By Sonnie Ekwowusi
Addressing the Service Chiefs last week at the Presidential Villa, Abuja President Buhari pledged not to leave office a failure. This pledge, unsurprisingly, has been eliciting no small commentary. There are two deductions, in my humble view, from the aforesaid Buhari’s pledge. One: despite his seemingly unperturbed stance and lackadaisical attitude on how the public assesses his performance in power, President Buhari is very much conscious of his place in history. He is afraid that history will judge him harshly and negatively. His pledge portrays him as someone writhing in great pains to discharge a heavy moral burden for his misusing power. He is laboring in vain to come to terms with the pangs of his conscience. If there is one judgment capable of making one restless or causing one to lose one’s night sleep it is the inescapable penetrating judgment of one’s conscience.
As President Buhari’s storm-tossed tenure comes to an end the poor man is battling to pacify the pangs of his conscience. This was why Mr. President appeared to be telling us last week: “I am not a failure. I am a good man. I will not leave office a failure”. I agree with Reinhold Niebuhr that the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the needs of the society and the imperatives of a sensitive conscience or the conflict between ethics and politics cannot be harmonized in favor of the individual if the moral imagination of the individual does not seek to comprehend the needs of the society. Or, put differently, the most perfect justice cannot be established if the moral imagination of the individual does not seek to comprehend the needs and interests of his fellow men.
The second deduction from President Buhari’s pledge last week is that Mr. President is not in touch with reality. Enslaved by his gratified lusts and sheer fatuity President Buhari has refused to read the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin emblazoned on the walls of Aso Villa Presidential Building, Abuja. He is yet to understand that his 8-year tenure has come to a pathetic and ruinous end. For example, this is August signaling the end of 2021. Next year is a political alignment and realignment year, and, so literally does not exist. 2023 is an election year. So it is the end for Buhari. His 8-year tenure has been eaten by locust. Ofone, (the end) as the Binis say. For one thing, Nigeria’s collapse under Buhari cannot be reversed under Buhari. Even if President Buhari decides to be constantly repeating the morale-boosting silenzio Bruno(of Luca and Alberto) from now till he quits power Nigeria’s collapse under him cannot be reversed. More importantly, history had already judged President Buhari a failure. Not less than 95% of Nigerians had judged President Buhari a failure. After political stewardship comes one judgment. No second judgment. Last Friday the Nigeria Info Radio Station did a phone-in program on Buhari’s pledge that he will leave power a failure. Virtually all the callers unanimously concurred that President Buhari had already failed. All the female callers said that Buhari had failed.
At present, Nigeria exhibits the major symptoms or features of a failed State: incapacity of President Buhari to defend and maintain Nigeria’s territorial sovereignty as well as secure the borders of Nigeria from internal and external violation in consonant with sections 1 (2) and 2(1) of the 1999 Constitution; inability of President Buhari, pursuant to section 14 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution, to protect lives and property of the citizenry and to suppress internal insurrection, banditry, secession threats, murder, anarchy, tension, fear, suspicion, disorderliness, hatred and chaos everywhere in Nigeria. The impression one gets wittingly or unwittingly on listening to Mr. President is that he has lost control of the state of affairs in Nigeria. It is sad that Nigeria under Buhari has become a full-fledged failed State in the fashion of Somalia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yemen, Central African Republic and Myanmar. Security wise, Nigeria is unsafe. Nigeria has a weak rule of law. Foreign investors are scared stiff coming to Nigeria. Foreign investors already in Nigeria are contemplating quitting Nigeria. Many young Nigerians are freeing to Canada and other countries.
In his Inauguration Speech in 2015, President Buhari said: “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody. That is a lie because President Buhari belongs only to the Fulanis. He is a President who is mainly serving the interest of the Fulanis. If Nigeria is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-national society, why should Mr. President hold brief for Fulani herdsmen; an attitude which does not reflect the shared visions and aspirations of the variegated interest groups and nationalities that constitute Nigeria?. Whereas President Buhari has deployed Nigeria’s military intelligence to hunt down Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho he has refused to use the same intelligence to arrest and prosecute the murderous Fulani herdsmen who, in the last seven years, have been freely going about killing, maiming, and raping their victims and dispossessing them of their farm lands. Has it not dawned on this President that he is a failure for allowing the murderous Fulani herdsmen to be killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians? Despite the mounting people’s complaints that 90% of President Buhari’s political appointees are from the North, President Buhari has refused to alter this imbalance in conformity to the pluralistic and multi-ethnic nature of the Nigerian society and the Federal Character principle as enshrined in section 14(3) of the 1999 Constitution. This is another glaring evidence of the failure of President Buhari. These days hardly any day passes without some Nigerians being killed or mowed down or kidnapped or abducted. The most tragic is the abduction of school children. In fact we have lost count of the serial abduction of school children under Buhari. In fact parents whose children are in boarding houses in secondary schools in the North are now withdrawing them from such boarding houses to save them from being abducted. This is another evidence of the failure of President Buhari.
In case you are still probing why history is unkind to Buhari, conscience of the nation Leah Sharibu was abducted on February 19, 2018 by Boko Haram religious terrorists. Since then she has been held by her captors for refusing to convert to Islam. We don’t even know whether she is still alive or dead. Meanwhile the Buhari government is socializing with Boko Haram terrorists and even offering the so-called “repentant” Boko Haram terrorists amnesty. In February 2020, the Borno State Commissioner for Information, Babakura Jato, frayed up in anger upon discovering that the so-called “repentant Boko Haram” terrorists were not repentant at all because they had gone back to join their killer-colleagues in the killing field. He also said that a lot of soldiers are not happy about this ugly development. According to one Nigerian soldier, “We were at the Maimalari barracks when some of these Boko Haram people were released. The authorities are releasing them, but Boko Haram are killing soldiers that they capture. This does not make sense to us at all. We continue to sweep across the bushes to flush these people out, and then the government will release them. Does that not amount to wasted efforts?” Another soldier said, “You wonder why Boko Haram members are on the increase? When we arrest them and bring them here, some top people would come and start negotiating their release. But, I will tell you some of these so-called suspects are returning to the bush and they were never repentant.”
Can you now understand why history is unkind to Buhari?
