The mild and sarcastic debate about what Nigeria and President Muhammadu Buhari gained from his July 19-22 visit to the United States will continue for a little longer. It is in the nature of politics for its combatants to plot hugely distractive talkfests to upstage one another. The president was ecstatic about the visit, and his aides have reeled out flattering figures of the economic, security and diplomatic gains the four-day trip afforded the president and the country. Presidential aides mention some N2.7trn investment funds, in addition to the considerable thaw in the tense relations between Nigeria and the US. Furthermore, said the aides, the US, notwithstanding the constrictive Leahy amendment, may be preparing to sell modern weapons to Nigeria to revitalise the intractable war against Boko Haram.
For the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), which President Buhari at least once mispronounced during his meeting with President Barack Obama, the gains of the visit are unquantifiable. The opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), however, remains convinced the visit was virtually useless. But considered as a whole, there are elements of the visit that are quite salutary both to the prosecution of the war against terror and the badly battered image of Nigeria. Yet, it is difficult to resist the feeling that the visit, apart from being hasty and a little incoherent, glossed over many salient economic, political and diplomatic issues.
The visit was not entirely worthless, as the PDP has sought to portray it, perhaps out of envy. But it probably suffers the problem of timing and content. On the day the visit really began on July 20, the president timed his justificatory Washington Post piece to announce his diplomatic intentions and economic and social reengineering hopes. It read like a summarised transcendental agenda. Not only was the Washington Post forum to advocate such germane state issues misplaced, it was indefensible that the core elements of the piece were not debated at home before they were presented to the international community.
Among other issues raised, the article asserted quite definitively that the Buhari presidency’s reengineering programme would be anchored on three fundamental elements, to wit: “First, instill rules and good governance; second, install officials who are experienced and capable of managing state agencies and ministries; and third, seek to recover funds stolen under previous regimes so that this money can be invested in Nigeria for the benefit of all of our citizens.” In that case, the visit should have waited until at least the first two elements of the road map were tackled. Importantly too, it is curious that the president missed the import of his weighty statement, which gave the impression that either his ministers, who he says will be appointed in September, are superfluous, or that he already has a small caucus of super-thinkers conceiving infallible policies for him.
The anti-terror war is important and urgent, and Nigeria needs all the help it can get. But to visit the cerebral nation of the US and its equally cerebral president without his policy team, and without having sieved and weighed his fundamental programmes, is nothing short of undue haste. He may have returned with trillions of investible funds, and spruced up the image of Nigeria from the cavalier level the Jonathan presidency consigned it, but it seems all but certain that so much more could have been achieved had President Buhari placed the cart and the horse in their proper order. The visit also came at a time when the president was yet to appoint most of his advisers. Had he the full complement of advisers, and probably ministers too, he would have recognised the great value of state visits as a diplomatic tactics by nations to assess the depth and vistas of visiting leaders, not merely as a means of presenting a shopping list.
From President Buhari’s Washington Post article and all the reports of what transpired during his US visit, including his gaffes, it is doubtful whether the results he returned with met the huge expectations of the trip. But perhaps his expectations were limited to essentially what the president and his aides conceived and adumbrated. If that is the case, the president must be told he had no right to circumscribe his expectations, given the wider and ramifying needs of Nigeria, and the place and destiny of the country as an ambitious continental leader. In fact, now, the fear in many quarters is that the president’s inability to appoint advisers and ministers — for that is what it amounts to — constrains the quality of his policies, if not his ideas, as will be shown presently. It is not clear what the private feelings of his host were, but it may seem the US will be in a quandary just how to plug in to the needs of a visitor who has not quite enunciated his economic or social road maps with clarity and coherence.
President Buhari appears fixated on his honesty and integrity, two of his many virtues evidently beyond dispute, as indeed his host, President Obama, testified and amplified. But before visiting anywhere, President Buhari needed time and required diligence to enunciate his economic blueprint and a concise and expansive programme for societal regeneration and reengineering. Neither at home in Nigeria, nor anywhere he has visited, including the US, had the president given indication of what his great programmes would be. Perhaps work is ongoing on these two matters. Again, if that is the case, let him add a third item — a political manifesto for Nigeria, on which he has said absolutely nothing.
Except this columnist is greatly mistaken, no one has heard President Buhari declaim on any of these germane national issues with the expansiveness and comprehensiveness they demand. The suspicion is that, as many have argued, citing the examples of improved electricity supply, some stability in fuel supply, and renewed vigour in the anti-corruption war, the president may be relying on his body language to whip the country into line, just as former president Jonathan’s body language gave fillip to corruption and impunity. In addition, he is believed to be hoping that once a sizable fraction of the about $150bn he said was stolen from the Nigerian treasury was recovered, the country would naturally bounce back, the economy would get back on the right tracks, quality of life would improve, crime and terrorism would decline, and Nigeria would be well again.
It is not clear what proportion of Nigeria’s problems which that automated exercise would resolve, or whether the government’s grandiose hopes of an effortless future are not largely utopian. In any case, there is no precedence anywhere to show that given the gravity of the country’s problems, not to talk of the depth and breadth of the challenges it is facing, superficial measures are incapable of cutting the skein of crises in which Nigeria is entangled. The president may have doubtless read about a few recent economic miracles in some parts of the world, particularly Asia. He may wish to take a cue from any of them, particularly China. The more than 10 percent growth rate sustained by China since the 1980s was not by accident. It was largely a product of the conviction, passion and relentless commitment to radical, if not revolutionary, reformist economic policies by Deng Xiaoping.
For Mr Deng to stake everything to enunciate his state capitalism idea, an idea that earned him terrible and costly rejection twice during the 1966 Cultural Revolution and shortly before its end, he undoubtedly possessed depth of economic thought, far beyond what Chairman Mao Zedong boasted, and also way beyond what Mr Deng’s friends in the Chinese leadership, Zhou Enlai and Hua Guofeng, displayed. It is remarkable how the courage and depth of one man impacted the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese and Asians, and astounded and gripped the attention of the rest of the world for the past three decades and more.
It may be unfair to suggest that President Buhari does not possess some of the attributes displayed by Mr Deng, but so far, he has not shown those attributes as reassuringly as would persuade the country that a pair of steady hands and a very reflective mind is presiding over Nigeria. He postpones the appointment of advisers and ministers until sometime in September. Yet he says he will recruit the best to help him govern the country. Does he not have faith in these ministers and aides to contribute meaningfully and substantially in setting the foundation for Nigeria’s greatness, a foundation none of his predecessors, including the opinionated Olusegun Obasanjo, had been able to set? His reliance on a shadowy coterie of aides and permanent secretaries to formulate the rules, reforms and guidelines he talked about is seen by some of his critics, many of whom benefited financially from the Jonathan presidency, as a cover for his inability to come up with the critical and core ideas by which he hopes to run the country. He had 12 years to run for office, and enjoyed the luxury of nearly five months after he won the presidency, but he has been unable to articulate his economic ideas as clearly as Mr Deng, who was inspired by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, enunciated his own economic model. Not only has President Buhari’s economic ideas remained vague — at least nothing more transcendental than the practicalness he is famous for — there has also been no concise political idea and no uplifting notion of a great nation and society. It was General Douglas McArthur’s illuminating concept and vision of a modern Japanese society and its future in the murky waters of Asian geopolitics that led to his formulation of a unique Japanese post-war constitution, which was fleshed out by Japanese bureaucrats, including Shigeru Yoshida.
It is possible President Buhari’s aides are hard at work to formulate these needed ideas, and perhaps at the proper time, he will articulate them. When he does, the country will understand the direction he hopes to lead them. In his Washington Post article, he told the world he would be presenting before President Obama how he hoped to proceed. He needed to have made the presentation first to those who voted him into office, secure their assent, and give them direction. The scale of the rot is huge, as he has said repeatedly. But he must not expect that the fundamentals of that rot will respond to his talisman on the scale the country requires simply because his idiosyncratic rule is factored into the equation. Citing President Obama’s slow progress in assembling his first cabinet is hardly an inspiring example. The APC may defend President Buhari as much as they can, but the job of healing Nigeria and setting her on the path to greatness is too urgent to subject to the methodicalness the ruling party boasts of.
What the country wants to see in September, the arbitrary date President Buhari has set for his cabinet’s composition, are both a fine set of ministers and, more importantly, a coherent vision of his economic, political and social ideas. He must not disappoint, even if there is nothing he has said or done so far to indicate these great and ennobling ideas will come on the soaring scale expected by Nigerians. What he has done so far may be noteworthy, and his personal attributes inspiring. But what sets a glider apart from a rocket is the propulsion system. As Mr Deng proved in China, and Charles de Gaulle showed in France after World War II, and Joseph Stalin illustrated in the former Soviet Union, and as a host of other ancient and modern empire builders showed poignantly, nothing moves a nation, stabilises it, and entrenches it in greatness as the force of idea. It is President Buhari’s ideas or their lack that will determine what kind of ministers and advisers he will appoint, what rebirth the country will experience, and whether his legacies will endure, unlike the questionable and short-sighted legacies of his predecessors.
