By Dan Agbese
365Daily – The general election season is now upon us. The politicians and their parties are working out the maths of winning or stealing or capturing power.
The fate of our country in 2023 is in the hands of the party moguls. For good or ill, it is their bounden duty to decide what we make of our next general elections and the fate of the post-Buhari Nigeria.
We too are participants in the Nigeria project. This is the time for the rest of us to put our views across on what should be done to set our country back on the path of oneness. Politics, as the wag said, is too serious to be left to the politicians.
The 2023 general elections present us with some peculiar but critical challenges, not the least of which is that the crass mismanagement of our diversities under the current dispensation has widened our traditional fault lines and opened some other fissures.
This is the time to recognise them, appreciate them and factor them into the permutations for the locus of power at the centre in 2023.
The two major political parties, APC and PDP, are beset with internal problems. They find themselves entangled in the titanic battle of staunching their haemorrhage with minor or major desertion. The inability of the political parties to ideologically build themselves into strong parties able to drive, through their policies and programmes, our national development is the bane of our democracy. Weak and unsteady political parties are grievous afflictions on all democracies.
The real question is not who but which section of the country, north and south, should produce the next president in 2023. The fortunes or the misfortunes of each party are more or less tied to its answer to the question.
Perhaps, we should lend them a helping hand in the absence of a guiding principle through which the locus of power at the centre is determined at the regular election intervals.
The constitutional right of a political party to find ways and means of managing the affairs of a nation. That which it chooses to do does not become unconstitutional by reason of its not being in the constitution.
Sophistry is a red herring across the path of serious and rational thinking on managing our nation and its myriads of diversities in a manner that makes Nigeria our Nigeria all of the time, not some of the time.
The south sees the north and its so-called greed for power as the nation’s main problem. As the debate on the locus of power at the centre heats up, copious evidence would be provided to show that the north has used its sheer number to dominate power in the country since independence to the discomfiture of the south.
This evidence cannot be rationally contested. So long as the south feels marginalised by the north, so long will government at the centre be seen as a patch work of ethno-religious interests masquerading as government of the people; so long as the south feels that it is not an equal partner with the north in the Nigeria project, so long will our country remain an atomistic nation in perpetual conflict with itself; and so long as our political leaders are given to the luxury of paying lip service to equity, justice and fairness without a serious commitment to those ideals in practice, so long will the simple formula for building a nation and uniting the people elude us.
It is time for the north to recognise that it has a moral duty to share and share power equally with the south. Political power is not essentially about merit. It is about what is right for a country at a particular point in time. Power shift is right for the country. The north must let go in 2023. There are potentially great leaders in every part of the country. To recruit them, we must ventilate the system and end power hoarding.
To move forward, we must take two urgent steps. The first is for the parties to accept and formalise power rotation or power shift between the north and the south and cast it in marble. The second step is to accept the zoning arrangement as a means of perfecting the power shift.
It is not enough to broadly rotate power between the north and the south; power must also rotate among the zones in the north and the south to prevent one zone from using its numbers to dominates the other zones.
We can emerge from the current crucibles as an enviable republic and a united people. We must set aside sentiments and face the challenges of nation-building with the courage to use political power as an instrument for the good of the nation and its people. No cricket, of course.
We have enough patriotic Nigerians who wish to see our nation pull itself up from the murk of its past and current missteps, shed its toga of a potentially great country and put on the new toga as a great nation.
Then we can say to ourselves what President Barack Obama said to his fellow Americans: yes, we can. Yes, we can unite the people and build a great nation. Yes, we can be fair and just to all parts of the country. Yes, we can sacrifice our sectional thirst for power to the larger interests of the nation. Yes, we can and yes, we must.
• (This column was first published on September 17, 2021 titled 2023: the north must let go. This is a revised version).