By Rotimi Fasan

MORE than a month after the 2023 presidential election and three weeks after the governorship election, the dust raised from the elections is yet to settle.  It has been a case of one week one trouble as the country reels from one controversy to another.  Just over a week ago, the Department of State Security, DSS, alerted the nation to the activities of certain elements within the polity who have called for the inauguration of an interim government. This call is a direct reaction to the outcome of the presidential election that was won by the All Progressives Congress, APC, presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Since this announcement, the two front line opposition parties and their presidential candidates, Peoples Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar and Labour Party’s Peter Obi have separately claimed that they won the election, even as they had taken to the courts more or less in a coordinated action that is meant to reverse the outcome of the election. The illogicality of each presidential candidate claiming to have won an election that could only have been won by one of them while they pursue their court action is not apparent to them, much less convince them of the foolishness of their position. What seems to matter to them is their ambition, which has apparently blinded them to this untenable situation among others. It would appear that their failure at the polls is pushing them in such perverse direction that borders on incitements of insurrection. It is in this context that the call for an interim government has to be placed.

To be sure, those calling for interim government had been at it well before the 2023 election and they are by no means regular politicians. Some of them are well known associates of both practising and retired politicians. Their call for an interim administration, in spite of its strangeness to the Nigerian Constitution and all democratic norms, would appear to them as a patriotic call to arrest the country’s drift towards social and political anarchy. The fact that their calls came on the heels of clear evidence of failure of governance under the Muhammadu Buhari administration could be considered its own justification. The calls came towards the end of last year when there was a palpable lack of direction in the management of the country’s affair.

The energy crisis signposted by an acute scarcity of fuel ebbed and flowed, going through a repeating cycle of scarcity and availability of the product. There was no clear solution in sight. Banditry and hostage-taking for ransom in different parts of the North, including the perennial activities of insurgent elements in the North-East and the North-West were at a breaking point. All of these would be compounded by the thoughtless decision to redesign the naira, properly speaking, the recolouring of the notes that has now left the entire country in far more misery and pain than anybody had anticipated. Nearly six months since Nigerians had their bank savings confiscated in the name of a currency swap deal that was meant to provide them new naira notes in exchange for the old ones, the people have been left high and dry, with neither the new notes nor the old ones available. It has taken the belated intervention of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, for both the Federal Government and the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, to take an unambiguous stand that they would make money available to Nigerians. Even then, Nigerians are still at the mercy of the banks and Muhammadu Buhari’s monetary advisers. 

Many have lost not only their life-savings but also their lives in the course of the so-called cash redesign saga. A lot of farm produce have rotted in the markets and transaction of goods and services has been stalled, but Abuja and the CBN have remained adamant. Not even a Supreme Court injunction could make them budge. It was amid the chaos of these energy, monetary and political crises that the likes of Chief Afe Babalola made the call for an interim government.  The government, from their perspective, is to serve within a window period between the transition from the Muhammadu Buhari government and an elected administration. In the thinking of this interim government advocates, the interim administration will help resolve the troubles that followed the APC-led government’s mishandling of the various issues of insecurity, inflation and economic crises. 

Isn’t it rather odd that a leading legal expert like Chief Afe Babalola would be the one that would call for an interim government? Perhaps, it is a measure of how confused things had become that even those that would be considered legal experts are the very people engaged in demanding an illegality in the form of an interim government. But all of this was before the 2023 elections which these advocates of an interim regime never thought would happen. But the elections have come and gone and winners and losers have alike emerged. Why then the persistent call for this aberration by those too sour to accept their loss of the elections? It’s been three decades, almost to the day, that Nigerians were saddled with an interim government led by Chief Ernest Shonekan. This happened in the heat of the crises that followed the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election. We all know how that administration ended just after 83 days during which Nigeria was plunged as at that time into its worst political crisis since the Civil War. The end of that short-lived administration marked the emergence of the brutal dictatorship of General Sani Abacha under which state terror became the norm of governance. That some Nigerians would at this point be making such a call, following their failure at the polls, if the DSS is to be believed, is to say the least shocking.  

But Nigerians are apparently now so numbed by actions of their leaders that nothing appears to shock them anymore. So, any idea no matter how outrageous sits well with them. Should it even be surprising to anyone that there are calls for an interim government if supposedly well-educated Nigerians, civil society groups advocates and supporters of opposition parties could go on their knees in front of the headquarters of the country’s military establishment and literally beg for the take-over of governance by the military?  What could be more treasonable and unconstitutional than that? It’s like a woman inviting a rapist into her bed. All because some people would not accept the outcome of an election they have gone to court to prove was fraudulent. What’s the point in going to court if they would not be patient to hear the verdict of the courts?  It bears repeating that the issues with the 2023 elections were not such as could have produced a different result.