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Presidency 2023: Solution is all-inclusive governance

By Segun Ige
30 July 2021   |   3:30 am
It is important that one momentous outcome of the Southern Governors’ Forum in Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, on Monday 5, July, was the deliberation or decision that Presidency...
Buhari

Nigeria President Muhammadu Buhari. photo: TWITTER/FMICNIGERIA

It is important that one momentous outcome of the Southern Governors’ Forum in Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, on Monday 5, July, was the deliberation or decision that Presidency should arise from the South, come 2023. This decision obviously has different influences – both internal and external factors. Externally, it appears that the President, Muhammadu Buhari, has seriously been double-bound concerning the daunting dynamics of insecurity in the country. Internally, it does seem to be an opportunistic moment for the zone to seize the “days,” before things egregiously get out of hand, on the one hand, and to idealistically integrate, while pacifying, the balkanising nook and cranny of the zone, on the other, in and for all intents and purposes.

From a northern perspective, the governors may well be “ganging up” against Mr. President that “Look, it’s not that we’re exuding any form pretextualised libertarianism against your Excellency, but it’s just that we’re presently not temperamentally suited by the current situation of things. Kabisa! And even our far-flung sociopathic tabernacles and tapestries are straightforwardly incontestable of this fact.” Someone would have thought it was high time the governors, regardless, worked hand-in-hand with the President, especially in the face of a pressing, perturbing, and perplexing evolving epidemic of insecurity. More than ever, however, the President does need more hands to genuinely be on deck, but be it so.

Clearly and certainly, it wouldn’t have been a right and proper time, even at these delicate times, for the governors to be manufacturing consent, on the part of “the bewildered herd,” and be engineering dissent, on the part of Presidency. But, of course, it’s the duty of the “responsible intellectuals” to pinpoint how simultaneously subtle this 15-of-17 states’ overture has been able to put across their message pointblank, without ideologically mixing or mincing words.

But one crucial thing: I perceive that this southern fraternisation could fundamentally fuel more institutional divisiveness, ethnic racism, partisan bigotry and, indeed, “home-grown” Boko-Haramites or bandits, tactically luxuriated in the North, technically transcending to the South. Suffice it is to say that the arrest of IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu inspired the instinctual propensities of Yoruba Nation and, subsequently, the well-defined, well-intentioned, well-articulated alliance of the governors in accelerating their impassioned yearnings; that the clampdown on Sunday Igboho is territorially factorial in the formidable “dezonilisation” empire. The North, in the meantime, seems to be suspecting a “landslide, seaslide, moonslide” synergy in the cacophony of the spoils of power or office: a civic collaboration of “common-ground, common-sky, common-paradise” cabals.

Perhaps predictable is the pertinent presupposition of some northerly-informed Biafranistic group or one “North Nation” – namely the North could be some nation – notably because of the increasing decrescendo of nation-beingness spawned and sustained by discredited demagogueries and more basically because of the mendacious manifestoes manifested (of course ill-digestedly or ill-deliberately conceived by the masses) by perpetually programmed antidemocratic diehards. But be it mentioned that the masses are far “unmassing” themselves in the democratic processes of “provision,” decision, selection, coercion – unmassing, that is, making their very vindictive voices rise to the sky-high against the teeth-gnashing maladministration and malady of political apparatchiks.

Instead of a strictly selective forum, Southern, I would have canvassed for an all-inclusive governors’ forum, Nigerian, unleavened of any form of ethno-religio tempers and tentacles, whereby all governors could in a very democratically, directionally and decisively conducive condition reach a consensus concerning how to holistically contain the Nigerian variant of insecurity. Precisely and practically, we’re hierarchically operating on some realm of federalist hallucination and leadership delusion. But how could we continue to point accusing fingers at the petulant infelicities of the offspring, knowing that they have providentially sprung from the springboard of their bloodliners?

All-inclusive governance, of course, should never be expected to be successfully pyramidal. In news writing, for example, we talk about the “inverted-pyramid” style; but an inverted-pyramid, grass-root leadership style for a sustainable, progressive, directional, and developmental nationhood would perceptively wrack the “nation” in a quagmire. As much as I would not want to talk about the “open-grazing promulgation deadline,” the President at least ought to have been proactive with respect to Presidency arising from the South, asking and/or answering the “nay-and-aye” questions, off-shooting from the “let’s-bury-the-hatchet” prima facie fait accompli.

Ige is a freelance journalist, Lagos.

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