Tag: Shehu

I have been with them throughout our trying terms; what then is the reward of such dedication and suffering? They did not defect because of positions; they did not involve themselves in the pursuit of personal gains, and they accepted their fate throughout our trying moments. President Buhari, BBC Hausa Program, Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Dear Mr. Garba Shehu:

Greetings! I confess that for the most part, I am directing this open letter to you rather opportunistically because it will attract more attention than if I had written it as a regular piece in this weekly column. But having said that, I should also state that I do have another reason in directing this piece of writing to you and this is the fact that I have found many of your press briefings on affairs in the Presidency very articulate. Indeed, this is such a strong element in my mind as I write this letter that I wish to inform you and the readers of this column that, rightly or wrongly, I have come to rely more on the things that you say about affairs in the Presidency than the things that Femi Adesina, Special Assistant to the President (Media and Publicity) says.

Of course, you do occupy a more senior position than Adesina in the Presidency, but this is not the reason why to me, the things that you say carry more weight than Adesina’s press briefings. After all, we all know that, sadly, in our country seniority does not always mean superiority of mind and morality; as a matter of fact, it unfortunately often means the exact opposite. The things you say carry more weight because where Adesina tends to stick to the more mundane and routine aspects of what is going on in the Presidency, you tend mostly to come on the scene on the big issues, the critical factors vital to the success of President Buhari and his administration. Moreover, more than Adesina, in your press and media briefings you seem to speak with an authoritativeness that indicates that you have the President’s ear, his full confidence. Indeed, to me the contrast between you and Adesina is like the contrast between Doyin Okupe and Reuben Abati when both men worked with and for Goodluck Jonathan: Okupe was blunt and literal-minded; Abati was suave and articulate even when, on a countless number of occasions, he was defending palpably indefensible actions and policies of his boss, Goodluck Jonathan

If you have read the book, All the President’s Men, by Ben Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal that was made into a highly commercially successful film bearing the same title as the book, you might think that the title of this open letter to you is intended to insinuate an allusion in the reader’s mind to that book and the film based on it. As we know, the Watergate scandal revealed a depth of abuse and corruption of power by Richard Nixon that was so monumental that it led to his downfall and that is what both the book and the film titled All the President’s Men is about.  I hastily and vigorously refute any intention in this piece to project onto President Buhari what Watergate meant for President Nixon – heavens forbid!  I wish the President well; and God knows that our country deserves a break after the disastrous reign of the PDP especially in its last stage under Goodluck Jonathan. So rather than a reprise of Nixon’s downfall for our current President, what I have in mind by invoking the phrase “all the President’s men” as the title of this piece can be highlighted by two outstanding features of President Buhari’s ministerial and non-ministerial appointments since he took office on May 29, 2015: first, overwhelmingly, most of his appointees have been men; second, also overwhelmingly, most of his appointees have been men who, in one way or another, have been loyal to him, particularly in the long years of what one could describe as time spent in the political wilderness after his overthrow as military ruler in 1985 through the twelve years from 2003 to 2015 when he ran for the presidency four times before finally succeeding in the most recent of these elections. It is in this sense and this sense only that in this piece, I talk of “all the President’s men”: few or no women at all; and men who have been with Buhari through thick and thin. In other words, a distinct gender bias and an equally distinct over-personalization of the power of incumbency with special regard to ministerial and non-ministerial appointments, these are the issues that I wish to discuss and reflect upon in this open letter to you, Mr. Shehu.

It is perhaps necessary for me to state that in focusing on these two particular issues, I am not unaware of other issues that have been raised and widely discussed with regard to President Buhari’s exercise of his power to make appointments for key positions in his administration. Indeed, about three to four issues have been very prominent, so much so that they have almost completely eclipsed the two issues that I have chosen to emphasize in this piece. These include the unprecedented delay in making his ministerial appointments; allegations of a palpable “Northern” bias in the non-ministerial appointments; a much publicized disinclination on the part of the President to make appointments from states or geopolitical zones that voted heavily against him in the presidential elections; and alleged intra-party squabbles within the ruling party, the APC, over which chieftains or ‘heavyweights’ were snubbed and which were ‘rewarded’ by the President in making his ministerial appointments. In shifting the focus in this piece away from this particular set of issues, I wish to give no indication whatsoever that they are not important. They are important and indeed, no administration, military or civilian, in the country’s political history has so far ever managed to escape allegations of being tainted by one or all of these charges in one form or another.

In drawing attention to this important fact of our political history, I do not wish to imply that all that can be said about this set of issues have been said and I have nothing more to add. No, I do have one or two things to add and I shall do so very briefly here, for whatever such additional commentary is worth. Thus, I must say to you and through you to the President that I was deeply surprised and disappointed that a few months ago, he, the President, openly and rather vehemently asked why anyone should expect him to look to states and regions that voted against him in dispensing presidential favors, either through appointments to public offices or the citing of federal projects. This was extremely far from a statesmanlike statement and moreover, it was politically very myopic for one would have thought that the President and his advisers would have realized that it is in the long-term interest of himself and the ruling party to enlarge their actual and potential electoral plurality by being large-hearted and non-punitive toward the states and zones that did not vote for Buhari and the APC in the recent electoral cycle. In this regard, the Southeast geopolitical zone constitutes a very special case. In line with this assertion, I ask: how in the world could a ruling party that claims to be truly progressive and forward looking adopt a stance of permanent adversarial opposition to the peoples and interests of one the three major power blocs in the country simply because in one electoral cycle this major geopolitical zone voted against the President?

In asking this question, Mr. Shehu, I wish to draw your attention to one intricate and easily overlooked aspect of that widely publicized statement of the President in which he asked how anyone could dare to contest his right to reward states and zones that voted for him while sticking it to those that did not vote for him. As reported in many newspapers, the President did not say states and zones that did not vote for his party, the APC; quite specifically, he said states and zones that did not vote for him. It would have been bad enough if in that statement he had based himself on the party; however, it is a thousand times worse that his displeasure, his angst, pertained exclusively and unambiguously to himself, Muhammadu Buhari.

In a slightly different but related register, this same over-personalization of the politics of governance was very, very strong in the explanation that the President gave for accusations of a Northern bias in his appointments to the major non-ministerial posts in his administration. For months, this particular accusation had been rife in the press and other media outlets, so much so that when an “explanation” of sorts came this week through an interview with the President on the BBC Hausa Service, it was something of a relief that he was at last responding to something that had bothered many Nigerians including some of his supporters. But what an explanation, what an explanation! Northern bias was not his motivation, the President said; the appointees were only incidentally Northern; more substantively and subliminally, these appointees were men who had stayed with him loyally through the long years when he walked and toiled in the political wilderness. The epigraph to this letter, Mr. Shehu, is a direct quote from the translated version of that interview on BBC Hausa Service program this past Tuesday.

I readily admit that at a certain level of basic human sentiments and emotions, the quote from that BBC interview that serves as the epigraph to this piece is very moving, very touching in the President’s rather simple and innocent belief that his listeners everywhere will readily agree that it is a right and honorable thing to acknowledge and reward friends and supporters who had been unwavering in their loyalty in the darkest periods of one man’s travails. But the Presidency is an institution; for far too long our country’s governance has been bedeviled by extreme over-personalization. For me as a member of the nation’s “commentariat”, I had thought that we had reached a pinnacle in this phenomenon of the extreme individualization of the institution of the presidency during the two terms of Olusegun Obasanjo. Now along comes Muhammadu Buhari with a variant of the same phenomenon that seems even more problematic that OBJ’s incarnation of power as an instrument, an extension of the self’s driving passions and desires. In next week’s continuation of the series, I will focus on the gendered and neo-feudal expressions of our current President’s version of the phenomenon. Don’t worry, Mr. Shehu, my critique will be constructive, though honest and bracing. I want the President to succeed for his success will in the end be more than a personal triumph; it will be a welcome break from the impasse, the political, economic and social calamities that now stalk the length and the breadth of the land.

• Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyfo@fas.harvard.edu