A few years ago, I had an interesting conversation with a professor of political science in his office at the University of Ibadan. We talked about many things but mostly about where Nigeria was headed under President Goodluck Jonathan’s watch. We discussed his unique place in our political history as the first Ph.D. holder to become President of Nigeria. Book man at the top.
An intellectual in government is not such a common sight anywhere in the world. We had always dreamed of someone like him who would infuse our politics with high-minded intellectualism to drive our national development by forcing our politics to rise over and above the mediocrity of bread and butter that birthed stomach infrastructure. And left us at the starting block of the global human development index.
As often happens among professors, my friend let his professorial mind roam beyond our primary subject of discussion. He suddenly interrupted our discussion to tell me something he had been doing for a few months as at that point. He said he had been keeping a record of what he called Jonathan’s unpresidential statements. He said he was doing so because he was bothered by the fact that the President was making statements that tended to lower both the prestige of his high political office and that of his primary constituency, the university. He mentioned a few of them and promised to publish them at the end of the President’s tenure in office. We laughed.
He was actually collecting presidential gaffes – errors of facts that embarrassed the President’s audience. I told him his self-imposed assignment reminded me of what an American did to their own war- time President, George W. Bush. He followed the President’s every utterance and collected his gaffs in two little booklets he called Bushism. His primary purpose, I would assume, was to amuse fellow Americans at the expense of their President, a man said to have some problems with verbalisation. I have lost my two copies of Bushim but I remember this entry in one of them: “Is our children learning?” I am sure the answer must have been yes, they were.
My professor friend and I have not met for sometime now. I would not know how many of those unpresidential statements, to use his phrase, he eventually collected by the time Jonathan left office in 2015. I suspect he did not collect enough to fill a book. He must have wisely abandoned the thought of publishing the few he collected because giving the public so little would do less than full justice to his professorial self-imposed assignment. And the former President might laugh at his puny effort.
I know there are men who collect presidential gaffes as a serious hobby similar to that of stamp collectors. Presidential gaffes amuse us but more importantly, they tell us that no matter how high a political office might be, it cannot protect its occupant from the common human failings of thoughts that freely wander and tongues that slip and give voice to thoughts better not expressed. I have been an indifferent watcher of presidential gaffes in our country. I now regret it.
When a president commits a gaffe, he puts his foot in it, as in, he embarrasses himself and his handlers, the men and women employed at public expense for the sole purpose of preventing him from lodging his feet in his mouth. There are grades of seriousness in presidential gaffes. Some are not serious enough to excite public comments; some are intended as harmless jokes, not mistakes of the head or heart; the more serious gaffes try to re-write history with facts that do not square with the facts. No, not fake news.
Some Presidents are good at cracking jokes that must not be mistaken for gaffes. But some Presidents who are not so gifted in that department often make jokes that are clearly at the expense of someone at the receiving end. You can tell how much this hurts when the person at the receiving end of the presidential joke plasters his face with a polite laugh that a snarling dog would envy.
We have been told by the president’s men that Buhari jokes and laughs a lot. It was good to know. When a President cracks a joke that makes him all too human, it resonates with the people. Former President Obasanjo is a past master at this. A reporter once asked him, “how are you, Mr President?” Promptly, Obasanjo replied, “I dey kampe.” A President speaking pidgin English? He brought down the house.
When Buhari returned from one of his overseas trips recently he was received by the dignitaries and the service chiefs. He shook hands with the inspector-general of police, Mohammed Abubakar Adamu, and told him that his job must be tough on him because he was losing weight. The reporters who covered the event did not tell us if Adamu was amused by what the President either meant as a joke or as a commendation for his devotion to duty.
Either way, it was a gaffe. For one, Adamu has always been spare of flesh; for another, it should be a given that the chief law enforcement officer faced with this horrendous security challenges cannot but occasionally lose his appetite and his sleep and both would tell on his physique.
Here are two of Buhari’s latest gaffes. At a meeting with his Chadian counterpart, Idris Derby Itno, in Makka, Buhari said that with the elections now over, “he would have more time to pursue the threat of terrorism with full force.”
Why is that a gaffe rather than a presidential promise? I offer you three reasons. One, our country does not face a threat of terrorism. It is hostage to full blown terrorism. Two, Buhari inherited the Boko Haram insurgency four years ago. We thought that his predecessor’s response to it was scrappy because Jonathan believed it was a northern conspiracy against him rather than a real and bloody threat to corporate Nigeria. We expected Buhari, as a northerner and a two-star general, to be more strategic and more decisive in putting an end to the insurgency. But matters have gotten much worse under his watch, what with kidnappers and killer bandits making a joke of our security forces.
Three, it must be shocking to this country and its people that the President chose not to tackle our existential threats because he needed to win his re-election first. I thought his first patriotic duty was to save the lives of the people he expected to put him back in office. While the President dithered, our country and its people bled and still bleed.
The second gaffe amounts, in my view, to holding a grudge. This week, Abuja indigenes led by the FCT permanent secretary, Christian Ohaa, paid the President a courtesy call on Sallah day. He told them: “I have just spoken to the senator on my left (Philip Aduda) and I told him that his constituency did not vote for me. So, I was very pleased that when they made the arrangement they put him very far away from me. I have all the results of all constituencies. I am not threatening FCT because to make FCT secure is to make myself secure and the Vice-President. I think they know that they are necessary evil; that was why they decided to vote for PDP.”
My professor friend would have screamed: unpresidential. Why would the President bear this sort of grudge against people who exercised their constitutional right of choice at the polls? I shudder to think that Buhari’s second term in office would be a pay back time for constituencies that rejected him on February 23. God, let me be wrong.
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Well said