Adamu’s Forced Exit: The Post-Power Humiliation Of Buhari

 By Olu Fasan

Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s immediate past president, had a post-power syndrome. He once said he would find life difficult if a president from another party succeeded him. He genuinely feared that a successor from another party would treat him and his allies the same way he treated his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, and his loyalists in 2015.

*Adamu and Buhari 
So, Buhari exploited his incumbency and pulled all the stops to secure “victory” for Bola Tinubu, saying “he will continue my legacy”. Indeed, in his last days in office, Buhari made several appointments and launched several initiatives as if saying: “they’re safe in Tinubu’s hands.”

But he was utterly naïve! For no sooner did Tinubu become president than he began to unravel Buhari’s “legacy” and persecute his loyalists. Take his recent defenestration of Abdullahi Adamu as APC National Chairman and the incarcerations of Godwin Emefiele, after removing him as governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and Abdulrasheed Bawa, after sacking him as chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC! 

Future chroniclers of Nigeria’s political history would be enthralled by the intriguing story of the relationship between Buhari and Tinubu and the mutual calculatedness in pursuit of their “lifelong” presidential ambitions. The template they used to acquire power was hitherto alien to Nigeria. Never before did two individuals enter into a self-serving “you scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours” pact to help each other become president.

In 2015, Buhari secured 15.4m votes, but would not have become president without the 2.4m votes that Tinubu “contributed” from his South-West base. Fast forward to 2023. Tinubu became president with 8.8m votes but got only 2.3m from South-West; 799,957 from South-South and 127,370 from South-East. However, he amassed 5.6m votes from the North, with 2.6m from North-West. There are, of course, ongoing presidential election petitions. But if the Supreme Court affirms Tinubu’s victory, we can say that, just as Tinubu and the South-West made Buhari president, Buhari and the North made Tinubu president!

Thus, unlike previous presidents since 1999, Buhari and Tinubu lacked nation-wide electoral reach. They became president through an alliance between the North, particularly the North-West, and the South-West. The oft-repeated argument is that “politics is a game of numbers”. So, if Buhari and Tinubu could become president only with the votes of the North and the South-West, why not? Well, for unity and cohesion, Nigeria should be led by truly pan-Nigerian party and presidential candidate with significant votes across regional, ethnic and religious boundaries, not through sectional bifurcations of the country. But the point, which leads to the subject of this intervention, is that the Tinubu-Buhari electoral pact was based on self-interested calculations between two individuals who distrusted each other; who, even in power, played cat and mouse. Crucially, with ongoing consequences, Tinubu never trusted Buhari and never forgave his “betrayals”.

Indeed, Buhari was perfidious. Once he became president in 2015, his body language suggested he wanted to duck out of his “deal” with Tinubu. He gave Tinubu a noticeable wide berth, leading to a “cold war” between them. By the 2019 presidential election, Buhari had strengthened his Northern base and made some inroads into the South-East and South-South, such that he could have won the election without the South-West. If you took the two million votes that Buhari got from the South-West in 2019 from his total votes of 15m, he still had 13m votes, which were more than Atiku Abubakar’s 11.3m votes. Surely, Buhari must be thinking, APC could retain the presidency in 2023 without Tinubu.

And, indeed, ahead of this year’s presidential election, Buhari started manoeuvring to deny Tinubu the APC ticket. First, he got the National Assembly to include a consensus option in the Electoral Act. Second, he arm-twisted his party to adopt Abdullahi Adamu as National Chairman by consensus, expecting the stern-looking Adamu to enforce his will in the party. Third, in May 2022, Buhari told APC governors: “You chose your successors, allow me to choose mine,” preparing the ground for a consensus candidate. Then, shortly afterwards, Adamu announced Ahmed Lawan, then Senate President, as the party’s consensus candidate, certainly with Buhari’s foreknowledge and acquiescence.

I argued in this column that Buhari should, in the national interest, oppose Tinubu’s presidential bid. But Buhari was a weak and witless “leader”. Although he rose to become a Major-General, his military strategy failed him in tackling Nigeria’s security challenges and failed him in countering a consummate political strategist with deep pockets. Tinubu outmanoeuvred Buhari every step of the way! Tinubu’s explosive “Olule” speech in Abeokuta, ahead of the APC primaries, was a masterstroke. The speech galvanised APC leaders and delegates, reminding them how Tinubu actually “made” Buhari president in 2015. With that pathos, coupled with material inducements, as some APC leaders attested, Tinubu clinched the ticket. It’s worth remembering that after the “Olule” outburst, Adamu said Tinubu’s “utterances are very insulting”, threatening that the party would “sanction” him for his “unbecoming behaviour”.

In February, I wrote that if Tinubu became president, “he would, sooner or later, show undisguised animosity towards Buhari and his acolytes, who he believes worked against his political interests”. Adamu was one of them. So were Emefiele and Bawa, who, with Buhari’s support, respectively introduced and enforced the CBN’s naira redesign policy, which Tinubu believes was aimed at him. “Our monies were confiscated,” he said recently. 

Eventually, Buhari was instrumental to Tinubu’s “victory”. But Tinubu doesn’t forget perfidies. He wants retribution. Buhari made Adamu APC’s national chairman, Tinubu sacks him. Buhari recently conferred the National Productivity Order Merit award and Commander of the Order of the Niger, CON, on Bawa and Commander of the Order of the Federal Republic, CFR, on Emefiele, but Tinubu dismissed and detained them, citing grievous offences. Surely, this is a post-power humiliation of Buhari and a proxy war against him.

What’s worrying about the prolonged incarcerations of Emefiele and Bawa is the creeping authoritarianism and disregard for the rule of law. Equally disturbing is Tinubu’s power grab. With Tinubu tightening his grip on his party and the opposition, with the Senate President unctuously wearing the “Tinubu cap”, and with the judiciary allegedly lacking credibility, Nigeria’s fragile democratic institutions are endangered. Tinubu captured Lagos, he might, by pocketing the national institutions of governance, capture Nigeria. Watch out!

*Fasan is a commentator on public issues