Against the run of commonsense

BY ARIYO-DARE ATOYE

They took an interesting gamble, “caved” and “lost. At 81-18 in the American Senate, ending the shutdown, there was no common sense in Democrats obstructing the system and allowing it to happen in the first place. I bet the Democrats would dare not attempt another shutdown even when the Republicans’ gain might just be a temporary one – to fund the government just for three weeks. Except it was able to pull an extraordinary one, the Democrats may no longer be in a vantage position to extract big concessions for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme.

Have they also in a way buckled and fallen for President Donald Trump’s bait ahead of the crucial 2018 mid-term election? The shutdown may badly hurt the Democrats. Harry Enten, a senior political analyst for FiveThirtyEight, a website based in the US, had warned about a month earlier thus: “Democrats arguably have more to lose politically from a shutdown than Republicans. They hold a large lead on the generic congressional ballot, and Trump is deeply unpopular. Together, this means Democrats have a good shot at taking back the House of Representatives next year. Any unpopular moves such as forcing a shutdown could lower those odds.” The deed is done.

Circa 1884-5, the world colony officially entered the lexicon of African political affairs. “Colony” succeeded in defining the continent for almost a century. At the Berlin Conference, Africa region was partitioned into colonies under the rule of different European countries; and, for several decades, until independence came from the colonised nations. But while we thought Africa had seen the last of territorial colonialism, unfortunately a new gregarious form has birthed in Nigeria, more than half a century after independence. It is called Pastoral Colony, produced by Buhari-Ogbeh miniature conference of 2018.

Devoid of stakeholders’ input, it was an idea of two men – President Muhammadu Buhari and Agriculture Minister, Audu Ogbeh, who are trying to manipulate the instruments of the State to carve out colonies for cows in the 36 States of the Federation. While more than 10 states have caved in, and pledged to give thousands of hectares of land for pastoral colonies, it is yet to occur to Nigerians that animals (cows) are actually succeeding at restructuring, ahead of humans. This induced pastoral colony by the federal government is a form of restructuring on its own, using the state to carve out territories for cattle owned by individuals and foreigners.

Less than two weeks to the Buhari-Ogbeh partitioning on New Year day, the president had tried to shutdown the ongoing restructuring debate with illogical rhetoric, when he disdainfully said: “When all the aggregates of nationwide opinions are considered, my firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than structure.” Buhari has made up his mind about restructuring as a “no-no”, but his lieutenants, whose plans to retain power or maintain a political hold could only be guaranteed by his bid for a re-election, are however, skeptical about his popularity to win in 2019, without the restructuring card on the table. Conscious of Buhari’s massive dip in popularity, they are out for a second voyage of deception.

But it will be difficult for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to re-enact another masterstroke of propaganda to hoodwink or cajole Nigerians, and this time round, pretending to buy into the restructuring agenda, without which desirable southern and middle-belt votes cannot flow. Do you know that the mandate given to the Governor Nasir el-Rufai’s Restructuring committee was “to distil the true intent and definition of true federalism, as promised by the party during the 2015 elections campaign and examine the report of the various national conferences, especially that of 2014 and come up with recommendations?” The party had validated it lied itself to power with the committee’s mandate.

Back to the issue of pastoral colonialism, it appears the president and his kinsmen may be supervising a sort of conspiracy against the rest of us to please the herdsmen. Indeed, we have everything to be worried about, now that the Defence Minister, Mansur Dan-Ali, has made matters worse, validating the right of herdsmen to take any action: “If you go to Bayelsa or Ogun, you will see them. If those routes are blocked, what do you expect will happen?” It is even worse that the statement was made shortly after a meeting he had with the president. Nigeria is in dire straits; is there any common sense in a system that is ready to do everything for cattle and herdsmen, simply because the president has a vested cultural interest in them at the expense of the rest of us?

I borrowed the title of this piece, partly from a popular book, “Against The Run of Play,” written by a renown columnist and chairman of Thisday Newspaper Editorial Board, my own Egbon, Segun Adeniyi, in which he also exposed some seeming contradictions that are antithetical to common sense and common reasoning in our polity. The book captures what has become the most embarrassing frustrations of Nigerians about the President Muhammadu Buhari’s uninspired government, where he said in chapter nine: “Yet, with almost two years in power, there is nothing to suggest that Buhari is prepared for the office he spent 12 years campaigning for.” This concern has become a recurring decimal of what is steadily crystallising as an irredeemably failed government.

That book also reminds us of the prompt response of Buhari to the unsavoury comment made by the then Director-General of the State Security Service, Ita Ekpenyong, when scores of police and DSS officers were killed in the Ombatse tragedy of May 2013. “But nobody should hurt a citizen of Nigeria and then get away with it, not to talk of slaughtering at least 56 law enforcement agents and then somebody coming out from the system to say such a thing. It is either that person doesn’t know what he was talking about or he shouldn’t even be there.” The question to ask is, now that Buhari is there and he is vacillating over the unabated herdsmen killings, should he even be there?

As we countdown to the 2019 general elections, the chickens are coming home to roost, and there is palpable fear in the camp of Buhari’s APC. The whip that was used to chastise the old wife is reserved for the new wife, and they are very much aware of the effect and brutality of this whip. The biggest weapon deployed by the APC to gain power in 2015 was the social media. The party’s leadership, led by Buhari, did not only fund their social media influencers, they encouraged them to act uncensored, crossing everything that could be after the red-line. Even after winning, they started off using the social media to drive the narrative of a president who had come to fulfill “fantastically propagated” promises. But a few months after inauguration, they went from partial denial of promises to full denial of their covenant with Nigeria; from partial failure to total failure.

Now that they can no longer compete in the social media space with little or nothing to show in stewardship, and because the government lacks necessary competence to solve problems, they want to censor and gag critics from using the new media. “Relevant security agencies should as a matter of urgency tackle the propagation of hate speeches through the social media, particularly by some notable Nigerians,” said the Defence Minister. But Nigerians are unperturbed. They have said: bring it on; you are running against common sense.

Atoye writes from Abuja via [email protected]