THE BUHARI FACTOR IN 2015 [II] Category: Friday column Published on Friday, 27 September 2013 05:00 Written by Adamu Adamu Hits: 5242 For the past one year, instead of putting heads together to support the one to whom the people appear ready to give this consent, the entire vocation of a section of the Northern elite has been to look for an alternative - any alternative - to Buhari. But unable to dislodge him from people’s hearts, they are in effect engaged only in own asset stripping. They have accused Buhari of vindictive-ness - slowness at forgiveness and swiftness in punishment, while the reality in the North today is that every plaintiff in the politico-military trial going on is just as guilty as the defendant. One often hears the refrain that ‘Buhari has still not forgiven Babangida,’ which is not entirely accurate though it has persisted; but it all turns the whole problem into a Buhari-Babangida tango. And the elite who themselves today oppose - or do not support - Buhari do - or do not do - so largely on account of the fact that his regime had sentenced some of them or their mentors to jail terms of ridiculous lengths. And, for this reason, they haven’t forgiven him. Indeed, some political elders show their lack of forgiveness by giving support Jonathan as a way of getting back at Buhari, in spite of what his government has done to the North. So, it is really a case of regional lack of forgiveness, a kind of regional mutually assured deprecation. But instead of sitting down to solve the contradiction, they are now trying to bring General TY Danjuma into the affair as the new consensus candidate. Perhaps some people are not happy with Danjuma’s rising star and they wish to stoke the fires of conflict between him and the mass of Buhari supporters. If they must involve General Danjuma in all this at all, it should not be as a Northern presidential consensus candidate but as the person to chair the meeting where all these contradictions, petty jealousies and personal ambitions masquerading as ‘sectionalist patriotism’ are resolved. And there are good reasons for this. First of all, I know General Danjuma will not take it; he has three good reasons which are better heard from him when the offer is formally made to him. Secondly, in addition to those personal reasons, there are the collateral damages that will be suffered. If he were to accept the offer, this might lead to an even bitterer, perhaps unintended, Northern Christian-Muslim split that may never heal. Not that supporters of Buhari don’t trust Danjuma - they do; and, as to that, even his enemy does - but they will see his entry into the presidential fray as an attempt by a group, using him as part of an anti-Buhari cabal, to stop their hero; and, in a way, that is what it is. And the religious angle is the simplest sure-fire explanation that most of them will be made to buy. Thirdly, there is Danjuma’s distaste for political leadership even back then; and now there is his belief that he is of the old guard -and that the scene should be taken over by the new. And in Nigeria, where office confers greatness over its occupant, instead of the other way round, some have now put all their stakes on Speaker Aminu Tambuwal, a popular, apparently competent neophyte who, only when he accepts will he realise he has bitten much more than he can chew, and then become a candidate for some kind of heroic failure. Right now, perhaps the concern of the Northern Establishment shouldn’t be just to put a Northerner as president; but to put a mature, tried, tested and competent Northerner in the saddle, not for the North to lord it over others, but for it to redeem its reputation; and for Nigeria to begin to get its best and be assured of its destiny. Those who have in the past called on Buhari to forget his ambition are now called upon to forget their own fears, which are the products of their own private ambitions, and think of the North and Nigeria. They should appropriate and make Buhari’s Nigeria Project theirs and proceed to make good any deficiency they see in it. Registering a new party as others have done or as the G-7 governors are thinking of doing will not necessarily mean more democracy in the land: it will just mean more daggers thrust into the body of a fledgling opposition. And the PDP will perhaps be ready to give a billion to anyone who can create for it such a wonderful scenario. In addition, because of the North’s own acts of commission and omission, there has never been any level playing field in Nigeria’s elections. There are those in the North who, in the name of Islam, have shut out their women from the electoral process, depriving the North of half of its electoral strength; and even if this purdah were Islamic, the circumstances of the North ought to have warranted its temporary suspension. Then the real value of Buhari’s Northern vote is again almost halved by the rigging going on in the South-East and the South-South that routinely returns a voter turnout of between 95% and 108%! The North must find a way of stopping the rigging in the South, or matching it in the North. It is either the entire country does democracy, or the entire country doesn’t; because the nation cannot long endure half democrats, half riggers. This is no apologia for Buhari; this is an apology on behalf of Nigeria: it is news to no one and it is a shame to Nigeria. A consensus candidate in the North will only have feet to stand on if Buhari is not in the field; that is, provided Buhari is not running, any Northern candidate put up will beat Jonathan hands down; and it will not be just because of reverse sectionalism: it will merely be fitting recompense for incompetence, but they haven’t yet made the case that he shouldn’t. It is not that Buhari is indispensable; it is that there is no good and compelling reason to have to dispense with him. The reality is that Buhari will always remain the man to beat in at least 15 states of the North. There is no candidate who, in a free and fair election, can hope to garner anything against him but grief. And if only for this fact, they must accept that a winning Northern political consensus without Buhari is impossible if democracy is to have any say in the matter. Whatever they think or say or do about him, the reality is that the mass of the people of this country who are unhampered by sectional, religious or other elite-induced prejudice are solidly with him; most especially in the North where all the propaganda against him, except perhaps the religious, has fallen flat on its face. No one has such a genuine Messianic hold on his supporters. In any other country, Buhari would not only have become president, he would have continued to decide who becomes president after him. Indeed, if Buhari were not to run out of choice, his supporters would be ready to support anyone he chose as his own replacement; but, right now, it is not his endorsement of another candidate that his supporters are looking for: it is he himself, the embodiment of their political hopes and aspirations, that they want to see in power to give Nigeria a sense of direction, to stop the thievery that is killing the nation and to bring back discipline into private and public life, something he had done before. And even if Buhari is untested, chances are that he will at least head a government better than President Goodluck Jonathan’s. And if the Northern elite can put up with eight years of President Olusegun Obasanjo and five years of Jonathan, specifically, what is it that they cannot tolerate in a Buhari administration? And if it is a fear of having no say in a Buhari presidency, now, what say have they had in Obasanjo’s or are they having in Jonathan’s? It is time the Northern political elite accept the Buhari project as their own, led though it is by someone whose campaign has failed to woo them sufficiently; because, unless they do so, a monster more horrendous than the one they mistakenly fear will ultimately devour them. And the die is cast: of all the factors that normally decide the conduct and result of elections in Nigeria—the mismanagement of the economy, the abuse of incumbency powers, identification with political party position, policy orientation as indicated in election promises, religion and ethnicity—it is the personality factor, greatly helped, no doubt, by the clueless incompetence of the Jonathan administration, that seems set to decide the outcome of 2015. And the electorate is already neatly divided between those who want Buhari in for what he can do, and those who want Jonathan out for what he has done—and what he may yet do; and along the sidelines are those who want Jonathan to remain to continue his not doing anything. But what Nigeria desperately needs today is someone who will develop a grand vision for its future, lead it against all obstacles by the sheer force of example and inspire the country to follow him. This is the Buhari promise. [For the purposes of full disclosure, I must declare that in addition to being a columnist, I am Special Assistant to General Muhammadu Buhari: and I say this only so that I may give readers, who may not know this fact, all the information they need to have to decide on the objectivity of what I have put down here—and, having possession of this fact, determine whether in the circumstance I have kept faith with, or abused, the privileges and powers of column writing.]
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 23:52:54 +0000
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