If you will do justice to me, as an elected Nigerian president, let them look at the Constitution a Nigerian president works with, there are people who will closely work with me that don’t need to be taken to the Senate. If I select people who I know quite well in my political party, who we came all the way right from the ANPP, the CPC and the APC, and have remained together in good or bad situation… will that amount to anything wrong?
President Buhari, BBC Hausa Service Interview, October 13, 2015
Mallam Shehu:
This has been a long letter, but we are close to its end. So far, one unspoken but underlying reason for writing this letter is the fact that, like most other Nigerians – in particular those who were adults when President Buhari was a military ruler – I am trying to figure out if the elected president will be different from the military ruler and if so, in what consequential manner this will be manifested. With regard to this consideration, there is also this particular factor in my motivations: as a military ruler, the President had a widely known and much deserved reputation for holding strongly and rather inflexibly to his ideas and beliefs; indeed, he was known to be so indifferent to what people in general thought about him that the only people to whom he gave his ear were associates and confidants among his inner circle of supporters and followers within and outside the military. The infamous Decrees Numbers 2 and 4 of 1984 were the ultimate testimony to this aspect of the President when he was a military ruler.
I do not know how old you are, Mallam Shehu; I do not know if you were already an adult when those decrees were promulgated by Buhari’s military administration, but I can tell you that the pleas, the remonstrations to the young man that Buhari was as a military ruler to reverse himself and his administration on those obnoxious decrees were not only made throughout the length and breadth of Nigeria, they were also made widely in the international community. But to all these pleas Buhari remained totally deaf, even arrogantly and contemptuously so. Against the backdrop of this aspect of Buhari as a military ruler, as we are gradually getting to know the President as an elected ruler, one question that I and I suppose many other Nigerians of my generation will be asking is whether or not the second coming of Buhari will show a ruler who is willing to listen to and reason with people outside his inner circle of advisers and confidants. In essence, this boils down to who the President will put first, Nigerians from all parts of the country, especially the teeming majority of the talakawa North and South, or his inner circle of confidants.
Mallam Shehu, if the President does not know that the words of the quote that serves as the epigraph to this concluding piece in this series of letters to you provides no justification, none at all, for almost exclusively drawing his non-ministerial appointees from his inner circle of loyalists, let him know that people are not as gullible, as naïve as he apparently thinks. Every thinking and politically savvy Nigerian knows that the non-ministerial appointees of elected Nigerian presidents that don’t have to be sent to the Senate for screening constitute the inner core, the “kitchen cabinet” of the President; they wield far greater influence on our elected presidents than cabinet members that have to be sent to the Senate for screening and approval. Indeed, Malam Shehu, I do hope that you are aware of the fact that several commentators have pointed out that many of the ministerial appointees whose names the President sent to the Senate for screening were also selected on the same basis on which the inner core of non-ministerial appointees were chosen, i.e. loyalty to the President over the years and decades from military rulership to four attempts to become elected president, first in the ANPP, then in the CPC and finally and successfully in the APC.
Some pundits have even plausibly argued that the real reason why it took the President so long to make his ministerial appointments was not because he wanted to choose the best and the brightest but because he had to weigh and decide carefully among the large throng of loyalists who had worked for him over the years and decades. In this respect, “loyalty” in this context more or less means “fealty”; not surprisingly, fealty is a word that comes to us from the feudal age when all who served a baron did so on the basis of “fealty’ sworn to the overlord. Indeed, the distinct neo-feudal overtone here is strengthened by the President’s extension of “reward” to those personally loyal to him to states and peoples that voted for him. In other words, it is one thing to reward individuals that have been loyal to you; it is another thing entirely to reward or punish entire states and peoples that voted for or against you; when the two are combined, you have as close as it is possible to neo-feudalism in a 21st century plural, multi-ethnic, federal, democratic and constitutionalist state whose wealth and resources do not come from inherited estates but from rents collected from extractive oil and gas industries. In such an historical context, it is very shocking that the President can be so open, so blatant in linking rewards and “punishments” to those who show or do not show fealty to him, Muhammadu Buhari. Because I wish the President well politically, I sincerely hope that he can and will be made to abandon these distinct neo-feudalist strains in his actions and utterances this early in his presidency before they become entrenched as defining features of his administration.
I concluded last week’s installment in this series by stating that part of my concerns in this long letter, Mallam Shehu, is the fact that neo-feudalism is not a trait, a mode of thought and behavior that is exclusive to the President within the leadership of the APC as the new ruling party. Little did I know when I wrote this observation into the concluding segment of last week’s piece that the same newspaper that carried my column would publish an account in which Nasir El Rufai, the Kaduna State Governor, one of the leading intellectual lights of the APC, a man who had savagely pilloried the late President Umar Musa Yar’ Adua for being so parochial, being so nepotistic that his inner core of advisers and confidants came exclusively from his area of Katsina State, this same El Rufai was reported to have told a town hall meeting last week that people from the part of the state that did not vote for him should expect little or nothing from him. El Rufai’s brilliance is indisputable even if his opportunism is not easily forgettable; if he can be this crudely neo-feudalist, there is much to ponder on where the APC is headed as our new ruling party. The talakawas of all parts of the country and those who struggle for and on their behalf must start a dialogue now with the leaders of this new ruling party.
This preceding statement brings me to perhaps the thorniest or most convoluted expression of neo-feudalism in the APC, specifically the one that pertains to the Leader of the Party, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, aka “Jagaban”. Tinubu’s political “estate” within the APC, unlike Buhari’s, is not based on those who have been loyal to him over the years and decades; rather, his “estate” is based on those who have been his beneficiaries in the long war of attrition and conquest against the PDP. Ask no questions as to how he amassed the vast war chest that was in many instances used successfully against the PDP; the only thing that is important is that a great number of chieftains and heavyweights in the APC and before that the ACN, owed their political lives, their very survival on Tinubu and his control of that war chest. This was the basic rationale of his colossal political influence since 1999, at least before the formation of the APC and more specifically, before Tinubu’s encounter with Muhammadu Buhari as incumbent president. There is a telling lesson here from the feudal age: the baron on whom the supreme feudal overlord obtained his sovereignty over all the baronies in the land was always the first to go, the first to be done away with. In plain language, Tinubu seems to have reached the limits of the reach of his political “estate” in the suggestion, the imputation that Buhari is one of his “beneficiaries”. This is not untrue, but it is a gross simplification; nevertheless, it is being peddled widely within and outside the ranks of the APC.
Finally, there is Bukola Abubakar Saraki whose political “estate” within the APC is actually pre-bourgeois, pre-feudal and pre-modern in that his brand of cynical and opportunistic horse-trading had always existed in all historical polities prior to the modern full-blown bourgeois democracies. When he seized control of the Senate leadership with the great majority of his votes coming from the defeated minority party, he spoke and acted as if this was the most natural thing in the world of representative democracy. It isn’t it but this is beside the point. The ‘point” was that Saraki was successful and the party was unable to do anything to either reverse his “victory” or even call him to order. In effect, Bukola Saraki’s cynicism and opportunism hang like specters over all factions within the APC, at least in the present period when “estates” and “franchises” are being negotiated and traded in the new ruling party at the same time that what the party really and truly stands for remains unclear, even to its own ideologues and within its rank-and-file followership. The real worry within the ruling party itself and the country at large is that there are dozens, perhaps scores of other “Sarakis” lurking within the heart and soul of the new ruling party waiting for their chance to strike it big and rich, change and progress be damned.
Mallam Shehu, all is far from well with the APC as the new ruling party and the President has a large share of what needs to be corrected in the affairs of the party. If perhaps there seems to be too much “Dogon Turenchi” in my use of words like “neo-feudalism” and “fealty”, permit me to say that what I have been arguing in this long letter is really quite simple and straightforward and it is this: we are still at an early stage in both the administration of this President and the time of the APC as a new ruling party; before it is too late, before he becomes known as a ruler who chooses those he favors or disfavors depending on his past and recent experiences, Muhammadu Buhari should strive to be the president of all parts of the country, the parts that did not vote for him as much as those that voted for him. He must especially devote himself to a better life for all of our peoples that have for so long been set aside by the wealthy and powerful few for whom the wealth of the nation was indistinguishable from their personal richness and well-being. If he does these things, his example will redound on his party, the rest of the political class and the nation. I don’t know about Bukola Saraki but the President and the Party Leader have it within their grasp to transform the APC to the first ruling party in our country’s political history that begins to make a real, beneficial difference at home and abroad.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
