Yesterday, I hung our with my buddy from our BUK days, Aliyu
Ma'aji. Our discussion inevitably touched on Buhari and the current wave of
disappointment with his stewardship. We talked about how awful it must be for
the president's Southeast and South-South supporters to be taunted by their
kinsmen under the current climate of near-total economic collapse, hunger,
unprecedented inflation, and general hardship.
In explaining Buhari's confused improvizations on the economy, we
floated several hypotheses, but Aliyu introduced an angle that is not often
included in the menu of explanations for our souring love affair with Buhari.
He piggy-backed on a point made by Max Soilum about Murtala Mohammed. Soilum
had noted that Murtala's death is responsible for elevating the former military
head of state to a near-mythical status in Nigeria's political discourse, which
is riddled with nostalgia for Murtala's tough, anti-corruption regime.
Murtala, Soilum, argued, did not rule/live long enough to manifest
the inevitable errors of military men who try but often fail to manage a
complex society like ours with a regimented military philosophy of command and
control. Military people are rarely able to rise above their training, training
being different from education and enlightened problem solving.
Did Nigerians accord Buhari the same nostalgic, retrospctive
messianism, leading them to overrate his capacity to govern effectively, Aliyu
wondered. Like Murtala, Buhari ruled for a short time. He manifested some
errors common with military folks, but he did not rule long enough for his
overarching deficit of governing capacity and temperament to emerge in sharp
relief.
I concurred with the conjecture, quipping that in fact a whole
myth grew around Buhari's short military regime, a public narrative which
papered over several of the General's misdeeds and deficiencies and which
expanded in correspondence to the governing disasters of the post-1984 period.
Between 1999 and 2015, as the PDP systematically frittered away our resources
and undermined whatever institutions of public restrain they encountered, a
cottage industry grew around what one might call the Buhari
counterfactual.
Many Nigerians wondered aloud what Nigeria would be like if
Buhari's military regime had not been overthrown. Soon, people were filling in
the blank, mostly with fantasies that had little correlation to what Buhari did
or failed to to as military head of state. If Buhari had not been overthrown by
the bad, evil Babangida, so the narrative went, we would today be another South
Korea.
If he had not been overthrown, corruption would today be a thing
of the past. If he had been allowed to rule longer...bla bla bla. The
speculative counterfactuals proliferated infinitely. These counterfactuals in
turn led people to overstate Buhari's governing acumen and to understate his
governing deficits. They also activated Nigerians' legendary capacity to forget
the past, forgive its shortcomings, and engage in nostalgic mythmaking.
Until 2015, when it became plausible to imagine him as a civilian
president, people were speaking of Buhari as some often speak of Awolowo: the
best president Nigeria never had. But Jonathan's misadventure in power
maginified Buhari's mythical competence, whitewashed his inadequacies, and
enabled his victory in last year's elections.
Which leads me to the point I made even in agreeing with Aliyu's
thesis: that Jonathan's misrule made Nigerians desperate for any alternative
and that desperation usually leads to the suspension of critical judgment, to
cognitive dissonance.
With Buhari floundering, improvising aimlessly in several zones of
governance, and generally looking confused and ill-prepared for Nigeria's many
challenges, some of his supporters are now saying that it would have perhaps
been better if he never won, if he remained the messiah that never got a chance
to save the nation. That, they argue, would have preserved the myth of his
competence. It would have maintained the illusory axiom that he is the best
president Nigeria never had.
I have personally heard this from a couple of people who claim
that political exigencies, the intricacies of power, and elite manipulations
have soiled Buhari's reputation, exploded the myth of his messianic abilities,
and exposed him as a prisoner of power and as just another politician.
Some of these devotees never even wanted Buhari to run for the
presidency in 2015, believing that power would dilute the purity of Buhari's
moral capital. They would have preferred for him to remain the philosopher and
custodian of political morality in Nigeria, a transcendal figure unmoored to
and above the messy contestations of politics and the complicated art of
governance.
Authored by Moses Ochonu
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