April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

upbraiding of the country’s corrupt rulers than for a careful and nuanced
analysis of Nigeria’s social and economic challenges and the appropriate
policies to be applied as remedy. The march on Abuja in the early months
of 2010 led by the pastor even as the ailing president’s true condition was
kept a top secret only privy to his inner court, quickly degenerated into a
comical carnival. Charley Boy, the ageing comedian, Nollywood actors, and
the usual Lagos airhead celebrity crowd were in full parade in the Nigerian
capital, mouthing ‘progressive’ rhetoric and demanding that Goodluck
Jonathan be ‘empowered’ to assume the presidency. The ‘real’ battlehardened
progressives were nowhere to be seen.
That the opposition to Jonathan quickly melted away like morning dew and
Jonathan himself moved to appoint Professor Atahiru Jega, an academic
and a leading thinker of the progressive camp, chairman of the
Independent National Election Commission (INEC) was clear indication, if
indeed any was needed, of the deep legitimacy crisis that had taken hold
of the election-rigging PDP and the corrupt ruling elite arrayed behind this
machine.
The consensus country-wide, voiced out in beer parlours and mosques and
churches and wherever else citizens gathered in their numbers, was that
PDP politicians, like their fictional parallel in Achebe’s novel ‘A Man of the
People’, had stolen enough and now it was time for the owner of the house
to do something about this thievery. Jega was the new president’s sop to
this emerging consensus; a tactical manoeuver designed to stave off the
mob while he and his advisers quickly got to work repairing their party’s
battered image.
As in politics and other aspects of public life, some actions can have
unintended consequences. The emergence of Professor Jega, who in the
early 1990s had led the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities
(ASUU) in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Babangida junta
and its anti-poor policies, as INEC chairman was a potential game changer.
Creatively and strategically exploited, the new INEC under Jega was
precisely what Nigerian progressives needed to ensure that the 2011
general elections were free and transparent, and that all they needed to
do was organise well politically and the elections would be theirs to lose.
Jega has a well-deserved reputation as a dogged fighter for justice; a man
of unbending moral principles for whom ethnic politics and ballot-stuffing,
the favourite staple of Nigerian ‘politicians’, is anathema. All that was
now required of the progressives was to unite, stand on a common
platform and make a real bid for power.
That this did not happen, and that the three main political parties that
style themselves as ‘progressive’ are yet to reach an agreement on how to
jointly articulate a common policy platform two weeks to the elections,
suggest that all is not well with the progressive camp. Indeed, given the
once-in-a-life time opportunity about to be missed (and there is not even a
whimper in apparently progressive circles about what to do to avert the
impending calamity), the question has to be boldly asked: is Nigerian
progressive politics now really and truly dead? If it is dead, how did this
tragic development come about? Who struck the fatal blow? Or, if it has
only been knocked unconscious, what is to be done to revive it?
Now, it is important that I stress at this point that these are not merely
academic questions that have little or no relevance to the ‘great game’ of
power politics that is now playing out in Abuja and other parts of the
country. Nigeria is one of the countries on which the political stability of
the African continent rests, but it is also the continental laggard, busy
trying to stamp out ethnic and religious brushfires in her northeast, central