TO convey the simple message of asking President Muhammadu Buhari not to contest the 2019 presidential election, ex-military president Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida felt the urgency to deploy both his customary obfuscations for saying little in a grand and sometimes didactic manner and his general loathing for accepting responsibility. In short, his one message came hydra-headed. As a member of Nigeria’s prefectural troika, Gen Babangida knew that he had to say something quite striking and memorable about the state of the nation after the more pugnacious ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo delivered his damning characterisation of President Buhari’s person and government in late January. That that otherwise simple message was delivered in two dissonant statements, with neither bearing his signature, is simply typical of the 76-year-old general.
The first statement ascribed to the general was issued by his long-standing spokesman, Kassim Afegbua. It was a rambling, justificatory statement described in the very last paragraph as a thought-provoking piece for the consumption of ‘fellow compatriots’. It took the statement all of about 40 paragraphs — of soaring and pretentious sentences inflated with importance than the words really conveyed — to say in concrete terms what could have been rendered in two or three bold and searing paragraphs. But notwithstanding the author’s annoying prolixity, the message to President Buhari to step aside manages to come out very clearly. Not so the second statement ascribed to the general, this time with his name, not signature, appended at the end. It was a courageous but doomed attempt to vitiate the general’s bold intervention. Not only was it shorter and lacking in a central theme, it was so badly written that even if the general had suffered from double-mindedness, its inelegance, cowardice, ingratiation and perfunctoriness were sever enough to dissuade him.
It probably took nearly one week to become clear to the public that Gen Babangida has associated with Mr Afegbua’s statement. The second statement was issued by panicky aides and family members jittery about the general’s standing and their own private political calculations. It has not helped that both the police and the Department of State Service (DSS) needlessly meddled in a private family confusion they had no business with, irrespective of the fact that the general was a head of state. If the general could not prevail on his family to recognise his right to say what he said and to respect his judgement, the security services ought simply to stand aside and amuse themselves with the vacillations from Minna. It certainly was not to the general’s credit that when Dr Obasanjo, probably head of the prefectural troika, issued his own statement, both the content and the authorship carried oomph and conviction.
After the initial hemming and hawing, it is now clear to every Nigerian, except the country’s increasingly troubled security apparatuses, that Gen Babangida’s authentic statement came through Mr Afegbua, and that it admonishes President Buhari to step aside from the 2019 presidential contest. The statement also describes the president as an analogue leader unsuited for modern intricacies and challenges, blames him for allowing bloody clashes to fester everywhere in the country, for sticking to an unproductively reactive style of leadership, and for lacking in capacity, both intellectually and idiosyncratically, to manage people and crises. Then he calls for a new breed of leaders, a restructured society to make the union work better, new and substantial change in line with the All Progressives Congress (APC) manifesto, and a new, rebranded and ambitious Nigeria. The overall tone of the statement, irrespective of its verbosity, is that President Buhari is unable to satisfy these yearnings.
Like Dr Obasanjo, the image of Gen Babangida that endures in the popular imagination is that of a man who despicably annulled the 1993 elections, arrogantly subverted societal values, inspired greed and corruption on an astronomical scale, and, contrary to the impression he tried to create in his last week’s statement, is neither a patriot nor a visionary. These observations are unimpeachable. Even if his statement shows some prescience, it is unlikely that at his age, and with nothing inherently profound about his ideas, not to say his person and style, Gen Babangida can ever rehabilitate himself in the estimation of his countrymen. Nigerians will justifiably be wary of his interventions whenever he makes them, even if they come stiffly and gingerly as last week’s statement has done.
The Minna-based general may be lacking in the moral standing to comment on Nigerian affairs, and may in fact be one of those chiefly responsible for Nigeria’s current distress and decay, but his views on President Buhari’s lack of perspicacity, and his courage in coming out to denounce the president’s attempt to seek a second term, are noteworthy. They add to the trenchant views of Dr Obasanjo on the same subject, and hope to help build a critical mass that would dissuade the president from going ahead with his ambition to seek the second term he has neither the philosophical hunger nor the salient vision (social, economic and political) to undergird. Dr Obasanjo’s and Gen Babangida’s statements insinuate that President Buhari is not in control of his government, having already apparently ceded it to a group of shadowy characters intent on deploying power to its bitterest and acrimonious worst. It is reassuring, despite bearing a huge part of the country’s descent to chaos and retrogression, that the two self-appointed national prefects found the shaky voice to encapsulate the people’s anguish.
More of such interventions are needed by those who have not yielded to the Buhari talisman of waving a few achievements in the faces of Nigerians. As they say in international affairs, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. But Nigerians must be careful to constrict those interventions. The self-appointed prefects may offer their perspectives on any subject, including putting pressure on incompetent leaders to vacate office, but they must never be allowed to immerse themselves, as they seem eager to do, in producing the next president. Their track records do not bear out their altruism. They have the constitutional right to pontificate on any subject that catches their fancy, but the public must restrict such contributions to whatever analytical profundity they claim to possess. Both former leaders are glib when they assess their successors; they are not quite as forthcoming when they react to the public’s censorious rebuttal of their involvement as causative factors in the national tragedy.
As this column suggested in the follow-up piece on Dr Obasanjo’s special statement, and regardless of the moral standing of past leaders who now denounce President Buhari, the county must still come to terms with the issues they raised. Is the president competent to rule? Both Dr Obasanjo and Gen Babangida angrily say no. There are few who will not be tempted to agree with them. Does the president possess the fairness, judgement and a sense of justice to rule a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like Nigeria? Both former leaders think not. They stand on solid grounds. Is the president fighting corruption with the even-handedness expected of someone with an understanding of the expansive definition of that word? His laid-back position on the recall of the former pension reform boss, Abdulrasheed Maina, his reluctance to probe, sack and prosecute the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Babachir David Lawal, and his most shocking recall of the boss of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Usman Yusuf, while still under EFCC and ICPC probe, show very clearly that more than a lack of capacity, the country may in fact be grappling with the far worse dismay of a hijacked presidency.
Both Dr Obasanjo and Gen Babangida mentioned the president’s inexplicable handling of the herdsmen attacks and his government’s doublespeak on peaceful co-existence and grazing rights and colonies. It is tantamount to living in extreme denial to suggest that the herdsmen crisis may not eventually become to the Buhari presidency what the Chibok schoolgirls abduction was to the Jonathan presidency. Both the herdsmen attacks and Chibok abductions, not to say the slothful approach of the two presidencies to the crises, demonstrate a gross lack of understanding of the issues inflaming the crisis, a shocking lack of capacity to envision the future from the mountaintop, and a demonstrable unwillingness to come to grips with problems that are too close for comfort. Both former leaders gave the impression in their statements that President Buhari failed the standard. The poignancy of their observations, it must be appreciated, is not vitiated by the two ex-president’s moral or ideological failings.
It is, however, not impossible that some analysts, particularly social media denizens, think that both Dr Obasanjo and Gen Babangida should shut up and leave the scene, considering how they contributed in no small measure to imperiling the country. But that would not only be a wrong approach to the leadership emergency the country is facing; it would in fact be short-sighted. As the subversion of the powers of the Minister of State in the Petroleum ministry, Ibe Kachikwu, showed, and the denudation of the authority of the Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, also demonstrated in the brusque reinstatement of the NHIS boss, a deliberate and orchestrated subversion of the principles of leadership and the rule of law is underway. These very damaging incursions will neither be mitigated by the dramatic and panic resort to the ongoing APC-inspired restructuring palliatives nor be mollified by taking refuge in the president’s personal integrity. What is at stake here is that the ship of state seems to be floundering.
The next eight to nine months will be critical for Nigeria. On the one hand is a presidency that is clearly shooting itself in the foot every week and also gleefully and insouciantly underperforming; and on the other hand are former leaders anxious about a post-Buhari era though they are yet to show their hands. In-between are the rest of the electorate who yearn for a future without an underperforming and incapacitated government, certainly not a government imposed by amoral ex-presidents. How to walk that tightrope in the next few months will preoccupy them. They will ask themselves whether to swallow their pride and endure four more years of the Buhari presidency, or imagine the damage those four more years could inflict on the country. It is idiomatic that no one can have his cake and eat it. Nigerians will wonder whether that idiom cannot be stood on its head, for the crises presented them by leadership failings on a continuous basis are of such intensity and duration that shake the very foundations of their country and, indeed, their confidence.
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