MAJOR GENERAL Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) bows out today as the fourth Executive President of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, and the fifth in its history, and across the country and its far-flung diaspora, a loud, collective sigh of relief can be heard. It has by a wide consensus been eight locust years of privation, insecurity, division, shortages of essential food and energy and of despair. Buhari misgoverned Nigeria, deepened its political and social fault lines, enthroned sectionalism, and nepotism, oversaw two economic recessions and undermined democracy and the rule of law. Most Nigerians are happy to see him go.
Some did not survive to see this day as thousands died in the rage of the insecurity on his watch, others were displaced from their homes, many more have slipped unto poverty, and millions are unemployed. Hunger stalks millions; farmers in various parts of the country are distressed by a poor operating environment exacerbated by Fulani herders’ and bandits’ despoliation. Businesses face turbulence and millions of small ones have crashed.
Rising to power on a wave of popular discontent against 16 years of corrupt misgovernance, he met a country in trouble. He postured as a driver of change: an anti-corruption crusader, tough on crime and insecurity, a unifier in a fractured polity. Though he had projected an image of moral rectitude, in office, Buhari ended up adding only little value across the board – economic, political, and social – but ratcheted up many minuses.
A considerable proportion of the population view him as Nigeria’s worst leader since independence. But in the midst of despairing criticism, Buhari has a retort: “I have done my best.” For Nigerians, however, his best was simply not good enough.
Posterity will eventually settle the argument. For now, however, stakeholders have found him wanting. Buhari and his supporters, including regime officials, appointees and members of his party, family, and kinsmen, insist he has done well, citing policies and projects to support this. The Presidency’s ‘Factsheet’ provides a long list of such achievements and his ministers do too. Unarguably, the capital projects he undertook, though too little to reverse the country’s gaping infrastructure deficit, went further than his predecessors.’
But as he steps aside, it is necessary to take broad views of the national condition in June 2015 and in May 2023; examine Buhari’s own promised agenda, and how he delivered or failed to do so. The main themes are national cohesion and inclusion, the viability of the Nigerian state, leadership style, restructuring and elections.
Buhari’s inaugural speech on May 29, 2015, set out declarations of intent and raised hopes. Had he faithfully followed through, Nigeria should be marching from a solid pedestal unto greatness.
Buhari famously declared: “I belong to everybody, and I belong to nobody.” This resonated widely and taken together with pledges to work for the unity of the country and instil fairness and equity, it inspired hopes of inclusion.
But such hopes were promptly dispelled. Buhari thoroughly mismanaged Nigeria’s diversity. Never in the country’s history, thundered Junaid Mohammed (now deceased), a former federal lawmaker, had any national leader exhibited such brazen sectionalism, nepotism, and exclusionary tendencies in appointments to national offices. Unapologetically, he favoured his ethnic nationality, his northern base, his Islamic faith, family, associates, and narrow political interests in appointments and policies.
He followed through his declaration in a CNN interview to treat those who gave him “95 percent” vote more favourably than those who gave him “five percent.”
With him in office, the Fulani herders, gunmen and militants, joined by tens of thousands of others converged from all over West Africa, unleashing violence across the northern states. They spread their pillaging, massacres, and ethnic cleansing to other parts of the country. By late 2015, the Global Terrorism Index had ranked them as the world’s fourth deadliest terrorist group. They killed 847 persons in five states that year.
Emboldened by a partisan presidency and security forces, the Fulani marauding has become genocidal in Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, and Taraba states. GTI reported that the number of attacks in the first half of 2016 almost equalled the number of attacks recorded throughout 2015. By 2018, Nigeria had moved to the third most terrorised country propelled by Fulani extremism that was responsible for 72 percent of all terrorism-related deaths in Nigeria that year.
Buhari kept making excuses for Fulani herdsmen and their irrational insistence in sustaining the outdated open grazing system; he canvassed their right to non-existent grazing routes and grazing reserves. In succession, he promoted the creation of cattle colonies, federally funded cattle settlements and appeared to blame the victims for standing in the way of the marauders! The Fulani sense of entitlement has grown to gigantic proportions.
He exhibited naked sectionalism in appointing heads of the military, paramilitary and other security agencies, the ministries, departments, and agencies. With the exclusion of other ethnic nationalities, regions and his politicisation of insecurity, Nigeria’s fissures widened. Separatist groups grew, and the clamour for restructuring rebounded with greater vigour. One spin-off from the Indigenous People of Biafra has taken to violence.
Today, the country is on edge. It was ranked 14th on the 2015 Fragile State Index run by The Fund for Peace, a position it retained in 2019, and was ranked 15th most fragile country in 2023 as Buhari leaves.
The country’s divisions manifest in everything. The wars on insecurity, corruption and poverty are hobbled. The 2023 national elections widened the wedge between some nationalities and geopolitical zones. Mutual suspicion between the roughly equally split Christian and Muslim population, simmering for decades, is close to conflict situation. A former Defence Minister, Theophilus Danjuma, has repeatedly warned that few countries ever survive a sectarian civil war.
In times of crisis, leaders take charge. Buhari’s leadership style was exclusionary, unfeeling, and detached. He took charge of nothing, save to tend to his own health, with frequent travels abroad, and attending international engagements while parts of Nigeria burnt, massacres and disasters occurred, or bandits/terrorists undertook their industrial scale kidnapping of schoolchildren.
Among many others, he made very few visits to communities in distress. He tarried in Daura where he was holidaying, just two hours away from Kankara, Katsina State, when 300 schoolboys were kidnapped there.
By failing to take charge, he could not crush corruption, insurgency, and criminality, or revive the economy. With an inattentive leader, appointees and private individuals close to him usurped power. The heads of some key security agencies shamelessly took their infighting to the public space. Security chiefs engaged in corruption and impunity. Effectively, the regime’s key programmes were subverted from within because there was neither coordination, firmness nor consequences for failure, incompetence or disobedience of the law or presidential orders. One Inspector-General of Police famously ignored his order to relocate to Benue after yet another Fulani herders’ genocidal attack and all Buhari did was to whine in public; the IG served out his term.
His distraction manifested in the 2023 elections: he released money to the umpire, gave orders to the security agencies and insisted on his neutrality; but he turned his back thereafter, allowing desperados in his own party and the opposition to manifest their criminality.
While he and his party, the All Progressives Congress had promised to support the restructuring of the country during the 2015 campaigns, Buhari promptly reneged on assuming office. Bowing to public clamour, the APC set up a Committee on True Federalism headed by Nasir el-Rufai, the immediate past governor of Kaduna State, in 2018 that made 10 recommendations to devolve more power to the states and retool Nigeria into a proper federal polity.
Buhari ignored the report. Rather, he has opposed the clamour, arrogantly saying the restructuring agitators had not explained what they meant, as if Nigerians owed him explanation for wanting to exercise their fundamental right to determine their own future.
In the twilight of his tenure, March 2023, he signed 16 of the 35 constitution amendment bills transmitted to him in January by the National Assembly that made minimal federalising impact, and entrenching absurdities such as renaming LGs, an aberration in a federal constitution. Essential adjustments such as state policing and resource control were ignored.
Lee Kuan Yew took charge, ran a merit-based administration and waged war against corruption, economic saboteurs, and insecurity without favouritism. He built modern Singapore, whose economy is ranked the most open and the joint least-corrupt country in the world on the Corruption Perception Index. Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is demonstrating how purposeful, visionary leadership can help a poor traumatised country rise from civil war, genocide, and privation to deliver robust growth, stability, and inclusion. Ukraine is resisting the full military might of a nuclear-armed superpower inspired by a president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demonstrating courageous, hands-on leadership.
Exhibiting his military instincts, the Buhari regime rode roughshod over the rule of law and disobeyed court orders it found inconvenient. In 2019, in response, The PUNCH titles resolved to henceforth prefix his name in referring to him with his last rank in the Nigerian Army, Major General, until he purged himself of his martial disposition. He never did.
In the end, Buhari was a divisive, polarising president. Contrary to his inaugural speech promise, he belonged to his favoured ethnic nationality, his region, his religion, and his family; not to everybody. He alienated many sections of the diverse polity of over 250 ethnic nationalities, and faiths.
Buhari failed the leadership test, leaving in many places, what the late legendary musician, Fela Kuti, called “sorrow, tears and blood,” a divided population, battered economy, rowdy elections and a wobbly natural federation run like a unitary state, and hurtling towards state failure. He will not be missed.
