By Ikechukwu Amaechi
Three years from now, Muhammadu Buhari will become Nigeria’s former president. He will most likely retire to Daura and live out the rest of his life in his ancestral home.
Then what will matter most is the legacy he left behind for the largely unmerited privileges the country bestowed on him. The time to create those legacies is now. It will be too late in 2023.
Most of those who voted for him in 2015 did so because they believed he was a man conscious of legacy.
I was one of them. Former Managing Director of Nigerian Breweries, Eze Festus Odimegwu, was also in that loop.
Odimegwu said he voted for Buhari because he believed in his “personal example.”
He recalled in an interview after the 2015 ballot that “Buhari had been military head of state. Some others who had occupied the same position simply emptied the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). But he did not.
“He had headed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), but he did not steal. He had been military governor, he did not steal. There is nothing as personal example.
“Buhari doesn’t talk much. He is a man of few words. He is measured. But anything he says, he is clear. He doesn’t talk from two sides of the mouth. That clarity of thought and speech mirrors intention. A leader will never do well unless his intentions are good.”
That is the audacity of legacy. Those presumed virtues were what people remembered of Buhari after his first stint in power.
Last week, I went back to Abuja to do an encore with Odimegwu. He could barely recognise the pre-2015 Buhari. The Buhari who superintends the affairs of Nigeria today is an “unmitigated disaster,” he insists.
So, what happened? Was Buhari changed by the Presidency? Not really, going by the immortal words of former United States First Lady, Michelle Obama, that “being president doesn’t change who you are. It reveals who you are.”
The sentiment was re-echoed by her husband, former President Barack Obama, at Miami’s Florida International University in October 2016 thus: “Let me tell you something about this office that I’ve been in for eight years. Who you are – what you are – does not change after you occupy the Oval Office.
“All it does is magnify who you are. All it does is shine a spotlight on who you really are.”
Maybe Nigerians never really knew Buhari, the man they elected in 2015. But now that Aso Rock has magnified and shined a spotlight on who he really is, the image staring at us in the mirror is perplexing.
Beyond all this, however, what I see is a man who does not care, a man to whom legacy means nothing as long as his narcissistic agenda is achieved.
A president who has his eyes on legacy will not sit idly and watch his underlings wheedle the unwary with falsehoods even as the country slips inextricably into a season of anomie.
Such a president will not continue to live in denial, playing the ostrich in the face of grave national occurrences.
Under Buhari’s watch, Nigeria has become the archetypal Hobbesian state where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” with violent non-state actors daily delegitimising the commonwealth.
A president with eyes on legacy will do everything to halt this perilous drift to anarchy. Not Buhari. Instead, he is sitting on his palms watching his minions harangue Nigerians with the falsehood that security has improved.
On Sunday January 26, a day two bombs were exploded by terrorists with fatalities, Buhari’s spokesman, Femi Adesina, said on national television that “Nigerians ought to be thankful for the job being done by the government.
“It (insecurity) is not as bad as you make it seem,” he admonished his interviewer.
Two days later, Buhari himself threw Adesina under the grinding wheels of his hypocritical locomotive when he met with a delegation from Niger State in Aso Rock who came to tell him that insecurity and death had become the unenviable lot of the people.
“I was taken aback by what is happening in the North West and other parts of the country. During our campaigns, we knew about the Boko Haram. What is coming now is surprising. It is not ethnicity or religion; rather it is one evil plan against the country,” Buhari said.
“We have to be harder on them. One of the responsibilities of government is to provide security. If we don’t secure the country, we will not be able to manage the economy properly.”
This is one pledge too many. I doubt if anyone still takes him serious anymore. His promises no longer assuage anxieties.
And the reason for the incredulity is not far-fetched. There is no evidence of any of the so-called bandits or Fulani herdsmen wreaking havoc that has been successfully prosecuted for their heinous crimes.
Instead, Buhari is on record as advising the victims of these atrocious crimes to accommodate their tormentors in the spirit of brotherhood.
At the meeting with the Niger State delegation, he lamented that bandits had forced many to abandon their farms and homes.
So, he knows? What has Buhari done about that as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces? Is he aware that the bandits who chased away Benue indigenes from their ancestral lands are still occupying the lands while their victims are living in squalid conditions in IDP camps?
Buhari’s embarrassing security lethargy has led to regional self-help, which is what the Western Nigeria Security Network (WNSN) called Operation Omotekun is all about.
On Wednesday January 29, senators reminded Buhari to sack the service chiefs and the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Adamu.
A president with his eyes on legacy will not wait to be told that it is high time he kicked out service chiefs who have supervised the disconcerting deterioration of security.
Under Buhari, Nigeria’s democracy has gone to the dogs, elections have been reduced to a mere joke. He contested the Presidency four times and vowed to sanitise the electoral space. Rather than fulfil his vow, the situation has become worse.
No Nigerian has confidence in Nigeria’s electoral process. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is an extension of the Presidency. The courts are tethered to the apron-strings of executive shenanigans.
Under Buhari’s watch, election rigging has assumed a very frightening dimension. Before now, malpractices will mean, in worst case scenarios, thugs snatching ballot boxes and running away.
Under Buhari, nobody snatches ballot boxes and runs away. The political gladiators wait until after the counting to ensure that they have lost at the polling unit, and then, in the full glare of the camera, make a bonfire of ballot boxes and result sheets and all other vital INEC documents.
It happened in the Okota area of Lagos in the 2019 elections.
But that is even for those who still give a damn. The more hardened politicians don’t even care to campaign. They don’t bother about voting. They don’t snatch ballot boxes. They stay in the comfort of their bedrooms to write their own results and head to court.
Others kidnap returning officers and order them at gunpoint to announce them winners of elections they lost.
Everything Buhari touches when it comes to leadership goes south even as his government pettifogs. What a legacy for a man once touted as Nigeria’s saviour.
