President Muhammadu Buhari’s ride to office in 2015 was largely driven by his avowedly, stoic, anticorruption stance – a reputation he crafted in his first coming as a military commander in 1984. For some, his anticorruption persuasion was without blemish. For a country that had orbited out of rationality and flung deep into the abysmal quagmire of corruption in the preceding years to 2015, large sections of the electorate felt that a repeat of Buhari’s 1984 intolerance and stampede against the corruption malaise was the only route to sanity. Back in 1984, Buhari launched an unrelenting war against corruption and indiscipline, promoted austere living among citizens and took a lethal stance against narcotics trading by signing off death warrants on drug peddlers.
While his anticorruption war was notable and memorable, his economic management offered much that people who lived through the era would be very happy to delete from memory. His disdain for free market then as now, was cloaked under a spurious ideology of economic patriotism, by which he purported to wean the nation off consumerism, profligacy, and redirect it along productivity and self-reliance. He cut down expenditures and put a leash on the exchange rate in order to commandeer stability. In a strange move purported to arrest local currency hoarding, he changed the color of the naira in April 1984. This required holders of currency to file in long queues in the few bank branches available in those days to swap the old naira notes for the new ones. The exercise inflicted unimaginable pains on ordinary citizens. But his 1984 regime is most notorious for the painful price controls his administration instituted which punished merchants who sold above government-directed price ceilings. The move inevitably created all manner of distortions in the market in addition to scarcity, smuggling and black market racketeering. By the time his first coming ended in a 1985 coup d’etat orchestrated by his successor and another dictator, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, most Nigerians were just relieved to see him exit the scene.
His second coming in 2015 as a “born-again democrat” was an excellent piece of media choreography. Preceding that election, those of us born in the post-civil war era never witnessed a more cantankerous, divisive and vitriolic diatribe than was fanned by the partisan media, in their resolve to sell him off as the ultimate messiah. The ruse the media sold to the masses reinforced a popular imaginary of the slayer of the corruption dragon, which was again, packaged as the only ill of the Nigerian state which once eliminated — by none other than Buhari — must invariably, herald the Eldorado. “Sai Baba” was the populist revolutionary mantra, employed as a metaphor for the populist comeuppance and invoked against perceived oppressive elite hegemony and curated by the partisan media which seized upon the naive gullibility and collective mental astigmatism of the masses in their readiness to be mobilized, that is, turned into an unthinking mob. As ordinary Nigerian folks were incensed by politicians and their collaborating journalists to lurk horns like rabid, irrational and uncalculating he-goats all over the place, the happy beneficiaries were none other than the opportunistic, self-serving political elite and their servant bureaucrats – both united in perfidy and callousness in their joint exploitation of a perverse system that rewards only the crafty, the dubious and the slothful.
Thus the popular consciousness was hijacked by the media imaginaries of the anti-corruption tzar. And so, many came to expect the system to automatically “fall in line” — borrowing from the phraseology of his first coming’s War Against Indiscipline and “one-by-one for line”. It was naively believed that Buhari would just wield the magic wand and corruption and its perpetrators would simply run away.
But the “body language” didn’t seem to work the magic. Disappointingly, fans came to discover like the fox, that the comb of the cock is not a burning flame and that the hero’s feet is just a pack of clay. It took 6 months into his regime before constituting a cabinet, whose membership did not generally appease even his core fanatical support base. That was the first taste of what many have come to perceive as his management style — no heat, no action but mostly hypes. Lacking anticipation and imagination, his administration has been notorious for decision delays and reactionary syndrome. For a failing economy literally on life-support, such a reactionary, rather than proactive, mode of governance has not fared well for the system, it has further deepened the state of hopelessness and eroded whatever remnant of integrity he has.
Critics saw his administration as aloof and far removed from the people and the issues of the day. His health challenges did not help matters either, as he had to spend a total of 13 months abroad seeking treatment for undisclosed ailment between 2015 and 2019. Some go as far as saying that the economy and indeed, the entire Nigerian system, have been under autopilot since he assumed office, with occasional dynamism felt each time he traveled and handed over power to his vice. Some also feel that he either underestimated the enormity of economic challenges it was up against or misread its demands because his policy drive belied the urgency of the moment.
- to be continued next week
Bongo Adi
