Published 3rd Apr, 2023

By Ademola Adesola

Many Nigerians are seasonal optimists. This is especially true of the disproportionate majority forced to contend with the avoidable and ruthless forces of economic hardship and avalanches of misgovernance and injustice within the country.

Though beleaguered, their optimism is rekindled each election cycle by the hope that their newly elected rulers will reverse the persistent reality of preventable sufferings and positively transform the country.

The same hope resurfaced with the recently concluded prohibitively expensive, shoddy, and divisive general elections. Some have expressed optimism that the president-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu (BAT), is the ruler who will reform the country.

For these individuals, BAT’s command of the lucrative economic sectors in Lagos State, where he was a two-time governor and reputed for installing three successors, is evidence of the transformative leadership ability that he would bring to administering the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Like most things Nigerian, the erupting optimism this group maintains is an inverted kind. It is an inversion of the maintenance of hopefulness, indistinguishable from what Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe refers to as the cargo cult mentality, a belief by backward people that someday, without any effort on their part, a fairy ship will dock in their harbour laden with everything they have ever desired.

This mentality often leads those plagued by it to think that they have no other roles to play after voting for the leaders of their convictions. It abjures critical thinking and accepts everything at face value. For example, it leads them to agree unquestioningly to the unsubstantiated assertion that the president-elect has transformed Lagos State into an El Dorado while blinding them to the rebuking contradiction inherent in BAT’s preference for accessing healthcare in a foreign country rather than in the state he cultivated into a modern wonder.

If BAT’s self-enriching and crony-empowering style of leadership, how it is sustained, and the rhetoric of his campaigns are anything to go by, there is no doubt that the optimism expressed in anticipation of his administration at the federal level is a misplaced, barren, and escapist disposition. BAT’s administration will privilege the anti-public progress formulas that have served and aided him from Lagos to Abuja. After all, no one dispenses with a working formula. He will not kibosh his wondrously wrought propaganda, garish but stylish looting of the exchequer, or careful exhibition of the symbolism of leadership at the expense of its substance, among other appealing but dehumanising performances.

The BAT media claque that has come into existence since 1998 is a savvy veteran of misinformation and propaganda. It knows how to contrive misinformation to promote its master’s cause. It is effective in laundering the unsightly image of its creator. Why does it appear as if the BAT, whose parentage is unclear, who was involved in drug dealing, and who has unresolved question marks on anything about him, is not the one about to become Nigeria’s fifth civilian president since 1999? Why has the man suddenly become unassociated in many circles with the indescribable failures of the Buhari regime? Does anyone remember the cant about BAT being the first to speak for the masses when the cash-confiscation policy of the government formed by his All Progressives Congress party tightened the noose of misery around their (the masses’) necks? That is one self-focused formula BAT will not dispense with as president. His government will engineer suffering, and it will be the first to spit fire about punishing those who subject Nigerians to discomfort.

Some would remember how most of the drivels candidate BAT spewed on the hustings were refined in the furnaces of varied spokespersons and rationalized as the insightful renditions of an uncommon genius. In repudiation of what some have dubbed cognitive impairment, some members of the BAT propagandist formation said insomnia should be blamed for their principal’s repeated babbles. Another member of the BAT syndicate indicated he was addressing malformed brains when he prattled that the famous cash-stuffed bullion vans that were spotted in his leader’s Bourdillon enclave a few years ago arrived at that address by mistake. Those individuals will be part of the BAT administration and they will have more room and money to keep their propaganda machine more functional to the detriment of the public.

Nigerians who have never heard about the infamous Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party under the rulership of Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945, will know that man and all that he did with information through the activities of the BAT media squad.

The BAT presidency propaganda clique will be so effective that Nigerians who went to bed on empty stomachs will wake up to learn and accept that they had sumptuous meals for dinner. Any attempts to ask legitimate questions about the workings of the BAT regime will be met with the brutal force of manipulated information and fact-muddling press releases. Journalists who have once (or on multiple occasions) taken “transport fares” from the administration’s media handlers will be profiled as scrupulous thieves when they put the government’s feet to the fire of scrutiny.

In this kind of governance milieu, verifiable good governance becomes insignificant. Anyone who asks critical questions becomes a criminal. Development will become a flower vase; it will not be easily accessible. Many Nigerians will get to know that they are doing very well through press statements, primetime TV and radio appearances by governmental principalities, and through meticulously scripted presidential speeches. The keyboard mobsters on the communication highways of social media will effusively celebrate the tokenistic and imaginary accomplishments of the BAT presidency. All these would not be completely strange, for no one hears the truth of anything from those who earn their living by distorting facts and upending cherished values.

If Nigerians think the draconian and unfeeling Buhari is unpresidential in many respects, BAT will not be branded that way. There will be surfeits of presidential acting and speaking, albeit in the service of the self to ward off sustained attention to the lilliputian feats and operations of the administration. Stoppable disasters will happen, and the president will show up thereafter. Unforced errors with devastating human consequences will occur, and the head of the government will speak narcissistically and presidentially to them. Tardiness and inaction will time and again have free rein; what the country will get as attention will be BAT acting presidentially in a hollow sense. The statecraft that will define the BAT presidency will be such that it prioritises mere showmanship, ineffective presidential acting, and self-validation over any concrete, demonstrable improvement of Nigerian human conditions. Where Buhari was unable to transition into the democrat his campaign said he had become, BAT will leverage more and more on his contrived democratic personage. His presidency will be a beehive of entertaining happenings, as opposed to the graveyard dullness of Mr. Buhari’s presidency. He and his team will whip the masses with the poisonous scorpion of “benevolent autocracy,” but in acting presidential, the sufferers will be talked into accepting that inversion as a variant of liberal democracy. BAT and his team will reference the strange American democratic system. Something Trumpian, although recreated, will characterise the BAT administration.

In presidential speeches, biblical injustices will assume the hue of fairness and equity. The poor health condition that accompanies the president into office will be depicted as a consequence of the many accumulated sleepless nights in the service of Nigerians. If acting and being seen as presidential means subjecting the populace to more hardship, it is unlikely that the BAT government will be hesitant. In other words, nothing will be too sacred to be devalued in order to realise the exhibitionism of acting and seeming presidential.

Minds beholden to the malignant fiction (to borrow Achebe’s phrase) of BAT as an ethical, modern, and strategic leader may wonder why this piece is not, for example, about “thoughts on possible progress” during the BAT-coming era. If the best of BAT’s leadership is the Lagos of today, it is a waste of time to ink thoughts about how his presidency will bode well for the country. I do not wish to be understood as crooning the tune that no good will come from the BAT administration. Even the worst regimes have some costly successes.

To be clear, whatever success and progress will break forth from BAT’s government will be more in speeches and symbolism than in undeniable reality. Only friends, family members, and those within the circles of BAT’s expanded fiefdom and their hangers-on will be beneficiaries of what will be verbally rendered as sound, people-oriented governance. It is the scraps from those lots that the masses will be reminded to celebrate as dividends from the stable of an ingenious, smart, and visionary city boy.

The country’s presidency under BAT and his crew would be nothing but a bigger space for preserving cultivated, people-impoverishing habits. May I stress the point again: The BAT administration will not discard the methods that have proven useful in a previous governmental existence, particularly in Lagos. And it is for that reason that the government will be incapable of delivering the greatest good for the greatest number of the people. Nation-building is not within the ken of parasitic beings.

But will the exploited and impoverished Nigerians see that it is not for lack of hope that they do not live as dignified humans and then deploy the power they have during the BAT administration? Nigerians must recognise that no democratic process can thrive when the masses exist only during elections.

Dr. Ademola Adesola is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures, Mount Royal University, Alberta, Canada.

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