It was hard to tell how lasting these trends would be. I told myself it was the nature of democracies—including America’s—to swing between periods of progressive change and conservative retrenchment. — Barack Obama

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On March 3, two days after Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared winner of the Saturday, February 25 presidential election, the Supreme Court ruled that old notes N200, N500 and N1,000 be legal tender till December 31, 2023.

If I’m asked, behind the curtain of the cashless policy was the singular objective of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), President Muhammadu Buhari, and other stakeholders of the ruling party to temporarily inflict pain on Nigerians but permanently stake their claims in leadership.

In fact, I believe it was a purely emotionally potent simplification and necessary illusion created by the ruling party to sway the bewildered herd away from ever knowing the unvarnished truth of the cashless policy.

The ruling party predictably knew it was going to be difficult to have a Tinubu presidency without, in the first place, creating a consent for a cashless policy anchored on curbing vote-buying and reducing inflationary pressures. (Remarkably, the inflation rate has jumped from 21.3% to 21.8%!) Then the manufactured consent that Tinubu would buy votes, and the attendant hypocritical aspersions cast on Godwin Emefiele, created voter apathy. The APC was achieving its aim in a crooked and perverse way so that the remaining voters would be easily manipulated and intimated away at the polling units.

The consent became more confusing when the ruling party ‘lost’ in key stronghold states, including Lagos (Tinubu), Kaduna (Nasir el-Rufai), Katsina (Buhari), and Yobe (Ahmad Lawan). Manufacturing of consent is a thought-control mechanism deployed by power occupiers so that they appear to be affected by their policies, while, in the meantime, they are the arch-perpetrators of the anarchy-igniting agenda for anti-people ends.

THE SPOKESPERSON OF THE SUPREME COURT

Nigerians and Nigeria are on the fence since CBN’s governor Godwin Emefiele, the practical spokesperson of the Supreme Court, has refused to speak. The Supreme Court has, by being ignored, proven that it’s lost its supremacy, autonomy and independence.

Cowed and compromised, the court is patently divided against itself so much so that the Lagos State High Court rejected the old notes after the Supreme Court’s first ruling on February 8, nullifying the February 10 deadline stipulated by the CBN for the phasing out of the old naira notes.

To be sure, the court has demonstrated some appalling level of stinking hypocrisy and cowardly silence when it acted as though it was on the side of the masses on its ruling that the old notes be legal tender on February 8. However, the bourgeois-opportunist influence became glaring when the court took to postponement rituals on February 22, thereby leaving the peasants to sad destinies.

Yes, even though banks have begun ‘skeletal recirculation’ of the old banknotes, most petty traders, fuel-station attendants, etc., are still rejecting the old notes. Putting residents in the dark is dangerous and unfair. It is a flagrant disregard for their humanity and dignity. Still haunted and hurt, and to now wait for the almighty Emefiele to pronounce his judgement on the Supreme Court’s order before they operate on a functioning moral and mental compass for their workaday life, the Nigerian people are on the final stage of Buhari’s hardship administration born out of the infirmity of his integrity. Where is Emefiele? Where is Buhari? The people are hungry. The people are dying. The people are waiting.

“The Supreme Court has ordered the old notes be collected. You better start collecting them,” I told a trader. “Which Supreme Court?” He responded derisively. “Was it the CBN that announced it?”

Is this how debased Nigeria’s Supreme Court has become, so much so that if Emefiele does not speak, a ruling has no value?

How long shall we wait for Emefiele, cried the poor, to speak for the Supreme Court so that we know our fate in the land of the living?

OF ELECTORAL AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

On Monday, Abubakar staged a protest, rejecting the presidential election results released by INEC. At the centre of ‘electocracy’ are the elite, in Nigeria, who are determined to fight everything out as long as they are still living and breathing.

Abubakar was a crackpot politician under the Obasanjo administration. He connived with US Congressman William Jefferson to perpetuate a fraudulent business telecommunications deal, notably via wire transfers from the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF).

Abubakar is a fiddle-faced schemer who has demonstrated his ethnic bigotry in deleting a tweet showing solidarity for Deborah Samuel, then 200-level student of Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto State, who was monstrously murdered and burnt to death by Islamic fundamentalists for uttering ‘blasphemous’ words against Allah, practically that he might win the state, and which he did with 288,679 votes.

To what end, then, was his protest: for self or for service?

THE NATIONAL PEACE COMMITTEE CAN DO BETTER

Created in 2014 and chaired by a former head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar, the National Peace Committee (NPC) was aimed at promoting a viable, peaceful and democratic environment in Nigeria. The NPC stresses issues-based and violence-free campaigns towards the advancement of democratic unity and uniformity.

But then, Nigeria is a complex entity that needs stable and perpetual peace so that in our indigenous diversity and entho-religious plurality, we can enjoy peace far beyond electoral seasons.

To say that every four years, presidential candidates would sign some peace accord for the purpose of having nothing but a free and fair election is not enough. Nigeria is far beyond campaigns. Nigeria should not be turned into an electoral ground for the opportunism and adventurism of power on every election day.

To interpret it, the peace ideal of the 18 presidential candidates at the second signing of the peace accord on February 22 was to have a stable atmospheric condition for pork-barrelling and log-rolling at the polls. Obviously, their notion of peace was not pure; it was selfish and heinous.