First Read: As Buhari Steps In (Part 1) By Dele Agekameh
“Having just a few minutes ago sworn on the Holy Book, I intend to keep my oath and serve as President to all Nigerians. I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.” This quotation taken from President Mohammadu Buhari’s inauguration speech in Abuja last Friday clearly sets the tone for what Nigerians should expect from their new leader in the next four years. Also, the large presence of foreign leaders from across the globe and other dignitaries at the event, equally gave a huge endorsement to the new administration
The new president came into office on the back of the sort of overwhelming popular support he had never before enjoyed and which he probably never anticipated in the many years he had attempted to rule the country once more, as a civilian leader. The simple analogy here is that going by votes only, he won acceptance with the largest majority of people from four of the six geopolitical zones in the country. What is different between his performance in 2011 and now is that, not only did he predictably retain the support of people from the North-west and North-east; he also made far more inroads in the South-west and the North-central states this time around. The truth is that, no matter what the opposition may say, ordinary masses actually took ownership of the last electoral process, some engaging in door-to-door campaign at great personal expense and peril, with many shunning primordial sentiments like ethnicity and religion, to ensure Buhari’s emergence as president.
In the run up to the election, a friend narrated to me an interesting encounter he had with a young man in his 20s. According to my friend, he was at a fast food outlet when one of the desperate anti-Buhari video documentaries by the Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, was being aired. After the video had run for a while, the young man turned to my friend and said: “You know, I was not yet born when this man was president in 1984. But the fact that his opponents seem to always criticize how he tried to force people to do this and that, tells me that the man may have tried to sanitise things in his own way and people were not happy with him for that.”
My friend said he went ahead to deliver an impromptu lecture to the young man about how Buhari, in his War Against Indiscipline, introduced public sanity measures and ethics like the end of the month environmental sanitation exercise, queuing to access public utilities and all that. According to my friend, the young man left that afternoon with a vow to cast his vote for Buhari and also pledged to convince his friends and neighbors to do same. This captures the level of expectation that came with Buhari’s candidacy and eventual victory at the polls.
At the age of 73, Buhari is a man, who can be said to have seen it all. Therefore, in terms of the temptation to toy with the people’s goodwill, he must strive hard not to disappoint people like that young man, nay, Nigerians in general. If at all he had earlier been recorded on the bad page of history, this is a golden opportunity for the new president to rewrite history. Such opportunities are rare though, but, here he is, with another golden opportunity to right the wrongs of the past.
Of course, let us not get ahead of ourselves and expect that everything will go plain sailing. That is, indeed, naivety of the highest order in the stern reality of the murky political waters and the peculiarly testy terrain that is Nigeria. Nigeria is a country where the resort to primordial factors can easily polarise even the most elevated socio-political issues and discourse. The truth is that, even if he does not know that already, Buhari may soon realize that even his ‘own’ people – both the northerners and the All Progressives Congress, APC – will begin to jostle to elevate their interests above the collective interests of Nigeria. This is why he should shine his eyes.
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‘Nigeria has been lost in the wilderness of despair for too long. Now is the time to re-plot our national graph and seize the opportunity presented by the emergence of Buhari, with both hands’
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From what I gathered from his close associates and as exemplified by the extract from his inauguration speech reproduced at the beginning of this column, the president is his own man. That is, once he is convinced about something, he cannot be easily swayed. I think the country needs that type of man with a strong character and strong will to be able to decipher between good and bad; between praise singing, sycophancy and objectivity. Even the most strident of leaders can be easily drowned in the sea of yes-men around him. Nigeria surely needs a man gifted with guts, gumption and iron in his back-bone to pilot the affairs of the country and extricate it from the cobweb of hopelessness into which it is currently enmeshed. Weather Buhari fits perfectly into that bill, will be determined by the events of the next four years.
And then, there will be the issue of those who financed the campaign and would be naturally eager to recoup their investments by angling for plum or juicy government contracts and appointments to this end. The administration will kick and cry in order to free itself from the fangs of these inevitable ‘hawks.’ In this case, Buhari will need to bear it in mind that he must succeed where others before him faltered and failed. The immediate past government is perceived to have failed miserably to live appreciably above the big hand of these ‘hawks.” The beauty of it all is that in the new president, there is a man with the necessary discipline to live above a lot of these temptations. This is because dealing with these sort of issues, can often require the type of single-mindedness that critics of Buhari, a former military ruler, have often accused him of possessing.
However, beyond his personal qualities and all that, the new president needs to surround himself with people of knowledge, technocrats and experts who will also demonstrate a good level of readiness to ride above pettiness and first and foremost, put their knowledge and expertise on the table for the common good. The new president, indeed, has one of such technocrats and practical men needed to help share virile ideas and steer the ship of the country well enough. He has that man in Professor Yemi Osinbajo, the vice-president, former attorney-general of Lagos State and a very practical academic.
Furthermore, it is pertinent to note that there will be a lot of bumpy climbs and slippery slopes along the line for Buhari-Osinbajo and for Nigerians in the coming days, months and years, but let us hope that we can all be patient enough and cooperate with the genuine positive endeavours of the government. To achieve this, we should not be unduly apprehensive and acerbic especially in the first few months of the administration. Personally, I am not too sentimental about the so-called 100 days mantra, but all things being equal, I think there is light at the end of the tunnel. Nigeria has been lost in the wilderness of despair for too long. Now is the time to re-plot our national graph and seize the opportunity presented by the emergence of Buhari, with both hands. The country must move forward and that responsibility lies on the shoulders of our new leaders as well as the people of this country. Never again should we allow some group of bandits and plunderers to make away with our common patrimony and ride roughshod over the populace. The days of impunity and bare-face robbery of the treasury should be gone and gone for good!
Concluded.
As Buhari Steps In (Part 1) By Dele Agekameh
As Buhari Steps In
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