“When you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way that when you die, the world cries while you rejoice.”― Ancient Sanskrit saying

The word on marble above shows the organic source of the topic. It is from a classic from Robin Sharma, the original ‘Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’. The topic derives from his book, “Who Will Cry When You Die?”
It is a time to resort to motivational writing for our leaders who don’t seem to be listening to what oracles and sages in the civil society including the media have been saying and writing.

Our leaders appear to have missed another point again even as they are still mourning the demise of one of them. They hate media reports of their listless and frivolous activities. They don’t like the constitutional role of the media – monitoring governance and holding government to account. They lean only on their understanding through their friends and relations who pose as consultants and experts. They don’t want to respect even the organic law of the land, the constitution, let alone public service rules and regulation.

They don’t like to comply with treasury rules as encapsulated in the financial instructions. They drop the appropriation acts as soon as the executive ink on the documents dry up. They don’t study editorials and commentaries as warning signals and writings on the walls at this time. They feel good that they don’t need the ‘irritation’ of independent media anymore. After all, the political economy of a free press is quite toxic and complicated at this time.

Our leaders feel comfortable that they can afford to recruit some unethical ‘media executives’ to do sundry dirty jobs for them. They can pay hack writers to publish what they would like to read. They now pay dubious ‘media entrepreneurs’ to monitor adversarial reports about them. They constantly receive awards from such artful ‘media entrepreneurs’ who have curiously polluted the media space. Sadly, they don’t understand the times. We have written and spoken a great deal of truths to their power. But they don’t want anybody’s voices of reason and wisdom. They don’t want the law to rule them. They are the law. They are the lords. It is the rule of lords, not the rule of law. They don’t want to hear that after elections, there should be governance.

They don’t care about the implications of winning elections and losing the people. They don’t listen to commentators who warn daily about the danger of assumptions that ‘money indeed answers all things’. They celebrate mediocrity as long as the mediocrities and neophytes they recruit are loyal and useful for tomorrow’s political engagements. They employ mercenaries daily to appear on early-hour television shows to deceive the people. They don’t know about the power of the truth they daily bury in the grave. They haven’t read in their classics that you can bury truth in a grave but it wont stay there. Yes, our leaders lean only on their understanding.

But we the people will not give up the fight for a new Nigeria that works for all. That is why I would like to resort to motivational talks to our leaders who hardly learn lessons. May be that will make them listen. Let’s share some tested words of life with them. I would like to encourage our leaders to get some soft power from words of grace from the masters such as Robin Sharma, among others who have been motivating successful business and political leaders who care to listen to what the civil society, including the media is saying to them. I mean leaders who will not bury the truth told to their power in the grave. And so let me introduce some wisdom nuggets from the classics of Sharma, “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”. It isn’t a compilation of editorials. It is a compact and useful book our leaders should read too. But they should also ask their political consultants and aides to buy for them the one that inspires today’s topic: ‘Who Will Cry When You Die?’

We are unarguably passing through an area of turbulence and our pilot, the commander-in-chief, is supposed to tell us that there is nothing to fear. But we the citizens in the flight can’t believe the hubris from our pilot that we have nothing to fear now. This is therefore a time to motivate our leaders at all levels that they need to do some introspection on who will genuinely cry in this country if they die today. We may even extend it to them to reflect well on ‘who will cry if their regime, sorry government dies today?’ That is the motivational message here today. It is also a time to stir their conscience about what another author and inspirational writer, David McRaney calls “the public goods game”.

“When you were born, you cried while the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a way that when you die, the world cries while you rejoice.”― Ancient Sanskrit saying

Does the gem of wisdom quoted above strike a chord deep within our leaders? Do they often feel that life is slipping by so fast that they just might never get the chance to live with the meaning, happiness and joy they think they deserve? If so, then this very special book (‘Who Will Cry When You Die?’) by leadership guru Robin S. Sharma, that has transformed the lives of thousands, will be the guiding light that can lead them to a brilliant new way of living and governance.

In this wisdom-rich manual, Sharma offers more than 100 simple solutions to life’s most complex problems, ranging from a little-known method for beating stress and worry to a powerful way to enjoy the journey through life while creating a legacy that lasts. When our leaders are finally ready to move beyond a life spent chasing wealth and popularity through media from pages and prime time without life-changing projects, to one of deep significance, this is the ideal manual for them. They need to reflect today on a life of significance, Rick Warren, another purpose-driven author has written extensively about.

Our leaders who keep recycling themselves from commissioner to governor and from governor to senator and from governor to minister should look into the seed of time and ask themselves: Who will cry when you die? If this set of dealers, sorry leaders feels that few people will miss them, it may be a time to make some changes. To give your best and to enrich other people’s lives takes a bit of effort, but it’s worth it. All these never-do- well leaders should aim to find personal fulfillment and live their lives to their full value. They can make an active change by using their time productively and recognising what is most important to the people. They will then realise that the best version of them is one that will surely be missed by others.

In ‘Who Will Cry When You Die?, Sharma offers advice on overcoming the difficulties of life while developing personality and skills.

Our leaders, once again, ask yourself: Who will care about you when you die? Have you ever thought about who will attend your funeral? Who will speak? Who will cry? And who will still be loving you? Asking ourselves questions like these can bring peace and calm to our daily life. These questions help remind us that we are human. We are not robots, and our days do not have to be repetitive.

Similarly, the Sharma’s manual urges us to schedule our daily life tasks. This is what will make our leaders to think more about accountability and servant leadership. They should pay attention to this schedule and identify when they are not spending enough time being human. They must allocate time for their loved ones, families, friends, and nature. They must also allocate time to being alone. Being alone allows us to think about life and the communities we serve.

They should do what they love to do. Scheduling, passion, and self-discipline are ideas that consistently arise throughout the self-development manual. Scheduling is an important art that everyone needs to master to become highly effective and successful. Our leaders who daily make mistakes even on simple governance issues need to take the basic lessons seriously. Leaders and managers should make a to-do list to be significant in office and power every day. The real secret to getting things done is to know what things need to be left undone. Our leaders appear disorganised and disoriented every day. That is why we are not making progress. An ancient word of life teaches us that we should let things be done decently and in order. I learned from a Middle-East ancient journal that being organised and orderly, is a national culture that is driving development in the United Arabs Emirates (UAE) an indeed most parts of the oil –producing and prosperous Middle East.

Studying ‘Who Will Cry When You Die? can help leaders live life to the fullest. People dying is a tragedy but often people’s lives are a greater tragedy. This is because they are wasting their time on frivolities on earth. We all want to leave a legacy when we die. We all want people to remember us forever. Let our leaders talk of life’s concept remarkably without losing its very essence. Our leaders should work to show themselves approved by the people they govern. Let’s look at some of our past leaders we cried for when they died. Most southwest political leaders like to don the famous Awolowo cap. But how many of them can be cried for as we continue to do for the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo who died since 1987 at the age of 78?

The iconic Awolowo, an uncommon strategic thinker and planner who was once referred to as “the best president Nigeria never had” introduced a free and compulsory basic education policy as fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy in Western Nigeria. He established a world-class regional university as a ‘glocal’ centre of research for tropical agriculture and medicine in Ile-Ife, (Unife). Another leader, Sir Ahmadu Bello in the North also established another world-class university, Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria (ABU). In the same c0mpetitive federalism spirit, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe established another remarkable University in Nsukka(UNN).

Inexplicably, a federal military government seized all the three centres of excellence in 1975 without paying compensation to the regions. But then, before we debate their return to the owners someday, let our leaders of today note that when the three leaders, (Awo, Bello and Azikiwe) died, we all cried for them. Just as the South African citizens and the world cried for Nelson Mandela when he died in 2013. And so our leaders should ask themselves today: Who will cry when they die?

***This relevant article first appeared here on August 13, 2023 but now useful for those who are still dancing on the grave of PMB without numbering their own days…

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

By Umar Ardo, Ph.D

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s decision to rename the University of Maiduguri as “Muhammadu Buhari University, Maiduguri” in honour of the late former President Muhammadu Buhari has raised fundamental questions regarding its logic, appropriateness and historical justice. While the gesture may appear symbolic on the surface, a critical examination exposes its lack of intellectual, cultural and moral grounding.

First and foremost, Muhammadu Buhari was a career military officer and a politician – not an academic, educationist or intellectual in any public sense. His legacy, whether praised or criticized, is rooted in his military career, his ascension to the presidency and his distinct governing style marked by authoritarian tendencies, economic conservatism and a controversial anti-corruption crusade. Renaming a university, a citadel of learning, knowledge, research and intellectualism, after someone whose relationship with academia is at best peripheral, if not outright tenuous, dilutes the institution’s identity and purpose.

⁠Universities are ideally named after figures whose lives and legacies exemplify educational values, critical thinking, nation-building through scholarship or transformative contributions to education policy. In this regard, Buhari’s record does not resonate with such ideals. The naming of the university after him is thus a clear mismatch between legacy and institutional identity.

Instructively also, the University of Maiduguri is neither situated in Buhari’s home state of Katsina nor in his geopolitical zone of the North-West. It is in Borno State, a region with its own rich historical figures, political icons and educational pioneers who could be more appropriately celebrated in a naming gesture. Buhari did not attend, teach at or found the University of Maiduguri. Nor did he demonstrate any special affinity or leave an indelible mark on the institution during his presidency. In this light, the renaming appears arbitrary and lacking not only in cultural relevance to the host community, but also lacking of geographical and emotional relevance.

There is also the question of historical fairness. The University of Maiduguri, along with six other federal universities, was established by the late General Murtala Ramat Muhammed in 1975 as part of a visionary policy to expand access to tertiary education across the country. Yet, none of these institutions bear his name. General Murtala’s short but impactful leadership laid critical foundations for Nigeria’s modern administrative and educational systems. If any leader deserves to have a university named after him – especially one of the seven he established – it is Murtala Muhammed.

To overlook Murtala and instead honour Buhari, who did not initiate nor significantly reform Nigeria’s higher education sector, is to distort historical credit and deny rightful recognition. Not to have thus honoured him is a historical injustice to the late General Muhammed.

If the intention was genuinely to honour President Buhari for his service to the country, several other avenues would have been more appropriate and meaningful:

• A military academy or barracks, given his identity as a soldier and former Head of State;
• A rural development institute, if one were to associate him with the “change” rhetoric and agricultural initiatives of his administration; or
• A public structure in Katsina, his home state, thereby maintaining a geographical and emotional resonance.

Honouring public figures posthumously is not inherently objectionable. But it must be done with a sense of proportionality, cultural sensitivity, institutional relevance and historical justice. The naming of national monuments or educational institutions should not be driven by political patronage, sentimental populism or hasty gestures of appeasement. This act, like the previous ones of the Tinubu regime, is a dangerous policy of politicizing institutions of learning by tying their identities to transient political figures rather than enduring national ideals or educational pioneers. Universities must transcend ephemeral politics and serve as beacons of critical inquiry, not as memorials to partisan figures whose legacies remain contested in the public sphere.

For any rational mind, President Tinubu’s decision to rename the University of Maiduguri, Alma Mata, after Muhammadu Buhari is ill-advised and conceptually misplaced. It undermines both the institutional integrity of the university and the historical contributions of those more deserving of such recognition. Nigeria must adopt a principled and thoughtful approach in immortalizing its leaders, especially in ways that inspire future generations and reflect the true spirit of the institutions being renamed. Rather than rewrite history to suit contemporary political narratives, we must honour history by upholding truth, merit and relevance. This gesture, unfortunately, fails on all counts.

The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.

The Economist

A dictator, then a democratic president, he died on July 13th, aged 82

Stepping off the ferry in Liverpool, Muhammadu Buhari was struck by the city’s orderliness. People obeyed the rules, observed the 18-year-old, who had won a competition to spend the summer in Britain. The rules didn’t even have to be written; society just worked. Order was also paramount at military college in Nigeria and the English town of Aldershot. The austerity of officer training, the career of choice for bright young men from the newly independent country’s north, suited the former head boy. He thrived in the repetitive drills, the hikes across unknown terrain in the dead of night.

Nigeria needed a good dose of military discipline, he thought, when thrust to the head of a military government by his fellow senior officers on the final day of 1983. It was an apparently unexpected appointment, but one that he took to with his usual rigour. The problem was not the country’s weak institutions, worn down by a flood of oil wealth, he thought. No, the enemy was the laziness and greed of Nigerians and their feckless civilian leaders, who had ridden the wave of black gold since 1979. In the War Against Indiscipline tardy civil servants would be forced to do frog jumps, queues whipped into line and hawkers who dared despoil the streets swept away.

But Nigeria refused to bend to Mr Buhari’s will. Almost 500 politicians and businessmen were arrested for corruption and sent to jail by military tribunals. A new currency was issued to flush out the stashes piled floor to ceiling in the homes of the elite. For many military men this purge was too close for comfort—and too uncompromising.

With Mr Buhari unwilling to bow to the IMF and devalue the naira, the economy groaned under the weight of low oil prices and external debt. Journalists were locked up, drug dealers executed and diplomatic relations with Britain broken off when a British customs officer discovered the previous regime’s transport minister trussed up in a Lagos-bound crate marked “diplomatic baggage”. When Ibrahim Babangida, the wily chief of army staff, announced the bloodless overthrow of Mr Buhari in August 1985, he complained that the stern general had opened a gulf between the military and the masses.

After more than three years under house arrest in the south of the country, Mr Buhari was released to his family farm in Daura, Katsina state. Detention destroyed his first marriage, with Safinatu, the mother of his first five children. But he quickly found a new wife, Aisha, who gave him five more. Several years of tending to his cattle and orchards followed; then some years chairing an oil trust fund under Sani Abacha, a military dictator far more brutal than Mr Buhari. As Nigeria moved towards democracy, so too the former general proclaimed himself a born-again democrat. It was no longer soldierly discipline that would save his country, but a rigid deference to the law.

Mr Buhari lost three successive presidential elections, his support never breaking out of the Muslim-dominated north. Each time he unsuccessfully appealed against the result, suffering the interminable court process, he said, to head off anarchy and bolster Nigeria’s nascent democratic institutions. That did not stop his supporters turning on southern Christians in 2011, leading to more than 800 deaths. He succeeded on the fourth go in 2015, the first time an opposition candidate had defeated an incumbent at the ballot box in Nigeria. But while the promise to once again wage war on corruption resonated with a jaded populace, victory came only in a coalition with politicians from the south-west.

What was never in doubt was his personal probity, an ascetic egalitarianism first nurtured at boarding school, where the British teachers favoured boys with good grades over those with gold wristwatches. When he came back to power in 2015 he reported just $150,000 in a single bank account, a drop in the ocean of wealth hoarded by Nigeria’s elites.

But though he never wavered in his crusade against corruption, Mr Buhari took a different approach second time round. In the 1980s he had been in a hurry. Thirty years later his nickname was “Baba Go Slow”, as he took months to name a cabinet and graft cases inched their way through the courts. This, his supporters argued, was deliberate, a strategy of gradual reform. Others saw a tired old man, lacking energy. When he announced he was leaving Nigeria for medical treatment in London at the beginning of 2017, his tall, already rail-thin frame was shrinking further inside his calf-length tunics, his high cheekbones painfully prominent.

Meanwhile, as in the 1980s, low oil prices were taking their toll on the Nigerian economy. And, once again, Mr Buhari ordered the nominally independent central bank to defend the naira, stamping out a nascent devaluation in summer 2016 when it was clear the currency had further to fall. Dollars were rationed and imports of everything from toothpicks to rice banned. Inflation soared and growth was choked off. The brutal jihadists of Boko Haram were pegged back, but continued to mount hit-and-run attacks and send young girls to blow themselves up, regardless of the government’s claim that the Islamist rebels had been “technically defeated”. Money-hungry militants returned to sabotaging oil installations in the Delta, after Mr Buhari cut short an amnesty programme. And Christian farmers and Muslim herders clashed over land in the country’s febrile centre.

Mr Buhari would occasionally break into slight gap-toothed smiles, but his jokes were invariably of the lecturing variety. His wife, when she publicly criticised political appointments, was told she belonged in “my kitchen, my living room and the other room”. Journalists were “too inquisitive” and should get on with some more investigative work. But, as hard as he tried to mould his countrymen in his image, Nigeria, his beloved, unruly country, could never be tamed.