Buhari, Saraki and caustic electioneering

President Muhammadu Buhari, the presumptive All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate for the 2019 election is lucky to have to eventually face only one of the more than half a dozen presidential aspirants of the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). More than three years in the presidential saddle and three times as presidential candidate during very bitter and unrelenting campaigns have quite curiously not toughened him enough to make him develop thick skin to criticisms, especially from boisterous and flippant presidential aspirants. His aides’ reply to Senate President Bukola Saraki’s damning speech a few days ago gave no indication at all that the Buhari presidency had developed the temper and sophistication needed to checkmate unfavourable or even hostile views of his government and person.

Dr Saraki had during his sensitisation trip to Bayelsa State, when he apprised the state government and PDP members and leaders of his presidential ambition, suggested that the country needed a man with the capacity and vision to lead Nigeria. It was a frontal and direct allusion to the opinion in certain key quarters that President Buhari was too archaic and divisive to preside over the affairs of Nigeria. Said the senate president: “Wherever you go, people ask questions: where do you belong? We need to address the issue of unity in this country; it is time for everybody to have a seat on the table, a time for everyone to have a sense of belonging in this country. It is not about me. There is a new order in the world today, wherever we go, we see leaders that have vision, that are ready to develop their countries. A lot of us talked about the Asian Tigers, but they did not come by chance, or trial and error; they became tigers because they have visionary leaders. They are leaders that are ready to defend their countries that have an idea of what they want to do.  As I keep on saying, you cannot give what you don’t have. Where we are now, we have a leadership that has no vision for us. We must bring visionary leadership to the presidential level so we can move this country forward.”

Cut to the quick, the presidency issued an angry, patrician rebuke suggesting rather curiously that Dr Saraki was rude and offensive in his language. Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, whose idiosyncratic inability to moderate his own responses is legendary, signed the response. Hear him: “The Presidency wishes to react to the crude speeches hitting the news from Senator Bukola Saraki who recently joined the Peoples Democratic Party with the sole ambition of running for the president of Nigeria. In response to the condemnable and extremely derogatory speeches by the PDP aspirant, we urge all Buhari supporters to display restraint in language and conduct and to always put across their points of view in a decent language. Throughout his political career, Senator Saraki has shown that he is a very dangerous person who can go any length to promote his personal interests. The language of his campaign is such that cannot be used against a domestic help. Is he just knowing that the President lacked vision? This is someone that the Senator had worked with very closely for more than three years. Amazingly, he never said all that he is now saying against him. Rather, his word for and on the President were always respectful and reassuring. That’s the man he called ‘My Father’. About him, ‘there is no cause for alarm…a President who is healthy, witty and himself.’ What then changed, all of a sudden?”

It is not clear how Dr Saraki’s admittedly vigorous, perhaps even caustic, view of the president has made him dangerous. He thinks the president lacks capacity and vision. That is harsh and wounding. But it remains his opinion, right or wrong. He says the president cannot give what he does not have. Again, that is lacerating; but it is neither offensive nor derogatory. He suggests that under President Buhari, not everyone feels a sense of belonging. Given that Dr Saraki addressed a Bayelsa State audience, a people whose son, Matthew Seiyefa, was brusquely shoved aside in favour of a retired Department of State Service (DSS) operative from Kano State, Dr Saraki’s hint that the president was dividing the country was understandable, even if it was opportunistically political. How Mr Shehu construes this as making the senate president dangerous is hard to explain. Indeed, none of the views publicly attributed to Dr Saraki in the media portrays the incendiarism Mr Shehu struggled to assign to him. The senate president’s views of President Buhari are undoubtedly unflattering and corrosive, but they are not rude or dangerous. Others, including ex-president Olusegun Obaanjo, have said worse things about the president. As a matter of fact, except to his ardent and uncompromising supporters, most commentators think the president’s style and appointments, not to say his views, are archaic, divisive and mostly inappropriate.

In responding to Dr Saraki’s harsh dismissal of the president, Mr Shehu may be confusing the senate president’s failings with the so-called disrespectful views he has publicly expressed about the president. The senate president is very ambitious, in fact too ambitious for many of his contemporaries to accommodate within their worldview. They see him as Machiavellian, untruthful, larcenous, and even politically amoral. Yet others see him as really not an exponent of democracy or of the libertarian values the constitution tries to promote and defend. Worse, some others think he is precisely the kind of politician quite eager and capable of plumbing the lowest depths of political wickedness in furtherance of his private and narrow interests. He will of course disagree with these conclusions about his person and politics, but he is unlikely to convince many Nigerians that he unfairly vilified.

But by conflating the senate president’s attributes — mostly the negative ones — with his politics, and in particular his trenchant conclusions about the president or the APC he had just angrily spurned, Mr Shehu misses the point badly. In the process, the presidential spokesman also seems to give the impression that the moralisation of politics embraced by President Buhari and his aides, to wit, the elevation of the virtues of honesty and incorruptibility, necessarily makes the president, his party, and his aides superior to the urgent need for capacity and vision in leadership. While a honest and incorruptible leader is desperately needed, especially given the country’s disruptive penchant for corruption and all sorts of financial malfeasances, it does not make the need for capacity and vision less valuable or subordinate. By all means, let the country be governed by honest and untainted leaders, if they can be found. But by all greater means, let those leaders possess the capacity and vision without which neither honesty nor integrity would avail much.

It is unlikely, however, that President Buhari or his spokesmen and aides would find the motivation to redress the president’s political and leadership weaknesses, especially of his alleged divisiveness, policy archaism entwined with both lack of vision and considerable unease with modern ideas and methods, and quaint worldview. Unlike the PDP which boasts of at least six powerful aspirants, each of whom possesses the capacity to dexterously hurl barbs at the president, the APC has only one aspirant, the candidate-president himself. Were the PDP aspirants spread over some six or more parties, with the distinct chance that each would direct his barbs at the president, it is hard to see him surviving the fusillade, especially considering that he has found it tough going weathering the pot shot from Dr Saraki. In a month or two, the battle will be finally and brutally joined. If the president cannot find the shrewdness and tolerance to respond brilliantly to the attacks from one or two quarters of the PDP, how would he fare when the opposition finally chooses one formidable rival to assail the APC at its weakest points, many of which points are open and gangrenous?