By Dr. Ike Odigbo
Watching Muhammadu Buhari's shoddy performance on the world stage at the 74th United Nations General Assembly holding in New York, one cannot but bow one's head in shame. As Igbos say, you endure more shame when the dancing step of your relative is out of sync with the rest on a public group dance outing. Placed side by side the historic speeches of other heads of government its not surprising we are where we are, at the bottom of the laddar of statistics of development in Africa and in the world.
Those who keep wandering why Africa is backward should wonder no more. The answer lies in a crop of shameless old men like Buhari who seek to retain power by all means but do nothing meaningful with it and even care less its implication for everyone else. The current president is the single most debilitating factor against any form of progress in the land. Again and again he has displayed this level of worrisome underperformance. We know the next time will not be different. For me, it should have been more surprising if the outcome was anything different.
Throghout the 2019 presidential campaign, when closely observed, Buhari flipped and flopped. The lousy shape of Nigeria's poitical campaigns was to his advantage. Noisy and full of rented crowds, it is impossible to encounter or asses the candidates directly. Loud speakers blared out music in the same way as hired performers dished out entertainment. And then shouting bouts in the name of speeches and handing over of candidature flags. Viewed in terms of what a political campaign should be, those open air campains all amounted to meaningless rubbish.
Buhari's handlers and APC party executives do all they could to ensure Buhari never appears close range before a camera and a journalist. First was the open presidential debate organised by the respected Nigeria Elections Debate Group (NEDG) in conjunction with the pro-government Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria which Muhammadu Buhari as incumbent dodged. Then luck ran out of him as he is forced by public demand to appear before an alternative platform The Candidates hosted by Daria Media in association with McArthur Foundation. Unlike the NEDG format which intended to grill all presidential candidates side by side each other, The Candidates was more conducive, featuring different parties and their candidates in a four-session format. Candidates were sitting and unlike the previous format did not have to confront, contradict or challenge each other.
Nevertheless Buhari disappointed big time. The very first question was simple and predictable: why do you want to be president of Nigeria? Buhari's answer is instructive and has characterized his goverment. He said that his party wants him to be their candidate and he is contesting because they put him forward. Personally he has no ideas or objectives or reasons to want to be president. We all watched it and we remember clearly how he could not make sense of simple questions and continually relied on his vice Prof. Osinbajo for explanations and answers. Everybody came out of that experience really worried. The same worry, even fright, was all written on the face of his most ardent supporters and ministers who came to cheer him up. It was a public show of shame and humiliation.
I was not disappointed. That outing only confirmed something that was becoming clear to everybody since Buhari became president in 2015. He tacitly avoided even repudiated the media at home. He only addressed the media on international outings, where I guess it is unavoidable. On many such ocassions he went foul of questions and answered rubbish. Many other times he misplaced obvious facts and misaddressed well-known personalities and world leaders. Generally he painted the picture of a buffon knowing neither his left nor his right. Unfortunately, the more mistskes he makes on the world stage, the more he attracted the kind of attention he would rather not wish.
With such level of unpreparedness or unfittingness one wonders why he desperately wanted to be president. At the first level of citizen, he has the right to vie for any office. Of course as a soldier he had tasted that position and bequeathed to Nigerians the best ever attempt to tackle high level indiscipline. Unfortunately his reign was cut short by yet another coup which ended his term. However, it would be difficult to understand or justify why he would still desire to come back when all about him is out of sync for a modern day president. And this is what gets one thinking of what might be his main reason for holding on to the office after a lacklustre first term.
There are two possible reasons. First, he wants to satisfy his pristine desire to be at the helm of affairs, which was cut short by the coup that removed him from power. He believes in himself as having what it takes to be on top. He compares himself to General Obasanjo who moved from military to civilian president. In achieving this goal, it gives him a high sense of fulfilment and sense of satisfaction. I have told friends that Buhari impressed me with his tenacity and sense of purpose. He contested four times and didnt give up, a journey that took him across four parties over sixteen years. Today he is president and has realized his ambition of being president.
But its not just for himself that he desperately wanted to be president. The second reason why Buhari wants to be president is that he want to give his own people, the Fulani and Muslims, some advantage over the other bona fide owners of Nigeria. His calculation might be that as the last standing military officer of his level in this generation he is the last titan who has what it takes to restore and institutionalize Northern and Islamic domination over Nigeria. Therefore, Buhari's mission in the presidency is not to all Nigerians but to his own chosen people, to his secterian interest. That should be obvious to any casual or keen observer.
The Northern monopoly over security chiefs, the institutionalized protection of killer herdsmen, selective fight against corruption, the concentration of the three arms of government in the North etc are all there for everyone to see. Nigeria and its institutions are firmly under the vicious grip of Buhari and his men. Nothing remains to bring their aim to full realization. It would amount to acute lack of perception or honesty for any Nigeria to fail to see Buhari's bigotry. In any case many Northerners openly celebrate his nepotism and are beginning to plot to retain power in the North, against established political principle of geopolitical rotation. When the rest of Nigerians raise objections and alarm over marginalization or fulanization or islamization it is not for nothing.
The main reason why I took all the time to account for Buhari's motif to remain Nigeria's president is to show that he only cares about those aims I have pointed out and is willing to endure the greatest form of public and international humiliation as long as he achieves his agenda of Northern domination. Clearly he is a laughing stock at the international stage but he seems not to mind because of the advantages it enables him to snatch. He has four more years to go, and assuming he lives through it, he will only make an already bad situation worse. Nigeria will bleed while the North and his bootlickers, including some Southerners, will appear to enjoy. But in the end, Nigeria will triumph, for neither will power remain in perpetuity in the North, his plan or hope of fulanization and islamization are bound to fail because they are both ill conceived and exercise in futility.
Buhari may not wish or suspect it but he needs to be told that in whatever he does history is being made. He cannot control that. He might well be a messaiah to the North but to the resr of us Nigerians he would be one of the very worst rulers this country has produced. There are countless rulers who started as saviours only to end as the tormentor or oppressor of their own people. And the oppressor of himself also. So far, he is the only Nigerian ruler who has plunged this country into recession twice. Maybe a third is on the way. I do not know of any democratic ruler whose records are so bad. In the final analysis it boils down to what the igbo people say about the mad man naked in the marketplace, that the damage and humiliation he brings on his relatives is not comparable to the ruin he brings on himself. You can reach me on: i.m.odigbo@gmail.com
