• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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With the Buhari myth dismantled, what next?

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In A Man of the People, Odili, Chinua Achebe’s protagonist in the unnamed fictional African state describes the surreal events after his protracted battle with his ally-turned-enemy Chief Nanga. After coming out of hospital, he observes jubilant crowds rejoicing at the news that the new military government has jailed Chief Nanga following a coup d’êtat. Just a few days prior, the same people had welcomed Chief Nanga’s campaign tour with equal jubilance as it passed through their town.

As long as we do not centre our political engagement on issues and ideologies, as against personalities, herd mentality and greed, we will consistently behave like the crowd in A Man of the People, who celebrate the exit of the bad leader who “took too much for the owner to ignore”, while a worse leader replaces them – over and over and over again

Now, a wizened old man standing amidst the celebrations sums up the general mood, solemnly declaring, “Chief Nanga has taken too much for the owner to ignore”, and the people standing around in the public square agree with him. Odili had observed the same old man just a few days before adopting a similarly solemn tone and declaring Chief Nanga to be “a man of the people”, in contrast to his rival who had “taken too much for the owner to ignore.”

Written in the early 1960s before Nigeria’s first ever military coup, this book turned out to be both prescient for its time and depressingly relevant to Nigerian politics six decades later. In our day, the old man without a consistent moral compass can be used as a metaphor for a majority of Nigerians whose political and voting decisions have no animating ideology except being on the side of whatever appears to be popular at any given time.

In 2015 for example, the previous president had ‘taken too much for the owner to ignore’ and so he had to go. In 2023, the current occupant of Aso Rock will also have ‘taken too much for the owner to ignore,’ and his departure will no doubt be met with similarly loud jubilation and self righteous expressions of relief and condemnation. In all of this, a basic point of note will be lost as it always is – a realisation that the current president, his predecessor or his successor are not in fact the problem.

Buhari is not the enemy. There is actually no enemy

Read also: Buhari seeks Diaspora Nigerians active involvement in economic recovery efforts

When reading A Man of  People, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeing in binaries, thus making Odili the hero and Chief Nanga the cartoon supervillain. Chinua Achebe never specifically made the point, but he wrote this book and its follow-up Anthills On The Savannah not to be preachy social commentaries, but as political satire. Every character was written to be as subversive and three-dimensional as possible.

For instance, despite all his faults, Chief Nanga is not objectively a terrible human being per se. His use of thugs, weapons and cash as instruments of electoral engagement is simply how to play the political game in that country. His lecherousness and unhidden lust for women as nothing more than objects for his satisfaction is not really that different from how the idealistic, self-righteous and immature Odili sees them. His vices are in the open for all to see.

Most importantly, when drawing a parallel between the Chief Nanga character and its many subsequent real-life iterations including president Muhammadu Buhari, it is essential to understand that Chief Nanga is in fact, a man of the people. He is both a creation of his society and its most cherished person. The people love him and no other candidate speaks to them in the earthy, visceral way that he can. The eloquent, well-educated and statesmanlike Dr Makinde by contrast, is derided by the people as a “traitor,” “coward” and “Doctor of fork your mother.”

This can be applied to Nigeria’s modern politics with an alarming degree of accuracy. Like his fictional antecedent, Muhammadu Buhari has never been especially cagey about who he is and what he represents. Between 2001 and 2013 for example, he built an entire political career on the back of being an ethnic champion with an unashamedly provincial outlook on the world. He was who he was – the Abacha acolyte-turned-demagogue that was neither versed nor interested in anything but his own power or self aggrandisement.

At the height of post-election violence in 2011, when his supporters were in the middle of enacting an ethnoreligious purge and the country needed him to issue a calming statement like a statesman, he instead issued a wildly provocative comment about “dogs and baboons being soaked in blood”, and allowed himself to be photographed weeping over the election results. The results were predictably disastrous, with no fewer than 800 innocent people losing their lives including Youth Corps members, traders, worshippers and policemen. Most tellingly, he never once accepted responsibility for this or even expressed sorrow over the loss of life.

While giving an interview to Thisday newspaper during his fourth crack at becoming president in 2014, he replied to a question about how he intended to protect Nigeria’s $510bn economy by saying that he intended to use the army, navy and airforce. He further stated that in recognition of his anticipated successes at “fighting corruption,” wealthy nations would then offer Nigeria “soft loans.” Like Achebe’s Chief Nanga, Candidate Buhari was about as subtle, layered and enigmatic as a blank sheet of paper – he was who he was.

The fact that Nigeria then went on to elect a thoroughly unsuitable candidate into the country’s highest office is thus not the candidate’s fault. His renowned arrogance, insularity, ethnic tribalism and near-total absence of any sort of intellectual substance were not a secret that only becoming president could expose. Like Chief Nanga, everything that he was – or could ever be – was visible to the blind and audible to the deaf. He is therefore not the “enemy” as many Nigerians are beginning to typecast him.

Merely typecasting President Buhari as the supervillain of the story is a let-off and a copout on the part of Nigerian voters and public opinion shapers who do not want to accept that they willingly and wilfully walked into a disastrous situation against all common sense, because of their own herd mentality, intellectual hubris and greed. Using the president as the scapegoat – like his predecessor – thus serves as a way to avoid introspection and admit our own limitations.

As long as we do not centre our political engagement on issues and ideologies, as against personalities, herd mentality and greed, we will consistently behave like the crowd in A Man of the People, who celebrate the exit of the bad leader who “took too much for the owner to ignore”, while a worse leader replaces them – over and over and over again.

So what are the issues?

A few weeks ago, I appeared on an episode of The Advocate on PlusTV Africa, where I spoke on the subject of identifying ourselves positively in terms of what we want, or negatively in terms of what or who we don’t want. My argument was that reducing the complex process of political engagement to simply “Who is popular” vs “Who don’t I like” is at the heart of all that has gone wrong with the postcolonial African state.

My position was that this method of engagement takes democratic politics, which is meant to be a vehicle for our human advancement, and makes it degenerate into African tribal warfare. Instead of questing toward bettering our lives, this method creates a binary ‘us vs them’, resulting in a battle that absolutely nobody wins except the ‘Chief Nanga’ who piggybacks on it into public office.

A more productive use of our limited time on earth would be to identify what exactly it is that we do want and then establish how we would like to achieve it. This is what is known as an ideology. After creating an ideology that accounts for everyone by recognising our differences and properly federalising the intended solutions, the next step would be to identify the individuals who are best equipped to action our ideologies and then put them in office via a straightforward electoral process.

What I have just described is the foundation of electoral democracy and it is more than a thousand years old. There is no reason why we cannot get it done here. This way of engaging with our political system removes the existence of vote buying, electoral thuggery and leaders or representatives who think that the central purpose of public office is to stick forks into the public contracting and budgeting process.

It also implicitly incentivises Nigerians to engage constantly with their leadership, not just during election campaigns or when there is a tabloid-friendly scandal. The goal is to stop Nigerians from acting like Achebe’s rudderless crowd in Anata, constantly celebrating like lemmings and expressing faux-sageness when one hopelessly incompetent government replaces another, only to do worse than the last one.

Proper political literacy makes people aware of the full extent of their rights and responsibilities under a democratic system, so that they can become active protagonists in their country, as against the  human confetti Odili describes in A Man of the  People. Whether such literacy can be propounded in time for 2023, 2027, 2031 or indeed anytime in our lifetimes is the subject of another conversation.