Given his landslide victory at the just concluded APC presidential primary, Major General Mohammadu Buhari seems to be on the cusp of history once again. It is history steeped in and dripping with paradox. This needs not delay us. It has been said that thunder does not strike twice. But if the loud rumblings for change across the country and the sudden tectonic shift in favour of a sanitising presidency are anything to go by, the Daura-born general has another rendezvous with history.
Exactly 31 years after his military colleagues chose him to be the public face of what they presented as a war against corruption and indiscipline in Nigeria, fate and the logic of aborted business seem to be conspiring to restore him to the very same pedestal. Is Buhari about to step into the same river twice? Put in another way, does history actually repeat itself?
It is a tangled web of ironies and confounding ambiguities. The ruins of reaction also throw up rays of revolutionary hopes. Thirty one years after riding to power on the crest of a popular military coup, General Buhari is seeking to return to the same office through free and fair elections. This will be his fourth attempt, too. As a soldier, Buhari was completely apolitical, often dripping with contempt for political generals. But out of the army, he seems to have developed a gargantuan appetite for politics.
On the face of it, something does not add up. Why does Nigeria appear to be going round in circles like a barber’s swivel chair without any remission or amelioration of condition? The Buhari phenomenon is a huge paradox that requires further inquiry. We can no longer afford to play poker with the destiny of Nigeria.
Thirty one years after the then Brigadier Sani Abacha’s historic broadcast, Nigeria roils in the quagmire of underdevelopment; a cesspit of corruption and historic malfeasance. Sullen angry crowds confront you everywhere you turn. The social fabric that binds a nation together has collapsed, leaving in its wake a state of hair-raising anomie.
The nation has never been so ethnically, religiously and economically polarised. The north east has virtually imploded. If you factor into this the looming fiscal meltdown as a result of tumbling oil prices, it is a perfectly scary proposition. Never in its history has Nigerian been more in dire need of a redeemer or a group of redeemers.
But there have been Nigerian redeemers and Nigerian redeemers. They have come in different sizes and shapes. Yet they have always almost without exception managed to leave the country in a worse shape than they met it. Many analysts have pointed at the structural misconfiguration of the nation right from colonial gestation which has made it impossible for Nigeria to throw up its best and brightest. Others have fingered an alien and alienating state originally designed for colonial galley slaves and which has now become an equal opportunity instrument of terror and torture. A few have chosen to blame a failure of leadership.
Whatever may be the reason, the evidence of state failure is staggering and overwhelming. The state is in serial stasis, its comprehensive paralysis so evident that Nigeria has become a butt of continental and global jokes, its leaders treated like comic buffoons and figures of outlandish farce in a brave new world of ceaseless innovations powered by knowledge production. Even a third rate country like Chad can subject Nigeria to a cruel hoax such as we witnessed in the cleverly executed Boko Haram illusory ceasefire.
Central to the failure and tragedy of Nigeria as a nation is the failure of military messianism such as we have witnessed in a huge chunk of post-colonial Africa. Military rule left many African countries in political and economic ruins with the military itself as an institutional bulwark of the state humbled and humiliated and a very poor shadow of its former self. In Ethiopia, Zaire, Liberia, Uganda, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Burundi and Sierra Leone, the official army had to be neutralised as a precondition for the reconfiguration and reorganisation of the state and the nation.
The Nigerian military has been lucky that its misadventure in power and partisan politics has not cost it much beyond a loss of institutional coherence and cohesiveness and a structural dislocation of its old fighting flair. It could be much worse. General Mohammadu Buhari is very much a product of this military messianism in Nigeria and the paradox of his career illustrates the tragic trajectory. It also in a curiously paradoxical manner points the way forward for a cruelly afflicted nation. It is to this trajectory that we must now return.
In February 1976 after the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed, the then Colonel Buhari was passed over for political promotion by his military superiors. To appease the core north which was still smarting over the death of the tempestuous Kano-born Mohammed, it was decided that an officer of pristine and immaculate Fulani extraction should be named as Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters and in effect Obasanjo’s political deputy.
The choice narrowed to either Colonel Buhari or Lieutenant Colonel Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. Although he was Yar’Adua’s senior, it was felt that Buhari’s stiffness, his inflexibility and lack of political exposure might endanger and compromise a potentially distinguished professional career. Thus Lieutenant Colonel Yar’Adua suddenly became Brigadier Yar’Adua at the youthful age of thirty three.
Although clever, dexterous and probably judicious in the light of extant political realities, the political engineering was not without its bizarre anomalies and contradictions. A livid Colonel David Medaiyese Jemibewon , as the governor of the old west, bluntly refused to submit himself to the dictates of his former subordinate and routinely bypassed the Supreme Headquarters to reach General Obasanjo as Head of State.
However that may be, the courteous, affable and fabulously savvy Yar’Adua went on to make economic hay as a businessman and as the master of militarised politics in modern Nigeria. A wizard of the shock and awe school of political contention, Yar’Adua overwhelmed the old political ramparts with men, money and material and was virtually on his way to the State House before fatally succumbing to a combination of political and military ambush unfurled by his northern colleagues.
In the case of General Buhari, he went on to serve with distinction and immaculate incorruptibility as Nigeria’s Petroleum Czar. He was also a star GOC as his exploits in the Chad Basin would attest. Ironically when it was time for a military coup to dismiss Nigeria’s dissolute and corrupt political class, it was Buhari’s old qualities of stiffness and inflexibility, his iron will and old-fashioned distaste for immorality that recommended him to his colleagues as the stern, no-nonsense face and visage of the new project to sanitise Nigeria.
These qualities worked excellently well when it came to Nigeria’s external image and the management of the economy. But they foundered on the rocks of Nigeria’s cultural, political and regional polarities. It was felt in many quarters that the Buhari administration was grossly insensitive to the cultural and political sensitivities of other regions and religions. The arraignment and conviction of political villains was grotesquely lopsided. Many noted the preferential treatment given to Alhaji Shehu Shagari while his deputy, Alex Ekwueme, was kept in confinement where he developed a snowy beard of Nebuchadnezarean proportions.
Very soon, malignant rumours began to circulate that the coup was part of a sinister Fulani project to retain power. Led by the illustrious Mahmoud Tukur, the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities issued a famous treatise which dismissed the Buhari government as the military wing of the NPN. The reaction of the Buhari administration to these insinuations was a combination of astonishing innocence and political obtuseness. The government provided ammunition for its own enemies who were waiting patiently in the wing and very soon the Buhari regime became history.
Almost 30 years after, the country has arrived at a similar conjuncture with the same Buhari as a democratic exemplar and the civilian arrowhead of a nationwide clamour for democratic restitution and a restoration of national sanity in the economic and political spheres. In the interval, Nigeria has been laid low and prostrate by a succession of military despots and civilian autocrats.
An ethnic version of the Russian roulette or tribal round robin rammed down the country’s throat by a military cabal after they were confronted by the consequences of annulling the freest and fairest election in the country has become a political albatross with the advent of the Jonathan presidency. It is a proverbial fly perched on a delicate spot in the nation’s anatomy.
So, is General Buhari about to step into the same river all over again? Not exactly. If 31 years ago, the economy was in the doldrums, now it is in a violent tailspin. Thirty one years ago corruption was a national malaise, now it has become a pan-Nigerian pandemic threatening to overwhelm the nation. To worsen matters, the ethnic, religious and regional fissures of the country have become gaping wounds and a large swathe of the nation has already succumbed to religious insurgency.
All these require much more than General Buhari’s fabled incorruptibility and granite integrity. He will be asked not just to go after economic saboteurs but to create wealth without which it will be impossible to address the issue of social inequity, and with an eye to the sensitivities of a combustible multinational nation. It will require uncommon skills, political dexterity and the sagacity of a modern miracle man.
It is a measure of the urgency and indeed the emergency of the matter at hand that the dominant political tendency in the South West whose ideological ancestors and political forebears were in the forefront of the battle against the old Buhari administration have now teamed up with nascent political forces from the north in a last ditch bid to rescue Nigeria. This is just as it should be. We cannot be fixated on old battle orders and ancient feuds when emergent realities point at pressing and immediate dangers in other directions. Those who bear grudges of the past are rendered incapable of facing the grinding necessities of the present.
The ringing and insistent clamour out there is for a qualitative change of leadership based on competence, integrity and higher seriousness which will rescue Nigeria from its current economic rot and political disorder. The post-June 12 ethnic formatting of leadership pioneered by a military cabal and perpetuated by General Obasanjo has now had its time and day. Otherwise like a catatonic animal in deep hibernation, Nigeria may be put permanently to sleep by adversarial climatic conditions. We have only two months to make up our mind.
