Is President Buhari Truly A ‘Converted Democrat?’

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

 Delivering a lecture titled “Prospects for Democratic Consolidation in Africa: Nigeria’s Transition”, on Thursday, February 16, 2015, at the Chatham House, London, the then presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, General Muhammadu Buhari, claimed he was a “converted democrat”.

*President Buhari 

“I have heard and read references to me as a former dictator in many respected British newspapers, including the well regarded Economist,” he intoned. “Let me say without sounding defensive that dictatorship goes with military rule, though some might be less dictatorial than others. I take responsibility for whatever happened under my watch.”

But he claimed that was in his earlier incarnation. He has morphed into a new being. “I cannot change the past. But I can change the present and the future. So, before you is a former military ruler and a converted democrat who is ready to operate under democratic norms.”

The applause was thunderous. Buhari claimed, without providing any proof other than the fragile reed of contesting three presidential elections, the results of which he repudiated because he lost, that global watersheds such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War, convinced him that democracy as a system of government was unassailable.

The international community was sucked into the fantasy and vigorously promoted his candidacy. Three years after taking oath of office, the ululation has quietened and many are scratching their heads for answers, which is a surprise. Did Nigerians actually believe Buhari’s self-proclaimed ‘Damascene moment?’ Isn’t it said that an old woman is never old when it comes to the dance she knows — that old habits die hard? Anyone who fell for Buhari’s ‘Damascus Road’ yarn obviously did not reckon with the Igbo adage that says no one learns how to be left-handed in old age. But there are some people who also argue that it was good Nigerians believed candidate Buhari’s shaggy-dog story.

If not, he would have most conveniently toppled Chief Obafemi Awolowo from his perch as best president Nigeria never had. The president can no longer lay any claim now or in the future to being the country’s messiah because, to borrow a cliché, the taste of the pudding is in the eating, and in three years Nigerians have had a mouthful of the president’s dessert.

What the Buhari presidency is doing is a norm-bursting power play that is endangering our democracy because it takes more than contesting elections to be a democrat. When the Presidency whimsically ignores court orders and dissenting voices are hounded by security agents, it sets a new democracy low.

Last week, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, told the Voice of America that the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, arrested since 2015 and granted bail multiple times by courts of competent jurisdiction, the latest being on July 2, 2018, cannot be released because a law that only himself is privy to, dictates that personal right can be violated on the altar of public good without telling Nigerians how Dasuki’s freedom of movement infringes on the wellbeing of Nigerians. In his hackneyed logic, to save Nigeria from itself, its laws that essentially regulate the conduct of both the government and the governed, must be violated. But Dasuki’s case is not peculiar.

Despite several court orders that the Shiites leader, Sheik Ibrahim El-zakzakky, his wife and other members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, IMN, be released from detention, government has refused to let go. Buhari is taking Nigeria down the path of tyranny. He has no respect for the judiciary and is highly contemptuous of the legislature. Egged on by duplicitous hangers-on, he holds the grandiose, but patently erroneous, belief that in a democracy only he should rule Nigeria. In flagrant violation of Section 80(2) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), which prohibits withdrawal and expenditure of public money except as appropriated by the National Assembly, the President recently withdrew $1 billion from the public till for the so-called fight against Boko Haram insurgency and $462 million for the purchase of fighter jets from the U.S. without National Assembly’s authorisation.

He cannot claim as George Washington, America’s first president, did in his letter to Catherine Macaulay Graham on January 9, 1790 that his “station is new” or to be walking on “untrodden ground,” because as Nigeria’s president in 2015, he is not re-inventing the wheels of democracy, which was what Washington did, literally. President Washington had no precedents to fall back on. Buhari has and, therefore, has no excuse for the pervasive impunity orchestrated by executive lawlessness.

Matters came to a head on Tuesday when security operatives, in an apparent bid to abort the mass defection of National Assembly members from the ruling APC to PDP stormed the Abuja homes of the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, and Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu in the early hours. The idea was to ensure that they never left their homes and possibility to create the enabling environment for the President’s loyalists in the Senate to effect a regime change. That was bare-knuckle politics. As 2019 approaches, the gloves are off.

While they succeeded in putting Ekweremadu under house arrest, Saraki, who was to appear before the police same day for further investigation into his alleged role in the Offa robbery killings in Kwara State, outsmarted them. Expectedly, both the Presidency and the police have denied any complicity. In a statement late on Tuesday, the Presidency came out swinging against what it called relentless allegations of presidential interference in the affairs of security agencies across the country. “It is odd, strange and bizarre that while ordinary citizens can be called up to answer questions or be interrogated, the VIP cannot be questioned without the annoying insinuations of partisanship, persecution or outright politicisation,” the presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, said. “This country cannot achieve development when important cases are viewed through a political prism and the law is considered as being applicable to some, and not applicable to others. The law of the land is intended for all, not for the poor or those at the lowest rungs of the social ladder.”

The Presidency’s justification for the manifest impunity that now walks on all fours in the land barely passes the laugh test.

But even more ridiculous is the statement by the police claiming that the authorities did not deploy the personnel that besieged the two homes and suggesting that “the police personnel seen in pictures in the media were those in the convoy of the Senate President and others attached to him.” No-matter how anyone may wish to spin it, the events of Tuesday represent a significant ratcheting up of the attacks on Nigeria’s democracy.

Repression of fundamental rights being experienced under the Buhari government diminishes the sacrifices made by ordinary people who resisted military dictatorship, which he was a primary beneficiary. But one thing is certain. When roused, Nigerians don’t roll over. And President Buhari ought to know that. After all, he was there with General Sani Abacha when the late maximum ruler roused Nigerians with the same malevolent tendencies. How it all ended is still recent history.