Former head of state, Muhammadu Buhari, may not have reached mythical status like the eponymous Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, but he has clearly become a genuine hero whose death, had it occurred in last week’s Kaduna blast that claimed more than 100 lives, would have had dire consequences for the country and the Jonathan presidency. Two days before suicide bombers targeted him, the retired general had excoriated President Goodluck Jonathan for insensitively declaring war on Nigeria, a war he said the president could not hope to win for natural and historical reasons. Even if the two incidents were unrelated, majority of the general’s admirers would never allow themselves be persuaded that the Jonathan government did not have a hand in it. All that was needed for conflagration to break out was a spark in Kaduna, and another fuse lit somewhere else in the far North where the stoic and bold general had made his reputation as a friend of the dispossessed.
If Dr Jonathan cannot take counsel from the Buhari incident, then he is probably more unwise than he is globally – as a result of his poor handling of the Chibok abductions – reputed. The president remorselessly exploits Nigeria’s political, religious and cultural fissures, and it is doubtful whether he is sensitive to the implications of a political explosion. If the unthinkable had happened in Kaduna last week, and mayhem had been unleashed, would the president feel confident to exonerate himself and his brand of politics from the catastrophe? A Nigerian president is required to understanding the history of his country, where the dividing lines must be drawn, which boundaries he must never cross, what sentiments he must never exploit, and what defenders he must never permit to rally to his cause, let alone entertain openly and shamelessly. There is nothing to suggest that the president appreciates these lessons, nor does he have the discipline to let the lessons, were he to understand them, constrain his actions and policies.
No one doubts that Dr Jonathan is Nigeria’s most divisive president. He and his aides may think this label harsh and undeserved, but more and more, as if determined to keep flying in the face of providence, he exploits and exacerbate these divisions. For instance, rather than see the opposition as an integral part of democracy, and indeed as an ingredient, if not a fulcrum, for the stabilisation of Nigerian politics, both he and his party, and also his overzealous and uncontrollable aides, believe that the only way to normalise politics in these parts is either to extirpate the opposition like a pest, stigmatise their leaders, or defang it so comprehensively until it becomes unrecognisable and impotent. This depressing worldview manifests in the rash of impeachment intrigues inspired and instigated by the ruling party, and connived at by the presidency, notwithstanding Dr Jonathan’s half-hearted dissociation from the Adamawa, Nasarawa and other impeachment plots.
In addition, and just like during military regimes when the line between a ruler’s private and public/national interest becomes deliberately and short-sightedly blurred, Dr Jonathan has deployed national security organisations, whose operations are guided by definitive constitutional provisions, to wholly private and skewed interests of the president. The military, particularly the army, secret service, and other instruments of coercion have been completely reoriented towards the preservation and advancement of the Jonathan presidency. Little thought is spared for the cohesion and operational effectiveness of those security organisations.
Gen Buhari’s poignant and controversial statement also alludes to something more debilitating and truly worrisome about the president’s style. Dr Jonathan’s presidency is not only divisive; it has engaged, more than any other government before it, in the demonisation of the North, the North liberally defined. Taking advantage of the ingratiating style of Nigerian politicians, their sycophancy, their unending greed for power and their impotence in the face of tyranny, Dr Jonathan has either by public statements, body language, or indifference to the plight of the Northeast encouraged or allowed the continuing demonisation of the North. This attitude is unsafe and unhealthy.
For a long time, and even more remarkably so now, the presidency has argued that the political and business elites of the North are behind Boko Haram. Many South-South groups and individuals, and now alarmingly many Southwest groups and individuals, actually parrot the view that Boko Haram, in spite of its beginnings and chronology, was hatched to undermine the Jonathan presidency. Like all other elites in the country, but perhaps more guiltily, the northern elite was at first slow in recognising the danger constituted by Boko Haram. In fact, given its initial silence and knowing winks, it appeared that the northern elite were indifferent to the violence. They probably recall having lost the power stakes midway into the Umaru Yar’Adua presidency, and then to Dr Jonathan after the 2011 general elections. For a period, they became dangerously inured to the damage caused by Boko Haram and the long-time social, economic and political impact of the sect’s anarchic campaigns. But to conclude they hatched, inspired and funded the insurgency was a little too fanatical and specious.
Surprisingly, even leading members of the Afenifere and some other top Yoruba elite hitherto reputed for deep thinking and calmness in analysing national issues have become converted to Dr Jonathan’s fallacy. Such conversions in the Southwest must, however, be properly situated within the framework of the emerging ideological and power struggles in the zone. To assuage their guilt for abandoning what is believed to be the mainstream progressive politics in the Southwest, former so-called Awoists and other self-proclaimed progressives have suggested that both the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) contain progressive elements, or that at any rate, the APC is not even truly progressive. Having argued thus, it became both desirable and ineluctable for the Jonathan supporters in the Southwest to embrace the silly and unfounded notion that northerners support Boko Haram’s subversive campaign because they see leadership as their birthright.
When Dr Jonathan permitted himself the luxury of visiting the Northeast a few years back, he had accused the elite of harbouring Boko Haram insurgents, an accusation still repeated by many even in the Afenifere. He made no mention of the impotence of his security organisations, which he controls exclusively and deploys as he pleases. He even threatened his hosts with fire and brimstone should one more of his troops be killed by the insurgents. Since then, the militants have killed more so-called ‘northern supporters of Boko Haram’ than soldiers and southerners, and it is not certain how many more northerners they need to kill to persuade southerners to revise their theories. The militants have killed respected members of the North’s military elite such as Gen Mohammed Shuwa, and other members of the political and traditional elites. Yet, neither Dr Jonathan nor his Southwest supporters have felt the need to properly situate the ongoing terror war within the context of the global terror war and international extreme political and even jihadist tendencies.
The PDP’s insistence on blaming the APC for the large-scale insecurity the country is experiencing, in spite of evidence to the contrary, not to say its adamantine resolve to equate the opposition with religious fanaticism, has led many in the opposition to believe that the Boko Haram insurgency is actually nurtured by the ruling party for private and political ends. There will be no end to the accusations and counterarguments. But in terms of misinformation and disinformation, there is little doubt that the Jonathan government and the ruling party are cruelly and effectively exploiting the Boko Haram insurgency to retain control of the political space and to cynically manipulate the minds of the gullible, especially in the Southwest, Southeast, South-South and North-Central.
Gen Buhari has timeously warned the president about how close to the brink his government has brought Nigeria with his divisive and exploitative politics. Given the kind of people he has surrounded himself with, and his own deplorable inability to go beyond the surface in analysing and understanding the dynamics of Nigerian politics, power and peoples, I fear Dr Jonathan is quite unable to grasp the fears that trouble Gen Buhari’s mind. For, as it has long been evident, even the ability to appreciate danger requires some depth of understanding, a quality altogether lacking in the present government.
