Anambra State is the latest epicenter of the muffled revolt and civil disobedience breaking out all over the Southeast. The shift of the eye of the storm from Imo State may have been triggered by next month’s Anambra governorship poll, which the gunmen hope to sabotage. On some apocalyptic tomorrow, the Southeast tectonic plate of revolt may yet shift to another state. But regardless of wherever the revolt manifests next, the federal government had been forewarned years ago that it was mismanaging the crisis in the zone when it took on the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). If the response to the revolt by the zone’s five governors is desultory and unintelligent, to the point that they seem to have lost legitimacy, that of the federal government has been even more chaotic and incompetent. Abuja’s only tactics is either to disparage the zone as a whole, a contemptuous approach the Muhammadu Buhari administration has belatedly withdrawn in favour of conciliation, or to deploy more force. None has worked, and the region is yet to be pacified.

While the revolt is still raging, and gunmen are running rampant in Anambra, the federal government finds itself needing to superintend a governorship election. Its options are severely limited. It has been unable to conciliate the zone, and cannot conceivably do so in the few weeks before the poll. It cannot release IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu without losing face, assuming that the gunmen shooting up the Southeast are IPOB militants. Mr Kanu himself has never been a man of moderation; his release may simply give his revolutionary fervor added fillip. Abuja also tried to flatter the Southeast’s political elite when the president visited Imo State early last month and met minds with them. It has become obvious that the region’s political leaders have little or no influence on the region or its angry youths. As the Nigeria Police leadership in Abuja has given indication, the only option left for the federal government is to overwhelm the state with soldiers and policemen in order to make it difficult for the gunmen to breath or even have leg room on the day of balloting. The election will, therefore, hold; but as expected, turnout will be abysmally low, for the voters know which side their bread is poisoned. It is not clear which political party will gain from the expected low turnout, especially given the gale of defections that has obfuscated party loyalties. But whoever wins will have to contend with the problem of legitimacy, a small matter for disdainful Abuja, and a nightmare for voters who will have to stare down incensed gunmen.

The revolt in the Southeast was not inevitable. President Buhari bears a huge part of the blame. After his victory in 2015, he should have moved steadily and firmly to reunite the country, including his most implacable foes, behind his administration. His age-old prejudices, reinforced by his insular kitchen cabinet and probably embossed on his worldview by the first and counter coups of 1966, prevented him from the conciliation and inclusiveness the country desperately needed after the nerveless Goodluck Jonathan years. Year after year, he equated the distemper among the Igbo as either a prelude to or a pretext for secession. And he kept reminding them of the price he and others paid during the civil war to keep the country united, a unity he now superciliously describes as non-negotiable. Alienated, marginalized, underrepresented, and comprehensively vilified, the region began to gravitate towards IPOB, the more militant expression of their disaffections. Mr Kanu, who was unwisely abducted back to Nigeria, has in a few years become the lightning rod for their anger, the embodiment of their pains and exemplification of their impotence. But he is a flawed champion of the Igbo: unpolished, grandiloquent, imperious, impetuous, and of poor judgement. He has led IPOB and somehow inspired the Southeast youths more charismatically than the staid and detached elders of the region, but he has promoted collateral ruination.

The IPOB and its cousin Eastern Security Network (ESN) have learnt to dissociate themselves from the shooting rampage going on in the region, but few believe them. Everyone seems to be comfortable describing the gunmen as unknown gunmen, though they sometimes carry out their violence openly and in daytime, a testament to the impotence of the security agencies. Beyond holding the Anambra governorship poll next month, the region and the federal government must seek ways to placate the rebellious youths and mollify the seething Igbo as a whole. The federal government’s strong-arm methods have weakened the region’s political elite and strengthened the agitators; it is time they scientifically found the best way to stanch the flow of blood, rather than contribute to it, and defuse the anger and resentment shown by the Igbo. Force may win the battle; it will not win the war or secure the peace. The tactless Governor of Ebonyi State David Umahi has warned of the possibility of raising a counter-secession force to battle the gunmen who are presumably IPOB. His poor judgement demonstrates, together with the ways and manners of the disagreeable Willy Obiano of Anambra State, why the region’s youths have little respect for their political leaders.

The Buhari administration has not been less inept in handling the Igbo crisis. Apart from its deliberate refusal to eschew its long-lasting prejudices against the region, the administration has shown no indication of what needs to be done or inclination to do anything. The longer it fails to grapple intelligently with the problem, the more the problem festers until it becomes the death of everyone, including the country as a whole. It cannot negotiate with Mr Kanu, for the young man is neither respected as a leader in the region, despite his claims and the fear of him and his fierce rhetoric, nor has he shown the foresight, restraint and judgement needed to legitmise the cause he represents or stake his claim as a leader. The administration will also be wasting time placating and smooth-talking the region’s political leaders. They are too feeble, incompetent and distant to make a difference. And since the administration cannot raise a new crop of leaders, as it tried disingenuously to do in the Southwest when it wished to shake off the leadership that helped midwife the APC victory in 2015, it must find sensible and innocuous ways to include the region’s reigning elite as well as resolve the grievances of the youths, be they unknown gunmen, IPOB or ESN.

To do these, President Buhari could reshuffle his cabinet and his security team, appoint Igbo ministers in more visible portfolios, appoint a south-easterner as one of the service chiefs and another as head of a paramilitary agency, and also include one or two Igbo men as members of his kitchen cabinet. Surely he can still trust a few of them. Does it mean rebellion is the key to inclusion? No. Inclusiveness should be intrinsic to the presidency. No future president can afford to alienate a major ethnic group without consequence. Should the president become better attuned to Nigeria’s political dynamics, he will save his presidency, pacify the Southeast, pull the rug from under the feet of Mr Kanu and others like him, and recalibrate and balance the polity. The Southeast itself skewed the federation when it held the levers of power in the First Republic. That led to crisis and war. No sensible president would emulate that supremacist ideology. President Buhari may abjure inclusiveness, but he really does not need to be reminded that no region, regardless of the sophistry of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF) spokesman, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, can win or has won the presidency alone. No region can also rule alone, as the president has tried unwisely and unsuccessfully to do without taking cognizance of history. President Buhari has about 18 or 19 months to go. It is up to him to go out in a blaze of glory or pine, like ex-president Obasanjo in 2006, for extra time to repair the enormous damage to the polity.

Nnamani, Obasanjo’s third term, Osinbajo and Buhari

Nigerian elites are full of intrigues. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, who said there was nothing he asked God that was not given him, plotted third term in 2006 and told barefaced lies that he didn’t, thereby dragging God into the fray. Ken Nnamani, ex-senate president in his new book “Standing Strong: Legislative Reforms, Third Term and Other Issues of the 5th Senate” gave an account of and attested to the insane and money-driven lobbying that went into driving that contemptible objective. It is hard to controvert the senator’s account, particularly how crestfallen Chief Obasanjo’s chief of staff, Abdullahi Mohammed, a retired major-general, was when the plot finally miscarried. But last year, ex-governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu, was adamant that the real hero of the third term debacle was the man Chief Obasanjo anchored the plot on, Ibrahim Mantu, who was at the time chairman of the senate constitution review committee. Sen Nnamani, said Mr Kalu, was double-faced, malleable, and could not be trusted as he was running with the hare and hunting with the hound.

In November 2016, former vice president Atiku Abubakar also claimed credit for torpedoing Chief Obasanjo’s third term agenda, insisting that the former president sent the then attorney general Bayo Ojo and special adviser Jerry Gana to elicit his support. When he declined to support the agenda, he became the former president’s mortal enemy. “My offence was simply that I disagreed with him on the amendment of the Constitution to remove tenure or term limits or what was popularly called third term agenda,” sneered Alhaji Atiku. “In fact, Obasanjo sent the then Attorney General of the Federation, and Jerry Gana to my office to bring me the draft of the amendments to the constitution. After going through, I found out that tenure limits had been removed. In other words, he could be president for life. I now asked them, ‘if I send you to the President can you deliver this message’? And they said ‘yes’. I said ‘go and tell him I will not support it and I will fight it.” Many more people have claimed credit for an objective the supposed sole beneficiary, in his characteristic facetiousness, said never existed.

It is unlikely that President Muhammadu Buhari nurses any third term agenda. Presiding over the affairs of complex Nigeria has become for him an ordeal so befuddling that he probably wishes, despite the perks and perquisites of office, would end sooner than later. But there will be stories about his presidency as soon as the crown settles around the ears of his successor, stories of opportunities missed, of deliberate and orchestrated religious and ethnic undertones and overtones, of reliance on cabals, and of the bitter in-fighting within his kitchen cabinet and among aides. Of course, there will also be stories about the reasons for Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’ volte-face which manifested in London last week when he described President Buhari in superlatives as ‘Nigeria’s most popular, only credible leader ever’. Phew. Prof Osinbajo is thought to be given to restraint of the deepest, most intellectual hue, a man who knows how to nuance his statements, and who can sniff humbug from 10 kilometres away. Surely he has not lost his canny ability to measure words, despite the rumours of his presidential aspiration.

Well, his learned friend and fellow ecclesiast, Tunde Bakare, pastor of the Citadel Global Community Church in Lagos, has kept up his diatribe against the 1999 Constitution and the president. In his State of the Nation address relayed from his church last week, days before he visited the president and walked back some of his fiery denunciations, the pastor suggested that the president would be a failure if he failed to ‘tear down’ the constitution and anchor the renegotiation of Nigeria’s unity, which according to him was negotiated twice before and after independence. But what did Prof Osinbajo say to draw the ire of so many Nigerians? Hear him: “The president is possibly the most popular Nigerian politician that we ever had in generations. He is possibly the only person, who can go into a place or somewhere without bossing people to gather and they will come and listen to him speak. We need that level of credibility to be able to solve problems in our country. And I think because of his level of credibility, despite everything, he is still the only one that can call everyone, and even people, who do not necessarily agree with him know that he is a man of his words…Anybody, who looks at how Nigeria operates will recognise that we are better off in this system, and that is the truth. Yoruba are not better off on their own. Igbo are not better off on their own. The North is not better off on its own. We are better off as one nation…”

Surely his hyperbole could not have been caused by the London air, nor his rumoured presidential bid, nor yet any kind of pressures on him. His words were those of a convinced, eager and satisfied subordinate. He had been ostracized after he famously booted out from office the fumbling legislative putschist, Lawal Daura, a former director general of the Department of State Service (DSS), whose men laid siege to the National Assembly during one of President Buhari’s medical trips to London in August 2018. The eminent professor is gradually worming his way back into the confidence of the president and his team, and may in fact have been cast as a potential dark horse for the 2023 race. But to rhapsodise the president in such giddy phrases, nearly all of them either questionable or wholly untrue, requires an excess of exuberance alien to the mental constitution of the law professor.

Were President Buhari to be the most popular and credible Nigerian leader ever, the effect would have been felt in all areas of national life. In any case, to what services have those presidential virtues Prof Osinbajo giddily extolled been brought? In vain his London audience waited for the other shoe to drop, as the professor sang his panegyrics. The best they got, however, was a reluctant ‘despite everything’ (in the fourth sentence of the quotation above) harried and neutralized by another fulsome expression of deification. In 1958, France’s Charles de Gaulle made his acceptance of leadership conditional upon the rewrite and canonization of the Fifth Republic Constitution. The Nigerian president may lack such depths, foresight and patriotism, preferring instead to flirt around the thin frontiers of demagoguery, yet he has been assailed by a myriad of existential crises enough to convince even the most hardened reactionary that the country is either in death throes or experiencing birth pangs.

All said, in the closing months of President Buhari’s second term, there will probably be no significant changes to the constitution despite the worst misgivings and encouragement of patriots. More, there will be no change in his style or ideas about nationhood. He is as fixed as the northern star, literally and figuratively. The vice president’s rhapsodies will in fact reinforce the president’s conviction about his invincibility and infallibility, not to say his conservatism and reaction, the twin ideological drivers that have pushed the country to the brink.