By Idowu Akinlotan
Late last month, the All Progressives Congress (APC) marked six chequered years in office without fanfare. Three months earlier, the party also marked eight years in existence as a political party. Fittingly, no celebration was attempted on both occasions. The suspicion is that both anniversaries would have been celebrated had the party felt confident about its achievements. Instead, it retreated into its shell and brought a rabbit out of the hat in President Muhammadu Buhari’s bombshell television interview and Democracy Day address. The party was barely two years old when it took office in 2015, an unprecedented feat for a political toddler. And in the face of steep opposition, it also won re-election four years later. These are milestones deserving of celebration for an eight-year-old party.
Sadly, the precociousness that brought the party into office and the political genius and chutzpah that saw it aspiring to national leadership at two years of age and winning presidential election and re-election with such daring and adeptness have been woefully inadequate in helping it to responsibly manage the enormous power at its disposal. Every challenge it faced – from insurgency to banditry and kidnapping, and from economic crisis to EndSARS protest, not to talk of the Southeast and Southwest self-determination/secession conundrums – has been met with incompetence, clumsiness, ideological vacuity and dismal lack of foresight and surefootedness on its part.
The party is supposed to be the most ideological in Nigeria, if not in Africa, going by its claims and posturing. But it has ended up as an organization destitute of ideology. Its only claim to principles has been its sometimes practical but nevertheless ad hoc approach to governance. If it makes sense, regardless of lacking consistency with its manifesto, it will promote it. Beyond that, the party has simply trudged along, groping its way into an uncertain future, hesitant about what kind of legacy it should envision for itself or bequeath the country. The public naturally presumed ideological purity for the party, believing without evidence that the party’s extravagant claims had indemnified them against being duped. They also hoped that the party’s ambitions would be escalated into grander ambitions for the country. Instead, the party has collapsed into internecine conflicts and disseminated barbarous antagonisms across the country, corrupting and weakening every sinew, and poisoning the lifeblood and muscles that sustain the nation.
A celebration would have enabled the APC to renew their contract with the electorate, sell their ideas of how to recreate the country from the ashes of despair and discontent, and instill hope in a greater and inspiring tomorrow. But if the party could not celebrate because it is also facing its own despairing identity crisis and brutal internal struggle for control of both the levers of the party and its soul, then perhaps the president would want to roll out the drums as a modest celebration of his own success in personifying the resilience of a country that stands strong in the face of daunting crises.
However, as the president’s Arise Television interview showed last Thursday, his grasp of the existential crises facing the nation remains rudimentary, his snide remarks about who dictates what to the party inflict wounds on loyal party hierarchs, and his panaceas for reclaiming the country from mediocrity remain exasperatingly simplistic. Every leader needs a deep mind that can call to deep, a mind labyrinthine in its reach and network, a mind capable of grasping the complexities of national challenges as well as proffering answers and solutions that are no less complex and visionary than the problems are entangled. That kind of mind is, however, lacking.
From all indications, there are no guarantees that the APC would glide into the future stronger than it has shown the capacity to do, despite the president’s exultation last Thursday over the so-called rebuilding of the party, a rebuilding that now appears to be emptying the party of its soul, weakening its hope, and damaging its resolve. In fact the danger for him, much more than his party, is that he may end up being reviled in the Southeast – but he probably does not care – dismissed and derided in the Southwest, disapproved in much of the Middle Belt, received with mixed feelings in the Northeast, and ignored in the Northwest. Both the president and his party have just two brutally short years to repair the damage to their image and persons. Whether they will make amends is not quite as clear as whether they can.
The president’s interviews and Democracy Day address sum up the entire body of his life’s work and person. That summation is not flattering. Contrary to what many people think, not only is it clear that the president is in far greater control of the policies and character of his government, he is also enthusiastic about them, and has openly shown he personifies them, despite his illness and seeming detachment. He speaks of democracy when everything he does wars against it, including his inability to read and appreciate the import of the EndSARS protests. On Friday, he belatedly decided to jaw-jaw with leaders of the Southeast, though he had spent the better part of his years in office undermining the influence and authority of APC leaders in various zones, including the Southwest, and even threatening them. Above all, he has boasted more attachment to Niger Republic and defended the extraordinary commitment of Nigerian resources to that country on the lamentable excuse of familial connections and unsubstantiated business advantages. And he has subscribed to and sanctioned an unconstitutional and unlawful return to grazing routes and reserves though the policies were never enacted nationally even in the First Republic that he extols as a paragon of law and order.
For some 16 years, the Peoples Democratic Party trifled with democratic principles and acted as if party leaders were both immutable and infallible. But despite their frivolity, they never substantially threatened democracy. On the contrary, partly because hawks and non-democrats accompanied the Buhari administration into office, it has taken only a few years for the administration and the APC to demolish democracy’s building blocks, enthrone regional and ethnic exceptionalism as the guiding principle of state, and displayed inestimable contempt for democrats, other ethnic groups, religions and civil society. In addition to their brinkmanship, they would have declared martial law in order to have a better grip of statecraft had they been sure they would not either come to grief or unite the opposition against themselves. The president said he hoped the APC would go on and on beyond 2023, and he believed that he and the party had done enough to elicit and sustain popular confidence. If only wishes were horses. Having turned Nigeria into a regimented people forced to goosestep behind him, having shortsightedly engrossed the Fulani worldview while displaying cavalier attitude to other nationalities, and having submerged Nigerians in debt to, in his argument, remedy the nation’s infrastructural deficit, it remains to be seen whether the people would place premium on their stomachs or on their freedoms, especially as neither goal is being placated by the president’s purposeless leap into the democratic and economic void which he has created and nurtured.
Worried by the seeming lethargy of the Buhari administration in addressing Nigeria’s worsening insecurity, the Committee for the Goodness of Nigeria (CGN) comprising the Interfaith Initiative for Peace led by Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar, and His Eminence, John Cardinal Onaiyekan; the Socio-cultural Consultative Committee led by ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo; and the National Peace Committee led by former military head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, met in Abuja on Thursday for hours. No communiqué was issued; but it was reported that they had sought audience with President Buhari. It is not certain whether they should bother, for the president’s mind is already made up on a number of critical national issues that unfortunately promote insecurity and instability.
The coalition must, however, not be discouraged from trying. They see the disaster looming in the horizon, which the Buhari administration, because of its nefarious motives, does not see. The president and his administration, including the hawkish advisers who cajole him to be inflexible and to eschew dialogue, will not yield an inch in mitigating the factors promoting insecurity in Nigeria, including the controversial grazing routes and reserves that hark back to the last century, and the restiveness in the Southeast which the administration is exacerbating by its insensitive, provocative and incendiary statements.
But the country must also remind Chief Obasanjo and Gen Abubakar that they were also partly responsible for the disaster overtaking the country. When Gen Abubakar foisted a secretly written constitution on the country, a constitution that brazenly lied to the public and to itself, what did he expect? When Chief Obasanjo cruelly undermined the then ruling party and manipulated his successors into office against the will of the people, why would he expect peace and progress? Having laid the foundation for disaster and thwarted the will of the people, it was natural that one day a monstrous government would take office and perpetrate atrocities. Now the former leaders are trying to quench the raging inferno with a spoonful of water. Tough luck.
Those who clamoured for President Muhammadu Buhari to address the nation on the wave of insecurity drowning the country are probably disillusioned by now. This column had warned that as foreboding as his silence was, it would be better for everyone should the president resist the temptation to speak. From experience, his silence was often more golden than his speeches. But should he surrender to the clamour, this writer painfully concluded, he would probably exacerbate the problem and cause more frustrations. Alas, the president gave in on Thursday by agreeing to be interviewed on Arise Television on wide-ranging issues affecting the country. Now that the people finally had their way, and have heard what he had to say, they would be left deeply mortified that the president again lost the opportunity to endear himself to the world and show himself a statesman.
The engaging simplicity of his answers seems to portray the president as reluctant to cause anyone grief. However, the answers do not hide the painful fact of his incapacity in addressing the country’s complex challenges with any degree of depth or altruism. The Arise TV anchors asked the right questions, even though follow-up questions seemed curiously stifled. The anchors were as aggressive in their questions to the extent politeness and respect for the president would allow, and they were generally eloquent and dispassionate. If questions alone could produce an enjoyable interview, the Arise TV anchors did enough to arrest the attention of the stupefied audience, most of whom did not know that an interview was in the offing.
Nigerians got the interview they craved; but the injury inflicted by the ancient disposition of the president, not to talk of his misconstruction of the questions, the evident lack of substance and depth in his answers, and the revelatory parochialism that many feared has greatly compromised his presidency manifested in vivid and gruesome colours on Thursday. If this interview does not cure the appetite of Nigerians for more presidential interviews, then they must be gluttons for punishment. There was hardly a question the Arise TV panel asked that was not appropriate; but there was no presidential answer that rose to the level of sublimity the public half expected. Since he assumed office, perhaps the president condescended to only three or four television interviews; for the sake of peace and order, there should be no more interviews for the next two years as the influence and relevance of this administration ebb away.
Consider these few questions and the presidential responses. Asked how he hoped to tackle worsening insecurity, the president passed the buck to the governors: “You were elected like me. Go back to your states and provide security. You can’t just go round, win elections and then sit down and expect others to help you with your work.” Dumbfounded? Well, wait for more. You had thought that given the relentless hemming and hawing of some presidency and government officials on the subject of open grazing the presidency had sensibly modified its position and finally aligned with modernity. How cruelly wrong you were. Said the president, and this is probably the final opinion of the Buhari administration on the subject: “Two Southwest Governors came to me to say cattle rearers were destroying farms in their states. I asked them what happened to the grassroots security panels from traditional rulers to local governments who meet regularly to identify the root of their problems and identify crooks within their environment and apprehend the criminals. Who destroyed this system? Go back and fix it, give your people sense of belonging. I don’t like it when people campaign to become governors and people trusted them with their votes, and after winning, they can’t perform, they’re trying to push responsibilities to others.”
It is not just that his answer was misplaced, nor that the buck passing was exasperating, it is also frightening that given how food production has been blighted in the past one or two years, not to talk of the appalling loss of lives all over the country caused by rampaging herdsmen, the president could still hold on to such outdated views of animal husbandry. The way he responded to the question, especially the threat to expropriate land for his favoured herders, most of them foreigners, it was clear that he had so much on his chest, so much rage – too much in fact that in the same breath, he betrayed his contempt and dislike for those who opposed his perspective. In addition, his views on insurgency, appointment of the Chief of Army Staff, operations of local governments, the EndSARS crisis, and the factors encouraging foreign investment were too simplistic and convoluted to give any hope that these problems would be resolved soon. They will not be resolved; the country can only hope they will not be worsened. The president will keep caressing them, because they are ulcers that won’t heal; but his efforts will be fruitless since his presidency is lacking in both quality advice and nationalistic perspective to understand and treat salient national issues with the astuteness and impartiality needed.
If the audience needed an answer that exemplified the shortcomings of the presidency in responding to grave national issues, they got one when the president bemoaned his inability to fight corruption as much as he would want because of the strictures of democracy. In other words, the most transparent and least corrupt countries in the world, which incidentally are democracies, are of no significance to the administration. Virtually all the responses of the president were nothing more than excuses to explain why simple issues could not be accurately interpreted, let alone understood, and why the government cannot be effective, despite all the constitutional tools given the administration to impact the society. The general sterility is suffocating. The interviewers must have been pained beyond endurance to see their thoughtful questions pulverized by a contrasting and debilitating lack of understanding from the president.
