By Femi
Aribisala
THINGS have not been going according to plan for President Buhari. For the last four months since his famous victory, the president has been engaged with a battle royal with the very people who put him in power. In order to win the election, Buhari had to form an alliance with wily politicians of the old-school; men seasoned at getting their hands dirty and adept at manipulating the system to power-political advantage.
THINGS have not been going according to plan for President Buhari. For the last four months since his famous victory, the president has been engaged with a battle royal with the very people who put him in power. In order to win the election, Buhari had to form an alliance with wily politicians of the old-school; men seasoned at getting their hands dirty and adept at manipulating the system to power-political advantage.
*Femi Aribasala
Buhari had tried to make
it without these men in the past, but without success. On his third
attempt in 2011, he opted for Tunde Bakare as his running mate. Bakare
was not a politician but a man of known integrity: a radical Christian pastor
to boot. Nevertheless, Buhari still lost by 10 million votes to the
lesser-known Goodluck Jonathan.
In 2015, he chose Yemi
Osinbajo as his running-mate, another man of integrity and, yet again, a
Christian pastor. But there was something different this time
around. He agreed to dine with known political devils. He
formed an alliance with the very political elite he had long despised.
These are men who know the crooked ropes of the Nigerian political
system. They know how to finance a nationwide campaign with
funds obtained magically; no questions asked. They know how to buy
and manipulate the press. They know how to conjure votes with the
sleight of hand.
With
their help, Buhari finally became president against all the odds. The
million naira question then became how he would rule alongside these strange
bedfellows. How is he going to be their anointed president without
becoming one of them? How is he going to be president without becoming
another politician? How can he become president through the help of these
men without becoming hostage to them in his victory?
Buhari
has kept Nigeria
waiting as he struggled with this dilemma. While the press nicknamed him
“Baba Go-Slow,” behind the scenes, he was fighting an epic battle against his
strange allies the best way he knew how. In that free-for-all, Buhari has
thrown his best punches and made his best moves. Finally, after four
months of protracted infighting in which his media handlers tried all
they could to put the best spin on the situation, he finally caved in and
accepted defeat.
On
30th September, 2015, Buhari was forced to accept he could not go it
alone. On that day, he finally decided to join the APC politically as its
president. Even more significantly, he finally agreed to join forces as
president with those he had despised all his political life; the PDP. On
that fateful day, President Muhammadu Buhari jettisoned his earlier
druthers. He relinquished his much-ballyhooed “change” programme and
became reluctantly a full-fledged old-school politician.
*President Buhari and Senate President, Saraki
Buhari’s
first mistake was to presume his campaign idealism could carry him through his
presidency. Having won the election comfortably, the president decided
the decent thing to do was to allow the legislators in the National Assembly to
choose their own leaders without interference from Aso Rock.
This
was a departure from the procedure of his predecessors and his naïve
supporters praised him for it. This was the Buhari they voted for; a man
who would breathe new life into the clogged political system. But the
whole thing backfired disastrously as the president became a victim of his own
attempted saintliness.
What
the system required was a president determined to ensure the right people are
in leadership positions in the National Assembly to ensure his programmes are
implemented expeditiously and to the letter. What we got instead was a
president so idealistic, he allowed his opponents to turn the tables on him.
Buhari’s
hands-off vis-à-vis the National Assembly ensured that he ended up with a House
and Senate leadership well-positioned to frustrate his programmes. In
spite of APC ‘s victory at the polls, the PDP used the backdoor to steal the
control of the legislature; using a template perfected while the APC was
still in opposition by Aminu Tambuwal.
Both
the Speaker and the Senate President were elected by minority PDP votes against
majority APC votes. Moreover, both the Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, and the
Senate President, Bukola Saraki, are now former PDP men. Both of
them secured their positions by forging alliances with their former PDP
colleagues; instead of their current APC party-members. As a result,
while Buhari was still celebrating his victory at the presidency, he woke
up one morning to discover that the PDP had regained the legislature by a coup
d’état.
It
could even have been worse. The PDP could have gone the whole hog and
secured a PDP man as Senate President. With 49 senators out of 109, all
the PDP needed were 6 more votes to achieve this. This could have been
squeezed out with a few back-room deals with the Trojan Horse PDP senators
currently sitting pretty as turncoat APC members. But they decided not to
be too greedy. They installed wily Saraki, a former PDP man, as Senate
president. They then made the deals and secured their own PDP man,
Ike Ekweremadu, as Deputy Senate President.
This
was a wake-up call for the president. Finally, he learnt that his
idealism just would not cut it in the murky waters of Nigerian politics.
He cannot stand aloof but has to dive in and get dirty himself.
Accordingly, recalcitrant Saraki was declared persona non grata in Aso Rock;
but this could only work for so long given that he is the Senate President.
His wife was invited for lunch by the EFCC; but a battalion of senators showed
their defiance by escorting her there. Thereafter, the dogs of the Code
of Conduct Bureau were unleashed on Bukola Saraki himself.
*Jonathan
On
his election, Buhari had served notice that he would be his own man and not
anybody’s dogsbody. He declared: “I belong to everybody and I belong to
nobody.” This must have irritated those who put him in power to no
end. He then went ahead to declare his political independence by telling
APC governors they would have no say in his choice of ministers. He also
refused to consult his party hierarchy in his early appointments and with
regard to his choice of presidential aides.
With
this, all hell broke loose. The same press that had been used to his
advantage during the election was unleashed against him. The Teflon
president was now presented as a sectional ethnic leader determined to
northernise the country through regionally-lopsided appointments. The APC
party hierarchy declared it would have none of this. Party chairman, John
Odigie-Oyegun, declared: “The party will henceforth be fully involved in the
subsequent appointments, which is where the supremacy of the party will come to
bear.”
Thereby,
the battle was joined. Would the “noise-makers” in the APC prevail
against the president and force him to use his ministerial appointments to pay
back his political debts to those who successfully manipulated the process to
get him finally elected after three failed previous attempts? Or would
Buhari, now that he is elected, go it alone and bring in his own team of
carefully selected technocratic saints and angels?
If
he succumbed to the party, he would end up with the same old crop of
yesterday’s politicians, many tainted with corruption, but would safeguard his
political flanks. However, if he prevailed with his own men, he could
present a new face of Nigerian politics by asserting the primacy of
technocratic savoir faire over political compensations and “come and
chop.” The one would confirm him as the new hero of the Nigerian
public. The other would make him a traitor to his questionable political
allies.
The
outcome of this struggle was announced with his ministerial list. This
revealed that Buhari surrendered after being roundly defeated by the old
politicos of his party. The president has been forced to contradict his
own promises and rhetoric by succumbing to APC pressure. From now on ,
what we are going to get is no longer Buhari the idealist, but
Buhari the new-fangled politician.
It
is clear from the announced names of Buhari’s proposed ministers that these are
not the people he took four months to select. Buhari does not need four
months to come up with the likes of Babatunde Fashola, Rotimi Amaechi,
Lai Mohammed, Ogbonnaya Onu, Kayode Fayemi and Chris Ngige. These are
old-time politicians whose names could have been announced 24 hours after his
inauguration. None more so than Audu Ogbeh, a man who was a
minister 33 years ago and is recycled by Buhari yet again.
Significantly,
out of the 21 nominated names, 8 of them were formerly associated with the
“abominable” PDP. Indeed, Audu Ogbeh was a former chairman of the
PDP. There are actually more former PDP men in Buhari’s ministerial list
than there are former ACN, CCP and technocratic men and women. So much
for Buhari’s much-touted “change” from the PDP.
Whatever
could be said about these nominees, they are hardly the men and women of
stainless-steel that Nigerians have been led to expect as Buhari’s
ministers. As a matter of fact, many of them have huge corruption
allegations hanging over their heads. Two of them are associated with
Afri-projects Consultants; an organisation tainted with corruption while Buhari
was chairman of the PTF.
Clearly,
these were not the men and women Buhari wanted to have as his ministers
initially. They are those he was forced to accept after four months of
struggle with party chieftains. Even now, the struggle continues.
Not surprisingly, Buhari prematurely badmouthed his nominees as “noise-makers”
on his trip to Paris ;
inadvertently showing his disenchantment with having to make do with those he
would rather do without. Nevertheless, the president’s reluctant nominees
can still be waylaid by his opponents in the Senate, including the acolytes of
Bola Tinubu whose preferences Buhari flagrantly ignored.
The
president’s answer is a resort to old-fashioned political maneuvering, in the
tradition of the infamous APC “navigator;” Olusegun Obasanjo. Put the
fear of Buhari into Senate President Bukola Saraki by arraigning him before the
CCB tribunal on outdated charges paradoxically similar to the ones Tinubu was
acquitted of several years ago. If Saraki knows what is good for him, he
will quickly ensure that the president’s list sails through the Senate without
any hiccups.
The
jury is still out on whether Saraki and his Senate colleagues will succumb to
this now famous “body language” of Mr. President.
*Dr. Aribasala is a syndicated columnist
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