Muhammadu Buhari And The Tragedy Of The Long Grudge

 By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

On December 31, 1983, Sani Abacha, then an unknown brigadier in the Nigerian Army, went on radio to announce the overthrow of the elected civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari, claiming that the military had done so “in the discharge of our national role as promoters and protectors of our national interest” because of “the great economic predicament and uncertainty, which an inept and corrupt leadership has imposed on our beloved nation”.

*Buhari 

The following day, Nigerians learnt that the new military regime was to be led by Muhammadu Buhari, a wiry major-general with a reputation for asceticism, serving as the general officer commanding (GOC) the Third Division of the Nigerian Army in Jos. Commissioned into the Nigerian Army in January 1963 following training at the Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, England, Buhari was not just the most senior among the officers involved in the coup, he was also the most experienced. His contemporary and would-be nemesis, Ibrahim Babangida, who emerged as the chief of army staff, was commissioned eight months later, in September 1963.

Bishop Kukah’s Final Scorecard On Pres. Buhari

 By Rotimi Fasan 

As was the case this time last year, the Catholic Bishop of the Sokoto Diocese, the Rev. Matthew Hassan Kukah, has again issued a damning score card on the Muhammadu Buhari administration. Kukah has become a consistent critic of President Buhari and of the All Progressives Congress, APC, party-led government.

*Buhari and Kukah

Aside what has become an annual December ritual of assessing Buhari’s performance in office, the bishop has also taken other available, “out-of-season” opportunities to ask searching and inconvenient questions of the ruling APC government.  That he is at it again, just two months to the next presidential election and less than five months before Buhari’s second term in office expires, should be enough measure of his conviction that President Buhari has failed as a president. This on account of his inability to live up to his electoral promises in 2015 through 2019. 

Nigeria: The Dilemma Of The North

 By Sola Ebiseni

In spite of the undeniable clear identity of the Middle Belt and its incomparable gargantuan geographical space, those who still fantasise the old monolithic North would not budge. They keep wallowing in the preservation of the North and would not agree that the empire the British helped them create have long served its useful purpose.

The empire is in a constant state of flux either from the exigencies of statecraft which ensure its fragmentation in state creation or the unchecked influx of tribes of all nations in common brotherhood bound either by religion or cultural occupation which puts the earth and its fullness at the unpartitioned disposal of all. In that situation, it requires no research into history to acquire citizenship.

Mr. President, Under Your Watch Corruption Only Changed Its Tactics And Swagger!

By Ishaq Sani

Dear Mr. President,
Thank you for rewarding our die-hard loyalty with betrayal. Before the 2015 election, those who told us never to believe in you, and described you as nepotistic and tribalistic, and called you an unrepentant fundamentalist have been vindicated. Those who ascribed your 1984 war against indiscipline and corruption fight to Gen. Tunde Idiagbon did not lie.

*President Buhari 

Shortly before the 2015, I likened you with my idol Thomas Sankara, and deified you like the Greek god Apollos, but like the popular cliché “the leopard cannot change the colour of its skin,” you proved our opponents right.

Under your watch the lives of animals appear to be more sacred than the lives of humans; killer herdsmen or better still, unknown gun men, as you would prefer them to be called, are the second most deadly terrorist group in Nigeria and not IPOB as your government tried to establish.

African Oil Producers Cannot Think Beyond Crude Oil

By Farouk Martins Aresa

Why do Africans wait until it is too late for our rescue? Right now most African oil producing countries are still fighting about which regions produce more oil. Areas that are not producing oil are exploring other regions for oil. Many of us lost our thinking faculties in hedonism, greed and are spread all over the world beyond value to Africa. So, No Thinking Beyond Crude Oil!

Only in Nigeria do looters go to court to recover loots or oil blocks! Oil became a curse in Nigeria. Many now wished oil were never discovered around their areas because of the devastating effect it had, leaving their land an environmental swamp. Farmers cannot cultivate crops and fishermen have been idled. Parents watched children restlessly forming gangs of kidnappers, thugs used by politicians and militias as a way to make a living and use the poor’s plight to enrich themselves.

Yet, all the planning to divest away from oil have not materialized after many years. Right now, it is a race against clean energy. Many countries have promised to stop producing automobiles that are powered by oil in about ten years or less. While fear has griped right thinking Africans, we are still waiting for African innovation in automobiles powered by other forms of energies like electric, water, hydrogen or just air. Our scientists are too busy looking for the next meal.

Osinbajo And The Demand Of Leadership

By Rotimi Fasan

It’s been more than one month now since Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, assumed the status of Acting President. Even when this is not the first time he would be holding forth for the president, it is the first time he would be doing it for this long. Except in an actual state of incapacitation it is doubtful if anyone could envisage a situation like this when the president would be away from office for over a month without being declared ill or incapacitated.

*Osinbajo 

But by embarking on a medical vacation which has been indefinitely extended on the advice , Nigerians have been told, of his British doctors President Buhari has afforded his deputy an opportunity to demonstrate what he could do if given the chance. Before now, Osinbajo had operated in the shadows of President Muhammadu Buhari. This is the way things should be as the presidential system of government is a monarchy of sorts that does not leave room for two heads.

The Vice president in such a system is a ceremonial leader who can only operate at the behest of the president and to the extent the president permits. Which thus makes the office of the vice president that of a sinecure. The vice president performs delegated duties, only such responsibilities assigned him or her by the president. But President Buhari is not a stranger to such a system of delegated responsibility. As a military head of state he had a deputy, Tunde Idiagbon, that many Nigerians thought had as much power as the head of state.

This was in a dictatorship that had no room for democratic niceties and in which the word of the leader was itself the law. Yet Idiagbon functioned apparently with the full support of Buhari. Although others with a revisionist mindset have had cause to read things differently but that Buhari gave Idiagbon a wide latitude within which he shared the power of the leader with him was a sign of self-confidence. The same self-confidence, even if unintended, appears to be at work now. Ag Pres Osinbajo Osinbajo has never looked the part of the over-ambitious; he appeared content to operate from behind Buhari where he belongs constitutionally.

But the dramatic manner in which the president’s medical vacation of ten days has now been extended indefinitely has thrust him into the limelight in a way he may not personally relish. For it is turning out that some Nigerians are already making invidious comparisons between his mode of leadership and that of his principal.

Can Buhari’s Dumb Government Also Choose To Be Deaf?

By Rotimi Fasan

In describing the Muhammadu Buhari administration as dumb I do not wish now to be understood as referring to what many commentators increasingly call the administration’s or, in fact, the president’s cluelessness (Is it not amazing that this administration has so quickly frittered away its goodwill in less than two years, to the extent that it’s now being described in the same unflattering register as the Goodluck Jonathan administration?) Buhari, Osinbajo and Adeosun.

 

*Buhari 

Rather than commenting on the frustrating missteps and ineffectuality of this government, my focus here is on the widening wall of silence that the administration has chosen to erect between itself and the Nigerian people. It is a needless and useless wall that will ruin whatever very modest gains can yet be recorded for the administration- if it knows true sovereignty lies with the people.

The Buhari administration has rigidly stuck to its gun in its irresponsible failure to communicate with the people of this country and keep them in the know of important activities in government circle. Whatever are the immediate inconveniences this stance could mean to sections of the Nigerian people, whatever may be the pains being presently endured by some Nigerians (such as the beleaguered people of Southern Kaduna) as a consequence of such willful hostility from leaders of this country, the government in the long run stands to lose far more than any section of the Nigerian population.

It’s not given to many to have the boon of a second chance. But Nigerian leaders randomly take such chances for granted without any hint of an awareness of it. We’ve seen this tragic cycle repeat itself in the lives of our leaders and occupants of public offices from the lowest position in the land to the highest offices imaginable. Given a second or even third chance in some public office, they go on to repeat the very errors and scandalous performance that marred earlier opportunities, making them forgettable footnotes on the pages of history.

Provided he has the sense of history to measure his own conduct and appraise his government’s performance, President Buhari would one day look back and regret his failure to connect with the people by building on the goodwill that ushered him into power. For this he has nobody but himself to blame. This is a self-inflicted but entirely avoidable wound that is right now festering and worsening the relationship between the government and the people. It’s in this sense that I have described the present administration as dumb, that is mute and lacking the ability to speak. The detail that needs to be restated, however, is that this government’s muteness is not a congenital defect.

It is rather a clear case of hubris, a demonstration of an authoritarian disposition within a democratic context. It is no more unavoidable than it is natural. It would seem then that President Buhari feels affronted by differing opinions and would rather not have his authority questioned in the manner permissible in a democracy. His dismissive silence, which looks sullen in every particular, is the only way he could get back at those who ‘disturb’ him with their ‘noise’, unsolicited and annoying demand of explanations to actions he would rather take without being held to account.

Buhari With Idiagbon

By Farouk Martins Aresa

President Buhari’s one-year anniversary has been anything but glorious. It has been pitiful compared to his last time around. It is a different era, yet Buhari has done what most Northern rulers do best. When he loaded his personal staff with Northerners, some of us defended him based on the fact that he was overthrown in a palace coup. He has gone further by reserving most of the strategic positions for Northerners as if Southerners and Federal character do not exist.

*Buhari 

Late Idiagbon might have taken more heat than he deserved during the first coming of Buhari as military dictator. They ruled by fiat, regardless of what others thought. Idiagbon and the Supreme Military Council then had more input in order to gratify Buhari’s power base. Eventually, they confirmed his fears and overthrew him and Idiagbon. In this case, we realize that Osinbajo is in a civilian democracy. A Vice-President is used as the President deems fit.

Idiagbon was in a way more powerful than Osibanjo as the military dispensation gave them the clout to carry out War Against Indiscipline (WAI). Most of the people that voted for Buhari this time around wanted some grip on the national purse that was looted beyond reason with so much impunity. This gave Buhari an edge over the former President Jonathan. As far as those that voted for him are concerned, he has somehow lived up to it but below expectation.

Some of us would want him to go further. While we do realize constrains of democracy, the rule of law and due process, there are ways of confronting a killer disease if the life of the country is at stake. The same way western countries confront terrorism before it devours their cultural or normal way of life. They created task forces, detentions and outside jurisdictions.

Buhari could have gone as far as Obasanjo did with the atmosphere of accountability and the fear of consequences for the type of impunity we saw in the last Administration of President Jonathan. Ribadu was forceful, visible and acted as a deterrent for corruption under Obasanjo. He even claimed he used OBJ to investigate his friends and challenged anyone to point to any head of state that gave an investigating officer so much leverage and power.

Electing A Dictator – A Major Drawback For Nigeria’s Democracy

By Lloyd Ukwu

Prelude:

The problem with dictatorship is that it usually lacks the capacity and patience to understand the meaning of the rule of law and due process. Both doctrines are often slow and therefore require patience. Dictators don’t have patience, they want it here, now and by any means necessary. 

 In 1984, Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the democratically elected government of President Shehu Shagari. It is true that every coup plotter is guilty of breaching the Nigerian constitution and shooting his way into power. But arguably, unlike Ibrahim Babangida that overthrew a military junta, Buhari’s offense was more egregious because he overthrew a democratically elected government – an expression of the collective will of Nigerians. In his false feeling of importance, Buhari has always believed in his messianic mission. He thinks that he knows it all, and that, unlike any other Nigerian, he knows what is best for Nigeria. His twisted sense of superiority and inordinate craving for power found expression in his 1984 coup and his subsequent, repeated run for the presidency. Before he finally won in 2015, he had been defeated in three earlier presidential elections. 

On his third defeat, he broke down and wept in public, an action that would have ended his political career if he were an American politician. Politicians hardly weep in America. To me, that unrestrained public effusion of tears signified his utter desperation for power. His frequent threats to Nigerians were also indicative of his excessive hunger for power. 

After he lost the 2011 presidential election, he made his threats; vowing to make Nigeria ungovernable. And true to his word, he attempted to make Nigeria ungovernable. Through his Boko Haram connection, he unleashed terror on Nigeria. Some say that if Buhari had no relationship with Boko Haram, why did the terrorist group nominate him as one of its negotiators? And before the 2015 election, he threatened to spill blood and cause mayhem if he loses the election. Unfortunately, in 2015, Nigerians buckled under Buhari’s threats and shenanigans, and elected a dictator-president.