Some honest, brutally direct commentary on the presidential election and the violence in its aftermath. Punchy, comprehensive, and frank analysis from Simon Kolawole, who, by the way, was/is a well known Buhari supporter, bucking the trend of his newspaper that clearly was/in bed with Jonathan and the PDP. Unless we begin to analyze crisis in such political incorrect and honest manner, we will continue to chase symptoms and atmospherics. Buhari's behavior in the aftermath of the election was reckless and inexcusable and could have plunged Nigeria into another civil war. Where selflessness and graciousness were required he exhibited crass egocentrism and a bitter, angry entitlement streak that is unbecoming of a statesman.
This Nonsense Has to Stop Now!
24 Apr 2011
Simon Kolawole Live!:
Email: simonkolawole@thisdayonline.com
Finally, I am beginning to question my convictions about the unity, peace and progress of Nigeria. After fifty years of independence and almost 100 years of amalgamation, Nigeria is still in shreds despite several efforts to stitch a country together. Hawkers of hate and vendors of violence always seem to have the upper hand. The sanctity of life is rubbish as far as they are concerned. When I saw the violence and killing spree that erupted up North after last Saturday's presidential election, my ever-abiding faith in the unity of Nigeria was shaken to its very foundation. The only positive I could take out is that there were no reprisals in the South. This, as little as it may appear, has doused what might have become a widespread national calamity. I shiver at the thought of what might have been.
By the way, I am a believer in Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari. I started dreaming of a Buhari presidency in 1998. I supported him wholeheartedly against ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2003 and against Alhaji Umaru Musa Yar'Adua in 2007. But I saw certain things in the run-up to the 2011 presidential election that toned down my enthusiasm. First, I was very uncomfortable with the ethnic and religious undertone to the mobilisation for him. I kept getting reports of the messages being preached against President Goodluck Jonathan by Northern clerics on the ground that he is a "kafir". I was further put off by the use of sheer intimidation and blackmail by Buhari's supporters to force people to support their man.
Most importantly, I was highly discouraged by the failure of Buhari to factor the South into his political calculations. Since 2003, he had never won anything in the South. If you're going to be president of Nigeria, you have to reach out to all. Nobody is ever going to be president of Nigeria by appealing to only the people from his region and religion. In widely published news reports, Second Republic senator and deputy co-ordinator of Jonathan/Sambo Campaign Organisation in the North-central, Senator Walid Jibrin, pointedly accused Buhari's party, the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), of whipping up religious sentiments against Jonathan in the North. It was an open secret. I was so worried because I knew where all these things would end up. Nevertheless, I believed it was overzealousness on the part of Buhari's men, because the Buhari I know is not a bigot. Perhaps it was just politics.
Following the violence that erupted after Buhari's defeat, it is amazing how some analysts have been so untouched by the killing of innocent Nigerians, including youth corps members, but have instead focused attention on politicking with figures. It is so amazing that some are trying to hide behind the "outrageous figures" Jonathan got from the South-south and the South-east to justify the killings in the North. These analysts tacitly support the mindless murders while pretending not to. They conveniently ignore the underage voting and the intimidation that jacked up the figures for Buhari in the far North. To them, there is nothing to be said about that. It is sauce for the gander and poison for the goose. Of course, under no condition should rigging be justified but fairness further demands that you don't close your eyes to wrongdoing on any side anywhere in the country. How on earth can a sane person try to explain away the killing of innocent souls for any reason at all?
It is even more amazing that some people are saying the violence was not premeditated, that it was "spontaneous". I beg to disagree. The violence started in Gombe on Saturday even before the results were announced. The Adamawa version erupted on Sunday night while we were still awaiting the results. Then it spread to other states. I don't want to believe the rioters were so sophisticated that they had already compiled the results by themselves on Saturday or Sunday ahead of INEC's announcement on Monday evening. They were being pushed to kill, to shed blood, to slaughter. By whom, I don't know. But there was nothing spontaneous about that.
Come to think of it, the targets were clearly picked: anybody suspected to have supported Jonathan was put on the firing line. It was not just "kafirs" that were targeted. Even any Hausa/Fulani suspected to have supported Jonathan was dealt with for "selling out". This explains why even the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa'ad Abubakar III, was not spared the venom, allegedly for asking people not to vote along religious lines. A politician friend of mine from Malumfashi, Katsina State, said his house was burnt because he was a PDP member. "The houses of eight of us who are PDP members were selected and burnt, even though Buhari won our local government by a landslide," he lamented to me on phone. A similar thing, called "Wetie", happened in the old Western Region in 1964-65: anybody suspected of working for the ruling Northern Peoples Congress was tagged a quisling and marked for murder. What have we learnt since then? Are we not going backward?
Indeed, violence and intimidation had been systematically unleashed long before the general election began. Jonathan's campaign office in Damaturu, Yobe State, was burnt down. When he went to campaign in Kaduna, his billboards were pulled down by youths shouting "Sai Buhari". His campaign train was pelted with missiles in Lafia, Nasarawa State, and Gombe, Gombe State. Across the far North, people were routinely stopped and forced to chant "Sai Buhari". You dear not say anything to the contrary! A former military governor told me he was returning from the mosque one day when Buhari's supporters mobbed his car and asked him to tell them whom he was supporting. People were being forced to covert to "Buharism" through mob action. There is nothing spontaneous in this. Yet I insist that Buhari I know is not a violent politician. His campaign, to my mind, was hijacked by opportunists.
Why is Buhari so popular among the commoners up North? We need to understand the region's socio-political structure a bit. There is a religious establishment, controlled by the clerics, and the political establishment in the hands of the political elite. Then there are the ordinary people on the street. The clerics wield the biggest influence on the crowd. The crowd goes wherever the clerics point to. The ordinary people detest the political elite because of perceived corruption and insensitivity to the plight of the masses. The political leaders are seen as oppressors. On the other hand, Buhari is seen as an honest person, "Mai Gaskiya", the antithetical politician. He is, to the people, the liberator who would deal with the oppressors. It was very easy for the clerics to market Buhari; after all, he was running against a "kafir" and a "usurper" (Jonathan).
There was this interesting story of a cleric in Sokoto who bought buckets of black paint, gathered four of his children and marched them to the streets with the singular assignment of removing or defacing Jonathan's posters anywhere they were found. In a newspaper interview he granted after he was arrested, quizzed and released by security agents, the cleric said he did it because Jonathan violated the zoning principle of the PDP as it was the turn of the North to rule Nigeria. This is intriguing. Zoning used to be seen as a PDP thing. But as soon as Jonathan won PDP's ticket in January, zoning became everybody's problem. Many of my Northern friends who used to support Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and hated Buhari with passion quickly shifted their support to the retired general and started calling him an honest person. And even though it was not openly pronounced, Buhari had become the official Northern candidate. Many politicians, some of them criminals and PDP riggers, seized the opportunity and defected to the CPC, knowing fully well that Buhari's popularity was going to be a stepping stone to winning elections.
But beyond the emotions of the mob out there, could Buhari have won the presidential election? From indications, he believed he would win enough votes in the North to force a run-off. He had no presence in the South at all. I have said it a million times that nobody can become president of Nigeria by winning votes in his region alone. His strategy, as I understand it, is that if he led with a simple majority of votes based on the North's population, then there would be a run-off which he would also win relying on the North's population. The miscalculation here, in my opinion, is that the North would vote as one. Someone even told me Buhari would win in the 19 Northern states. I did warn Northern politicians last year that the North could never vote as one. It has never happened before. The most popular political figure ever produced by the North, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, never won in all the provinces in Northern Nigeria!
Some smart analysts have told us that the post-election killings in the North should be understood within the context of rigging in the South. If it had not been rigged, they said, Buhari's strategy would have worked. One strand of this belief is that Buhari won the election and INEC deducted 40 per cent from his votes, thereby handing victory to Jonathan (Buhari called it "computer fraud" and said he had evidence). If this is true, Buhari would still not have won the election. He was credited with 12,214,853 votes to Jonathan's 22,495,187. If Buhari's votes were marked up by 40 per cent across the 36 states and Abuja, his total would be 20,358,088, still almost 2 million votes less that Jonathan's. Yet, no fair-minded person would say Buhari scored 40 per cent of the votes anywhere in the South. It was an impossibility. I never saw how Tony Momoh and Yinka Odumakin were going to deliver those 40 per cent Southern votes to the CPC.
The other strand of this belief is that the figures from the South-south and South-east were "sexed up". To be honest, the voter turnout in these two regions was staggering and suspicious. There is no doubt about that. There is no amount of explanation that will make me believe those funny figures from Abia, Imo, Rivers, Bayelsa and Anambra. But, let's be reasonable here: even if we discount the "rigging" by as much as 70 per cent to keep voter turnout in the two regions at 30 per cent (compared to South-west's 32 per cent turnout), Jonathan would still have polled 14,722,489. He would still have defeated Buhari by over 2 million votes. In fact, if the entire votes attributed to Jonathan from his region, South-south, were taken out, he would still have scored 16,376,579. He would still have won. So why the orchestration of violence and killings over a lost case?
And may I ask: how come the statistics experts conveniently ignore the massive underage voting incidence up North? One of the youth corps members who was murdered in cold blood in Bauchi had said on his facebook page that CPC supporters forced underage voters on him and demanded that the remaining ballot papers be handed over to them for thumb-printing. Is that acceptable? Fairness demands that we should condemn both the sexed-up figures from the South as well as underage voting in the North. It is illogical to say every vote for Buhari was legal and willingly given, while only Jonathan "sexed up" his own figures. The best way to sort out this sort of problem is by legal means, not arson and slaughter. Those who attempt to justify the killings on the basis of some warped statistics should have their heads examined.
I would sum up in this wise. One, the violence we witnessed last week was premeditated; the timing and the targets, in addition to the history of attacks that preceded the polls, put a lie to the suggestion that it was spontaneous. Two, the tension in the North over zoning—or the likelihood of a Northerner not occupying the No 1 position until 2019—contributed to the violence significantly; if Jonathan had not run, and say Atiku or IBB had defeated Buhari last Saturday, there would have been no killings. Three, even though Buhari is a good and credible candidate, his failure to command good following in the South, or work out an alliance with the ACN, was a political handicap for him; it was just practically impossible for him to win the presidential election with Northern votes alone, especially as the North was never going to vote in one direction.
Finally, while I agree that the figures from the South-south and South-east were too good to be true, even a generous discount would still not give victory to Buhari in those zones. Therefore, we should condemn the underage voting and forced support for Buhari in the North with the same passion with which we condemn the figures from the South-south and South-east. Justice must be done. Buhari and his supporters should gather their evidence and head for the tribunal. The fact that he lost at the courts in 2003 and 2007 does not mean there is no hope of a judicial victory, especially as Buhari says he has concrete evidence to prove that his votes were stolen or robbed off. Also, those who were responsible for the killings—and the reprisal killings—must be brought to book. The time has come for the government to show that it means business when it comes to protecting the lives of Nigerians. This nonsense must stop.
--
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
No comments:
Post a Comment