Friday Musings with Ayo Olukotun, ayo_olukotun@yahoo.com, 07055841236
“Do we have any other person that will challenge the President again? Whatever you call it, as far as we are concerned, we have one person and that is the ticket we will fly”
– Plateau State Governor, Simon Lalong, speaking on behalf of governors of the All Progressives Congress, The PUNCH, October 31, 2017.
“No governor can appropriate the power of endorsement to themselves. The Buhari I know is a believer in the rule of law. He has not excluded anybody”.
–Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, APC National Leader, The PUNCH, November 22, 2017.
Leadership, that vital ingredient that drives nations and people to achievement beyond their dreams, has been Nigeria’s soft underbelly for decades. Over-recycled, jaded politicians bereft of new ideas, exhausted army generals feigning democratic credentials and skilful manipulators of compromised electoral processes, straddle a disappearing unlucky nation.
On Monday, the Mo Ibrahim Governance Report for 2017 rated Nigeria as one of Africa’s worst governed nations, giving it an overall governance score of 48.1 lower than the African average, of 50.8. It is against this backdrop of violated hopes, false starts and myriad promises unkept, that the political class, as the opening quotes indicate, is debating the prospects of President Muhammadu Buhari’s second term. For, while the governors, obviously with an eye on their projected second term have overwhelmingly endorsed Buhari, Tinubu is quibbling by insisting that Buhari must face competition within the party. Time will tell whether Tinubu’s suggestion of playing by the rules is to polish up a predetermined agenda by making it more presentable, or whether it reflects a fundamental cleavage within the All Progressives Congress. In practical terms, however, the top heavy nature of power will ensure that if Buhari becomes a contestant, it is imaginable that only a straw contender, if any, will challenge him.
Of course, we are talking here about the limited nature of the intramural conversation within Buhari’s party. There is another school of opinion which finds the idea of Buhari’s second term so distasteful, not the least because it was articulated while he was in a London hospital hanging between life and death, that they will not dignify it with any serious comment. Representing this later school, is Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, who, in September, bristled, in response to journalists’ prodding, “Why are we talking about second term for heaven’s sake? I don’t understand this. I refuse to be part of that discussion”. This riposte reflects sensitivity and embarrassment at the very proposition.
To expand this point, recall that it was the chairman of the APC, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, who began the chant, while Buhari was in a London hospital, that there was no alternative to the then badly ailing President. Soon after that, sundry campaign groups such as the Buhari Support Organisation, mushroomed to open campaign offices and to demand that Buhari should contest the 2019 election. This was at a time when the country was on tenterhooks and government officials and Buhari’s family members requested prayers on behalf of the President.
Strange too is the fact that Buhari had not even clocked two years into his first term, when the groundswell was initiated. Additionally, the campaigns, even up till now, are not making any reference to Buhari’s performance in office, which should normally have formed the basis for his recontesting or to the facts of his medical history which included a vacuum in the nation’s affairs at intermittent periods.
Before pursuing the analysis, this writer asks the readers to allow a digression, by way of a short take.
Very often, as a nation, we have lamented the shortage of genuine policy dialogues that encapsulate the intellect of academics and the executive capacity of policymakers. Well, on Tuesday at the launch of a book, on Moving Nigeria from Consumption to Production, authored by Prof. Banji Oyeyinka, which took place at the Sheraton Hotel in Abuja, we had the beginning of a policy dialogue. Oyeyinka, a former Regional Director for Africa of UN-Habitat, managed to assemble high level officials such as Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, (SAN); Dr. Okechukwu Enelamah, Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment; Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed; Special Adviser to the President, Babafemi Ojudu; among several others. True, the reading culture of public officials in Nigeria, is nothing to write home about, but Oyeyinka, through the launch and an interactive colloquium succeeded in getting the central ideas of his book across to the policy elite who were hugely represented on the occasion.
It is no wonder that Osinbajo stated at the event that “in this book, there is a lot we need to take away and I am talking here about policymakers and policy executors especially. The book gives a complete description of how to make Nigeria work”. Hopefully, this submission will be the beginning of a reset in much needed, inspiring policy conversations between academics and policymakers, with the rest of the country joining in for the greater good of Nigeria.
To return to the initial discourse on Buhari’s second term, it should be noted that the President has the constitutional right to seek re-election, but curiously, he has not spoken about this, beyond body language, but his loyalists and supporters are shouting themselves hoarse about it. It is doubtful if the political class in Nigeria can be trusted with sound judgement in matters such as this. Morbid self-interest, cynical arithmetic about short term projections of gain dominate their actions, more so in a context where the state is viewed as political and economic resource. For instance, none of those clamouring for second term has spoken forthrightly about Buhari’s medical odyssey.
A sampler: On February 5, 2016, Buhari was away on a medical vacation for a week or so. On June 6 of the same year, he took another medical leave, lasting for 16 days for a persistent ear infection. This year, he took a similar vacation, lasting 49 days between January and March. When he returned to the country, he said he had never been that sick. Similarly, in an unprecedentedly long absence from work, Buhari was on medical vacation between May and August, 2017. He returned to the country after over 100 days. To be sure, his gait these days shows that he is much better than he ever was since his election in 2015. Nonetheless, it is almost irrational to pretend that for a leader in his mid-70s nobody should bother or ask any questions about the status of his health, should he decide to go for a second term. What is baffling, and also disturbing, is that there is little or no reference by those adopting him to this hard fact.
The other point to be made concerns the extent to which Buhari and the APC have been able to translate their loud campaign for change into effective policymaking. The jury is still out on this score, but at a minimum, it is crucial to insist that nobody should be seriously proposing a second term for Buhari without a dramatic upsurge in governance achievement.
That has yet to happen, and so it is difficult to see on what basis the campaign is being mounted. It is premature, indelicate and to an extent insensitive.
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