Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
As a manner of political speaking, however, ‘renewed hope’ could be a legitimate linguistic legal tender. A government that has run out of goodwill perhaps needs to invest most in the rhetoric of hope. When people have been driven to the wall of adversity, they are the best audience for a message of hope. On the contrary, a people in contentment is the least attractive market for a better, more hopeful day. But in the Nigerian climate of today, to advance ‘renewed hope’ as an agenda of government is somehow mischievous and cruel political messaging. It is a mockery of a nation whose people are going through unequalled anguish to insist that you are renewing their hope. The hardship and hunger are still raging.
In the countdown to the 1993 presidential election between the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), I served on the think tank of Chief M.K.O Abiola’s campaign. Our search for a unifying national resonant theme came down to one thing: the need to imbue Nigerians with hope in the future of their country and in their own future as private individual citizens.
To us gathered for what we saw as a national assignment, Chief Abiola was a pan- Nigerian symbol of hope for every Nigerian across barriers of ethnicity, region, religion and class. He symbolized what most Nigerians would like to see happen in their lives.
Most importantly, Abiola was that poor kid who, in earlier life, had hawked inconsequential merchandise on his head in a bid to find enough money on a daily basis to help his poor mother. Yet out of the anonymity of a deprived and very ordinary childhood, he emerged in later life to become a beacon of financial success with huge amounts what was in those days iconic wealth. He rose in his chosen accounting profession to become the financial chieftain of the lead multinational telecommunications of the time, the International Telecommunications and Telephone (ITT) company. Subsequent complex networking with the then military governments of the time shot him into the nation’s leading money oligarch and symbol of wealth and financial success.
But Abiola did not hoard that treasure fortune for just himself and his immediate family. He spread his philanthropic net on all and sundry across the country. He built schools, mosques and churches all over the country. He assisted the poor and needy with scholarships, business loans, cash gifts and welfare gestures.
His patriotism knew no bounds or barriers. He was simultaneously a Yoruba man, an Igbo chief, a notable northern Muslim devotee and faithful. He was at home with Quranic verses as he was with Baptist prayers and hymns. I recall his frequent – offhand recitations of Bible passages as well as of Quranic verses. If any politician in Nigeria personified the Nigerian ideal, it was Abiola. He was a pragmatic philosopher king, at home with scholars in disputations about Africa and Nigeria as he was with world affairs and practical issues of governance and problem-solving.
He engaged the most enlightened and informed audiences on a diversity of issues from Pretoria to London, from Washington to Beijing and his views were reckoned with.
His private diplomacy was next to none. He carried his message of hope for Nigeria and Africa to wherever he travelled almost like an independent private sovereign. I recall being received at the State House annexe in Entebbe, Uganda, by President Yoweri Museveni who briefly recalled the financial and material support he received from Abiola to liberate Uganda from the Milton Obote and Idi Amin brigandage.
Similarly, if any successful single Nigerian symbolized the hope of every ordinary Nigerian, it was M.K.O Abiola. He was large-hearted. He was patriotic in a very passionate way. He belonged to none and identified with all. He was a visionary of the Nigerian dream and ideal, speaking on numerous global fora on what Nigeria was capable of. He also longed for reparations for the bleeding of Africa by the slave trade and the colonial holocaust.
It was therefore easy and natural for us to christen his campaign the “Hope ’93” campaign and so also his campaign headquarters in Ikeja as The Hope ’93 Headquarters. All the campaign themes resonated with Hope as a unifying word and subject. And we agreed on the central television image of the poor ragged Nigerian who lacked everything as the subject of the entire political drama of the time. Nigeria found itself in one image speaking in one voice, one longing and one source of hope. That was in 1993, a hope that was variously betrayed, dashed and killed.
Fast forward to 2023 and after. Bola Tinubu vied for the presidency of Nigeria. He did not quite know what theme to tie his aspiration around. Given his affiliation to the Abiola phenomenon, he has since adopted “The Renewed Hope Agenda” as a belated mantra for his presidency. Ostensibly, he and his devotees are eager to tie his presidency around the theme of the hope that fueled the Abiola phenomenon. So, here came the Tinubu presidency riding on a tattered flag of Renewed Hope. Almost four years after its adoption, no one in the Tinubu choir has yet told us what this ‘Renewed Hope’ is all about.
Quite unlike Abiola before him, no one has told us how Mr. Tinubu and his political briefcase symbolizes hope for anyone other than himself , his immediate family and his motley devotees. Abiola embodied the hope he preached. We knew the sources of his wealth. We knew Abiola’s former schools, his classmates and even some of his teachers.
Tinubu’s humongous wealth is of an unprintable source. They say Tinubu was an accountant at Mobil Oil. Others say he went for undergraduate studies in the United States but the specific university remains a subject of countless affidavits and litigations. Tinubu was a tolerably good governor of Lagos state surrounded by a battery of technocrats and pseudo-intellectual hacks. He did fairly well. But Lagos is not Nigeria.
Even while he was campaigning for the presidency in the run up to 2023, non one can point at one coherent speech or statement in which Tinubu articulated either his vision of Nigeria or his specific agenda for seeking the lofty office. On the national level, it is true that Tinubu embraced a bit of the metropolitan Lagos by including a few non-Lagosians in his cabinet as Governor. But then given the socio-economic architecture of Lagos, it is harder even to define who is a Lagosian in the socio-economic and cultural melting pot that the city-state has grown to become.
Outside his immediate South West Yoruba catchment area, President Tinubu has hardly shown the kind of pan-Nigerian identity for which Nigerians hungered for Abiola. Instead, Tinubu has literally reduced Nigeria into a cottage Odudua Republic. Virtually every significant and strategic government department is headed by a fellow Yoruba appointee. It is now hard to argue that the Yoruba imprint of the Tinubu administration is deniable. By this nativist appointments, Nigerian are being dragged back into a tribal society, a regression from the little progress that had been made towards the evolution of a national polity.
Whereas M.K.O Abiola was a meritocrat, believing in the best of Nigeria for the best jobs, Tinubu has instead diminished Nigeria to his own stature and diminished the gigantic attainments and accomplishments of the Yoruba race to the mediocrity of his hand -picked minions. Most of his appointees are from among his immediate Lagos circle of friends and his Ogun neighbourhoods. As a result, the sorry state of Nigeria today is being wrongly blamed on the entire Yoruba race. But, what we are witnessing is the incompetence and incapacity of Tinubu’s selection of minions, mendicants and circle of friends.
This brings us right back to the cardinal issue of hope as a political weapon. Politicians abuse two key words: Hope and Change. Forget Change for now and let us focus on hope which is more relevant here and troublesome because it is abstract. Hope is belief in things unseen and unattained. When a politician preaches hope, he is dragging the field with the evangelist preacher. In politics, hope in things unseen is an empty concept if the politician has nothing in his personal life and policy arsenal or basket of achievements to show the populace as the target of hope. Abiola could stand full-chested to point at himself as a desirable goal of those who hoped and aspired to his rule. And he was right in every sense.
Hope is not an agenda of governmental action. It is not a policy, a programme. It has no timeline or measurable goals. It is a non -existent abstract. It is like heaven in most theologies, a never-never land for which devotees forever long but never attain. Somehow, devotees believe the place of hope will come about in their lifetime but never ask them when?
In his catechism and portrayal of hope, Mr. Tinubu has been most unhelpful to himself. The prime pontiffs of his gospel are the least credible and convincing people on the Nigeria political earth. See the present assorted Nabobs of presidential power on parade: Wike, Umahi, Akpabio and the other inconsequential wagoners! Are Nigerians meant to hope that these mascots of unexpected power will one day metamorphose into believable apostles of hope and future goodness when they themselves are unsightly effusions of rot and moral decadence, the corrupting absolutist dregs of ultimate incumbent power.
As a manner of political speaking, however, ‘renewed hope’ could be a legitimate linguistic legal tender. A government that has run out of goodwill perhaps needs to invest most in the rhetoric of hope. When people have been driven to the wall of adversity, they are the best audience for a message of hope. On the contrary, a people in contentment is the least attractive market for a better , more hopeful day.
But in the Nigerian climate of today, to advance ‘renewed hope’ as an agenda of government is somehow mischievous and cruel political messaging. It is a mockery of a nation whose people are going through unequalled anguish to insist that you are renewing their hope. The hardship and hunger are still raging in urban and rural areas. The worst insecurity is still rampant. Innocent people are being killed on an industrial scale by the day for no sensible reason other than the incapacity of the state. Living costs continue to climb by the day as all social services decline or become progressively unavailable. Deprived of nearly every social service that citizens should look up to in a normal society, our people are being asked to ‘renew hope’ with no idea of what the land of hope looks like.
Worst of it all, the apostles of ‘renewed hope’ are back in town in a new season of campaigning and salesmanship. They want Nigerians to brave all odds and vote again to ‘renew’ the mandate of Mr. Tinubu and futile ‘hope’ in his inept administration.
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