PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari has been listening only to himself and his aides who tell him what he wants to hear. Two weeks ago, this column urged him, in his futile struggles with alienated groups in the country, to listen now and again to his enemies, since he appeared dedicated to making more of them than making friends. But the president is headstrong, and his friends and aides, particularly from his side of the country, take pride in their tunnel vision. The result last week was the launching of Operation Python Dance II, leading to the almost total sequestration of the Southeast. Shortly after President Buhari returned from his medical trip abroad to bad-temperedly give a laconic address to his long-suffering countrymen, this column remarked, among other things, that the president’s advisory team, particularly his security team, was too restricted and insular to be of help to him in complex and demanding situations. Events of the past one week in the Southeast have conclusively proved that the country is in the grip of leaders too stiff and too isolated to shrewdly tackle the looming political storm.
Operation Python Dance II, obviously inspired by the president’s meeting with his security chiefs two days after his resumption of duty, is designed to crush any plan of rebellion or secession in the country. The president clearly stated what he thought was the problem in the national broadcast in reference. According to him, and perhaps referencing the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and the activities of Nnamdi Kanu without saying so explicitly, any self-determination campaign was a plot for secession, and, in his quaint syllogism, self-determination was next door to war. Having stated the problem so simplistically and so inelegantly, shutting out every nuance and complexity, the president virtually gave the signal, if not direct order, for a military crackdown. He may have mouthed his conversion to democracy — of course not necessarily belief in the concept — but he is at bottom an unapologetic exponent of military rule.
No problem can be solved until it is first stated carefully and accurately. The Buhari presidency may have a general hunch of the issues that lather the Southeast, but it has not stated the problem clearly and accurately because of its lack of depth, poor reflection and little grounding in the relevant philosophical concepts required to govern Nigeria. What troubles the Southeast and Nigeria is not Mr. Kanu’s gloomy prediction of the country’s fate, nor his hate speech, as indefensible as it is, not yet IPOB’s amateurish and inflammatory approach to self-determination. To suggest irrationally that these are the problems at the core of Nigeria’s existential crisis is to connive at the president’s fulminations against Mr. Kanu and IPOB, as well as to supinely acquiesce to the silly ratiocination that stigmatises and stereotypes the Igbo but conversely and insidiously canonises the president’s ethnic preference.
It is doubtful whether President Buhari and his advisers can yet be persuaded to take a fresh and more dispassionate look at the problems of Nigeria, and to, as academics insist to every student they teach, learn the art and science of accurately identifying the variables at play in order to properly define a problem. If they can, they will need to be cajoled into recognising that Mr. Kanu is merely the inconsequential public face of a seething national problem, a problem that is dangerously simmering below the surface, waiting for eruption. Sadly, the president has dismissively characterised restructuring as a needless campaign that is best handled by the National Assembly and the National Council of State. He refuses to admit openly that passing the buck to the two bodies was his own way of indicating the extent of his contempt for both the concept and the campaign that energises it. No one in his team has looked him in the face to tell him that his views on those salient issues are anachronistic. But they must find the pluckiness to do it.
The issues are, in fact, not as mysterious as the president makes them. Restructuring, like the Igbo self-determination campaigns, predates President Buhari’s government and indicates long-running unease with the untenable political and economic structures that stymie productivity, creativity and stability in Nigeria. Despite the president’s frequent restatement of the fallacy that Nigeria operates a federal structure and is united beyond any fresh negotiations, few doubt that the reigning political structure is a unitary system fuelled and riveted by crude oil wealth. Worsening the debate about restructuring is the president’s own lack of savvy in advocating measures to calm feelings of alienation and exclusion. He has assembled a security and paramilitary team that is sectional and religiously coloured, and has also surrounded himself with advisers that are defined by their groupthink and admit of no devil’s advocate. Worse, he has damned complaints and threatened fire and brimstone against agitators responding fretfully and sometimes desultorily to his temperamental approach to security and governance. Apart from the problem of restructuring, the fact on the ground is that President Buhari is not running an inclusive and national government. Why is he, therefore, shocked that the Southeast — despite the advantages they supposedly received from the Goodluck Jonathan government — is up in arms against his insular style of governance?
In 1966, faced with the crises that followed that year’s January coup and the July counter-coup, the Yakubu Gowon government split the regions into 12 states to take the wind out of the secessionist sail. It was too little too late, but it helped diffuse the reaction to the crises and weaken the opposition to the war efforts. More than five decades later, and faced with an even more potentially destructive crisis, the Buhari presidency has become indefensibly and unwisely inured to the advantages of restructuring a country that is no longer tenably run along unitary lines.
The president has paranoiacally focused on Mr. Kanu and IPOB without correspondingly feeling unnerved by his close circle of advisers’ political and cultural shibboleths. He is strangely unaffected by the fact that all the measures he has propounded since he returned from medical care abroad have fallen in line principally with the prevailing views from the North. He has not attempted to even pause, let alone ponder, whether there are no other ways of resolving a crisis that is threatening to expand beyond control and consume the whole country. He is not anxious to examine whether more scientific and diplomatic means cannot be found to dissipate the crisis. He has not even convened a genuine meeting of south-eastern leaders and their Young Turks to brainstorm over the problems convulsing the Southeast. At least his compatriot, the late ex-president Umaru Yar’Adua, heeded wise counsel and parlayed with Niger Delta militants to find a lasting solution to the oil region’s crisis.
What seems to drive President Buhari’s inflexible approach to the Southeast ferment is that he is persuaded by the stereotypes relentlessly drummed into his ears by his narrow circle of advisers and unrepresentative security chiefs. Somehow, they have formed the belief that the Igbo are impulsive, irrational, coarse, troublesome, clannish and aggressively determined to take over the country’s leadership, as exampled by the 1966 coup, to the exclusion of others. There may be some elements of truth in these observations, but is there any ethnic group, including the Hausa/Fulani and the Yoruba, which does not have its own long list of stereotypes? Is there a perfect ethnic group anywhere in the world? Should a brilliant leader not concern himself with finding ways to moderate and mediate the frictions that some of these stereotypes, assuming they are well founded, conjure?
The Yoruba are denigrated as professional agitators, wily, materialistic and snobbish. They drive other ethnic groups up the wall with their superior airs. After enduring years of contemptuous treatment from the rest of Nigeria shortly before independence, the Hausa/Fulani are dismissed as lazy, neo-colonially minded, uncivilised, fanatical and obsessed with ruling Nigeria as a guarantee of their safety and well-being. Indeed, there is no ethnic group without its own stereotypes, whether true or misleading. It is unhelpful to focus on these so-called stereotypes in determining how to relate with one another. This is why it is urgent to restructure the country in such a manner that no group will feel threatened, discriminated against, or fearful of being dispossessed. Surely, Nigeria can find leaders who can engage themselves cerebrally to find a workable structure.
Apparently, President Buhari is either too steeped in the ways and habits of the past or secretly harbours too many prejudices and unhelpful leadership idiosyncrasies to be of any help in this matter. Rather than engage the agitators, and forgetting that he kept virtually aloof over more vicious herdsmen terrorism, he feels the constitution — the same constitution he has violated serially — enjoins him, indeed makes it obligatory, to deal ferociously with any agitator. As a result, he has ordered a military crackdown in the Southeast to be executed by the same military battling image problems in the Northeast and elsewhere. Of course, almost immediately, using various pretexts, and egged on by strident voices from the North, soldiers vengefully swooped on the Southeast to inflict brutality upon friends and foes alike. Even harmless journalists were not spared. Yes, IPOB doubtless menaced the public and endangered the polity, but the military descended on the region with a mindset that showed contempt for both the constitution and the people. They seemed to corroborate all that Amnesty International had repeatedly said about their brutal style and total disregard for the rights and liberties of innocent citizens.
Worse, it is indeed strange that the same North that fought bravely but unconscionably to prevent both the Nigerian government and the United States from declaring Boko Haram a terrorist organisation between 2009 and 2013, despite intensive campaigns by rights groups and the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), eagerly advocated for IPOB to be declared a terrorist organisation in a matter of months. That declaration, which did not witness debates between the various organs of the Nigerian presidency, nor followed the Terrorism Act, 2011 (As amended), was then strangely and unconstitutionally assigned by faceless officials to the military to announce to the public. Southeast governors, perhaps influenced by the fiery but superficial oratory of Governor Rochas Okorocha weeks ago, have cottoned on to the declaration and hastily proscribed IPOB. What that will achieve is not clear. It is obvious that both the federal government and the governors have foreclosed any sensible, peaceful and structural resolution of the deep and underlying problems dislocating the Southeast and other geopolitical zones. How they hope strong-arm tactics would extirpate the political and economic viruses predisposing the Southeast to agitation is hard to understand.
The Southeast governors who should know where the shoe is pinching their people have an obligation to champion a more scientific approach of identifying the factors causing the crisis. Only then can they attempt to coax the unyielding Buhari presidency into embracing lasting and perhaps permanent solution. Instead they have unwisely surrendered to Abuja’s unreflective and misplaced efforts. Their measures will not work, and will not last. The problem, inexpertly and misguidedly centred on Mr. Kanu and IPOB, despite both being merely the symptomatic manifestations of deeper, structural and more fundamental problems, may temporarily yield to force. But eventually, the volcano will erupt. It always does, regardless of the leadership’s lack of imagination and innovation. The public danger may indeed be very dire and urgent, but it is incredible that soldiers deployed in the Southeast last week found a pretext for the kind of brutality and abuse they executed not only in that region but also in the Northeast during the Boko Haram campaigns.
