Of Abobakus In The Buhari Vanguard By Abiodun Ladepo

It has been as expected…the torrents of vitriolic commentaries being heaped on former President Obasanjo for publicly excoriating President Buhari and daring to call for the formation of a Coalition of Nigerians to help rescue the country.  Those who will die with Buhari...the Abobakus of the #SaiBaba and #Change mantras…do not think “Evil” Obasanjo has the moral right to criticize “Saint” Buhari.


They cite some of Obasanjo’s failings when he was president: That he bribed legislators to give him a third term; he orchestrated the impeachments of governors Alamieyeseigha, Ladoja and Fayose; he schemed to get some Senators removed; he massacred an entire people in Odi village; he marginalized his vice president (Atiku Abubakar); he sold some of our national institutions to his friends for pittances; he imposed a sickly Yar’Adua and a grossly incompetent Jonathan on us, and he was an early endorser of Buhari. Who is he to now tell Buhari he has performed woefully and should not seek reelection? Who is he to tell buhari he needs to go home and rest, and then join the rest of senior Nigerians on the sidelines offering wisdom to new players? Dismount from the horse, Obasanjo had charged Buhari.

I think that not only does Obasanjo have the moral right to speak; he has the moral obligation to point out to our country and our leaders where we have gone wrong. Before Obasanjo’s letter, Buhari had stopped listening to everybody except those in the infamous cabal; those that his wife described as having hijacked his presidency, profiting from where they had not sown. It would appear that no sooner had he been elected than he got literally stricken by dumbness, numbness and muteness. The signs were there but those packaging him did such a good job we did not notice.

It started with him taking about six months to form his cabinet. First we thought he was having a hard time finding people of probity and integrity to hire; that he was scouring the length and breadth of the entire country looking for men and women who would help bring Nigeria back from the brink of collapse to which Jonathan had driven it. But what happened when he released his ministerial nominations? It was full of people with questionable performance records, obvious paperweight performers and pseudo-intellectuals. And it was egregiously skewed to the north. More appointments followed that same pattern. As if that was not bad enough, when Nigerians complained, Buhari arrogantly retorted that the regions (south-south and southeast) that gave him only 5% of their votes should not expect to be treated the same way as the north that gave him 97% of its votes. He made that unfortunate remark from London. Little did we know it was a clear window into his heart…how deeply ethnocentric he was.

Then the question of his illness arose. We’d always known he had a nagging ear infection problem. In fact, he once publicly joked about it. But when he started leaving the shores of Nigeria for the UK to receive medical care, we started to wonder if it was just an ear infection. First, why was Nigeria paying so much FOREX to treat the president when the country’s healthcare delivery system was in such shambles? What purpose did Aso Rock Clinic serve, with the billions that had been poured into it, if it could not treat our president? Okay, other presidents received treatment abroad too. But Buhari was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be more frugal. He was supposed to be more reasonable. He was the epitome of integrity.

So, many of us forgave the sin of neglecting us to die in the moribund healthcare system in the country while he got the best care that our money could provide in London. But what we couldn’t forgive was the fact that we did not know what ailed him. His sickness was shrouded in ironclad secrecy. Was it malaria? Was it prostate cancer? Was it typhoid fever? Was it acne? Was it anal cancer? We didn’t know. So we speculated wildly. At one time, the president spent the better part of a year in London!

Yes, he had Vice President Osinbajo acting as president. But we all knew that there were limits to what Osinbajo could do. Could he, for instance, sack a Minister? In essence, we had our president in a prolonged supine position while we needed an almost frenetically energetic president to lead a country that was in such a hurry to excel.

Clearly, this was not the Buhari we all rooted for and hailed into office in 2015. Under his watch, we have not secured conviction of any corrupt, heavyweight politician or military officer. All we hear are stories of arrests and of people returning stolen funds. We have incarcerated Sambo Dasuki and others for almost three years without conviction. Nigeria should not be practicing these kinds of extra-judicial treatment of people in 2018. Collecting stolen funds from corrupt people don’t serve as deterrence. Jailing them does.

Under General Buhari’s watch, Boko Haram terrorists morphed into Fulani herdsmen and routinely descend on whole villages in Nigeria. They gruesomely murder defenseless people almost as if it was a sport. In one recent instance, 73 Nigerians were so murdered and it did not elicit a personal visit to the village from the president. It did not even educe a national address condemning the killings. We did not hear the president empathize with the victims, or offer them material and emotional succor. We did not hear him promise them robust protection. It was a devastatingly strident silence and abdication of responsibility by someone to whom so much was given and from whom so much was expected. Did he not watch television? Did he not read the papers? Did his national security team not brief him? Then he committed the unheard of folly of asking a grieving Governor Samuel Ortom to come to Aso Rock instead of him (Buhari) going to Benue where the killings occurred. The same day that those 73 souls were being buried, Buhari was hosting some governors who came to endorse him for second term! What happened to the Buhari that went to Maiduguri when Boko Haram was still bearing its name? Was that not the very definition of tone deafness or unmitigated arrogance?

Under his watch, Nigeria experienced another nation-wide shortage of fuel during last Christmas. That fuel crisis is yet to abate as I write this. There were accusations of subsidies still being paid, and of fuel hording and profiteering still going on. Yet, this was a man who supposedly knew the oil industry well, so well that he retained the Petroleum Minister portfolio himself. In other words, the petroleum minister failed in his job. Families could not travel for the holiday. Businesses strained to stay open. Those who ran generators with petrol lived in heat and darkness when electricity supply failed. It was like living in the 12th century. Again, throughout the fuel crisis, the president did not address Nigerians directly. If he cared about us and shared our pain, we did not know. If he had any solution, we did not know. What happened to the refineries about which he spoke so loftily during the campaign? We are yet to get a word from him on the progress, if any. Were they castles in the sky?

Under him, electricity supply has remained the same or gotten worse, depending on where you live. We hear about increased installed capacity, but that does not translate into reasonable supply in our homes and businesses. So, you have terrorism, epileptic electricity supply and a moribund healthcare delivery system – key aspects of our country’s lifeline…aspects that other countries consider national security interests - all crying for laser-focused attention and the president is not talking to us monthly, if not weekly?

I heard from the grapevine that Buhari has been working from home (the living quarters of Aso Rock) since August last year when he returned from his last medical vacation in the UK. And that he works only a couple of hours a day! Is that what Nigeria needs today? Forget about our absence on the international front as leader of Africa. What about here at home? What about the urgent need to improve our infrastructure? What about rural development? What about the crumbling tertiary education? What about youth unemployment? What about facilitating agro-based industries? What about restructuring the police force? What about investments in mass transportation? What about science and research? What about….? The list goes on. How can this man be thinking about a second term when he clearly doesn’t have the energy required to even finish the first term respectably?

We have so much we need to do that we can’t afford to have a president that is only available for a couple of hours per day.  We have no choice but to wonder if the president is sentient…if he is in full control of all his faculties. Is he even in the country? When was the last time Nigerians heard directly from him in a live, non-choreographed, unedited give-and-take? All these photo-ops that his media aides are pushing out don’t cut it. Nigerians need to know that the man can still string together intelligent and coherent sentences. We need to know that he is abreast of all the major issues affecting Nigerians. We need him to give us an outline of the efforts being taken to remedy all the issues we have and what more needs to be done. That’s the kind of presidency we envisaged. That’s the modern presidency. We did not elect an emir.

Perhaps if it was a different president, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed. But this was the arrowhead of the #Change mantra! We had been so emotionally brutalized and so psychologically bludgeoned by Jonathan that we expected more from Buhari. So, those who are still tethered to his crippled ship - a ship listing precariously in the turbulent socio-economic waters of today - are on their own. I didn’t need an Obasanjo to tell me before jumping ship. If the captain of the ship were awake and demonstrated the ability to steer, I could be persuaded to remain on board. I didn’t need Obasanjo to tell me that the devil was in my village when I knew that the village chief sold drugs and his wife sold Ogogoro.