Have you ever met a Nigerian politician? I mean a successful Nigerian politician who has risen beyond the mosh pit of local politics and become a state governor, senator, lawmaker, minister, or federal government appointee? I have been (un)fortunate enough to have run into many of these individuals, and to a (wo)man they all share one trait in common – they are very, very likeable in person.
Think of the Nigerian politician you reflexively recoil from when their picture enters your mind; the one whom you truly, deeply, and genuinely detest because of what they stand for. Is it the retired 2-star military General with 3 recessions under his belt? Is it the bespectacled fellow in Badiko who threatened foreign election observers with “bodybags”? Is it the Lagos State government’s majority shareholder on Bourdillon Road?
Is it the fellow in Calabar who occasionally takes breaks from weeping during press conferences to pass a budget of “Olympotic Meristemasis”? Whoever it is, however much you dislike them, if you were ever to meet them in person, you might be surprised to find yourself responding very differently to how you might imagine it. One and all, they possess the charisma and personality to charm the pants off people – sometimes quite literally in fact.
Muhammadu Buhari and the saga of the past 5 years should have taught us all something by now, it is that anybody can be made likeable – even a 3-time coup plotter with a 40-year career filled with various atrocities to his name
One dark secret about the creature called the “Nigerian Politician’” is its ability to passionately make love to your emotions and sentiments while concurrently driving a tornado nail into your neck with no hesitation.
“Nice” or not, politicians are not your friends
Something that a lot of people in the Marketing and Communications space said about candidate Muhammadu Buhari in the run-up to the 2015 election was that the man was nothing like what he had been portrayed as. In person they said, Candidate Buhari was jovial, light-hearted, soft-spoken, and never short of a quip or two. Whereas they expected to meet a black-and-white talking picture who communicated exclusively in grunts and growls, they met…a human being with a sense of humour.
This apparently, was all it took for many people in that space who clearly knew better, to conclude that Candidate Buhari was worthy of becoming President Buhari. People like me wore ourselves out in a voluntary, non-partisan and ultimately doomed effort to remind people that Buhari was not the bowtie-wearing bop daddy high-fiving his grandson on the campaign posters, but a cold, ruthless, brutal military dictator who once tried to kidnap a dissident from London and bring him to Nigeria in a cargo crate, but it was to no avail.
Buhari was “nice” in person, and that was the only leadership metric that these people were interested in. It did not matter that just 4 years before, he had blatantly stirred up and enabled his supporters in the North to embark on a deadly riot against Southerners, Christians and NYSC members, leaving over 800 people dead. It did not matter that he was the only surviving person in Nigeria’s history to have committed the ultimate act of treason by seizing power from a democratically elected government and made himself an unelected dictator.
He was “nice,” and that was all it took to become Nigeria’s president. Now 5 years later, in our post-Lekki Massacre reality, we are left to repent at leisure after the reality has become abundantly apparent that Candidate Buhari’s “niceness” was only ever meant to be the political lubricant to ease General Buhari’s hostile takeover of the Nigerian state. He is not so nice anymore, is he?
Beware of the political ‘nice guy’
At a recent sitting of the Lagos State Judicial Panel into the events surrounding the Lekki Massacre, General Ahmed Taiwo’s performance elicited much fluttering of hearts and compliments from Nigerians following the events. Apart from the fact that he told lie after lie and got caught up in his own web of yarns multiple times, General Taiwo handled himself like a consummate gentleman. He even found time to speak one-on-one with a few attendees, and he announced that he would make his entry to the youthful world of Twitter soon.
His arrival on Twitter was heralded as some sort of rockstar event, complete with welcome announcements from verified Nigerian handles who had fallen under his charm. Amidst the pomp and fanfare, one would almost forget that the entire purpose behind his sudden entry into the public space is because of a brutal military massacre of unarmed civilian protesters at one of urban Nigeria’s most visible locations. One would almost forget that it is General Taiwo’s job in fact, to throw as many spanners into the work of the judicial panel as it seeks to establish a legal case for holding the Nigerian military responsible for what nearly half a million people watched it do live on Instagram.
General Taiwo’s “niceness” and “charm” is not in fact, some kind of moral virtue that should be extolled – it is quite literally his job. His job is to tell a series of improbable lies in such a manner as to make the patently untrue appear true – or at least to sufficiently obfuscate the truth as to get his employer off the hook for killing innocent Nigerian citizens exercising their constitutionally guaranteed right to assembly, association, movement and expression. General Taiwo is of course, not a politician, but his job is the same as that of a quintessential Nigerian politician – to make you like him enough to the point of believing, or at least ignoring, the lies coming out of his mouth.
Like any other public-facing operator in Nigeria’s political space, General Taiwo is well versed in the art of engrossing your feelings in a warm French kiss while cold bloodedly severing your spinal cord with a bush knife. Like a politician, he is not a friend of you or anyone other than his own personal interest, which coincides with the institutional interest of his employer. In a couple of decades when he has retired, do not be in the slightest bit surprised to see him run for public office on the platform of being the likeable, rational, calm-headed ex-military officer who will end the army’s human rights abuses.
In Nigerian politics, “niceness” is little more than a PR strategy to get people to take their punishment more willingly. The measure of a public figure’s ‘niceness’ is NOT in any way correlated to their earnestness, their ability to do a job, or the pureness of their intentions. If Muhammadu Buhari and the saga of the past 5 years should have taught us all something by now, it is that anybody can be made likeable – even a 3-time coup plotter with a 40-year career filled with various atrocities to his name.
You fell for General Buhari. There is no need to fall for General Taiwo.
