Tag: President Muhammadu Buhari

Barely one week into President Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, Nigerians have become embroiled in a debate over whether he is cautiously forging ahead or making haste slowly.  They want to see action, plenty of it, perhaps reminiscent of military regimes, the kind that came in those sentimental and impressionable days with ‘immediate effect and automatic alacrity.’ They want, by now, to see his list of ministers ready, even if it would not be presented for screening. They wanted to see his principal staff in place a day after he was sworn in, kicking and puffing with activities and thundering the resolve of a president high on energy and brimful with ideas. They want to see everyone, security agents and civilians alike, shaping up or preparing to ship out. Alas, barely one week into his presidency, the renewed and reinvented President Buhari has only managed to announce a few appointments, one of which even sounded like duplication.

The problem, it seems, is that during the campaigns, most of the voters, many of whom reached voting age long after President Buhari had ceased to be military head of state, did not actually know him. The voters took to heart the piffle dished out by PDP propagandists, some of whom, like Femi Fani-Kayode, Governor Ayo Fayose and Olisa Metuh, simply invented the APC candidate of their notorious fantasy. They sold him to the electorate as an ogre, brutal and impetuous, abrasive and unreflecting, and hasty, bigoted and inflexible. If he were all of these, those who voted for him in the northern part of the country couldn’t care less. They did not dispute the propagandists’ impressions, but they were unmoved by the extreme pejorative dismissal of a man they trust and had become instinctively attached to. Elsewhere, the propaganda was rather effective, with the Southwest voting for him by a close margin on account of their double-mindedness over his attributes; and the Southeast and South-South embracing his opponent, former president Goodluck Jonathan, to the hilt.

Otherwise, the real President Buhari is fundamentally different from the picture of him painted by the PDP during electioneering, a picture quite at variance with his personality and attributes. As head of state, he was never impulsive; he was instead methodical, unhurried, even long-suffering, reserved, surprisingly trusting, and eager to delegate responsibilities. Nothing said he was infallible in those days, and in fact made his fair share of mistakes. But he was then, and still now is, a man who quietly made up his mind and stuck with it for a considerable length of time. Nor did he suffer from any complex, a fact that made him indifferent to analysts describing his first coming contrapuntally as the Buhari/Idiagbon government. More importantly, those very close to him argue that the picture of him painted by his detractors is so far off the mark that it is difficult to redeem.

It is, therefore, unlikely that President Buhari can be moulded into someone he is not in a matter of few weeks or years simply because he had been invested with the mantle of leadership. From the look of things, given his reactions to the germane politics of his party, including last year’s primaries and keen jousting for influence and dominance in the APC, he will proceed more with the deliberateness the public can’t seem to recognise or appreciate than seek to please them. He will build a careful continental, and if need be, international, coalition against Boko Haram, examine all conceivable battle scenarios, assemble the troops and materials needed to wage an effective war, no matter how long, and then launch determinedly into the campaign. He is inflexible as his opponents say, but it seems more like the kind of inflexibility that makes him committed to a task for as long as it takes, notwithstanding the reverses.

It has also been suggested that he had all of six weeks to plan his first few actions once sworn in. Instead, it is said, he opened himself to interminable queues of visitors and well-wishers, while failing to pay attention to the exigent issues of the day. But notwithstanding the transition committees set up to make the handover seamless, President Buhari did not receive the Jonathan government’s handover notes until a day before inauguration. In a democracy, he needed to exercise more caution than in a military regime. Nor could he have ignored the stream of well-wishers to whom he owed his election, if not his present and future support. Five years of the Jonathan presidency might have hurt the country unbearably, but it is no excuse for expecting that in one week, the Buhari presidency would begin, without reflection or study, to launch recklessly into popular schemes and programmes.

It is expected that he will assemble a great team, reappraise his campaign promises and party manifesto in accordance with current reality , and after a few prefatory steps and troubleshooting measures, will in the many months ahead plan and execute uplifting and soaring projects. It is not clear how he will relate with the National Assembly, but he has his party and leading party strategists to help him navigate the warrens that both legislative chambers have become. He will in addition need to sharpen his wit and reflexes, for he will be confronted now and again by many urgent and debilitating national issues. In many instances, the opposition will attempt to blackmail him even as they enact and execute policies and programmes that undermine the rule of law and constitution. Ekiti and Rivers are examples.

Much more than what speed he is on, his main challenges will concern how to calibrate intelligent reactions to the selfish manoeuvring of the opposition, whether in Ekiti or elsewhere. Rather than re-programme their party scientifically as a sound alternative to the APC, the PDP seems to be confecting and perfecting a series of measures to blackmail the president and the rest of the country using the constitution and all other sentimental buncombe. All President Buhari needs to do is ensure great fidelity to the constitution. He should confront political chicanery firmly, promptly and courageously. He urgently needs to set the tone for the country, a tone that was neither in his campaign promises nor in his party manifesto. That tone will determine to a large extent whether he will be feared and respected like great world leaders, and therefore be successful, or he will be ignored and exploited like former president Goodluck Jonathan. President Buhari needs a disciplined, focused and ambitious country; only he can set the tone in the direction. This has nothing to do, at least so far, with the speed of his actions. It has instead everything to do with the brilliance and prescience of his actions.

Nigeria has the population, economy, skilled manpower, a dangerous mix of problems and challenges, as well as exists in very interesting times. All that is required to drag her out of stagnation and decay and turn her into a roaring success is an intuitive and courageous leader, one imbued with sound judgement and deep intellect. Will President Buhari be that man? Nothing guarantees he will be a success, or that he has all the qualities to make the difference. But there is nothing in him that predisposes him to failure either.

As far as speeches go, President Muhammadu Buhari’s inaugural speech was not his most creative or inspiring. And even though quite remarkably he delivered it much better than he had done in recent years, and addressed many salient and troubling national issues, it hardly proceeded beyond the serious ordinary, a businesslike speech from a man and politician more obsessed with reflecting reality than climbing the esoteric heights of rhetoric. He seemed to serve notice, by the barely 2,000-word speech, that his government would emphasise substance over the meretricious. In his first coming as a military head of state, when his elocution was much more endearing than it is now, when the invincibility of youth pushed him to brinkmanship and great daring, he felt the encumbrances of age and military rule less than his cautious, slower and more reflective inaugural speech exuded.

In 1984-85, his style led many to believe he was an inflexible ruler, disdainful of consensus. But his speech last Friday, minus the influence of his 72 years age, gave the wholesome impression he was misunderstood or misread during his first tour. He learns, he builds consensus, and he is not a reed unwisely refusing to bend before the wind, especially when that wind has nothing to do with the great and noble elements of life, such as principles and other political virtues. President Buhari says he has changed. This is not the whole picture. What has changed about the man, as his speech conjured, is not the essential Buhari, to wit, his fidelity to honesty, his wholesome embrace of truth, his quaint philosophy of family, and his fanatical admiration for values and virtues that ennoble and differentiate a person. What has changed is his understanding, not his person, of some of politics’ and life’s eternal verities in accordance with global standards and shifting mores.

During electioneering, he had been compelled by the electorate to admit his wife into the campaign trail. For so ascetic a man as the former army general, voters were pleasantly surprised to discover he had not only a beautiful wife, but also a beautiful family. By compelling him, voters humanised him rather than limited or diminished him, and they even raised him to an unusual if inadvertent aesthete of culture and fashion, and a purveyor of grace and goodness. But he was, and apparently still is, also a traditional man, with a distinct and decent streak of religiosity. And despite his accomplishments in military and politics, he is still at bottom a shy man. As he alighted from his vehicle at the inauguration ground, he went many brisk paces ahead of his wife, as if he felt the discomfort of many faces harshly focused on how this intensely private man would relate with his wife in public. When he was gently admonished by former president Olusegun Obasanjo to go round the VIP Box to acknowledge the presence of the many dignitaries who graced the occasion, he imperceptibly restrained his wife from following him as he made his way up the stand.

President Buhari has come a long way, both in maturity of view and in social graces. He is no longer the starry-eyed military officer of some 30 years ago, nor will 21st century Nigeria with its feral social media and intrepid orthodox media allow him the privacy he covets. He has managed to secure a beautiful wife and family; the world will scrutinise how he relates with them. Without doubt, it seems obvious that even in this awkward area of his life, he will also learn and mature much faster than anyone will give him credit. They may not be able to get him to kiss his wife in public, for that will be the day, but they will get him to match his brisk pace with her dainty pace. And his daughters, who have shown independent and admirable personalities of their own, will be hard to restrain in living their now very public lives, especially considering how well in the past they had comported themselves.

Like sportsmen and musicians, politicians and especially leaders are in fact leading celebrities. But it was not just as celebrity that the crowd that thronged Eagle Square on Friday wanted to assess President Buhari. Yes they would have loved the president, the vice president and their wives and children not to be too far apart, and they would have loved, after the president took his oath, to have the first and second families stand together on the platform where they were sworn in. For, attending inauguration, wherever it is done, is the perfect symbolism and embodiment of politics as entertainment. But much more, the crowd also wanted to hear the president speak, and for that speech to grab them with all the literary and psychological ornaments of fine words, great statements, fiery promises or threats as the case may be, and any other thing deemed efficacious in arresting and entertaining the crowd.

In his perfectly synchronised but sedate speech, President Buhari neither inflamed the crowd nor alarmed the elite. Probably the most alarming thing he said was his poetic declaration that he belonged to everybody and to nobody. It was the perfect statement indeed for everybody who feared that the president could be a hostage to one religion or ethnic group or the other. Perhaps it also assured the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and any other political party fretting in dark and obscure corners, that the president could be less schizoid about other parties. And probably the most stirring part of his speech was when he remarked about Nigeria’s founding fathers in the opening paragraphs, and assured that the people would not regret voting him into office. He also reminded his audience of their proud heritage, of the empires that had dignified their parts of the country.

Other than these few inspiring statements and assurances, there was little else in the speech but normal reiteration of promises made during electioneering. He would tackle Boko Haram by relocating Army headquarters to Maiduguri. But former president Jonathan did that too, if a little unsuccessfully. He would take more than a passing interest in what is happening in the other tiers of government, especially the local government. Perhaps he can; but he will navigate testy legal and political grounds to do that successfully. He will continue to support the amnesty programme, which he reminded the country would end in December, and will redirect efforts to developing the blighted oil rivers. Well said, and an indication of his comprehension of the weaknesses of the programme.

It is difficult not to go away with the impression that President Buhari deliberately refused to inflame or alarm the people with his tempered speech. He had made greater speeches and statements before, even during electioneering. He was never as tedious as his predecessor, nor as burdensome and ponderous as Chief Obasanjo. In fact his austere phrases, not to say the overall terseness of his speeches, have their own invaluable appeal. Last Friday, his speech was businesslike, to the point, achieved brevity and conciseness, and conformed to the image of a leader whose bona fides Nigerians have grown to appreciate and trust. It will be a rare thing indeed that President Buhari can be tutored to write or deliver better speeches than he has done so far.

What will not be in doubt is that he will act with far better acuity and purpose than he has spoken. The reasons are his inimitable intuition, hard work, honesty of purpose, and patriotism. He will respect democratic values, as he has promised, but he will nonetheless hit malfeasance and sloppiness as hard as he has become accustomed to. He may lack depth in certain  areas of modern economics, but he will make up for that with his indisputable eclecticism, and reliance on trusted and brilliant aides. He talked of immense goodwill following Nigerians and himself to Friday’s presidential inauguration. It is hard not to get the feeling that time and the elements appear to be combining to favour him and the country he is trying to salvage.