Each village meeting concluded that Buhari is not coming back to rule as a representative of the military, should he get elected, but as a member of All Progressives Congress.
Finally, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has given the Nigerian electorate the other side of the electoral equation to consider in its search for the right presidential ticket to govern Nigeria in the next four years. Many APC members are already calling the Buhari-Osibajo ticket the ‘Dream Team’ to fix Nigeria. As expected in the marketing of candidates that electoral contest engenders, PDP spokespersons are quick in telling voters that this team is not formidable enough to unseat the incumbent. The interest of today’s column is to share reservations and recommendations of folks in many Yoruba towns and villages (which I had visited in the last four weeks) with regards to the two teams; one old and the other new, asking for citizens’ approval in the next presidential election.
On questions about the incumbent team, citizens did not have specific comments. They told me that they know enough about the Jonathan-Sambo ticket already, having had the two leaders in power for close to six months. They rather threw their own questions to me: “Are you sure Buhari can fix the country better than he did in 1984?” I answered that I was there to find out what they thought as voters, not to express my thought as a commentator wanting to feel the political pulse or temperature of the masses with respect to leading contenders for the APC ticket. I insisted that I was in every town or village visited in my personal capacity to listen to indigenes and residents, not to persuade anyone with my own feeling on the important matter of fixing Nigeria.
At a bar in Osogbo, one young man clad in a mechanic’s blue overcoat kicked off the discussion: “Should Buhari win the primaries, does anyone think that he will be in a position at 72 to fix Nigeria any better than what he did at 42?” Many okada riders in the room said between sips of beer that Buhari was too obsessed with unity and discipline in 1984 for him to be able to fix today’s more complex Nigeria. Others shouted them down that they were too young to know what happened in 1984 and should not waste the time of the visiting newspaper columnist by re-casting the prejudice of old UPN members. I quickly interjected, urging everyone to respect the view of the other and called for ground rules for the bar seminar. We all agreed in Osogbo as we did in Ipetu-Ijesa, Ile-Oluji, Ondo, Okitipupa, Inisa, Oyan, Ilese, Sagamu, Ikorodu, Ilorin, Offa, Ajase-po, Oyo, Fiditi, Ote, and for Lagos area in Ipaja, Festac, Alagbado, Mushin, and Ibafo. We agreed that each person would be allowed to air his or her views on each candidate and we would cast a vote at the end of each evening’s road-side political seminar on each issue discussed.
If votes recorded in the informal seminars were anything to go by, Buhari’s emergence in Lagos last week as the APC flag-bearer would not have surprised anyone in many of the bars visited. Most of the discussion in various towns was about his presidential candidacy. He was the candidate most favoured and also the most scrutinised. There was no session at which the issue of his need to explain why he made certain choices during the eighteen months he was military head of state. The negative questions were many: “Why did he stop the Lagos Metro Project; why did he keep UPN politicians in jail when nobody had accused them of stealing from public till; why did he ask citizens to wait in straight lines like soldiers at bus stations; why did he order that people who threw litters on the streets be flogged by WAI brigades?” One person in Okuku even asked why Buhari wanted to bring two leading southern UPN politicians; Dikko and Akinloye, back from London in crates to come and face trial for corrupt enrichment in Lagos. But there were older persons in the room who quickly put the last question to rest by saying that Dikko was Fulani like Buhari and that Akinloye was a leader of NPN, not UPN. One matter that came up in each session was the readiness of Buhari to do the needful: re-structure the polity and allow each region or state to develop at its own pace.
From one town or village to the other, the beer-parlour seminar was characterised at the beginning by boisterous discussions, but each ended on a sober note of philosophic reflection that many pundits would not associate with bar discussions. Many issues that could have been raised by PDP campaign managers were raised pointedly and not necessarily to damage Buhari’s campaign but to let him have the benefit of the interaction between the Yoruba political memory and electoral behaviour. One of such revelations was the point that a man’s deeds at 40 should not be used to disqualify him from any race that he joins at 70 and that thirty years should be long enough to change a man or woman that is not retarded. I was told by a clearly ‘lumpen’ group that doing something that made people uncomfortable thirty years ago is not as bad failing to grow with time to see things differently thirty years after, but that such leader must be ready to explain the reasons for his actions thirty years younger. A young woman, moving from serving beer to drinking Guinness stout, said: “It is the vision of the leader regarding the future that matters, not what he did not do to the satisfaction of everybody thirty years ago.”
I was told that Buhari in 1984 did not do anything with a mandate. Nigerians had no power over his choices of what to do, as he was responsible to his fellow military men who picked to replace Shehu Shagari, whom citizens voted for but who was apparently unable to govern the country properly while citizens who gave him their mandate to rule were also unable to call for his impeachment. Some blue-collar workers even said that Buhari was in 1984 a loyal member of a pack, the Nigerian military class, not a party with the overarching slogan of Change. The military-ruling class was described as one that from the beginning of military rule in 1966 to its end in 1999 made too many mistakes about how to fix Nigeria. Some persons even pontificated that if we are going to hold Buhari’s performances in 1984-85 against him, we should have done the same to Obasanjo who later came to govern Nigeria as a civilian president for eight years through the proverb: “Bawoni obo se s’ori ti inaki ko se?” (What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander).
I also heard that voters should hold Buhari and his running mate down to electoral promises they are able to make. One woman said several times at the top of her voice that Buhari has been saying since 2007 that he would restructure the country if elected, an indication that he was not going to be satisfied with addressing the symptoms at the expense of the causes of Nigeria’s problems which have been festering for over half a century. Nobody knew at that point that Buhari was going to choose a running-mate, YemiOsibajo, who also spent so much of his legal mind defending and protecting the vestiges of federalism in place during his eight years of serving as Lagos State’s chief legal officer.
Soldiers in their one-dimensional thinking, one Danfo driver said, “misread the country’s political signs. They thought federalism was the enemy of the country’s unity and all of them in power worked hard to dismantle the country’s federal system, only to realise that the unity for which they broke the country into mini-states designed to survive on life support from petro dollars has remained elusive, even sixteen years after the exit of military rule. If the groups in the discussions were big enough to justify any generalisation, one would have paid substantial attention in this piece to a school teacher’s advice to Yoruba voters: “It is not enough to vote for Buhari and abandon him to his own devices; it is important to remind him at all times that he is the candidate of a party that in Yorubaland is seen as standing for Freedom for all, Life more abundant. Each village meeting concluded that Buhari is not coming back to rule as a representative of the military, should he get elected, but as a member of All Progressives Congress.
