Questions for the Coming Election Cycle

The Advocate

** By Onikepo Braithwaite**

**
Onikepo.braithwaite@thisdaylive.com**

In 2018, I wrote a piece in which I referred to Nigeria as a ‘dysfunctional, fragile, crisis State’. Some of the reasons that I gave for this assertion were “weak and failing institutions, poor infrastructure, insecurity and internal violence (Boko Haram, Robbers and Herdsmen), poverty, hunger and suffering of majority of Nigerians, greedy elite, political shenanigans, high level of corruption and it’s siblings – tribalism, nepotism etc”. The aforementioned reasons that I enumerated, are all intertwined with the failure of successive governments to fulfil the primary purpose of government, that is, the security and welfare of the people and the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy – see Section 14(2)(b) & Chapter II of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended)(the Constitution). In 2020, in another piece, I referred to an article I read in the Financial Times of London of 22/12/20 titled “Nigeria is at the risk of becoming a Failed State”. The Fund for Peace Fragile States Index uses some of the indices that I outlined above, to measure the extent of the fragility of a State.

This deterioration didn’t/doesn’t occur in one day – it is a process. What looks sudden, is almost always the last visible stage of a longer erosion. The warning signs – elite predation, loss of territorial control, collapsing services, hardening group grievances, flight of talent (‘Japa’ Syndrome), are visible years before any single dramatic day.

As a people, Nigerians are not students of History; we forget the past and are usually quick to blame our problems on the here and now. Presently, all the blame of Nigeria’s woes is on the shoulders of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, because as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the buck stops at his table. But, virtually every person now treated as a serious contender for the Presidency or Vice Presidency in 2027, has already held high executive and/or legislative office in this Fourth Republic. Certainly, that the Tinubu administration is very much part of the mess Nigeria is in today, is indisputable – it cannot be absolved, because many of the ills of the past are still thriving today. But, be that as it may, can the other candidates truly distance themselves from what Nigeria has become today? Particularly when many of them were part of the same political family, at one time or the other?

**Insecurity/Kidnapping **

Just as ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, the deterioration of a State can take decades. For instance, insecurity in Nigeria, namely kidnapping – it’s first modern wave occurred in June 1999, when two Shell foreign Helicopter Pilots were abducted in Bayelsa State – a group that identified itself as ‘Enough is Enough’, claimed responsibility.

In the 2000s, kidnapping took a commercial turn, in the South South and South East. Boko Haram’s kidnap of the Chibok Girls in April 2014, changed the scale of the crime and marked the turning point of its spread to the North. Then there was the Dapchi Girls in 2018, and the rest is history – kidnapping and insecurity continued to escalate.

One of the reasons that late President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR was chosen over President Goodluck Jonathan, GCFR and elected into office, was because Nigerians believed that being a former military General, he would perform better as far as security is concerned, that kidnapping and insecurity generally would be curbed or reduced to a bare minimum. On the contrary, insecurity thrived during the Buhari administration, and the number of IDP Camps increased. So, why are we behaving as if Nigeria only started suffering from insecurity last year?

Today, kidnapping is no longer done for a warped ideological agenda or ransom alone; it has branched out to other criminal ventures such as, kidnapping for organ harvesting, rituals and even child trafficking. Recently, I watched a videoclip of a Policewoman and spokesperson of FCT Police Command, SP Josephine Adeh, in which two women, Blessing John and Rose Daniel were displayed (their faces were not shown). Allegedly, they had abducted four children in the FCT in 2025, a set of twins and two others. Two of the children were recovered, while the other two had been sold in Port Harcourt for N1.5 million each – child trafficking. What struck me about the story was that though they were arrested and charged to court, only Rose appeared to have been remanded, and she was released four months later. Needless to say, by 2026, they were back to their old tricks, and were arrested again, in the process of trying to abduct a four year old girl. It is obvious that the short ‘vacation’ in prison wasn’t enough to deter and reform them, as they went straight back into abducting children when Rose regained her freedom.

SP Adeh said Blessing and Rose had served their term. After only four months? How is this possible? Was she mistaken? In the FCT, kidnapping and child trafficking are usually prosecuted under a mix of the Penal Code Act (PCA), Child’s Rights Act 2003 (CRA); Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act 2015 (NAPTIP Act), and the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act 2022 (TPPA), depending on the facts of the case. Nevertheless, whichever law, abduction is a felony attracting anything from seven year’s imprisonment to the death sentence (when the kidnapping results in the death of the abductee), while child trafficking is also a serious offence. For example, Section 27 of the CRA prescribes a punishment of 7-10 years depending on the circumstances, for abducting a child, while Section 30 prescribes 10 years imprisonment upon conviction for child trafficking. See** Nwokocha v State (2019) LPELR-47075(CA) per Uchechukwu Onyemenam, JCA. **A weak State is not one that lacks a statute book. It is one that cannot make the statute book bite.

If Blessing and Rose were charged under the CRA or the NAPTIP Act, those offences are ordinarily bailable. That a repeat child-trafficking allegation produced a short remand and a return to the same trade, is the point. Lack of accountability, is one of the hallmarks of a weak State.

Economy

When oil prices crashed in the 1980s, Nigeria experienced an economic downturn. With the IMF-backed Structural Adjustment Programme, growth returned in the late 1980s. Under the regime of General Sani Abacha however, the deterioration of institutions deepened, sanctions bit, investment fled, and inflation spiked (it reached around 70% in the mid-1990s). Poverty deepened. One often-cited estimate is that, the share of people on less than $1 a day rose from about 36% in 1970 (just over 20 million people with a population of approximately 56 million), to about 70% by 2000 (over 88 million people with a population of approximately 127 million). By the inception of civil rule, according to the estimates, majority of Nigerians were living on less than a $1 a day!

While the economy appeared to fare better between 2000 and 2014, so much so that Nigeria looked like Africa’s largest economy, there were missed opportunities. Buffers were not rebuilt, and by 2014, the Excess Crude Account established by President Olusegun Obasanjo, GCFR, was being drawn down; oil theft and sabotage resulted in a decrease in oil production; fuel subsidy costs rose and poverty stayed high. Between mid-2014 to early 2016, Brent crude fell from $112 p.b. toward $30 p.b.

Between 2015 and 2016, Nigeria suffered its first recession, in about a quarter of a century. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, and Nigeria suffered another recession, also because of a slump in oil prices. The ‘removal’ of the fuel subsidy and the foreign exchange correction in 2023, brought more hardship on Nigerians. The truth is that, Nigeria’s economy started to decline in the 1970s when oil displaced the old non-oil production base, instead of existing side by side and complementing it, and conjuncturally, in mid-2014, when the last high-growth oil cycle ended and was not replaced. Corruption which also didn’t start today, but has only escalated over the years (see Sections 15(5) & 16 of the Constitution), hasn’t helped matters.

Fragility Needn’t be Destiny

Fragility doesn’t have to be a death sentence. Crossing from weakness to failure or success, is a decision, it is based on choices. A State can stay weak without collapsing, and it can also recover, even though the process of recovery is difficult. Just as deterioration doesn’t occur in one day, so also recovery doesn’t happen magically, it cannot happen in one fell swoop with a singular reform. It is cumulative. And, anybody that claims that it can, is being economical with the truth.

Therefore, as we go into the next cycle of elections, we must not only ‘shine our eyes’, but open our ears properly to listen to candidates and their manifestos. The bitter truth is that, anybody, including the incumbent, who promises an immediate reversal in our circumstances, is deceiving us. Instead of raining abuses and digging up dirt on each other (as if any of them has a pristine record), Nigerians want to see candidates show us their practical recovery plans for the country, beyond sloganeering.

**Pertinent Campaign Questions **

How do they plan to stop organised killing and break the business of violence? How do they plan to reset the fiscal and monetary floor? How do they plan to chase out illegal miners and their local collaborators, and harness our resources for the benefit of Nigeria and Nigerians? What will be done to make government accountable? What will be done to enhance the independence of the Judiciary and uphold the rule of law? What will be done in the area of electoral reform, so that elections will no longer be about who has the deepest pockets, but more about the brightest and the best? What will be done about providing infrastructure, and at the same time, stopping the people from destroying same by scavenging? What will be done about the deep level of poverty? What will be done about out-of-school children? In short, how do they intend to achieve the goals set out in Chapter II of the Constitution, as they relate to any political office a candidate may be vying for?

**Conclusion **

Recovery, like decline, is cumulative. It does not arrive with a new oath of office, a single subsidy decision, or a slogan. It arrives when the State again monopolises force in fact, and not in communiqués; when a child-trafficker who has already sold two children does not treat four months in custody as a cost of doing business; when public office ceases to be the most reliable path to private wealth; and when those who seek 2027 can say, without comedy, what they did with the years they already held.

Section 14(2)(b) is not a campaign decoration. It is the Constitution’s own statement of why the State exists: the security and welfare of the people. Chapter II sets out the programme. Neither provision began in 2023, and neither will expire in 2027. The buck stops with whoever sits at the table now. It also sat with those who sat there before.

So, the question for the coming cycle is not who can abuse the incumbent most fluently, nor who can promise an overnight resurrection; it is who will treat fragility as a decision that can still be reversed — with a plan for security that breaks the business of violence, a fiscal floor that does not assume $100 oil, a justice system that can hold the powerful and the petty, elections that test merit rather than the depth of the war chest, and the honesty to admit that a crisis assembled over decades will only be dismantled over years.

A people who will not read their own history, will keep mistaking the last chapter for the whole book!