As a nation we prefer to operate more on the basis of default than by the book. As a nation of experts in cutting corners, we always like to circumvent rules and regulations. We do not care much about how things should be done. In our bizarre conflation of the real and the ideal, we tend to sacrifice propriety at the altar of folly.
We always think we can achieve results without following procedures. We hate any notion of due process in both our acts of commissions and omissions. As rulers and ruled, as leaders and followers, we like to subvert ethics in the way we do our things.
The way we carry functions assigned to us is exclusively unique to us. Due to our penchant for selecting the default mode, we have now succeeded in running our country aground. Nigeria is totally prostrate out of sheer insouciance. By all measurement yardsticks and development indices, the country is completely insolvent. Only in Nigeria you can find citizens chiseling at the building blocks of the values and institutions that strengthen our sense of nation with glee. Does it then surprise anyone that democracy in Nigeria is not yielding dividends?
In our kind of democracy, we either go for someone from the section of the country or someone that shares our group identity. Be that person a President or the Governor of our state. Reception accorded to a leader depends mostly on his or her tribe or religion. If the leader is one of our own, we tend to overlook his or shortcomings and infractions. This is the pattern that is emerging from our postcolonial socio-political order. We only see the good of the person that is from our tribe or religion. This way we do not like to see anybody criticize a leader that comes from our tribal or religious group. Just some years down the line in our democratic journey, precisely during the tenure of President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian President from a minority group in the southern part of Nigeria, very few Nigerians criticized his style of leadership objectively. Defenders of the President were always on the look out for the motivation of his critics. There was indeed a whole army of defenders of his rule out there, ever ready to pounce on anybody perceived to be an opponent of their President. Nobody cares about the cogency of criticism leveled against him as the President of the entire country.
Weather President Jonathan is right or wrong, he is right all the same in the eyes of his blind supporters. The merit or otherwise of your criticism of the President is viewed from the lenses of your identity either as a Christian, a Muslim, or your ethnicity, or even the section of the country you come from. Nobody cares about the currency of your criticism. As far as you are suspected to belong to the tribe of the outsider, your opinion is not welcomed. You are treated as if you do not share the same rights and privileges with those Nigerians that see the good in the one they exclusively see as their own President. Government policies are equally viewed with skepticism, weather such policies are intended to advantage the section of the country that happened to produce the President of Nigeria, or weather they are meant to undermine people from other parts of the country. This attitude has been with us for some times now. Towards the end of his tenure, President Jonathan was perceived either crudely as the President of the people of southern Nigeria or that of Christian Nigeria, where Muslims were excluded from the affairs of state.
Now it is the turn of the one from the other section of Nigeria, those that saw themselves as underdogs under President Jonathan. As President Muhammadu Buhari demonstrates his own style of rule the story is obviously similar, as if there is a reversal of roles in the drama that is playing itself out. There does not seem to be clear difference with President Jonathan. President Buhari’s diehards are largely Muslims of northern Nigerian extraction, with a heavy concentration of them from the Northwest and Northeast geopolitical zones. A large section of these uncritical followers behave as if the President of Nigeria is only the President of their own section of the country. As if they are taking cue from Jonathan’s supporters, they too do not want hear that their man is derailing. We are by their brazen shenanigans experiencing the antics of hordes of blind supporters of a President. They too do not want to hear anything negative about their man. We are all living witnesses to how the digital warriors of President Buhari blindly extended their support to him. In their reckoning, their President must not be criticized because he has come to straighten Nigeria, which has been suffering from long years of serial abuse and misrule. Again, like the supporters of Jonathan, Buhari’s supporters do not want anybody to point out his failures.
Rightly or wrongly, in the usual messianic streak they have been consistently associating with the President, he must not be criticized in the manner he chooses to execute what they see as his onerous efforts of rescuing Nigeria from the brink of collapse. From his mien and action, the President seems to have convinced himself that he is doing just what his supporters say he has come to do. In this line of reasoning, the ardent supporters of President Buhari have promptly proceeded to classify other Nigerians as mere wailers who do not exercise patience over how President Buhari is running the country. How they see you at any moment all depends on your stance on issues of the day. They do not care if you too sympathize with the huge mess that he was anointed to preside over. Anyway, they are not willing to see the inadequacies of a leader they considered infallible, especially as they uncritically extol his personal integrity. These blind followers of a President whose actions clearly border on total incompetence do not want to hear even an iota of constructive criticism leveled against him notwithstanding the good intentions of his critics.
Putting President Buhari under the radar would definitely reveal his weaknesses. From all indices, the President’s performance has failed to measure up to his rhetoric as well as the anticipation and great expectations that swept him into power in 2015. In this election season, his supporters do not want to hear anybody talk about his failings, which even his vociferous wife has consistently been expressing. She is not happy with her husband’s poor performance in office. On two occasions she revealed that her husband is not the one running the show of the government he was elected by majority of Nigerian voters. As a matter of fact, from Mrs. Aisha Buhari’s harangue, it is clear the President is not the one in charge of his office. She accuses some invisible forces of remote controlling her husband, the President. In my opinion too, President Buhari does not strike me as one who is adequately prepared to administer a complex polity like ours.
Based on these weighty accusations, it is expected that normal individuals in a discerning society will pause to ask questions, to find out why the person they invested too much hope in is not delivering on his promises to them. If people are convinced that the President cannot administer the country effectively, they should tell him to give way to more competent hands. In a country of over 180 million people, it will be an insult to the collective intelligence of the nation to hold on tenaciously to an erroneous view, which says only one individual has the requisite qualities to provide good leadership either because of his personal integrity or incorruptible character. Millions of Nigerians these share these same qualities. The problem here is that our primordial sentiments are constraining our abilities to discover those Nigerians that can do the job even better. In any case, the fact of the matter is that we cannot move this country forward based on pure and undiluted primeval sentiments.
As things stand, the level of government dysfunction under President Muhammadu Buhari is very alarming. The prospect of having another four years of lackluster tenure is unimaginable, especially when one looks at mammoth economic hardships, widespread poverty and ignorance, security threats engulfing the country, decline in law and order, deepening corruption of power, ethno-religious conflagrations, rise of criminal non-state actors and collapse of institutions and values that border on the state of anarchy. Going by his advance in age and health challenges, President Buhari should have done himself a world of good by becoming our Nelson Mandela. Nothing stops him from preparing a worthy heir apparent from the very competent hands within the ranks of his party apparatchiks. If truth must be upheld, President Buhari should at this point be thinking of retirement from active politics. He should choose the path of honor instead. He should also demonstrate his love for Nigeria in a manner that supersedes his personal ambition.
