Is Buhari trapped in the past?

In hindsight, President Buhari’s handlers will rue the Arise TV interview. It presented to viewers a man who looked trapped in a time warp. It removed the mystique around a taciturn ruler, revealing an insular president, stuck in the past, with self-preservation as his sole preoccupation.

The interview clarified that those ruinous policies which have sent Nigeria into a ditch – including putting a noose around the naira, banning Twitter, wasteful energy subsidies, the militarisation of the Southeastern region, earning notoriety for the mundane task of cattle rearing, and elevating nepotism to the status of state policy – is all Buhari, the President, and Presidency.

Duplicitous image launderers, political opportunists, and shameless intellectuals are complicit in this distortion of reality. They packaged a man trapped in a time warp as the future.

The young people conned into this time-warping charade, now understand why many right-thinking persons considered Buhari unfit for office.

That interview presented Buhari unvarnished. The dystopian reality it revealed is that the ship of the Nigerian state is steered by a man staring unblinkingly at the rear-view mirror, a mind frozen in the time of cattle grazing routes, of a bloody civil war where the winner looked as bad as the loser, of military generals turning a broadcast station into a shooting range.

The first question about his security plans, provided an opportunity for the president to a terrorised nation to offer reassurance. To lay a grand vision, show how resources are being deployed to troubled regions, the challenges involved in the task, successes recorded.

After stating his government’s efforts at ensuring food security – shutting the borders and ordering Nigerians to grow what they eat – Buhari took the interviewers back to the time when he “collected people, put them in cages and say they are guilty until they can prove themselves innocent…,” The nostalgia was so unmistakable in his voice, it was surreal.

“But what happened? Eventually, I myself was arrested, detained and they were giving back what they had looted,” Buhari said.

The palace coup that removed Major General Muhammadu Buhari in 1985 did a number on his psyche. In Karl Maier’s book, This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis, Babangida had this to say about motivations behind military coups:

“You see, we were smart people. We don’t intervene when we know the climate is not good for it or the public will not welcome it. We wait until there is frustration in society. In all the coups, you find there has always been one frustration or the other. Any time there is frustration, we step in. And then there is a demonstration to welcome the redeemers. We have not done it without collaborators in the civil society — collaborators in the media, collaborators among people who have the means.”

On August 27, 1985, mid-level military officers, led by Ibrahim Babangida, hijacked Buhari’s government and hurled him into prison. Buhari had emerged as head of state on the promise of fixing the economy, one year later, it was worse. Asceticism didn’t compensate for invalid economic ideas.

So Buhari’s mien may have been jocular during the Arise TV interview, but his actions speak to self-preservation as the subtext of every policy.

The use of soldiers to disrupt protests, the reluctance to fire his previous set of incompetent security chiefs, efforts to gag the free press and shut down criticisms online, the quiet “easing out of corrupt people,” holding on to wasteful petrol subsidies indicate that self-preservation trumps acting in the country’s best interest.

“And I will not change…” Buhari said. While many have faulted the president’s comments, few doubted him.

Rear-view mirror leadership is marked by an obsessive fixation on the past, a nostalgia for how things were, and a stubborn resistance to change.

Buhari’s longing for the old police institution, his reductionist view of the workings of traditional institutions, and the subtle appeal to return to the bucolic settings of the 1950s exemplify a rear-view mirror mindset and ignorance about the current structure of the country he presides.

In a previous national address, he told those pushing for restructuring to take it up with their lawmakers. His government has rejected the idea of state police yet he speaks as if the governor he told to go and handle the security situation in his state controls the police.

The peculiar problem with Buhari’s rear-view mirror mindset is that he is ruling Nigeria in 2021 with the vision he had of how the country should be run in 1983. That he could persuade supposed progressives from the South West to buy into a medieval vision, speaks more to their crass opportunism than Buhari’s sagacity.

His carefully cultivated myth of integrity fuels a cult following in Nigeria’s poorest northern region where six years later, their fortunes have only worsened while they chant his name in worshipful reverence.

In the interview, President Buhari expressed his repudiation for the religious extremism in the North east but is helpless in dealing with the security challenges.

“You know what is happening in the North East and the South South, I too was almost overwhelmed by what is happening in the North West…” he said.

Buhari was the clearest on the question about open grazing following the ban on the practice by 17 governors of southern Nigerian states.

“What I did was ask them to go and dig the gazette of the first republic, there are cattle routes and grazing areas. Cattle routes are when they are moving up country North to South or East to West, they have to go through there.

“If you are getting to stray into any farmer’s farm, you are arrested. The farmer is invited to submit his claim, the Alkali or the judge will ask them to pay, if they cannot, the cattle is sold and if there is any balance, you are given, and people are behaving themselves,” the president said.

The president’s statement to recover grazing routes in 2021 drawn up over half a century ago, in a country where deforestation, urban development fueled by rising population, and many several agricultural programmes have overrun, betrays not just an unwillingness at being rational but an aching lack of empathy.

“But those sophisticated ones, they are good with AK47. So, from other areas, people rush to Nigeria, and Fulani from Mauritania and Central Africa, look the same, so they think they are the Nigerian ones,” Buhari said suggesting an infiltration by criminals, he added:

“I assure you that we are trying to resuscitate these cattle routes, grazing areas, and make them accountable,” he said.

Advocating for ranching to mitigate constant clashes between herders and farmers now posing a risk to the country’s food security would be the statesmanly thing to do, but you have to be a statesman to think like one.

Much of the interview dwelt on insecurity, revealing how fraught the situation is and how ill-prepared the president appeared. He talked about “speaking to them in the language they understand,” issuing threats, where action would suffice.

But according to English writer Charles Colton, those who are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions. Buhari’s threats have done little to dissuade marauding terrorists mauling citizens in their farmlands, raping women, and killing children.

“We have given the police and the military power to be ruthless and you watch it in a few weeks’ time there will be a difference because we told them that…” the president said.

Weeks later, nothing has changed.

Buhari could not hide his disdain for the Igbos when asked about his government’s discriminatory policy against people from the South East region in the military. He said that they have to earn their positions.