As a spiritual person and a political analyst in this country with arrested development and where the god of the big man is his belly, I am persuaded that we should continue to thank God, the Almighty that Muhammadu Buhari, a soldier, a farmer, a politician and a Fulani big man won the 2015 presidential election.
Yes, we should continue to thank God whose strong arms alone provided a rainbow coalition of even strange bedfellows that brought President Buhari to power in 2015. I think we should for a moment translate from our natural realm to the spiritual for the purpose of this thanksgiving. I want us to calm down and reflect on the benefits of that 2015, the year some seers said Nigeria, the hope of the black nations on earth would be wiped out. Hold your breadth, and let us thank God that we as pilgrims, have made tremendous progress that a God’s General and a spiritual man, John Bunyan hinted at in his classic, ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’.
This purpose-driven note today is beyond a meretricious predictability when we often claim that if the taciturn and lanky army general had not won in 2015, there would have been uncontrollable violence that would have been triggered by his supporters’ spontaneous reactions throughout the country. That has been simplistic.
As we ruminate and lament over the frailties, failings and lack of concrete and measurable progress in the country today, the point I would like to drive home is that there have been some tremendous and intrinsic benefits the 2015 electoral victory of President Buhari has brought to this country. This is beyond the violence that was prevented by the historic victory.
As I noted earlier, we should not discount the place of spirituality in political management. The God of all grace will continue to rule in the affairs of men. Though today is not a time for discussion points on the implications of low spirituality in character crisis that has markedly affected our leadership, suffice it to say that the spiritual man is always needed for a national rebirth. Come to think of it too, I have seen and read about how authentic spirituality has exalted two great nations: the United States and South Korea. The foundation of the Constitution of the U.S, for instance, was laid with solid spirituality by founding fathers who were well guided by great spiritual men. That foundation culminated in their currency with an inscription: “In God We Trust”. Liberal democrats have not been able to remove that emblem of honour and ornament of grace.
Governance: Between The Natural And The Spiritual Man
THE ancient word reveals that: to the natural man, the intellectual is the highest department. He may have genius for literature, poetry, painting, sculpture; but he can never transcend the sphere of mind. The natural man is he whose perceptions do not extend beyond the region of the intellect, the part of his being, which he has in common with the animal creation. The natural man is he in whom pure intellectual reason and the merely natural affections predominate.
But though the natural man’s sphere is thus limited, there is glorious fullness within the limits; the perfection of art is yet unattained; the possibilities of knowledge are far from exhausted, though the noble minds of the long ages have been occupied in study and research. We need not undervalue the natural man’s sphere, so far as it goes.
But the spiritual man enters a region altogether unknown to, and hopelessly closed to, the natural man. It is the sphere of the unseen, the eternal, the spiritual; in a word, of God and the things of God. Regeneration in the power of the Holy Ghost involves and includes an awakening of new sensibilities to Divine and eternal things. It is as if a man were endowed with some new senses, and found revealed to him what his fellow men might not know. In this higher and further sphere, man can alone find satisfaction for his full powers. It is an encircling sphere that hallows all the lesser ones in which he shares with his fellows.
It appears that our people in power undervalue the power of spirituality as a critical success factor in office and in power. But today, I want us to see the thanksgiving in this context of power relation as a deep spiritual thing. And so we should thank God that General Buhari won in 2015. And here is the thing, if the then President Goodluck Jonathan had been re-elected in 2015, not many people were hopeful that he was going to be born again and expected to turn the country’s parlous state around. Most people would like to explain the victory of candidate Buhari in the context of votes cast against President Jonathan. That is some inconvenient truth that can’t be kept in a grave, anyway: The good man, Jonathan was not going to save his government from perdition.
Let’s not talk about ruling party in Nigeria at any time: only the president rules: even the law doesn’t here. And so, as I have repeatedly quoted Barack Obama here, “elections have consequences”. And the immediate consequence of a re-elected Jonathan in 2015 as we prepared for 2019 elections would have been a coalition more gargantuan than the APC lambasting the electorate that rejected the best president we would have had in General Muhammadu Buhari. So, if Buhari had been a possible candidate for 2019 after losing the 2015 election, I know the Asiwaju of Lagos and the Africa’s foremost statues-builder in Owerri and, of course, all the fanatical supporters of Buhari in most parts of the country would have artfully designed a big campaign message anchored on this rare gem called INTEGRITY of the General from Daura who would have been denied victory four times.
Certainly, we should as a nation thank the God of Knowledge for enabling us since 2015 to avoid that kind of scenario in 2019 when we should be regretting our senseless rejection of the best president we never had. It is certain that even the Owu restless Chief, the most prolific letter writer against poor governance and misrule who once fired a don’t-run long letter to President Buhari would have joined the bandwagon of the campaigners and town-criers who would be saying, yes, we told you so…we told you to elect a good man whose body language alone would have wiped out corruption that has eaten up our land.
Yes, but for the 2015 loss of Jonathan to Buhari, we would have been told in 2019 election season that Buhari was the only Nigerian octogenarian who could manage the economy to make N1 to $1. What is more, if Buhari had lost the 2015 presidential election, the Asiwajus, the Obasanjos, the Amaechis, the el-Rufais, the Lai-Mohammeds, the Oyeguns and most especially, the Dauras, the Kingibes, etc would have been taunting us with how the man would have revived all the railways from Daura to Calabar through Lagos and Enugu. If Jonathan had rigged the election in 2015, specifically, they would have been telling us today with some swashbuckling that the notorious state oil corporation, the NNPC they had actually promised to sanitise for operational efficiency and profitability would have been a world-class focal point for Nigeria’s prosperity, especially with the President’s 40 years experience in the oil industry.
Verily, verily, they would have told us that if Buhari had won the 2015 election, electricity generation would have beaten South Africa’s more than 40,000 megawatts for over 50 million people. The other consequence of that in 2019 would have been a powerful multi-party delegation to Daura begging the man to just come and use his body language to solve all our economic and political challenges since 1999. Besides, they would have said because restructuring or federalism had been in their manifesto, the Buhari administration would have changed the constitution to reflect a real change from this convoluted unitary system to genuine federalism, a demand President Buhari rejected on January 1, 2018 and his Party, APC curiously accepted 25 days after (January 25).
There is, therefore, a testimony about democratisation in Nigeria, the spring of hope for the black people on earth. We have a bounden duty, a responsibility really to thank God for the 2015 election upset for Jonathan, the democratic world agreed enhanced the Majesty of Democracy in the world’s poorest continent.
In the main, the 2015 election outcome has remarkably created a new political reality for us as a nation. For one thing, the wind of change Buhari and his men advertised has blown and we have seen the anus of their hens – so clearly. Only this weekend, someone posted to a platform Buhari’s remarkable speech at the Chatham House, United Kingdom almost three years ago (February 21, 2015). An extract from the statement he made there reads:
‘…What is the difference between me and those who elected us to represent them? Absolutely nothing. Why should a Nigerian President not fly with other Nigerian public? Why do I need to embark on a foreign trip as a president with a huge crowd with public funds? Why do I need to go for foreign medical trips if we cannot make our hospital functional? Why do we need to send our children to school abroad if we cannot develop our universities to compete with foreign ones…?
Thank God, we have seen the answers to the above rhetorical questions on presidential fleet, education and healthcare. The nation can testify to the president’s much vaunted integrity and how the New Sheriff in town’s body language has fought corruption even from the presidency to the uttermost parts of the country. We have seen the wonderful job President Buhari has done on the new-look NNPC that has wiped out fuel scarcity. The magical body language produced an interim Chairman of the arrowhead of anti-corruption crusade, Ibrahim Magu since November 2015.
The nation has seen the security situation from Borno through Benue to Taraba and Adamawa. Even Elder Olu Falae and other victims of Fulani herdsmen’s bloody missionary journey in Nigeria can testify to the consequences of the 2015 election that Buhari won. Never in the history of mankind has a nation’s farmers felt so patronised by a President of Fulani extraction who keep enjoining them (farmers) to endure Fulani herdsmen’s destruction of their farms. Now here is a new paradigm: the internal security chief (police IGP) and the defence minister have devised a new public information strategy: blame the law and not the lawbreakers in Buhari’s new security strategy paper.
You can see why we have to thank the God of all grace for the outcome of the 2015 election – yes, the election that has opened our eyes to the fallacy called integrity, all the unfulfilled promises and all parochialism we don’t have to worry about in the next campaign for a true leader of the most populous black nation on earth.
(***This relevant article first appeared here on February 18, 2018)
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