This week must be one of the most humiliating ones
for the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency.
Here and there, he has had to endure
insults and unpleasant observations from leaders of western countries he has
spent valuable time trying to impress. First, it was the gratuitous insult from
the United States president, Donald Trump, and then the British Prime Minister,
Theresa May, piled it on when she used Nigeria as an exemplar of crushing
poverty and retarded development. Nothing they have said about either Buhari or
Nigeria is new or strange; we already know what ails us. What no one seems to
know yet is how to upend this lousy government and pave the way for a more
productive, and forward-looking governance. From the feelers one gets by
reading and talking to Nigerians, it seems that many have already done the
calculations and resigned to the fate of another four years of Buhari. On this
one, I want to remain optimistic that it is not over yet for Nigeria, and that
a Buhari-less future is still quite possible.
To get to that future, we will have to go through
two sets of people. One is the Buharists, a cult of devout followers of the
President whose desire for a perpetual Buhari leadership has little to do with
the quality of his governance. I will argue that no Buharist, none whatsoever,
boasts of either the President’s intelligence or his deployment of it to
confront serious national issues. Instead, they exaggerate every mundane
insight he has into simple issues and praise his supposed moral integrity
because there is almost nothing else that continues to recommend him for the
Presidency. It does not bother them that Buhari does not articulate any vision
for the Nigerian state neither has he demonstrated that he is driven by a sense
of urgency to push his country beyond its state of poverty and disrepair. When
he returned from another medical tour in the UK recently and was interviewed,
it was frustrating that he was still stuck on the same old song about
corruption and jailing of offenders.
One can, of course, argue that Buhari also clings
to corruption as a solo agenda because he has to pander to those whose sole
demand on his Presidency has been for him to jail those who denuded the
nation’s wealth. Some of those followers, based on the issues that preoccupy
their politics, are either blind to the gnawing reality of growing poverty or
they have so much swallowed the All Progressives Congress propaganda they live
in an alternate reality. I am not sure there is enough time and reason to flip this
constituency.
There is another category of people who are not yet
resolute about voting for either Buhari, his opponents, or abstaining entirely.
This constituency has significant numbers that can sway the nation’s fate come
2019. In the days ahead, they are the ones to be convinced that given Buhari’s
antecedents and temperament in handling crucial national issues, he is not the
man for Nigeria’s future. While there are no definitive statistics to work with
to gauge the feelings of different demographics and their sentiments about the
elections, this group of voters is going to be inundated with the only weapon
of warfare that the Buhari administration can wield: corruption. We should
anticipate and preempt this message before they turn it into a loud party and
drown the voices of reason in their din as they did in 2015.
The idea that Nigerians are exceptionally corrupt
is a myth, and the belief that if we can get rid of corruption, Nigeria will
consequently prosper is unrealistic as no country can be said to have toed such
a teleological line. The myth was a dominant character in the 2015 elections,
and it fuelled the hysteria that all Nigeria desperately needed was an
anti-corruption-oriented leader to set the nation on course permanently. That
presumption paved the way for a Buhari Presidency. Even now, it is still a
potent weapon to impoverish Nigerians and retain them within a nightmarish
cycle of bureaucratic nothingness. Buhari and the APC keep propagating that
falsehood for the ends of self-perpetuation while they hold Nigeria down from
meaningful progress.
Rather than their conclusive claim that Nigeria or
even Africa is the way it is merely because of the economic crimes committed by
the political class, an easier diagnosis is that corruption exists as it does
because Africa is peopled by leaders like Buhari whose understanding of issues
of corruption is one-dimensional. They presume that it is axiomatic that social
progress and advancement will follow a corruption-free polity when the reality
is that rich and advanced nations too have not succeeded in wiping out
corruption from their systems entirely. When you compare the corruption in
Nigeria to what goes on in the USA, our Nigerian leaders, for all their
thievery, look like mere pickpockets. In fact, larger economies give rooms for
wider chances of crimes and abuse of power. What their systems have done
differently has been to build systems and reproduce social processes that
encourage continuous self-improvement to ameliorate occurrence of corruption.
They did not paralyse initiatives by taking corruption as their peculiar
cultural habit.
Unlike the practice Vice President Yemi Osinbajo
seems to have patented, they did not perpetually distract everyone with stories
of who stole what, rather than a narration of ideas of how to build a modern
society. The point here is not to downplay the pernicious effects of corruption
in our society. I believe corruption – as it exists in our society as both
economic crimes and abuses of political power- is a huge problem and it
accounts for the complacency of those who should strive towards building
systems that will strengthen our democracy. However, the obsession with
economic crimes and subsequent punishment of jailing people after taking them
through sensational media trials is an approach that leads nowhere in the long
run. Nigerians are not exceptionally corrupt; corruption is a universal human
culture.
Half of economic corruption in Nigeria, from the
mundane interaction where small sums of money are exchanged for favours, to the
mid-level ones you experience in government bureaucracies, up to the grand
level corruption in larger public systems and private corporation can be
eliminated by developing a modern system where transactions pass through
technological systems that surveil those processes. Buhari and Buharists, and
their mania with jailing people for their infractions have made us pass up
opportunities to have intelligent conversations about how to unclog our
unwieldy systems using modern intelligence and redirected our focus to gripe
over symptoms of deeper malaise.
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For 2019, the culprit on which the APC will lay all
the failures of Nigeria will once again be corruption, and they will define
that corruption as people belonging to other political parties carting away
national fortunes in Ghana-Must-Go bags. They will obscure any broader picture
that critically interrogates why things are the way they are. If there is an
appeal that one can make to the undecided folks, it is that we cannot continue
this way, forever taunted by the illusion of a corruption-free polity when what
we need now are intelligent and patriotic leaders who are pushed by a goal
higher than themselves. We no longer need leaders with a self-righteous fervour
who perform poverty to make the attainment of wealth look amoral. The leaders
who celebrate their watching a 32-inch television in the age where their
counterparts use smart devices to access the world are not an option for the
future. They should be allowed to rest their analogue feet in the past where
they belong while the nation coasts ahead with a leadership that is
enlightened, educated, and innovative enough to create wealth and build
sustainable systems that will guarantee a better life for all of us.
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