaugurated without an inaugural address.

It’s also telling that no past living head of state or president, except the uncommonly genial Yakubu Gowon, honored the illegitimate, discreditable charade called inauguration. They all withheld their symbolic stamps of approval from the disgraceful travesty. That’s a first.

Because he lacks legitimacy to rule again, expect the official inauguration of fascist totalitarianism in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. All illegitimate regimes brutally suffocate their citizens who stand up to them.  That is why François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, famously said, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

This is by far the darkest period in the history of Nigeria's democracy. I commiserate with Nigerians who are witnessing the brutal annihilation of the faintest vestiges of democracy in their country by an inept, illegitimate fraud who is, in addition, held hostage by an irreversible mental and cognitive decline as evidenced, yet again, in the tediously rambling disaster of an interview he gave a few days ago where he couldn’t tell Nigerians who he is.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Farooq, wow.

How did you move from a Buhari supporter pre-2015 to such a total Buhari critic?

thanks

toyin

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[Toyin Falola]

Great Farooq:

 

Can you write on followership. We focus a lot on leadership without followership.

 

1. Why do people follow? They probably see something that you and I don’t see. Why do people make choices? And do the number of those who vote not tell us that we may be exaggerating these victories. How can someone emerge as a governor in Lagos with about 800,000 votes in a city that claims to be 15 million people?
2. I write from Nigeria---everywhere, folks want me to assist them to leave the country. Students want to leave for higher degrees, professors want to go on sabbatical, poorly paid say that they can become cab drivers. I understand that individuals want to improve their lives and you and I can do whatever we can. But I know that leaving a country is not the way to build a country. I always ask, why don’t you work with others for internal transformation? Why not develop the University of Ibadan instead of seeking a PhD admission in Texas? Why not develop the UCH instead of going to India? Why do people in developing countries always see migration as the default line? Western powers perfect the means to ensure wealth flow from Africa to the West, we keep perfecting the means to migrate. Nigerians are right to ask me why I left, too, to which I answered, “self interest”, and I add a sincere apology which means nothing to struggling people, to confess. Eritreans had told me the same thing when I pleaded to hundreds of them in refugee centers. How can our people say they want to stay in refugee centers? Thus, I know that my own choice of migration has undercut my argument. I apologize every day that I wake up. When I served on a commission to plead to President Zuma over xenophobia issues, a problem that is still ongoing in South Africa, we were confronted by two contradictory issues:

“Professor, why don’t you ask your team to ask people to go back to Nigeria to develop the place?”. Zuma called me aside one on one and asked me to assist him in pleading to the Nigerian government to stop Nigerians from coming as this is creating political problems for him

or

“Professor, can you plead to President Zuma that we don’t want to go back to Nigeria”. When I stammered for an answer at Durban, I was abused. When people abuse me, it really does not bother me. Human beings must vent. They cannot abuse Zuma or the South African police, but I am fellow brother, and pleading to them created a serious betrayal, as far as they can see it.

I don’t have a heart of steal, and I will get to my hotel and break down. I put up a strong face in public but I break down in my hotel. I want Dubois to come back, I want Nkrumah to come back, for us to have listened to them.

 

Thus, is there a way not to keep your energy on the various options to transform our spaces? Can we just not say that we will keep getting disappointed by the African state? If a man keeps complaining about his wife, why not divorce and seek alternative options?

 

I think it is Mamdani who has argued that Africa’s problem is not yet big enough which may be why a big solution is yet to come.

 

Can we not rebuild communities within their internal capacity to build good community schools, markets where people won’t cheat, good community governance?

 

Can we not recapitalize the poor?

 

Can we not even re-moralize our spaces, building positive values, preaching against corruption, choosing alternative role models. In my own time, a time that is no more, we were not looking unto wealth, unto power, but unto enduring values.

 

If your citizens look unto wrong people, can we develop internal capacities?

 

Can you and I not begin to think of getting back to put our feet in the mud, collaborate to build schools, collaborate to build universities (I have been part of building seven universities-not mine, but for friends), collaborate to produce PhDs in Africa, ideas useful to our people, plead and work that “tribalism” will get us no where? What can we do?

 

I am a very disappointed person, traumatized by the failure of a great country, depressed that I don’t know what to do, frustrated that my hope is dashed, that I don’t understand what will happen next. Thus, you can see that my recent exchanges in public and private come from hopelessness. I don’t want my people to be beggars, beggars to the West, beggars to Western economies. I don’t want my people to be slaves, to use their brains and labor to develop others. I don’t want my people to be called shitholes.

 

In our great country, one cannot make any point without being called PDP or APC.  I was PDP yesterday, and today I am now APC, and tomorrow, Chop-Chop Party! This last one is a joke, as I recently realize over my postings on pastors and jets, that some of us do not see in humor a way to make serious points.

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, June 1, 2019 at 2:37 AM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

 

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

 

May 29, 2019 will go in the record books as the day Nigeria formally adopted, institutionalized, and inaugurated rigocracy as a system of government. In my March 2, 2019 column titled “This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy,”I defined a rigocracy as a system of government which owes its existence not to the votes of the electorates of a country, but to audaciously violent, in-your-face, state-sponsored rigging.

 

 The new Buhari regime isn’t just a rigocracy; it’s a rigocracy wrapped in multiple layers of brazen-faced illegitimacy. An illegitimate, ethically stained Chief Justice of Nigeria inaugurated an illegitimate president who unashamedly stole someone else’s electoral mandate in broad daylight.  This reality puts Nigeria’s democracy in double jeopardy.

 

Buhari (whom people on social media now call “Buharig” because of the unprecedentedly crude electoral heist he perpetrated in February) and the cabal of corrupt, indolent, and unconscionable provincials who rule on his behalf instructed their minions to rig the last presidential election because they knew Buhari had not a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

 

The assault on the integrity of the electoral process actually started way before the election took place. The president was told to decline assent to a revised electoral bill that would have made rigging impossible. Then the president’s villainous fixers circumvented the law, and even the conventions of basic decency, to remove the Chief Justice of Nigeria and replace him with a malleable, compromised dissembler from his geo-cultural backyard so that any judicial challenge to their planned rigging would be ineffectual.

 

In spite of their rigging, however, Buhari still came up short on Election Day. He lost to Atiku by nearly 2 million votes, according to figures on INEC’s own server, which they have been unable to refute with the resources of logic and evidence. So Buhari ordered INEC to invent arbitrary figures and proclaim him “winner.” And degenerate, unprincipled, and morally compromised Mahmood Yakubu who has gone down in the annals as the absolute worst and most detestable INEC chairman Nigeria has ever had obliged dutifully.

 

 That’s why more than months after the election, INEC has not had the courage to share the raw data of the election with the public. It’s because the numbers won’t add up. The numbers won’t add up because they are not even remotely faithful to the outcome of the votes cast on Election Day. Mahmood Yakubu’s venal, purchasable INEC is still frantically fudging the figures to justify the fraudulent figures they assigned to presidential candidates.

 

To be sure, this isn’t the first time elections were rigged in Nigeria. In fact, all previous elections have been rigged. Nevertheless, in past rigged presidential elections, the winners would still have won even if the elections were free and fair. It was often overzealousness and the absence of restraining mechanisms—and legal consequences— against electoral manipulation that enabled their rigging.

 

For example, in 1999 Olusegun Obasanjo enjoyed the support of every electoral bloc except the Southwest. His minders didn’t need to rig to win. In 2003, he had the support of every voting bloc except the Northwest and the Northeast. That was enough to hand him a handy victory.

 

In 2007, the late Musa Umaru Yar’adua, whom I refused to address as “president” because of the intolerable magnitude of rigging that brought him to power, would have easily defeated Buhari without the need to rig. Buhari, after all, only campaigned in the Muslim north, which was also Yar’adua’s natal region. The rest of the country saw Buhari for what he was (and is): a violent, closed-minded, malicious religious and ethnic bigot. So no one outside his primordial cocoon wanted to touch him with a barge pole.

 

Buhari’s public perception as the personification of spiteful religious and ethnic bigotry was unaltered in 2011 when he ran against Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan also didn’t need to rig to defeat him. In an October 10, 2010 article, even Nasir El-Rufai, who later became his most important political asset, rightly characterized him as “perpetually unelectable because his record as military head of state and [his]insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus.”

 

In 2014, Buhari had a total makeover, thanks to the same Nasir El-Rufai who reached out to his allies in the southwest. He was dressed in borrowed robes—both metaphorically and literally. Jonathan’s own unacceptable incompetence, which we thought was the worst we had witnessed until Buhari came and shattered his record, made Buhari an option. In other words, unvarnished, un-deodorized Buhari was no electoral threat to anyone, so rigging to defeat him was purposeless overkill.  

 

 It is also true that Atiku rigged in his strongholds in the last election. I’ve also seen firm videographic evidence to suggest that Atiku’s supporters in the southeast and in the deep south rigged on his behalf, although Atiku’s rigging in his strongholds couldn’t cancel out the magnitude of Buhari’s rigging in the Northwest, the Northeast, and in Lagos.

 

 Nevertheless, the rigging that ultimately determined the outcome of the presidential election this year wasn’t the rigging that took place at polling booths. If it had been limited to that, Buhari would have lost. INEC outright ignored the record of the election stored in its system and plucked grotesque, fantastical numbers out of thin air. It is the first time since 1999 that a presidential candidate who lost an election by a massive margin, even after rigging, has been declared winner. It’s an outrage.

 

From May 29, I took a decision to stop calling Buhari Nigeria’s president because he is NOT. He is a shameless mandate thief, the face of a fascist rigocracy, and a dreadful reminder of the collapse of all pretenses to democracy in Nigeria. Even the president’s minders know this. That is why they couldn’t summon the courage to write an inaugural address for him, making him probably the first president in the world to ever be inaugurated without an inaugural address.

 

It’s also telling that no past living head of state or president, except the uncommonly genial Yakubu Gowon, honored the illegitimate, discreditable charade called inauguration. They all withheld their symbolic stamps of approval from the disgraceful travesty. That’s a first.

 

Because he lacks legitimacy to rule again, expect the official inauguration of fascist totalitarianism in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. All illegitimate regimes brutally suffocate their citizens who stand up to them.  That is why François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, famously said, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

 

This is by far the darkest period in the history of Nigeria's democracy. I commiserate with Nigerians who are witnessing the brutal annihilation of the faintest vestiges of democracy in their country by an inept, illegitimate fraud who is, in addition, held hostage by an irreversible mental and cognitive decline as evidenced, yet again, in the tediously rambling disaster of an interview he gave a few days ago where he couldn’t tell Nigerians who he is.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Great one from Falola.

But, with all due respect, sir, its when we see you slugging it out out in the University of Ibadan, struggling to meet your current publication standard as of 2017 or 2018 of publishing 11 books a year, or surpassing it, as you have consistently escalated your publication record since the two books a year standard you initiated on completing your Ife PhD, that your message will resonate particularly powerfully.

I suggest, though, that you don't prioritize such a relocation. Its okay if you dont do it at all. It might not be worth the trouble and just create frustration for you.Your current shuttling between Nigeria and your base might be what is best for everyone.

To what degree are the challenges of African universities due to  infrastructural inadequacy emanating from the larger society and to what degree to inadequacies in a  sense of collective struggle in a world rigged agst the African?

If the Nigerian political elite, for one,  were centred in nation building, then we would have a sense of joint aspiration.

Are they so centred? Is there any significant sense of moving towards a common destination?

The most obvious agenda I can see right now of Buhari's govt is a right wing Fulani headed vision of Northern Muslim dominance. I cant see anything else.

thanks

toyin

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/3861B0BA-106F-42E2-A98A-ED3844EA242E%40austin.utexas.edu.

[Emeagwali, Gloria (History)]

It is all about prioritizing one goal above another. If you are scared of a certain kind of cultism that you fear may lead to rapture and capture of the entire bureaucracy, then you may pick the rival candidate above another, no matter what.
If you believe that your priority is actual or potential anti- corruption you may go in another direction.
Some people who absolutely disliked Hillary because of what they felt was a militaristic and corrupt inclination, still voted for her when they looked on the other side and saw what they perceived as an opportunistic fascistic abyss of no return.

In the end that seems to be what liberal democracy has to offer, a package of bitter complicated trade offs.The trade offs are not sweet because invariably the electorate on each side may despise the equation it settled for.  Of course there are also the  voters who
may decide  that their priority is a bowl of rice and some beer given the fact that, as they see it, all politicians are liars anyway.

And people also flip camps depending on how their priorities change over time in complicated relativistic equations.


Professor Gloria Emeagwali
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU

---

From: usaafric...@googlegroups.com <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 1, 2019 12:20:33 AM
To: USAAfrica Dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

 

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Oga Falola,

I get your point, but like I pointed out in a previous column, in the absence of strong, enduring institutions, leadership is all that matters. The Nigerian followership is weak, manipulatable, and overly reliant on leaders for inspirational strength. In my opinion, if we don't get the leadership right, nothing else will be right. 

Chinua Achebe made this point brilliantly in his "The Trouble with Nigeria." He showed, for instance, that Murtala Mohammed's personal example caused people in otherwise unruly Lagos workers to buck the city's impossible traffic and make it to their offices before 7 a.m. every day. When Obasanjo came back to power in 1999, people initially took his anti-corruption rhetoric seriously until they found out he didn't mean it. Same with Buhari.

In other words, because of the excessive concentration of power in leaders in Nigeria, we can't make legitimate demands on the followers if we don't first get the right leadership.

Farooq

Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
 

Sent from my phone. Please forgive typos and omissions.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/3861B0BA-106F-42E2-A98A-ED3844EA242E%40austin.utexas.edu.

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

It's an exaggeration to say I was a Buhari supporter. As I always say, my loyalty is to principles, not personalities. I did defend some positions that Buhari was aligned with in the past, but I had been critical of him even before 2015. Here is an opinion I wrote about him in April 2003 in AllAfrica.com, which is similar to this column:

Nigeria: 'Obasanjo Won Because Buhari is Unelectable' (https://allafrica.com/stories/200304280271.html)

OPINION

The commentary below is one of hundreds of contributions to "Nigeria, What Next?", allAfrica.com's debate on the best way forward for Africa's most populous nation after April '03's contested election.

It's undeniably true that the elections of April 19 were marred by electoral irregularities in isolated states of Nigeria. But the irregularities are not sufficient to invalidate the credibility of the elections. "Electrocracy", which most people mistake for democracy, has no in-built institutional mechanisms or safeguards against fraud in elections. Elections even in the United States are often fraught with fraud. It is too much to expect Nigeria to transcend this abiding institutional defect inherent in electocracy. But it must be admitted that elections, in spite of their limitations, are about the only instruments we can deploy to approximate the popular wishes of the people.

The elections of April 2003 may not be immune from irregularities, but their outcome reflects the most accurate approximation of the choice of the Nigerian people.

President Obasanjo's closest contender is General Muhammadu Buhari who excites negative passions in parts of Nigeria other than the far North. Nigerian people may dislike Obasanjo. But they dislike Buhari more. It's simply a gradation of hatred. To expect Buhari to win a national election is akin to cherishing the illusion that the late Bola Ige, or for that matter the late Chief Awolowo, can ever be president of Nigeria. These people - Buhari, Ige, Awolowo and Chief Ojukwu - derive the social basis of their popularity for narrow ethno-religious confines. They have never in their private and public lives made even the vaguest pretences to nationalism and broad-mindedness.

But whatever may be said about Obasanjo, it cannot be denied that he has an irrevocable, infectious faith in the unity of Nigeria. He is admirably nationalistic and broad-minded, and has never been identified with narrow interests. From the beginning of Nigeria's electoral history, the people have always voted against insular and despicably narrow-minded characters like Buhari. There is evidence for this assertion in the consistent rejection of Awolowo at the polls.

It's the height of self-delusion for Buhari to expect to win a national election when he permanently presents himself to the nation as a Hausa-Fulani nationalist. The North made a fatal strategic error to have presented him for a national election. He is simply a hard commodity to advertise, much less sell, in any part of Nigeria other than the Hausa-Fulani North.

If the elections were to be repeated several times over under the free-est and fairest conditions imaginable, Buhari would still lose with a wide margin. He is unelectable in southern and central Nigeria, and the votes of his people in the far North are not sufficient to get him elected.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Abuja, Nigeria

23 Apr 2003

Had Atiku been declared winner and I start to call out his policy missteps, you would probably also say the same thing even when I have been brutally critical of him in the past.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CALUsqTT%2BiAddSR6UD7_TxDG9ipR0ceF%3Dmxd6CX5BFP_z-Rut9A%40mail.gmail.com.

[OLAYINKA AGBETUYI]

Oloye.

I totally agree with your line. Like yours my own heart had been haemorrhaging for a long while. I disagree which Achebe that the problem has to do with leadership in the solitary figure of the chief executive.  Leadership in the more expansive sense of the whole political class, yes!  Leadership in the sense of the civil society movement, yes.

This is why I was so gratified that leading intellectuals like Professor Moses Ochonu has been able to come up with the recent article he posted on the list serve recently.( I will be presenting my formal reply to his article shortly. ( and he once thought we would not agree on anything!)

The truth of the matter as he maintained is that democracy in Nigeria ( and Africa) has to be re- imagined.

It's easy for people to keep thinking of bailing out or blaming the leadership without rethinking how we are mainly culpable for inability to change the system to one in which we MAKE the leadership accountable to us.

As far as Nigeria is concerned we fail to recognize that what was handed down by the military ought to be transitional to THE PEOPLE'S democracy with a NEW constitution based on the reality of post military democracy.

Nothing short of Civil Society going back to the barricades to get a country that works will do at this stage.  How many Nigerians will be able to bail out with western countries putting up the walls against the influx if the ' 'barbarians?

Why weren't people bailing out in the 70s?  Why couldn't my cousin wait till he finished his Masters at Newcatle and quickly opted for a postgraduate diploma so he could quickly return home to seize the opportunities awaiting him?  Why is it that the lingering thought of anyone going abroad nowadays is to find an excuse to convert to a resident abroad?

Like you I share the guilt and had one been prescient  I would make different choices.

OAA.

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

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From: Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu>

Date: 01/06/2019 10:26 (GMT+00:00)

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

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Great Farooq:

 

Can you write on followership. We focus a lot on leadership without followership.

 

1. Why do people follow? They probably see something that you and I don’t see. Why do people make choices? And do the number of those who vote not tell us that we may be exaggerating these victories. How can someone emerge as a governor in Lagos with about 800,000 votes in a city that claims to be 15 million people?
2. I write from Nigeria---everywhere, folks want me to assist them to leave the country. Students want to leave for higher degrees, professors want to go on sabbatical, poorly paid say that they can become cab drivers. I understand that individuals want to improve their lives and you and I can do whatever we can. But I know that leaving a country is not the way to build a country. I always ask, why don’t you work with others for internal transformation? Why not develop the University of Ibadan instead of seeking a PhD admission in Texas? Why not develop the UCH instead of going to India? Why do people in developing countries always see migration as the default line? Western powers perfect the means to ensure wealth flow from Africa to the West, we keep perfecting the means to migrate. Nigerians are right to ask me why I left, too, to which I answered, “self interest”, and I add a sincere apology which means nothing to struggling people, to confess. Eritreans had told me the same thing when I pleaded to hundreds of them in refugee centers. How can our people say they want to stay in refugee centers? Thus, I know that my own choice of migration has undercut my argument. I apologize every day that I wake up. When I served on a commission to plead to President Zuma over xenophobia issues, a problem that is still ongoing in South Africa, we were confronted by two contradictory issues:

“Professor, why don’t you ask your team to ask people to go back to Nigeria to develop the place?”. Zuma called me aside one on one and asked me to assist him in pleading to the Nigerian government to stop Nigerians from coming as this is creating political problems for him

or

“Professor, can you plead to President Zuma that we don’t want to go back to Nigeria”. When I stammered for an answer at Durban, I was abused. When people abuse me, it really does not bother me. Human beings must vent. They cannot abuse Zuma or the South African police, but I am fellow brother, and pleading to them created a serious betrayal, as far as they can see it.

I don’t have a heart of steal, and I will get to my hotel and break down. I put up a strong face in public but I break down in my hotel. I want Dubois to come back, I want Nkrumah to come back, for us to have listened to them.

 

Thus, is there a way not to keep your energy on the various options to transform our spaces? Can we just not say that we will keep getting disappointed by the African state? If a man keeps complaining about his wife, why not divorce and seek alternative options?

 

I think it is Mamdani who has argued that Africa’s problem is not yet big enough which may be why a big solution is yet to come.

 

Can we not rebuild communities within their internal capacity to build good community schools, markets where people won’t cheat, good community governance?

 

Can we not recapitalize the poor?

 

Can we not even re-moralize our spaces, building positive values, preaching against corruption, choosing alternative role models. In my own time, a time that is no more, we were not looking unto wealth, unto power, but unto enduring values.

 

If your citizens look unto wrong people, can we develop internal capacities?

 

Can you and I not begin to think of getting back to put our feet in the mud, collaborate to build schools, collaborate to build universities (I have been part of building seven universities-not mine, but for friends), collaborate to produce PhDs in Africa, ideas useful to our people, plead and work that “tribalism” will get us no where? What can we do?

 

I am a very disappointed person, traumatized by the failure of a great country, depressed that I don’t know what to do, frustrated that my hope is dashed, that I don’t understand what will happen next. Thus, you can see that my recent exchanges in public and private come from hopelessness. I don’t want my people to be beggars, beggars to the West, beggars to Western economies. I don’t want my people to be slaves, to use their brains and labor to develop others. I don’t want my people to be called shitholes.

 

In our great country, one cannot make any point without being called PDP or APC.  I was PDP yesterday, and today I am now APC, and tomorrow, Chop-Chop Party! This last one is a joke, as I recently realize over my postings on pastors and jets, that some of us do not see in humor a way to make serious points.

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooq...@gmail.com>

Reply-To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, June 1, 2019 at 2:37 AM
To: dialogue <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

 

Saturday, June 1, 2019

Formal Enthronement of Buhari’s Illegitimate Rigocracy

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

 

May 29, 2019 will go in the record books as the day Nigeria formally adopted, institutionalized, and inaugurated rigocracy as a system of government. In my March 2, 2019 column titled “This is Rigocracy, Not Democracy,”I defined a rigocracy as a system of government which owes its existence not to the votes of the electorates of a country, but to audaciously violent, in-your-face, state-sponsored rigging.

 

 The new Buhari regime isn’t just a rigocracy; it’s a rigocracy wrapped in multiple layers of brazen-faced illegitimacy. An illegitimate, ethically stained Chief Justice of Nigeria inaugurated an illegitimate president who unashamedly stole someone else’s electoral mandate in broad daylight.  This reality puts Nigeria’s democracy in double jeopardy.

 

Buhari (whom people on social media now call “Buharig” because of the unprecedentedly crude electoral heist he perpetrated in February) and the cabal of corrupt, indolent, and unconscionable provincials who rule on his behalf instructed their minions to rig the last presidential election because they knew Buhari had not a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

 

The assault on the integrity of the electoral process actually started way before the election took place. The president was told to decline assent to a revised electoral bill that would have made rigging impossible. Then the president’s villainous fixers circumvented the law, and even the conventions of basic decency, to remove the Chief Justice of Nigeria and replace him with a malleable, compromised dissembler from his geo-cultural backyard so that any judicial challenge to their planned rigging would be ineffectual.

 

In spite of their rigging, however, Buhari still came up short on Election Day. He lost to Atiku by nearly 2 million votes, according to figures on INEC’s own server, which they have been unable to refute with the resources of logic and evidence. So Buhari ordered INEC to invent arbitrary figures and proclaim him “winner.” And degenerate, unprincipled, and morally compromised Mahmood Yakubu who has gone down in the annals as the absolute worst and most detestable INEC chairman Nigeria has ever had obliged dutifully.

 

 That’s why more than months after the election, INEC has not had the courage to share the raw data of the election with the public. It’s because the numbers won’t add up. The numbers won’t add up because they are not even remotely faithful to the outcome of the votes cast on Election Day. Mahmood Yakubu’s venal, purchasable INEC is still frantically fudging the figures to justify the fraudulent figures they assigned to presidential candidates.

 

To be sure, this isn’t the first time elections were rigged in Nigeria. In fact, all previous elections have been rigged. Nevertheless, in past rigged presidential elections, the winners would still have won even if the elections were free and fair. It was often overzealousness and the absence of restraining mechanisms—and legal consequences— against electoral manipulation that enabled their rigging.

 

For example, in 1999 Olusegun Obasanjo enjoyed the support of every electoral bloc except the Southwest. His minders didn’t need to rig to win. In 2003, he had the support of every voting bloc except the Northwest and the Northeast. That was enough to hand him a handy victory.

 

In 2007, the late Musa Umaru Yar’adua, whom I refused to address as “president” because of the intolerable magnitude of rigging that brought him to power, would have easily defeated Buhari without the need to rig. Buhari, after all, only campaigned in the Muslim north, which was also Yar’adua’s natal region. The rest of the country saw Buhari for what he was (and is): a violent, closed-minded, malicious religious and ethnic bigot. So no one outside his primordial cocoon wanted to touch him with a barge pole.

 

Buhari’s public perception as the personification of spiteful religious and ethnic bigotry was unaltered in 2011 when he ran against Goodluck Jonathan. Jonathan also didn’t need to rig to defeat him. In an October 10, 2010 article, even Nasir El-Rufai, who later became his most important political asset, rightly characterized him as “perpetually unelectable because his record as military head of state and [his]insensitivity to Nigeria’s diversity and his parochial focus.”

 

In 2014, Buhari had a total makeover, thanks to the same Nasir El-Rufai who reached out to his allies in the southwest. He was dressed in borrowed robes—both metaphorically and literally. Jonathan’s own unacceptable incompetence, which we thought was the worst we had witnessed until Buhari came and shattered his record, made Buhari an option. In other words, unvarnished, un-deodorized Buhari was no electoral threat to anyone, so rigging to defeat him was purposeless overkill.  

 

 It is also true that Atiku rigged in his strongholds in the last election. I’ve also seen firm videographic evidence to suggest that Atiku’s supporters in the southeast and in the deep south rigged on his behalf, although Atiku’s rigging in his strongholds couldn’t cancel out the magnitude of Buhari’s rigging in the Northwest, the Northeast, and in Lagos.

 

 Nevertheless, the rigging that ultimately determined the outcome of the presidential election this year wasn’t the rigging that took place at polling booths. If it had been limited to that, Buhari would have lost. INEC outright ignored the record of the election stored in its system and plucked grotesque, fantastical numbers out of thin air. It is the first time since 1999 that a presidential candidate who lost an election by a massive margin, even after rigging, has been declared winner. It’s an outrage.

 

From May 29, I took a decision to stop calling Buhari Nigeria’s president because he is NOT. He is a shameless mandate thief, the face of a fascist rigocracy, and a dreadful reminder of the collapse of all pretenses to democracy in Nigeria. Even the president’s minders know this. That is why they couldn’t summon the courage to write an inaugural address for him, making him probably the first president in the world to ever be inaugurated without an inaugural address.

 

It’s also telling that no past living head of state or president, except the uncommonly genial Yakubu Gowon, honored the illegitimate, discreditable charade called inauguration. They all withheld their symbolic stamps of approval from the disgraceful travesty. That’s a first.

 

Because he lacks legitimacy to rule again, expect the official inauguration of fascist totalitarianism in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. All illegitimate regimes brutally suffocate their citizens who stand up to them.  That is why François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire, famously said, “It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.”

 

This is by far the darkest period in the history of Nigeria's democracy. I commiserate with Nigerians who are witnessing the brutal annihilation of the faintest vestiges of democracy in their country by an inept, illegitimate fraud who is, in addition, held hostage by an irreversible mental and cognitive decline as evidenced, yet again, in the tediously rambling disaster of an interview he gave a few days ago where he couldn’t tell Nigerians who he is.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Journalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

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[Samuel Zalanga]

Yes, there is a good example from Malaysia under Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad to support the argument that Achebe made about Murtala but only up to a point. 

Thus, on another note, we must be careful. These issues are very complex frankly. What makes an administration to work is not just one factor but an intersection of complementary factors. There are too many things that need to work or be in place at the same time and there are in some cases even unintended consequences. 

For instance, it is well-documented that because Murtala Mohammed summarily dismissed civil servants without regards to established civil service procedures, this later led to  the unintended consequence of increased corruption. Why? Because with military rule in Nigeria continuing, many other high ranking civil servants started seriously embezzling public funds for strategic reasons i.e., as a social insurance in case they are summarily dismissed before official retirement age since military rulers tended to use decree and did not feel always compelled to adhere to regular civil service rules. The idea for the civil servants is to have a backup plan in case of such summary dismissal. So Achebe in this case just looked at one aspect of the situation with regard to Murtala's reform. Murtala had good intention but in the Nigerian context, his action created unpredictability and the need for social insurance. And in those days, the government was the largest employer of people. It is probably still the same today in Nigeria, but today there are more opportunities in the private sector for employment than in those days. 

What Prime Minister Mohamad did in his case to increase efficiency is that he introduced (among other things) a time punching machine for all employees to punch in their time cards when they arrive their office in the morning and any time they checked out of the office. He himself did so everyday and they showed him doing that regularly on television. He also directed that all government officials including himself must have a name tag. So when you go to the office, you do not  need to ask the name of the officer you are meeting with. Furthermore, he introduced something called:  "the client'd charter" which means as a client in any government office, your rights are posted on the notice board and if you do not receive a service you are requesting within the official time frame on the notice board, you have the right to officially complain and get a serious hearing.  The emphasis was on efficiency in delivering public service which helps not only citizens but private and international investors. The reform underscored accountability in public service and inspired all employees to learn to excel. Some dimensions of one's chances of being promoted were based on merit and not just years of service. 

Malaysia's exposure to global capitalism and their desire to meet the efficiency demands of local capitalists and the global capitalist system highly motivated the reform effort and once the reform started working, the general public saw its value and payoff and therefore supported the government.  With an expanding middle class because of the successful expansion of the private sector, many middle class professionals preferred a system that emphasizes efficiency and the ability of clients to get what they want just based on established procedures and expectations. It was not a prefect system given that Malaysia too had to deal with the issue of ethnic and cultural diversity. I am not sure that the spirit of capitalism has gotten so established and internalized across the board in Nigeria. Actually Nigeria for the most part did not confront the efficiency and accountability approach seriously as means of increasing state capacity for the delivery of public goods and services. Rather we chose to create more states and local governments, assuming that this will bring the government closer to the people without necessarily confronting the issue of state capacity in delivery of public goods and services which has multiple benefits for a country that has chosen the capitalist path of development. More states and more local governments turned out to be creating more corruption and more investment in paying salaries and other benefits to a small percentage of the Nigerian population employed by the government at various levels, while ignoring the need to seriously invest in providing public goods and increasing state capacity for delivering such goods and services for the benefit of all citizens. 

But assuming Buhari or anyone makes the system works efficiently, which Nigeria really needs, but do so within the basic framework of neoliberal capitalism as it is implicitly assumed, there are still serious questions of social justice that need to be addressed because neoliberalism is not just an economic strategy or system but also a moral philosophy about society. There is excellent documentation of how its implementation in the U.S., Britain and other countries in the world has led to not only widening inequality between the rich and the poor but also institutionalized mechanisms of social exclusion as justice is by and large reduced to commutative exchange in the system. This is why I am very concerned about neoliberal Pan-Africanism where African unity is presumably supposed to take place in the dog eat dog world of neoliberal utopia. 

The question of whether countries in the Global South can transform themselves from the top or above, instead of from below through mass bourgeois or socialist revolution has been addressed long ago by Ellen Kay Trimberger in her book, which started as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, titled: "Revolution form Above: Military Bureaucrats and Development in Japan, Turkey, Egypt, Peru." While many critical comments were made about the book that are worth noting, the key issue about the book that is in my assessment relevant for the discussion here is the broader question of under what conditions do revolutions in Global South countries take place from above? She identified several conditions based on her case studies and application in the book. Trimberger is skeptical about successful mass bourgeois or socialist revolutions taking place in developing countries (i.e., revolution from below), and she tried to address the reasons why. Moreover, such revolutions are violent and so she thought revolutions from above are better and less violent even though such revolutions too do not have a clear pathway to creating a modern industrial society, assuming this is the goal. The question though is: what sort of situations and conditions need to be in place for such revolutions from above to take place and be successful? The question comes close to the idea of many people looking for a political messiah at the top that can appear and through some extraordinary human qualities transform Nigeria or any African country for that matter. 

Often I find discussion on Nigeria alone is not satisfactory because there is hardly any problem of development that Nigeria is experiencing that some country some where in the world at some time did not experience. It is good to identify our problems and then ask whether such problems have been experienced in other parts of the world and at other times, and if so, how did they address the problems and what lessons can we learn from that to adopt and adapt to our specific situations. Adaptation is a key issue here.  

In an attempt to avoid lessons and insights from other parts of the world that can be relevant for African countries, sometimes we emphasize our cultural uniqueness. Sometimes uniqueness is used to avoid drawing insights from other contexts that can be useful for us in Africa. Yet in many areas of consumption, our African cultural uniqueness does not seem to stop us from exuberantly consuming products produced by other cultures that we imply are unique from ours. Indeed, in the case of Nigeria, a way has been found to flaunt the consumption of such products (i.e., produced in other cultures or societies) through conspicuous consumption as a mark of status and distinction. Atleast some adaptation has taken place at that level, even if we do not want to quickly acknowledge it. Maybe it is a manifestation of William Ogburn's cultural lag theory, where change in material culture is faster than change in non-material culture such as at the ideational level. 

At the end of it all, in my assessment, this is a very complex issue that requires interdisciplinary understanding and humility. None of us can claim to have the one single answer or the final answer. There are so many pieces to the solution. And in a liberal democracy, because people are free to hold and disseminate their views even if sometimes others feel they are wrong, one of the best pathway forward is to go for what John Rawls calls creating an area of "overlapping consensus" assuming we are all sincere in trying to solve the problems. If the goal is to solve a problem, then our commitment to finding the solution to the problem with all sincerity should encourage all of us to work in humility towards creating an area of overlapping consensus that can become the foundation for collective social action. To do that, we have to work against polarization otherwise in pursuit of our unique and exclusive solutions, we may end up creating a "tragedy of the commons."  The danger here is as we all know, the market sorts out people into social groups in ways that make each group to narrowly pursue its narrow self-interest just as liberal democracy exploits such division.  Owing to this reality, even the scope and chances of creating an area of overlapping consensus is becoming increasingly difficult. It is easier to divide people to become "tribes" than to unite them even in the western world. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this threat long ago emerging in American society, if not controlled, and so he called for the need for "enlightened self-interest" as strategy for avoiding the tragedy of the commons. 

Given how things are in Nigeria, which is indeed, pathetic especially given one's hope as he grew up, the other day I took to lament with Sunny Okosun's song "Which Way Nigeria?" -- https://web.waploaded.com/music/sunny-okosun-which-way-nigeria-independence-song-f64694

Thank you very much. 

Samuel Zalanga

Bethel University

Department of Anthropology, Sociology and Reconciliation Studies,

Bethel University, 3900 Bethel Drive, #24, Saint Paul, MN 55112.

Office Phone: 651-638-6023

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