Buhari: Case of squandered opportunity

For most Nigerian politicians, the countdown to 2019 general elections began, even long before the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) advertised the elections’ timetable, in March 2017. That is one of the negative characteristics of Nigeria’s electoral system or politicking, wherein barely midway into the four-year life of an administration, political activities will gear up and governance, the primary purpose of winning political office, will be relegated to the background. Of course, with politicking in full swing, office seekers will concentrate ample efforts on their selfish quest to win elections.

It is not a new phenomenon in Nigeria, and the seeming meek acceptability of it by generality of the electorate, offers politicians the needed licence to further subjugate citizens’ interest to their own. In this regard, not even President Muhammadu Buhari has proved to be different. In fact, those who were hoodwinked into believing that he was a special kind of politician, and different from the rest, have had disappointment as their lot.  Buhari has actually evolved, in so short a time, as one who can outdo the average Nigeria politician, in every respect that has stunted the desired progress for our nation. Every of his body language and, indeed, his very acts and omissions, since he emerged President, unmistakably situate him as one who is out to play politics, with just anything and everything, without regard for their predictable negative or undesirable effects. Instances abound.

His appointments weigh heavily in favour of his northern geopolitical zone of the country.  His utterances are no less insensitive, just as he has scant regard for legal processes, treating judicial decisions with contempt and ultimately defying them. That former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, and leader of the Shiite Islamic sect, Ibrahim El Zakzaky are still languishing in prison, without sentencing by any court, is because of Buhari’s blunt refusal to comply with orders of courts.

Of course, it was not long into the life of his administration, before such conduct started to erode the trust of the citizenry; the very trust which hugely contributed to his winning election. Today, very many, perhaps majority of his ardent supporters for the 2015 election, vociferously express disillusionment and anger at his style of leadership; the style that has not just alienated those supporters but has, for  good measure, generally plunged citizens of different ethnic nationalities and religious beliefs, deeper into the abyss of disunity and mutual distrust for one another.

Insensitive to these negatives, and their dire consequences for the nation he was elected to lead, Buhari is already strategizing for re-election. In fact, signs that he has his eyes fixed on 2019 started manifesting, since last year. For a President whose ill-health, for long, kept away from the public and from the country, and indeed from presiding over the affairs of the nation, not even his ardent supporters are comfortable with defending such inconsiderateness. Really, what kind of supporter can, in all honesty, defend a President, who has virtually nothing to showcase as achievement, at halftime of his administration?

Buhari inherited problems from the previous administration, yes, and that is normal. In a democracy, whenever the electorate votes out an administration, it is to allow a new one to improve the nation and its people. Regrettably, everything Buhari has touched since assumption of office gets worse. That was how petrol price officially jumped to N145.00, from less than N100.00 under President Goodluck Jonathan, and the product has even become unavailable, since November last year. That was how the strength of our naira weakened, so uselessly against the US dollar, that one US dollar now equals almost N400.00, from about N160.00 before Buhari’s coming. That is how Fulani herdsmen now kill, without restraint, while the President keeps mute in his Aso Rock comfort zone. It is an endless tale of woe for Nigerians, under the Buhari administration.

His two cardinal campaign promises of security and fighting corruption are deliberately sapped of vigour. Though, his administration inherited the Boko Haram reign of terror, but his campaign was anchored majorly on the promise to rout the group. He had boasted to utilize the strategies his military background offers, to deal the group a devastating blow, within months. But with his tenure nearing completion, what his administration serves Nigerians today is the spurious claim that Boko Haram has been “technically defeated”. Whatever that means! Except it is taken, that the sad and deliberate under-reporting, by the media, of Boko Haram bloody activities, amounts to Buhari’s defeat of the terrorist group, the northeast still witnesses killings, virtually on a daily basis.

Add to that, the upsurge in the killings by Fulani herdsmen, who are obviously emboldened by Buhari’s indifference to their atrocities, and the right conclusion will be reached on security status, under Buhari’s watch. Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State and his people will tell the stories of sorrow better. The reward for their massive support for Buhari in 2015, is their constant butchering by Fulani herdsmen. What have they done wrong? They simply resisted the determined mission of murderous Fulani herdsmen, to turn Benue ancestral farmlands into cattle grazing fields.

But then, the Benue State harvest of deaths, which ominously happened on the first day of 2018, only replicated the killing spree Fulani herdsmen have continued to stage, without restraint, in different farming communities of the middle belt and southern parts of the country. Never in the history of Nigeria, have we had a President display such extreme indifference to killings, as Buhari does, to Fulani herdsmen killings. Such inaction can only make victims and their sympathizers reach a compelling conclusion, that the herdsmen are enjoying the President’s tacit approval, because they are his Fulani kinsmen.

On the fight against corruption, the cliché, “When you fight corruption, it fights back,” has been employed by the Buhari administration, as subterfuge to perpetrate the very act itself, even on a more astounding scale. Happenings simply show, that the corruption that fights back is, ironically, domiciled within the administration. No other scenario demonstrates this incongruity better than the fact, that the administration’s chief corruption fighter, EFCC acting chairman Ibrahim Magu has being unequivocally adjudged as tainted, by the Department of State Security, Nigeria’s domestic intelligence agency.

Notwithstanding, the Presidency is comfortable with keeping him. Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el Rufai on June 5, last year quoted Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to have said that Magu would remain EFCC head, despite the Senate’s rejection of his nomination, based on the DSS report. If anything, that position has further exposed the administration and its claim to be fighting corruption, to more ridicule and contempt. Also, only an administration of jokers will think that, despite a good number of its officials, as well as some allies of the President Buhari, impudently conducting themselves in manners that have all the characteristics of corruption, Nigerians will still take them seriously.

The mere speculation that Buhari desires re-election, actually depicts him as coldly unperturbed, about the disappointed feelings of Nigerians, nay his supporters, without whose votes the Presidency would have eluded him the fourth consecutive time in 2015. Before the political realignments, courtesy of which he eventually won that election, he was not really a personality that most Nigerians would wish for, as their modern day President, because his shortcomings glowed and still glow as scarlet. In fact, El Rufai had had cause to describe him as “unelectable”. Very apt, because during his first coming as military dictator in 1983, his human rights record was littered with abuses, and it remains one of those sad reminders of our chequered history. Then, the economy fared even worse. So, who would want such a man as leader again?

Yet, when the political class, overwhelmingly, resolved to shove Jonathan aside, it stopped to matter to them that the man they were propping evoked everything that is antithetical to democratic governance. But not long after he assumed office, events have continued to prove that voting for the Buhari Presidency was a classical demonstration of the metaphorical cutting of ones’ nose, to spite their face. I mean, the political strategist himself, Bola Tinubu could not have been so naïve as to believe that Buhari had truly become a “converted democrat”. Overnight? Now, the disillusionment is so prevalent, because the disappointment happened so quickly, that it has occasioned mass loss of supporters for Buhari. As it is, those supporters who cannot muster the courage to damn the shame, and publicly denounce Buhari, have simply become mute. They have since realized that the nation is terribly worse off, for that callous decision of theirs in 2015.

With this realization, the 2019 presidential election will present either of two outcomes: the resetting of Nigeria, for real democratic governance, and national development that will attend it, or further exposure of the country to unceasing atrocious experiences, which may only be comparable to the biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. The choice is for Nigerians to make, as they did in 2015.

The first outcome will only happen, if Nigerians cast sentiments aside and vote wisely for somebody that is certainly not Muhammadu Buhari. No single individual has ever personified cluelessness, insensitivity, arrogance, bigotry, nepotism, vengefulness and extremism of multifarious colours, as Buhari. The term, “hate speech” has gained prominence, in the life of Buhari’s administration, simply because his every act and omission have alienated many a Nigerian, and leaving our fault lines really pronounced. How can it be explained, that in addition to northerners holding almost all strategic appointments, out of Nigeria’s 17 security agencies, not less than 14 are also headed by northerners. It had never been so, until Buhari came. To reset Nigeria, these anomalies inevitably need rectification.

The second outcome is a no-no; with its potential to elongate the already known scourge that is Buhari’s administration. Significantly, to become an elected President, Buhari achieved what was an impossibility in Nigerian politics, when he defeated an incumbent. But he is also strolling on the ignoble path to ultimately emerge, as the man who literally squandered enormous goodwill, and lost a golden opportunity to build a united Nigeria, by giving all and sundry a sense of nationhood. His fanatical followership, prior to the 2015 election, had showcased him as one who could simply do no wrong. Basking in the euphoria of that popularity, he had proclaimed at his inauguration, on May 29, 2015, that “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.” The opportunity to strengthen the nation’s unity, after a bitterly fought election, and galvanise every institution and the entire citizenry, for altruistic development, stared him in the face, literally begging to be exploited.

His first coming, as military dictator in 1983 is a dark chapter in the nation’s history already. But some men are inexplicably endowed with luck. Buhari happens to be one of such; to the extent that despite his dark antecedents, he is always credited with qualities that cannot be definitely established. Which person of integrity comfortably surrounds themselves with known treasury looters? Though, he has not indicated interest for re-election, but we know how it happens here. Some clownish governors of seven northern states have led the way, by choosing the day Benue State was burying its 73 citizens, slaughtered by Fulani herdsmen on New Year day, to gather in Abuja, to urge Buhari to run in 2019.

Of course, the President has the freedom to heed their call, and exercise his constitutional right accordingly. However, against the background of his tyrannical hold on the country, the possibility of him remaining in the saddle from 2019, for another four years, should really call for sober reflection. Nigerians should pose just this one question, to their individual selves: If with re-election awaiting him, for which, he knows, he must woo the kings in a democracy, the electorate, for their votes, Buhari has been treating citizens with utter disdain, and perpetrating all the odious acts that now define his administration; what will be their lot, if he gets re-elected, in which case, he will never have any cause to plead for anybody’s vote? The answer to this will go a long, to determine whether Buhari will be an option at all.

Make no mistake, second term for Buhari is a possibility, albeit a grim one. But Nigerians can democratically frustrate it, by disgracing the bigot at the polls. All it will take, is massive voter registration and also massive voting against him; such that will leave no room for rigging.

Otherwise, if his second term happens, Nigerians will be damned.  But then, it is our choice to make. After all, it was not for lack of knowledge of his tyrannical past, that majority voted for Buhari in 2015.  The difference today is that, those whose enthusiastic naivete landed the nation in the misfortune we are all swimming in, are themselves telling bitter tales, having learnt their lesson the hard way. In 2019, hopes are that, they will be better guided and heed informed warnings of the foresighted.

Omenuwa is a lawyer and commentator on national issues.