In terms of personality, there cannot be two people who are as dissimilar as night is to day as our president, Muhammadu Buhari, and the American president, Donald Trump. But as rulers, the similarities between the two men are as uncanny as they are utterly surprising. Briefly stated, here is the bottom line in our profile of these similarities: a gift of masterful personal charisma that is almost completely neutralized by an unacknowledged proneness to weakness, confusion and obtuseness in running the affairs of the nation. There is nothing inherently antithetical between great personal charisma and the demands and responsibilities of governance. Indeed, some of the greatest statesmen and women in history have been endowed with large and equal doses of the two. But when charisma comes with either an innate or determinate propensity for weakness, confusion and coarsened sensibilities in exercising power over a nation and its populace, then the charisma becomes a liability, an alibi for mediocre, unjust and frightening political governance. This, I contend, is what we have in the unfolding scenario of the rule of our president and the incumbent American president.
In making these opening observations in this piece, this much I must immediately admit: of all the thirteen executive heads of states that we have had in this country, Muhammadu Buhari is one of the two or three rulers who seem the least comparable to Donald Trump. Indeed, to speak quite candidly on this issue, the two Nigerian heads of states that I personally find the most comparable to Trump are Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. Obasanjo: like Trump, he is a supreme egomaniac whose first, second and third locus of ethico-political priority or investment is himself. Babangida: like Trump, he freely mixes amorality with immorality, so much so that he is as incapable of remorse as a recidivist rapist who is forever hoping to be given the chance to revisit and re-enact all his previous crimes. Buhari is not a saint, but he is not an Obasanjo or a Babangida. And as a matter of fact, either as a military dictator or an elected ruler, Buhari is not among my favouriteNigerian ruling class politicians. But I want him to succeed. I want him to succeed simply because his success will help to bring our country closer to the minimum of consolidation of a democratic order of the developing world that can meet the challenges of a global economic and political system that is overwhelming rigged against the interests and aspirations of the poor nations and regions of the world. If this is true, what then is the basis of my comparing Buhari with Trump?
I promise: I will give a straightforward and unequivocal answer to this question at the end of this piece. Before then,it it is necessary to further expatiate on my claim that a similarity does indeed exist between Buhari and Trump with regard to the gift of an enormous personal charisma that is neutralized by an unacknowledged weakness, confusion and crassness. We must of course admit it: American democracy is much older and far more stable than our own fledgling, abiku democracy in Nigeria. Moreover, America is the most affluent country in the world while Nigeria is one of the poorest and most economically unjust. These significant facts notwithstanding, women and men are the same all over the world and the moral and political coordinates of governance are comparable everywhere in our common earth. Moreover, please think of this fact, compatriots: the Nigerian presidential system is closely, even apishly modeled on American presidentialism. Above all else is the fact that kleptocracy reigns supreme in both countries, though it is of course more rampant, more “unashamed” in Nigeria than in the United States. No, dear readers, there is nothing fanciful in comparing a Nigerian mode of questionable political charisma with an American one.
And so: what are the expressions of charisma suffused by weakness, naivety and confusion in the respective vocations of the current presidents of the two countries? We can only be selective in our response to this question. Like Trump, Buhari came into office thinking that the sheer charismatic force of his personality would blow away corruption and bring “change” to the status quo andthe country. But corruption has not only fought back in the president’s chosen or preferred theatre of war (the law courts), it has invaded the inner chambers of his presidency, right up to office of the SGF, thereby making the Nigerian president look utterly feckless.
Trump had a more colorful metaphor for the same thing: he was going to “drain the swamp” of corruption and inertia in Washington, DC, he shouted to the four corners of the land during the electoral campaigns right up to his inauguration as the new incumbent of the White House. But before he could settle down in the nation’s morally diseased capital, the “swamp” had claimed Trump and drawn him and many members of his administration into its murky embrace. Indeed, as I write these words on Friday, March 31, 2017 inside the US itself, it has just been revealed that the disgraced former National Security Adviser to Trump, General Michael Flynn (Rtd), was a secret foreign agent of Turkey and had also received large cash handouts from Russian parastatals close to Putin. Thus, in both cases in Abuja and Washington, DC, the question is loud and clear: why has the charisma of each president been so ineffectual, so naïve, so laughable in its utter lack of critical self-awareness?
Charisma in Buhari and Trump has perhaps found its most effective limits in its confrontation with divisions and vested interests within each president’s own ruling party, respectively the APC (Nigeria) and the Republican Party (the US). This scenario seems worse in Buhari’s encounter with the political robber barons in the APC, but that may be because Trump has been in office for less than three months while the Nigerian president has been in office for about two years. Thus, while Buhari has now more or less completely given up all pretense to being in control of the political bosses of his party in the National Assembly and the states, Trump is still twitting and barking orders at rebellious operators in his party to fall in line and give his programs legislative backing. This is regardless of the fact that dissolute factions within his own party have just handed the American president a crushing defeat in the form of failure to repeal and replace the so-called “Obamacare”, a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign for the presidency.In both the Nigerian and American cases, the following questions are now being asked: can a president whose “charisma” cannot match the machinations of politicians and vested interests inside his own party be expected to carry out promises and programs intended to be beneficial to the whole country? Why is “charisma”, alone on its own and without much else to fortify and make it hardy and resilient, why is it so ineffectual?
These questions find their most pertinent application in the framework of the much larger question of the survival of the nation itself. Here I must perhaps make a confession: I have just arrived in the US after a long stay in Nigeria and I find that this same politically existential question of the survival of the nation is on nearly every thinking person’s mind in each country. Please note the qualification of “existential” here with the adverb, “politically”. This is because it is not so much the literal survival of each respective country that is in question; rather, it is what will be left of the country, after the “charisma” of Buhari or of Trump might have been finally contained by forces that neither man can grasp, let alone master? Put differently, here is the same question: what will be left of the country, its unity, the moral, psychological and cultural resources in its patrimony, after the president’s “charisma” has finally caved in to the nation-wrecking interests tearing away the last remnants of vitality, justice, solidarity and honour across the length and breadth of the land?
At this point in the discussion, it is time for me to now return to the question that I earlier promised I would answer unequivocally at the end of this essay. Here is the question, slightly rephrased from the form in which I first posed it: if Nigeria and the US are so different in the age and the nature of their democratic dispensationsand in the wealth and power of each nation, and if Buhari is one of the least comparable of Nigerian rulers to the current American president, Donald Trump, why then have I thought it necessary, perhaps even instructive to compare the two men? I shall be very direct and concrete in my response to the question.
Unlike what obtains in Buhari’s Nigeria, Americans have not (yet) started killing one another in bloodbaths based on ethnicity, religion, regionalism and settler-indigene identities backed by destructive, rampaging violence. But this is no comfort to most decent, humane, thinking Americans since everyone recognizes that the present period is more filled with hatreds and phobias based on race, gender, sexuality and religion than any other period in at least the last half century if not longer. In plain terms, American society is more riven by these divisions now than anyone can remember in living memory. Both Buhari and Trump are products of this deeply troubling history, Trump far more culpably so than the Nigerian president. Indeed, one could go so far as to say that Trump is as much an instigator, a catalyst of this development as he is also its product. Buhari is not completely innocent of being a fomenter, an instigator of violently irredentist identity, but for the most part, this belongs to his past. His “present”, so to speak, is shrouded in mystery and irresoluteness. The nation and the world expect far more of him than he has either been willing or able to give and this is the main or real issue: his charisma is wearing thin and becoming jaded, torn.
Speaking only for myself, I found it deeply disturbing that throughout all the killings in Southern Kaduna, Buhari hardly uttered a squeak. The cries of the dead and their grieving families hardly reached or touched him, it seemed. More portentously, his administration seems totally lacking in the will and the understanding needed to bring justice, restitution and peace to all the aggrieved communities in the country in all parts of the country, east and west, north and south. Justice is indivisible, restitution and peace are due to all communities without discrimination. But Buhari’s administration is dithering. And meanwhile, as a baleful background to the violent inter-communal bloodletting in the land, the looting is still going on, the heavens help us!
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu
