On August 27, The Financial Times of London (FT) published a story on the impending meeting between United States president Donald Trump and Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta. It was a fairly upbeat story describing the optimism of those the paper spoke with regarding a meeting they hoped would define Mr Trump’s perception of relationship with Kenya in particular and Africa in general. But the story contained what seemed like a cursory sentence, albeit unquoted, that summarised the US president’s view of the Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari who visited earlier on April 30. According to the writers of the story, Katrina Manson and David Pilling, Mr Trump was so dismayed by the Nigerian president’s political and bodily posture that he swore beneath his breath never again to meet someone so lifeless. The story then hoped Mr Kenyatta, when he visited, would represent Africa well and help change the impression Mr Trump had of African leaders, if not the continent entirely.
The story resonated well with opponents of President Buhari, a politician they hope they could either persuade not to run for a second term — a forlorn hope if ever there was any — or dethrone should he choose to throw his hat into the ring. For the first time in many years, the president’s spokesmen were unsure how to respond or if there was any need to respond at all. Femi Adesina, one of the two spokesmen, said he had no comment; and Garba Shehu, the second spokesman, said the presidency would not react to such a comment. It was left to the presidency’s social media warriors to excoriate Mr Trump, describing him as an execrable character unfit to make any honest or valuable character assessment about anybody, let alone about the more morally upright and honourable Mr Buhari.
Surprisingly, most of those who read the story or wrote commentaries on it assumed that Mr Trump was largely talking about the president’s fitness and health status. This is a terrible misinterpretation. President Buhari may not be as sprightly or gregarious as the feisty Mr Trump, but both of them are over 70 years of age, and the US president appears to be acutely aware that age imposes certain limitations on individuals, especially those in high office. Those who watched the live broadcast of the joint Buhari-Trump press conference on Al Jazeera could not but be struck by the realisation that the Nigerian president hugely underperformed. Mr Trump was therefore probably referring to the impression he formed of President Buhari from the private and public (press conference) meetings they held. The US president himself relies on bluster to wade through his press conferences both within and outside the US, in part to cover his failings and low intellectual endowments. He would be shocked to notice that his visitor had neither of the accoutrements that had enabled him to present a manageable and sometimes exultant facade before the American people.
A day or two before the Buhari-Trump engagement, expectations were high — some of these expressed in Nigerian and foreign periodicals — that President Buhari would respond appropriately and adequately to Mr Trumps derogatory remarks about black people and Africa; and that he would make the continent proud. He disappointed everybody, including Americans themselves, many of whom, especially their reporters, find their president repulsive and intolerable. Indeed, a reporter pointedly asked how the Nigerian president would react to Mr Trump’s description of Nigeria and some other African countries as shitholes. President Buhari prevaricated and then incomprehensibly suggested that the American president might have been misunderstood. It was obvious throughout the press conference that the interviewees and the interviewers struggled through what turned out to be an excessively boring press conference.
It is fair to say that President Buhari played safe throughout the press conference, saying nothing to upset his host, and refusing to stand up either for himself, his country, or his beliefs. He was safe, but he was not inspiring, nor bold, nor courageous, especially in view of the plenitude of issues he ought to have addressed publicly. Yes, he was not articulate, and will never be, but had he made up for such shortcomings with a display of untrammelled logic and ferocious patriotic and pan-Africanist ideals, he would have given the public a glimpse of his depth, not to say perhaps the recondite issues he raised with the US president in their private meeting. On several occasions, Mr Trump, who is himself not a man of profundity or logic, and who is often contemptuous of weak rivals, helped President Buhari to complete his thoughts and save him from embarrassment in the eyes of the world. The Nigerian president’s weaknesses were too glaring, and Mr Trump groaned beside him in pain and discomfort. When President Buhari’s aides returned to Nigeria and wrote glowing tributes to the performance of their boss, it was clear they hypocritically drew the wrong lessons from the visit and the press conference.
The FT did not set out to humiliate the Nigerian president by paraphrasing President Trump’s disapproval of his performance during the US visit. The paper merely tried to juxtapose the Nigerian president’s visit with the hopes about President Kenyatta’s visit. They anticipated that the Kenyan leader would learn from the failings of the Nigerian leader, and more importantly recognise that he needed to stand up for Africa and represent the continent well, especially before the impatient and scurrilous American president. And by publishing the impression Mr Trump had of President Buhari, both the reporters and the American president’s aides indicated that everyone knew that the Nigerian president did not quite hold his own during his US visit. Nigerians also know their president very well. If the misinterpretation of the statement by Mr Trump is removed from the equation, it would be clear that the US president was referring not to President Buhari’s poor health status, but his lack of ideas, incomparable disinterestedness in things, and intellectual sparseness.
It did not take all of the more than three years President Buhari has spent in office for Nigerians themselves to conclude that nothing profound on any topic, not even on the anti-corruption fight or on the battle against insecurity, would come from their president. They didn’t need Mr Trump to remind them that nothing deep and transcendental would come from Aso Villa under President Buhari. They have realised that he has frighteningly stunted ideas about democracy, rule of law, and indeed poor vision of where Nigeria should be in the next few decades and more. They dispute the accusation that they bought a pig in poke in 2015, insisting that they had hoped that on the four or so cardinal issues the president promised during the campaigns, he had a passable understanding of their wider ramifications and consequences upon the polity. Now they are not so sure anymore.
It has perhaps taken Mr Trump to succinctly describe President Buhari’s failings — for whether Nigerians like it or not, leaders have the capacity to do adequate and fairly accurate peer review when they want to. Sadly, no one will confirm whether Mr Trump actually made that statement or not. In fact, asked whether the statement was true or not, American ambassadorial staff in Nigeria had urged reporters to redirect their questions to the FT reporters. Of course the FT reporters will stand by their story, and it is not clear anyway whether any Nigerian honestly disbelieved the Trumpian conclusion about President Buhari. And, to add to the misery, no one can ask Mr Trump whether he said what was attributed to him. He would ignore the question, for he is an unorthodox man, unfettered by diplomatese, logic, truth and empathy. President Buhari had one golden chance last April to win the confidence of the American president in order to gain certain advantages for Nigeria and make the continent proud. He flunked the test.
It is pointless debating the veracity of the statement attributed to the US president. It also does not seem appropriate to ask President Buhari’s aides to imbue their principal with the lofty ideals and ideas the country had hoped to see in him when they elected him. At his age and given his background, that exercise will end up barren. What is most appropriate is to find ways of managing him before next year’s election, and to determine subsequently whether vis-a-vis other candidates in the coming presidential poll he should be managed for four more years or asked to take a deserved rest.
