Idowu Akinlotan
IT must weigh heavily on the minds of Nigerians that of all the responses to the gravest existential crisis Nigeria has probably ever faced, President Muhammadu Buhari and his combative spokesmen think it is a question of style that no constant stream of words or statements are coming from the number one citizen. The country should be debating the actual responses of the president, whether they are meaningful enough, whether he is moving from one related issue to another quickly enough, whether he is answering questions with empathy, competence or indifference, and whether his aides, whom he has saddled with certain responsibilities relating to the mitigation of the coronavirus infection in Nigeria, are marching briskly with him. With thousands dying daily from the disease, it is understandable if Nigerians, who are not spared the horrifying savagery of the disease, worry about what their president is saying or, in this case, not saying.
The debate should never be about whether the president has the liberty to choose to be reticent in the face of a worsening national crisis, or whether his spokesmen are characteristically uncivil in their refutation of the people’s allegations. The debate should be about the virus, its relentless march, and the quality of options embraced by responders. The president’s options are limited, direly limited, regardless of the state of his health or whether given his age and health challenges he is in fact susceptible to the disease. He is expected to lead in order for the country to follow, not by delegating powers and responsibilities alone or even by precepts, but almost entirely by example and by getting his hands dirty. If he cannot, he owes the nation an explanation, not mournful and unbroken silence.
As this piece was being written, nearly 90 Nigerians were estimated to have been infected by a virus scientists claim has merely mutated and recrudesced. There is fear that the number of infection could rise much further and faster than previously thought, perhaps to thousands and thousands. It is that fear that they need their president to speak to, for him to marshal voluminous and appropriate responses and arguments. Nigerians note that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has announced a welter of economic measures and palliatives to tackle the fallout of the coronavirus crisis, and even though the measures are in some respects substantial and expected, the people are uncomfortable with their ad hocism, not to say the lack of parliamentary debates to fine-tune them and give them impetus. Nigerians also note that a presidential task force on the crisis engendered by the virus has been set under the leadership of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF). But they question the appropriateness of that assignment, regardless of the competence and personal qualities of the SGF. They acknowledge that the committee has put a number of salutary measures in place and spoken somewhat ably to the situation. But they see that there is no coordination among all the groups responding to the crisis, nor do the CBN and the task force have the overarching authority to marshal the responses of the 36 states into a unified and coherent whole.
No matter what the president thinks or his spokesmen say, his lack of impactful and visible presence not only stymies the fight against the virus, it has also created multiple vacuums which many incompetent state governments are childishly and amateurishly rushing to fill. The cohesive responses which the president should naturally inspire, particularly with him leading from the front, is noticeably absent. Some states are on lockdown without any sensible indication of when the measure would be lifted. Some states are on a partial shutdown, but even these are tempted by the drama and showiness of total lockdown to enact that same extreme policy. Few have bothered to look at the structure of the Nigerian economy: whether like China it can sustain a lockdown on the scale some state governments in Nigeria have envisaged, or whether like the United States and many European countries they have the database that would guide the distribution of reliefs. Even the federal government is mulling over a total lockdown. Paramount to the proponents of a lockdown are the fear of the damage the virus could cause to life, as Italy and Spain are experiencing, and its potential to quickly overwhelm and crash the country’s abysmally poor and underdeveloped healthcare system.
Nigerians need their president to aggregate and chart a direction out of the multiplicity of responses to the plague, particularly if it comes to a lockdown. They need him to think for the country in terms of the calibrated responses Nigeria’s fragile economy can cope with without triggering an unmanageable uprising or recession. But the future has caught up with Nigeria, a country that has consistently elected poor leaders into office. Sadly, there is nothing to indicate, given the country’s poor leadership recruitment process, that parochial and pedestrian considerations would still not guide the election of future leaders. The people have been responsible for electing wrong representatives into office, and have done so joyously and repeatedly. Now they must be wondering why those leaders are either absent in times of trouble, and are rationalising that absence. If the president finally stirs himself, assuming that possibility theoretically exists, there is no proof that his interventions would be both appropriate and adequate. Nigeria’s existential crisis is undoubtedly set to be compounded.
How on earth could the government indefinitely postpone their weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting? And with that postponement, which group of persons or which person would take decisions on behalf of the government? How could they intentionally create a vacuum and hope that a task force or a minister or a monetary agency would fill the brutal gap? These questions are not provocative. Nigerians are victims of a disturbing dereliction of duty by the government. Not only should the FEC still continue meeting, even if it kills them, the parliament should also sometimes sit to periodically review the effectiveness of the laws or motions passed to guide the country’s war against the virus as well as inspire an anxious people and constantly speak to the grave situation wasting the land.
Years ago, this column took exception to Nigeria’s governing structure, warning that the president had difficulties in propounding a modern or comprehensive vision of what the Nigerian legislature and judiciary should look like, not to talk of how to mould the executive branch into driving the march into the future. The column also belaboured the presidency for assembling a coterie of aides that seemed eager to act conspiratorially all the time and preferred to dedicate themselves to parochial interests instead of helping the president coax a vision for the future out of Nigeria’s disparate and sometimes competing cultures and religions. Should he fail, and the column was pessimistic, it would unleash a disaster upon the country, stifle progress and engender hopelessness. The column also warned that it was not right for the president to determine that he was centring his entire administration on one man, as he glibly announced at the inauguration of his second term. The warnings went unheeded, with the president sticking fast to his old ways and structures.
The sickness and evacuation of Abba Kyari, who is widely regarded as the fulcrum of the president’s office, has exposed the Buhari presidency as a fragile set up, indicating that it was neither structured nor designed to aggregate the modernising forces and influences indispensable to the development of Nigeria and the forging of a great nation. Indeed, it is because everything rotated around the office of the Chief of Staff to the president that Mallam Kyari could not afford the sensible 14 days self-isolation his travels to high-risk coronavirus countries required. No one knows why he felt immune to the disease. But with his temporary exit, everything in the presidency has teetered very badly and finding direction seems problematic. Even the president, assuming he is still as fit as a fiddle as his spokesmen say, has seemed lost. The short clip he was said to have made on the response of his government to the virus does no credit to his person or government.
If both the president and Mallam Kyari regain their composure, is there any hope that the presidency would soon return reinvigorated and restructured? No one is sure. The president’s style, as rationalised by his spokesmen, is deeply idiosyncratic. It is unlikely to change. He will not surround himself with confident, outspoken and impassioned men, and he will not see opening up his government to all parts of the country as a sign of strength. Some leaders have a fanatical zeal to seek out wise and promising minds from all walks of life. President Buhari’s conservatism bars him from any such adventurism, preferring to surround himself with aides with whom he feels safe and unflustered. Theoretically, he has the liberty to select his team, as long as no laws are broken. But when a crisis like the one engendered by coronavirus strikes, the fault lines of his presidency and the weakness and controversiality of his ideas come out in bold relief.
Supporters of President Buhari and his spokesmen may not agree, but if the president had wise men around him and listened to them, it is unlikely that when the virus began its rampage the government would not have been prevailed upon to quickly ramp up its response. In the circumstance, the government’s response was unnaturally slow and exasperating. Nigeria had a head start of more than two or three weeks. There should have been a partial shutdown of the country as early as end of January or early February, and the country’s border controls and medical response to the virus should have been prepared far in advance. Alas, disaster still struck, with some rumour mongers unkindly suggesting that the airports remained opened far longer than required because the president considered his private interest.
It is not certain who will announce a lockdown first, the federal government or the states. Lagos has led the way and the fight against the virus, but it has not recorded any deaths despite having the highest number of infected people. Some states are fortunate not to record even one infected case. That luck will not hold up for much longer if a lockdown is not executed. Some states have, however, panicked themselves into a hasty lockdown without considering the feasibility, seeing that most workers in their states are self-employed and depend on daily income without any help from the government. Lagos has been sensibly reluctant to do a lockdown or curfew, but has nevertheless rolled out palliatives to mitigate the effect of a partial shutdown. Though it is worst hit, it has tended to function like a thinking government from which others, including the federal government, should borrow a leaf. It is restrained, probably debates its measures, recognises the potential of a hungry and immobilised populace, understands that it is the nation’s commercial capital, and is wary of the economic and social consequences of shutting down its factories and banks. Indeed, other than its civil service, most of its other measures have been very restrained and calibrated for the short term.
It is an irony that Lagos has addressed the crisis like the federal government should, and the federal government has addressed the crisis like a local government might. Information minister Lai Mohammed has spoken glibly of a lockdown; it is hoped that the federal government would meet, debate the measure, agree on palliatives and how to get them to the needy, and determine how long in the first instance the proposed lockdown would last. They must calculate the cost to the economy, recognise the people’s congested living conditions, and gauge exactly what measures they hope to execute during a lockdown. The term may seem appealing, especially seeing how some countries have executed it and profited from it; but it is actually a desperate measure which serious economies are wary of embracing. China’s production engines continued to rev even during their regional lockdowns. Given their surging economic might, they didn’t have a choice but to think expansively beyond the significance of the measure. Locking down Nigeria, without first knowing what to do with it, may trigger consequences the government might be unable to manage.
Lagos has not yet mastered the science of distributing palliatives. And despite being at the forefront of the war against coronavirus, it has been hesitant to declare a total lockdown. It recognises the need to first study the mobility of the vectors of the virus, how they came through land borders, airports or seaports. The airports and land borders have been shut, but a few of the latest cases reportedly came through the seaports. The state knows it must clarify the measures it has put in place, in the face of federal negligence and initial slothfulness, to immobilise those carriers? If the state cannot stanch the flow of these vectors, and a lockdown becomes inevitable and probably desirable, then it understands that it must find ways of reaching the poor, who are probably more than the 200,000 households it said qualified for relief. The poor will not stay locked up to starve without a struggle. They will revolt, if not immediately, then a little later. These issues must be anticipated, addressed and resolved before a lockdown is ordered. A shutdown or lockdown is not a fanciful measure to be talked about flippantly or embraced casually, regardless of the apocalyptic figures of infections and deaths. A cost-benefit analysis is imperative.
Hopefully too, the federal government does not imagine that it has no responsibility to poor Nigerians caught up in a lockdown. It has, in fact, far more responsibility than states. If the president and his chief of staff are not visibly available to lead the war, and the vice president has been left castrated, those who still have some leverage in the federal government should think like patriots and promote someone they can trust to think for the country and lead the war. The lethargy at the centre is a disservice to Nigeria and an insult that ridicules and lowers Nigeria in the eyes of the world. The war is too grave to be left to the childish discretion of some state governments and the uncoordinated responses of some members of the Buhari cabinet. Indeed, no one can deny that Nigerians feel a sense of emptiness in the fight against the disease. They yearn for a commander, a charismatic one to inspire and give them hope.
The US president Donald Trump is assiduously leading the war for his country, exampled by his unending press conferences. Britain’s Boris Johnson has unfortunately caught the virus in his intrepid actions and movements around the country to defeat the virus. Britons won’t forget that he led from the front. Many other presidents are enduring sleepless nights in their feverish effort to defeat the menace, even as legislators in some countries are coming down with the disease. It is cruel and standoffish to talk of presidential style in the face of the mortal threat Nigeria faces.
