The Positive Sides of Unpleasant Buhari

There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide

John Adams

Maybe you are among many today who are already irritated and feel that Nigeria, their country, is finished politically.

John Adams, the second President of the U.S., has some words for you:

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

For Adams’s children to have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy in a democracy, the confession continues, he would have to study politics and war to be able to guide them adequately.

Has he not said all that democracy means–politics and war?

The above is a sincere confession of an early political player in the teething years of American democracy. As the second President, he ruled between 1797 and 1801 when the US was probably in the kind of mess Nigeria today finds herself.

As everyone seems to know already, this so-called democracy has been unable to help us in Nigeria. Everybody, including the players, are looking for an extra democratic solution. If democracy is beautifully designed as on paper in our case and a leader is not performing as expected, you endure and or rule him out of reelection. If he or she becomes too toxic to be allowed in office until election time, the people, through the parliament, apply the impeachment clause. But where all these designs are inoperable as in our instance and things are not getting better, can we then say that our democracy is heading for suicide?

Maybe in the end, despite all the bashing of President Muhammadu Buhari for mooring our ship of state to the cliff, history may still compliment him as the man whose impatience with democratic principles helped to fast-track the doomsday in Nigeria.

Having, by his style, blocked every means of reasonable governance, and made it impossible to activate any of the democratic safeguards, we are willy-nilly getting to an early solution. It may end up to the President’s credit, allowing the forced union called Nigeria to lapse since ab initio she was destined not to live.

If Buhari has been playing hide and seek, we would at least see him occasionally and maybe content. But where the President is totally and glaringly absent from duty as it were, amid loads of challenges, couldn’t that be the easiest means of reaching for the worst for a solution.

Nigerian democracy is clearly in an ugly state as seen in the 1700s by John Adams, at the point of murdering itself. Nobody is going to mourn the death of a democracy that has no impact on the populace.

Just six years ago, Nigerians thought they were at the lowest they could ever get. Then-President Goodluck Jonathan had thought he was going to be the most abused Nigerian leader. Countless pejorative epithets were applied to describe him.

When he lost the election, so the umpire said, the nation was in a kind of ecstasy, people buried themselves in the mud in celebration, others walked long distances to Abuja and counted it all joy.

Hapless Jonathan was the fall guy, everything bad was associated with him and the feeling generally was that the messiah was here with us and el dorado was in sight. Small voices that tried to play the devil’s advocate that it’s too early to chant hosanna were told to shut up.

A lone voice but Jeremiah-like in prophecy, Jonathan told Nigerians that they would come to know and appreciate him for providing the priceless jewel in the freedom that may not be offered by the incoming messiah. Of course, to many then he was bellyaching and carping, talking to himself and trying to rationalize his election loss.

Six years after, the Jonathan issue has cast us in the same mould as the biblical Jews who, soon after shouting hosanna in the highest as Jesus Christ arrived for the Jewish festival, turned round to call for his crucifixion alongside condemned criminals.

In this case, it’s the reverse, virtually all the mouths that abused and castigated Jonathan are singing a new song now.

The villain of yesterday is now the hero of today. It is so because the just-come messiah, by his underwhelming performance in governance, has turned the villain by his unimpressive display and by so doing unwittingly lionised Jonathan.

It was easy in 2015 for President Buhari to sell a misleading belief of himself to gullible Nigerians on two fronts, security and corruption. Being a former military head of state, he was seen as the man to quell the riot of security challenges crisscrossing the land. He was also seen as the upright man for the job, having successfully sold the dummy of a penny-pinching lifestyle. He was seen as the man to tackle the menace of corruption in our polity.

All that has gone, all blown away in the wind. Insecurity under Buhari has multiplied in various forms with the country never having been so threatened.

Corruption in government under his watch has been so imperilling that every hand is right now in the pie for grabbing. In fact, inside the President’s home, the story is not all palatable. The first family’s involvement became so bad that the president’s son-in-law is today a fugitive–on the run for getting messy in public funds while occupying a position in a federal agency.

If anybody is still optimistic about this federal government leading the people out of the woods, it must be those selfish ones who probably are ‘chopping’ and therefore are blinded by the sound of their mouths. Not so for many like us who are already at the make-or-mar junction.

The thinking is that if the increasing wave of agitation to leave this unworkable federation leads us to find a sincere and concrete way to prevent it, then President Buhari has scored something worthwhile.

He created Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB. If he had run a balanced government where no region felt marginalized, if he had not allowed his distaste for Ndigbo to get over him, if he had not needlessly incarcerated Kanu, if he had not caused the nation’s military to do python dancing on ala Igbo to chase Kanu into exile, maybe the situation would have been different.

Also, if the President had managed his love for his kinsmen, the Fulani herders, well by not allowing sentiment to run over him and reining in the Miyetti Allah instead of empowering them, maybe there would not have been a Sunday Igboho in the South West or the Eastern Security Network or even the Asaba revolt of the southern governors.

All these catalysts of disintegration were created by this government. It can be said that it is this regime that went into the bush, fetched ant-infested firewood, brought it home and now is facing the task of pushing back the ant-eating lizards. IPOB started as a mere pressure group of agitators campaigning against the continued marginalization of Ndigbo in the politics of Nigeria. While IPOB was declared a terrorist group by the same regime that was visibly caressing a Fulani group Miyetti Allah backing marauding herdsmen and bearers of AK-47. Given how the mismanagement of Mohammed Yusuf led to the country having one of the worst terrorist groups on its shores, a listening government would have been more circumspect in handling militant youths.

Pushing Igbo, Yoruba, and South-South youths to be up in arms will be nurturing an unmanageable monster of war on multiple fronts. But if the stubborn federal government continues to aid and abet this unwelcome scenario leading to the eventual dissolution of the forced marriage of North and South in 1914, so be it. Who knows, Buhari may be the Nigerian equivalent of Mikhaïl Gorbachev who helped the Soviet Union dissolve in peace.

If Buhari’s intransigent governance style unites the perpetually uncooperative southern Nigeria in a deft political move to adequately match the ever arrogant North, then credit goes to Buhari.

Yes, credit for helping to push all to the wall instead of shifting the devil’s night as has been the case since independence. If you like call it the positive sides of the unpleasant Buhari.