NO one can determine whether President Muhammadu Buhari will reflect on his statement suggesting that one of his predecessors in the presidency, more likely ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, boasted spending about $16bn on power projects without delivering power. If the president does, he will be convinced that he needs to eat his words, set the records straight, and look for other more plausible and sensible issues to play politics with. If he is reflective, he will be deeply mortified by how badly he got his figures wrong, how despite holding down the presidency for three years he had moaned around and ruminated on the wrong facts, and how really precariously he had drawn the wrong conclusions based on the wrong assumptions and facts.
Presidential aides have mercifully not attempted to rationalise the president’s latest gaffe. They can’t, no matter how hard they try. The president sometimes indulges in dry jokes, but this time, when he received on Tuesday the grinning and eager members of the Buhari Support Organisation led by the intransigent Customs boss, Hameed Ali, he was unequivocal about his disapproval of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s politics and criticisms. In fact the president’s statements, lips quivering, were so strident that reporters characteristically and unanimously presaged their reports of the visit with what the president fulminated against rather than what Col Ali (retd.) crooned over. No one can tell why and how the president got his facts so wrong.
Perhaps Col. Ali’s fawning conclusion about President Buhari’s politics and leadership, which he described as transparent and patriotic, was to blame. But inspired by the uplifting statements of the Customs boss, and probably persuaded that all the people rooting for him tell the truth about his endowments and politics, the president instantly launched into a tirade, wildly traducing Dr Obasanjo, the chief personification of his enmities. Here is what the president said: “You know more than I do on the condition of our roads. Some of them were not repaired since the PTF days. No matter what opinion you have about (late Gen. Sani) Abacha, I agreed to work with him and the PTF. We constructed road from here (Abuja) to Port Harcourt, to Onitsha, to Benin and so on. This was in addition to other things in education, medical care and so on. You know the rail was killed and one of the former Heads of State between that time was bragging that he spent $16bn, not naira, on power. Where is the power? Where is the power? And now we have to pay the debts. This year and last year’s budgets that I took to the National Assembly were the highest in capital projects: more than $1.3 tn. Let anybody come and confront me publicly in the National Assembly. What have they been doing? Some of them have been there for 10 years. What have they been doing?”
With those unsparing 168 words, and insisting that he was repeating in public what he wanted the public to know, President Buhari opened a can of worms that inadvertently questions his knowledge and familiarity with national issues, and also exposes some of his pet prejudices in garish colours. Quite apart from his subsequent adumbration of oil prices, which he also got badly wrong, the president inadvertently opened himself to searing criticisms. Dr Obasanjo’s aides had last month described those who surround the president as moronic, a description many analysts winced at; now they feel exuberant and justified to describe the president once again as ignorant and lacking in proper understanding of issues relating to the financing of the power projects. It is hard to fault them, even if their use of words flatters no one.
The president needlessly made reference to his Petroleum Task Force (PTF) days. He should have restrained himself. Not only was that programme very controversial, it made his detractors conclude that he had displayed so much bias in the citing and funding of PTF projects that he could not conceivably describe himself as a patriot and unifier. Statistics show that an ungainly and indefensible majority of the projects were cited in the North to the detriment of the South. Equally, his detractors suggested that as proof of his inattentiveness to details, he virtually surrendered the running of the PTF to his favourite but controversial and allegedly grasping consultant. The president needlessly woke this corpse up and imbued it with ghoulish life. Dr Obasanjo’s aides and friends are therefore beginning to recall the president’s unflattering record in the PTF.
More astonishingly, the president made a snide remark about those who think the late dictator, Sani Abacha, was unworthy of national leadership. For a dictator who robbed Nigeria blind and who pillaged the commonwealth, it beggars belief that President Buhari would say “No matter what opinion you have about Abacha…”. In other words, the president is still not convinced that the cruel and hedonistic Gen Abacha was a national disaster and a mockery of what leadership is all about. It says something of the president’s values and worldview that he neither regrets taking appointment from Gen Abacha nor finds the late dictator’s attributes too revolting to associate with. This is truly shocking.
As proof that his animosities run very deep, and probably that he also nurses deep contempt for the National Assembly, he finds the presence of mind to throw a barb at them, including their predecessors. He questions their work and commitment, despises those who have lasted in those chambers for 10 years, and throws a challenge to them to come and confront him. Is it any wonder that the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Ibrahim Idris has shown irreverent and untrammelled disregard for the parliament? For a president who started out by denigrating ministers as noisemakers, and who for more than six months refused to put a cabinet in place, it is not surprising that he wishes to rule as a sole administrator daily bemoaning the restraining influence of the judiciary, the irritating polemics of his cabinet, and the questioning and sometimes censorious scrutiny of the parliament. It is that instinctive dictatorship that showed up in inelegant colours last Tuesday when he received the Customs boss, one of the many flippant public officials who idolise and lionise him.
But above all, nothing proved the tendentiousness of the president’s woolly conception of the national paradigm as his conviction that $16bn was spent on the power projects that delivered only darkness. He is president; and if he feels particularly piqued by what transpired in that sector, he had the leeway and the funds to authorise a quiet probe of what could be described as a national calamity. He did not. Instead, he bought into the unsubstantiated stories woven around the issue, chewed the cud on it for nearly a decade, and has regurgitated aspects of the controversy in a manner that diminishes the presidency. How many more unsubstantiated yarns has the president bought and nurtured over the years, especially in politics where he seems to think he has some natural endowments? The country is now only having a glimpse of these ‘endowments’ three years into his presidency.
Reports by this newspaper in the past few days showed that the facts and figures relating to the power projects were readily available for the president to peruse. Those facts show that nowhere near $16bn was spent on power projects in Nigeria. Indeed, under Dr Obasanjo, whom the president sarcastically dismissed, a little over three billion dollars was spent. Overall, says this newspaper in its investigations, not more than $8.5bn had been spent in 13 years, most of it after the Obasanjo presidency. Having thus armed the vitriolic Dr Obasanjo the more, President Buhari should prepare himself for a far worse verbal and possibly epistolary assault in the coming months, especially as the elections draw near.
It is doubtful whether presidential aides can be blamed for the president’s latest misfiring. He speaks off the cuff, and when he does that, he speaks candidly and animatedly, almost with boyish innocence and a carefreeness that shows how unmindful he is of where the chips may fall or what the truth is. His extempore remarks show the essential President Buhari, as opposed to the managed, carefully controlled and sculpted hibernator whose decades out of office were apparently spent hardening his many superficialities. If his aides cannot manage his extemporaneousness, how can they hope to manage him in the stressful and demanding presidential debates? He is not eloquent, regardless of his intermittent rustic humour, and he has no mastery of economic issues, not to talk of professing any deep and esoteric convictions of democracy and its concomitant virtues. Will he dodge the debates? And can he safely dodge them without suggesting that he feared to expose his limitations?
Many civil society organisations have called for a probe of the power projects spending, and even the EFCC has indicated it might look into it. They are wasting their time. The president got his facts wrong, and tried to ride piggyback on the emotions of the public to assail his fiercest critic. Unfortunately for him, he shot himself in the foot. State investigators should not waste public funds looking into what is not lost. It was said in the 1990s that Gen Abacha had a damning dossier on Gen Ibrahim Babangida, and that every successive president had one black book or the other on his predecessor. If he has nothing better to do, President Buhari is welcome to build one dossier or the other on Dr Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. For, after all, Dr Obasanjo himself is said to have a dossier on the PTF. With all past Nigerian rulers holding a loaded gun to one another’s head, it is remarkable that the guns have not gun off even once. They should spare the country the charade. Hopefully, next year, the electorate would be smart enough to put the right people in office, except of course they are gluttons for punishment.