Between Buhari the President and Buhari the General

Vincent Akanmode

The Punch newspaper deserves full credit for perspicacity with its recent resolve to address President Muhammadu Buhari with his military title of Major-General. The move, the newspaper said, was a symbolic protest against the President’s penchant for disregarding the rule of law. It also said it would henceforth describe the Buhari administration as a regime, just to underscore the military tendencies of his government.

The newspaper felt the need to register its frustrations about the President whose administration has kept in detention a former National Security Adviser (NSA), Col. Sambo Dasuki (rtd), since December 1, 2015, following his arrest by the State Security Service (SSS) for allegedly stealing the sum of $2.1 billion meant to acquire arms, helicopters and fighter jets for the military in the campaign against the dreaded Boko Haram sect. He remains yet in detention despite being granted bail by four different High Court judges as well as the ECOWAS Court.

The leader of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), Alhaji Ibrahim El-Zakzaky and his wife were also arrested after the December 12, 2015 bloody clash between Shi’ites and soldiers on the entourage of the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, in Zaria, Kaduna State, and have also not been released in spite of various court judgments granting them bail. In the same vein, the convener of Revolution Now and presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in the last presidential election, Omoyele Sowore, has remained in detention since he was arrested in August after calling for a revolution. On two occasions since then, he has been released on court orders only to be re-arrested.

Punch’s decision to address the President as Major-General Buhari and call his civilian government a regime, therefore, is a consequence of perceived government’s abuse of human rights and unwillingness to submit itself to the rule of law. If, however, the measures were meant to force Buhari to toe democratic line, the paper may not be anywhere close to achieving it, given the excitement with which many of the President’s aides and supporters have embraced his military title. Some even said they did not vote for a democrat but a general, and that they did so because of his antecedents and style of governance while he held sway as head of state between 1983 and 1985. They prefer the stern looking and taciturn Buhari of that era to the smiling one of the current dispensation.

The President’s spokesman, Mr. Femi Adesina, had indicated the warm embrace of the Major-General title in Buhari’s camp with his response to the Punch editorial, saying that there is absolutely nothing wrong with addressing the President with a title he worked very hard to earn. He said: “Nothing untoward in it. It is a rank the President attained by dint of hard work before he retired from the Nigerian Army. And today, constitutionally, he is also Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. All over the world, just as in our country, a large number of retired military officers are now democrats. It does not make those who did not pass through military service better than them. Rather than being pejorative, addressing President Buhari by his military rank is another testimony to free speech and freedom of the press, which this administration (or regime, if anyone prefers: it is a matter of semantics) has pledged to uphold and preserve.”

Of course, I am not in a position to speak for Punch, but I do not believe that the newspaper actually set out to ridicule Buhari. At the very worst, it could be a strategy to spur the President into action by reminding him of the latent personal qualities he has failed to deploy in his leadership assignments; the qualities I thought were about to manifest when he announced soon after he won his reelection that he would be taking some tough decisions in his second term.

With the President’s pronouncement, my mind had raced back to the firm and decisive Buhari that held sway as the nation’s leader between December 1983 and August 1985; a short but highly eventful era of national reawakening when the War Against Indiscipline (WAI) restored a culture of orderliness in public places and suspected looters of the nation’s exchequer were haunted and hounded. Remarkably, the regime even changed the designs of the different denominations of the naira because it was suspected that a lot of public office holders had stolen from the national treasury and were reluctant to keep the looted funds in the banks for fear that it would be traced to them.

The story is told of how some Chadian soldiers, whose country had been in a prolonged civil war, invaded some Nigerian communities in 1983 while Buhari held sway as the General Officer Commanding the 3rd Division of the Nigerian Army in Jos. It was during the Second Republic when the gentleman President Shehu Shagari was the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. With a simple signal from Shagari to Buhari to flush out the intruders, an all-action Buhari launched an offensive that drove the Chadian soldiers so deep into their own territory that the Chadian President had to plead with Shagari to prevail on Buhari to withdraw his troops.
The Buhari we desire is one who confronts an invading army and causes them to flee with their tails between their legs. It is not one whose order is flouted and nothing happens when he tells the First Lady: “Go to the other room and keep quiet.”