Enough empirical evidence has made two things to be crystal clear since the advent of Nigeria’s democratic dispensation in 1999. The first is that Nigerians are not in charge of their country because they’ve been practically excluded from the economic and political conditions that affect their existence as a people. The second is that Nigeria was never founded on justice, equity and fair play. The country’s political arrangement is such that her rulers are always from the same small clique of people, probably not more than a hundred, out of which a chief of state---either military or civilian---emerges. This structure has been in place since the civil war. It is a political arrangement that John Campbell dubbed the “patron-client networks” in his seminal book.
Campbell is no ordinary foreigner. He probably knows Nigeria inside out, including all her secrets as result of his position as a former US ambassador to Nigeria. In the book titled “Nigeria Dancing on the Brink” Campbell lucidly dissects Nigeria and its political players, which, to the discerning, may have explained why the country may never amount to much in terms of development because of this entrenched “patron-client networks,” the only road through which political power can be attained. How these networks works in the book is just one of the startling revelations about a seemingly hopeless Nigerian condition. In the book, the author says that the networks have rules, which is virtually unwritten but well understood. A patron at the helm of the country’s affairs may push the power envelope as much as possible but never to violate these rules. Some of the paramount rules of the networks are “that there is to be no president for life. Another is that patrons at the pinnacle of the networks are never killed by their rivals, though their clients are fair game. A third is that money accumulated by a political figure in office is sacrosanct.” He also says that “rival patrons, however, ensure the personal and financial survival of an ex-chief of state. Those who aspire to the highest office in the land or to control that office through surrogates want no precedent of presidential accountability by legislative oversight---nor do they want a presidential killing that could someday be a precedent applied to them, hence the durability of national political figures such as Gowon, Buhari, Babangida, Obasanjo, Danjuma, and (late) Ojukwu, despite the pervasive violence of Nigerian politics.” Campbell says further that the networks “have held power, lost power, and lived to play again.” The “coteries of patron-client networks are interconnected at every level of society and government [that] even the Lagos Area Boys, thugs involved in various extortion and protection rackets, have their oga (patron). So, too, do the ‘rag pickers’ working the Lagos refuse dumps. The system is based on mutual dependence and support.” It is this political arrangement that has been labeled by a Human Rights Watch as “criminal politics.”
President Goodluck Jonathan’s ascension to the country’s highest office was serendipitous. He (and by extension his geopolitical region) was ‘drafted’ into the main vortex of power because some of the main deciders (patrons) of the networks had no choice. Jonathan’s region was never really reckoned with and its leading political lights are not considered part of the key patrons of the networks despite their being the ‘geese’ that lays the golden eggs. If anything, the region’s political players probably play a fourth fiddle to the paramount power bloc of the networks. But some daring elements, on account of an egregious socio-economic injustice meted against their people by the Nigerian state changed this time-tested political arrangement when they took up arms against the nation and succeeded tremendously, probably beyond their wildest imagination. Even they received from the state other incredible largesse they did not ask for. Jonathan was never one of the key players even in his region let alone in the nation’s complex networks. He was a complete outsider to the power structure, which has always been the exclusive preserve of patrons from the core north, the southwest and the near north as a significant political appendage of the former. Yet, Jonathan’s emergence on the pinnacle of political power was a combination of political expediency by the patrons (because the militants have found out that the emperor [Nigeria] has no shirt after all). These militant elements discovered that---just like a bully whose outward brigandage is the direct opposite of his internal insecurity and low self-esteem---Nigeria would engage in draconian measures in order to prove a small point. But when faced with equal violence even from a small band of rag-tags, she cringes and asks you to name your price. Some luck? Yes. Jonathan must also have had the intervention of the divine (for those so passionately religious). So, the patrons admitted him, even if grudgingly.
Upon becoming the new chief of state outside a power structure that has taken more than half a century to build, Jonathan must choose one of two available options. He could either use moral suasion to convince and encourage patrons of the networks that it is in their own long term strategic interests to dismantle the networks that has chained down the country and her people, and build a just, equitable and sustainable society, akin to what Mandela did in South Africa despite the age-long injustice to his people by way of the apartheid system. Or he could build his own network to compete, supplant or cooperate, as the case may be, with the rest of the networks to deepen the pauperization of the country and her people. He chose the latter. Jonathan probably could not have opted for the first option even if he had wanted. He most likely would have been vigorously resisted. This is because all state institutions, including his executive branch are either controlled directly by other patrons or indirectly by their clients. He would have been clipped and/or his seat summarily removed from under him because the rules of the networks did not include making Nigeria a great nation. She’s to be plundered. Since he must build a network that is formidable enough to withstand the vagaries of the entrenched, battle-tested networks and do so quickly, Machiavellianism is just what the political scientists ordered as strategy. Political brigandage in which murder and assassination are not exempt, mind-boggling corruption that can otherwise be described as heist, and impunity are the tools required to building a formidable patron-client network. After all, the patrons before him deployed these same tools. Even with his own re-definition of corruption and reckless impunity, Jonathan is still within the bounds of the rules. Veteran patrons of the networks are just too shocked that a supposedly naïve, ‘shoeless boy’ from a backwater could best them at the game they invented.
That is the reason why militants who should be spending the rest of their lives behind bars are now stupendously wealthy and politically influential that some of them had supplanted some state governors. Since his network must compete and supplant other networks that had taken decades to build and nurture, caution and operating within the constitutional framework are hindrances that Jonathan cannot afford. Therefore, cash haulage by an aircraft belonging to a client of his network ostensibly to procure arms made more sense. Going through some international procedures of arms procurement would have left a paper trail. So, in building a formidable network of his own, Jonathan’s clients---among them a stark illiterate---secured pipeline protection contracts and procurement of gunboats while the country’s navy drools. It’s not for nothing that the two most important Service Chiefs, Army’s Kenneth Minimah is Jonathan’s kinsman and his Defence counterpart Alex Badeh is a minority Christian from the north whose people are probably tired of playing a second fiddle to the networks of the core north. These two clients possess the real power to roll out the tanks to protect their patron if push comes to shove.
Nigerians may have been angered, and justifiably so, by Dokubo’s war threats should Jonathan lose. They may have been riled when Tompolo said he would take away the oil (our collective patrimony?) should Jonathan not be re-elected because the commodity is the only thing that makes unity more meaningful to the patrons. But they’ve come of age to understand the game. Jonathan’s clients in his new network are probably wondering why the fuss in their looting spree when other patrons at the helm and their clients, since the civil war, did the same and heaven did not fall. So, when Danjuma said that the president’s clients should be arrested, and Obasanjo, probably the Grand Patron of all the networks and has been relentlessly castigating Jonathan in the public, it means that some consensus may have been reached among them that Jonathan must not be allowed another term, otherwise it would be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in Jonathan’s second term than for these patrons. The president can either negotiate a safe exist and enjoy his loot and that of his clients, which is permissible under the rules. Or he can ‘engineer’ his own electoral victory and damn the consequence. He will probably do the latter. Only he himself can make this choice. After all, power concedes nothing without a demand.
Femi Odere is a media practitioner. He can be reached at [email protected]