Femi, you are an uncommon columnist with irreproachable integrity.
You are your own man … that’s what your writings say, loud and clear – Akogun Tola Adeniyi, on my soon to be out Book: Simply a Citizen Journalist.
Everything considered, President Buhari was a great Nigerian leader, indeed, a titan.
As former President Ibrahim Babangida did not fail to mention in his tribute to him at his passing, President Buhari was:”quiet yet resolute, principled yet humble, deeply patriotic, and fiercely loyal to Nigeria,” to which, according to IBB,”he gave his best”.
I wish to commiserate with the people of Katsina state, the entire peoples of Nigeria, especially the immediate family of the late President and Commander- in – Chief of the Armed Forces of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR.
May the Almighty God grant him eternal rest.
As a chronicler of events, and a trained historian to boot, I wrote copiously about President Buhari’s persona and government.
I, therefore, not unexpectedly, had a torrid time trying to select three from my over fifty articles which dealt, in great detail, with his administration between 2015 and 2023.
I will only plead with my editor to please grant me some extended space to put these 3 articles out for the reading public.
In: ‘Is President Buhari Just Plain Unconcerned Whatever Happens to Nigeria or Nigerians’, of 3 January, 2021, I wrote as follows:
” So much is wrong with Nigeria that I personally no longer know what to think or believe. Indeed, I no longer know what to write, having severally repeated myself on issues which, not only I, but even well known friends of President Buhari, the likes of the Emir of Katsina and His Eminence, the Sultan, have had cause to speak about of recent concerning where the President has landed Nigeria.
Even as every organisation with the minutest connection to the North – Coalition of Northern Groups, the Arewa Youth Consultative Forum, NEF, ACF etc – now equates the minutest criticism of the Buhari government to regime change, it cannot but be heartwarming that the usually forthright NEF spokesperson, Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, could still permit himself to say the following: “There are many grounds to question the competence and sensitivity of President Buhari’s administration. Even his most ardent supporters, if he has any, that is, will wish he has shown greater respect for inclusion and accountability of those he chooses to trust with power. The nation is paying a heavy price for mediocrity and ineffectiveness in key areas of decision-making under President Buhari”.
With truisms like this, one would not mind putting up with the obsequiousness of Presidential spokespersons, and those other hangers on who are now so dim- witted they cannot offer the President some honest viewpoints even as Nigeria regresses daily under his watch.
I am presently so completely tanked out having written a whole year too early, on the topic: Annus
Horribilis on 29 December, 2019 which would have been most appropriate today, pandemic aside.
Readers will, therefore, please forgive me as I go back all the way to my archives to fetch an article that not only encapsulates the times, but generated so much furore, and trended on social media for well over two weeks.
Published, 15 December, 2019, ‘What Is Happening Mr President’, was also deliberately misinterpreted by those who either are mischief makers or who, because they do not understand the English language, permitted themselves to be easily lured into thinking that I was on an errand for a particular politician who they say had an axe to grind with the President.
I had no alternative than to urge them to go and read my column from inception which, incidentally, went back to COMET, and so debuted long before The Nation.
That article will now be edited for space constraint.
Happy reading.
For those who may not know, I have more than established my bona fides as a supporter of President Muhammadu Buhari. When he was not anywhere sure he would emerge the APC Presidential candidate for 2015, I wrote about him as follows: “Nigeria, in its current dire straits, needs Buhari more than he needs Nigeria”.
This was repeated in a book by the late Prof Tam David West when he wrote: “Buhari: The Politics Of Age, October 14, 2014:”Nigeria, in its current dire straits needs Buhari more than he needs Nigeria.” -Femi Orebe,“The Nation On Sunday”, September 28, 2014 Page 18”.
I write that to show not just where I stand on the Nigerian political spectrum, but to let President Buhari himself know that in asking what are bound to be absolutely uncomfortable questions, they are not coming from enemy territory, but from the tortured soul of a supporter of his, who has been at the receiving end of those Nigerians who claim I was one of those who sold them ‘a pig in a poke and the most tribalistic Nigerian President ever’.
In fairness to the critics, I have often personally wondered as to how the President still manages to sleep, if he is able to, after he must have taken a hard look at how the North has come to so completely dominate the Nigerian public space under his watch to the extent that one would be right to say Nigeria is under a Northern stranglehold.
Worse really, is the fact that this seeming internal colonialism shows no signs of remission as various stratagems are still ongoing; examples being the Water Bill currently at the National Assembly, as well as the case of the Federal Commission on Nomadic Education, which though has failed, maximally in its core function, given the number of out- of -school children in the North, but is now doing everything to insinuate itself into the contentious grazing reserves matter which is aimed at sexing up the country’s demographics in favour of the Fulani.
As I wrote earlier, these views of your government are now being shared by core Northerners.
But like one time House of Reps member, Dr Junaid Mohammed, U S- based, Farooq A. Kperogi, has rightly described your government as ‘Government Of Buhari’s Family, By His Family, And For His Family’.
He wrote more: “Before he was sworn in as President in May 2015, Muhammadu Buhari, without prompting from anybody, publicly told his immediate and extended family members to stand back from his incoming government. He even warned that any family member who used his name to peddle influence would face dire consequences”. ”I was so impressed by this declaration that in my May 16, 2015 column titled “6 Reasons Why Incoming Buhari Government Fills Me with Hope,” I isolated it as one of the six reasons I thought Buhari’s administration would “represent a qualitative departure from the legalised banditry that has passed for governance in Nigeria for so long.” Specifically, he continued : “Buhari’s symbolic but nonetheless significant gestures like telling family members to steer clear of his government and telling aides to obey traffic laws inspire me. I remember the President saying all that and I was beside myself with joy. You would, indeed, have ridden a horse in my belly. But all those soon dramatically changed that the First Lady had to cry out, protesting what she called a hijack of your government. I thought that was impossible”.
The rout is complete.
I am aware that the First Lady had once observed that you do not know many of those working in your government, but that notwithstanding, I think it is necessary I remind your Excellency, that Nigeria presently has no less than 250 ethnic groups’, divided into 6 geo – political zones . Under no circumstances should these things happen as they are totally unconscionable and a matter of great discomfort for those of us still supporting you in this part of the country. It is extremely nauseating that a part can so horribly dominate the rest when those others are no slaves.
No genuine supporter of yours in the South can be happy, or roll out the drums for this state of affairs as they are not only unthinkable, but totally ungodly. It is even worse, given Nigeria’s current realities of mass poverty and unremitting insecurity.
Unfortunately, Nigerians are not hearing a word from APC leaders in other parts of the country who toiled with you in forming the party on which you rode to power, thus heedlessly, and selfishly, disappointing those they led to the party.
Whatever you can do to correct these ungodly acts will be of great help, not only to your party, as it will molify the people somewhat, and most probably, secure a positive legacy for you.
Otherwise all your contributions to Nigeria, at this extremely difficult time, may come to naught, which I pray, God forbid”.
The second selected article is:’President Buhari’s 2nd Term: Where WillI The Votes Come From’ dated 17 September, 2017.
It reads:”When on Sunday, 17 September, 2017 I wrote the article below, my intention was to rouse President Mohammadu Buhari, free him from the suffocating grip of a mafia whose mindset is cast in the 17th century, and wake him up to the reality that he is President of a multi- ethnic, multi-religious and, a culturally diverse country of over 200 million people. That those hopes have largely been dashed became obvious to me after the totally unconscionable appointment of a Northerner to replace the former Yoruba Director – General of the National Intelligence Agency, thus completing the banality of Northerners’ complete control of the Nigerian security apparatti, the effect of which we now see in the shambolic way the security agencies are treating the murderous Fulani herdsmen.
If the article was advisory then, things have so degenerated now that if APC is to have any hope of victory in 2019 , the Buhari government must be rescued from that un-elected cabal.
“My prayer had always been that God will restore President Muhammadu Buhari to perfect health, to such an extent his health will not even be an issue in the 2019 elections.
That prayer has largely been answered in the affirmative.The question to now ask is: where will the votes come from to earn him a second term? To answer that question, let us examine the man and his government.
Relying exclusively on what I knew of contestant Muhammadu Buhari up until 2014/15, and seeing how then President Goodluck Jonathan had firmly enthroned systemic corruption in the country, I wrote shortly before the APC primaries of December, 2015, that Nigeria needed Buhari more than he needed her.
But can I, in all honesty, say that today?
President Buhari showed very early in his administration that he was not going to be his own man when, in what many saw as a dig at Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a man who gave a leg and an arm for his victory, he said he was for nobody, but for all, as if anybody said he should be beholden to Tinubu.
By the time he ended his ‘search’ for his ministers – some 6 months after – his relations, and assorted Hausa/ Fulani/Kanuris, to the near total exclusion of Nigerians from other ethnic groups, have taken over the government. That the country’s entire security architecture is in the hands of Northerners must have been the icing on the cake.
If that was resented in the Southwest which had been crucial to his election, what about the North Central geopolitical zone which the progressives won for the very first time ever?
Political pragmatism should have informed the President to encourage the party to cede the senate Presidency to the nPDP after CPC and APC had taken the Presidency and the Vice presidency, respectively. That is how, very easily, the extremely polarising executive –legislative face off which has since haunted the party, and the government, could have been avoided. The President did no such thing. Today, the National Assembly is controlled by the ruling party only in name.
How then have these avoidable missteps affected President Buhari in the performance of his duties, and how, in turn, will they affect election 2019?
The President has recorded considerable achievement in the discharge of his promises to the electorate on anti corruption and the fight against the all pervading insecurity he inherited from President Jonathan, even though some critical, but avoidable, challenges remain. While inter agency squabbles have significantly hampered the anti corruption war, despite EFCC’s successes, the judiciary has been most unhelpful, with some judges, despite ACJA, still granting unreasonably long adjournments, and giving rulings that show they don’t care a hoot if Nigeria goes to the dogs.
The judiciary, especially some judges and a few, quite identifiable members of the senior bar, have constituted themselves into a bulwark of support for corruption’s ferocious fight back.
Similar mitigating challenges also trail the war against insecurity, especially Boko Haram which remains not only a potent enemy of state, but one on which so much money is being wasted.
Kidnappings, armed robberies, serial killings etc continue to be the bane of every Nigerian citizen. Cost of living is high just as youth employment gnaws at the heart of most parents.”
All these should tell President Buhari he has his job cut out for him from now on.
Nor can a resurgent PDP, which is already stoking the embers of citizen’s malcontent, be taken for granted. In this respect, President Buhari must realise that Nigerians have very short memories. Yes, PDP is a party of buccaneers, yes they stole the country blind, yes, they literally turned the country into Somali and Southern Sudan combined, but hey, if Nigerians are still this hungry by 2019, the electorate will not remember that it was President Jonathan who turned the CBN to an Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) and got, on his instructions, a 2.1Billion dollars earmarked for the military completely incinerated by his acolytes.
How has the Buhari government fared on such key subjects as Education, top posts of which are also dominated by the North, Healthcare delivery, Housing, road infrastructure etc? Why so many strike in our institutions of higher learning and how come labour has become so unduly restive?”
When the above was written, the Benue genocide and the Taraba bloodletting were still aeons away. Police men have not yet become game for Fulani herdsmen, with our security agencies looking askance. An arrogant, Emirs -backing, miyetti Allah, confident the government would never lift a finger to check its murderous excesses, was still talking largely in whispers. Not now, when they are in the open, killing and maiming; burning villages and farmsteads, and telling state governments what laws they can, and cannot enact.
Happily, President Buhari still has some time, though not much, on his hands, to rouse himself, re brand, restrategise, and begin to run an inclusive government. He must ensure that these murderous killers are brought to justice, as killers must get their comeuppance; albeit, through the due process of law.
The President must wean himself off his excessive ethnicity. It is as unjust, as it is unexplainable in a multi-ethnic society. He must see every part of the country, especially the thoroughly shortchanged Southeast, as deserving of fairness and equity”.
Finally, the third article, captioned as ‘When Is a Failed State’ of 6 August, 2021.
I wrote therein as follows:”The more I look at Nigeria, the more agonised I become. This gets worse when I look at her trajectory since 2015, a year Nigerians had believed would be the very beginning of our redemption from PDP’s 16 -year stranglehold – 1999 – 2015. How wrong this has proved?
The Economist of London writes:”Nigeria now confronts six or more internal insurrections. Her inability to provide peace and stability to its citizenry has tipped the hitherto, very weak state, into failure”.
The question that then arises is: were Nigerians wrong in 2015 when, on the election of President Muhammadu Buhari, they started to smell redemption from the quagmire which 16 years of the PDP threw them into?
My answer would, undoutedly, be that Nigerians had more than enough reasons to believe that given President Buhari’s incandescent personal integrity, his experience in government and the many years he tried to be voted president, Nigerians were not wrong.
Yet, Nigeria is where it is today.
Why?
The Economist touched on this very germane question when it wrote further: “A country plagued by acute corruption problems, and with the unremitted crude oil revenue scandal of 2014 still fresh in the people’s minds, many were eager for a change; the type never seen before. Here, after all, was a retired army general, one already experienced in governance, with a great strength of will, and supremely considered tough enough to take on the nation’s cabal of hardened criminals. He, indeed, had promised, during the campaigns, to appoint only technocrats to head the country’s departments and to see off the Boko Haram insurgency. For a nation lacking basic amenities such as power, despite its huge energy resources, the choice could, in fact, not have been easier. To most Nigerians, therefore, General Buhari, with all his integrity was the man for the moment”.
Nor was the Economist alone, as yours truly was sanguine enough to have earlier written, on these pages, that Nigeria needed candidate Buhari more than the obverse.
As the Economist did not fail to mention, disappointment was not long in coming, adding that in “less than a year of his assumption of office, the economy which had grown at an average rate of 7% between 2011-2014, had plummeted into recession. He had taken 6 months to appoint a cabinet and far more to appoint heads of agencies and boards, just as he increased import duties on the most basic of commodities in a bid to raise government revenue”.
Worse, however, was the unbelievable insularity that underpinned his appointments. His cabinet was presumably inferior, in the decision making process, to the more powerful, thoroughly shadowy kitchen cabinet of alleged blood relations, and those loyal friends and allies of his long political odyssey, irrespective of their individual competences, beyond hegemonic ties. In consequence of all these, the Economist went on, “the country’s currency lost 70% of its value, unemployment rose from 6.5 to 26%, commodity prices tripled across many quarters and the state-regulated premium motor spirit prices were hiked by 67%. Today the Naira exchanges for more than 500 to one dollar”.
Nigerians, out of respect for the president, could still have borne their increasing poverty with equanimity. After all, Nigeria has been categorised as the poverty capital of the world. But the indescribable insecurity changed all that.
In every part of the country, you are no longer safe on farms, highways, forests, schools, but worst of all, in your own homes, from where you or your children can be summarily plucked, with the government hardly batting an eyelid.
Even when hordes of literal sucklings, pupils aged below 10 years, were kidnapped from their schools in the North , the government still managed to feign complete ignorance leaving the parents to face the ordeal.
Today in Kaduna, Zamfara and Niger states, like any state at all, I am not sure any parent sending a child to school in the morning can say with any certainty that the child would return home. Between Boko Haram and bandits, schools have truly become ‘haram’.
While the meddlesome Sheik Gumi, and his entourage could make tourist -like soree’s to bandits’ hideouts, kidnapped children could still spend days upon days – one was 55 days – and men and women of our security forces would be forbidden from attacking the rogue, non state actors. It has, in fact, been reported that bandits, some of who recently shot down a fighter jet, do have more sophisticated weapons than our security forces. Is the Economist not correct about our status as a failed state when bandits could shoot down a fighter jet, and hold their kidnapped victims for as long as they choose? What exactly stops the government from declaring a fullscale war on them or, j in the alternative, seek external help? Is it correct to assert that religion and ethnic consaingunity are behind government’s failure to tame insecurity?
There is also the question of the ease with which Fulani herdsmen literally live above the law, maiming, killing and kidnapping at will.
Let us now end this article with the views of Dr Hakeem Baba – Ahmed, the NEF spokesperson, as he expressed them in an expansive interview with The Nation newspaper of Saturday, 31 July, 2021.
Question: “On a final note, despite all the criticism, are there any positives you see in six years of the Buhari administration?
Dr Baba- Hamed: “No! And I say that with a lot of regret. If there were, I would say so. I was among the tiny group of people who contributed to putting this man in power, and there were huge expectations.We genuinely believed that President Buhari would fix security, the economy and tackle corruption; that he would give this country a new lease of life, show leadership and be different from Jonathan’s PDP administration”.
“We had very high hopes, particularly those of us in the North who were at the receiving end of Boko Haram insurgency at that time.We didn’t see any of those things. We have seen decline in the quality of leadership, we have seen decline in security, we have seen decline in the economy. If today I tell you, there are families in the northern part of the country in the rural North, which grows its own food and eat it, families that eat one meal a day, people will find that unbelievable, but it is the truth. If I tell you that there are women in some villages in parts of the North who sleep on trees at night because they are afraid that bandits will come in the night to take them away, people may not find that believable, it is the truth. If I tell you children leave home for school and their parents are not sure whether they will come back and that a large number of parents are removing their children from school in the north which desperately needs children, particularly the girl child, to stay in school, some people will say that is not true. But, it is the truth.That is the reality we live in. If I tell you there are communities in the South that Northerners cannot go to, some people will say it is not true, but the reality is that it is true. That is what the six years of Buhari administration has done to Nigeria”.
“It gives no pleasure, believe me honestly, I wish he has done the opposite, so that, I can be proud and say thank God, all the efforts we had put in 2003, 2004, 2005 has borne fruits, that we have shown that we can actually produce a good leader that would make a difference, but he has failed to do this and my major concern now is that, I am worried that the same administration is working to put another administration in power and the PDP is not any better. PDP just wants to wrestle power from President Buhari and do exactly what Buhari is doing, that is the tragedy for this country”.
There you have it dear readers. But unlike Dr Baba – Hamed, do not judge President Buhari.
Allow History to do that.
Erratum
Dr John Kayode Fayemi’s 60th birthday was on February 9, 1965.
Apologies for wrong date quoted in last week article.
