President Muhammadu Buhari’s wife, Aisha, is a woman with strong political and social consciousness, who is outspoken and unafraid to make blunt public interventions on governance issues. Unlike the fawning Buharists, who whitewash her husband’s administration, Mrs Buhari doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has often criticised his government.
However, as President Buhari’s lacklustre administration winds down, Mrs Buhari has turned to apologising for its pathetic performance, begging Nigerians to forgive her husband. But why would Nigerians heed her plea when her husband is a wilful and unrepentant “sinner”? Well, first, the apology!
Recently, at the 62nd Independence Day Special Juma’at prayer and Public Lecture held at the National Mosque Conference Hall, Abuja, Mrs Buhari said: “The regime might not have been a perfect one, but I want to seize this opportunity to seek forgiveness from the Ulamas and Nigerians in general.” She referred to the economic conditions, which is “causing a lot of hardship and difficulties,” and “the effects of banditry, kidnapping and many other ills in society.” She repeated the apology in an exclusive interview with BBC Pidgin on October 21.
Of course, family honour would not allow Mrs Buhari to say publicly that her husband’s government has been an unmitigated failure; instead, she resorted to euphemism: “The regime might not have been a perfect one.” What an understatement! Her past criticisms of her husband’s government show that she strongly believes he has performed well below the expectations of Nigerians, that his administration has failed to live up to the promises of “change,” which swept it to power in 2015 and, undeservingly, in 2019.
In an explosive interview with the BBC in October 2016, Mrs Buhari said of her husband’s government: “Things are not going the way they should,” adding: “Nobody thought it’s going to be like this.” Alluding to her husband’s obstinacy, she said: “When one is doing something wrong and people talk to them, they should listen.”
So, Aisha Buhari is right to beg Nigerians to forgive her husband. But the plea rings hollow because President Buhari’s abject failure is due to his own wilful and deliberate choices
Of course, everyone knows that Buhari is utterly self-willed. Three years later, in 2019, near the end of her husband’s first term, Mrs Buhari said his administration’s flagship Social Investment Programme (SIP), “has failed woefully,” averring that the N500 billion programme intended to take people out of extreme poverty “made no impact.” And shortly after, her husband started his second term in 2019, she said: “The people he (Buhari) put in the cabinet should just sit up and do the needful, so that the First Lady would stop talking.”
So, however, the sycophantic Buharists praise Buhari as a transformational leader and “give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” to quote George Orwell, the truth is that the emperor has no clothes, and even his wife knows it!
A few years ago, I wrote a piece titled “Buhari is Nigeria’s most arrogant yet inept leader” (BusinessDay, January 14, 2019). I still hold that view, and, in fact, believe he’s Nigeria’s worst president since the return to civil rule in 1999. If you think that’s outlandish, let’s compare him with the other presidents since 1999. Take President Olusegun Obasanjo. Well, Buhari lacks his competence and vision.
Obasanjo secured a reduction of Nigeria’s external debt from $38 billion to $13 billion, and created state institutions, such as the Eintoconomic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). By contrast, Buhari has plunged Nigeria unprecedented levels of debt, with the total external debt stock at $40.06 billion (N16.61trn) as at June 30, 2022, while total public debt stock, representing domestic and external debt stocks, was N42.84 trillion ($103.31bn) as at June 30, 2022, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO). Talk of a debt trap!
As for institution-building, Professors Paul Collier and Tim Besley, who co-authored the Oxford-LSE report on state fragility, said: “Great leaders build institutions.” But instead of building institutions, Buhari undermines existing ones. For instance, he has eroded the autonomy and independence of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), which he treats as an appendage of the presidency. There is hardly any institution of state that has not been politicised and riven with corruption under the Buhari administration. He condoned it!
Then, take President Umaru Yar’ Adua. Truth is, Buhari lacks his ability to recognise and manage Nigeria’s diversity. Yar’ Adua doused tension in the Niger Delta through a political solution, through recognising and addressing historical grievances.
But separatist agitations reached a crescendo under Buhari because he mismanaged Nigeria’s diversity and rejected a political solution. Buhari is the only president since 1999 who refused to convene a forum for national political dialogue. He rejected reports of previous political conferences, and poopooed restructuring. He’s absolutely not a nation builder.
Read also: Investors fault Buhari for breaking housing promises
What about President Goodluck Jonathan? Some might wonder why anyone would suggest that Jonathan was better than Buhari. Well, Jonathan had the good sense to assemble a talented team even though he himself lacked leadership qualities. But Buhari lacks leadership qualities and surrounds himself with mediocre ministers. Here, you have a president who is utterly clueless and yet hates experts. He once called economists “the so-called economists” because they told him what he didn’t want to hear!
In 2015, as he assumed office, Buhari described ministers as “noise makers.” Ministers “make a lot of noise,” he said. Of course, because he regarded ministers as noise makers, he didn’t care about the qualities of those he made ministers. As a result, his cabinets, both in his first and second terms, are the worst in Nigeria; utterly devoid of technocracy.
Think about this. Buhari created the “Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning” and put Zainab Ahmed in charge, despite her absolute lack of international clout and her not being, by any stretch of the imagination, a seasoned economist. Recently, Mrs Ahmed said she wasn’t aware that the CBN planned to redesign Nigeria’s currencies and strongly condemned the idea. But President Buhari later said he actually approved the redesign.
Really? How could the president not even consult the supposed “Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning” on such an important matter as the redesign of Nigeria’s currencies, which, whatever its merits, could impact on the economy? Could Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala be treated like that when she was Minister of Finance? Absolutely not. But in Buhari’s view, Mrs Ahmed is just a “noise maker”; so, she could be side-lined. Elsewhere, she would resign for such a shabby treatment!
For me, what really grates about Buhari is that he tried desperately for 12 years, from 2003 to 2015, to be Nigeria’s president. He ran unsuccessfully three times, only succeeding at the fourth attempt after entering into an opportunistic alliance with self-serving politicians. One would have expected that someone who sought power so desperately knew what he would do with it and that he would hit the ground running if he became president.
But, alas, as Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, spokesman of the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), put it in one article, once in office, Buhari was “dangerously looking as if power was an end in itself.” Indeed, over the past seven-and-a-half years, Buhari has behaved as if power is an end in itself. He’s aloof and indifferent; enjoying the trappings of power, while watching Nigeria sink deeper into the vortex of decline.
As I write, Buhari is in London for two weeks for a “medical check-up,” after just returning from Japan. Yet, floods are ravaging Nigeria and Western countries are asking their diplomatic staff to leave Nigeria due to security threats. Last week, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, former minister of foreign affairs, said President Buhari “should be on seat, not go anywhere now.” Well, not Buhari, the absentee president!
So, Aisha Buhari is right to beg Nigerians to forgive her husband. But the plea rings hollow because President Buhari’s abject failure is due to his own wilful and deliberate choices.
