Tuesday,February 27,
2018/ 8.50 AM / by Reuben Abati
Karma is a bitch.
Poetic justice is a bastard. Both have combined to wrong-foot the incumbent
Buhari administration to make it look like a big mistake and an act of
misjudgment by the Nigerian electorate.
If Buhari had been disallowed from taking power in 2015, and those who
advised President Goodluck Jonathan not to give a damn had their way, and Jonathan
had remained in power and all the current problems had surfaced, it would have
been said by Nigerians that Goodluck Jonathan truncated Nigeria’s destiny.
In 2015, the refrain, which was reaffirmed
recently by those who authored it, was that Nigeria could only move forward
with anybody but Jonathan. If Buhari was prevented from taking over power,
Nigerians would have been very aggressive towards the Jonathan administration. It would have been said that the messiah was
robbed of victory. It would have been argued that the man who would have saved
Nigeria was prevented from doing so. It might have even been argued that under
General Buhari, Nigeria could have become the greatest country on the surface
of the earth.
Such was the impact of the
propaganda. Such was the nature of the politics of the time. The Buharideens
would never have allowed a post-2015 Jonathan government to work. Even if it
did, the opposition would have imagined a greater possibility. But here we are,
three years down the line: the messianic propaganda has failed. Their Saviour
is not the Jesus Christ they imagined him to be. The country remains unsaved.
Their promise of change has been no more than scaremongering. When the question
is asked: are you better today than you were three years ago?, no ordinary
Nigerian can answer that question positively: change has brought him or her
nothing but agony and anguish.
Should they offer an answer, it
would be a response marked by regret. The biggest tragedy that has occurred
therefore is the demystification, the unmasking, the unveiling of a man who was
thought to be a god but who has since danced naked and is dancing naked in the
market-place. Strikingly, the Emperor is without clothes. Some of the most
vociferous critics of old have also been exposed. Nasir el-Rufai deployed all
the heights of his intelligence to demonise the Jonathan government on social
media. No one else has been able to match the quality of his vitriol. Today,
the same Nasir is busy demolishing the houses of anyone who dares to make a
negative comment about him, or he takes them to court and threatens them with
Armageddon. The same rights that he demanded for the Nigerian people, he now
tramples upon.
There was also our beloved
kinsman, Alhaji Lai Mohammed. He was the scourge of the Jonathan
administration. He could issue five anti-establishment press statements in a
day. There has been no one like him in Nigerian history doing the job of
opposition spokesman. He was ruthlessly efficient. Nobody in the current
opposition parties has demonstrated his capacity as an opposition figure, in
part because all the opposition spokesmen have been harassed, blackmailed,
dehumanized, and intimidated, but called to do the job, on the other side of
the fence as Minister of Information, Alhaji Mohammed remains a study in
self-contradiction. His five minutes of fame in the Nigerian political sphere
has since ended.
He used to be creative and
dynamic, but now faced with the challenges of the real thing, the only thing
that comes out of his mouth is the dumb argument that Goodluck Jonathan is the
source of all the problems of Nigeria or similar inanities. When the matter is
not so phrased, we are told that the Jonathan administration stole the country
blind. And yet whereas the government of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)
borrowed the sum of N6 trillion over a period of 16 years, the APC government
has borrowed more than N11 trillion in 3 years! Is it possible all the oil
wells have dried up and Nigeria no longer makes money? What has happened to the
country’s revenue stream? The absurdity
of the situation is further explained by the fact that when a gas cylinder
malfunctions in the house of an APC member or there is a crisis in their other
room, the man that is blamed is Goodluck Jonathan or the previous
administration. They defend the impossible and the unintelligible. But that
trick is no longer working. The other
tragedy of the Buhari administration is how it has allowed itself to get
involved in a Nigerian version of the popular “one-corner-dance”, a downward,
self-denigrating choreographic exertion. The result is that right now, people
have now moved from the anything but Jonathan corner to the anything but Buhari
corner in Nigerian politics. Karma is a bitch. Poetic justice is a bastard.
Nothing illustrates this better
than the title of this essay, the entry into which has been deliberately
delayed, to prepare a setting and a mood for the crisis that Nigeria faces. One of the reasons the Nigerian electorate
voted out the previous administration was because of its perceived inability to
rescue the abducted Chibok girls. There was an international outcry about this.
Bring Back the Chibok girls even became the most popular hashtag on
international social media, and Jonathan, who had also signed the anti-same-sex
bill into law became a villain in the eyes of the international community. The
various interested forces, local and global joined hands together to pull down
his government.
During the 2015 political campaigns,
General Muhammadu Buhari was packaged as a morally upright statesman who would
put an end to the impunity of the insurgents and terrorists. Jonathan was
considered weak. Buhari was regarded as strong. And so on and so forth- let me
just put it like that in order not to be accused of comparison given my own
antecedents. But here is where the rub
lies: President Buhari has failed the people in their expectations. He has frittered away their goodwill.
He promised Nigerians that Boko
Haram will be defeated, and somewhere down the line, we were told the Boko
Haram had in fact been “technically defeated.” The President even received a
captured flag of the insurgents, together with the personal Quoran of Ibrahim
Shekau, the leader of the group. Today, the Boko Haram gang continues to show
that they have not been defeated. The Federal Government negotiated with these
same insurgents and gave them money to secure the release of over 100 girls,
some Boko Haram leaders were released, but the other Monday, Boko Haram
abducted over 100 girls in Dapchi in Yobe state. This is sad and tragic.
Whatever the government may have gained has been lost. The girls that have been
released have been replaced. The fight against Boko Haram is back to square
one.
The clay feet of those who
thought they knew better than everyone else has thus been exposed. For President
Buhari, this must be a personal tragedy. His strongest promoters indeed
believed that under his watch, the problem of insecurity will be solved. But
under him, more money has been spent on national security, with poor results,
and the security situation has only worsened. The previous government had the
Boko Haram to deal with, this government has its cup full: the herdsmen-farmers
conflict, the low level insurgency in the Niger Delta, the crisis of
self-determination in the Eastern region, the nationwide proliferation of small
arms and ammunition, the notorious Boko Haram and the angst of a disappointed
public. On all fronts, the government is found wanting.
Yes, it has been found wanting and
in a suspicious manner too. It is in
fact curious that security forces were withdrawn in volatile areas of Benue
state, just a week before the criminal herdsmen struck. Who ordered that
withdrawal? The Inspector-General of Police has also reportedly withdrawn the
Special Forces sent to secure the same areas. The Benue Governor, Samuel Ortom
is so incensed he is now saying he is willing and ready to pay the supreme
sacrifice for his people. In Yobe state,
soldiers were also withdrawn from high-risk areas just before the Dapchi 110
were abducted. The military has since defended itself. It has no capacity its
spokesman says, to protect all schools in the Northern part of the country. And
we can’t blame the military, can we? It is
a sign of the calamity that the country faces that soldiers are the ones now
protecting virtually every inch of the Nigerian space, internally and
externally. Our soldiers are tired and overstretched, over-used and
over-abused. The police are also similarly overwhelmed. It has never been this
bad. Fact: the government of the day has
been humbled. I once argued that Nigeria is a very difficult country to govern
but when you claim to know it all, you are bound to face the contradictions.
Every problem solved generates other problems.
People choose their governments
and leaders because they believe they can lead and protect them. When that trust is betrayed, the legitimacy of
the government is in question. In more than 20 states, salaries have not been
paid for months. And it is a stupid
point to say that the previous government stole all the money. How about all the money that has been earned
and borrowed since then? Missing? What is responsible really for this drift,
this cluelessness, this self-abuse, from
a know-it-all team that took over Nigeria in 2015? My other concern is that
beyond all the propaganda and the hypocrisy and blackmail, President Buhari’s
team may not really love him at all; they may in fact have truly, set him up
for his downfall. Buhari’s biggest stake
is the legacy he leaves behind. The little I see of that legacy is not good at
all. I once published a piece in which I alleged that Nigerians had hopped into
a one-chance bus; I want to modify that and add that it is actually President
Buhari who boarded a one-chance bus, and for that he has my heartfelt sympathy.
Whatever bus brought him to power is a one-chance bus.
What has happened so far merely
vindicates the Olusegun Obasanjo and Oby Ezekwesili groups. The former is
asking for a Third Force, a Coalition of powers and forces. The other is
wielding a Red Card. Both are united in this regard: they consider the two
political parties that have ruled Nigeria since 1999, useless and ineffectual.
They want a new dawn for Nigeria. They want a discontinuity of hypocrisy and
opportunism. They acknowledge one significant point: that Nigeria has remained
at one spot. Nothing has changed, the change agenda has failed, everything
remains the same. Whether these groups
are able to achieve, or motivate the real change the people desire is another
matter, but the honesty with which they have reversed themselves is telling,
and good for our democracy. You need not raise the point that both Obasanjo and
Ezekwesili belong to the same elite that they now repudiate.
I sympathise with the parents of
the Dapchi 110. It is sad that their
only hope is in God, and the possibility of a miracle. Students get killed in the United States, due
to gun possession issues in a psychotic society, but to send a child to school
and have him or her abducted by terrorists is the grievous pain ever possible
in Nigeria. What is clear is that the Nigerian leadership elite has failed the
people. This is not a political party matter; it is about capacity, political
will, leadership and commitment. This is
probably why a body of opinion has developed to the effect that the two major
political parties in the country – the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)
and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have both failed the country. But can
extant or any political parties, in their present shape, save Nigeria? I doubt,
and that is my thoroughly non-partisan opinion.
The
political party system in Nigeria has to be rebuilt, reformed and
reconstructed. Beyond that, we need a
new crop of leaders. The solution may not lie with Obasanjo or Ezekwesili or
the Nigeria Intervention Movement but they have thrown up ideas about the
national dilemma that cannot be ignored. Such ideas cannot be ignored because the
biggest victims are not the ten per-centers or the men and women in high places
who succeed not through talent or excellence, but mere opportunistic “faith”;
the victims are young Nigerians, the same people we call the leaders of
tomorrow - that tomorrow is already postponed, because that generation of the
future is led by analogue leaders whose glory is trapped in the past. Nigeria needs to rescue tomorrow from the past
and the present. Nigeria needs fresh energy, new ideas and a leadership
revolution. Wherever they may be, may
God protect the Dapchi 110, who have been failed by the Nigerian state. If
Buhari rescues them, he may well succeed in rescuing his government a little from
the devastating and ruthless onslaught of poetic justice.
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