Category: Idowu Akinlotan

NEWSPAPERS squirmed last Monday with the startling story of President Muhammadu Buhari’s post mortem on the 1985 coup that toppled his military regime. He took office himself through a coup d’etat in December 1983, whether the motives were pure or not, and was toppled by another coup led by Ibrahim Babangida, an army major-general at the time. There were reports that Gen. Babangida moved against the then Gen. Buhari because of the latter’s inflexibility, autocratic bearing and refusal to carry his colleagues along. There were indeed many accounts of the coup.
To lay the ghost to rest, President Buhari, in an interview conducted some months ago but only now published by The Interview magazine, gave his own reading of the coup. His explanation attempted to rebut Gen. Babangida’s insistence that President Buhari misread the motive(s) of the coup. Said the president: “I learnt that Gen. Ali Gusau, who was in charge of intelligence, took an import licence from the Ministry of Commerce, which was supplies, and gave it to Alhaji Mai Deribe. It was worth N100, 000, a lot of money then. When I discovered this, I confronted them and took the case to the army council. Gen. Malu was the Chief of Defence Staff; Gen. Babangida was the Chief of Army Staff; Tunde Idiagbon was the Chief of Staff, Defence Headquarters and I was the Head of State. I said if I didn’t punish Gusau, it would create a problem for us. It is North versus South; majority versus minority; Muslim versus Christian. That was what it showed. So, I said Gen. Ali Gusau had to go. He was the Chief of Intelligence. That was why Babangida got some officers to remove me. Let him repeat his own story. Ali Gusau is still alive.”
It is not only Gen Gusau who is alive; Gen Babangida is also alive, thankfully. Whether they will react to the president’s account or not is uncertain. And whether the victim of the coup is expected to know more than the planners of the coup is also not clear. What is clear, however, is that the president should have included the rebuttal in his memoirs, assuming he plans one. By joining issues now with his former colleagues over a 1985 ghost probably indicates what many fear about him: that the president keeps grudges and exacts a terrible price from those who offend him. Apart from inadvertently portraying Gen Babangida as chivalrously fighting for Gen Gusau, the president’s version also attempts ingeniously to respond to critics who today accuse him of nepotism, ethnocentrism and bigotry. It is not certain whether that attempt will successfully dispel the feelings many Nigerians hold about his government’s biases.
Overall, the president should have ignored the interview granted by Gen Babangida to explain the motives of the 1985 coup. Asked what he thought of the explanations of those who deposed him, he should have parried the question, especially because he obviously cannot trust himself not to be emotional about the matter, not to talk of the impression of pained grief he appears to be forcing himself to endure over the circumstances surrounding the coup. The fear now is whether he still harbours other grudges in his past, particularly during his military dictatorship. But as for the impression he tried to create of his sense of fairness and justice, the present realities enveloping his presidency instill only partial confidence.

WITH about 250 ethnic groups and over 500 indigenous languages, and fractured and turbulent inter-ethnic relationships that triggered a civil war, series of coups, social and religious upheavals, and continuing national mistrust, it is truly bewildering that Nigerian leaders can argue, and in some cases even insist, that the Nigerian union mediated by British colonialists in 1914 should not be renegotiated and remoulded. Bewildering may even be a tame word. The obstinate attachment to a problematic and unstable union is in fact an indication of lack of knowledge and understanding. A cursory reading of Nigerian history reveals very clearly the fault lines, the mistakes, the dynamics, the changes, and the new realities produced by modern complexities, shifting ideologies and intervening variables such as globalisation. A union that ignores or resists these changes will ossify and die. Somehow, Nigerian leaders, perhaps on account of their lack of introspection and failure to comprehend history, assume that the dynamics of 1914 and the imperatives of 1960 are immutable, even infallible.
The main fear by those sceptical of a reworked union, it seems, is that any attempt at renegotiation is likely to produce unintended consequences such as war and disintegration. This fear has in turn generated the misuse of concepts and terms surrounding the controversy, leading sceptics to assume that any talk whatsoever of restructuring would invariably undermine national unity. There is thus absolutely no attempt to understand the past, no interest in appreciating the problems and changes of the present, and no vision of the future. In fact the current attitude of Nigerian leaders, not to talk of all their actions and policies or their incompetence and parochialisms, seems to suggest that the entire debate is an emotional exercise to sustain iniquitous and unfair advantages by some groups. And in propagating such fears, the sceptics invariably make reference to Yugoslavia’s break-up rather than expound on the salutary examples of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union, or the honest and dynamic efforts by the United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, among others, to come to grips with their own diversities.
Thrice in the past months, President Muhammadu Buhari has restated his opinion of what he thinks of restructuring and national conference. He has not based his views on any reading of history, nor on any attempt to truly understand the basal and existential dynamics of Nigeria’s instability. He bases everything on sentiment. Hear him last week: “On security, we have made a lot of improvement. On Boko Haram militants, there is improvement. We are now concentrating on the (Niger Delta) militants to know how many of them in terms of groupings and leadership, and plead with them to try and give Nigeria a chance. I assure them that the saying by General Gowon that to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done…In those days, we never thought of oil, all we were only concerned with was one Nigeria. So, please, pass this to the militants, that one Nigeria is not negotiable and they had better accept this. The Nigerian Constitution is clear as to what they should get and I assure them there will be justice.”
In other words, assuming he has carefully studied the constitution and the brittle bases upon which the Nigerian union is founded, the president is not too fretful about the observable weakness and inadequacy of the constitution to address grievances, modulate them and accommodate the diversity that has turned Nigeria into a crucible of hate, intolerance and ethnic exceptionalism. For even any talk of rewriting the constitution to accommodate the morphing needs of the moment is to him a dangerous and needless exercise. To the president, it is enough that he took over a united country, and he intends to leave it that way regardless of any criticism of his lack of innovation and anticipation. When the task of keeping the country united was being tackled, he says, no one thought of crude oil. He was in fact invoking an altruism that by every consideration was neither evident in those days, nor evident even now when it is clear that oil has become the glue binding the country together. The president also seems to suggest, perhaps fictitiously, that once security was re-established, the stability of the union would be guaranteed. Thus, in a few statements, the president displayed a worrisome lack of appreciation of the factors propelling the desperate cries for change. He has made up his mind, and from all indications, he is unprepared to change it. He changed his mind on fuel price, but he still thinks everybody is wrong, including those who supported the so-called deregulation and helped him smooth over the opposition to the unprecedented price hike. He changed his mind to allow market forces determine the exchange rate of the naira, but he still scoffs at those who coaxed him to give assent. Except he encounters that eureka moment again, he will continue to view national conference and restructuring as a ploy to dismember the country.

Modern intricacies
Those who regard President Buhari as someone who means well for the country may be right. Perhaps he actually does. But he will need to do so much more to convince those who have dismissed him as a veritable dinosaur completely inured to the changes that have taken place everywhere in Nigeria in the past two or so decades. From his angry subversion of the rights and freedoms of those he detests, such as Shiite leaders and pro-Biafra agitators, there is little to show that the president comprehends the disturbing intricacies of the modern world. More, there is little to suggest that in coming to his inflexible position against negotiating the bases upon which Nigeria rests the president has done a private study of the forces that shaped the country he is presiding over, not to talk of the new and more complex forces shaping the present, nor yet the cataclysmic forces that will evidently shape the future.
The cerebral Henry Kissinger, a former United States Secretary of State, advocates the need for a leader to have the mountaintop view of his country, a vantage position that makes the leader appreciate the present which his compatriots see but may not fully grasp, and the future on the other side of the mountain which his compatriots obviously do not see at all. A leader, argues Dr Kissinger, must be able to strike the delicate balance between the future and the present, between radical transformation and gentle transformation, so that he does not outrun his people in such a manner as to create suspicion and trigger a revolt. Without such men of vision in leadership, it is impossible for the nation to survive or adequately grapple with the world’s shifting and sometimes horrifyingly disruptive dynamics. But on the other hand, as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Congo’s Patrice Lumumba showed, men of vision are an endangered species. They see what others don’t see, and are thus impatient. Their impatience breeds contempt for the majority laggards; and their airs are resented by the people, leading to an inevitable clash of vision.
President Buhari’s response to the national conference campaign demonstrates his unease with the lessons of history. To compound a distressing inability to capture the dynamics of the past with an equally disconcerting inability to get to the mountaintop to have a kaleidoscopic view of the past, the present and the future is a dangerous recipe for any leader or nation. As far as the mechanics and attitudes of governance is concerned, the Buhari presidency is reputed to approach the constitution and its own policies and programmes like a military government. Given the frustrations of the people with such mindset, he is, therefore, likely to be the last former military head of state, if not army general, to be elected president. And if he is not also to be the last president of a united Nigeria, he must recognise the new realities germinating everywhere, and begin to institute flexibleness, consensus, compromise and accommodation into the country’s body politic.

Between hindsight and foresight
President Buhari has restated for the umpteenth time that he and others sacrificed so much to keep Nigeria one, even suggesting carelessly in Katsina a few months ago that pro-secession agitators were trying to push ‘us’ out of Nigeria. He forgot he was president. He might have fought in the war, but he showed, and apparently still shows, an incomplete understanding of the forces that shaped the revolt and circumscribed that unification war. He has not shown he recognises that the civil war had no closure, and that the social, political and economic forces that triggered the fratricide not only remain but have worsened and even ossified. In no part of his national speeches so far has he shown that he has done a private study of those forces, let alone avail the country the benefit of both his hindsight and foresight. Yet, for the sake of peace and unity which mean so much to him, he desperately needs to. History is full of leaders who virtually wrote or inspired the constitutions of the countries, and their biographies are still available for the interested, inspired leader. Those leaders saw into the future because they understood the past and had no illusions about the present. Where does President Buhari locate himself in the continuum?
The president should stop talking of ‘non-negotiable’, as if the grimness with which he says it demonstrates firmness and resolve. Let him instead meet minds with Nigerian historians on his perception of the forces that shaped the civil war, inspired the many coups and countercoups that undermined the military and polity, and other phenomena that threaten to balkanise the nation. Let him persuade the country that his understanding of these phenomena is superior and more realistic than any they have known. Let him show he knows where the country should be headed. But let him never give the impression that once the Niger Delta is pacified, and Boko Haram is defeated, and pro-Biafra agitators are silenced, and Shiites are oppressed and massacred into submission, and the corrupt have returned the country’s stolen money, then all would be well. To put it mildly, that chimerical understanding of a nation of 250 often fractious ethnic groups is negligent, misplaced and damaging. After all, Nigeria didn’t contend with Shiites, stolen money on today’s scale, religious militants, etc, before it exploded into war in 1967.

Schizoid interpretation
In the president’s statement quoted above, he also spoke of treating the Niger Delta justly. He would give them what the constitution promised them, he said condescendingly. The president, it seems, has narrowed everything down to materialism. But assuming that such a schizoid interpretation of history were accurate, how would he juxtapose his declared sense of justice with the current allegations that his military and paramilitary appointments are skewed? Where, indeed, would he place his own Freudian slips that tend to give him away as more pro-North than any past or recent national leaders? And where would he place his handwringing on the herdsmen attacks that have set the country on edge, especially his refusal to visit states or villages where horrendous acts of savagery were committed? He has promised to be just. Let him by his explanation and deliberate and conscientious actions show that his government is founded on that great principle of justice.
Most significantly, until President Buhari convinces Nigerians that his government and personal disposition indicate overarchingly that neither tribe nor religion matters, his statements will continue to carry little weight. Few can see in his appointments, contrary to the arguments of his apologists, or in his spoken and unspoken view about the Shiites crisis, Kogi conundrum, Benue (Agatu) attacks, and pro-Biafra agitation, among others, the sense of justice he has preached and tried to inculcate in Nigerians. And without a conscious effort to understand the past and present, let alone point the country in the direction of a glorious and ennobling future through sensible restructuring, how can he confidently talk of Nigeria’s stability?
But, of course, the president can stick to his point of view. After all, his predecessors also stuck to the same point of view and were not discomfited by the appalling outcomes that have destabilised the country and dragged it to the edge of the cliff. If the president sticks to his worldview, let him not be surprised that the problems mushroom rather than dissipate. And let him hope that when the inevitable explosion comes, there will be someone with enough clout and intellect to control and direct it. Nigeria’s past did not begin with 1914 or 1960. Those dates were the creation of the British. Nigeria’s history, the history of the world shows, will not end as it began. Borders will change, ideologies will change, cultures will change. If those changes are triggered, directed and moderated by farsighted leaders, then Nigeria’s story will shape out much better than the forces tearing it apart. If those changes, however, take on a life of their own, the end would be unpredictable. So, by all means, let the president speak of ‘non-negotiable’. But let him be aware that he is seeing only an infinitesimal part of the dismal Nigerian picture. Those parts he has not seen, or has refused to see, are much more troubling and explosive than he can imagine.

SINCE the appointment of Acting Inspector General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, analysts, politicians and columnists from the Southeast have been exasperated with President Muhammadu Buhari over his seeming deliberateness in disregarding and excluding Igbo representation in the country’s security (military and paramilitary) apparatus. They are right to feel incensed. It is indeed hard to imagine that the president assembled his security team and omitted Igbo representation by accident. If indeed it was accidental, then it is a reflection of the quality of his kitchen cabinet; a cabinet this column has thrice taken to task for its structural insularity. But if the security team was assembled with careful and, as the presidency appears to argue, meritorious deliberateness, then it is even more baffling and provocative, a reflection of something much more insidious in the presidency, something more calculating, more subverting of national ethos.

Shortly after the president began to assemble his kitchen cabinet last year and showed a predilection for parochialism, this column warned that it presaged a dangerous trend that might disallow the president from enjoying a broad perspective of ideas, suggestions, viewpoints and philosophies that conduce to national cohesion and stability. The column also warned that if no one leaned on the president to change tack, the narrow base from which he was recruiting his close staff, not to say the wider cabinet, could get even narrower and ideologically insular. But the presidency’s response to the fears and criticisms was one of impatience. The public should wait until the entire cabinet was assembled, presidential aides growled. Now both the kitchen cabinet and the general cabinet have been assembled, and neither gives any indication that the president appreciates the political, nay, democratic, imperatives of his team, nor of the country. Worse, as it is now evident, even the country’s security apparatus does not reflect the country’s diversity, religion and geopolitics. Is no one embarrassed?

Presidential aides will want to respond testily to Igbo allegation of alienation, for even the president himself seldom reacts to such matters with the urgency and liberal disposition the controversy calls for. The refrain is often that the president would select only those he trusts, and that in any case, members of his team, or teams, merit their appointments. Perhaps, too, presidential aides would suggest that the shape, structure and colour of the security team are a safeguard against unforeseen circumstances that may be triggered by the president’s tough and unsparing measures to sanitise Nigeria, and a reflection of the intensity and quality of the work he plans to do to revamp Nigeria. Both responses would not only be misplaced, they would be insensitive and wrong-headed. For a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like Nigeria, the conclusion many have drawn is that the president’s kitchen cabinet, general cabinet and security team are polarising, unrepresentative and damaging of national ethos and cohesion.

The first and indeed most significant consequence of these skewed and absolutely indefensible appointments is that it definitely constricts the representativeness of the president’s policy options. This column gave this warning last year at least three times. But at the time, many top government officials read meaning to the warnings, believing self-servingly that this column, though not being this paper’s editorial, spoke the minds of the paper’s owners. Today, after the composition of everything there is to compose, it is evident that the Igbo have virtually been shut out. If they complain, the president has a duty to regard the complaints as sensible and justified. The complaints are to help him make solid and meaningful adjustments, and lay an even solider foundation for Nigeria’s future. Nigerian unity, as he must be painfully aware, is not cast in granite. It must be serviced, nurtured and groomed.

Given the unfortunate skewness of the president’s appointments and the general inappropriateness of his policies, not to talk of their ad hocism and disregard for ethnic fairness and social justice, it is beginning to look like even the ongoing anti-corruption campaign is nothing but a smoke screen to rally people behind the president. As this column has maintained, the anti-corruption war is still a battle against the symptoms of corruption, not a systemic attempt to tackle the malaise from its very roots. Had it been a well-structured battle, one that is underpinned by an uplifting, coherent and structured philosophy, the collateral damage being witnessed would have been feeble and short-lived. Had that structured philosophy been identified and enunciated, it would have led to a wider and more encompassing campaign to remake the country and put it on a sound, stable, peaceful and solid footing to compete with other nations in the 21st century. The anti-corruption war, which is virtually the only serious campaign being waged by the Buhari presidency, would have been just a subset of the whole, organised and executed brilliantly, perhaps more effectively and without distractions and fanfare.

Had that structured philosophy constituted the government’s policy framework, an overall picture of where the Buhari presidency wants to go or where he wants to take the country would have been evident. That philosophy would have averted or destroyed the impunity of unlawfully sacking 12 vice chancellors and their councils last February, not to talk of the embarrassing appointments of at least three of their replacements from a single university and region. Irrespective of the internal politics of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), it would also have made the unlawful sacking of its governing council also impossible. That philosophy would have made the meddlesomeness and deliberate perpetration of injustice inspired by certain forces in the federal government and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the Kogi governorship election conundrum unthinkable. That philosophy would have keenly recognised the lopsidedness of the country’s security appointments and redrawn a more viable, inclusive and lasting security structure for Nigeria. Furthermore, the sensitive portfolios in the general cabinet would have been widely distributed to eschew any feeling of alienation and, conversely, exceptionalism.

Apart from obviating the danger of alienating almost the entire south from the key and inner workings of the Buhari presidency, that structured philosophy would have engendered fresh thinking on the economic, social and political crises facing the nation. Notwithstanding the best efforts of the Buhari presidency, it has failed to recognise that there is a desperate economic emergency that must be tackled with new and brilliant ideas. It now seems that an economic emergency may never be declared, for the president apparently appears fascinated with jaded economic ideas, many of which he has startlingly repeated in flagrant disregard of economists’ advice. He has, for instance, grudgingly allowed market forces to determine the value of the Naira. But a few days ago he still wondered aloud about the efficacy of a measure he loathed and publicly denounced.

That structured philosophy simply does not take cognisance of the horrifying social dilemmas the country is also facing. Anarchy is overwhelming the country, and whole regions and communities are unsafe, some as a result of poverty and hunger for which no methodical and lasting policies are directed, and others as a result of the government’s pussyfooting over herdsmen attacks. Cultists, kidnappers, impersonators of security officers (which by itself is a reflection of the consistent abuse of power by the government and its agents), and all manner of perversions have taken over the country. Worse, by its misinterpretation and misuse of the constitution, the federal government and its agents are stoking political disharmony in many areas of the nation, including Ekiti, Kogi and Rivers. It presumes rightly that in some of the states governed by execrable characters, the public would support its unconstitutional moves.

In short, the absence of a structured philosophy of government has created a vision vacuum, subverted or weakened the justice system, begun to crowd out free speech and dissent, and is failing miserably to tackle the urgent existential problems confronting the country. It is clear that even this government will fare worse in terms of laying a solid foundation for democracy and the rule of law. It lacks the requisite temperament, discipline, patience and brilliance. It wrongly believes that if it somehow stabilises the economy — a feat that is looking increasingly doubtful — it would have succeeded in its assignment. Nothing could be wronger.

If President Buhari did not directly orchestrate the deliberately skewed arrangements being complained of by the Igbo and other groups in the south, he should take the complaints and criticisms against the skewness of his appointments seriously. He has the power to right the wrongs. He should exercise it. His predecessors refused to lay the needed foundation for democracy, economic rejuvenation and rule of law; but he should assemble a team of economists and advisers to bring about the new ethos he promised the country, an ethos which is now sadly being pursed superficially by a crowd of presidential aides and ministers whose perspectives are coloured by a single and insular idea. Things should not get worse than they already are in order for alienation not to breed defiance.