Human beings are like open books which can be skilfully read and wilfully misread. In the matter of General Buhari, Nigerians, including yours sincerely, have been reading and misreading General Buhari in the past thirty nine years since he fully burst into national consciousness as the leader of a self-advertising reforming military junta.

In postcolonial politics, the mood and milieu are often as dark and mysterious as the men and women directing affairs. Nothing is given away directly and intentionally. Everything is shrouded in dark mystery and arcane posturing. What you think you see is not the real thing, and the real thing  is not what  you think you know. Human beings are like books in this regard. You cannot judge the real contents of a book by its blurbs. There is as yet no critical art or literary skills available to judge a book’s real construction on the cover, or the face if you like.

The ancient practitioners of good old Literary Criticism came up with a dual theory which they think can explain why books, like human beings, will always remain a mystery even to the author himself and why it is possible for a person to misunderstand and misjudge himself.

In the notion of Intentional Fallacy, the theory faults those who believe they can come up with the real intention of the author, while Affective Fallacy scorns those who allow their own unwholesome emotions to come between them and the critical evaluation of a book.

As the Buhari administration begins its last lap of honour( or dishonour according to hostile interlocutors) Nigerians are busy reading and misreading the general from Daura. It has been a rowdy and emotional spectacle. There are many who believe that the man’s real intentions have never been hidden from public purview.

Those who are misled and those who misjudge him are only those who choose to be misled and those who habitually misjudge. Yet there are also those who think that the general may be harbouring a few more aces in his sleeves. All these are building up to what promises to be a most momentous evaluation of an administration in post-military Nigeria. Nigerians are hitching to present a damning and unflattering report card as soon as the administration breasts the tape.

For an administration which carried a lot of hope and expectations for millions of Nigerians, an administration redolent of reforms and a fresh beginning, it is turning out a damp squib. Where did we get things wrong once again in this country? Blessed are the cynics and perennial nay sayers who expected nothing and who invested little emotional dividends in General Buhari’s capacity to restart the spluttering engine. But there are also millions out there who cannot afford to imagine that Nigeria is a failed business enterprise awaiting receivers.

This is why it is important to go back to the context of General Buhari’s emergence as Nigeria’s second civilian leader who had served an earlier tour of duty as a military dictator. We do this while we ask Nigerians themselves to flesh out the details with a view to determining while things, particularly the choice of days to lead us, often go catastrophically awry. It is said that when a child stumbles in a race, it looks towards the finishing line. But when an elder falters, he looks back at the starting block.

By the beginning of year 2007, the Buhari momentum was gathering incredible force and momentum. It was an irresistible gale at the gates of an immovable object. It was becoming quite obvious that between the man and his Taliban-like piety and Nigeria’s traditional power structure, something will have to give sooner than later. Buhari was an implacable messiah and the northern masses were in a restive mood. The man from Daura was riding the crest of an anti-democratic populism which was bound to complicate Nigeria’s democratic rebirth.

But despite the obvious signals and the handwriting on the wall, the Nigerian powerbrokers still managed to put General Buhari through the electoral grinders twice more, in 2007 and 2011. Perhaps they needed to further deodorize and defang the Daura-born general to make him fit for purpose and less of a threat to their idea of national cohesion and stability. They could not afford to have a radical Islamic zealot in power who would order their prompt execution.

They almost lost the plot in 2011 when General Buhari’s fanatical mullahs overran the electoral booths and the north in protest against electoral shenanigans. With the north in flames, it was a close run affair. The Buhari hordes knew how to vote but not how to protect their votes. They needed an injection of political sophistication and the razzmatazz associated with electoral modernity. The power masters from the west of the nation have proved themselves to be the real masters in that department.

So by 2011, Buhari began to cast a long gaze in the direction of the old West. The Buhari phenomenon was by then acquiring a nation-wide momentum which could no longer be ignored or strategically neutralized. Confronted by the sheer inevitability of a Buhari return to power, Nigeria’s power brokers began to make concessionary and conciliatory noise about the stiff, ramrod straight former infantry general.

In a double-edged tone laced with mortal ambiguities, General Obasanjo noted that while Buhari was quite good on security, the same thing could not be said about his capacity to handle the economy or diplomacy. In the case of the northern sector of the Mafiosi, they prepared to domesticate and de-radicalize their hitherto off-message son.

It should be noted that in 2007, the Afenifere power substratum adopted General Buhari as the presidential candidate of their party, the DPA, in the absence of viable electoral prospects for the fledgling and badly coordinated electoral machine. But by 2011, they had turned violently against him even when he fielded as his running mate a Yoruba who could be regarded as their ally.

It is within this context that the following essay was written in early 2007. Casting a retrospective glance backward, it is clear that while the essay got a few things right, it was also wide of the mark in many respects. For example while the bleak prognosis about General Buhari’s primordial proclivities appears on spot, the optimism about his prospects for social justice and political equity now ring particularly hollow.

On one point, the essay appears to be particularly prescient and strategically savvy. In the light of the unfolding drama, one is not sure of whether the dominant progressive tendency from the old west that went into alliance with General Buhari’s ultra-conservative forces actually sat down to cobble an agreement which will not put the region in political jeopardy. In all this, the reader is encouraged to make up his mind as the nation enters uncharted political waters for the umpteenth time.

Almost twenty five years after leading a coup that terminated democratic governance in Nigeria, General Muhammadu Buhari has found himself at the vanguard of democratic redemption of the same country.  As far as apostolic conversions go, this one is surely of Pauline proportions. What a country!— one might be tempted to ask in exasperation and wonderment. Twenty five years ago, a novelist plotting this kind of magical yarn would have been censored for his irresponsible imagination. But here we are, and as they say, actual reality has become unrealistic in Nigeria.

If there is a sense, then, in which Buhari’s spectacular ascendancy underscores the man’s steely resilience and the continuing stranglehold of the old military establishment on the nation’s political jugular, there is another sense in which it is a reflection of elite failure and the poverty of politics in post-military Nigeria. With its shambolic parties, their perverse and pilfering politicians, the fluid and flux principles with which they crisscross carpets and switch allegiances ,Nigeria’s current democratic experiment is a very poor copy indeed.

A quarter of a century after Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s assertion that this generation may never know real democracy, this grim prognosis has all but come to pass. It is therefore a remarkable irony of history that his last apostles should be caught in the current controversy about General Buhari.

Whether Awolowo’s assertion is a parting curse to a nation that had betrayed him and wasted his outstanding talents or a piece of remarkable clairvoyance, we may never know. What we know is that broken and dismayed by the turn of events, the old man retreated into gloomy solitude only to be translated into eternal glory shortly thereafter.

But there appears to be a fate worse than death. In 1993, only six years after the old man departed, his followers were forced by military machinations to group behind a reconstructed renegade. Miraculously, the heroic apostate prevailed only to be systematically taken apart by the feudal-military complex.

Ten years later in 2003, they were forced again to line behind an unreconstructed heretic who had been forced on the country by their old nemesis and who quickly rubbed their nose in the sand. Now in 2007, twenty years after the departure of their beloved leader, Awolowo’s surviving disciples have been forced to line behind an old enemy and avid tormentor: General Muhammadu Buhari.

When the issue is posed from this historical angle, and given the constellation of contradictory forces, it may be seen that the problem is not General Buhari as such but the dramatic contraction of radical space and possibilities in a neo-military state and the continuing shrinkage of opportunities for  progressive politics and its standard-bearers in the Nigerian polity. Every struggle in the last thirty years in Nigeria has ended in the consolidation of oligarchic rule; every stirring revolt against the status quo has brought in a worse version of the status quo through the back door.

Is it any wonder then that after the magical debris has cleared from the illusionist fantasia that was the party primaries, the two leading democratic exemplars and stars of our democratic eclipse are two retired generals: The one an aging autocrat and militant apostle of a strange oxymoron that we propose as command democracy; and the other a seemingly reformed military oligarch haunted by the demons of his autocratic past.

There is an easy solution to this problem, this grand chicanery and perpetual conspiracy against the manumission and democratic emancipation of Nigerians from their modern slave-masters. One can throw up one’s arm in despair and frustration and then go home to await divine intervention ; or one can sit back and wait for the system to collapse from the weight of its own internal contradictions. But political revolutions do not occur overnight and history is a furtive tiger which often steals upon the scene without much fanfare.

On the other hand, since hope springs eternally in the Nigerian breast, and since no ruling group can be eternally cohesive and coherent, one can explore the fissures and crevices constantly thrown up by the movement of history in the political space until these develop into a capillary network with momentous possibilities. With great optimism of the political will coupled with an abiding pessimism of the critical intellect one can make a reasoned and measured choice within the contradictory amalgam of Nigerian politics and personalities.

It is this maddening constellation of contradictory forces that has thrown up General Muhammadu Buhari as the beautiful bride of the current political scene. Let it not be denied that the general is widely admired by many; openly courted by significant sectors of the society and fanatically worshipped by the teeming multitude across national divide who see him as the only politician with the integrity and the strength of character to confront the PDP behemoth.

If this were due to a staggering case of historical amnesia, then we can agree with our Nobel laureate that our leaders have gone mad again. But embedded in the Buhari ascendancy are harsh political realities which we can only ignore at our own peril.

Yet it is also true that Buhari is haunted by ghosts from his autocratic and anti-democratic past. There is a powerful local lobby with phenomenal global reach which sees Buhari’s attempted return  as an  affront to common sense and natural justice and unless Buhari wants to rule Nigeria as a pariah and neo-Islamic state, he can only ignore this elite sector at his own political peril. In a worst case scenario, this significant sector can scuttle the intricate broad-based alliances Buhari must forge in order to have national acceptance.

It is these demons from the past that have brought Soyinka and Ebenezer Babatope ,a.k.a Ebino Topsy,  railing at the gates of Buhari  in significant interventions in the past one week. Both men have personal and political reasons to be disturbed by the seeming national amnesia behind Buhari’s return.  While Babatope’s contribution is muted and measured, perhaps a reflection of his awareness of how much social and political capital he has frittered away in recent times, Soyinka’s piece is a grand philippic dripping with venom and vitriol.

As usual, Soyinka does not intend to take hostages. His epic outburst speaks to the open sore of the nation and the failure of national reconciliation which ought to have been a cardinal pursuit of the Obasanjo regime. Rather than hide the festering suppurating wounds in a diseased purulent bandage  , the Nobel laureate has chosen to pour acid on the open sore. The result is a messy maw of mangled flesh and scalded tendons.

But while Babatope’s piece is ultimately a backhanded campaign manual for Umar Y’Ardua by a man who is comfortable among political predators despite his heroic antecedents, Soyinka’s intervention is an injured outburst from an illustrious patriot who has fought on the side of justice for close to fifty years. The danger, however, is that the two can be used for the same purpose. It is significant that in his piece, Babatope, in anticipatory approval and without being aware of Soyinka’s approaching intervention, quotes with joyous relish Soyinka’s earlier strictures against Buhari.

Soyinka’s strictures are harsh and perhaps justly so. As a matter of fact one must expand and  deepen his critique of Buhari  in order to arrive at political equity.  Indeed within six months of its existence, the Buhari administration was widely derided and reviled as the military wing of the ousted NPN. It was widely speculated that the main reason for its existence was to forestall a more revolutionary bloodbath by disaffected junior officers.

If this was arguably a piece of slanderous speculation, the Buhari government soon lived up to its reactionary billing. The ousted president, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, reportedly aborted his flight to safety upon hearing  the leadership composition of the new government. He was‘kept in plush comfort where he reputedly increased his brood while his deputy, Alex Ekwueme, was thrown into the harsh privation of Kirikiri where he developed a beard of apostolic proportions.

General Gowon who was returning from exile for the first time miraculously slipped across the border while Emeka Ojukwu was hauled into jail where he spent almost a year in a hail of bilious smoke and self-pity. There was also the dramatic daylight disappearance of Uba Ahmed after he was captured by junior officers who thought it was a new dawn for the nation. After his house was‘burglarized and his passport seized, it was Chief Awolowo again who prophetically cautioned that the omens were still not clear.

We can go on ad nauseam. The families of those unjustly incarcerated and those sent to their premature deaths will never forget. The point to be made is that the Buhari administration did not just commit horrendous human rights abuses, it was‘also rabidly partisan and militantly contemptuous of the ethnic and regional sensitivities of the nation. Such was the danger it represented that towards the end, two civil war heroes, Generals Benjamin Adekunle and Akinrinade, were openly advocating a confederation for the nation.

It is therefore a typical Nigerian paradox that a government so harshly reactionary in its driving ethos, a government reeking with ethnophobic malice could also be militantly patriotic on several scores. The Buhari administration made Nigerians proud in several respects: its puritanical prudence, its ascetic frugality, its stout refusal to devalue the naira, its nationalist rebuff of western interlopers, its economic offensive as seen in the counter trade, its stirring and soulful rhetoric against indiscipline, national self-abasement and the forlorn cravenness of our elite ,and, above all, its heroic attempt to recreate the momentum of the golden mid-seventies.

If it is these memorable virtues that many of our compatriots choose to remember about Buhari rather than the harsh restrictions, the draconian infractions, Wole Soyinka must not blame them. Neither must he view it as a descent into definitive dementia. As Kafka would say, it is not that what you say is false but it is so hostile. The politics of memory, of remembering in a post-colonial nation is a complex, overdetermined affair. Too much memory, particularly negative memory, often leads to an awareness overloading which compels the mind to downsize negativities as a strategy of containment against unremitting hostility and persistent betrayal particularly in a post-colonial polity permanently rigged against rationality.

Soyinka should take pity on his beleaguered compatriots. The light-headedness often associated with Nigerians these days, the strange happiness and loss of memory is a form of auto-therapy; an antidote against real madness in a nation of self-surpassing calamities. Having been subject to serial betrayal by their leaders, they have opened a new chapter in the annals of laughing and forgetting, and in the unnerving grin of the serially violated. The danger in a reflex rejection of Buhari is that it could split the progressive collective. There is an ideological, regional and generational dimension to this.

There are progressive colleagues from the south who have never seen anything amiss in whatever Buhari did. There are radical compatriots from the north who believe he is a victim of a South-west intellectual conspiracy.

There are some of Soyinka’s younger colleagues and admirers who will be forced to align with Buhari going by the logic of current party affiliations. And there are those much younger progressive elements who cannot give a damn about what Buhari did to some old men a long time ago. What should now be done is to sit Buhari down and extract from him every ounce of commitment to the progressive ideal.

As for General Muhammadu Buhari ,  perhaps history beckons. Cashing in opportunistically on anti-Obasanjo sentiments and the nation-wide revulsion with the ruling party is not the same thing as coming up with a comprehensive blueprint which will mark him out as a truly visionary leader.

If he intends to serve as a true national leader, and having disavowed the Oputa panel, this is the right moment to climb down from the high horse of bland refutals  and level with the injured of the land. That is the only way he can help to heal the open sore of an unfortunate nation.

• First published in January, 2007.