By the time his tenure is over, will President Muhammadu Buhari be called great? Or will he be dismissed as just another has-been, or, worse, a mistake of the presidential kind? Well, it depends. For it will depend on how he applied himself to the weight and demands of his office, and whether he managed to crack the huge challenges facing his over 170m people, or the challenges cracked him.
Some eight months into the Buhari presidency, some have, however, started drawing their own conclusions, most of which no music to the president’s ears. On the street corners and in some other public places, the verdict is unflattering. Even in some of the most carefully-worded columns written by the best brains on offer, the impression is steadily being created that we just might have ended up in a cul-de sac, a dead-end street, without exit, the only escape being a retreat. If that is true, it is a peculiarly tough situation because in the case of the president, there are still over three full years to go, in the first instance.
The discontent, however, is, perhaps, not without some background. The president’s fewness of words in explaining himself and the actions of his administration has manifestly unsettled his critics. So has his body language. And so have a number of other things that have happened, or failed to happen, since he took office. The slump in the economy, thanks to the oil prices crash, has kept many growling, for instance.
But the apparent conclusion that we have a bad president on our hands is hasty, in my opinion. Some kinder commentators have pointed out that it is too early to judge Buhari but I daresay that these eight months have been quite promising, and that if sustained, the country is well on its way to redemption. The anti-corruption campaign and counterinsurgency onslaught offer sufficient hope, and, though the doubters may not be impressed, the economy too might tick up sooner than feared, with a bit of concerted effort from the ministries and agencies, especially the agric and solid minerals sectors.
That is not to say the optimists, one of whom I fancy myself, think the Buhari administration has not put a foot wrong. His first media chat further gave the president away as a crusader with the blinkers on, not wishing to be distracted by anything or anyone in the war against corruption. He even appears to see the judiciary process as a clog in the wheel. The bail granted to former National Security Adviser, retired Col Sambo Dasuki, which the administration has repeatedly flouted, is proof enough that sometimes the judiciary grates. Another irritant to the president is “that one you are calling Kanu”, as he referred to Mr Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Independent Peoples of Biafra or IPOB during the televised chat. The “revelation” that the IPOB man has two international passports, none of which he allegedly came into the country with, among other reasons, seemed to have convinced Mr President that the guilt of the accused is too grave to be fouled up by the judiciary. Even in the Zaria Shiite affair in which some hundreds were allegedly shot and killed by soldiers, Buhari did not seem to think it necessary to mask his convictions (that the sect members were guilty as charged), even though he said he was waiting for the reports of the investigations.
These dispositions do not sit well with the principles of democracy and the rule of law. The president will do well to reverse those tendencies and temper his natural impulses. His ministers and aides as well as commentators should keep nudging him on the right democratic paths.
But no one should lose sight of the fact that in the history of this most proverbially blessed, yet so pitiably and relentlessly raped country, Buhari is the only president who is attempting to slay the rapist-beasts. His stiff approach and clear frustrations with the elaborate and slow-grinding wheel of the law are only human faults, to which no president is immune. Sir Winston Churchill, perhaps Britain’s finest, unsettled his compatriots so much that some were persuaded that they were probably better off without him. He had such courage and stunning turn of phrase that he kept British fighters marching on during WWII and eventually gave their country victory, else, as some feared, the Brits would have been speaking German. But in 1915, in the ill-advised Gallipoli military campaign in the Dardanelles strait, Britain, with Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, lost about 120,000 troops, excluding those who fell ill, in nine months of battle to conquer Istanbul on the way to hitting Russia. Among other minuses, Churchill was criticised for advocating the use of poisoned gas against Kurds and Afghans in 1919, and was also accused of holding some racist and anti-Semitic views. There were so many other rotten things with which Churchill went to his grave but was justifiably given an unrivalled hero’s burial.
Former actor, governor and United States President Ronald Reagan, in his time, swept Jimmy Carter out of the White House and wormed his way into Americans’ hearts by shrinking taxes, and government while tuning up old-fashioned family values. Today, any Republican presidential aspirant who wants to best Hillary Clinton invokes Reagan, yet it was Reagan’s tax policy which spared the rich and punished the poor. It was Reagan who sold arms, and gave money, to Iran, and funded Nicaragua’s rebels, a scandal which he unsuccessfully fought to play down. Like Churchill, he too had plenty drawbacks, but it took nothing away from his place in the heart and history of the most powerful country in the world.
Older history is replete with great leaders with better-forgotten other sides and mistakes, from British kings to Alexander the Great and beyond.
The point to note is that leaders do not simply become bad simply because of some of their faults or mistakes. They become great when put on the scale and judged, positively, on the great things they did.
Buhari, clearly with faults all his own, has taken on Nigeria’s most devastating and all-consuming monster. For years Nigeria was one of the most corrupt nations on earth, according to Transparency International or TI. In 2000 no nation was more corrupt than ours. The following year only one country performed worse that Nigeria on the corruption index. It remained in that position from that year till 2004 when it staggered to the position of third worst behaving country out of 145 surveyed.
Corruption has wrecked everything in the country. It has stifled business, taken away credibility from elections, made nonsense of transportation, reduced education to a joke, undermined the military and the police, made the civil service unappealing, rendered infrastructure comatose, removed the soul of religion, even killed more than anyone can keep track of.
Buhari should not copy other leaders’ bad traits but his best side is clearly fighting Nigeria’s most notorious monster. May that side win so that he will be great.
