LAST Monday, President Muhammadu Buhari finally began visiting troubled states that have become emblems of Nigeria’s bloodletting between frustrated farmers and host communities on the one hand, and rampaging herdsmen on the other hand. Taraba State was first on his itinerary, and what an emblematic first it was, both in terms of the spatial restriction of the visit and the peep it offered into the president’s earnest feelings about the people and the attacks and killings they have had to endure. It was a relief that he finally visited, but it was a relief tempered by the inscrutable and, in some sense, controversial remarks he made on the occasion. If his minders and aides do not coax him into far more empathetic remarks and deeper appreciation of the cultural sensibilities of his hosts, particularly victims of senseless attacks, the country should expect him to make far more revelatory, inappropriate and politically damaging remarks during his next set of ‘condolence’ visits.
In Taraba State, where he curiously limited himself to interacting with polite stakeholders in Jalingo, the state capital, the president offered a reason for choosing the state as his first port of call. “There were more killings in Mambilla than Benue and Zamfara states,” he said touchily, perhaps aware that he needed to justify the sequence of his visits, but unaware that the tragedy is not just about statistics. “I chose to visit Taraba first, but I will be going to Benue and Zamfara after I return from Ghana to also condole with the people,” he added. It is not clear why inevitably he had to speak of Mambilla — where last year according to the Fulani more than 700 of their kinsmen were killed, but according to the state government about 23 died — interchangeably with Taraba while ranking casualty figures to justify the order of his itinerary. For many weeks, as every newspaper reader knows, there were unending controversies over the number of people killed in Mambilla, Sardauna Local Government, viz-a-viz those killed in other settlements in the state, including Lau, Ibi, Gassol and other areas. By singling out Mabilla for mention, instead of speaking of Taraba as a whole, the president unfortunately stoked suspicion about his ethnic preferences.
Since Taraba was the first troubled state he would visit, after many months of resisting pressures from commentators, stakeholders and victims of herdsmen attacks who decried his aloofness, the president also felt compelled to explain why he dithered for so long. “As a President,” he argued strangely, “I have sources of getting intelligence on happenings across the country, and so I should not be expected to always go out to the field to make noise and insult the sensibility of Nigerians before it would be known that I am taking actions against the killings.” Why he would construe visiting trouble spots and empathising with victims as making noise is hard to fathom. There is no explanation to justify this worldview. But even if he had visited the killing fields and sounded off insincerely, could that be interpreted as insulting the people?
It is abundantly clear that the president labours under many illusions. First, whether he accepts it or not, it is his responsibility to visit his countrymen who grieve, especially when they are victims of horrendous and planned attacks, be they farmers or herdsmen. When communal crisis is destabilising parts of the country, it becomes the responsibility of the president to pay attention and get a move on. What he does on those visits — whether noise, as he said testily, or insulting sensibility, as he imagines — is entirely up to him, and would in large part reflect the wisdom he possesses, the breadth of his appreciation of issues, and the quality of advice he receives. The president probably does not trust himself or his worldview. But he has state resources to employ brilliant aides in whom can be found “the wisdom of the gods”.
If the president’s aides prepared him for the Taraba visit, it neither showed in his remarks nor in his natural and extemporaneous self. His aides should not flatter him that his Taraba outing was stellar. It was absolutely not. He reeled from one gaffe to another, and from one Freudian slip to another. Nigerians have long feared that the president has surrounded himself with advisers and aides who adhere rigidly to a tunnel vision of national issues, a vision coloured by tribe and religion. Every time commentators worry that the president’s perspective is insular, and his appointments are narrow, he had responded by pointing out, as Vice President Yemi Osinbajo did a few days ago, that his appointments, especially of Cabinet rank, have been broad and breathtaking. But the key question is whether those intellectuals and wise aides frequently engage in meeting of the minds with him.
After failing to visit the killing fields for so long, the president had a responsibility to ensure that his outing was impeccable, a paragon of intellectual and polemical finesse, demonstrating astuteness about the deeper issues of tribe, religion and development that cannot be gainsaid. By any reckoning, both by his remarks and by limiting his visit to the state capital, President Buhari’s visit was fruitless and even seemed coerced. After all, according to him, he had a way of knowing what was happening around the country without stepping out of the villa. But perhaps the president should be reminded that the reason for such visits is not to gather intelligence but to demonstrate, in physical and practical terms, to the people he leads that he cares about them, their sufferings and their grief.
If his visit to the more combustible Benue State is not to miscarry very badly or peter out into fatuity like Taraba’s, his aides need to do a better job of preparing him for his next set of visits and arming him with facts and figures. They may not be able to exorcise his tribal instincts, which have apparently metastasised, but they can lean on him sufficiently to arouse his human feelings, help him understand the issues involved, compel him to make a major policy statement about the source of the troubles endangering and shaming the country, and hope that the public offended by his hidden prejudices can at least find the resilience and good grace to tolerate his mindset. So far, as the Taraba visit embarrassingly demonstrated again, the president has restricted himself to sermonising over the herdsmen/farmers clashes. Aware that more sensible arguments have rubbished the so-called environmental/climate reason for migratory grazing, but still unmoved by those arguments, the president has been unable to repeat the jaded explanation so callously and enthusiastically expressed by the Defence minister about the dangers of constricted and disappearing grazing routes.
When distraught Benue State leaders sought audience with him in Abuja after the New Year’s Day massacre, the president preached to them about tolerating and coexisting with their Fulani neighbours. That sermon attracted derision from all over the country. In Taraba, the president again resorted to sermonising in place of demonstrating firmness and fairness, and in place of a great policy statement. Said he, in part to traditional rulers among his audience: “Governor Darius Ishaku and I are here temporarily. We will go at the end of our tenure, but you are permanent with the people at the grassroots. So, I charge you to go back and find ways of resolving the crises in your domains. Go and give your people justice for peace to reign. When I was campaigning, I came here and promised to provide security, boost the economy and fight corruption. Today, even our worst enemy can attest to the fact that the APC-led Federal Government has done well in the area of security. We have decimated Boko Haram, while the fight against corruption is going on well. I can only appeal to the conscience of the people for them to embrace peace and live with one another in harmony so that there could be development and not destruction.”
There was nothing in the president’s remarks that showed he recognised that the grieving and frustrated people of Taraba State were waiting for their president to show the way and come up with a solution, no matter how tentative. If they were worried that he had none, they were too polite to voice those concerns during the meeting. It is perhaps too early to prejudge how the other visits would go, or whether the visits have not in fact become political campaign feelers; but if the futile Taraba outing is a good barometer, then it is unlikely any solution to the bloodbath in the country can come from the All Progressives Congress-led federal government. The president beats his chest about how successfully his government had reined in insecurity. He is partly right. Boko Haram has been degraded; but in its place has arisen a hydra-headed monster consuming Nigerians and ravaging the society. Against this, the government has had no answer nor even the will to try something new, something revolutionary.
If the president’s visit to Benue starting from tomorrow does not show a clear departure from the Taraba outing, many commentators will confirm their worst fears, that the president is neither abreast of the deeper issues of nationhood and statecraft, nor is he extemporaneously agile enough to hold his own in debates, not to talk of firing endearing presidential ripostes in the heat of verbal or polemical challenges. In early 2015, when presidential debates were being organised, the APC strenuously averted disaster by excusing their candidate from the fierce exchanges that hallmarked the exercise. After all, in 1999 ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo avoided matching wits with his more intellectual and eloquent opponent, Olu Falae, a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF); and ex-president Goodluck Jonathan in 2011 shunned the debates, afraid he would be worsted by Nuhu Ribadu and other more gifted polemicists. If the then Candidate Buhari escaped the furnace in 2015, it was in character. But Nigerians are so angry and frustrated now that it is hard to see most of the country’s geopolitical zones voting for any candidate who avoids the coming presidential debates or performs badly in them. The clashes laying the country waste are not insoluble. Nor have the issues in dispute become so esoteric as to be inscrutable. What the country needs is a president with the presence of mind to wade through the wasteland and esoterica to deliver on the great promises of a beautiful and stable Nigeria.
