Great Farooq:
Can you write on followership. We focus a lot on leadership without followership.
- 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?
- 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 <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Saturday, June 1, 2019 at 2:37 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@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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