On Monday, former Vice President, Namadi Sambo, met Nigeria’s President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) at State House, Abuja to be debriefed on his assignment as ECOWAS’ Head of Mission on the election in the Republic of Niger. Given an inconclusive first round in December, where none of the presidential candidates garnered above 50 per cent, a mandatory second round took place on February 21. The winner has been declared.
That election is considered remarkable because it was Niger’s first democratic transition of power since they gained independence from France in 1960. Like many African countries, Niger has had its share of turbulence. Their history is chequered with coups and violence, political and economic instability, as well as all kinds of social regressions. Landlocked and suffering from droughts, they are one of the poorest countries in the world. Life expectancy is low, infant and maternal mortality figures are high, and they are quite vulnerable.
Despite all of that gloom, they have not fared as poorly as Nigeria did in the past six years. They are even more hopeful of a better beginning. The outgoing president, Mahamadou Issoufou, who got into office after his predecessor was kicked out in a coup, described the February election as “a new, successful page in our country’s democratic history.” He had spent two terms of 10 years altogether, and as early as last year, announced he would not be seeking a term extension. The election was not perfect, and there were allegations of rigging by the losing candidate, Mahamane Ousmane, that led to post-election fights. But, as Sambo observed and relayed to Buhari, the election was generally well-conducted.
Here is the irony: Buhari, while responding to Sambo, reportedly thanked him for a job well done. He should have left the issues there, but he went ahead to state that, “Nigeria shares more than 1,400 kilometres of border with the Republic of Niger, and we should be concerned about the stability of that country. We are concerned about their stability.” This paternalistic attitude on Buhari’s part shows how much he is out of touch with the emerging reality. If anyone should be concerned about the stability of a country with which they share a national border, it should be the Nigeriens, not the other way around. We are presently a bigger threat to their national stability than they are to us.
First, on the same day that Buhari’s aides put out the press release stating how concerned he is that Niger’s internal crisis might spill over into Nigeria, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation announced Issoufou its 2020 winner of the Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. The Prize awards a lump sum of $5m for a decade and a lifetime pension of $200,000. The Prize is awarded based on how much the leader improves their country, respects term limits, and treats their democratic processes. The Prize is not given lightly, and it is considered a credible appraisal of the leader to whom it is awarded on the relatively few occasions it has been given. In the 14 years since it was inaugurated, there have been eight years where, throughout the entire Africa, a deserving winner could not be found.
If Issoufou got the 2020 Prize, it means two things. First is that his efforts for his country must be seriously deserving of the honour. The Prize committee said as much. They noted that despite the perennial issues of violent extremism and desertification, Issoufou reduced the poverty level and put his people on the path of progress. They are still an unenviably poor country. Despite that harsh reality, their poverty rate fell from 48 to 40 per cent in the past decade. In that same period, Nigeria’s poverty rates soared that we became the poverty capital of the world with more than 90 million Nigerians currently living in extreme poverty. While Niger made some small progress, Nigeria went from being poor to being multi-dimensionally poor.
Second, and as far as leadership is concerned, Issoufou’s outranks Buhari’s brain-dead regime by many miles. That comparison itself is telling, and highly infuriating too. That is why it is ironic that Buhari would consider Niger’s instability a threat when the country that is currently plagued with shabby leadership and whose disintegration will imperil the entire West African region is Nigeria itself.
We are the ones regressing on every chart of human development. Year on year, we are stuck with the same problem Fela Anikulapo-Kuti identified in the 80s-water, light, food, house! As the rest of the world talks about improving the quality of life for their citizens, Nigeria seems unable to move beyond perennially talking about hunger. We spend valuable time to perorate cow grazing. This time six years ago, people clamoured for Buhari hoping to put a decisive stop to a clueless and deadweight administration and, hopefully, usher in a new beginning. They thought that if we could make a break with the past, maybe we might advance or perhaps just turn a corner in our warped history.
Today, those high hopes have become nightmares. We are more lost today than at any time in our history. Nobody, not even any of the most devout Buhari supporters who troll everyone over their opinions of his regime, dares claim he is doing a good job any longer. The reality that they too cannot extricate themselves from the miasma of his bad leadership has dawned on them, and they have even started removing their heads from their rear ends to rightfully worry about what the future portends for this country.
In the past six years of Buhari’s presidency, Nigerians have grown far worse off than they were in 2015 when they desperately sought redemption. We have a leadership that has not solved a single problem yet has worsened the quality of life by virtually every measurable index. In February, at a Presidential Economic Advisory Council forum, Buhari reportedly said he was shocked to learn that only two per cent is irrigated out of the vast agricultural land resources available. Now, he resolved, his regime has now awoken, and they “will not doze off again.” Imagine!
After six years of our lives having been frittered away by the most laid-back and unimaginative President ever, he casually concedes he has been sleepwalking through the Presidency. That admission should be treated as criminal negligence. A President who confesses to playing away the nation’s time is also accepting liability that all the lives that were lost and diminished within that period are on him. Unfortunately, Buhari’s confession is not because he takes responsibility for his failings. It is because he understands that there are no consequences for his failures. There are no robust systems of accountability, and that is why a lacklustre President like him can merely wave off his failures.
Whatever might be wrong with the Niger Republic at present, one cannot say their president did not at least try. They did not become Dubai, but they also did not badly regress like Nigeria. Buhari has decimated our lives to the point where Nigeria now threatens to implode. This President got into office on a wave of high expectations, and by his own admission, he just went off to sleep until a country that was already in a precarious state started crumbling. He has no business expressing concern over how surrounding countries could be a hazard to us when it is glaring that we are the ones who could imperil them.
If he had any self-awareness, he would see that we are the menace. We have not only failed to improve our lives -no thanks to his inept leadership- we have also failed others who look up to us as the giant of Africa for inspiration. It is sheer arrogance and baseless self-aggrandising to think they could be a problem when we are already the problem. If Nigeria should break up or the instability presently roiling the country should get the better of us, our massive population redistributing itself around the region will be a disaster for the entire West Africa
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun, Punch