A foreign based Nigerian lecturer at University of Alabama at Birmingham, has written a thought provoking article on the recent happenings in the polity with reference to President Buhari and his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
Buhari and Jonathan
If you’ve lived up to a dozen years, there is a good chance that
someone who wronged you subsequently felt apologetic about it but wasn’t
courageous enough to say so.
Then one day you ran into each other and exchanged the obligatory
pleasantries of how do you do? To your surprise, the person launches
into an oblique confessional about having become a changed person or now
seeing the world differently. In effect, the person was
not-so-courageously saying, “Sorry, I was wrong.” It is arguable that President Muhammadu Buhari just did that to his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan.
During election campaign in 2015, Buhari was rhetorically unkind to
Jonathan, squarely placing all of Nigeria’s problems on Jonathan’s
shoulders, everything from the Boko Haram menace to the raging poverty.
In various ways, he called him inept, indecisive, irresponsible, and, of
course, corrupt. If only Buhari was elected, Nigeria’s woes would be
gone, he pleaded. He made that case most notably in a lengthy address at
London’s Chatham House in February 2015.
On Boko Haram: “Let me assure you that if I am
elected president, the world will have no cause to worry about Nigeria
as it has had to recently…. We will always act on time and not allow
problems to irresponsibly fester, an I,Muhammadu Buhari, will always
lead from the front and return Nigeria to its leadership role in
regional and international efforts to combat terrorism.”
On the economy: “After the rebasing exercise
in April 2014, Nigeria overtook South Africa as Africa’s largest
economy. Our GDP is now valued at $510 billion and our economy rated
26th in the world. Also on the bright side, inflation has been kept at
single digit for a while and our economy has grown at an average of 7%
for about a decade.
“But it is more of paper growth, a growth that, on account of
mismanagement, profligacy and corruption, has not translated to human
development or shared prosperity.”
On equity: “The … current administration has
created two economies in one country, a sorry tale of two nations: one
economy for a few who have so much in their tiny island of prosperity;
and the other economy for the many who have so little in their vast
ocean of misery.”
On his solution: “In the face of dwindling
revenues, a good place to start the repositioning of Nigeria’s economy
is to swiftly tackle two ills that have ballooned under the present
administration: waste and corruption. And in doing this, I will, if
elected, lead the way, with the force of personal example.”
What these excerpts say definitively is that leadership is the
primary agent of change. But in his recent address to launch the
administration’s “Change begins with me” campaign, the me is no longer the leadership but the people. Here are the opening paragraphs:
“I welcome you all to this important occasion of the launching
of the National Re-orientation Campaign, called ‘Change Begins With Me’.
Nigeria today is passing through a challenging moment where hardly
anything works in a normal manner. Many have attributed this phenomenon
to the total breakdown of our core values over the years.
“It is safe to say today that honesty, hard work, Godliness
have given way to all kinds of manifestations of lawlessness and
degeneration in our national life. This is why we have among our
cardinal objectives ‘change’, which implies the need for a change of
attitude and mindset in our everyday life.”
In effect, Buhari says, it is not leadership that transforms
society, it is the changing values of the people. It stands to reason
that buried inside this apparent recalibration is an apology to
Jonathan. Where Buhari had earlier castigated him for all of Nigeria’s
ills, he now says, “Sorry, my brother, it wasn’t you.”
Buhari’s apology actually began with his Independence Day speech last year. “To bring about change, we must change ourselves by being law-abiding citizens,” he had said.
In now stressing the role of values in societal change, Buhari is
actually straddling a long simmering debate among developmental
economists, sociologists and political scientists. The issue of
contention is the question: What is the primary driving agent of
societal development, is it sound leadership or the values of the
people?
The late Chinua Achebe famously weighed decidedly on the side of
leadership in his often cited book, The Problem With Nigeria. That view
has long attained the status of an aphorism in Nigeria. And it is the
dominant perspective among Western analysts.
But no less an intellectual heavyweight than Max Weber has led the
contrary argument. The late 19th/early 20th century Germany sociologist
linked the rise of capitalism to the Protestant ethic, or more
specifically the Calvinist version. It was an ethic that encouraged both
frugality and capital accumulation. This contrasts with Catholicism
with its emphasis on piety and charity.
Buhari’s switch — or straddling — on this debate, actually gets my
nod. My sympathy lies more with the values argument, as I elaborate on
in my book The African Press, Civic Cynicism, and Democracy. It is not
that I discount the importance of leadership in the advancement of
society, but because the values argument is not accorded its place in
popular discourse.
Where Buhari — politicians in general — err is in not being
forthright in what they can do and what they can’t do. At least be a
little more so. Rather than promising the improbable, they could espouse
their principles, hopes and goals, with the caveat that they would
accomplish only what they could. Alas, that is not politically alluring.
Jonathan’s apology to Buhari
One promise the Buhari administration has not flipped on is the
prosecution of corruption. The probe has now indisputably reached former
President Jonathan’s doors with the admission by his wife that frozen
bank accounts with a combined $31.5 million belong to her. As reported
by the Associated Press, the former first lady’s lawyer wrote to the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission that $15 million of that was
for medical expenses she incurred in London in 2013. That raises the
question of how she paid the expenses in the first place.
We have always known that Dame Patience was no ordinary first lady.
What we didn’t know was that she had $31.5 million to her accounts to
back up her irrepressible flair. The question now is what former
President Jonathan knew about the largesse and when he knew it. Perhaps
as he accepts Buhari’s apology, he will tender one in return.
About the Author:
Minabere Ibelema teaches undergraduate courses in news and feature
writing, editing, mass media law, University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and a columnist for Punch Newspapers.
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