The Punch newspaper recently decided it would henceforth prefix President Muhammadu Buhari’s name with his military rank of Major-General and refer to his administration as a regime. In an editorial entitled “Buhari’s lawlessness: Our stand”, the newspaper said it would refer to the president and his government in those militaristic and pejorative terms “until they purge themselves of their insufferable contempt for the rule of law.”
Well, the Punch is absolutely right: Buhari is an authoritarian leader who runs a “militocracy”, disguised as a democracy! Yet, although General Buhari visits his hardman authoritarianism on Nigerians, he also leads a dysfunctional government, which, as his wife never stops telling the world, is hijacked by a cabal and run by incompetent ministers and officials.
Recently, Mrs. Aisha Buhari said: “I think the people he (Buhari) put in the cabinet should just sit up and do the needful”, adding, “so that the first lady would stop talking”.
Here’s the question: Why is General Buhari arresting and trying journalists for treason, disobeying court orders, trampling on the rule of law and creating a climate of fear, and yet can’t rein in the cabal that has hijacked his government or, dare I say it, stop his wife from washing his administration’s dirty laundry in the public? Indeed, recently, Mrs. Buhari effectively called the president’s senior media assistant, Garba Shehu, a fifth columnist, accusing him of “a misguided sense of loyalty”! The Jekyll and Hyde character of General Buhari – tough on opponents, soft on acolytes – is indeed emblematic of his broader Janus-faced personality.
For instance, his decision to drop the use of his military rank once he was elected president in 2015 was two-faced; a triumph of symbolism over substance. It was merely presentational and nothing more.
I wrote in another column at the time, questioning why Buhari was ashamed to be called Major General in office, while his vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, was proud to be addressed as Professor. After all, General Dwight Eisenhower, 34th president of the US, and General Charles de Gaulle, a post-war president of France, both to whom Buhari was compared by those who saw him in their mould as Nigeria’s saviour, used their military ranks as presidents. But, then, there was a key difference.
Neither Eisenhower nor de Gaulle overthrew a democratically elected government as Buhari did when he and his colleagues toppled the Shehu Shagari government in 1983. So, it was understandable why he didn’t want to use his military rank as president: his brutal military dictatorship was a blot!
Little wonder that, during the 2015 presidential election campaign, Buhari had to assure the world that he was a changed man. In a Chatham House speech in London, he said: “Before you is a former military ruler and a converted democrat who is ready to operate under democratic norms”. By describing himself as a “converted democrat” and by later dropping the use of his military rank once elected president, Buhari sent a powerful statement of his intent to renounce his old hardman habits and embrace genuine democratic values.
But it was a mistake to have taken him and his statement at face value. For a leopard never changes its spots. As the famous American writer Gary Pauben also put it, “You can take the man out of the woods, but you can’t take the woods out of the man”.
In truth, as The Times newspaper in London once said in an editorial, dictators who become “democrats” tend to “eat out democracy from within”, adding that they “operate according to their own rules”.
The paper named President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Recep Erdogan of Turkey as examples. It could have added President Buhari! For if Buhari was ever a converted democrat, his conversion was threadbare, he soon backslid: an authoritarian recidivist!
In his book, Authoritarianism: What everyone needs to know, Professor Erica Frantz of Michigan State University listed the following as some of the features of personal dictatorships: a narrow inner circle of trusted people; installation of loyalists in positions of power; and the creation of security services loyal to them. And in an article entitled The rise of the populist authoritarians, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times said that populist authoritarians would always justify repression of those they see as enemies of the state.
Sadly, General Buhari fits the above characterisation. He has a narrow inner circle of trusted people from his ethnic group; puts his loyalists in positions of power; and surrounds himself with security chiefs mainly from his ethnic group. Although, as Alexis de Tocqueville said, “the discourse of crisis is the native language of any genuine democracy”, General Buhari responds to every crisis not with dialogue, but with military force.
He once ordered the military to “fight and destroy relentless” those agitating for self-determination, ordering security chiefs “to ensure Nigeria remains one”. In his nearly five years in power, General Buhari has not introduced any political reform, and has no plan to do so; his reflex response to any form of agitation is to use military force, sending soldiers to quell dissent! More a military hardman than a converted democrat!
Truth is, despite promising to “operate under democratic norms” General Buhari’s instincts run contrary to such norms.
Surely, the recent invasion of a court to re-arrest Omoyele Sowore, the incessant attacks of journalists, at least 61 cases this year, and the blatant defiance of court orders, 40 in five years, according to Amnesty International, are the behaviours of autocrats, not democrats!
Yet, while General Buhari subjects Nigerians to this reign of terror, he and his hangers-on are enjoying the trappings of power, feeding off the state, quarrelling over apartments in Aso Rock.
And, of course, running a dysfunctional and ineffectual government. General Buhari’s regime, not Nigerians, needs a dose of his military discipline!
VANGUARD
