US Election: Lessons For Nigeria

We are a nation in perpetual contrast! We claim to want the best for our country. But at every election turn, we hand over the country to those who have the lowest mental aptitude to govern a complex country like Nigeria!

In the heat of the 2015 election between President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari, I asked one of the Buhari supporters, a PhD holder, why he would support Buhari who paraded a questionable West African School Certificate (WASC) qualification against Jonathan, with a PhD. His response determined our relationship since then. “Even if it is a goat, I will still vote for him against Jonathan!”, he told me. The result is what we are seeing today. When you vote for a goat, you don’t expect the agility of a lion from it!

The first five chapters of Chude Jideonwo’s book, with contribution from Ademola Williams, How to Win Elections in Africa (2017), contain interesting topics. The chapters which run from page one through page 32 have the sub-topics: Legacy doesn’t matter as much as it used to, Change matters. Period.; Anger matters, more than you know; Establishment matters and Candidates matter, first and foremost.

The authors, on the qualities of candidates, say: “All the messaging in the world, all the ideas in the world, all the great plans and purposes and visions in the world amount to nothing if they cannot find the candidate who embodies this, that expresses it and that symbolises it” (Page 26).

The excerpt above underscores the importance of the competence of any candidate who seeks to rule over a people. The greatest problem bedevilling Nigeria, I say without hesitation, is leadership, quality leadership.

We have been so unfortunate in the last 25 years to have had almost the dreg of humanity at the helm of our affairs as a nation. The situation has been more terrible for Nigeria in the last nine and half years under the administrations of President Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Buhari was elected in 2015 under the guise of a pseudo-legacy of honesty, discipline and a strong stance against corruption. Nigerians learnt too late to realise that all the robes Buhari was decorated with were borrowed ones and misfits in fabrics, sizes and styles. Under his watch, corruption wore three-piece suits on the streets of Nigeria while the Mai Gaskiya kept on picking his teeth!

Buhari’s successor, President Tinubu, gained access to the Aso Rock Villa because his handlers were able to successfully sell the dummy of a man with inimitable legacies of sterling performances when he held sway as the governor of Lagos State.

All attempts to convince the people, especially the poor masses, that the masquerade they were asked to come and behold at the political arena in 2023 was nothing but a normal human being with guttural voice and terrestrial robes, fell on deaf ears. Today, we are all victims of the terrible choice we made last year. The tendency that we may remain victims of the lacklustre performance of Tinubu for the next six and half years is very high.

In the United States (US), today, November 5, citizens will be out to elect a new president who will take over power in January 2025. I have followed the US election with little or no interest. The problems at home here are more than enough to bother about what happens or does not happen in the US.

I agree that whoever becomes the president of the so-called God’s Own Country will have multiple effects on us here in Nigeria and the entire world. It is not lost on me, nor on many Nigerians, that Nigeria has rarely benefitted anything from the Western. In fact, the West often takes more than triple of whatever it offers us! Regardless of who emerges as the US president, their primary focus will always be “America First”!

This is where I think we should focus our attention. We should, in my own thinking, begin to ask if there will be a time when we will have a leader who will put Nigeria first before his personal ambition. That is the biggest lesson I have learnt from the US election and its electoral processes so far.

The US is not a Superpower because God created it to be so from day one. No! Leaders after leaders developed the country to be what it is today because the US has been fortunate to have leaders who think “America First”.

Nothing captures this more than the attitude of the incumbent President Joe Biden. Biden had sought to be US president for a second term. He was the choice of his party, the Democratic Party, until the love for the country came in and he had to bow to public opinion by yielding the stage to a more robust candidate, Kamala Harris, a woman and Biden’s Vice President.

The US is an institutionalised country. Nobody aspires to be the president without subjecting himself or herself to public scrutiny. It is not a place where a president-to-be will call the bluff of the people and refuse to participate in public debates.

The presidential debate in the US goes beyond an avenue to lay before the people, the presidential candidates’ programmes and plans. The presidential debate is essentially the avenue provided for the mass of the people to test the mental capacity of whoever aspires to lead the country.

The US has developed to that level of political maturity where the beauty of a candidate’s manifesto does not sway voters. While manifestoes are valuable, citizens prioritise the candidates’ ability to read the manifestoes, understand and effectively implement the ideas and ideals outlined in these documents.

This is what Jideonwo and co point out when they posit that: “All the messaging in the world, all the ideas in the world, all the great plans and purposes and visions in the world amount to nothing if they cannot find the candidate who embodies this, that expresses it and that symbolises it” (op cit).

The above test is what President Biden failed during the June 27, 2024, presidential debate with his main challenger then, former President Donald Trump, who is also running as the Republican candidate in today’s election in the US.

At the debate hosted by CNN in Atlanta and watched by over 51 million viewers in the country, President Biden was rated poor in all ramifications and his performance was declared by Elliot Morris and Kaleigh Rogers of ABC News’ 538 as a “disaster.”

One major weak point that the public noticed in Biden’s performance at the debate was his “frequent loss of train thought while he gave meandering, confused answers.” The general opinion was that Biden failed to convince anyone that he had the capacity and capability for another four years.

Little wonder all hands; party officials, fundraisers, undecided voters and volunteers, were up for him to step aside. The Democratic Party and the public correctly judged his mental ability. Biden had no choice but to step down for his vice president, Harris, to take over.

That is one of the beauties of the US democracy; the very one Nigeria claims to have copied. One single debate took Biden out of the race. But what do we have in Nigeria? How do we test the mental preparedness of our would-be presidents?

I have read a lot of comments by Nigerians about the US election and the Trump versus Biden debate. I have friends who were promoters of the spine-chilling cliche of “Buhari-can-have-NEPA-bill” – a reaction to the argument that beyond having no minimum certificate to contest the 2015 election, Buhari does not possess any inspiring mental aptitude for the office he sought- jumping and calling for Biden’s withdrawal from the race.

I did not also find it amusing that many Nigerians who did not see any wrong in President Tinubu asking his aides to answer questions thrown at him at the charade called Chatham House outing in 2023, pontificating on the Biden debate with Trump!

It is on record today that since 2015, there has been no presidential election debate in Nigeria. Yet, within that period, we have held three consecutive presidential elections in 2025, 2019 and 2023. The implication is that for the past nine and half years, Nigerians have never had the opportunity to assess the mental aptitude of their would-be presidents.

The argument has always been that debates have nothing to do with performance! This argument, sadly, is the position of many Nigerians who stayed glued to their TV sets, keeping vigils, to watch the US presidential debates between Trump and Biden, and between Trump and Harris!

This lazy mental reasoning also played out in the recent Edo State governorship election where the two major political parties, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP and the All Progressives Congress (APC), refused to push forward their candidates for any debate.

Ours is a nation where all a Fulani man needs to be president is to line up all the Almajiris of the North behind his candidature and his Yoruba counterpart to enlist the support of all street-urchins of Lagos on the election day! The Igbo candidate, of course, can always bank upon the home support of the Nzobu nzobu orchestra of Ndigboland!

A nation that sacrifices merit for mediocrity can never rise above the mediocrity of its leaders. The physiological, physical, mental and character configuration of a leader matter. The health and mental fitness of a president will have negative or positive effects on his output. This is why we should not support any candidate who is not willing to put his mental and health issues to test at public debates before any election. If Biden had not participated in the June 27, 2024, presidential debate, the Democratic Party would have fielded a “disaster” as its flagbearer.

Nobody gives what he does not have. We have dwelt too much on lies and propaganda. We keep dressing dregs of humanity in our country in the celestial robes of Angels. We place ethnicity above competence and go after money at the expense of our collective future.

Those who should not hold the lowest councillorship positions are leaders of governments and legislative bodies in Nigeria today. We elect leaders based on sentiments and we expect them to be fair, just and equitable. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. Check out all the leaders in the executive and legislative posts; what do you find?

A last quote from Jideonwo: “Elections begin with candidacies. And often, they rise and fall on candidates. If the essential candidacy is defective or inadequate, almost everything else is doomed to fail.” Do we need a further prognosis of our woes?