Tag: abati

IN a piece he wrote sometime before the 2015 presidential poll, but which was published only last Tuesday as an adjoining piece on his THISDAY newspaper column, Reuben Abati, former spokesman of ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, made a lot of curious arguments about the attributes of his former master and the incapacity of his challenger in that election, President Muhammadu Buhari. Entitled ‘Buhari’s “One Chance” Campaign’, the vigorous piece excoriates the eventual winner of that poll as a purveyor of “mean tactics, hate-driven propaganda, shallow costuming, third-party outsourcing of leadership, and manifold deception”.

But in the piece, written with all the literary flourish his writings make ardently tangible, Dr Abati also rhapsodises the attributes of Dr Jonathan as someone who “…is his own man…He is tested, healthy, strong, focused and committed. He has campaigned on the basis of his record of achievements and the phenomenally positive transformation that Nigeria has witnessed under his watch in the past four years…” He went on to list some of those achievements, including “the expansion of the space for human freedoms, and a purposeful, engaging campaign for a second term”.

The piece was not published in 2015 because opinion was divided among his potential redactors. Wise counsel, he seemed to suggest in his Tuesday piece, prevailed. That wise counsel should have still prevailed because the piece ought never to have been published, whether then or now. It is of course immensely tempting to view President Buhari’s failings as a pretext to applaud the qualities of Dr Jonathan. And as the piece illustrates, those failings have not only ossified, they also appear irredeemable. The piece itself is undoubtedly prescient in the accuracy with which it warned the electorate of the irreconcilable differences that existed between the idiosyncrasies of President Buhari and the democratic yearnings and hunger for social and economic transformation of the electorate.

But the piece remains dangerously fallacious. Yes, the 2015 contest was essentially between Dr Jonathan, as an incumbent, and President Buhari, as the challenger at the time. And yes, the temptation was to focus almost exclusively on the contradistinctive qualities of the two men. However, the piece was finally published last week because Dr Abati felt that the embarrassing failings of President Buhari, much more than those of Dr Jonathan, disqualifies the incumbent. The writer couldn’t resist the urge to shame public judgement and expose the electorate for their gullibility.

Before that logic gains traction, it must be emphasised that President Buhari’s failings, while not deniable, do not suddenly exculpate Dr Jonathan from his own leadership failings. There is in fact no settling the precedence between the two. But if a decision were to be forced on the public, it is inconceivable that they would opt for Dr Jonathan. The former president was a better democrat in office, far more tolerant, and more modern, strong and in possession of his own soul. Yes; but he was also incalculably undisciplined, presiding over probably the most graft-ridden and profligate government in Nigeria bar that of the late military dictator and killer, Gen Sani Abacha. His judgement was also something else, so poor and so misplaced that he unfortunately appeared inexcusably and intolerably weak. It must not be forgotten that he lost the election essentially because many Nigerians and nearly all of the rest of the world were appalled by his weak and inexpert handling of the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls.

It is, however, a tribute to Dr Abati’s piece that Nigerians dissatisfied with President Buhari’s handling of the wearisome challenges facing the country, such as the herdsmen attacks, shocking illiberal policies, and unimaginably skewed appointments, are willing to judge the Buhari presidency against Dr Jonathan’s abysmal standard rather than against a higher standard. The piece is not “fully reflective of the mood in which it was written”, as Dr Abati presumes. But it unflatteringly demonstrates how precipitously President Buhari’s presidency has dropped from its initial Olympian height. It is even stranger still that Dr Abati professes some optimism suggesting that President Buhari can still change the narrative. He is lying. Publishing the piece at all is an indication that the man he concludes is so unalterably set in his ways remains, in the private estimation of the writer, unhelpfully intractable.