Interim National Government: One Insidious Call Too Many

The first time a set of people sat down and decided that they needed to go outside the law and constitution of the Federal Republic Nigeria to appoint a government, thus illegally, for the good people of Nigeria, it was because they had power at the Centre, they were discredited and they had lost legitimacy. In short, this set had become impostors and were prisoners of their own transgression and guilt.

And that first attempt to impose a so-called Interim National Government on Nigerians failed spectacularly. The leaders who were the architects of the act of political betrayal of Nigerians became infamous. Lives, of innocent activists and a few of the guilty scoundrels, were lost in the crisis. Nigeria as a country lost face, stature in the comity of nations, time in her journey to true democratic development and her economy suffered in the throes of a pariah nation.

So why would anyone suggest today that an Interim National Government, which was really a “national embarrassment” of a chapter in our history of nationhood, has any role to play in any need for any kind of political redress?

History could excuse the actors of that inglorious ING drama for they knew not what civil governance was.  And they were not schooled in the finesse of true government legitimacy. If they were not confused by the power they were used to wielding, through the barrel of the gun, they would not have conspired to foist a government of their choice of opulent and random fellows on Nigeria, and assumed that it could replace the majority votes of Nigerians to elect their leaders. They –the actors- were only just military and they were led by a serial coupist in the person of General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida.

The general dribbled himself out of options after annulling the June 12 elections. While being disgraced out of the illegal headship of the nation, he contrived a face-saving notion of “stepping aside” for an Interim National Government on August 23, 1993. That dubious experiment lasted just over two months till November 1993 when General Sanni Abacha staged another coup, taking full advantage of the ING’s weakness and falsity.

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Again, what excuse could any right-thinking person has today for seeing an illegal contraption as notorious as the ING as a solution to any political misunderstanding; even if there were to be one? Why would any group resort to such a foible? ING was an error of a leadership call and judgment that had only happened once and burned the nation quite badly.   

Essentially, why would anyone suggest that Nigeria can set aside an election in which over 25 million Nigerians voted, in which over 1.5 million regular and ad hoc staff of the electoral commission labored, and over N300 billion tax payers’ money and treasury haul was spent?

An election that “For instance, the official release of results so far showed that, President Buhari lost Katsina, Bola Tinubu lost Lagos, El-Rufai lost Kaduna, Ganduje lost Kano, Lalong lost Plateau. All these states are strongholds of the Ruling Political Party! How else can a process be free, fair, and transparent?” to quote General Olu Bajowa in his flay of Obasanjo’s call for its cancellation.

All because an election has been won and lost –the most natural consequence of any form of contest.

How do I know that the proponents of this idea are congenitally lazy and their mind befuddled by their questionable privileges of the past? Because, the president they expect to make such an ignoble call, annul the result of a general election, had himself lost the presidential election on three past occasions and went to court to challenge the result when he was not satisfied.

The president in charge today followed the due process when he was a presidential candidate and lost in three previous elections. He used the legal process each time and bided his time to contest again and again in following electoral seasons. How would normal people, not blinded by their greed for power and taste for corner-cutting, imagine that such a president would write his name into ignominy by annulling an election contested, won and lost in a peaceful process.

Another intimidating irony of the ING call is that the main juggernaut of the fierce fight against the ING when it first occurred, who made sure that it never had a day of healthy breaths in its short shameful life, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is the man whose mandate the hollow call will attempt to steal. I don’t see a match here. Asiwaju is too strong, practiced and impassioned to ever be deterred by these unpatriotic clowns.

If the call is so ridiculously vain, and the chance of it gaining traction is so slim, and the chance of any Interim government is so abysmally nil, how come I and other rejectionists are going to all these troubles to lambast it instead of ignoring it?

Because, regrettably, Nigeria and Nigerians have become conditioned to accommodating theatres of the absurd when incrementally insinuated and then instituted. Because, the one who started it, so insidiously by calling for election cancellation, is a former president, one with unyielding military orientation, who ironically was the sole direct beneficiary of the sacrifices and settlements many Nigerians pay and reached in the aftermath of our only cancelled presidential election of the past.

General Olusegun Obasanjo, who only got selected to become president to appease the South West because the restlessness and agitation had refused to abate, made the first call for the cancelation of another presidential election in Nigeria. Again, a mandate won by another of his Yoruba kinsmen.

Wait, is it possible for General Obasanjo to wish that Nigeria passes through another hell, which will kill many innocent Nigerians and maybe brew such a crisis that will throw up another Obasanjo gaining power opportunistically and who would be, essentially, non accountable to Nigerian voters  –a theatre of the absurd indeed.

Is Obasanjo and those who think like him to blame? I don’t think so; where people who call themselves democrats, who have benefitted from process democracy in the past (Atiku Abubakar was a two-term vice president as Peter Obi was a governor), who willingly participated in an election, would condone a call to terminate a democratic process –for whatever reason- when the courts and due legal processes persevere.

If sane Nigerians were going to dismiss the call for ING as childish naiveté on the part of the politicians who lost at the polls, who thought nothing of inviting destruction to visit the democratic institution that had sheltered their ambitions, even when inordinate, the recent disclosure by the Director of State Security that it had uncovered a real plot by certain elements to truncate democracy in favour of ING, vastly remove any levity from the equation. It ought to stop all good people in our tracks. The evil is real and the devil’s foot soldiers were mobilized.

On the flip side, the State governors (we don’t know of any exemptions) have called on the DSS to act swiftly and arrest the culprits. “Do your job,” they said and stop what would be a sure decent to anarchy. The scenario leaves true democrats and progressives only one choice: to get up, ensure that this particular ING remains a fool’s pipe dream.

And if it –the ING call- had got any breath, we need to put pillows over its little snort holes and brutally snuff life out of its cursed body. We must seek out its incubation nest and destroy its ill-fated life before it hatches.

If we were to have learnt from history, it is that Nigeria should never touch anything resembling the “Interim National Government” with a long pole. It’s an evil we knew and have rejected, period.

Come May 29, 2023, a new government, of renewed hope, will be inaugurated and Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu will take on the job of his life, prepared but unassuming. We all ought to be excited to watch this “fixer” take the mantle of our nation’s leadership. Congratulations, Nigeria.

Hon. Setonji David ,Chairman, House Committee on Information, Strategy and Security, Lagos State House of Assembly) writes from Lagos