PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari may have been re-elected with a plurality that reinforces his confidence in his first term programmes and ideas, but he will be wise to look beyond the surface to find out why most of Nigeria’s social and economic indicators in fact regressed in his first term. The regressions have not been caused by his opponents, whether in the Southeast or Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), or even a substantial half of the Southwest and North Central, or some retired military generals, or the so-called pampered, thieving and implacable elite. Yes, all these groups have their faults and weaknesses, but they also have their legitimate right to be unalterably opposed to the president and his ideas. It is not unethical to detest the president and his ruling party, just as the president has the constitutional right to enunciate and find support for his programmes and policies. Neither position is immoral.
After yesterday’s state polls, after the smoke has cleared and winners and losers have vented their anger and emotions, it may be time for the president to put together a transethnic team to study the statistical dynamics of his victory, including where he performed well and why, and where he struggled and why. He needs to humbly eschew his instinctive divisiveness an self-righteousness to interrogate the statistics of the 2019 elections, to discover what hidden or open messages they tell him about his person and policies, or what they reflect about his leadership, particularly his failings and strengths. More critically, he needs to find out what the polls say of the country he has been privileged to lead for four years, and what they are saying of the future in terms of its economy, politics and society. Poll statistics really say a lot. Let him dig and find out what they are saying. And then let him interact with the country he presides over and see whether, despite the interminable and sometimes sanguinary pull and push between ethnic, religious and class groups, Nigeria cannot find common grounds upon which to build a stable and prosperous future. Can he be trusted to engage these imperatives?
Without prejudice to the outcome of the legal challenge his opponent in the presidential election, Atiku Abubakar, is mounting, it is not too early for the president to consider an agenda for himself. He does not have four years from this May to set the foundation for the future Nigerians anticipate. Had he set such a foundation in his first term, and planned to consolidate it in his second term, by 2023, the result would have been unmistakeable. But after floundering for much of his first term, probably due to his government’s lack of focus and rigour, not to say his combative and desultory approach to fighting social ills, he will now be pressed for time to appropriately realign the country and prepare it for a glorious future. If his unflattering antecedents are anything to go by, however, the outcome may already be settled. But the country must hold out hope that this time he can assemble the right patriotic team to think for his government outside the framework of ethnic and religious exceptionalism.
Should such a team be assembled, it would mean that the president has given indication that he is willing to abjure his idiosyncratic narrowness that saw him respond warmly in his first term to the demands and perspectives of a section of the country, particularly the section he confessed gave him unalloyed support. It would also indicate that he is finally thinking about a legacy for his presidency, one that would plant him in the minds of Nigerians for generations to come. No one appears sure what is on the mind of the president, whether he genuinely understands the problems afflicting and dividing the country, or whether he is genuinely misguided due to the cultural contamination many like him have suffered as a result of their provincial backgrounds. Whatever the problem is, it is time for the president to attempt some redemption. Below are a few of the areas he needs to focus on in his second term, assuming that he can get a team to envision the future for and with him, and he can also conjure the open-mindedness needed to grasp the fundamentals of the real and lasting change the team would suggest.
The economy
Whether he likes to acknowledge it or not, President Buhari has not produced macroeconomic models for Nigeria. In the past few years, many conferences and workshops had been conducted to rethink the country’s economy. He was either an invited guest or they were done at his government’s behest. But there was no time he sat through the entire deliberations, not to talk of appreciating the issues discussed, or owning them in such a way that he would have an instinctive feel for the urgent economic problems confronting the country, the paradigms that drive them, sometimes misguidedly, and the panaceas needed to effect fundamental adjustments. They have fed schoolchildren in some states without minding the unfairness which that entailed for those not fed, and have implemented Tradermoni programme, probably because of the instant results it is judged capable of delivering. They have also implemented the TSA policy, substantially augmented tax revenue, promoted agriculture, instituted measures to engender ease of doing business, and engaged some reforms here and there. But neither these programmes nor other successes have so far have been built into a model consistent with the socio-economic needs of the country, a model implementable now and in the future, complete with timelines and measurable goals.
President Buhari’s first year produced a welter of naive and contradictory economic policies that pushed the economy into recession. He blamed his predecessors, but analysts know what the real problems were. If the reformist Chinese leaders who effectively took over from Mao Zedong had preoccupied themselves with blaming their predecessors, Deng Xiaoping would not have created the economic model and foundations capable of supporting and driving the Chinese economic miracle that has become the envy of the world today. President Buhari has also blamed corruption; but corruption is merely a symptom of the disarticulation in the system, a system so dysfunctional that it would be wishful thinking to expect the tinkering so lauded by the president to lift Nigeria out of poverty into steady growth and development. Let President Buhari develop macroeconomic models for the country, and let the country interrogate them. More importantly, the president himself must understand the models and owned them.
Politics
Except the president is living in denial, there is no way he can stabilise and unite the country around common objectives without a deep and comprehensive rethinking of its structure. The country is structurally unbalanced, like a defective building. But the president, like many others, think that reworking the foundation would predispose the country to fractures, if not outright balkanisation. They are wrong, very wrong. By the time they honestly inquire into the conflicts that have convulsed the country since independence, they will be shocked to find out how misguided and unrealistic they have been all along. Apart from the herdsmen crisis that consistently provoked clashes and mayhem, partly due to the president’s irresolute approach to the problem and a reluctance to resolve the crisis with the required neutrality and thoughtfulness, Nigerians may just be discovering that the multicultural ideal propagated by some Western democracies are illusory and impracticable. In Nigeria, land and cultures are a spiritual ideal far more transcendental than even religion, regardless of shifting demographics.
The rash of nationalist parties in Europe, some of them far-right parties consumed by nativist ideologies, is a reflection of the stridency of their insular politics unrestrained by their sophistication. Until the supposed threats that imbue these negative tendencies with life are dissipated, these extreme ideologies will continue to find relevance. It is unrealistic to suggest that Nigeria’s ethnic groups, many of them already embracing and promoting exclusionist politics and supremacist ideologies, can suddenly respond positively and commonsensically to placation and homilies. They will not. They will continue to guard their cultural turfs jealously, react violently to threats, whether they be from elections or from any other source, and engage in deadly struggles for national power and dominance. A thinking president will assume the presence of these predisposing factors rather than dismiss, and find the best ways to manage them. Until President Buhari comes to terms with what he must do to manage these fratricidal and centrifugal tendencies, the conflicts can only worsen until they become unmanageable. As competition for resources and land intensifies, the room for manoeuvre for a burgeoning population will probably shrink. President Buhari needs to find the statesmanlike wisdom to grapple with the country’s existential problems before the initiative is finally lost.
Society
Of all his failings, President Buhari’s most galling is his inability to envision a socially re-engineered Nigeria. The reasons are not far-fetched. He is ascetic, simple, almost a philistine, and probably religious to the point of worrisome excesses. For a country hosting more than 250 ethnic groups, variegated cultures and traditions, and manifesting spiritual vivacity through their various religions, to be led by a president who is virtually anti-life and anti-culture can be quite challenging. But President Buhari must find a way in his second term to accommodate a people who have, in spite of themselves, reached out to him and accommodated him. Ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo was marketed as that egregious ideal: gregarious but truculent, sociable but almost hedonistic, artistically inclined if his bucolic tendency had not undermined his gifts, and irredeemably boisterous but unable to apply his energies to lofty and noble goals. President Buhari is the complete antithesis.
The next four years must witness a social revolution that would usher in the arts/culture, music, sports — the renaissance in short. But how so ungifted a man can reach for the stars without committing self-immolation remains to be seen. He does not drink, and he cannot now begin to be a connoisseur of wine. There is no record that he reads one book a week, and he is unlikely to be tempted by what he would consider a drudgery. He has had more than one wife, but unlike Napoleon Bonaparte and Suleyman the Magnificent, there is no record indicating he ever composed any poem or panegyric to womanhood, if not to their beauty, then at least to their entrancing shape. But if he cannot rise above himself, can he not get someone with whom he could entrust that aesthetic assignment?
Foreign policy
The Buhari government probably sees foreign policy as a luxury. Having failed to master domestic policies, President Buhari may be quite reluctant to dabble in a sector he warily views as stuffy, artificial and complex. As far as his government is concerned, few can fail to notice that foreign policy is all but dead. Of course Nigeria still posts and receives diplomats, and the president makes trips abroad, as frequently as his health can allow. But it is doubtful whether he or anyone else knows what the rubric of his foreign policy is. No one knows beyond the trite restatement of previous paradigms popularised during the activist months of the Murtala Mohammed military government. Africa is still the centre of Nigeria’s foreign policy, and West Africa, particularly ECOWAS, is at the core of the policy concentric circle. But like a distant star, Nigeria muddles on over climate issues, attends international conferences, and routinely speaks at the UN General Assembly. Beyond these, it is a yawning vacuum and a painful blank.
Would Nigeria want to promote a new world economic system? Of course not. It appears satisfied remaining a financial and trade appendage of China. What of a new power relations, such as the Concert of Medium Powers once promoted by former External Affairs minister, Bolaji Akinyemi? Is it not even more needed now in view of the weakening of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the rise of China and the attendant stress and conflicts rearing their heads as a consequence of the changing balance of power equations? Nigeria has not given a thought to these issues, let alone find and associate with countries with similar orientations. Nigeria used to be very active in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now African Union (AU), and took ECOWAS ideology very seriously. But as it surrenders grounds to more focused countries like Ghana and Rwanda, it has found it difficult to respect or inspire respect for ECOWAS rules and regulations, and cannot offer itself as a regional role model in the observance of the rule of law, international trade, human rights, and defence policies and military campaigns. The decline is almost complete and stifling.
President Buhari may not know much about anything, but he can find the right people to conceptualise a great and inspiring framework for an effective and coherent foreign policy for his government. However, for the right people to join his government and be effective in their assignments, especially those who know their worth, they will have to be confident that the president is not overruled by a cabal, and his ministers have equal access to him, with none of them finding himself humiliated by favoured officials from select tribes or groups.
Conclusion
Both Chief Obasanjo and ex-president Goodluck Jonathan had the opportunity to lay a great politico-economic foundation for Nigeria at the beginning of the Fourth Republic and thereafter. They did not, though they appeared more equipped, in terms of exposure and education, than President Buhari. However, if the president has learnt anything from his first term, much of it spent either managing internal conflicts within his government and his party or alienating his friends and admirers, he must by now have understood that despite some bright sparks, his government in fact underperformed. But only he can tell whether he will change in his second term, far beyond his verbal promise to make a difference. He still doesn’t have quite the temperament or the time to fulfil the enthusiastic promises he has made for his second term, but it would be hasty to count him out. Indeed, knowing that they are probably stuck with him for the next four years, all Nigerians can hope for is that their president would disappoint those who have concluded that he could not pass muster.