By Toyin Falola
As it so often tends to be with people who have headed a country, Muhammadu Buhari’s strongest sentiments lie in the hearts of the millions he once led. They stretch far into the years when he rallied supporters under the umbrellas of different parties, losing each time to his and their dismay, to those days when he finally ascended to the highest office in 2015. It is sobering now that he had unwittingly implied the same when, in the famous line of his inaugural speech, he said, “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.” My thoughts here resonate strongly with this line as it easily forms a template by which we can easily assess his presidential years. That and the mantra of “Change,” upon which his party rode to electoral victory. Among other promises, Buhari made severe commitments to reform.
At the inception of his first term, he aired his intentions to apply himself to overhauling public institutions, pursuing unity, and, very importantly, tackling corruption. At the time, no other promises would have sounded much better in the hearing of Nigerians. A recession was well and truly underway. Goodluck Jonathan had disappointed in his management of insecurity and economic headwinds. Combine that with an austere demeanour and a thorough job by political spin doctors at purging the incoming president of all disrepute, and no candidate sounded like a greater fit. Still, the outcome of the election was probably more polarizing than many were keen to accept. For one, Buhari was a candidate under a coalition party, one that could now effectively mobilize and trumpet his candidacy to the mainly Muslim north. On the other hand, the Buhari-Jonathan contest of 2011 left hundreds dead in the wake of the latter’s victory, implying that both sides had strategic and pernicious maneuvering to undertake on their road to office.
It did not help that Buhari had maintained explosive rhetoric, stating in 2012 that baboons and dogs would all be soaked in blood if the 2015 elections went the same way as those of the previous year. Thus, when, by the end of the presidential elections, Jonathan conceded defeat and retreated quietly from national politics, everyone breathed a heavy sigh. The decision by Buhari’s camp to focus on security and corruption was astute. Research around the same time had shown that nearly 90 percent of Nigerians were concerned about corruption and crime, with over 70 percent being worried about Islamic extremism. Who better was there than to handle these matters than someone whose leadership record was not merely military but political too?
Sadly, however, the Buhari mystique was not built to be durable. The man, both by design and happenstance, would begin to refute all that he had artfully concocted as representative of the kind of leader that Nigerians wanted. First was his decisiveness. The Buhari that oversaw the ‘War Against Indiscipline’ in the 1980s with so ruthless a fervour that Wole Soyinka was forced to describe it as having been carried out “to sadistic levels,” now dithered at selecting the appropriate lieutenants to carry on a business of governance agreed by all as demanding urgency. Beyond earning him the nickname ‘Baba Go Slow’, his decision came at a cost to the country in terms of administrative efficiency. It is common practice for foreign investors to measure the quality of people appointed to key government offices, especially economically strategic outposts, in the early days of new administrations. These choices set the tone for what kind of national policy was coming down the line before they even began operating, and so were the form of influencers for the much vaunted ‘investor confidence’. So, even if he had referred to ministers as “noisemakers” who left the real work to civil servants and technocrats in a private chat with French journalists, such vacillation was not likely to win him friends among them.
But that was just one out of the many ominous clouds that always hung around the man who had been so heavily marketed as a reformed democrat. Now and then, his exact thoughts about the Nigerian condition and how to rectify it would slip out. There were the failed promises, too, though some key ones, particularly in security and economy, could only have arisen from fantasy, to begin with. Buhari had notably contested the utility of the fuel subsidy scheme. He lampooned it as fraudulent and rigged to enable theft of the nation’s resources. When he came on, the expectation was that he would plug a crucial area of revenue leakage for the Federal Government. This was an illusory goal. Buhari was more than particular about provoking the already tense sensibilities of Nigerians and wound up allowing the scheme to run through his administration, even as prices rose steadily.
It is here that the Chinese president, Xi Jinping’s condolence message, is perhaps quite suitable for his supporters. The Chinese leader had described the former president as abiding by policies that were fit for “national conditions.” And that rings true to the extent that Buhari had truly been up against the dissent that would have accompanied any upsetting economic moves. If he had entirely scrapped the fuel subsidy, food prices (already spiked by increasing hunger and alarming unemployment) would have soared. But it does little to justify the peril that his position created from a leadership point of view. With several red flags about the Nigerian economy going downhill, fast, Buhari was unmoved.
Worse still, he used a combination of unorthodox stopgap policies and high borrowing. With Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele as his wingman, his government steadily herded Nigeria to the brink. Interestingly, the same man had pilloried his predecessor for the first few years of his administration for the mismanagement of the economy. It then became a theatre of hypocrisy as the man once touted as Nigeria’s ticket to sanity unraveled slowly at the seams.
Aside from this, analysis of Buhari using the same puritan template with which he had been sold reveals alarming flaws. It is only to be expected that a man proclaiming a war on corruption should embody the very values that make him believable. These, of course, include transparency, accountability, and respect for fundamental human rights. The Buhari government had repeatedly promised to publish the names of people sponsoring terrorism, but his team only persisted in inventing varieties of excuses for the failure to publish. The president also went after staunch critics of his government, particularly members of the media. Under Buhari, the country witnessed a series of direct assaults on members of the press who were simply doing their lawful duties.
Since his government was famed for suspect appointments, including of people charged with the same corruption he had promised to fight, he was locked in a multidirectional battle to suppress challengers. His was a brazen resolve to do everything but defeat the ills he swore to uproot. While he expressed publicly his intentions to guarantee press freedom, the actions of his government suggested that his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. On this score, the tenure easily qualifies as a free-for-all stampede on accountability. Even the First Lady, Aisha Buhari, could hardly resist helping herself to a share of the impunity pie. In 2022, a student of the Federal University of Dutse, Aminu Adamu, had captioned a photo of the former first lady in a tweet, “Mama is feeding fat on poor people’s money.” Her response was a quiet abduction by the secret police and detention for two weeks. During that period, he allegedly suffered torture and ill-treatment, both proclaimed by Amnesty International as a brazen violation of his human rights. Her husband’s government punctuated his tenure with enforced disappearances of critics, many on trumped-up charges conveniently shrouded by the controversial Cybercrimes Act. The indifference to the sanctity of human rights and the rule of law was sure to permeate to his lieutenants, who wielded state resources at will in quashing enemies. Once, former Inspector-General of Police, Usman Alkali Baba, had charged officers attached to a new campaign to combat insecurity in the Southeast to worry less about human rights violations in the execution of their duties. Through the Buhari years, scenes like these were the norm. Save the fact that it was an entirely different age from what obtained more than forty years prior, the playbooks remained similar in their substance. Granted, then, that few, other than fanatical supporters of the president, would still be amenable to the illusion that the former general had shed his old skin.
While Buhari had decisively dented his image with his hand, the crop of people most affected would easily be the youthful population. His comment insinuating that Nigerian youths were a band of lazy folks waiting to absorb windfalls from the government was one of the many disaffecting moves he would make. The president had obviously failed to appreciate the intensity of effort invested by the brimming population of young people in competing on a global scale. He also refused to consider the institutional hurdles that the demographic is frequently forced to surmount to reach its peak. And even when they do, the struggle is encountered in staying there. If the president had been informed of nothing else, he should have been aware of the massive outflow of talent to foreign countries in a bid to escape the stifling national environment he now led. Buhari’s dismissive countenance towards young people reared a distinctly uglier head in 2020, during the # EndSARS protests. There, the military fired on protesters clutching the Nigerian flag as they sang the national anthem, and for the longest period, denied it. Even Buhari’s ministers participated in the farce by staging a comical attempt at investigation. The panels of inquiry that followed had mixed successes across the board, with elusive accountability by those responsible for ordering the massacre. And each year, people returned to the Toll Gate to remember those who were lost under the forceful gaze of policemen. #EndSars cannot be written off for many reasons.
The president’s attitude was, at the time, already typical and predictable. In the past, he had outrightly ignored public pressure for action by the presidency, maintaining so still a silence that the office could as well not have existed. For instance, as the farmer-herders crisis assumed a more horrific intensity, Buhari’s silence had led many to wonder if he was choosing his ethnic loyalties over the country. On occasions when he eventually responded, the lukewarm quality was hardly unnoticeable. Directly antagonizing youths was his ban on popular social media X, then known as Twitter, for several months. The prelude was the app’s deletion of his incendiary tweet on Biafra — “Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Biafra war. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.” That comment had sparked outrage as it prodded the delicate nerves attached to the darkness of the civil war to date. So, when Twitter responded by removing it as it stated that it was in contravention of its “abusive behavior” policy, the government pounced with a ban on the app two days later. It was one thing for a back-and-forth to have ensued between the president and the giant social media company, and another to impose an outright ban on a device that was both a means of livelihood and a coping strategy for many Nigerians. Considering that there was already a great deal to be aggrieved about, including the strikes by the Academic Staff Union, Buhari simply succeeded in enlarging his flaws.
Yet, if Buhari’s failure to appeal to youths had heightened desires for the end of his tenure, his naira design policy made it more definite. The man’s interest in seeing that Tinubu, the godfather who had helped him into office, did not make it there himself spurred a descent into the absurd. The Central Bank ordered a currency redesign with the official excuse that it was routine, intended to tackle kidnapping, vote-buying, and encourage a pivot to a cashless economy, but all while failing grandly to acknowledge capacity gaps. Moreover, the bulk of transactions in Nigeria’s majorly informal economy are conducted in cash. Springing a redesign on the populace within an extremely tight window of three months was therefore a call for a frenzied dash.
As matters became more chaotic, details emerged showing that the leadership had failed to explore all consultation mechanisms and potential outcomes before embarking on the redesign. The data was clear: too many people relied on cash, and there were too few banks, especially in rural areas. There were also grave risks of harm to the financial system if the policy persisted. Still, the CBN plowed on until the Supreme Court stopped it in its tracks, at least. It is difficult to imagine a more tumultuous way for someone who had ruled for eight years to imprint his legacy.
It is my opinion that the late former president was barely in touch with the decision-making of his government in its twilight. As he so often said in the final months, he was eager to retire to the offstage life that Daura offered. So, if one mess or the other was created in the whirlpool of challenges that is Nigeria, due to the omissions of a government bearing his name, it was bearable once he reached the endpoint. This is not to say that his government did not have its accomplishments. Indeed, Buhari set Nigeria on what probably qualifies as the biggest infrastructure drive in the country. His impacts on Nigeria’s rail and road infrastructure are crystal clear for all to see. He is also famed for his interventions in the payments of pensions and gratuities, where hopes had been thin.
Politically, Buhari leaves behind millions of ardent supporters in Nigeria’s north. Once a reliable pillar in his serial jousts on Nigeria’s election arena, they now form a vital staging area for both the incumbent and the opposition. It will surely be insightful to observe how both sides curry favour with this base and the gambles they make in aligning their goals with national interests, but the Buhari years will not be so easily forgotten. By that, I do not merely refer to 2015; I mean also the deeply memorable nineteen months of his dictatorial years. These two, engraved by the events that characterized them, will no doubt survive in our collective memory.
