The Looming Electoral Failure of an Apprentice Nation
Nigeria’s opposition appears unable to mount the kind of political challenge that could seriously threaten the ruling APC. Beyond the electoral arithmetic lies a deeper failure: the absence of compelling alternatives, rigorous public debate, and sustained pressure on government policies. The problem is not simply who wins the next election, but why successive governments reproduce the same failures.
| State | Registered Voters |
|---|---|
| Lagos | 7,488,633 |
| Kano | 6,570,276 |
| Kaduna | 4,662,640 |
| Katsina | 3,876,051 |
| Rivers | 3,736,434 |
| Oyo | 3,588,111 |
| Delta | 3,525,988 |
| Benue | 3,057,225 |
| Ogun | 3,037,981 |
| Bauchi | 3,012,547 |
Look at those numbers! Simple arithmetic. First thoughts? Make dem de play de go de go. (Tinubu is going nowhere.)
They’re all working for Tinubu, as far as I’m concerned: Atiku and Peter Obi. The only credible candidate out there, in my view, is Sowore. Him sef fit de operate behind smokescreen. At this late stage, I trust nobody.
But one thing I believe: the APC will not lose the coming elections. Anyone dreaming otherwise de play.
It’s all about hearts and minds. Serious candidates, by now, would have created a narrative that was virtually unassailable, a narrative in which ordinary Nigerians could see their future so clearly that Tinubu’s return became politically untenable.
By now, Tinubu ought to be panicking, reversing his atrocious tax laws, perhaps even reducing the price of fuel simply because the political pressure had become unbearable.
Whosai!
The man is powering on. And why? Because nobody is really putting him under the kind of political pressure that matters.
Not a single candidate is speaking seriously about bringing back the subsidy. Just open your mouth and say it! Create that possibility. Give people something to believe in. Create the political pressure. And when elected, do as everyone else has done: explain how difficult it is to actually implement.... (It's called politics.)
Instead, they’re lining up behind Tinubu, helping him explain why subsidy is gone for good.
Nobody is talking seriously about the tax laws either. Why should anyone pay taxes in this country at rates higher than what they were paying before? Government has not even adequately justified the previous rates, and now it wants to increase them?
If the country’s internally generated revenue is low, well… how is that our fault?!
Three decades of a profligate Fourth or Fifth Republic (I’ve stopped counting) brought us here. What about us? What about our own internally generated revenue? E nor de increase?
It should be quid pro quo. Increase our ability to generate revenue for ourselves internally, and then we can tolerate an increase in your own internally generated revenue.
Where is the candidate who stands up and says, "This is unacceptable. We will do it differently"? Where is the political argument against this inordinate tax increase?
Instead, the candidate who claims to be the people’s best friend seems more interested in travelling than engaging in serious intellectual debate. New York to pray for the victims of 9/11. Washington, D.C., to “consult” with Nigerians in the diaspora. Then Europe.
But where are the serious engagements with our universities: UNILAG, UNIBEN, ABU, UNN, UI, and Ife? Where are the lectures, the debates, the difficult questions from students and scholars about his vision for Nigeria?
A presidential ambition should be subjected to intellectual scrutiny, not sustained by endless appearances and reassuring platitudes.
That is the tragedy of political obscurantism: visibility without intellectual engagement, movement without direction, and rhetoric without the discipline of serious questioning.
Mercifully, he left Egypt out of his itinerary. Hopefully, he still remembers what they told him 4 years ago about electricity generation.
“He’s a clown. An annoying one,” someone said in a Molue a few days ago, before continuing, “Anyway, I will not be voting. Na una sabi.”
Me? I think the problem is larger than one election, one candidate or one administration. The failure we are witnessing is not merely electoral. It is institutional, historical and intellectual. We keep changing the people at the top without changing the arrangements that make failure possible.
That is why I wrote a book whose original subtitle was The Anatomy of Failure. The editors changed it to From Ruin to Renewal. A change I now regret. Because perhaps The Anatomy of Failure was actually the more important title.
Before we can renew anything, we must understand how we arrived at ruin. We must examine the habits, institutions and assumptions that keep reproducing the same outcomes, regardless of who occupies the presidency.
Apprentice Nations (link below) should, in my view, be in the hands of every Nigerian.
My vision for the book was that it might one day occupy something of the place that Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth occupied for generations of revolutionaries - across Africa and indeed the developing world.
Why? Because armed revolutions in Africa have largely failed. The need for a revolution of thinking is dire!
From Mozambique to Angola, from Zimbabwe to South Africa, and from Libya to Burkina Faso, we have repeatedly seen the same basic problem: changing the men at the top does not necessarily change the system underneath them.
Sometimes we change governments. Sometimes we change ideologies. Sometimes we change uniforms. But somehow, we keep reproducing the same failures.
Nigeria has tried its own versions of political rupture, military intervention and revolutionary rhetoric. Yet here we are.
What we need is NOT another armed revolution. What we need IS a revolution of thinking.
And that starts with anatomising the past.
It starts with asking why citizens remain spectators in a political system that claims to represent them. It starts with asking why public failure is tolerated for so long, why political promises are so easily abandoned, and why the people are repeatedly asked to endure conditions that would be considered intolerable elsewhere.
Those questions lead directly to one of the central concepts developed in the book: Boya Jeka.
Boya Jeka, in a certain Nigerian language, suggests: Oya! Let’s go. It is a barely disguised homage to Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga.
The Loya Jirga is hardly a democratic system in the conventional Western sense, but there is something instructive in the underlying idea of an assembly in which members of a community come together to discuss matters concerning their own welfare.
The idea is simple enough: people should have a mechanism through which their voices actually matter.
That mechanism must do more than provide the appearance of participation. It must create a genuine connection between citizens, their communities and the decisions that shape their lives. It must give people a way to identify problems, demand answers and organise around their own interests.
Nigerians, have you ever wondered why, after several decades of war, the roads in Afghanistan are better than the Benin–Auchi road?
Think about that for a moment.
Afghanistan has spent decades dealing with war, insurgency, foreign intervention and political instability. Yet here we are in Nigeria, on a major highway, watching trailers literally overturn as they attempt to traverse the Benin–Auchi road at the lowest possible speed.
How does that happen? How does a road become so bad, for so long, that heavy-duty trucks are effectively fighting for survival simply trying to pass through?
And more importantly, why does nobody seem to care enough to fix it?
Could it be because there is no real pushback? Because the voices of the masses are unheard? Because citizens have become spectators rather than participants in the political process? Or because the representatives we send to Abuja are more concerned with pursuing their own interests than with pursuing the interests of the people who elected them?
This is where Boya Jeka comes in. It is an attempt to provide a roadmap, not merely for changing governments, but for changing the relationship between citizens and power.
That is all a book can do. A book cannot build the road. It cannot repair the bridge. It cannot force a government to listen. It can only present a path forward and say: Here's another way.
The walking is up to us.
And perhaps this is the uncomfortable truth Nigerians need to confront: we are all complicit in our own imprisonment. By omission or by commission. By what we do and by what we refuse to do.
By the politicians we tolerate, the failures we normalise, the roads we endure, the institutions we abandon, the elections we reduce to tribal contests, and the years we spend waiting for somebody else to come and rescue us.
The point of Boya Jeka is not that someone else will save us. It is that we must create the means by which ordinary people can begin to act collectively, insist on accountability and reclaim responsibility for the conditions in which they live.
Other interesting concepts are Associocracy and Bank-ocracy.
I have done my bit.
I rest my case.
Obi Akaraiwe | Don Kenobi
Apprentice Nations | From Ruin to Renewal is published by #BigAgendaAfrica and may be found on Amazon using this link:
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