Nigerian elections: 5 main challenges dealing with the nation’s subsequent president

Nigerians will quickly decide who their subsequent president can be in a general election. Polling is due on the finish of February and inauguration is scheduled for 29 Could 2023.

As Nigerians depend right down to election day, it’s value contemplating the important thing challenges the nation’s subsequent president will cope with as he takes on his mandate.

The challenges revolve round 5 vital areas:

• nationwide cohesion

• safety

• the economic system

• the college system

• the combat in opposition to corruption.

It’s so much to ask, however the challenges are surmountable if the president has the need and dedication to the best of democratic governance.

The large threats

Fractured polity: Nigeria is extra divided and polarised than it’s ever been. The cleavages and fault-lines of ethnocentrism, sectarianism, sectionalism, parochialism and spiritual extremism are pushing the nation to the brink.

The polarisation is clear in conversations across the de facto rotational presidency, the controversy over presidential candidates and religious faith, the neo-Biafra separatist agitations within the south-east, and the poisonous and bigoted ethnocentric rhetoric peddled within the mainstream and social media.

The following president should undertake pressing measures at nationwide reconciliation and integration to avert impending chaos.

Learn extra: Africa’s largest democracy goes to the polls amid rising insecurity

Collapsing nationwide safety: The prevailing state of nationwide safety in Nigeria is apocalyptic. The receding Boko Haram insurgency within the north-east is being substituted by a nexus of banditry and terrorism within the north-west.

The north-central remains to be grappling with the lethal farmer-herder crisis. For its half the south-east is enmeshed in separatist violence and the related prison opportunism.

There’s an upswing in gang and ritual brigandage within the south-west whereas south-south remains to be troubled with militancy, piracy and oil theft.

The following president should get a grip on these dire safety threats.

Learn extra: Nigeria’s next president faces a collapsing security situation: five things he can do

Battered economic system: Nigeria is battling with slow economic growth. The nationwide forex (naira) has been grossly devalued amid a risky exchange rate. Inflation and unemployment rates are excessive and rising.

Rises in the price of residing are unprecedented and insufferable. The federal government appears to have misplaced traction on nationwide financial planning and administration. The following president has the problem of revamping an ailing and critically dysfunctional economic system.

Learn extra: Nigeria’s economy: four priorities the next president must deliver on

Restive college sector: Nigeria’s college system is witnessing a scientific deterioration on account of authorities neglect.

In 2022 public universities within the nation misplaced almost a yr on account of an industrial dispute between the federal authorities and the varied college unions over points referring to funding, governance and staff’ welfare. The crux of the dispute was authorities’s failure to honour a series of agreements it signed with the unions.

In an effort to interrupt the persevering with strike of the educational employees union in late 2022, the federal authorities secured a court order compelling the lecturers to return to work. However the circumstances and points that warranted the strike have barely been addressed.

This implies industrial concord and stability received’t final within the nation’s college sector. The following president might want to take early notice of this.

Learn extra: Nigeria’s university system needs radical reform: student loans for more than 100 million people might be a good place to start

Endemic public corruption: Corruption amongst public functionaries in Nigeria is endemic, although the present administration claims to be against it.

Even the previous accountant normal of the federation was alleged to have swindled over 100 billion naira (US$216,449 million).

The following president should confront the menace head on, setting an instance of transparency and nil tolerance of self-regard.

What’s wanted

It’s clear that the subsequent president is inheriting a large governance burden. Coping with it requires forthrightness, sincerity of function and radical political will.

To succeed he must be able to method governance in a different way. He should be decisive sufficient to confront an entrenched system of vested curiosity and self-regard.

He should be a patriotic statesman who’s dedicated to the utilitarian principle of democratic governance – the best happiness for the best variety of the civil populace.

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The destiny of the nation within the face of those challenges largely will depend on the energy of character and dedication of the incoming president.

An excellent statesman will be capable to mitigate the issues by adopting a hard-line dedication to the ideas of democratic good governance, even within the face of potential reactionary pressures arising from entrenched vested interests.

However, underneath a nasty statesman, the probabilities are that the challenges will irritate right into a flamable combine which will herald a failed state in Nigeria.