(OPINION) My views on Buhari’s leadership by Idang Alibi

A friend of mine, a former governorship candidate in Kebbi State, Salihu Nataro, sent me a text message wondering why, according to him, I have so far been silent on Buhari’s leadership and governance of the country. As if on cue, Walter Amakiri from Rivers State, who says he reads me with religious devotion, called and made a similar observation. The next day, Mike Abiodun sent another text from Ondo State accusing me of having not said anything critical of Buhari. He threw in what appears to me like a subtle blackmail: was I, by any chance, expecting an appointment from him? Whatever it is, these men have succeeded in drawing me out.
I thought that I should be cautious because all too often we Nigerians, especially the pundits and journalists among us, rush to judgment on our leaders and sometimes get it all wrong. We end up discouraging someone who would have been a great leader. Several years ago, when Clinton became president of the USA, Time magazine reported that in the man’s early days of presidential confusion, how to deal with the pile of CVs of people seeking appointment into the new government alone was a huge challenge of its own. Time said that one day, someone will arrange the CVs heap in a horizontal manner; the next day, it will be in a vertical format and the next day, it will be a pile of vertical and horizontal, obviously indicating which ones are top priority to be considered and which ones that are not. Eventually, one morning, the pile standing attention in the Oval Office as if rebuking Clinton for inaction, collapsed and spread on the floor!
But Clinton eventually found his feet and, in spite of the Monica Lewinsky affair, went on to become a most successful USA leader. In fact, he is often reckoned with as one of America’s all-time great presidents. Clinton’s initial seeming cluelessness and how he quickly sorted himself out and became such a huge success story taught me an invaluable personal lesson: not to rush to judge any administration until it has sufficiently proven itself to be truly clueless and incompetent.
However, whatever my opinion may be worth to these friends and other readers who think I should say something about Buhari so far, I intend to do so in a three-part series because I have so much to say. The first is this one. The second is going to be entitled “Buhari, do not go the way of Yar’Adua” and the final one will be “Who are Buhari’s Strong Men?” In this first part, I want to volunteer, what I must warn, are four preliminary observations about the nearly four month-old Buhari administration.
One, Nigerians expected Buhari to take off with the speed and velocity of a Concorde jet and, even with the obvious inclement weather, to land successfully because of their prayers and enormous goodwill which should act as navigational aids to him. But Buhari and his few crew members have taken off like a helicopter and are still hovering in the air, perennially lamenting to the control tower how bad the weather is.
With the massive support Buhari got from all over Nigeria, some of us expect that he will mount the saddle with the surefootedness of a man who knows that millions of Nigerians are with him and are ready to cheer every of his move to sanitise this thoroughly rotten system. Besides, he has been there before. Why then is he approaching governance with the tentativeness of a chicken that is coming to a new environment for the first time? He seems to be suspicious of everybody including his party and party men and women. Because of his widely acclaimed personal integrity, the man seems afraid of what Nigerians will say should he make a mistake and bring on board persons who fall short of that criterion of integrity.
The president should realize that there are, broadly speaking, four categories of persons usually available for appointment into public offices: there are those who are incorruptible and who are also competent. This set is the desire of everyone but they are difficult to come by. Surprisingly, because of the nature of politics they may still not be suitable, in spite of their qualifications, for appointments into public offices for reasons of ideology, timing, existing circumstances or reality on the ground, geography, religion and other criteria! The second set is those who are competent but corrupt. The third is those who are not corrupt but are incompetent and the last is those who are both corrupt and incompetent and therefore totally unsuitable for appointment. But here also because of other political considerations some people in this set end up with juicy offices far beyond their competence and character. Such is the nature of politics.
My number two observation is that Buhari is slow because he is afraid of making one or two false moves and he is then accused of being a hypocrite so he is unwilling to appoint those who are tainted by allegations of corruption. My take is that if he holds unto this fear for too long, he will end up with more appointments that will disappoint more people and alienate his party. My argument about corruption and corrupt men in power is that in a setting like ours where corruption has been the reigning national ethos for so long, it will be extremely difficult to get persons who are competent and who also have managed to keep themselves unsoiled.
In such a setting, wisdom demands that a president must learn to be more pragmatic. Let the competent, the suitable but slightly corrupt be appointed but rule the line that from now onwards, they must toe the narrow but clean path. I say this because the nation must move forward and since angels will not be recruited to come down to serve us humans in politics and administration, we must make do with the few good humans available rather than search in obvious vain for the sparkling clean.
Three, Buhari is a lake surrounded by agonisers and not organisers. Even since the late pan-Africanist, our own Tajudeen Abdulraheem of Funtua, advised Africans to stop agonizing and try to organise and get the continent out of poverty, I thought that this wise statement will become a mantra that would be carved in gold and hung in the office of every African president or prime minister because it contains a gem of wisdom that will deliver us from our travail. But this is not the case. We still have leaders and their close aides who perpetually lament the bad situation instead of organising how to get their country out of what everybody knows is a very bad situation.
When people complain that Jonathan’s men and women left an empty treasury, my response has always been that thank God, they did not steal the treasury itself. We, therefore, can still generate the resources to put in that empty treasury to use to develop our country, that is, if the will is there to stop lamentation and to embark upon well thought out action plan. The challenge is for Buhari to hunt for the men and women of ability and creativity who are selfless and patriotic and have the capacity to assist him generate wealth to refill the national till. One good step he has taken in that direction is the recruitment of Babatunde Fowler who demonstrated in Lagos state that he has the capacity and capability to do just that, as his chairman of FIRS.
But Buhari needs to do much more, and quickly too. Solid minerals are one huge untapped wealth available to him. But where is the policy to commence immediate tapping of these wealth and riches? Remember, he talked passionately about this sector during the campaign. The pension fund is bursting at the seams with trillions of Naira. Let him also see how he can lay hands on that to support farmers and estate developers with long term credit facilities. The other day his government ‘discovered’ billions of dollars of the LNG fund but unfortunately, it was shared as a part of the bail out among the governors rather than used to generate more wealth. Who knows how many trillions in hard currency may yet be discovered in several secret accounts somewhere else in this nation of dodgy public servants?
And finally, four, the recent appointments which have generated so much storm indicates that Buhari may be an insular president, an all knowing lone ranger who keeps so many important moves close to his chest. He does not have an inner circle of trusted men who act as his sounding board and he is suspicious of his party that it may not go along with his thinking. If this observation is correct, as we can deduce from his action, then this is dangerous for Buhari and his party. This is because power, whether through a military coup, a revolutionary overthrow or through the ballot box, is usually a conspiracy of some sorts by a few political, bureaucratic and business elites. Any point man or leader who fails to recognize the fact that he must bend over backwards to carry the various interests along faces the risk of a palace coup or his party losing the support of critical sectors of the populace.