Fear is the oxygen of change. It is what makes it combustible too. Fear of old iniquities and a pervasive terror of the new, drives many a man or woman to scurry into a hole or pitch tent with the proverbial known evil. There is too much uncertainty with the new.
The fear of the unknown drove many to pitch tent with Goodluck Jonathan at the last general elections. Fear of old iniquities, the bleak present and an austere future drove many more to put their hopes in Muhammadu Buhari.
Buhari’s emergence however, complicates our perverse dynamics of corruption. His immediate past predecessor was no revolutionary – Jonathan was no hero and he never pretended to be one. He was not interested in upsetting the status quo or ridding the country of sleaze – he understood that Nigeria throve on vice thus he simply played the role of passive leader and enabler. His infamous ‘Stealing is not corruption’ assertion accentuated imagery of his leadership as an intellectual and moral aberration.
Enter Muhammadu Buhari, the redeemed dictator, self-proclaimed martyr and moral crusader. Buhari’s publicised distaste for corruption incites the separation and tension between moral and amoral personae. The attendant backlash from profiteers from the corrupt order, accentuates the thrill of seduction and revolt against the incumbent president’s anti-corruption campaign.
In the ensuing melee, hard choices have to be made and unpopular decisions taken, often to the detriment of the nation’s longsuffering citizenry. Although there are estimated benefits in the long run, very few Nigerians are ready to accept that the obnoxious hike in pump price of Premium Methylated Spirit (PMS) from N87 to N145 for instance, was a necessary evil amid the country’s bordello of chaos and institutionalised corruption.
While the measure became necessary to check the excesses and criminality of Nigeria’s buccaneering oil cabal and their cohorts in government, the impact is more severe on the citizenry. In the gale of severe criticism that trails the hike in fuel price, flashes of reasoning and spirited arguments in support of President Buhari’s ‘harsh but necessary measure,’ resonate across the social and political landscape.
This no doubt establishes burgeoning goodwill for the president among progressive segments of the citizenry. It also relates to trust. For instance, it can be inferred from various arguments in the social and traditional media that Nigerians are solidly behind Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign and occasional painful palliatives. Highly opinionated segments of the citizenry declare that they aren’t giving Buhari as much grief as they gave Jonathan because they trust Buhari “not to eat their yam” or leave it for random goats to eat.
Nonetheless, Buhari’s brazen offensive against institutionalised corruption is seen as unwarranted invasion, trespass and criminal intrusion into the debauchers and debauchees’ sacred space. In pre-Buhari era, immoderate lust for riches was dismissed as priapism of want – like drunkenness and promiscuity, that was the fault of fools and satyrs. Buhari’s animosity against the debauched and his stark polarity of good versus evil canonizes integrity and amplifies the significance of honesty in public service.
However, his inability to address the degeneracy within his cabinet will be counterproductive to his efficiency as president and anti-corruption crusader. Like this writer intoned in an earlier piece, of Buhari’s ministers, too many are vectors, mortal agents of the worst kind of viruses. Eventually, they will make his government food for worms. From the moment of their appointment, the infestation of Buhari’s administration commenced but Buhari and his political groupies naively maintained that if the head – that is, Buhari – be moral, the body (his cabinet and underlings) too will have no choice but get with his program.
Buhari confuses their obsequiousness, exaggerated display of loyalty and forthrightness with a heartfelt yearning to serve Nigeria and bolster his campaign to redeem the country from the jaws of his predatory ruling class. He mistakes his capacity to instill fear in the hearts of his ministers as a trait of effective leadership. But fear is never enough. Buhari’s ministers may fear him but they do not respect or appreciate him. They do not buy into his vision for Nigeria because the system that produced them negates Mr. President’s dream of an ideal state.
It is worthy of note that his ministers’ terror of him stems from their fear of being chucked off his cabinet. Their inability to arrogate authority to themselves and appropriate political celebrity for selfish ends, causes Buhari’s team great dissatisfaction. They consider themselves unduly chaperoned and monitored. Their predecessors, that is, ministers that served with the last administration, consider them Buhari’s parlour pets.
Lust, an immoderate hankering for riches, which was an intrinsic trait of the Nigerian presidency is under chains and lock in the current dispensation. This is a good thing for the nation but a tragedy to Buhari’s ministers and the ruling class. Lust characterised the aggressive, predatory cabinet of former President Jonathan thus making it the norm and coda of public service. Consequently, Nigerians imbibed and bought into the culture of corruption. Those that hadn’t the nerve or the connection to profit from the rot, assumed the role of voyeurs, watching as the nation drowned in a quicksand of debauchery.
As Nigeria mutated into a frightening theatre of politics and blood, Buhari emerged on the stage, donning the cape of a new-fangled alchemist hero. To actualise his fantasy of ‘change,’ he inserts Victorian ideals in a dysfunctional polity. The resultant clash of personal ethics and political culture is instructive. Tragedy morphs with comedy, the banal with lyric, and ideal beauty with the grotesque and obscene. Buhari’s culture and ethic of change soon conflicts with his cabinet’s. His ministers consider his politics a product of naive sentimentality, dubious patriotism and cynical sophistication.
The fact that Buhari ignores them to seek the ‘wise’ counsel of his ‘closest confidant’ outside his cabinet rankles his ministers. It resonates jarringly to them. They understand that they are highly dispensable and replaceable. Rumours that certain men and women on occasional visits to the Presidential Villa in Aso Rock comprise the president’s preferred replacements to certain members of his cabinet. A few members of his team that sucked up to him and played acquiescent ‘Yes-men’ cum errand boys have come to the sad realisation that, like they used Buhari as a means to their ends, the Retired General from Daura, equally used them as means to his own end. Although they considered Buhari incapable of playing dirty, they found out that the president’s seemingly bland and linear politics is a hybrid of self-fertilising forms.
Suddenly, they realise that Mr. President is aware that they are dubious change agents that rode into his cabinet on spurious waves of sentimentality, political indebtedness and dirty politics. Certain members of the presidential cabinet know they will not survive the current term or a second term with Buhari. From the president’s body language, they know he simply tolerates them. Buhari’s favourable run of goodwill among the citizenry also poses a grievous problem to them. Unlike the previous dispensation when they easily concocted and marshaled webs of brilliant propaganda against Jonathan’s government, they understand, albeit very sadly, that it is impossible for them to employ similar tactic with the incumbent regime. Buhari has to be corrupt or identifiable as an enabler of corruption for them to succeed with such plan.
NATION
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