EVERY Nigerian by now knows how prone their president, Muhammadu Buhari, is to saying the wrong things at the wrong moments about the country it is his privilege to preside over. If his outing in London early this week had gone without any verbal incident or accident, his patient and long-suffering countrymen would have found it out of character that all was calm on the Western front. But though Nigerians were not taken by surprise that their president misspoke yet again last Wednesday at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London, they were still flabbergasted that he plumbed new depths of misspeaking in the dignified and stately presence of snickering business and global leaders.
Responding to a question not stated by reporters or even the president’s spokesman, Femi Adesina, nor apparently a question even targeted at getting him to speak directly about his country’s young, President Buhari shocked his audience by making a sweeping generalisation about Nigerian youths. Said the president in his response to the unidentified question: “More than 60 per cent of the population is below 30. A lot of them haven’t been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare, education free.” For the incensed public back home, the president had said more than enough for them to understand his drift. To them what he had to say was both untrue and unpleasant, and it was typical of him. They recall how in an interview with a British newspaper in the same London in 2016 he had insinuated that some Nigerian youths seeking asylum, and probably thereby embarrassing Nigeria, should not be indulged by their hosts because they had embraced criminality. The reactions then was furious.
It was, therefore, expected that though he would now and again ski verbally off-piste, so to speak, he would exercise the best precaution and adroitly smother his private prejudices and reservations. To the perennial dismay of his minders, however, the president often lets loose during his overseas travels in equal measure as he lets his hair down in those salubrious environments. It is obviously not an accident that most of his gaffes were made during his often animated foreign trips. But last Wednesday’s was particularly bad, regardless of his spokesman’s valiant effort to put a gloss on it. In Mr Adesina’s opinion, the president neither said anything provocative nor anything wrong. Indeed, he indifferently sidestepped the wrongness or rightness of the president’s statement on the youths.
“At the Commonwealth Business Forum in London on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari gave a keynote address on Making Business Easier Between Commonwealth Countries,” Mr Adesina began cautiously. “The presentation was followed by a discussion, and question and answer session. Responding to a question, President Buhari had cause to talk about some Nigerian youths, and he said: ‘We have a very young population; our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.’ ”
The president’s spokesman then went on to inveigh against those he claimed were so unlettered as to be unable to appreciate the nuances of language, who could not understand what he described as the wide gulf between “all” and “a lot of”, manipulators and twisters of language who loved to “transmogrify” words mischievously and unconscionably. As this column once noted, Mr Adesina needlessly encumbers himself with so much anger in responding to issues and remarks on behalf of his principal. There are ways to correct mistaken impressions and producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.’ ”
The president’s spokesman then went on to inveigh against those he claimed were so unlettered as to be unable to appreciate the nuances of language, who could not understand what he described as the wide gulf between “all” and “a lot of”, manipulators and twisters of language who loved to “transmogrify” words mischievously and unconscionably. As this column once noted, Mr Adesina needlessly encumbers himself with so much anger in responding to issues and remarks on behalf of his principal. There are ways to correct mistaken impressions and quotes in such a manner that both the image of the president, whom he works for, and the sensitivities of the public, whom he interfaces with, are not hurt. But the angry spokesman spurns wise counsel.
Yet, the grammatical distinction Mr Adesina makes is not quite as evident and overarching as he thinks. He speaks of “all” and “a lot of” as if “a lot of” is not such a significant and offensive categorisation when it comes to a negative statement about a group of people. First of all, “a lot of” is indeed and truly very significant as a representation and quantifier of a universal set. What matters, as a matter of fact, is not the little distinction — not wide gulf, as Mr Adesina puts it — between the two descriptions of the youths the president had in mind but the sweeping and demeaning things he said about them — whether all of them or a lot of them. Mr Adesina’s anger often gets in the way of some of his sensible rebuttals; but much more than his anger are the sometimes futile distinctions he draws when he seeks to ameliorate the president’s perverse use of language. It was bad enough that the president saw any of his countrymen as a parasite; it is worse that he felt he should regale the global audience with his uncomplimentary putdown of the people he presides over.
What undergird President Buhari’s worldview are his sophomoric understanding of right and wrong, his indefensible dualism of life in Nigeria, his definite but tenuous defence of his own constricted moral universe. When these things mix together, they colour his perception of reality, make his convictions inflexible, and paint virtually every other person as questionable and suspect. This was why he saw “a lot of” the youths of his country as idlers and leeches who would not seek education but demand everything free. If, as he said, they would not seek education, has he asked himself why they do not? And supposing they do not, has he done anything about ensuring they seek education? Since his assumption of office, and in the light of the agreement his predecessor reached with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), has he released a kobo to redeem even one tranche of the agreement?
President Buhari constantly whines. That is why he blames everybody for everything. It is not true, as his spokesman has said, that he has high opinion of Nigerian youths. He does not, despite his guarded use of the controversial quantifier. He thinks everyone is obsessed with the country’s oil fortune, but he has done nothing to convince anyone that he himself is not besotted to oil, given his retention of the petroleum ministry portfolio and despite not having enough time to pay attention to its worsening dynamics. After all, he has also heavily criticised the judiciary, which he generalises as the criminal justice system, without propounding ideas for deep reforms, or allocating substantial sums to revamp the broken infrastructure of that blighted and forgotten sector.
The president’s unflattering opinion of Nigerian youths, whether all of them or a lot of them, is consistent with his sanctimonious conclusions about the integrity of every other person and group in the country. If his minders want to help him overcome his jaded social and political views of life, they must patiently take him through the general philosophy of life afresh, wean him off his suspect misanthropy, and re-educate him on the general principles of constitutional rule and the huge moral responsibility that goes with the high office he occupies. Otherwise, he will continue to see the world from a wrong prism, a world he would conclude is irredeemably evil. But with a president so cocksure of everything, and a spokesman who gushes so unrepentantly over his principal with all sorts of grammatical extenuations, not to talk of a slew of aides stupefied by the president’s contrived grandeur and reticence, there is little hope that President Buhari would not misfire again at his next trip abroad. Had the president reserved his gaffes to shaming outsiders in other countries, the distress Nigerians face when their president skewers the country and humiliates them would be far more tolerable.
