Elegiac encomiums have been pouring in from within and outside Nigeria for the late former President Muhammadu Buhari who passed on, on 13 July in a London clinic after a protracted illness. Aged 82, he would have died while in office but for providence.
His remains were laid to rest last Tuesday, in his home town, Daura, Katsina State. No political figure of his age rivalled him in fame or popularity, even without riches. Nigeria, which he served as a soldier, politician and statesman, gave him a befitting state burial. A special Federal Executive Council (FEC) session was held on Thursday in his honour. The seven-day national mourning for him ends today. We commiserate with Aisha, his widow, his children, his entire family, and all Nigerians for this irreparable loss.
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Since his demise, his stewardship has been a special subject of public discourse, fuelled by varied factors and interests. Mr Buhari was born on 17 December, 1942. His public service career did not begin in 2015, when he was democratically elected as president, or on 31 December 1983, when he emerged as a military head of state.
Enlisted in the army in 1961 and commissioned two years after, he fought in the Nigerian Civil War and was military governor of the then North-Eastern State, now Borno State, as a Lieutenant Colonel. He was also a federal minister in charge of the petroleum ministry. By 1983, he had become a major-general, and General Officer Commanding (GOC) the 3rd Division of the Nigerian Army.
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It was during this time that he crept into the public imagination after his troops drove Chadian soldiers 50 kilometres to Ndjamena, their country’s capital, following a border skirmish with Nigeria.
Shortly after that incident, he and his cohort toppled President Shehu Shagari’s government. In a 20-month interregnum that resulted from it, he came across as a stickler for orderliness or discipline, evident in the signature War Against Indiscipline programme of his administration.
But his thirst for further service to the nation attracted him to politics. Therefore, he contested presidential election three times in 2003, 2007 and 2011 – under different political parties. Twice, he won more than 12 million votes in the North but failed to get the required national spread to win the contests. A coalition of parties that dissolved their identities later lured Mr Buhari out of retirement to contest for the fourth time under the resultant All Progressives Congress (APC), and he finally realised his ambition in 2015.
The elation that greeted his ascension to power was phenomenal. His personal discipline, integrity, widely acknowledged zero-tolerance for corruption, disdain for material acquisition, and his military antecedent, within the context of the prevailing unacceptable level of insecurity in the country, came together to give Nigerians a sense of a new dawn, which they believed would address much of their concerns.
Sadly, his eight years in office became another missed opportunity for Nigeria to rediscover itself. The Economist, an influential newspaper, in its Buhari obituary last week said, “He failed to build a better Nigeria than he met it.” But, “What was never in doubt was his personal probity.” We couldn’t agree more!
At PREMIUM TIMES, we had since 2023 reached that conclusion on Mr Buhari’s underwhelming scorecard. For instance, inflation averaged 9 per cent in 2015 when he assumed office. But by April 2023, a month before he left office, it stood at 22.22 per cent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The economy tanked, and the GDP growth rate averaged 1.5 per cent yearly. The unemployment and manufacturing figures were equally dismal.
The economy and political environment he inherited from the PDP government did not help matters, truth be told. State governors owed their workers salaries in arrears. By July – just two months in office, 27 of them visited Buhari to plead for bailouts to enable them pay public service emoluments; and he obliged them. Indeed, the public treasury was mercilessly looted; militancy in the Niger Delta took a turn for the worse with extensive oil pipeline vandalism, in protest over the loss of their son, President Jonathan, in the 2015 election; while the price of crude in the global market headed south.
As a leader not endowed with the redemptive ideas that Nigeria badly needed, Mr Buhari resorted to reckless foreign and domestic borrowings to sustain governance. From a ₦12.12 trillion debt stock in 2015, this steadily rose to ₦41.6 trillion as of 19 December 2022, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO). The situation was so bad that 96 per cent of national revenue was spent on servicing debts annually.
Mr Buhari’s known frugality and discipline deserted him with the ₦22.7 trillion Ways and Means advances from the CBN to the Federal Government by the end of 2022, which was secured covertly, without the approval of the National Assembly. Worse yet, it exceeded the five per cent threshold of the previous year’s revenue as stipulated in the CBN Act. The economy still reels from that recklessness.
Under Mr Buhari’s watch, human life lost its sanctity. Bandits, kidnappers, herders and other illegal arms bearers turned the national landscape into graveyards of sorts. Data from the Nigeria Security Tracker put egregious killings from the foregoing at 63,111 persons in the period under review.
Some critics have even argued that more corruption occurred during his regime. This is debatable. But with a national oil company – NNPC – that spent trillions of naira on fuel subsidy that remains unaccounted for, one of his ministers allegedly getting enmeshed in a ₦57 billion scam in an interventionist ministry, some of his appointees being in charge of the four public refineries for which Nigeria spent billions of dollars to fix to no avail, and who are now being invited by the EFCC for questioning, all this may sign-post the coming of more stunning sleaze discoveries.
Yes, Buhari may have secured more convictions and recovered stolen funds, but they pale in comparison to the rot he promised to deal with, which never happened. Corrupt judicial processes, to a large extent, could be said to have manacled him, and he openly confessed to this as being a major headache. It forced him to be nostalgic of his military days when the handling of similar suspects would have been done differently.
But he had no excuse for the injudicious exercise of statecraft in 2022, that led to the state pardon granted to the only two former governors – Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame – his administration convicted of corruption. The two abused their offices while serving as governors of Plateau and Taraba states respectively.
With the subsidy scam syndicates untouched, $17 billion worth of crude oil stolen by the oil majors between 2011 and 2014, which his administration uncovered but could not recover, a Nigerian Customs boss and Accountant-General of the Federation looting the treasury to the tune of over ₦200 billion and returning too little in plea bargains, these were all indelible dents on Mr Buhari’s anti-graft mystic. In fact, as a leader, he ticked all the boxes for Ralph Emerson’s aphorism that “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”
His military antecedent was a millstone for his regime’s serial disregard of court orders, and violation of human rights. Ibraheem El-Zakzaky and wife, Omoyele Sowore and Sambo Dasuki, were some of his notable victims in this regard.
Impervious to change and unyielding to superior reasoning, early notice that a perverse administration was underway in 2015 was in the five months it took him to appoint ministers. Not even his wife’s public denunciation that his government had been hijacked by a cabal, and a deficit in delivering his electoral promises, could force Mr Buhari to re-think the trajectory of governance. He barely changed his cabinet for much of his eight years in office despite public misgivings and the glaring incompetence of some of his ministers and advisers.
But it wasn’t all grotesque and dim for his administration. To deny him due credit where necessary would be most uncharitable. He did reasonably well, in our view, in infrastructure, in spite of revenue challenges. The Second Niger Bridge, which the PDP failed to build for 16 years with better revenue inflow; the total rehabilitation of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and its railway to boot; Abuja–Kaduna, Kaduna-Kano, Enugu–Port Harcourt Highways and the emplacement of the Single Treasury Account for revenue accountability, are enduring legacies.
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Very significantly, he was the one who finally restored legitimacy to the June 12, 1993 electoral victory of the late MKO Abiola, giving this the national recognition it deserved, while granting full national honours to the winner of that contest, and his place in the roll call of former Nigerian heads of state. This was more than a symbolic gesture that enabled official closure to and healing of one of the ugliest episodes in Nigeria’s troubled past.
His government degraded Boko Haram insurgents, against the backdrop of the 17 local government areas initially under their control in Borno State. Explosions from Improvised Explosive Devices by cells of these jihadists in motor parks, markets, churches and mosques across northern towns and villages gradually waned and disappeared.
Nigeria had a better equipped Air Force with 23 brand new aircraft, in addition to the 12 Super Tucano jets acquisition – all testaments to his “unyielding” determination “in confronting the Boko Haram insurgency.”
Without Mr Buhari, Nigeria would have lost a humongous $11 billion to P&ID contract fraudsters, in a gas processing scam in the NNPC in 2010. A London court finally determined the case in our country’s favour in October 2023. The rogues had won the case in 2017 through an arbitration panel in the UK. But the government appealed the judgement.
Despite his leadership deficits, Mr Tinubu at Thursday’s Federal Executive Council tribute session fittingly observed that, “His life was a rebuke to vice and refuge to virtue(s).”
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