Buhari needs to take a hard look at himself

How much more unfortunate can a people be. Nigerians voted for a man they thought, based on his antecedents, would run the most competent, organised and clean administration in Nigeria’s history.

But what did they get? A most lethargic, chaotic, incompetent, deceitful, corrupt, clannish, arrogant and wicked government that is not only wrought with infighting, confusion, and a shocking lack of grasps of the fundamental of governance and administration, but one which is as corrupt as any we’ve had in the past but cleverly disguises it as patriotism and one quite adept at exploiting the fault lines of the country to promote ethnic and regional interests.

Much more nauseating however, is the hypocrisy of the president. The other day, at the conclusion of Ramadan, the president issued a post-Ramadan message through his media aide, Garba Shehu, congratulating Muslims on the conclusion of the Ramadan fast and calling on ordinary Nigerians to stop the practice of celebrating corrupt people in the country but rather treat them with dishonour. Quoting directly from the statement, the president was said to have urged “ordinary Nigerians to stop glorifying thieves by treating them with disdain for bringing hardships to others”.

Ordinarily, that will be good advice coming from the president of a country that is particularly notorious for the discontinuity between state and society which is quite tolerable of corruption. This discontinuity clearly prioritises primordial ties over national ones and so long as the subject is a loyal ‘son (daughter) of the soil’, s/he must be defended and shielded from justice as much as is possible.

But it was the same Buhari who was advising Nigerians against glorifying thieves that had been glorifying the late kleptocratic dictator, Sani Abacha, at every opportune moment. At the remembrance prayers marking the tenth anniversary of the death of Abacha in Kano in June 2008, Buhari had shocked the country by declaring that Abachi “did not loot the national treasury contrary to the general impression”. Also on Tuesday, May 22, the President, while receiving members of the Buhari Support Organisation led by the Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Custom, praised the late General Abacha to high heavens for the marvellous work he did for Nigeria.

“No matter what opinion you have about (late Gen. Sani) Abacha, I agreed to work with him and the PFT. We constructed road from here (Abuja) to Port Harcourt, to Onitsha, to Benin and so on. This was in addition to other things in education, medical care and so on,” Buhari was quoted as saying.

This is the same Abacha that was ranked, in 2004, as the fourth most corrupt leader in history estimated to have siphoned between $2 – $5 billion of Nigeria’s money and stashed them abroad. Since 1999, successive Nigerian governments have been making attempts to repatriate the stolen funds. Indeed, various sums of money in foreign currencies have been successfully repatriated, especially from Switzerland.

What is more, on April 27, 2016, president Buhari himself tweeted that “Nigeria is awaiting receipt from Swiss govt. of $320 million, identified as illegally taken from Nigeria under Abacha”.  Even though a nuanced reading of the tweet showed that Buhari was cleverly trying to imply that the money was only stolen under Abacha but not necessarily by him.

Like Wole Soyinka recently reminded the president, we may understand his official loyalty to Abacha who rehabilitated him after he was jailed by Babangida and appointed him Executive Chairman of the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF), where he was given unlimited powers to spend billions of Naira between 1996 and 1998. But his loyalty should not and cannot take pre-eminence over national interest and the truth.

Besides, as the respected BusinessDay columnists, Olu Fasan, recently argues, by glorifying Abacha and insisting that he doesn’t care about Nigerians’ views on Abacha, “President Buhari gratuitously insulted this country and hurt the sensibilities of its people.” He also “does irreparable damage to his anti-graft reputation.”

I have always maintained that Buhari’s anti-graft reputation was a ruse. From his first coming, he has demonstrated he is temperamentally and morally unfit to fight corruption due to his excessive provinciality and clannishness. Olu Fasan captures this brilliantly: “A leader who is seriously fighting corruption would not spare even his own family, but Buhari has a long history of double standards, bias and selectivity, in his anti-corruption crusade. He often sees no evil, hears no evil and speaks no evil when corruption is detected in his camp, but huffs and puffs, threatening fire and brimstone, when corruption is suspected in the camp of the opponents.”

In the last three years, there have been weighty corruption allegations against prominent members of his kitchen cabinet such as Abdulrahaman Danbazau, minister of Interior, Tukur Burutai, Chief of Army Staff, Abba Kyari, the President’s chief of staff, and Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to the government of the federation. Unsurprisingly, the president expeditiously and without investigation absolved all of them of the allegations. It was a thoroughly embarrassed president that eventually ordered the suspension of the secretary to the government of the federation for the same allegations for which he was previously absolved by the president. But even after his removal, the former SSG is yet to be investigated and tried and boastfully came out recently to mock his traducers that he still has unrestricted access to the president.

Equally, sometime last year, the Minister of state for petroleum, Ibe Kachikwu, sounded the alarm over the illegal award of over $25 billion dollars contracts by the NNPC who hid under the name of a president who was convalescensing in the United Kingdom. Nothing has been heard of the allegations ever since Kachikwu was hushed up.

How does one make sense of the constant butchering of the people of the north central by the president kinsmen – Fulani militants- and the refusal of the president to prevent the attacks or even order the arrest of the perpetrators of the violence even after they have openly come out to crime? How does one rationalise the fact that the military and other security agencies are always conveniently unaware when the killer herdsmen go on a rampage but spring up to prevent reprisal attacks and disarm the locals the moment they recover and begin to mobilise for self defence?

How come, despite all the killings and violence that is threatening to turn tear the country at the seams, the president has continued to keep faith with his security chiefs – all of them from his part of the country – and has been unable to sanction any of them even after it was established that one of them has clearly disobeyed presidential orders?

If all these could be happening even when the president is seeking re-election, just close your eyes and imagine what will happen when he’s elected into office for the second time with no need for re-election.