Buhari’s politics of nostalgia and ‘bring-backery’
President Muhammadu Buhari’s recent launch of the “Change begins with me” campaign did not arrive with a soft landing. No sooner had the president launched the campaign than it was dogged by controversies. First, the minister of information, Lai Mohammed, who purportedly originated the idea, was accused by two Nigerians of plagiarising their concept. Then, the president himself was said to have plagiarised President Barack Obama in his speech at the launch. Mohammed denied plagiarism, but the presidency admitted it, blaming an “overzealous” staff member. But, leaving aside the overzealousness of an official or of a minister who became the message not the messenger, the truth is that nothing is new about the “change-yourself-first” mantra. It is older than some gave it credit for.
Mahatma Ghandi and John F Kennedy could, indeed, lay claim to being plagiarised. After all, it was Ghandi who famously said: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”. Ghandi went on to say, “If you change yourself you will change your world”. And, as many will recall, JF Kennedy invoked the patriotic injunction: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”. And, to be honest, these mantras are, at least on face value, right. It is true, for instance, that change must start with everyone; it is also true, at least from a patriotic, if not rational, point of view, that we should not ask what our country can do for us but what we can do for our country. But everything is contextual. And it is context, yes, the circumstances that formed the setting of the campaign that appear, in my view, to undermine it.
For me, the biggest factor eroding campaign’s integrity is the notion that it’s a throwback to a bygone era, the idea that it marks the return of Buhari’s “War Against Indiscipline (WAI)” 30 years ago when he was military head of state. A BusinessDay report on the launch was titled “In a re-invented ‘WAI’, Buhari launches Change Begins with Me campaign to drive attitudinal change”. So, this is President Buhari being nostalgic about the past again! The president hardly stops referring to the period he was a military head of state in the mid-1980s. Indeed, his constant refrain, even in 2016, about why General Ibrahim Babangida removed him from power in 1985 suggests that he still bears a grudge about his overthrow. Sometimes, I wonder if Buhari was not repeatedly seeking the presidency, as he did for four times, because he believed there was an unfinished business during his time as a military dictator that he needed to complete. General Olusegun Obasanjo once asked General Yakubu Gowon when the latter wanted to run for the presidency in 1993 general elections: “What did you forget to take from the state house that you have to go back”. Of course, that question was inapplicable to Buhari because, having been ‘prematurely’ overthrown, after less than two years in power, he probably felt that Babangida stopped him from accomplishing what he would have liked to achieve as military head of state, and thus he wanted the opportunity to continue where he stopped!
President Buhari, indeed, reminds me of Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, with whom he shares a similar story, albeit in different contexts. In the 1980s, Livingstone was the Leader of the Greater London Council (GLC), the government of London. But because of his far-left rhetoric and policies, the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, abolished the GLC in 1986 and removed him from office. However, 14 years later in 2000, Livingstone was elected as the Mayor of London. He started his acceptance speech with the following words: “As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago …” Somehow, there is a sense in which I think President Buhari is saying to Nigerians, “As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted by Babangida about 30 years ago”. I mean, how else would you explain the nostalgia and constant hankering after the past, a past that was characterised by a headmasterly and didactic approach to governance, to economic management and to political reform?
Yet as the American writer Yuval Levin said in his recent book, The Fractured Republic, one of the great failings of politics is nostalgia. Levin argued that politicians who promise to bring back the past are often misguided because, first, there was plenty wrong with the past and, second, the promise of a return to the past is impossible. This prompted the London Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein to remark that, “The politics of nostalgia are just a con trick”, arguing that it is wrong to suggest that a country can move forward by going backwards!
President Buhari, of course, has a rose-tinted view of his bygone era as military head of state. But do Nigerians really share that view? The economic and political situations in the country were terrible during that period, as I recall. Of course, Buhari was celebrated for his war against corruption and indiscipline and his no-nonsense handling of security matters. But, while there was no better alternative to the former military dictator in last year’s presidential election, it is, in my view, a sign of Nigeria’s degeneration that he was brought back to power to deal with the same basic problems he built his reputation on 30 years ago – corruption, indiscipline and insecurity! To be sure, Buhari was not elected president last year because of his economic wizardry or because of a “golden age” of sound economic management that he could replicate. As General Obasanjo recently said “Buhari is not a hot person when it comes to the economy”. Nor, indeed, was he elected because Nigerians believed he would transform the political landscape of this country. For, let’s face it, on political restructuring, Buhari is a traditionalist, a conservative!
So, the two things that could move this country forward – economic and political reforms – are not being given any serious attention by the Buhari government; the ones that are merely symptomatic of larger problems – corruption, indiscipline and insecurity – are those dominating the government’s agenda. Ideally, according to the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule, 80 percent of the government’s attention should be devoted to economic management and political and institutional reforms, and 20 percent to the symptomatic issues – corruption, indiscipline and insecurity. Take any successful country. Its government is laser-focused on economic, political and institutional issues, while the primordial problems of corruption, indiscipline and insecurity are dealt with at the right levels by institutions that are working quietly, yet making a huge difference!
But Nigeria does not seem to understand the relationships between causes and effects, symptoms and root-causes! The president said, for instance, that change must not be seen “merely in terms of our economic and social progress, but in terms of personal behaviour”, adding that “before you ask ‘where is the change they promised us’, you must first ask how far have I changed my ways”. At a time when living standards have collapsed, when hunger is ravaging the lives of ordinary Nigerians, it is incredibly glib and blithe to put personal behaviour or on a par with economic and social progress. Surely, without economic and social progress, people will be unhappy, demotivated and unable to make constructive contributions to society. As the authors of the book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, pointed out, it’s all about incentives. If you change the incentive structures in a society, you will change people’s behaviours. And there are no greater incentives for progress than the right economic, political and institutional structures.
Unfortunately, Nigeria is majoring on minors and minoring on majors. We are not taking the big leaps, the step changes that will radically transform this country. If President Buhari launches bold and radical economic, political and institutional reforms, rather than merely tinkering at the edges, as he is currently doing, a campaign on attitudinal change on the back of those reforms would make sense. But to launch a campaign to change people’s behaviours, redolent of the president’s war against indiscipline some 30 years ago, without addressing the incentives that influence those behaviours amounts to what a former British minister, David Willetts, once described as “bring-backery”, an attempt to bring back a past out of share romanticism or traditionalism. But nostalgia and bring-backery are meaningless if they don’t lead to transformational change. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with a campaign to change attitudes, but my point is: Nigeria must stop majoring on minors!
Olu Fasan