By Abdullahi Garba
By Abdullahi Garba
General Muhammadu Buhari has once again reared his head to contest Nigeria’s Presidency. Almost three decades after being overthrown by his military colleagues, it is disturbing to hear him pointing accusing fingers in his bid to whitewash his soiled political linen. Even at over 70, Buhari adamantly ignores the toll of age and political pastoralism that has now ravaged his frail frame, countering any pretence of capability to be an effective and energetic leader, if he ever was.
Only Buhari and his followers remain adamant in refusing to read the handwriting on the wall of Nigeria’s democracy under which he has been consistently turned back by Nigerian voters. He contested the presidential poll in 2003, 2007 and 2011and failed to win the hearts and minds of Nigerians who have a long memory of his brand of leadership. His hero-worshipping followers remain a regional rump thereby jinxing his desperation to be seen and heard to be a nationalist. Though he is idolized by the followership that encourage him to seek to lead Nigeria from his narrow political base, the fact is that General Buhari started as a brash dictator full of contempt for politics, politicians and everything associated with them, including democratic rule.
He never anticipated an ambush by the schemers and plotters that surrounded him after his unceremonious exit from the army and governance and gave him the misleading impression that he could become a civilian president. The fact that he is still beholden to the whims and caprices of his hero-worshipping followers is best highlighted by the unchanging faces that have accompanied the General on his ill-fated quest for presidential power in Nigeria. I make bold to say that those that dragged him to the race were political adventurers around him who have been persistent in this project and had done so severally in the past to try to reap from the fallout of his contest.
It is an indictment of Buhari’s exaggerated leadership capacity that he is chronically unable to make references to his own tortuous tenure as Head of State but rather seeks to rubbish the PDP’s record as the basis of his own quest. Perhaps he has conveniently forgotten that the litany of problems of Nigeria which he dishonestly heaps on the PDP actually took root in the draconian days of dictatorship under him and his soldier-successors. Nigerians cannot forget in a hurry, the decree that gave effect to retrench Nigerian workers limiting the powers of the courts through ouster clauses.
Others include the building of presidential guest house in Daura his native home, giving impetus to perpetuation in power, which later lay fallow until it was converted to a hospital by then-governor Umar Musa Yar’adua, and the detention of prominent Nigerians without just cause. It is to the credit of the PDP that it has maintained such a formidable presence across the country to underscore its popular acceptance by majority of Nigerians in spite of indiscriminate politically-motivated blackmail and incitement by the likes of Buhari. His high-handed approach to governance has put off the vast majority of Nigerians, and eventually snowballed into his retirement.
From the accounts of the coupists who ousted his regime out of power, they were known to have planned their onslaughts against the absence of Tunde Idiagbon and had no problem arresting the General as he gave in so easily in anticipation of their expectations. Despite these glaring defects, he has continued to portray himself as a populist.
If all Buhari can say in justification of his belated and misplaced interest in the presidency of Nigeria in 2015 is to recall failures of governance that he and his junta colleagues compiled as an agenda for overthrowing a democratically elected Shagari government as far back as 1983, then it is very clear that he is not only bereft of ideas but trapped in the cocoon of his dictatorial days.
Throughout his recent declaration speech, Buhari, like a broken record, merely repeated the entire rhetorical armchair criticism for which he has become known for. There was no hint of any new or relevant insight or solution from him that could be compared with the experience and initiatives that the ruling party has deployed to address national problems even as they get more complicated by political sabotage.
Such empty-barreled noise-making cannot take the place of well-reasoned diagnosis and well-informed prescription of relevant and effective panaceas. From the way Buhari and his supporters in the APC talk cheaply about changing Nigeria from their peculiar position as failed former leaders, the only change they will bring about is a change for the worse due to stale knowledge and rusted capacity.
They are only interested in occupying the Presidency of Nigeria in order to stave off the pangs of irrelevance and impoverishment mounting on them as their years out of office and out of the corridors of power turn to decades. Mercifully, Nigerians have since shaken off the shackles of regimented thinking and draconian application of policies for which the General is still viewed with trepidation in today’s Nigeria. A new generation of fresh forward looking Nigerians has since pulled the rug from the clay feet of the Buharis who belong in the museum of failed leaders of yesterday’s Nigeria.
Garba wrote from Kaduna