President Muhammadu Buhari made one of the most down-to-earth statements of his presidency last Thursday, though by proxy. After meeting Nigerian security chiefs at the Aso Rock Villa, the National Security Adviser, (NSA) Babagana Monguno, claimed Buhari said that he dreaded failure in office, so much; and I dare literalize it, like leprosy. “And (President Buhari) also made it very, very (italics, mine) clear that he’s not ready to exit government as a failure,” Monguno said.
Monguno is taking us to class this morning as he has provoked the need to interrogate the concept of failure. What is failure? At what point in life is someone said to have failed? Is it ennobling to fail or, put differently, is failure noble? Is there any aesthetics in failure? In other words, should those who fail see some glamour in failure, or more succinctly, is there a philosophy of failure?
Ivan Moris, in his The Nobility of Failure: Tragic heroes in the history of Japan, examines what leadership failure means. It is a narration of the rise and fall of some greats, figures who towered and still tower over Japanese historical and literary landscapes.
While examining what yardstick Nigerians will or have been using to determine who is a failed leader, the Japanese model should be interesting to us. Most of the stories examined by Morris were marked by the fickle nature of those close to these leaders and how they brought destruction their ways. From the book, you will get away with the impression that Japanese seem to prefer a noble loser to a vindictive winner, no matter the wrong side of history they belonged. Splattered all over the book are narrations of the exploits of warriors who though won wars but who, ages after, are labeled villains, reviled and scorned by their people.
Now, using the Monguno claim of a Buhari who doesn’t want to end his tenure of office a disaster, a tenure soon to end in less than two years time, how feasible is this claim? My departing point of analysis is this famous song by late pop diva and ex-Regent of Ikogosi in Ekiti State, Bunmi Olajubu. Sang in the early 1990s and entitled Bata Mi A Dun Ko ko Ka, this song articulates what, in grim terms, are the features of success and failure, especially in the cosmology of the Yoruba people. In the enviable world of the been-tos of the 1960s and 1970s Nigeria, what distinguished this class of people, who were just arriving Nigeria from their search for the golden fleece abroad, among others, was their stiletto shoes which made ko-ko-ka sound as they approached. This was markedly different from the uninspiring noise made by the salubata slippers of those who had no attainment, who didn’t go to school and whose approaching walks as they plodded on, in Olajubu’s song, was signified by the mere onomatopoeic perere noises of their slippers.
Olajubu’s measurement of failure and success can be broken down to the philosophical cause and effect. If a child goes to school and aspires as his peers were doing, in the Yoruba of the time’s explanation of the roots of success, his shoes will ultimately produce the ko-ko-ka sound. If, on the reverse, the child neglects this ancient wisdom and joins bad gangs, his slippers will invariably bellow out the uninspiring and irritating perere noise. This Olajubu song, whose patent belonged to pre-colonial Nigerian Yoruba homes, was one of the teaching aids deployed during this period to inspire children to go to school. Another was also Minister of Works under Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Chief J. O. Odunjo’s poems in the Alawiye series which moulded most children of this period. These poems contained similar nuggets. If you see a multitude scorning education, don’t pattern your life after them; woe will betide such child, tears await a wandering child; so wrote Odunjo.
Using Olajubu as a paradigm and taking into consideration the Monguno’s claim of Buhari’s aversion for ending up in 2023 as a colossal failure, are the president’s shoes already sounding ko-ko-ka, making the perere noise or will ultimately do so?
Recently, I read Femi Adesina, Special Adviser on Media’s eulogy of his boss’ infrastructural interventions which he relishes as sine non qua non among contemporary Nigerian presidency. If you travel with Adesina on this route, you may easily be infected by this adumbration of what success is, assuming it to be the true meaning of success. The question to ask is, does infrastructure define a president as successful? Is it the index, the observance of which makes a leader to escape being called a failure?
The truth is, as individuals, as a nation, as a state, as leaders, we determine whether we want to be successful, ab initio. In some other cases, we determine in our minds to be successful but unconscionably tread the path of failure.
Having been ridden roughshod upon in 1984 and torn off power like you do a sodden rag by Ibrahim Babangida and his coupist colleagues, Buhari apparently wanted to come back to power. Thrice when he was denied, he wept like a melancholic baby. Those who believed in him thought the tears were shed for Nigeria’s loss of his kind of leadership. Six years down the lane after he became president, the narration has assumed a teary dimension. The twine that binds Nigeria’s three dominant but fissiparous ethnic groups together has lost its tether under Buhari. Nigeria had never been this divided along ethnic fault lines since amalgamation and the challenges of the country had never received this level of ethnicization.
It will be selfish and uncharitable to lay all by the feet of Buhari. Nigeria was not wired to be peaceful by Britain. All that the colonialists wanted us to do, in the word of Immortal Bob Marley, was to “keep on fussing and fighting.” From Tafawa Balewa to Goodluck Jonathan, Nigerian rulers worsened the British quicksand Nigerian superstructure. But pre-2015, Nigerians still retained some modicum of affection, love and admiration for one another. All these things bright and beautiful, all our togetherness great and small, all the Nigerianness that were bright and beautiful, Buhari smashed them all into pieces. How did he do it?
His body language. Buhari is grossly insensitive to Nigeria’s diversity. First is that, most likely because he has complex for A-list aides, associates and ministers, his choice of cabinet members and aides is less than meritorious. He lusters in an assemblage of lickspittle aides and advisors who have no minds of their own. Even Jonathan, with his burnished ignorance, didn’t possess that level of complex and surrounded himself with people who could hold their own in the world.
Second is Buhari’s rabid tribal bigotry. Pass mark for appointment into critical offices, for him, is region and religion. Daura is A-pass mark for Buhari. These less than forward-looking people he surrounds himself with, coupled with his limited oeuvre, is what signify what is called gravitation towards the path of failure. You cannot oscillate among a combine of failure and you won’t fail. For you to qualify to climb high in Buhari’s mind, you have to first and foremost be Fulani, from the North, then a Muslim.
Thus, it is not unlikely that you will see passion-full people from Daura and environs clapping and saying rankadede to Buhari while he made a spiffy show of walking on Daura streets during Sallah. For instance, the Controller General of Immigration, Muhammed Babandede, from Jigawa State, will be going on retirement on September 21, 2021, after initial extension of office by Buhari. Since its inception, the North has appropriated headship of that organization. When Buhari appoints Babandede’s successor presently, it will be another rankadede. That is how ethnic bigotry defines appointments into offices under Buhari, in contravention of global indices of adjudging leadership.
Many of the afflictions that today plague Nigeria under Buhari are unexampled in modern history. Naira is far becoming a replica of the Zimbabwean dollars under Bob Mugabe, falling unaided like an acrobat. Hunger, which Monguno referred to, is wracking the bellies of Nigerians and lack had never been this pervasive. Forget that chest-thumping by Monguno, insurgency has almost crippled the north, with some parts of Nigeria in the hands of these jihadist bombers. So when Buhari and his commissars flaunt infrastructure as index of his success in office, they are either talking out of naivety or plain wickedness.
If Buhari didn’t construct a single meter of railway, no single kilometer of road, a length of bridge but strengthened our togetherness as a people, even if he, like those Morris’ Japanese tragic heroes, was regarded as an infrastructural failure, he would be a noble failure. With this, Nigerians, like Japanese, would be said to prefer a noble loser to a vindictive loser.
Credit: Festus Adedayo