Former National Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent Electoral Commission,
(INEC) and Bayero University, Kano political scientist, Professor Attahiru
Jega is formally in partisan politics. What began like a joke yesterday morning
has moved rapidly into an official proclamation enjoying the seal of the
People’s Redemption Party, (PRP) which is the party he has been in the hub of
its re-packaging.
It all began when Prof Jega
responded to a question by a member of the Northwest Political Science
Association of Nigeria Whatsapp platform by saying he had joined the PRP
“as an ordinary member trying to contribute in any way possible to make it a
credible alternative party for governance throughout the Nigerian federation”.
He
added how the party is being reorganized and strengthened in terms of
structures and ideological clarity to meet the challenges of the contemporary
era, all his own words. The response also spoke of intensified efforts on
membership recruitment to ensure effective national presence, stressing the
primacy of people of integrity, patriotism and competence who might currently
be sitting on the fence, particularly in the Ivory Towers to get on board “to
galvanize this effort towards success”. “We must remove bandits and
kleptocrats from the sphere of governance at federal and state levels to
reposition Nigeria for desirable democratic development”, he stated in this
initial Whatsapp message.
It is not clear if he intended
the sharp response to go beyond the WhatsApp platform in question or not but,
in a matter of hours, the message was everywhere. As more text messages
circulated by readers inscribing and re-inscribing the text spread, the PRP
added its own dimension by padding the original text with its own logo of the
key, a visual metaphor representing the party as key to Nigeria transcending
her arrested development. That was a categorical graphic that leaves no one in
any doubt that Prof Jega has made his most political move in life.
As
an intellectual of Political Science persuasion, an activist and a technocrat,
he has always been in politics but never before in partisan politics. This is
thus a completely new and most likely to be a qualitative phase.
Attahiru
Jega, an American educated Professor of Political Science with multiple
locations within and outside Nigeria joining a platform such as the PRP at a
time of national distress must indicate to all reasonable people that a major,
deliberate group political calculation must be in the making.
Should the push come to shove and
a Jega were to bid for power, Nigeria would have got the calmest president in
her history, should the presidency be the destination. The joke among his students
used to be whether he ever cracks jokes or listen to music and which types. But
it has since turned out that Jega crack jokes. And he is most likely to be a
replica of the late Swedish political economist and his fellow researcher, Prof
Bjorn Beckman. According to Mallam Kabiru Yusuf, the mastermind behind the
Abuja based Media Trust who told the story, he was playing a number he thought
Prof Beckman would ridicule as petit bourgeois proclivity but only for it to
turn out that Beckman knew the song and could sing along.
Is
it possible that a Jega outing could quickly acquire its own momentum in the
context of the craving for re-inventing leadership in Nigeria? It would have to
be worked for but a youth consensus for that direction is not only possible but
likely. And a gender applause too, without forgetting a large portion of the
academia, within and without.
For
theorists, a Jega candidature will be a very interesting rupture of the one
sided notion of populism as always right-wing. Prof Jega himself has
contemplated this in the mid 1990s, endorsing populism but insisting we must
watch out on tactics. His idea of removing “bandits and kleptocrats from the
sphere of governance at federal and state levels to reposition Nigeria for
desirable democratic development” suggests he is very conscious of what he said
before and how not to fall into that trap. By ‘bandits’, Jega is not referring
to the violent hordes savaging rural innocence but to ‘banditocracy’ as a
variant of looting/corruption.
Leading the Academic Staff Union
of Universities, (ASUU) against a determined military regime and courageously
applying a technological fix to the crisis of free and fair election and what
that opened up in Nigerian politics would count heavily in his favour. It is
also easy to stretch the imagination to the first time a Professor of Political
Science would be high up there in the Nigerian hierarchy of power. The only
thing to worry about is if anything, local or global, should happen as for
Jega’s party or presidential leadership to not achieve a leap for Nigeria under
him, it will be seen as a proof of the impossibility of remaking Nigeria.
Whatever
happens, a Jega in partisan politics is not going to mean anything less than a
new era: a former critic turned a power holder, a former INEC Chairman becoming
a candidate and a former academic who finds himself a huge field of play to
practice what he has been telling his students!
interventions.ng
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