State Capture: The Survival Of The Nigerian Nation And Its Nascent Democracy

By HAJIA HADIZA MOHAMMED

Under Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria is a captured state. A nation of over 200 million people is being ruled by a character whose origin is shrouded in mystery.

One of the symptoms of a failed state is the collapse of state institutions. But when the state institutions are deliberately weaponized to serve some powers against the people, it is state capture. The state is captured when a few privileged individuals hijack the state administrative machinery and turn it against the people. State capture corrupts the democratic institutions, destroys public trust, create divisions and economic inequalities spatially and individually, uses the security and armed forces as instruments of oppression, uses the state institutions to pursue personal and primordial agenda and then corrupts the judicial system and makes it extremely difficult to get justice because the legal system and law enforcement agencies themselves have been compromised. Unfortunately, this is where Nigeria is now.

Under Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria is a captured state. A nation of over 200 million people is being ruled by a character whose origin is shrouded in mystery. Tinubu is a man of scandal who has lost every sense of propriety; who is being investigated like a common criminal internationally. And true to type, he has brought that criminal tendencies into governance. What he did in Lagos while he was the governor, capturing the administrative machinery and appropriating the state treasury is what he is replicating at the center and everyone seems to be watching helplessly, as Tinubu hijacks the country’s administrative machinery and our common wealth while his cronies and his kinsmen hail him as a master strategist. Under Tinubu, government policies have become tools of oppression, appointments are for patronage and compensation, not merit.

Tinubu has destroyed the nation’s nascent democracy using the other arms of the government and state institutions as his tools. The Nigeria’s National Assembly in the current dispensation exists only in theory and the judiciary are there to do the bidding of the executives. The state institutions: the armed forces, the police, the anti-graft agencies and even the electoral commission operate like the private firms of Tinubu. The result are enormous and far-reaching: high level corruption, impunity, lawlessness, abuse of human rights, thuggery, anarchy, breakdown of law and order, crime, deprivation and exploitation of the citizens, hopelessness, poverty in the face of plenty…

Since the coming of Tinubu to power, Nigeria has become the most terrorized nation on earth. The country is wilfully subjected to unwarranted barrages of attack internally from wrong government policies, insurgency, and banditry and most recently from political thuggery. The country’s democracy is facing serious threats from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and Bola Ahmed Tinubu who has transmuted into a full-blown dictator. Human rights are violated with impunity. Civil advocacy and freedom of speech are suppressed. The members of the opposition political parties are being hounded and harassed on a daily basis while Tinubu unleashes a gang of propagandists pushing out wrong and misleading information to gaslight and hoodwink the disillusioned Nigerian public. Tinubu has created fear, insecurity and poverty and used them as a weapon with which he intends to perpetuate his hold to power.
Today, many Nigerians live in fear; fear of the unknown, fear of political persecution and economic uncertainty. As the election date draws near and defeat staring the APC in the face, the party has resorted to the use of thuggery and violence. In this last three months, we have had over 100 cases of campaign violence and physical attack by the APC thugs on the opposition parties while the government and security operators do nothing: no investigations, no arrest, no prosecution and the ugly trend continues.

It is self-evident that Tinubu is power drunk and is desperate maintain his strangle hold to power. First, he used moles planted in the opposition parties to perpetuate crisis and weaken the opposition. And then used the funds borrowed from multilateral sources to lure the governors from the opposition parties into joining the ruling APC. He wanted to create a one-party state so that he would contest the presidency alone. But when the bigwigs from the main opposition parties formed new political alliances and platforms he turned again to destabilize them, this time using the courts as his weapon.

There is no doubt that Tinubu is obsessed with power and the desire to hold on to it at all costs. But his woeful performance that has created nothing but misery and hardship to the citizens is his undoing. His major weapon, poverty which he designed to create dependency and forced compliance, has proved to be his undoing. Nobody wants to hear the name, Tinubu. Tinubu is synonymous with suffering, pain and penury. He is rejected everywhere – in the North, East and even his own South West. Nobody wants to undergo another 4 years of hardship. Tinubu is acutely aware that he is not wanted and that is why he did not want to visit the whole state of the federation with his campaign team. It is an aberration that a man seeking to be elected to govern the people cannot face the people to flaunt his credentials, give account of his stewardship and explain his vision and future programs for the nation.

Tinubu is distraught with the looming fear of defeat at the polls. So, his only hope is rigging. And to do that, he needs the thugs. He needs to corrupt the state institutions in order to use them. He needs to compromise the judiciary in order to get the judgment that he desires. And this is the obvious reason for the political crisis that has engulfed the nation now. Nigerian you have a duty to exercise your civic duty with your voters’ card. Vote and ensure that your vote counts. We have to eschew fear that they are trying to create. We must not be intimidated with their thugs. We must vote out poverty, insecurity and anarchy and rebuild our nation. Long live Nigeria!

Hajia Hadiza Mohammed
hajiahadizamohammed@gmail.com
An actress, social activist, politician
London, UK.

Source: Abuja Network News