Can Tinubu’s “Emilokan” Presidency Fix Nigeria’s Broken Economic System

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With its shambles of a national election last month, Nigeria has traversed what might have been a decisive crossroads for the country—only to land in a muddle as complete as the one the country has been staggering through for the last 20-plus years.

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Africa’s most populous country has a new president, at least provisionally, pending legal challenges to the election by Nigeria’s two major opposition parties. But in Bola Tinubu, the victor, it also has a winner of dubious legitimacy because of widespread irregularities—at a time when the country desperately needs to rally toward a new sense of national purpose. What is more, in Tinubu, who is officially 70 years old but is commonly believed to be substantially older, Nigeria is getting yet another visibly aged leader of questionable stamina for a job that should not be a laurel or capstone, but rather the challenge of a lifetime for a creative and resourceful statesman at the peak of his or her capacities.

In a country long dominated by machine politics, Tinubu appears to have won in the most traditional of ways: by rising on the basis of personal wealth and backroom deals to the helm of Nigeria’s ruling political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC)—not incidentally, the party of the outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari—and then outcompeting all challengers not on the basis of a concrete and detailed program of government, but on political horse-trading across regions and ethnic divides, patronage, and, perhaps above all, many Nigerians believe, the distribution of mountains of party cash as inducements for untold numbers of economically struggling members of society to vote for him.

But with the latest election, this Nigerian system—which evolved in response to a horrific civil war in the 1960s, the military dictatorships that followed, and the powerfully centrifugal religious and identity divisions that have perennially loomed as threats to the nation’s survival—seems now to have outlived nearly all of its remaining utility.

That points to the appeal of Peter Obi, the most interesting and surprising candidate in the race. Obi was never quite the insurgent or outsider he was often made out to be. He, too, is said to be very wealthy. He, too, came up via the machine system, once serving as governor of Anambra state and as the vice presidential candidate of the other big traditional party (and rival to Tinubu’s APC), the People’s Democratic Party, in 2019.

But Obi broke with the old machine system to head the Labour Party in this race, and with a competitive, official third-place finish, mounted the most serious challenge to the two-party system that Nigeria has ever seen. Anyone who tells you they know how Obi would have performed had he won is deceiving themselves. It is not even certain that the two old machine parties, with their tentacles in the country’s all-important petroleum industry and deep links to the military, would have allowed Obi to take office had he managed to win the most votes. But I have little doubt that Nigeria needs more of the kind of campaigning and politics that Obi incarnated.

What this means, for starters, is the kind of vitality Obi displayed on the stump, eschewing the traditional disdain that Nigeria’s political barons have shown toward the press and to the idea of actually having to justify their positions and wade into the nitty-gritty of policy. On the stump, Obi, who is not quite a decade younger than Tinubu, looked like someone from another generation: appearing everywhere, seemingly all at once; inviting debate, not foreclosing it; and exuding energy as he threw off ideas and engaged with all kinds of audiences.

The Obi candidacy also seemed to promise a way out of the north-south divide that has so dominated Nigerian politics in the era since the dictatorship of Sani Abacha, a general who ruled harshly for nearly five years until his death in 1998. Albeit without perfect regularity, politics in the two-party system of the post-Abacha era has roughly worked on the basis of turn-taking between north and south, which has done more to ensure a rotating spot at the public feeding trough for elites from the dominant ethnic clusters concerned than it has to mobilize the country for the kind of effective development agenda Nigeria desperately needs. That is because Obi is a member of the Igbo, the large southeastern ethnic group that has been largely left out of this informal system of trading places at the summit of Nigerian politics.

Although many Igbo have long harbored resentment over their perceived exclusion, what I am arguing here is less a brief for Igbo representation, or representation for any other specific group in Nigeria, than it is an appreciation of the hope that Obi’s candidacy seemed to offer of helping Nigeria loosen the corrosive hold of ethnicity and the instrumentalism that often comes with it on politics and deepen the sense of commitment of all to a common national project.

U.S. Hailed Nigeria Election Results While Election Observers Cried Foul
A voter casts her ballot at a polling station in Amatutu, Nigeria, on Feb. 25.
A voter casts her ballot at a polling station in Amatutu, Nigeria, on Feb. 25.
Nigeria’s Flawed Election Risks a Democratic Backslide
A man reads newspaper at a newsstand as candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) Bola Tinubu is declared president-elect after the presidential election in Lagos, on March 1.
A man reads newspaper at a newsstand as candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) Bola Tinubu is declared president-elect after the presidential election in Lagos, on March 1.
Bola Tinubu’s Pyrrhic Victory
Perhaps the most striking fact that emerged from the recent vote was Obi’s victory in gigantic, cosmopolitan Lagos, the southwestern economic capital of the country, which in the lifespan of some readers may become the world’s most populous city. Lagos is the fief of Tinubu and a stronghold of the Yoruba ethnic group, one of the principal players in Nigeria’s take-turns, north-south spoil system. Today, there is plenty of disappointment among Obi’s supporters, but the victory of an Igbo, like Obi, in Lagos is an important step in moving toward a new national dispensation. This should enlarge the sense of possibilities for Nigerian politics in the future.

What should we expect from Tinubu? It would be easy for me to paint a dismal picture of a man dragging himself through the next four years and probably running again, and perhaps winning and ruling, very far past his sell-by date, as Nigeria—which West Africa, and, indeed, all of the continent, depends so much on for its future—continues to drift more sideways than forward. Tinubu has encouraged this very cynicism by sidestepping debates and by the very choice of his slogan, “It’s my turn.” Some elements in his resume and some important but relatively low-hanging fruit, though, make it possible to imagine a more positive and productive period ahead.

As governor of Lagos, a famously unruly city with woeful public services, from 1999 to 2007, Tinubu showed considerable dynamism. The organizing principle of his rule was that for the city to function better, a new social compact was required. The same could certainly be said of Nigeria as a whole today. Its basis for Lagos was simple enough: Under Tinubu, the enormous numbers of people who shirked paying their taxes were made to understand that henceforth they would have to do so. In return, though, the state would begin to do something quite novel: It would begin to improve public services in ways that would achieve public buy-in, because they would be fundamental, constant, and visible.

During a visit to Lagos a decade ago, Tinubu’s protégé and successor as governor, Babatunde Fashola, reeled off statistics to me to illustrate how well this had worked. The former Tinubu chief of staff told me that when the tax drive began in 1999, the city was only collecting $4 million a month in taxes. By 2013, he said, “We are doing 15-16 billion naira ($101 million), and the incredible thing is that we haven’t raised taxes.” Lagos is still not keeping up with the needs of its population, but as I toured the city then, and during subsequent visits, it was clear to me that things were being done on an impressive scale to improve transportation infrastructure, schools, housing, and other kinds of services.

Getting all Nigerians to buy into a civic compact like this and delivering on the far larger and more complex stage of a struggling and fractious nation is a challenge of a different magnitude than even running giant Lagos, and because of the woeful nature of the current political system Tinubu will not start off with high levels of trust in him. This brings me to the lower fruit. Nigerians badly lack reasons to have faith in those who govern them, and Tinubu should start there, by vowing to make his election the last to suffer from violence, major organizational deficiencies, vote-buying practices, and doubts about voter registration and counting.

The election he won came on the heels of some extraordinary political chicanery, after the government withdrew the national currency from circulation to replace it with newly printed bills. In the chaotic weeks before the vote, Nigerians struggled to even access their bank accounts, making everyday life incredibly hard. Little wonder, then, that in nearby Ghana, a country of only 30 million people, 13 million voted in the last election, whereas in Nigeria, a country of 200 million, 24 million did. With it so hard to simply get by in Nigeria, it would be hard to design a better way to suppress voter turnout than the currency-swap scheme, even if that wasn’t the explicit goal.

Organizing better elections is eminently doable and would help mark a break from the murky past in one of the world’s largest democracies. To achieve this, Nigeria would probably need to conduct a national census, which is severely overdue, but this itself could deliver a tremendous boost to the country by providing a detailed picture not just of the population but of living standards and of needs from place to place, so as to better deliver services to the people who need them most.

Tinubu’s tenure in Lagos should have taught him that effective government requires all of this, but that is just for starters. For him to make the next four years a bigger success for Nigeria, this very wealthy man will have to create a new political ethos for his country: that the highest purpose of power in the country is serving the people, not oneself or one’s own.

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