Do you remember, compatriots? In 2015, at the beginning of his first term as an elected civilian president, it took Muhammadu Buhari five months to form his cabinet. As we can all recollect, this record-breaking slowness took all of us by surprise, especially as Buhari and the APC came to power on the basis of a vigorous and successful campaign of – change! The surprise, the disappointment was greatly enhanced by the fact that when Buhari finally announced his cabinet, with only a couple of exceptions, it was a lackluster ministerial cabinet, one of the most mediocre in our country in the last few decades.
Buhari is a complex man. In only one term in office as an elected president, he has managed to emerge as perhaps the slowest and laziest head of state we have had in the post-independence era. On the security front, he has woefully underperformed. All over the country today, life is more unsafe, more onerous and insecure for most Nigerians than at any other time in the last five decades, always excepting the period before and leading to the civil war. And as if that was not enough, Buhari’s underperformance in the security front is tinged with undisguised expressions of sectionalism and ethnocentrism. And yet, he retains a large measure of his charisma with the masses and his mystique for millions of his followers, especially in the North, but not excluding parts of the South. His administration, including the presidency itself, has been rocked by corruption scandals; but at the same, Buhari’s reputation for personal moral integrity remains wondrously unquestioned.
A few days ago, I was stunned by television broadcasts of the last cabinet meeting of the president’s first term as, one by one, all the minsters gave lavish and obsequious praise of Buhari, as the man himself smiled from ear to ear in open acknowledgement of the verbal songs of praise being showered on him. All the virtues in the holy books of the Abrahamic religions were asserted as Buhari’s valid and inspiring qualities. One minister said that the president’s love of humanity was unequalled. Another said that it was Buhari’s simplicity, his total lack of pretension that had most impressed him. A female member of the cabinet asserted that “Mr. President” was very interested in women’s welfare and affairs, against widespread perceptions of Buhari as being not particularly politically correct in women’s issues. Chris Ngige’s praise was particularly colourful. “Mr. President”, the outgoing Labour Minister said, “when I tell people that you love humour, that you crack jokes, that you even raise one leg while laughing, they don’t believe me!”
Bearing all these contradictory things about Buhari in mind, are you, dear reader, among those who are anxiously awaiting the announcement of the cabinet for the president’s second and final term in office? Well, if you are, I am not! Why not? Because, in spite of his complexity, in spite of his mix of good and bad qualities, Buhari is very predictable, so much so that, give or take a few unknowable possibilities, the outline of what his last term in office will be is fairly clear. To put the matter as succinctly as possible, I predict, quite confidently, that the president’s laziness will continue and that together with this slothfulness, his sectionalism will combine with his centrist ideological beliefs and attitudes toward capitalism to make the road ahead as tough for most Nigerians as they have been in the first four years of his first term. In other words, beside his personal qualities and predilections, there are also the ideological and political tendencies of Buhari’s party, the APC that I for one characterize as center-right. Taken together, it is the combination of, on the one hand, Buhari’s personality and moral worldview and, on the other hand, his party’s policies and programs, it is their combination that makes it possible for us to predict where Buhari will take the country in the next four years. In my view, this is not a good place at all, to put it mildly.
Before going in detail to this assertion, this prediction, permit me to say that I take no satisfaction at all in making the prediction. This is because I do wish the president to succeed in his final term for the simple reason that his success will be the success of the country. Who wishes the mass killings in many parts of the country to continue? Who wants the widespread insecurity of life, .limbs and possessions to continue unabated? Who wants the rising tide of hatred and intemperate animosities among our peoples to continue? I think I can say with a measure of confidence that definitely, Buhari, the president himself, does not want these terrible things to continue happening in the collective, associated experience of our peoples. How do I know this? In responding to this question, let us return to the major part of the title of this piece: slow and unsteady loses the race.
Of course, this a reference to the moral of one of the most popular fables of Aesop, that of the hare and the tortoise. In the fable, the two animals enter into a race to see which of them would first get to the finish line. The result of the race seemed foregone, for who does not know that the hare is infinitely faster than the tortoise? But the foregone assumption about who would be the winner of the race failed as the hare became so complacent about the certainty of his winning the race that he took time to rest before reaching the finish line. A fatal error, for the hare fell asleep and the tortoise, who had all the while been slow but quite steady in his slothful pace, wins the race. If you wish to express the moral of the fable with a dialectical negative, you could say that victory does not always go to the fastest; sometimes, it goes to the slowest, the most persistent, the most steady. But please note: slowness combined with unsteadiness is a fatal combination.
Do not forget, compatriots, that Musa Yar’ Adua was given the nickname, “Baba Go Slow”. That was before Muhammadu Buhari’s second coming as an elected civilian president. As we now know, if Yar’ Adua was slow, Buhari is super-slow; he is supremely unhurried. He is notorious for taking long, unhurried time to read reports whose ramifications need urgent attention and/or action. He takes all the time in the world to respond to questions arising from controversial actions or statements credited, either to him or to leading members of his administration. Indeed, things may be falling around him in either the presidency or the ruling party, but Muhammadu Buhari, imperturbability personified, remains stolidly unconcerned. If one can talk of a negative dialectic to imperturbability, one can say of the president that he has turned unaccountability into a virtue. What is truly, truly amazing is the fact that quite often, Buhari’s virtuous unaccountability and unresponsiveness pertain to loss of lives, loss of hundreds of lives. Slow and unsteady loses the race…
The unsteadiness stretches right across the length and breadth of Buhari in office as both unelected military autocrat and elected civilian in mufti, in baba riga. Fortuitously for Buhari, Nigerians have a short memory span and we tend to remember the past rather selectively. Thus, where there are no fundamental differences between Buhari as military dictator and as democratically elected president, most Nigerians see a big difference, a difference that shows the younger despot as a man of quick and decisive action and the old and aging, super-slow “Sai Baba” as a ruler surrounded by people he cannot control. But this ignores the fact that as both military and civilian head of state, Buhari has shown a tendency not to distance himself from his erring or even thieving subordinates, that is as long as they remain personally loyal to him. And if that means that he loses face and credibility with the mass of ordinary Nigerians, so be it. Thus it is that both as a military ruler and civilian president, the man with the myth of incorruptibility was and is surrounded by officials and practices of morally dubious intent. To cap it all, to those who have decried the contradictions in his rule and personality, Buhari has been completely indifferent. Thus, there is a great steadiness in his unsteadiness.
For me, the real import of this steady unsteadiness can be found in one of the least understood or even acknowledged aspects of Buhari as a ruler. This is his populist and centrist ideological relationship to capitalism. As military ruler, he was very forthright, very insistent in his opposition to usurious capitalism. Indeed, so forthcoming was he on this point that he did not balk from alarming Nigerian Christians as a community by declaring that his economic policies would gradually shift from unregulated capitalism to the principles and practices of “Islamic banking” which, famously, is against exorbitant interest rates, the cornerstone of the profit motive and surplus extraction in all modern capitalisms. Indeed, it was with the utopia of “Islamic banking” in mind that, upon seizing power from Shehu Shagari in December 1983, Buhari embarked on an ambitious project of a very rapid repayment of all of Nigeria’s sovereign or external debts. At the time, there was little doubt that had he not been overthrown by IBB, Buhari and his regime would almost certainly have fulfilled that mission.
Fast forward, compatriots, to the present. Beyond their personalities and past experiences as ambitious politicians, the thing that distinguished Buhari from Atiku Abubakar in the last presidential elections was their respective ideological visions of the future of capitalism in our country, our continent and the world. To simplify a lot, let us go to the most essential, the most symbolic expression of this difference: Buhari promised not sell off the NNPC and most of the profitable public ventures of the Nigerian nation and people; Atiku vowed that if it was the very last thing he would do, selling off the NNPC was the greatest aspiration of himself and his party, the PDP. More expansively, Atiku and the PDP promised that they would effectively wipe out all vestiges of opposition to the complete privatization and deregulation of the Nigerian economy, from its commanding heights to the valleys of small and medium scale enterprises. And especially, Atiku promised that extremely favorable terms of trade would be offered to investors from any part of the world to come and do business in Nigeria.
Compatriots, if you are looking for the crucial differences that mark the APC as center-right and the PDP as vigorous or hard right, these are the expressions. But only as abstractions, alas. This is because in practice, in reality, all the big stalwarts in both the APC and the PDP are for unregulated and perhaps even unregulatable capitalism. The two parties, together with all the other ruling class parties and politicians are for the free-for-all capitalism based on merciless primitive accumulation that is in force in the economy and polity in Nigeria at the present time. Perhaps the most telling expression of the unregulatable nature of Nigerian capitalism in the PDP-APC era is the unregulated and seemingly unregulatable nature of the salaries, bonuses and emoluments paid to our legislators by, of course, the lawmakers themselves.
This legislative predatoriness sets the example and the tone for everything else in the rampant unequal distribution of wealth in our society, compatriots. Without a doubt, when the economic and social history of the present era comes to be written, the most important development will be found to be the massive transfer of public wealth to the private ownership of a class of Nigerians who themselves produced no appreciable wealth to speak of that could be equitably redistributed to all or most Nigerians. How supremely ironic that a man like Buhari who has cast a large shadow as a disciplined and virtuous ruler should be so lacking in the capacity and the will to regulate the agbero capitalism that is eating away at the foundations of our society and polity.
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu