Frail looking 74 year-old President Muhammadu Buhari, whose health is being managed by British medical experts for an undisclosed ailment, may gradually be adorning the garb of a statesman, as expected of him by true patriots but criticized for not living up to that expectation because of his divisive sectionalist tendencies. The president is perceived by the majority of the people of the geo-political zones of South South and South East Nigeria because of his political scorched earth doctrine of 97 per cent and 5 per cent votes casts for him as a direct proportion of government attention and patronage and as punishing them for freely expressing their democratic right of freedom of choice. These feelings are further enforced by the elevation of sectionalism in favour of the north for their massive electoral support, in a classic case of winners taking all in most appointments into strategic government positions, to a near state policy. Despite the usual struggle for power mostly expressed through ethno-religious sentiments, Buhari’s political scorched earth doctrine is unprecedented in the history of Nigeria’s electoral democracy.
In 1999, President Olusegun Obasanjo was roundly rejected by his own people of South West Nigeria. Again, in 2003, following a determined attempt to take power back from the South by the conservative north saw an impressive outing by then Gen Muhammadu Buhari that led to Obasanjo’s loss of votes in key northern states of Kano, Borno, Katsina and most part of the Muslim north. Interestingly, in both cases, Obasanjo did not apply the Buhari doctrine on the people who rejected him at the polls. Rather, he took deliberate steps to re-approach them by extending a hand of fellowship first to his own people of the South West by appointing Chief Bola Ige a leading member of AD into his cabinet, then Mahmud Waziri the chairman of APP as special adviser. Interestingly, these were the coalition partners that ensured his humiliation on the home front. By 2003 presidential election, the result of this political astuteness was in favour of Obasanjo. AD, the dominant party in the South West adopted him as their sole candidate and effected this adoption by not fielding a presidential candidate in order to forestall a divided Yoruba vote in the face of a strong challenge from the North. Again in 2007, in order to preserve the dominance of PDP, Obasanjo, kept faith with the zoning arrangement that rotates presidential power between the North and the South every eight years of two consecutive terms of four years. As the leader of the PDP, Obasanjo didn’t narrow his choice of successor to the Christian North, among whom he enjoyed unalloyed support throughout his electoral contests but applied realist pragmatism in picking Umar Musa Yar’Adua from the hostile North West state of Katsina, the home state of his strongest opponent, Muhammadu Buhari. The result of the this strategic move of giving the presidency to a region and people who attempted to scuttle his second term bid by massively voting against him, was the drastic diminishing of the electoral fortunes of Gen Muhammadu Buhari. He lost Katsina state and recorded lower votes in 2007[6.6m] as against [12.7m] in 2003, in what can be described as an unimpressive outing.
Enter former president Goodluck Jonathan, who ran for president against the zoning arrangement of the PDP in 2011 and expectedly met with stiff opposition from the conservative northern establishment, which this time worked in concert with a fraction of some progressive elements. Goodluck Jonathan emerged victorious but suffered a heavy electoral loss in the establishment strong hold of the North East and North West. Similarly, Goodluck Jonathan did not set out to chastise the regions where he recorded electoral loss. Not only did he take deliberate steps at rapprochement, he matched his intentions with visible achievements in these regions. He did not shut out the regions of North East and North West from his kitchen cabinet and Security Council on account of their electoral choices. Two out of his three NSAs, AliyuGusau and SamboDasuki were Hausa-Fulani Muslims from the North West states ofZamfara and Sokoto respectively. His influential PPS was Hassan Tukur from the North-Eastern state of Adamawa. Three out of four of his IGPs were police officers from the North West, where he recorded his greatest electoral loss.Goodluck Jonathan attempted to solve the educational deficit in the North by establishing universities in states that did not have federal universities. In order to resolve the Al majiri question, the Goodluck Jonathan administration established the Al majiri schools that aimed to integrate Islamic religious studies with universal basic and secondary education.
Therefore, when President Muhammadu Buhari, excluded the entire South East and South South from his kitchen cabinet and scorched the South East even more by exempting it from his security council on the grounds of what some of his supporters described as ‘’unworthy of trust’’, was a negative political culture that has further polarised the nation. Matters were made worse when the fragile peace in the restive oil producing Niger Delta was disrupted by a series of policy inconsistencies that appearto put a fundamental question on the wisdom and usefulness of the amnesty programme.One of such was the reduction in thefunding of the amnesty programme by the Buhari administration, thereby making the amnesty office unable to meet up with its obligations to ex-agitators. The abrupt scraping of the Maritime University that was one of the few physical achievements of the Goodluck Jonathan administration in his home region was a major policy mistake that ignited a collective passive protest of the Niger Delta people against the Buhari administration. The extreme marginalization of the South East pushed the people of the region to an edge where the separatist movement of NnamdiKanu’s IPOB was conferred with enormous legitimacy. For the first time since 1967, the Biafra agitation is being trumpeted loudly.
The failure of victorious Muhammadu Buhari to unite the country behind him by reaching out to every part of Nigeria and allay the fears of people who voted against him was a major failure of common sense of statesmanship in the art ofstatecraft. The grave consequence of these missteps in the wrong direction at the wrong place haunts the government and people of the entire Nigerian federation. A politically divided nation cannot achieve economic prosperity. The tragedy of these missteps is that for nearly two years we lost as much as we would have gained as a nation in peace and security.
However, following Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s common sense diplomacy to the South South and South East of Nigeria during his acting presidency; a move that was guided by the critical elements of negotiations, concessions and reconciliations have yielded positive results as evident in the gradual reprieve from economic strangulation largely caused by the decline in oil production in the Niger Delta, which was a direct result of the well-coordinated oil installation sabotage by the Avengers. Osibanjo’s efforts at a negotiated solution to the crisis in the Niger Delta as against Buhari’s strong arm approach, was received by the public favourably. Therefore, a president Buhari who is quite sensitive to public perception as a grand master of the game of minds, coupled with the stark realities of the futility of military approach acceded to the negotiated terms of peace, which has seen a halt to militant activities on the nation’s oil and gas infrastructure, leading to an improvement in crude oil revenue. In a sign of a clear and significant departure from its previous positions, which led to a conflagration in the polity, the federal government has increased the funding for the amnesty programme by an appreciable amount of 35 billion naira up from 20 billion naira in the previous year. This has enabled the amnesty office to clear backlog of salaries and stipends of beneficiaries up to the end of 2016. The contentious Maritime University has been re-established with a commitment to get it off the ground in the next academic year which begins in September. Interestingly also, the federal government finally accepted NnamdiKanu’s court-granted bail as probably the first step to douse tension among the people of the South East. These appreciable steps at building a united Nigeria should be deepened by the now acting president [or is it coordinating vice president] in order to make the postponed healing day, nearer.
