A justification for an
inevitable return of President Muhammadu Buhari to Aso Rock in 2019 has not
unexpectedly accompanied the frenetic campaigns in some quarters. The
president’s political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the
leaders of his government reel off the epochal achievements that have validated
an end to the citizens’ serial negation of his quest to occupy the presidential
office.
For them, these achievements redound to the bid for his return as a
means of completing the good governance he has espoused and enthroned. And more
importantly, they want the citizens to appropriate a campaign for his return as
serving a purgatorial purpose – a way of discharging their obligation of gratitude
to him for bringing uncommon integrity to bear on governance.
Yet, these people lack the right credentials
to proselytise the suitability of Buhari for re-election. Their fold lacks that
authentic voice to signal the readiness of Buhari for the 2019 election. That
voice is needed to tell us if Buhari has done well in the past three years and
some months. Or what accounts for the misses and near-misses and the
circumstances that must be guarded against for their recurrence. That voice is
that of the First Lady Aisha Buhari. |
| *Aisha Buhari |
Just a little over a year after Buhari assumed
office, it was Aisha who alerted us in October 2016 to the very remote
possibility of the president delivering good governance . In an interview with
the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in October, 2016, she told us how a
cabal that did not enjoy the public’s support was the one that was in charge of
Aso Rock and not her husband. This cabal, according to her, determined who
should be appointed into government. Such appointees neither shared the vision
of her husband nor did they help him in his quest for the presidency. In
essence, those who would have helped the president to translate his dreams into
reality were marginalised by the cabal. She threatened that she would never mobilise
women to campaign for Buhari if this trajectory of deviation from Buhari’s
vision by the cabal went on unchecked.
Since then, Aisha has assumed the role of the conscience of the Buhari
government. All the officials of the Buhari government and his party would
express their readiness to disown their mothers in order to prove that Buhari
and his government’s integrity is unassailable. They would insist that Buhari
has so much turned the nation into a developmental hub that Nigerian citizens
overseas are now restless with the nostalgia for home. Not even in the health
sector do they see the depredations of neglect by the Buhari government. Not
even when the president repeatedly goes abroad for his medical treatment. But
Aisha has exposed this kind of official duplicity. Indeed, it was Aisha who
told us in October last year that the Aso Rock Clinic had no drugs even though
it was given a yearly allocation. She was outraged that the level of decay and
official connivance was so horrible that there was no X-ray machine in the
clinic. She had to go to a private hospital to avail herself of its X-ray
machine. And nobody was sanctioned even after revealing the scandalous
development .
Aisha’s positions are not just the rantings of
a frustrated woman who is consigned to the ‘other’ room. We see the evidence
that justifies her positions. Consider the APC primaries. While the leaders of
the party were gleefully regaling the nation with tales of how they had proved
the naysayers wrong by conducting successful primaries, it was Aisha who warned
them of the risk of their party and political fortunes being consumed by the
cataclysmic consequences of their predilection for electoral manipulation.
It is thus imperative that for us to determine
whether Buhari should seek re-election, we should go back to Aisha. Would she
campaign for Buhari’s re-election? It does not seem Aisha would. At a
conference organised by Project 4+4 in Abuja on Tuesday, Aisha hinted us of
this. She insisted that two persons were frustrating Buhari’s efforts at good
governance. Since in the reckoning of Aisha these two men are not playing a
positive role in the government of the president, it is curious what made
Buhari to appoint them in the first place. It is the same warped logic for
recruitment that Buhari has displayed in his administration. It is a faulty
logic that cannot help him to do what is right. It is the logic that has
underpinned his appointing only cronies who at the end pursue provincial rather
than national interests .
Who are these men? Aisha did not allow us to
know their names. But we must not regard the failure of Aisha to name the these
two men as an accident or a deliberate act of circumspection. No, we are left
with this void of namelessness in order for us to grasp the infinitude of the
power of these men and the fact that it serves as a site for the proliferation
of the dark excesses with which they afflict the nation. They call the shots.
They determine how the president thinks. Here lies a nation-unravelling
contradiction. How is a man who is thought for and spoken for become a
touchstone of integrity and the embodiment of a nation’s aspirations? If the
citizens voted for a break with the past in 2015, do these men not hark back to
that dark past? Aisha is alarmed that instead of these men being excoriated and
exposed by those who are aware of their crude manipulation of state power,
those who know them rather seek their approval for access to the privileges of
Aso Rock. For these are the men who determine who should be awarded a contract.
They determine which part of the country should be given a developmental
project. Or how and when the Boko Haram war should be fought and ended. Are
these not the men who decide who should be prosecuted and not prosecuted in the
anti-corruption fight of the Buhari government? Again, there is a sense in
which the void is nameless in order to accommodate any officials of Buhari.
These officials preside over their offices like fiefdoms with their own rules
that cater to their own interests. There is no national or Buhari’s compass to
rein them in.
Thus, if Aisha who is exposed to the intrigues
of Aso Rock and the secrets of her husband that are not known to other citizens
cannot declare confidently that her husband is no more in the grip of the men
who have incapacitated him, it means that the president is not fit for
re-election . Let those who want to shed their blood for the re-election of
Buhari go ahead. Let those who want to trek from Lagos to Abuja in
demonstration of their support for his re-election do that. And those who would
make their states ungovernable, kill and maim for his re-election should go on.
But Nigerians cannot judge through these ones if Buhari deserves re-election.
They are not qualified to tell the citizens if
Buhari has the acumen to choose on his own the path that would improve the lot
of the majority of the citizens. They lack the competence to assure the
citizens that Aso Rock would not again be hijacked from Buhari if he is
re-elected. Their message does not resonate with the citizens when they insist
that there is no cabal in the presidency. It is the voice of the First Lady
that the citizens would like to hear.
That voice would express approval or
condemnation that would urge them to vote for Buhari or warn them to reject him
because of the danger of a hijacked presidency ahead. But if Aisha does not
warn them again, probably in a bid to preserve her domestic felicity, she has
done enough to let them know the kind of president they are saddled with. And
if they decide to afflict themselves with him again, this should not be because
there has not been enough warning from her.
*Dr. Onomuakpokpo is on the Editorial Board of The Guardian
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