Tinubu’s Buhari Burden

Chidi Amuta

President Bola Tinubu’s success or failure in office may not be the result of his own making. It would be the weight of a political burden he is so far carrying apparently quite willingly. Every policy pronouncement he has so far made and measures he has hinted at taking is an inherited yoke from the immediate past Buhari presidency. In a sense, Tinubu’s presidency so far is looking more like a reactive incumbency. He has merely been reacting to what his predecessor left in the in-tray at the Aso Villa office. Insecurity. Monumental poverty. Economic hopelessness. Subsidies and entitlements. A critically divided nation. Unprecedented corruption. Name it. It is all inherited from Mr. Buhari. But Tinubu and his cohorts seem reluctant to say so.

The most elementary lesson of the presidential systems and indeed every democratic succession is that the new leader is elected not just to clean up the mess made by his predecessor but also to leave room to make his own peculiar mess. So far, Mr. Tinubu seems too preoccupied with the baggage left by his Daura friend instead of getting ready to make his own mess or landmarks.

In some sense, President Tinubu has carried on literally like a beast of burden. He has not complained to the nation about the burden he inherited nor the extent of the mess on his plate. One or two random arrests have been made and a probe of the Central Bank has been instituted. It is of course true that government is a continuum. Each new leaders is chosen to deal with the trouble he finds on the plate. Leaders are elected to lead, not to lament or offer excuses on behalf of those gone by especially when the past and the present are born of the same party. But it is also an elementary responsibility of leadership to name the source of present headaches so that the public can minimally understand and empathise.

And this is where Tinubu’s publicity machinery is failing. They are busy constructing political enemies from among the opposition of Atiku Abubakar’s PDP and Peter Obi’s Labour Party. This is quite excusable. But it is lazy public relations. Tinubu’s existential adversaries are not the current opposition. They are not yet a full blown opposition figures since they are still in court. His most consequential political enemies might lie in his ruling party and the devotees of his predecessor. His greatest enemy is to be found in the inner cultic followership of his immediate predecessor. It is Mr. Buhari that laid all the booby traps that are likely to fell Tinubu or keep him busy for the next four years. The best test of party solidarity would be to try and upset Buhari’s apple cart. The political fangs and jack knives will come out.

And yet so far, the Daura general is comfortably savouring his cozy retirement in his ranch. He has even had the temerity to unleash his megaphones on the public to justify his actions in office. The most disastrous leader in the whole of Nigerian history is being revised as a man without regrets and who took the best decisions in the best interest of the nation. It is either being trumpeted that he has no regrets for the disaster he unleashed on the nation. And because we live in a nation where leaders face no consequences for their actions in office, Buhari is sufficiently shameless and immune as to use every occasion to preach to or lecture Nigerians on patriotism, good governance and the value of good leadership. In every other self respecting republic, a man with Buhari’s record in office should either be in jail, facing trial at The Hague or quarantined in disgraceful internal exile for the rest of his life. And here is just a tip of why.

Under Mr. Buhari’s eight years, close to 90,000 citizens were killed by bandits or kidnappers. Fewer than 100 known bandits and kidnappers were either arrested or brought to book for these crimes. Many of our young daughters, wives or female relations were abducted, raped, abused, carted off into forceful matrimony or sold off into direct slavery. Under Buhari’s watch, insecurity forced an estimated seven million Nigerians to become Internally Displaced Persons, sequestered from home, kith and kin and livelihood for an indefinite period.

In this period, Nigeria climbed up the global insecurity index. We became among the top five most dangerous nations of the world in the league of Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan while our police force is now grouped among the worst in the world.

Under this illustrious Daura general, the national economy was literally eviscerated.  Arguably, we have been set back a good three decades in economic terms. An external debt of anywhere between $80 billion and $100 billion hangs over our collective neck with over N30 trillion in domestic debts. Our external reserves, long brandished as $34-$37 billion was surreptitiously used to leverage clandestine external loans from American banks to the extent of over $18 billion with neither parliamentary approval nor other statutory due processes. We are now spending over 98% of our total revenue on debt servicing. Only this week, the World Bank designated the Nigerian Naira as one  of the worst currencies in sub Saharan Africa. As we speak, over N1000 is equivalent to $1 USD!

Not long before the 2023 presidential elections, a dubious Naira re-design project was suddenly unleashed on Nigerians by the duo of President Buhari and his Central Bank Governor, Mr. Godwin Emefiele. People’s bank deposits were literally confiscated by the government. An unanticipated cash crunch hit the nation. People could not access their own hard earned money. Others went through untold hardship to  get into banks that had no money- ether new or old currencies- to dispense. People died of poverty, disease and hardship. Up to this moment, hardly more than a trickle of the new currencies on which huge public expenditure had been incurred is in circulation. And no questions are being asked.

Still on money matters, close to N29.3 trillion of worthless currency was printed and pumped into the economy by a colluding Central Bank through a dubious Ways and Means mechanism, thereby fueling further runaway inflation which today hovers above 27%.

Under Buhari’s eight years, Nigeria witnessed the largest migration of citizens into multidimensional poverty than at any other time in our history. An estimated over 130 million Nigerians now live in poverty being the largest ‘poverty republic’ in the world, more than India with a population of over 1.4 billion people.

As Petroleum Minister, Mr. Buhari presided over the emergence of oil theft, illegal bunkering and illicit refineries as an industry and a sector of Nigeria’s expanding insecurity sub sector. At its worst moments, close to 30% of Nigeria’s daily oil production was being creamed off by oil thieves often with official and security knowledge and enablement.

Under Buhari, the nation witnessed the institutionalization of corruption. The leadership of the very agencies established to fight corruption (EFCC and ICPC) were themselves investigated and found culpable of condoning high level corruption and there were no consequences. No arrests. No prosecutions.  No recoveries. No reasonable forfeitures.

Mr. Buhari presided over a deliberate and reckless mismanagement of our national diversity through aggressive nepotism, nativism and divisive politics.

In response to irritations from secessionist movements in the South East, Buhari could not hide his allergy to the Igbos as a nationality. He threatened on Twitter to unleash genocidal violence on them by speaking to them “in a language they understand from the civil war years.” He capped this xenophobic vituperation by describing the Igbos as a mere ‘dot’ surrounded by ‘a circle’ of Nigerian security viciousness. Twitter scrubbed this twit as ‘hate speech’ for which Twitter was banned from the Nigerian web space for close to a year!

Back to Tinubu’s self -imposed Buhari burden. It is true that faithfulness to party demands that Tinubu should remain silent on the culpability of Mr. Buhari for the myriad burdens he has to contend with. Faithfulness to party perhaps dictates that he should gloss over some of Mr. Buhari’s excusable lapses. But we are not dealing with casual lapses but fundamental acts of epic incompetence or deliberate misdeed occasioned by ignorance or patent wickedness and insensitivity. We are dealing with acts and policies that have literally destroyed the nation we all call home.

Within the rubrics of faithfulness to party solidarity and policy continuity, it is perhaps understandable that President Tinubu has continued to own the highpoints of his predecessor’s infamous rule. He may have been emboldened in this regard by the outcome of the 2023 presidential elections. After all, he ran under the platform of the APC and was declared winner. This may indicate that the Nigerian populace saw nothing wrong with Buhari’s or the APC’s rule. That would be a conventional democratic wisdom. Ordinarily, the electorate should ‘punish’ a party with a defective performance record at the next election. The controversial result of the 2023 presidential election indicates widespread public hesitation to endorse the return of the APC after the Buhari infamy. It stops short of a wholesale rejection of the APC. A vote tally of less than 9 million in a registered voter population of over 83 million and a population of over 200 million cannot by any stretch be described as an endorsement of a ruling party.

Even at that, President Tinubu needs to understand the dividing line between faithfulness to party solidarity and his own political self-interest. While party solidarity dictates a rhetorical commitment to continuing with the Buhari legacy, real politik dictates that he distances himself, as much as possible, from the worst of Buhari.

As Buhari and his jaded acolytes continue to bring him out for occasional airing, his plight reminds me of Joseph Stalin win his last days. Towards the end, he was adjudged as somewhat unhinged by the public and his close lieutenants. But he insisted that he was acting rationally and in the best interests of the nation. Somehow, his  derangement had progressed so far that he could not distinguished between illusion and reality. He mistook each act of deluded autocracy as illustrious service to the nation.

He noticed that the attendance at his weekend garden parties was getting  unusually scanty. On one occasion, when he made his usual grand entrance, he asked aloud: ‘Where have all my friends gone?’ An aide leaned over and whispered into his ears: ‘All gone, all purged…’ Stalin, in his delusion, failed to see that his sweeping purges of ‘anti revolutionary elements’ had also wiped out majority of his friends and allies. Close to 6 million had perished on Stalin’s orders. The man of power had eroded and destroyed the very nation in whose name he was wielding the power of the state. But the suffering and death of the masses meant little to him. As he famously said: “The death of one man is a tragedy. But the death of many is statistics…”

To Buhari in his final days in power, Nigerians were no more than mere subjects and statistics. The nation was a playground. The nation of his legacy is best described as a field after a locust invasion. For President Tinubu to see his presidency as a continuation of this legacy is political hara-kiri. He needs to choose now.