Seven Questions on Nigerian Politics for Sa'eed Husaini

"The most dynamic opposition to Tinubu has emerged outside of the mainstream partisan divide."

Dr. Sa’eed Husaini is one of my favorite analysts of Nigerian politics. He holds a Ph.D. in International Development from Oxford, and he has a variety of affiliations, including the Center for Democracy and Development, The Policy Practice, and Africa Is a Country, where he co-hosts their podcast - see a recent episode here.

AT: How do you assess the legacy of former President Muhammadu Buhari?

SH: What stands out to me the most about President Muhammadu Buhari’s tenure in domestic policy terms is how closely he tried to reinvent his 1980s playbook. Both his 1983-85 junta and his 2015-2023 presidency began amidst economic crises that had both local and global origins. And in both cases his response was a mix of austerity, clamping down on civil liberties, and introducing elements of a protectionist trade policy and idiosyncratic nationalist-inclined experiments with exchange rate and currency management.

I think his administration will be remembered for the various adversities that emerged from or were intensified by these approaches — from multiple economic recessions and an unprecedented shortage of physical currency notes, to the suppression of trade unions, the violent clampdown on #EndSARS protesters, and the prosecution of dissenters like Omoyele Sowere and Nnamdi Kanu. At the same time, his protectionism yielded some uncertain benefits, including Nigeria’s achievement of some measure of self-sufficiency in rice production, for instance.

But I think the unpopularity of what can be seen as an attempt at right-wing statism — again, both in his administration’s 80s and 2000s guises — paved the way for Buhari’s successors to return Nigeria to a comparatively more orthodox path of neoliberal policy-making. As such, I think critics of Buhari who, expressing his unpopularity, want to suggest that his administration lacked any coherence or sense of economic policy direction will struggle to fully account for these obvious resonances between the policy regimes he introduced in the 80s and 2000s.

I suppose the key difference between the two administrations, and one that contains a note of irony, is the fact that someone associated with a strongly dictatorial approach to governing will also be remembered as the first Nigerian opposition leader to have gained power democratically, with his victory over incumbent Goodluck Jonathan in 2015.

AT: Who are the key winners and losers amid President Bola Tinubu's economic reform program? Why do you think he has stuck with the program despite considerable backlash and unpopularity?

SH: I think the winners from the currency devaluation would be the section of the Nigerian elite whose wealth is held offshore or in foreign currencies. I think we can assume that this includes a decent proportion of senior banking and business executives, state governors and most major politicians and elected officials at the national level, and some segments of the upper echelon of the bureaucracy. These segments of the population have seen their purchasing power increase substantially relative to the vast share of Nigerians who earn in local currency. The historic profit margins recorded by Nigerian banks, the intensification of the urban real estate boom and rural land grabbing, the consolidation of the political elite in support of Tinubu’s economic regime, and the general mood of optimism and excitement at the Lagos Stock Exchange all seem to attest to this.

I think this also explains why Tinubu has stuck to the economic program — it is likely because his policy regime does not face substantial opposition among the key power brokers who are within the political settlement.

A perhaps less obvious set of beneficiaries would be medium-to-large-scale agriculturalists (especially agricultural commodity traders) who, unlike small-scale farmers, are better able to absorb the higher costs of inputs while exploiting the market opportunity provided by higher food import costs and increased price of foodstuffs. One clear sign of this is how trade in grains and other Nigerian produce across the Nigeria-Niger border has become more profitable as the naira has slid. So you could say that we have a fairly powerful — and in ethno-regional terms — a fairly evenly spread group of winners.

The losers are, of course, those outside of the traditional political settlement — the urban poor, small-scale farmers, and lower-rung wage workers who have seen their purchasing power eroded as the costs of food, transport, energy, and housing have gone through the roof.

AT: How do you see the impact of Peter Obi's campaign and the "Obidient" movement two years after the 2023 elections?

SH: To try to be charitable, I think the Obi campaign partially contributed to inventing a new political dynamic at least in discursive terms — by investing the category of “youth” with a measure of historical agency. But I think the real electoral value of this “youth” discourse would have been limited to the more digitally connected urban areas in Lagos and Abuja, had Obi not also tapped into more enduring identity-based discourses and structures — especially Christian feelings of exclusion under Buhari and ethno-regionally based support from Obi’s home turf in south-east Nigeria. In other words, I think Obi’s performance had much less to do with the “Obidient” movement — if we define that purely as the newer, more online phenomenon — and much more to do with support from the Churches and Obi’s seizure of formerly PDP controlled structures in the south-east and Lagos (granted, both offline and online dynamics also overlap in certain areas).

What has been the impact of this after the elections? One clear impact is growth of apathy and resignation among a segment of urban youth who had a classic When Prophesy Fails experience. It did not help that the (false) hopes placed on the election post-petition tribunal were also summarily dashed by a unanimous vote affirming Tinubu’s victory.

This apathy, rooted in a growing sense that Tinubu is unbeatable, means that a segment of newly mobilized young people — some of whom were first time voters in 2023 — are likely to contribute to, rather than help reverse the nearly linear decline in voter turnouts that Nigeria has experienced since the founding elections of the Fourth Republic in 1999. A related impact is the fracturing of the PDP, which since the exit of (former PDP member) Obi, and the commencement of open rebellion by Nysome Wike, has eroded the basis of mainstream opposition to Tinubu. This fragmentation has meant that there has been little to no substantive debate or opposition in the mainstream political sphere about most of Tinubu’s policy choices in the first years of his presidency.

I would add that Obi’s better-than-expected performance has also contributed to a wait and see attitude among the lingering base of true believers who still hope that events in the lead up to 2027 — perhaps a surprise endorsement by Atiku Abubaker and the consolidation of the PDP structures around Obi — will turn the political tide in Obi’s favor. This does not appear to me to be a highly likely scenario. There is ongoing talk of an (APC style) “mega coalition” between Atiku, Obi, and a camp of APC dissidents who have not found a place in Tinubu’s administration — including, former Kaduna state governor, Nasir El Rufai. But it appears very unclear at the moment how the leadership question will be resolved among this group of all very ambitious politicians.

AT: Which forces or figures do you think represent the most dynamic forms of opposition to Tinubu at the moment? Have protests like #EndBadGovernance had a lasting impact?

SH: Yes I think the most dynamic opposition to Tinubu has emerged outside of the mainstream partisan divide, especially since the administration’s policy direction is largely accepted (even if with some slight modifications) by the main opposition parties and the major trade union federations.

I think this is why the most significant opposition that has emerged to Tinubu has arisen in the arena of social movement and spontaneous protests. The #EndBadGovernance protests which took place in August and October 2024 are an example of this. The protests did not align with any of the main partisan contenders, and instead were an expression of a generalized criticism of food inflation. While some newer social movements such as the “Take-It-Back Movement”, the “Arewa Youth Ambassadors”, and others attempted to provide some coordination for the protests, the most energetic sites of protest were probably much more spontaneous.

One impact of the protests has been to register the fact in the public imagination that there is still a constituency that opposes the current reform trajectory, even if it is a constituency that currently lacks a viable partisan expression. Seeing young people in northern cities take to the streets to register their dissent, despite injunctions from religious and political leaders, and even in contradictory ways (including waving Russian flags and some looting) was powerful.

That being said, it must be acknowledged that the protests did not succeed in establishing a viable political alternative. As usual for the Nigerian state, the administration responded to the demonstrations with a mix of repression and moderate concessions. There were several casualties and injuries and scores of demonstrators, including several minors, were jailed — with many charged with treason. The Nigerian Labour Congress, which did not join the protest but put out solidarity messages in support of arrested demonstrators, had its president interrogated by the police on multiple occasions following the protests. At the same time, the administration also introduced some measures to reduce the cost of food, including distributing some subsidized grains (especially rice) in parts of the country and reversing import restrictions on certain food items. I think the combination of carrot and — especially — stick have sapped some of the momentum generated by the protests. So too has the absence from the protests of more institutionalized opposition that would have come from anti-neoliberal unions or political parties.

AT: You've paid close attention to the history and present of the Nigerian Left - how do you see the Left's situation and prospects now?

SH: Yes, I think this relates to the point I was making in response to the previous question. There is strong popular opposition to the reform trajectory that the major parties have long adopted, and that Tinubu has intensified. But, for a variety of reasons, it has been quite difficult for a now quite fragmented Left to build anchoring institutions that can channel this popular opposition towards a viable political alternative.

As elsewhere, the Nigeria Left in the 20th century had a measure of institutional power in the trade unions, student movements, and some populist or progressively-inclined political parties. However, this has diminished significantly in the post-military period, for many of the reasons we are familiar with from other contexts — decades of structural adjustment and labour deregulation, the fall of the Soviet Union, the “NGO-ization” of progressive opposition, etc.

What is Left of the Left? To borrow a framework, some members of the “Old Left” — the generations that pre-dated or emerged during the anti-SAPs struggle — are still active in the public arena, offering alternative ideologically grounded criticisms of the status quo. Figures like Femi Falana, and veterans of leftist student and labour activism like John Odah and Hauwa Mustapha are some examples. But they are the exception. The orientation of most of the older generation of leftists is one of nostalgia for a by-gone era. And there is also a prevailing mood of cynicism among this cohort about the possibility of constructing anything new. This is understandable given that they saw the hollowing out, repression, or cooptation of the institutions they helped build.

There is something of a “New Left” that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s. The younger cohort in this group have become recurring figures in Occupy2012, and especially EndSARS, and EndBadGovernance protests. Much of this energy seems to gravitate around the presidential candidacy of the journalist and activist, Omoyele Sowore and his African Action Congress (AAC) party, which till now has remained electorally marginal. The Take it Back movement is led by this cohort, many of whom are younger millennials or Gen Z. But what are the prospects of this movement? Again, I think they have not quite found a way to convince a very skeptical Nigerian public that they are a viable political alternative. Outside of episodic protests, they have not really constructed anchoring institutions that can demonstrate and organize an alternative political dynamic. Their critics often claim that they are untested in public office and outside of campus-based protests or occasional social activism, and there is a lot of truth to this. There is also an element of accelerationism at play in their approach too — the expectation that social conditions will get worse and that this would automatically compel more Nigerians to embrace the alternative they are offering. Some of that might be happening at the moment, but enough to produce a viable left-wing alternative to the status quo? I am not so sure.

AT: What do you make of the state of emergency declaration in Rivers State?

SH: I don’t have a huge amount to say about this, and there has been some decent analysis on this by people like Dr Jibrin Ibrahim. But what struck me the most was how little debate there was in the National Assembly and among the governors about the removal of an elected governor. I think this again goes to show the extent to which Tinubu has managed to consolidate power across various levels of government. This level of executive power (mixed with a certain type of reform appetite) makes it feel like we are back in the Obasanjo period.

AT: Which governor do you think is doing the best job now, and why?

This is challenging and I am still forming an opinion. But the contenders in public debate include the governor of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo Olu, based on some strides in renovating the Third Mainland Bridge and extending road construction and the metro-rail project in Lagos. For the same reasons, Nysome Wike, the Minister of the F.C.T. gets lauded in some public commentary — there is a lot more road construction in the Abuja and environs than there was under the previous minister. Jigawa State also tends to be praised in development circles for being one of the few states with a focus on developing agriculture, which is the state’s economic mainstay. It seems the current governor, Umar Namidi, has continued down that path. However, the bar is often set low for Nigerian governors, as substantial, lasting institutional and structural changes — especially in the face of spiraling poverty, persistent insecurity, and growing public apathy — are often lacking in most states.