Insecurity, Forex: Tinubu’ll Have To Go For Broke

By Palladium

In one dizzying week, the Bola Tinubu administration has experienced probably its most challenging moment so far. Last Monday, gunmen believed to be kidnappers killed two travelling Ekiti State traditional rulers, while a third escaped the dragnet. On Thursday, the outlaws, but perhaps a different set, also killed another monarch in Kwara State, not too far from where the first set of killings took place. The killers acted like sleeper cells activated by remote control. They seemed to be saying that if other abductions and killings in different parts of the country would not ruffle the feathers of the president, these latest killings should. Hatred for the eight-month-old Tinubu administration is gradually ossifying in the North, while the Southeast has really never been placated, and the South-South remains unsure. With minor exceptions, the Southwest had remained a bastion of support for the administration; but now the killing of monarchs and abduction of schoolchildren may begin to stir passions.

In the same horrendous week, foreign exchange dealers took their speculative lunacy to insane heights thus making Nigeria’s puzzled monetary authorities frantic about the plunging naira which fell to an abysmal low of N1,482 on Tuesday and N1,435 on Friday against the US dollar. Before the week ended, exchange rate for cargo clearance, which had been about N952/$ in December rose to N1,356/$. By last week, the news on the economic front was virtually apocalyptic, sending dangerous signals about an impending economic disaster. In addition, last Sunday, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger Republic announced their exit from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) without the mandatory notice. To complete his nightmare, President Tinubu is the current chairman of the regional body. But there is no need to placate the three military regimes. Just develop the remaining 12 contiguous member states, and make them a regional showpiece. Despite the security implications, the errant three which replaced French hegemony with Russian oligarchy simply lack the smartness to appreciate the implications of their actions.

However, it is when things look dark that the true character of a man shows through. The economic/forex crisis had been simmering for decades unattended to, and the insecurity crisis has lasted for more than 15 years. The crises were expected to get much worse before the country turns the corner. However, because there are really no social safety nets, and the nets hastily cobbled together in the past few months had been poorly executed or even exploited by both elected and appointed public officials, the discontent among the poor may be threatening to boil over to the streets to the satisfaction of disaffected opposition forces. Worsening the crises are powerful elites and regional interests, many of them still hoping that somehow the whole democratic experience could be scuttled or truncated. Clearly, President Tinubu does not have the luxury of time. He needs to act now both to save his presidency as well as to deliver the country. He had tried to mollify the opposition, trodden gingerly over complex economic and social issues, and spoken cautiously to the powerful and highly connected, perhaps with an eye on future elections. Now, he will have to go for broke if insecurity and forex speculators are not to break him. Those angling for a collapse of the system foolishly think that once the process is triggered it can be controlled like specimens in laboratories. They are unrealistic.

Firstly, the president must convince himself that the economic crisis, particularly the Forex logjam, has been handled with dexterity and the best expertise available in the country. Does he have a group of economic experts and advisers, other than appointed officials, with whom he meets minds and debates the dominant themes of the economy? He needs to rejig his staff. At first view the panaceas applied by the administration, including palliatives, have been eclectic, reactive and often incoherent. The panaceas give the impression of a lack of surefootedness. Yet, the problems ought to be profoundly understood and clearly enunciated, and the solutions affirmed beyond a shadow of doubt, regardless of the maliciousness of economic exploiters and saboteurs implementing the scripts of opposition forces. The president must be keenly aware already that the economic condition of the people is indeed very dire, and he has a little time to remedy the problem. Yes, it must get worse before getting better, and it is also true that he is trying to grapple with issues and decisions evaded by his predecessors for decades, predecessors who opted for the low hanging fruits while jauntily passing on the rest of the nuisance to successors. President Tinubu wants to be different. That should be lauded; but he must let wisdom direct him as he calibrates what the people can absorb without threatening the safety of his administration and the stability of the country.

Secondly, he has the more pressing and far more difficult job of stanching the flow of blood as a result of insecurity all over the country. Here he must really, really go for broke. He has to break tables and break eggs. In fact, he has little or no choice, for should the situation continue for a few more months, he will not only lose respect, even the myth of his invincibility will be shattered and the stability of the country threatened. One, a rash of informal state police imitations are springing up in many states in response to unremitting insecurity. President Tinubu should retake the initiative and kick-start the constitutional process of devolving state policing powers. This measure is urgent and cannot wait for comprehensive restructuring deals. Regional emotions are still too fragile and combustible, especially in the midst of economic storm and silly arguments about relocations of departments of federal agencies and ministries, to be added to the far more complex and sensitive restructuring process.

Two, while the state police devolution measure is being worked out, the president needs to assemble a tactical mix of police and military squads in all the states and designate them as rapid deployment forces to fight kidnapping. Previous measures have become impotent. He should also put the legal machinery in motion to enable him and state governors activate a statewide lockdown when kidnappers strike in order to hem them in and fish them out. Had this system been in place, when kidnappers took the schoolchildren in Ekiti or killed monarchs, Ekiti would immediately have been put on lockdown, and squads in surrounding states put on red alert patrolling Ekiti boundaries until the abductors are fished out. This process must not be terminated even after the release of the captives; it must continue until the kidnappers are apprehended. The president should also consider the legal imperative of setting up special courts to try kidnappers, a trial that should terminate at the Court of Appeal, while the cases must be disposed of in a few months, say three months. This process should be applied to Plateau, Nasarawa and Benue where gunmen have continue to rampage and carry out ethnic cleansing. Lock the states down when killings occur, and the government must not rest until the perpetrators are fished out, even if it takes weeks. If former administrations were fond of sending condolences and promising to rebuild destroyed communities, the Tinubu administration should toe a completely different line.

The president should also set up a panel to resolve why big-time kidnappers who keep captives for months and negotiate with victims’ families endlessly could mystify and wrong-foot the intelligence and security services. Are security agents complicit? There should be no excuses. The kidnappers are known to communities which replenish them, some out of fear, others out of financial inducements. The Tinubu administration should be interested in why the intelligence services have proved both inept and impotent in the face of such open challenges to the peace and stability of the country. The president should be tired of playing the rule book of his predecessors who summon security chiefs to Aso Villa when preventable tragedies occur. He should sit with them, formulate ironclad plans, task new and old agencies with arresting the situation, local hunters included, and saddle communities with the responsibility of overseeing their forests. Failure is not an option. It is time to stop the madness. With devolved policing, states should take part of the blame for insecurity. Old measures have clearly proved nugatory; it is time for a bold and innovative administration to find and apply new weapons of lifting the siege to which the nation has been subjected by nomadic criminals and their local accomplices. It is time for the president to fiercely combat the menace and set a six-month or one-year target to impose peace.

Wike’s difficult and imposing dilemma

Former Rivers State governor and Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, Nyesom Wike, will sooner or later have to face and resolve the terrible dilemma that has dogged his path since he opted to side with the All Progressives Congress (APC) in last February’s presidential election. He was a natural Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) man and politician, not to say leader and financier when others played ducks and drakes with the affections of the opposition party. But he threw his weight behind the APC in 2022 when a few PDP hierarchs led the party to renege on its unwritten presidential zoning formula and for effect cap it up by emasculating him. That weight tilting, it must be admitted, was crucial to the success of the APC last February. But that tilting has also put Mr Wike in a quandary, unsure how to proceed politically and how best to hedge his electoral bets in the turbulent months and years ahead. He is a ministerial appointee of the APC-led federal administration, but his roots are still firmly, as far as the eyes can see, in the PDP. In short, he is the classical personification of the idiomatic expression of running with the hare, and hunting with the hounds. How far he can walk that tightrope remains to be seen.

For Mr Wike, a part of the problem is that the APC in Rivers State is still embroiled in some kind of leadership and identity crisis, though they have invited him to defect to the party and assume leadership. Since the APC is still crisis-ridden in the state, becoming a member or assuming its leadership is fraught with a lot of uncertainties. Should Mr Wike defect, there is no proof he can quieten the storm raging in the party. Former governor Rotimi Amaechi is a part of the storm, and he still breathes down the neck of the party despite defecting to the PDP and was outmanoeuvred by Mr Wike. Mr Amaechi’s men are, however, still in the APC and are fomenting trouble and waiting for an opportunity to revenge the humiliation of their mentor. They sense that Mr Wike cannot walk the tightrope forever. They believe that he cannot stay as minister in an APC government and be fighting guerrilla wars in the PDP. They assume, with plenty of common sense, that he cannot have his cake and eat it. But the boisterous Mr Wike may soon discover that proving an idiom wrong is far easier than proving his bilious enemies wrong. The reasons are legion.

One, a titanic battle for the soul and leadership of the PDP is afoot. At the centre of that battle is the party’s former presidential candidate, the geriatric Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and footloose party defector. Alhaji Atiku is a vicious and vengeful political fighter who brooks no opposition, despite his geniality, nor gives quarters, despite his glib talk.

Notwithstanding his age and baffling lack of substantial investment in advancing the cause of the PDP, not to talk of inspiring the refinement and reformation of the party’s essence and modus operandi, the former vice president seems bent on reusing the PDP as a special purpose vehicle for his sixth or seventh bid for the presidency. Mr Wike was his nemesis in the last election, probably the main reason he lost, if the spoiler role played by the upstart Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) is discounted. Alhaji Atiku is eager to demand his pound of flesh from Mr Wike. Fighting the former vice president off while remaining a minister in the APC administration will be difficult for Mr Wike. Indeed, Alhaji Atiku will make it doubly difficult for the fence-sitting former Rivers governor to get a foothold in the party to fend off his enemies.

Two, Mr Wike will find it somewhat comforting that the main opposition to Alhaji Atiku is constituted by the former Group of Five (G-5) governors who broke rank with the main PDP before the last presidential election as well as those who sympathised with the power shift argument which Mr Wike and the G-5 advocated. Led by Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, who is himself interested in running for the presidency sometime in the future, the anti-Atiku group is determined to neutralise the influence of the former vice president. They have labeled him a serial presidential election loser and harbinger of bad luck. In addition they do not see him as an inspiring and refining force in the party, nor do they see him as a committed democrat and ideologue capable of rebuilding the party into a formidable electoral machine. Eager to rebuild a party that has now been thrice defeated in the polls, the PDP governors have had it up to their necks with the kind of politics and ideas Alhaji Atiku represents. Importantly too, the opposition governors know that Mr Wike has no interest in contesting the presidency on the platform of the PDP, and would probably lend a helping hand in their fight against the former vice president. In short, Alhaji Atiku’s enemies in the party, who are beginning to rouse themselves, are many, implacable and regicidal. Decapitating him is cakewalk.

All things considered, Mr Wike is perched precariously on the horns of a dilemma. He will have to make up his mind whether to defect to the APC or stay put in the PDP. But staying in the PDP is becoming more and more untenable, as his unseemly fights in Rivers State are indicating. If he keeps his PDP membership, how would he play his politics in 2027? And if he leaves the PDP, how would he keep Rivers upon within his orbit? Mr Wike is not in an enviable position at all. Not taking the ministerial appointment would have opened him up to a terrible drubbing by the tactless Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State. Indeed the former governor’s dilemma would have been largely inexistent had he turned down the FCT appointment; but his hands would have correspondingly been weakened. Are his friends and enemies underrating his political skills? Perhaps. Maybe the feisty politician is after all more ambidextrous than most people guess.

Credit: The Nation