Now that the presidential election has come and gone, and hopes have been dashed and optimism eroded, it might be worth reminding the president why his first term in office was a monumental failure.
The president’s recent commitment to work harder in the next four years comes from the right place but misses the point –the failures of the last four years were not a result of the lack of hard work, but the paucity of ideas and talent in his cabinet. A cabinet of Rotimi Amaechi, Lai Mohammed, Chris Ngige, Audu Ogbeh and Kemi Adeosun could hardly be described as stellar. Kemi Adeosun’s case was particularly disappointing. With oil prices tumbling, and the economy contracting, the president’s lack of foresight became immediately apparent when he elected to appoint a woman whose best claim to the job was her stint as the commissioner of finance for Ogun State–a 2nd tier state in Nigeria. Anyone discerning enough could see that she had been promoted beyond her capacity. It was hardly surprising when the economy further spiralled out of control and into a recession under her leadership.
Indeed, for all the shortcomings—and there were many– one of the few good things of president Obasanjo’s administration was the plethora of talented Nigerians in his cabinet. Just like Buhari, Obasanjo inherited an economy that had been looted into coma by the successive military regimes, but Obasanjo was perceptive enough to hire Ngozi Okonji Nweala, Oby Ezekwesili, Charles Soludo, Dora Akunyili, Nuhu Ribadu, among others. Under Obasanjo’s administration, the economy grew at an average rate of 6% and the foreign reserve rose significantly from $2billion to $43billion. With his team, he was able to negotiate a debt forgiveness that amounted to $18billion. In his second term, Buhari must recognise the truth in this Latin saying: Nemo quod non habet—you cannot give what you do not have. Harsh as it may sound; political jobbers like Ngige and Lai Mohammed are simply bereft of the kind of ideas that the Nigerian state desperately needs. He must radically shake up his cabinet and look outside of his party structure to appoint qualified Nigerians regardless of their party affiliation or political loyalty.
President Buhari must curb the tendency to insulate himself. He must also shed his nepotism. A week after president Obama won his landmark election in 2008; he approached Hilary Clinton, his rival during the primaries, to be his Secretary of State. Obama would disregard party affiliation and political loyalty several more times during his presidency. Between 2009 and 2015, Obama appointed two Republicans as Secretary of Defence. Robert Gates, an accomplished intelligence analyst and a George Bush appointee was retained in Obama’s first term, and Chuck Hagel, a veteran of the Vietnam War, and a staunch Republican was appointed as Secretary of Defense in Obama’s second term in office. The APC does not have a monopoly of good people, and to carry on thinking otherwise is self-defeating and unhelpful to the Nigerian project.
The rise of right wing extremists
For too long there has been a conspiracy of silence regarding the threat posed by white terrorists. Terrorism has been spoken of, and engaged with almost exclusively as a brown people’s problem. In most western societies, the so called war on terror has inadvertently become a war waged against a specific religion and region. It has fanned the embers of hate among neo-Nazis, but it has also done something more insidious. It has legitimised a different sort of racism–one that exceptionalises, humanises and sometimes rationalises acts of terrorism committed by whites. We can see this in the ‘politics of naming’, and in the institutional response to acts of terrorism committed by whites. First, white terrorism is ‘empowered’ by the tag of supremacy. It is also legitimised and rationalised as white nationalism. What this allows is the inclusion of people with abhorrent views in political discourse as long as their views are well disguised as some form of nationalist rhetoric. Discourses around immigrants and immigration, fertility rates of immigrant communities provides plausible basis for the unfounded myth of the white genocide that white terrorists believe is underway. We also see the attempt by the media to exceptionalise acts of terrorism by whites. When a brown person commits acts of terrorism, there is a ‘naturalness’ to it–brown people are programmed to act in such ways. After all, they are freedom hating Muslims whose religion is fundamentally illiberal and irrational. The white terrorist on the other hand is a deeply disturbed individual who ‘only’ went nuts with guns.
The white terrorist is humanised in the media. His family roots and the ‘ordinariness’ of his upbringing is often investigated and splashed across the news page to reinforce in our subconscious that this was an exceptional case by an exceptionally disturbed individual. In Charleston, Dylan Roof’s manifesto was derided for its infantile rants. In Charlottesville, Trump drew moral equivalence between the acts of protest by anti-fascist groups and the actions of white terrorists that resulted in the death of a woman and the injury of several others. In Christchurch, the headline of a major newspaper in the UK read—the little blonde boy who became a murderer: how an ordinary white man from Scottish, Irish and English descent turned into a far-right killer. But this narrative that these are exceptional acts is patently false. White terrorism is not exceptional. Indeed, data collated through FOI by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute in the US, shows that over a nine year period in the US, terrorist plots and successful attacks by the far right outnumbered Islamist incidents by 2:1.
The argument here is that white nationalists, neo-nazis, and white supremacy groups are terrorists and to call them anything but this is to make an unjustified differentiation between the abhorrent acts committed by these groups and the Islamists. Naming them as terrorists has political and legal consequences. It ensures that as with Islamic terrorists or other terrorists groups, those who promote their ideology may be classified and treated as terrorists rather than as hate groups.
Bola Adediran
Dr Adediran is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He writes via [email protected] and tweets at @bholarinwa.
