President Buhari should under no circumstances allow himself to be
cast as a Fulani President, or a President of northerners or Muslims.
Vice President Osinbajo should never succumb to the temptation to see
himself as a Vice President for Yoruba people, or the Redeemed Christian
Church of God, or for Nigerian Christians. Goodluck Jonathan and Namadi
Sambo sadly saw nothing wrong in using religion to divide the country;
Jonathan taking delight in running from church to church, posing with
Pastors and Bishops (he even managed to squeeze in a photo-splashed
pilgrimage to Jerusalem), while his party tried to portray Muhammadu
Buhari and the APC as Islamists, Sharia apologists, ‘Janjaweed’ and even
the political wing of Boko Haram. During the presidential campaign Vice
President Sambo reversed the strategy, and did all he could to convince
us he was the next in line to Prophet Mohammed, in the Islamic pecking
order. (From him we learnt that ‘Namadi’ actually means ‘Na Madinah’,
and that Osinbajo was on a mission to Christianise Nigeria).
Both Buhari and Osinbajo should avoid anything that will portray them
as beholden to any group of Nigerians on the basis of sectional or
religious or partisan interests. They should strive to be leaders for
all of Nigeria, regardless of ethnicity, religion, age, or political
affiliation.
Two. The matter of the Office of First Lady. One of the greatest
contributors to President Jonathan’s loss of goodwill has been his wife,
the uncouth, overreaching, uncontrollable Patience ‘Mama Peace’
Jonathan. Wole Soyinka warned the President to keep his wife in check;
like much of the other advice he got he ignored it. Buhari has given
hints that he does not believe in the existence of the office of First
Lady, because there is no place for it in the Constitution. Our recent
experiences with First Ladies have convinced me that any President
serious about bringing change to Nigeria cannot afford to have his or
her spouse running a parallel government in the manner that Turai
Yar’Adua and Patience Jonathan did. While I don’t think the Office has
to be abolished, it is clear that whoever occupies it must do so with a
sense of decorum and responsibility.
Three. Presidential assertiveness. Goodluck Jonathan’s biggest
failings, in my opinion, lay in his almost total abdication of
presidential control and responsibility, so that he became a hostage of
the forces surrounding him. There’s an interesting anecdote by
journalist and newspaper editor Jide Ajani, who was part of a team that
interviewed President Jonathan in the presidential media chat of Sunday
May 4, 2014; the first after the abduction of the Chibok girls. After
the chat, Ajani was invited to join the president for dinner. Listen to
Mr. Ajani’s account of what transpired while they ate:
“Apart from Mr. Vice President, Namadi Sambo; Chief of Staff, Gen.
Arogbofa (rtd); Dr. Reuben Abati; and Labaran Maku, Information
Minister; the dinner table was filled with jesters. Some would not even
allow Mr. President to finish a sentence before they would interject and
complete the sentence for him. When Jonathan tried to explain the
complexities involved in the abduction saga and why he remained
disappointed in the way the episode is turning out, some people around
the table would not let him finish. ‘Yes, the state government should be
blamed, Mr. President’; ‘the school principal is not fit to head a
school’; ‘Mr. President, this looks like a set up’.” Ajani’s damning
conclusion: “Jonathan’s friends and close aides … appear to have
ring-fenced the man from reality.”
These buffoons and jesters surrounded the president and kept him
detached from reality. Instead they endlessly reinforced the nonchalance
and paranoia that came to define his administration. So that when, in
February, the Wall Street Journal asked him if there were any plans to
investigate the Ekitigate tape, all he could think to say was: “It’s all
fabrications. Why should I investigate things that are not real?” And
this was the same attitude he extended to everything, whether it was
allegations of impropriety against the oil Minister, or reports of
billions of dollars in missing oil revenues (“America will know!”), or
(in the early days) the news that hundreds of Chibok schoolgirls had
been abducted by Boko Haram, or that MEND had claimed responsibility for
the Independence Day bombings of 2010 (Recall that he hurriedly
absolved MEND of responsibility, because “it is erroneous to think that
my people who have been agitating for good living will deliberately blow
up the opportunity they have now.”)
What we learn from the Jonathan era is that a President who allows
these professional sycophants to hold him hostage will pay for it in
substantial political and moral capital. Buhari and Osinbajo would do
well to avoid surrendering to these men and women who haunt the
corridors of power, looking for whom to mislead and destroy. They will
wear all sorts of masks, they will be the ones singing and praying the
loudest in Professor Osinbajo’s early morning prayer meetings, they will
be the ones hustling to have breakfast with President Buhari or to sit
closest to him in the mosque. Some of them are worse than merely
sycophantic; they are downright evil characters, reprobate souls for
whom no lies are too large, and no schemes too immoral.
President Buhari and Vice President Osinbajo will need to find a way
to keep open that all-important access line to common sense and outside
reality. Our leaders need an antidote to the reality distortion fields
of the presidential villa. For all we know Goodluck Jonathan truly
believed he was transforming Nigeria, because that was the message his
army of court jesters consistently vuvuzela-ed into his ears. Imagine
the surprise that awaits him when he steps down from the gilded cage and
realizes that even the East-West road (which connects his home state of
Bayelsa to his wife’s home state of Rivers) remains, in many sections, a
death trap; that it may be faster to bicycle from Lagos to Kano than
attempt to take his much lauded trains, that the Kaduna-Abuja railway
line which his government has been boasting about finishing is really
still a long way from being ready for use. I don’t know how Buhari and
Osinbajo plan to counter the inevitable attempts to ring-fence them from
reality; what is clear is that if they don’t, they will, in a few years
from now, find themselves in the deep hole in which Jonathan is
concluding his presidency. And they shall deserve no pity, because they
had the example of Jonathan to learn from.
Four, a reading list for the President and President-elect. In recent
years a handful of former presidential insiders have published accounts
of their time in power. For me two of those books stand out, and not
necessarily because they are wholly truthful – indeed they have both
been challenged by other players who have recalled incidents and issues
differently – but because they at least have taken the bold step of
painting a picture of what it means to be an insider in the
intrigue-ridden catacombs of Aso Rock. First is Segun Adeniyi’s account,
‘Power, Politics and Death’ (on the Yar’Adua years); the second one is
Nasir el-Rufai’s ‘The Accidental Public Servant’ (on the Obasanjo
years).
I would encourage the President-elect and Vice President-elect to
find the time to read these two books and discuss learning points from
them. We cannot afford to repeat the most egregious mistakes of our
recent past. (As for the mistakes of the Jonathan era, we are surrounded
by them, and are still feeling the many effects). There’s one more
title I’d recommend for both men, and this is ‘Reforming the
Unreformable’, outgoing Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s account
of her first stint in office as Minister of Finance, under President
Obasanjo, between 2003 and 2006. There is no sense in repeating,
deliberately or out of ignorance, the mistakes of the past. The task
ahead is too important, and too urgent, for Buhari and Osinbajo to not
put in all the preparation that is necessary. Posterity will not forgive
them or their party if they bungle this long awaited task of
redemption.
Follow me on Twitter: @toluogunlesi
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