I fully anticipate that most Nigerians will figuratively call for my head after reading this headline. How could it be that a leader who has inflicted such profound and unrelenting hardship upon the populace, and who appears utterly disinclined to offer even the smallest relief, could ever be missed?
(Tinubu’s wirepullers at the World Bank have essentially declared that Nigerians must, at the barest minimum, endure this misery for not only the entirety of Tinubu’s possible two terms but for an additional seven years thereafter.)
But, one must ask, who could have ever predicted that Nigerians would miss Presidents Goodluck Jonathan or Muhammadu Buhari, to cite two recent examples? A video trended on social media about five weeks ago of a man who, on President Muhammadu Buhari’s last day in office, sunk to his knees and supplicated to God to never let Nigerians miss Buhari.
“When Jonathan became our president, we were missing Yar’adua,” he lamented. “When Buhari became president, we were missing Jonathan. God, I use God to beg you, please don’t let us miss Buhari. May we not miss Buhari!”
Yet, scarcely more than a year later, Nigerians find themselves missing Buhari—a reality that has led many on social media to joke that the man in the viral video celebrated Buhari’s departure too soon.
Today, a great many Nigerians would eagerly return to the days of Buhari, which they had rightly described as a dark and suffocating snake pit of relentless suffering—the very same way they longed for Jonathan’s atrocious tenure under Buhari’s rule.
In 2018, when I said to someone that, as frightfully inept as Buhari was, Nigerians would come to miss him—not because of any merit in his governance but simply because his successor would prove to be even worse—my interlocutor reacted with outrage and accused me of cursing Nigeria.
He, like many others during Jonathan’s administration, vehemently declared that it was impossible for anyone to be worse than Buhari, and that anything more calamitous than the Buhari regime would spell the absolute collapse of Nigeria.
Nigerian hasn’t collapsed even if it isn’t standing. It seems an immutable law of Nigerian politics that every successive president is invariably worse than their predecessor.
More significantly, human beings seem hardwired to recall the past with a disproportionate fondness that it seldom deserves. In my January 8, 2021, column titled “Kukah, Pantami, and Self-Interested Government Critics,” I observed: “The truth is that every previous administration often benefits from a kind of cognitive bias that psychologists call rosy retrospection, which is the tendency to remember past times more positively as they recede into distant memories. Even Buhari will benefit from rosy retrospection years after his tenure. Should people who defend or ignore him now be given a pass if they come down hard on his successor?”
It was during my undergraduate years at Bayero University, Kano, in the early 1990s, that I first became acutely aware of this distinctly human inclination to invariably and uncritically romanticize the past.
During one of my visits to the university library’s psychology section, I encountered a book that introduced me to the concept of cognitive biases. It was there that I learned of terms such as rosy retrospection, chronological snobbery, and declinism—all of which distort our perceptions of the present and future.
Much like rosy retrospection, declinism inclines people to view the past with nostalgia while adopting a bleak outlook toward the present and future, often despite evidence to the contrary. Although, in the Nigerian context, such declinist sentiments frequently have a foundation in objective reality.
To give another example, in 1993, most Nigerians had grown weary of Ibrahim Babangida, whose Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) had sapped the vitality of the nation. When he handed power over to Ernest Shonekan in August 1993, we collectively exhaled in relief. Yet, that respite was short-lived. When Sani Abacha overthrew Shonekan and unleashed a reign of terror, Nigerians began to miss Babangida and, in time, to recall his most egregious misdeeds with surprising favor.
Given my awareness of cognitive biases, I remember telling my friend Aliyu Ma’aji in 1994 that a time would come when Nigerians would miss and perhaps even celebrate Abacha. Here is a recollection of that moment from my May 7, 2020, article titled “Curious Posthumous Deodorization of Abacha’s Grand Larceny”:
“I recall a conversation I had with my friend Aliyu Ma’aji (who is now Ma’ajin Zazzau) when we were undergraduates at BUK in 1994. We were walking a long distance and holding buckets in search of elusive water because there had been no electricity for weeks in Nigeria. Vehicular movements had basically stopped, and people were forced to trek long distances because there was no petrol anywhere.
“In the midst of the severe deprivation and sense of existential siege we were undergoing, I said, ‘Aliyu, do you know that a time might come in the future when Nigerians would celebrate and sentimentalize Abacha as one of the best heads of state we’ve ever had?’
“Aliyu lost it. ‘Wallahi tallahi, if any bastard ever says a single good thing about Abacha in my presence, I’d beat the living daylights out of him!’
“I wonder what Aliyu feels about all the posthumous rehabilitative narratives of Abacha who literally made life a menacing torment for people in the 1990s, who stole the nation blind, whose son used presidential jets like kabu-kabu and died in one, who murdered innocent people like chickens, who repressed the nation with Hitlerite malignancy.
“When Buhari says history will be kind to him, he is banking on the legendary amnesia of Nigerians and their predilection to rehabilitate and deodorize dead political elites even if they were evil or dreadfully inept.”
Thus, before one rushes to crucify me for asserting that Nigerians will eventually miss Bola Ahmed Tinubu, remember that no one ever thought they would miss any president or head of state during their time in power.
People do not miss past leaders because they were good; they miss them because their successors are often worse, or because they are more acutely conscious of the present pain than the past agony.
It is akin to missing the torment of the frying pan after being cast into the fire. Whether one is scorched in the frying pan or incinerated in the fire, one is still in distress. The sting of present suffering does not negate the reality of past torment.
My certainty that Nigerians will miss Tinubu stems from the reality that nearly all potential successors—both within the ruling APC and the opposition—are proponents of the same poverty-inducing, soul-crushing, middle-class-eroding neoliberal economic policies aggressively propagated by the World Bank and IMF.
The disagreements between opposition politicians and Tinubu are confined merely to matters of method and timing, not substance or policy. They uniformly endorse the removal of petrol subsidies and the devaluation of the naira (the two principal policies responsible for the current mass despair in the land), differing only in how these policies should be executed. Such distinctions are, ultimately, distinctions without a difference.
No nation has ever implemented these policies without wreaking havoc on its economy, obliterating its poor, and decimating its middle class. If another neoliberal charlatan, masquerading as a savior, assumes power after Tinubu, Nigeria’s situation will worsen, and the people will inevitably yearn for the Tinubu era, wondering why they ever believed it was intolerable.
Since neoliberal economic populism now enjoys mainstream acceptance in Nigeria, and since its proponents—including a cadre of uneducated and misguided youth—have succeeded in branding those of us who defend the merits of subsidies (absent corruption) as regressive, antiquated “commies” pitifully frozen in prehistory and have made old, discredited right-wing economics seem chic and intellectual fashionable, we must resign ourselves to watching from the sidelines as Nigerians experience the inevitable consequences. Perhaps that lived experience will be more instructive than our warnings.
There is only so much an adult can do to caution a child who is mesmerized by the allure of fire. Sometimes, the child must touch the flame and suffer its burn to truly comprehend its danger. Experience, after all, is a far superior teacher than pontification.
Farooq Kperogi, author and Professor of Journalism @KennesawState University, is a columnist with Nigerian Tribune