By Moses E. Ochonu
Buharists are always asking us to applaud the
president for every little tokenistic and symbolic gesture even when such a
gesture is late, ineffectual, and compelled by public pressure. It's a form of
emotional blackmail of course, but no matter. Let us humor them.
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| *President Buhari, wife Aisha, surrounded by family and friends, during his birthday party |
Because of its track record of deception, lies,
overwrought propaganda, hypocrisy, and duplicity, many thoughtful citizens are
now understandably hesitant to praise the Buhari administration even when it
appears to have done something praiseworthy. This is proving irksome to
Buhari’s hardcore loyalists. But why are Nigerians who are notoriously
politically easy to please reluctant to extent praise to Buhari? It is because
they don't want to look stupid days or hours later when the leaks and
revelations start occurring, implicating the do-gooders themselves as the
culprits of the very problem they were pretending to solve.
On several occasions, some
Nigerians have praised the president prematurely for taking a particular action
only to look foolish a few days or even hours later when it emerged that the
wrong that the president was being praised for righting was caused by him in
the first place. These Nigerians realized that the president and his
propagandists had manipulated them.
What could be more sinister
than that? You create a problem. When the problem comes to the public's
attention, you feign ignorance, hoping that it would blow over. Then there's
public outrage and demands for ameliorative action. You duplicitously pretend
to be shocked and outraged at the very problem you engineered into existence.
Then you take reluctant, half-hearted action in response to the public outcry.
Finally, you and your fanatical supporters demand praise for your incomplete
and largely cosmetic action on the problem you caused.
The pattern is now familiar
and has repeated itself once again in the Maina recall scandal. It turns out,
thanks to the latest leaks, that the Head of Service, Ms. Winifred Oyo-Ita, verbally
briefed the president at an FEC meeting about the wide-ranging negative
implications of the recall. She advised the president against the recall
because, as she recounted in her leaked memo to Buhari’s Chief of Staff, the
blowback that would follow would fatally damage the president’s anti-corruption
posturing. That conversation occurred on October 11, when the conspiracy to
recall Maina was underway.
Buhari obviously ignored
her written and verbal counsel and signed off on Maina's recall.
Fast forward a few weeks
and the proverbial shit hit the fan of public anger.
Did Mr. Integrity fess up
to his knowledge of and role in Maina's recall? No. He pretended that he had
just found out about it, made a deceptive show of firing Maina, and ordered a
"probe" into the circumstances of the recall. The ridiculousness of
probing an action he approved against the wise counsel of the HoS would emerge
with clarity after the leak of Oyo-Ita’s memo. Once the charade of probing and
firing was completed, the president’s handlers and supporters announced that we
should clap for the Great Leader for saving the republic from the cabal and,
for good measure, from the PDP, which Garba Shehu comically blamed for Maina's
recall.
This is worse than
corruption. It is corruption compounded by presidential deception, duplicity,
cover-up, and manipulation.
And Buharists wonder why
Nigerians are increasingly reluctant to praise the Great Leader for his few
contrived “positive” actions.
As it was with the Maina
recall scandal so it was with the Babachir Lawal situation. Buhari did not only
sit on the report of the senate probe panel indicting the former Secretary to
the Federal Government, he took the stunningly embarrassing step of writing to
the National Assembly to exonerate Lawal. The president claimed that the
presidency had looked into the affair and had found that Lawal was innocent. It
was shocking. Shocking that Buhari was lending presidential authority and
political capital to such a despicably corrupt enterprise. He was playing
investigator and judge in the case to protect his friend and loyalist, Lawal.
And this, much to the president’s misfortune, was happening at a time when
newspapers in the country and online news sites were awash with graphic
documentary evidence of Mr. Lawal’s corruption.
It was not only the
corruption; it was also the fact that Mr. Lawal was stealing funds meant for
internally displaced persons, IDPs. And yet Buhari, demonstrating yet again
that for him personal loyalty trumps country, wrote to exonerate the former
SGF, disregarding the media and Senate indictment and the avalanche of evidence
in the public sphere supporting that indictment.
As if the president’s
(mis)behavior was not self-humiliating enough, when he reluctantly bowed to
pressure from the Senate and the public and suspended Lawal, his handlers and
supporters went to town and audaciously demanded that his critics praise the
suspension and give him credit for taking action on the scandal.
To do what they were asking
us to do, we would have had to develop amnesia and forget that a few months
prior the president had unilaterally declared Lawal innocent. We would have had
to refrain from asking the question of what changed to cause the president to
reverse himself. The evidence was still the same, so why did the president
suspend a man he declared innocent in the face of much inculpating evidence?
Why did the president subject himself to such ridicule? The answer is as
disconcerting as it is simple. The president has no integrity; he is a sucker
for loyalty, and he is at home with corruption and corrupt people.
To do what his supporters
were demanding, we would have had to pretend not to know that the president had
wished that the scandal would fizzle out and that his letter would quash the
matter so Lawal could continue in his role as SGF. They were in effect asking
us to praise the president for reluctantly undoing a wrong he perpetuated in
arrogant disregard of legislative and public outrage against the conduct of
Lawal. But that’s the familiar audacity of this president and his supporters;
they want to score points either way. They reckon that even a clear error of
judgment on the part of the president can be spun into a public relations point
in his favor.
Additionally, the president
and his supporters do not have a sense of irony and are impervious to the shame
of self-contradiction. Perhaps seeking to distract attention away from the
daily output of corruption scandals, last week, the government, through the
Attorney General, announced gleefully that it had signed an agreement with the
Swiss Government for the release of another $321 million of late dictator
Abacha’s seemingly bottomless loot stashed away in that European country.
But in June 2008, during the
ten year death anniversary prayers for the late dictator, Buhari, who served as
the Chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund under him, said Abacha never stole any
money.
It was shocking therefore
to see that when the announcement of the Abacha loot repatriation was made,
Buhari’s supporters again rushed to spread the news, declaring it another
victory for the president’s anti-corruption drive, never mind that every
president since 1999 has received tranches of the Abacha loot. Lost to the
president’s supporters and his AGF, who started the celebratory frenzy with the
tone of his announcement, is the contradiction of denying that Abacha stole
from Nigeria
If Abacha didn't steal any
money then why is your AG gleefully announcing the imminent repatriation of yet
another tranche of Abacha's Swiss loot? This question never occurred to the
president and his supporters. An event that should have been hushed up because
it would embarrass the president in light of his earlier denial of Abacha’s
thievery was turned into an inexplicable but desperate attempt to praise the
Great Leader.
Once again, this episode
spotlighted the president’s most enduring weakness: a penchant for impulsively
protecting and defending corruption among his associates.
Buhari's problem is not
just parochialism and nepotism, which are now bywords for his administration.
Perhaps his biggest character flaw is unqualified personal loyalty to his
benefactors and loyalists. Time and again, it has led him into the corruption
of enabling and defending graft.
No sensible, self-valuing
Nigerian should risk their reputation and honor to praise anything this
administration does because every "positive" action has proven to be
a lame attempt to cover up an egregious act of corruption on the part of the
same characters pretending to take corrective action.
Sometimes such “positive”
actions are shameless efforts to take credit for events and accomplishments
they had nothing to do with. In some other cases, the "positive"
action was a cynical ploy to manipulate, deceive, and distract from ongoing
scandals, or to simply quieten a growing storm of public anger. There is no
underlying sincerity of purpose or integrity.
A government that coyly but
unabashedly seeks to reap public relations dividends from covering up its own
corruption through pretend action and feigned ignorance is beyond corrupt.
A government that
manipulates the anxieties of citizens by spinning negatives into positives is
unworthy of empathetic understanding and benefits of the doubt. It is
fundamentally disrespectful of the citizens on whose behalf it exists and acts.
*The author can be reached at meochonu@gmail.com
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