A birthday celebration is often not the best time to skewer a celebrator; it is usually an occasion to sing his praise. President Muhammadu Buhari’s 80th birthday celebration at the State House Conference Hall in Abuja last week was brilliantly curated by its organisers and seemed almost capable of turning sceptics into believers, painting the president in colours aficionados of art would find puzzling to interpret. The birthday celebration was so successful in achieving purpose that a critic might even be forced to lessen his vitriol, assuming the critic is not Bishop of Sokoto Catholic Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah. Indeed the push and pull of opinions on President Buhari, admittedly a controversial president by every yardstick, should help historians produce a balanced account of the essential Buhari and his many forays into politics and leadership.

Hopefully, the definitive account of the life and times of President Buhari will not be an authorised biography. One or even more authorised accounts may already be in the works; but it is expected that another one or perhaps a few more unauthorised accounts are also already in the works. Between the two spectrums, the country and the world will hopefully gain useful insight into the man and his politics. The unauthorised biography will of course be more helpful, for there is so much to say for and against the man, though it is not clear what the verdict of history would be. But if on balance that verdict is somewhat laudatory, it will, however, clearly not be swaddled by the saccharine remarks the president’s associates and family inundated the public with on December 23.

By his admission, he had tried his best for Nigeria. He, however, acknowledged that his best was probably not enough for reasons he stated to include the selfishness of those who expected so much more from him. His analysis of the crisis of expectation that bedeviled his presidency might be far-flung, but it would have been more helpful if he had engaged a private interrogation of his weaknesses and failings culminating in his inability to meet the expectations of those who voted him into office. His analysis might also indicate how dissociated he could sometimes be from reality, and why he did not seem too fond of engaging in self-criticisms and corrections.

There was consensus on his good-naturedness, the integrity of his heart, his sense of humour, which is probably more bucolic than cosmopolitan, and his firmness as an exponent of order and organisation as well as his secularism manifested in the number of Christian aides that surround him. It would, however, have been helpful if that consensus had been projected to the national scene and be exemplified by his appointments and patriotic and nationalistic spirit. If that transition could not be managed, might the answer be located in his deliberate parochialism, as Bishop Kukah suggested, or in his limited exposure and restricted circle of acquaintances, or something else entirely different such as his indecipherable and complex approach to the virtue of trust?

The president’s defenders are right to suggest that a holistic examination of his nearly eight years in office would turn out surprising details about his sagacity, hard work, nationalist zeal, great policies and undeniable infrastructural strides, and his concern for the states he gave financial succour, etc. There is no denying that the Buhari administration has many great and lasting projects to its name, and will be remembered for a very long time, perhaps longer than the administrations of his predecessors, despite the debt peonage he has all but sunk Nigeria. However, Bishop Kukah, regardless of the prelate’s own cocksureness and vacillations, seems closer to a more accurate understanding of the standards against which an administration and a leader should be judged. The bishop appears understandably caught up with the crass politicking of the church, a murky ground that has ensnared many priests, but he understands much more than the president’s defenders that leadership is a far more transcendental concept than many critics and analysts seem to understand.

The president’s 80th birthday ought more appropriately to have been celebrated through a colloquium on his leadership and perhaps too on his administration, regardless of his distaste for celebrations and his intrinsic shyness. It would be his last as president, and he had not for once afforded experts and unbiased local and foreign analysts to do some sort of dissection of his time in office. Carrying out a political vivisection of his administration out of office is not quite the same as conducting a leadership laparotomy on his person as president. Had he seen the wisdom in organising a colloquium, it would have afforded the country a pro and con assessment of his leadership and administration. Undoubtedly, it would have taken the wind out of Bishop Kukah’s sail and perhaps also help him to set the tone to what history would say about him and how posterity would judge him.

More importantly, had he enabled dispassionate colloquiums of his leadership a few years into his administration, experts would have helped him, regardless of his limited exposure and appreciation of issues, to recognise the yardsticks by which his administration would be judged, not to say the goals he would have needed to pursue. Bishop Kukah pointed out one of those yardsticks to include the nature and scope of his appointments, concluding, perhaps too forcefully, that the president was nepotistic. And by suggesting that President Buhari would be leaving Nigeria more vulnerable than he met it, the bishop seems to be directing attention to a transcendental leadership theme which the president and his aides seem unhappily unable to grasp. Whether the president is personally incorruptible or not, or fair-minded or not, or malicious or not, etc. would always be controversial. What would not be controversial are often the intangibles of leadership such as leaving the country less vulnerable, less divided, less parochial, etc. On these other scores, there is no consensus that the president recognises these virtues nor intuitively knows how to deal with them.

President Buhari acknowledges that his best was probably not enough. The question is whether he knew what that best should even look like. He has done appreciably well on infrastructure and a few other landmarks, but it is doubtful whether he appreciates that his administration and leadership would be remembered for how well and how subliminally he handled the intangibles. As former United States president Richard Nixon and former French president Charles de Gaulle said about impactful leadership, when the curtains are drawn on a leaders’ time in office, the people must feel their lives have been changed positively in ways that are permanent. Bishop Kukah nearly hit the nail on the head when he asked how Nigerians felt when President Buhari assumed office in contrast to how they now feel nearly eight years later. The president’s associates may be dishonest in responding to that poser; perhaps the president himself should attempt an answer.

If the president will attempt that question, he must examine why in all of nearly eight years, he had declined to ask himself, as many Nigerians do, why the country’s structure is so unbalanced, why the constitution is anomalous to national aspirations, why, instead of pursuing the rule of federalism, his administration had fanatically sought to entrench unitarist policies of water bill, reestablishment of anachronistic animal husbandry practices, and unconscionable ethnic cleansing in some parts of the Middle Belt. Nigerians have no concept of Nigeria, and though they have tried to survive as best as they can, they are in fact alienated from the country. Yet, the solution is not so far-fetched and complicated that an enterprising and innovative administration cannot imagine it. To see what has been done to education, where his ministers and associates have promoted war and chaos, and how the health sector has been left largely untouched and unreformed along sophisticated and ultramodern methods, truly beggars belief.

Achievements and legacies are not limited to, nor even largely denoted by, infrastructural renewal. Lasting legacies, as world history has shown, are often domiciled in the bowels of the intangibles – of national self-belief, of national ideology, of a uniquely and properly codified national way of doing things, of modernising the present and conceiving the future, and of aspiring to the stars. It is true President Buhari has done some significant things, but a chasm remains between the ‘significant’ elemental things his administration has accomplished and the epochal, life-changing, nation-defining intangibles that often endure. In recent history, Japan’s self-belief inspired their China and Southeast Asian adventures, Britain’s their Pax Britannica, America’s their Pax Americana and NATO, Russia’s their Soviet Union and now the disruptive concept of Historical Russia, and many more, both ancient, medieval and modern, in Europe, Asia, the Americas, etc. Without national ambition, and without recognition of the manifest destiny of the black people, it is impossible to imagine greatness, let alone attempt it. Is the president still eager to talk about his best?

Prof. Akintoye’s resignation, APC and IPOB

The resignation of Banji Akintoye, a professor of History, as leader of the Yoruba self-determination group, Ilana Omo Oodua Worldwide, has left many people puzzled because of its multidimensional implications. It has significance for Ilana itself, the politics of the Southwest, and the anarchic self-determination struggle championed by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in the Southeast. Seldom has an ostensibly unimportant and restricted resignation been so ramifying. Ilana, mostly the brainchild of the eminent professor, was always destined to come to this pass. By imploding so soon, it tells of how hotheaded the leaders and members of the group were, and perhaps too how idealistic.

Ilana was of course not the first Yoruba self-determination group where Prof. Akintoye, a Second Republic senator, berthed. He had been associated with a number of groups dedicated to the Yoruba cause, some of them consisting of a few eminent but shadowy Yoruba leaders, and others an agglomeration of Yoruba groups such as the Yoruba Groups Worldwide which elected him as the fourth leader of the Yoruba (after Obafemi Awolowo, Adekunle Ajasin, and Abraham Adesanya) some three years ago. Fiery, impatient and completely fascinated with the rich history of the Yoruba, he had consistently found it difficult to dissociate himself from the splendour and valour projected by his ethnic group. It was, therefore, not surprising that he desperate tried to live and recreate the greatness exemplified by the Yoruba, especially at a time when Nigeria continues to prove unworthy of many of its constituent nations.

His resignation, citing age and enfeeblement, is bound to attenuate the vigour of the Yoruba self-determination struggle. Even though internal dissension triggered his resignation, a misunderstanding involving the troika of Professors Akintoye, Wale Adeniran, and Maxwell Adeleye, he has been succeeded by his deputy, Prof. Adeniran, a professor of Linguistics. The linguist’s bona fides are not in doubt, but no one in Ilana or any other Yoruba self-determination group has the audacity, pugnacity and iconoclasm of Prof Akintoye. He had got that far in the Yoruba self-determination struggle, and even embodied it, precisely because of his unremitting loathing for the national mediocrity subverting the country, and because of his idiosyncratic disrespect for rules, regulations and consensus which slow down any struggle, whether self-determination or much more. And having authored two Yoruba History classics, A History of the Yoruba People, and Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland, he had brought to the struggle an undisputed reputation. Stepping into his shoes will not only be difficult, if not futile, doing it at this time when the conditions are not ripe for the kind of struggle the Yoruba groups envisage will be even more herculean.

The resignation may also be an admission of the temporary failure of the struggle. Prof. Akintoye was unable to restrain the unguarded and, at a point, misdirected response of radicals like Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, to the infiltration of Yorubaland by miscreant herdsmen robbing, raping and pillaging through the Yoruba countryside. When Mr Igboho and his clique expanded their noble and widely acclaimed objective of sanitising the Southwest countryside and forests to demanding for independence, Yoruba leaders, fearing a chaotic response to Nigeria’s existential and constitutional challenges, put their foot down and demanded an end to the violence and rascality. It worked, surprisingly, and indeed much to the admiration of the Southwest intelligentsia and power elite. The Yoruba leaders’ action was not immensely popular at the time, but in retrospect, it saved the Southwest from careening down the slope the Southeast destitute of far-sighted leaders sleepwalked into.

The Southwest leaders argued at the time that they were in the process of staging a credible bid for national leadership, and it would be counterproductive to undermine that bid with the savagery amplified by IPOB in the Southeast. In fact, Ondo State governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, a surprising revelation of doggedness, sagacity and visionariness in Yoruba politics despite his inauspicious beginnings, put the whole self-determination struggle in sound context. Said he on Christmas eve: “We recognise the right of the people to protest or agitate…It is not at this stage in the history of this country that we will repeat IPOB in Yorubaland. Opportunity beckons at us. We cannot afford to throw away that opportunity. We must work to ensure that there is power shift. The opportunity for the presidency to come to the south, especially the Southwest, is around the corner. We will not sit down and support anyone clamouring for Oodua nation. We will not support it. We have fought for this with everything we had. Nigeria will be good.”

It is indeed tragic that despite the enormous sacrifice of Southwest political leaders to entrench democracy and ensure power shift, and also keep the region stable for national stability and growth, the Southwest aspiration is being truncated by cynical commentators mouthing fallacies and heresies. But the biggest lesson in the Akintoye resignation, a lesson alluded to by Governor Akeredolu, is that the Southwest remains an oasis of peace because of the anticipation of power shift. It is that power shift that is now threatened by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Should power shift prove impossible, Yoruba leaders and politicians will be unable in the medium run to pacify its aggrieved and alienated radicals. In contrast to how Southwest leaders restrained their young radicals, the Northwest excused and indulged its bandits until the entire country now spends billions of naira to tackle a festering sore. The same indulgence blew militancy out of proportions in the Northeast, and the same excuse and indulgence have turned the Southeast into a restive and sanguinary region.

Prof. Akintoye’s perspective on contemporary power politics and revolutionary ferment in the Southwest is unimpeachable. But he was ill-suited to lead an uprising whose time had not come. His radical and peremptory approach to self-determination, however, presages and even foretells a dangerous cocktail of reactions that would follow the rejection of the efforts and sacrifices of Southwest leaders and politicians for national peace. Two main groups jostle for the hearts and minds of the Yoruba: those willing to give the country a chance for now; and those who think nothing will come out of patience, seeing that the country’s structure is too skewed to be of any use. The former enjoys only a tenuous advantage over the latter. To spurn power shift and make all efforts by Yoruba leaders and politicians to sustain and manage Nigeria’s imperfect democracy of no effect is to let the olive branch drop from the hands of Southwest leaders whose leadership is already threatened. It is unlikely the repercussions will not come fast and furious.