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What will be President Buhari’s
legacy?
THREE years from now, Muhammadu
Buhari will become Nigeria’s expresident.
He will most likely retire to his
ancestral home of Daura to live out the rest of
his life. At that stage, what will matter most is
the legacy he left behind for the unmerited
privileges the country bequeathed him. The
time to create those legacies is now. It will be
too late in 2023. Most of those who voted for
him in the 2015 presidential election did so
because they believed he was a man conscious
of legacy.
I was one of them. Former Managing
Director of Nigerian Breweries Limited, Eze
Festus Odimegwu, was also in that loop. In an
interview shortly after the 2015 polls,
Odimegwu said he believed in Buhari’s
personal example. "Buhari had been military
head of state. Some others who had occupied
the same position simply emptied the Central
Bank of Nigeria, CBN. But he did not. He had
headed the Nigerian National Petroleum
Corporation, NNPC, but he did not steal. He
had been military governor, he did not steal.
There is nothing as personal example.”
Besides, Odimegwu noted that: “Buhari
doesn’t talk much. He is a man of few words.
He is measured. But anything he says, he is
clear. He doesn’t talk from two sides of the
mouth. That clarity of thought and speech
mirrors intention. A leader will never do well
unless his intentions are good.” That is the
audacity of legacy. Those presumed virtues
were what people remembered of Buhari after
his first stint in power.
Last week, I went back to Abuja to do an
encore with Odimegwu. He could barely
recognise the pre-2015 Buhari. The Buhari who
superintends over the affairs of Nigeria today
is an “unmitigated disaster”, he insists.
So, what happened? Was he changed by the
presidency? Not really going by the immortal
words of former U.S. First Lady, Michelle
Obama, that “being president doesn't change
who you are. It reveals who you are,” a
sentiment re-echoed by her husband, President
Barak Obama, at Miami’s Florida
International University in October 2016 thus:
“Let me tell you something about this office
that I’ve been in for
eight years. Who you
are - what you are - does
not change after you
occupy the Oval Office.
All it does is magnify
who you are. All it does
is shine a spotlight on
who you really are.”
Maybe Nigerians
never really knew
A president
with his eyes
on legacy with
do everything
to halt this
perilous drift
to anarchy
Buhari, the man they
elected president in 2015. But now that Aso
Rock has magnified and shined a spotlight on
who he really is, the image staring at us in the
mirror is perplexing. But beyond all this, what
I see is a man who does not care, a man to
whom legacy means nothing as long as his
narcissistic agenda is achieved.
A president who has his eyes on leaving a
legacy will not sit idly and watch his underlings
wheedle the unwary with falsehoods even as
the country slips inextricably into a season of
anomie. Such a president will not continue to
live in denial, playing the ostrich in the face of
grave national occurrences. Under Buhari’s
watch, Nigeria has become the archetypal
Hobbesian state where life is "solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short," with violent non state
actors daily delegitimising the
commonwealth.
A president with his eyes on legacy with do
everything to halt this perilous drift to anarchy.
Not Buhari. Instead, he is sitting on his palms
watching his minions harangue Nigerians with
the falsehood that security has improved
considerably. On Sunday, January 26, a day
two bombs were exploded by terrorists with
fatalities, Femi Adesina, presidential
spokesman, said on national television that
“Nigerians ought to be thankful for the job
met with a delegation
from Niger State that came to Aso Rock to
tell him that insecurity and death had become
the unenviable lot of the people. “I was taken
aback by what is happening in the North West
and other parts of the country. During our
campaigns, we knew about the Boko Haram.
What is coming now is surprising. It is not
ethnicity or religion; rather it is one evil plan
against the country.
“We have to be harder on them. One of the
responsibilities of government is to provide
security. If we don’t secure the country, we will
not be able to manage the economy properly,”
he vowed. This is one vow too many. I doubt if
anyone still takes the president serious
anymore. His promises no longer assuage
anxieties. And the reason for the incredulity is
not far-fetched. There is no evidence of any of
the so-called bandits or Fulani herdsmen
wreaking havoc that has been successfully
prosecuted for their heinous crime. Instead,
the president is on record advising the victims
of these atrocious crimes to accommodate
their tormentors in the spirit of brotherhood.
At the meeting with Niger State indigenes,
the president lamented that activities of
bandits had forced many to abandon their
farms and homes. So, he knows? What has he
done about that as the Commander-in-Chief
of the Armed Forces? Is he aware that the
bandits who chased away Benue indigenes
from their ancestral lands are still occupying
them till date while their victims are living in
squalid conditions in IDP camps?
Squalid
conditions
being done by the
government.”
“It (insecurity) is
not as bad as you
make it seem,” he
admonished his
interviewer. But two
days later, the
president himself
threw Adesina under
the grinding wheels
of his hypocritical
locomotive when he
Buhari’s embarrassing security lethargy has
led to regional self-help which is what the
Western Nigeria Security Network, WNSN,
called Operation Omotekun is all about. On
Wednesday, January 29, senators reminded
the president to do the needful – sack the
Service Chiefs and Inspector General of
Police, IGP, Mohammed Adamu.
A president with his eyes on legacy will not
wait to be told that it is high time he kicked
out service chiefs who have supervised the
disconcerting deterioration of security.
Under Buhari, Nigeria’s democracy has
gone to the dogs, elections have been reduced
to mere joke. Yet, here is a man who contested
the presidency four times and vowed to
sanitise the electoral space. Rather than fulfil
his vow, the situation has become worse. No
decent Nigerian has any iota of confidence in
the country’s electoral process again. The
Independent National Electoral Commission,
INEC, has become a mere parastatal of the
presidency. The courts have effectively been
tethered to the apron-strings of executive
shenanigans.
Under Buhari’s watch, election rigging has
assumed a very frightening dimension. Before
now, malpractices will mean, in worst case
scenarios, thugs snatching ballot boxes and
running away. Under Buhari, nobody
snatches ballot boxes and runs away. The
political gladiators will wait until after the
counting just to ensure that they have lost at
the polling unit and then in the full glare of
the camera make a bonfire of not only the
ballot boxes but also the result sheets and all
other vital INEC documents. It happened in
the Okota area of Lagos in the 2019 general
elections.
But that is even for those who still give a
damn. The more hardened politicians don’t
even care to campaign. They don’t bother
about voting. They don’t snatch ballot boxes.
They stay in the comfort of their bedrooms to
write their own results and head to court.
Others kidnap the returning officers and order
them at gunpoint to announce them winners
of elections they lost. Everything President
Muhammadu Buhari touches when it comes
to leadership goes south even as his
government pettifogs. What a legacy for a
man once touted as the country’s saviour.
HOW time flies! It is
now some 50 years
since the Nigerian civil
war ended. I recall those
days in mid-January 1970
when the war ended. I was
a form four student in
Government College,
Keffi, and we had just
reported back to school
after the end of the year
holidays. I came back to
school with a small
transistor radio which
Vanguard, THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020 — 17
became of high value to me and my
roommates, to follow reports aired by BBC
and other international radio outlets.
There were hardly any newspapers in
remote Keffi, then. And television was still
some years ahead. The radio was the most
dependable source of news. It was from the
radio that we started having an inkling that
the war was ending. By the time the official
announcement came it wasn’t much of a
surprise. In any case it was also confirmed
by the principal of the college at the
morning assembly session.
There was immense sigh of relief at the
announcement, especially for those of us who
were midway into secondary schools. We
had known nothing else but the war since
we came into the form one. The first shot
heralding the civil war was launched in the
mid-1967 when my set was just settling into
form one.
Since then it was one trauma or the other
as the war escalated. We had imagined that
the war was far away in the Eastern part of
the country, but when bombs were detonated
in Lagos and Kaduna it registered that one
was vulnerable anywhere. There was a
general fear of the unknown all around. We
even had bomb drills in schools to train
school children on what to do in case of
bomb attacks.
One could remember a general slowdown
in everything. Obviously government had
no money to do anything else but prosecute
the war. Everything that needed government
funds was affected. The roads were
dilapidated, and
journeys took days
rather than the hours
we spend now. The
road I followed to
college from
Maiduguri, my home,
was the single lane
highway through
Bauchi, Jos,
Akwanga, Gudi and it
was only tarred in
Children of the Nigerian
civil war
Wars are
horrors; we
should talk
about them so
as to avoid
them, not to
repeat them
parts.
In fact, the portion from Bauchi would be
some of the most terrifying roads one had
ever travelled on. There were frightening
deep gorges on the sides of the roads leading
up the hills to Jos and after. There were no
buses or taxis; we could only travel on
rickety, open bolekajas. Trains were a luxury
but available. At least one could take a train
from Maiduguri all the way to Gudi.
Nevertheless, the depravations we suffered
as school children during the civil war on
my side of the divide cannot by any stretch
of imagination be compared to what our
mates went through in the other side of the
divide.
Many of them were uprooted from where
they considered home and driven under
frightening conditions to a life of terrifying
depravations. They suffered cramped family
lives, deaths, bombs, hunger, diseases, in
whatever order. In wars, and times of
troubles, children suffered most and the civil
war literature is full of such testimonies.
After the war, secondary school over, we
all converged in the universities as from
1972 onwards with the other kids from the
war-torn areas who survived the war.
Through various levels of interactions and
sharing of experiences, we came to
appreciate what hell they went through in
those traumatic years. Much later I would
come face to face with the horrors that the
civil war visited on the affected areas when
in 1975 we went as delegates from ABU
Zaria to Benin to attend the convention of
the now defunct National Union of Nigerian
Students, NUNS.
We went through Onitsha and it was the
first time I crossed the River Niger into the
East. Even though it was some four years
after the war the tell-tale scars were visible
all the way to Benin. The roads were bumpy
and full of pot holes. And in all the towns
and villages we passed through, the
buildings bore plenty marks from bullets
and or shells. Poverty was written all over
the place. It was truly horrifying to see.
During the national service year, I lived in
Lagos but I took time off occasionally to
visit fellow corpers living in the East. I would
spend a day or two with Bello Abdullahi who
served in Ogidi – Chinua Achebe’s home
village, a short run from Onitsha. I would
then hop off to Owerri where Tijjani El-
Miskeen was teaching.
My last port of call would be Port
Harcourt where Zakar Isah Chawai was
serving along with his new bride. In all these
journeys the pattern I saw was the same:
dilapidated infrastructure, destroyed
buildings in towns and villages, and poverty
written all over. That was 1976, six years
after the war, yet the conditions were just as
bad as the war had just ended.
Wars are horrors. We should talk about
them so as to avoid them. Not to repeat them.
Sunny side of the
social media
WONDERS never end! At a time when
the social media was under intense
scrutiny with negative labels such as fake
news being bandied about, it is heartwarming
to follow what good the social
media has generated to the life of blind
singer living in a village in Makoda local
government of Kano State. The singer,
Magajiya Dambatta was a heroine of the
1970s, a great popular singer who had
produced songs extolling the virtues of
sound education and moral values. In the
early 1970s many would recall the
sonorous voice of Magajiya Dambatta,
dishing out song after song, over the radios
in Kano, encouraging citizens to bring out
their wards to school.
Unfortunately, the old maestro went blind
and subsequently fell on real hard times.
She was forced to go out begging to sustain
herself until words reached Jaafar Jaafar,
Editor-in Chief and publisher of the Daily
Nigerian, an online medium. Jaafar went
out to the village and sought out the singer
to assess her situation and the environment
as well. He immediately put her condition
to the public on his Facebook account to
raise awareness on the plight of the
unfortunate blind singer as a means for
mobilising funds from the public towards
her rehabilitation. The response was
overwhelming. Over 500 responded to
Jaafar’s entreaties and within a week an
amount of over N5million had been raised.
After this wholesome collection, Jaafar
went back to the village to brief Magajiya.
I followed their encounter as it was
reported in many international Hausa
language radio stations. Their meeting, as
readers would expect, was ecstatic as
Magajiya was briefed on the goodies lined
up to cater for her livelihood. She even
belted out a thank you song, in a strong
and vibrant voice, that belied her 82 years.
This is expected because I understand that
a substantial part of the proceeds will be
used to build or rent a modest dwelling for
her. They have also planned a three-year
payment of allowances to cater for her food,
shelter, health care and other daily needs
on monthly, quarterly or as the need arises.
She would also be taken to the Aminu
Kano Teaching Hospital for detailed
medical examination, particularly her eyes
condition.
Obviously things are looking up for
Magajiya Dambatta. Thanks to the
positive power of the social media and
large-heartedness of Jaafar Jaafar and his
friends. We shall be following the
developments.
C
M
Y
K