Will PMB trounce Buhari?

What shall we call its nameless name, this gnawing disarticulation that dogs our every attempt at progress? After Yar’Adua, we reasoned that a Jonathan with a PhD would catapult us to where we needed to be. With gusto we campaigned for him. He won. Four years later, we were wondering what hit us. When his […]

What shall we call its nameless name, this gnawing disarticulation that dogs our every attempt at progress? After Yar’Adua, we reasoned that a Jonathan with a PhD would catapult us to where we needed to be. With gusto we campaigned for him. He won. Four years later, we were wondering what hit us. When his tenure was halfway spent and we had warned him that his romance with the people was getting sour and that he needed to reignite it. When that didn’t happen and the choice in 2015 came down to a Jonathan or a Buhari, we said let’s try a new man. 

We supported Buhari with everything we had. He won. Less than three years on, we are beginning to feel the same way we felt towards the end of Jonathan’s tenure. And I keep wondering, what is hitting us all over again?

Those who make it their business to prod incumbent presidents and governors to seek a second term without bothering to do a review of the first, are the ones who perpetuate our political stasis. Their style is not ingenious but is totally benumbing. At a time when the nation was mourning the victims of terror unleashed by herdsmen in Benue State, I wonder whose idea it was to publicly campaign for the president’s re-election? 

Whether the president will run for a second term or not is his decision and his right  to make. However, what galls me is the continued perpetuation of a disease I noticed in government circles since Obasanjo’s tenancy of the seat of power. I noticed it under the Owu general; it persisted to a lesser extent under Yar’Adua and continued under Jonathan and Buhari. 

In my column of January 9, 2017, I revisited this issue of what I called the Kabiyesi syndrome – how political mendicants attempted to deify incumbent personages for intentions that are not altogether altruistic. In that piece, I argued as follows: 

“I call it the ‘Kabiyesi’ syndrome – the transmogrification of al elected person into a pseudo royalty as if his position was hereditary like that of the authentic royal father… So, the leader falls into a trap from which only Providence can extricate him. He starts having messianic complex. I have seen this play out over and over again at the local, state and federal levels that I wonder if those leaders were never prepared for the high position they occupied to the extent that they had to encounter empirically verifiable reality about the problems facing the people from sycophantic third parties…

“But for the ‘Kabiyesi’ syndrome, many things would have been done differently by the federal administration which came in waving a flag of change. We simply cannot continue doing things the same old way and expect to get a different set of results. And we must dispassionately evaluate the actions of our leaders so as to help them to succeed. I concede that the current government has mounted the most serious anti-corruption war in three decades. Whatever nay sayers and prominent thieves say, we would have been worse off without the current anti-corruption effort.

“But in terms of style, Buhari has to change gear as I have had cause to counsel in an earlier piece. The president is being turned into a national monument that is viewed only a couple of celebratory times a year. Why must he be hemmed in as if he’s being ‘protected’ from the people? We have had half a dozen tragic occurrences in the last one year at which the president ought to have made even a symbolic appearance to assure the people that he has their back. Any PR expert worthy of his hire would tell you that a million video clips of the leader may not have the effect of one single public appearance to reassure the people …

“President Buhari should not allow himself to be turned into a political ‘Kabiyesi’.  No issue involving human lives should be too small for the president to wade into. A president should be holding the hands of survivors of natural or communal tragedies; he should be a presence in the consciousness of every appointed official because he can spring a surprise at any time… And if I seem to be presumptuously counselling you, O President, it is not that I hate you, but I don’t love my country less.”

That was last year and my point is even more germane now than ever before. Good governance ought to be more important than re-election unless the focus is not national development. At this stage of the Jonathan presidency, I said Goodluck would defeat Jonathan if he didn’t recalibrate his compass. Today, I say without fear of equivocation that PMB would defeat Buhari if he continues to take his bearing from compasses of doubtful accuracy.

Don’t get it twisted, if the same circumstances that threw up a Buhari against a Jonathan in 2015 were to be replicated, a Buhari would carry the day. And if Buhari in 2019 finds himself at the same crossroads at which Jonathan was marooned in 2015, he too would be worsted, if not by the PDP (which at the moment is battling its own demons) but by a third force about whose emergence we shall be at liberty to speculate in the testy days ahead.