On Monday, there was another massive attack in Plateau State that ended in the death of dozens of people. The perpetrators of that massacre were unsparingly cruel and the gory images of old and young victims, which surfaced online afterward, say quite a lot about the kind of maniacs that hunted those villages and killed the people.
Like we have come to expect, the Presidency issued another lukewarm statement that said all the right things it was supposed to say, except it also expressed the fear that President Muhammadu Buhari’s opponents would take advantage of those incidents. The press release followed the same pattern of previous ones: the President condemns the act and promises that the perpetrators would face justice.
Over time, those press releases have come to symbolise the feebleness of the bite of the government’s security apparatus. There is not much more proof needed to conclude that the government has lost control than some citizens boldly claiming they attacked other citizens to retaliate against the killing of their animals. Come to think of it, considering how much they have got away with; they no longer have a reason to fear the law.
Considering also that Buhari’s candidature was promoted as one capable of arresting the security situation because of his military background, the frequent herdsmen attacks on innocent civilians are not only a disappointment, but they are also a betrayal of popular trust. The failure of Buhari’s administration to improve the situation beyond the hand-wringing stings harder because of what he had once symbolised – integrity.
Buhari was always lucky to be thought of that favourably for, at least, two reasons. One, his successors have mostly been fellow dictators and bumblers and since no revisionist history can successfully describe that they offered anything close to an ideal leadership, he continued to evoke fanciful imaginations of a benevolent dictator – tough, incorruptible and armed with an unbending will. People speculated that with his militaristic rigid stance on every issue, who else was better positioned to arrest the Nigerian social and ethical rot than Buhari? Second, as Nigerians, we are disconnected from our own history and tend to nibble on memories built from the shifty sands of revised memories and nostalgia. The lie that a strong leader is what we need to straighten what is bent about Nigeria has finally unravelled with Buhari.
In 2015, the exaggeration about Buhari’s leadership capability assumed an especial mythic proportion when he was brought out to run for president once again. Not only was the 1985 Buhari repackaged and deodorised for voters, but he himself also began to believe the fiction they had built around him that he could raise the dead. He travelled the length and breadth of Nigeria promising to stabilise the naira, jail looters, provide electricity, turn Nigeria to Eldorado, use the sheer force of his will to stamp out the Boko Haram insurgency and give us a future where we will all live happily ever after. Of course, Nigerians, perennially deprived of good leadership and thirsty for a semblance of hope, did not ask him to highlight the details of his plans. They thought he was, indeed, a man of integrity and if he insisted on being given a chance to prove himself, he should be offered the opportunity to do so.
Three years after he was sworn in, we can look back at the three cardinal promises of Buhari’s government – to fight corruption, improve the economy and guarantee security – and see that he scores low in all of them. No matter how much idealism Buhari and his followers wallow in; no matter how much they blow their little achievement out of proportion, it does not change the apparent fact that he just does not get it. He and the rest of his cabinet are just as confused by the seeming intractability of Nigeria’s problems as his predecessors were. He has not brought to the table any unique insight that suggests that this tunnel has a light at its end.
In recent time, nothing has thrown the President’s failure on issues of national security into more substantial relief than the frequent herdsmen attacks in the Nigerian middle belt. That region is not the only part of the country that has been bleeding since Buhari got to office, but the people have suffered quite a lot of vicious and malicious attacks by herdsmen. There is an endless cycle of violence in those parts of Nigeria that resemble the Gaza Strip. Monday’s attacks by herdsmen, who claimed they were avenging the plunder of their cattle, just made the government’s already full cup boil over to the point that it is extinguishing their fire. Although Buhari officially tried to respond to this attack quickly enough by dispatching Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to Plateau State, what we have seen so far suggests that our present crop of leaders might be incapable and clueless about the solutions to the carnage.
On the economy, the same Monday brought the grim news that Nigeria has dethroned India as the poverty capital of the world. That means that India will no longer be the face of third-world poverty. Nigeria, our dear country, currently bears that shame. According to the report by the Brookings Institution, Nigeria altogether has some 86.9 million people living in acute poverty, on less than $2 daily. India with almost seven times our population has 15.4 million poor less than Nigeria. This is data our leaders have not bothered to contend with. Nor have they countered the fact that opposition politicians sponsored the report. They must know that the report has elements of truth and reality condensed into it.
For some of us, the Nigerian poverty rate did not come entirely as a surprise: our population has been drastically growing without a commensurate rise in either the quality or quantity of infrastructure that can promote human flourishing as our numbers increase.
Nigeria’s population is projected to hit 250 million by the year 2030. If Buhari wins a second term and by the time it is completed, we might be seven years away from creating a quarter of a billion people. We are producing more humans, but ironically, our understanding of humanity is being depleted by our failure to infuse the quantity with quality. We have not yet learned to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves satisfactorily, yet we keep reproducing. We do not have a leadership that coordinates collective energy and use it as a resource to generate a more productive economy. Our leaders are more interested in the small picture, the immediate gains, and the consolidation of political power.
The third goal the Muhammadu Buhari administration set for itself is to tackle corruption. Corruption was one area that was supposed to be a slam-dunk for him, but then reality has been trickier than his tough talk. The All Progressives Congress controls both the executive and the legislature, but they could not even pass a credible budget between the executive and legislature. By this time next year, the squabble of padded budgets and corrupt executive/legislature will rear its head again. Those corrupt people that we were told would run away from Nigeria as Buhari became President are not only within the country, some of them are luxuriating within his government. Come 2019 election, they will be on his campaign train dancing shaku shaku, and explaining to the rest of us why we need to stamp out corruption. What really have we gained from this Buhari/APC leadership?
Credit: Abimbola Adelakun, Punch