As the
nation raised its voice against run-away banditry, kidnappings and
rustling decimating lives and livelihood in rural north and caging the
northern branch of the national elite, President Muhammadu Buhari
boarded his plane last week for an economic summit in Jordan. From there
he was to visit Dubai for a number of days. His deputy meanwhile
boarded his own plane to Rwanda to participate in remembrance ceremonies
for a horrific genocide. Senate President Saraki also jetted out to
Qatar to attend some international parliamentary event. In this
globalized world, their audiences must know that in Nigeria villages are
being abandoned; highways are being deserted; dozens are kidnapped
every day and the nation they lead is waking up to security threats that
could dwarf Boko Haram. Yet, there they were, requesting foreigners to
invest in a nation where foreign highway construction engineers have to
be protected by armed soldiers and policemen, where human life has
virtually no value, from a nation aping democracy when its elections
provide the most fertile ground for crimes and fraud. Diplomatic
etiquette will discourage pointed questions around relationships between
violent crimes, the economy and Nigerian democracy, but there must have
been a few who thought these three leaders either have the thickest
skins or the highest levels of insensitivity.
President
Buhari will travel out whether the nation is having its worst or best
moments, but he does have the discretion to choose when it is the more
sensible thing to do not to leave the nation for days on end. He chose
the worst possible moment to attend an event that will not make a drop
of a difference to the Nigerian economy or his false image as a tough,
crime-fighting President. President Jonathan did not earn the popular
tag ‘clueless’ for nothing. His legendary insistence that Boko Haram was
a northern conspiracy against him, the manner he consistently devalued
its danger, his initial denial that Chibok girls were abducted, his
trademark mien that things are always better than they actually were,
combined to create the image of a President that had no idea what was
going on in the nation he led.
President Buhari took over
from him, pushed Boko Haram into distant enclaves where it adjusted
appropriately, removed road blocks from highways, sent tons of money to
the insurgency in the Niger Delta to appease it and then…nothing. He sat
in charge of a nation where doing very little about everything was the
new normal. Decision-making was patchy, laboured and rare. Declines in
the efficacy of public, security and law and order institutions began to
register in lives of citizens. High-level corruption found new, cosier
neighborhoods to flourish, and emerging crimes began to straddle huge
parts of the nation. Tentatively at first, armed gangs created by an
earlier wave of crime of rustling which uprooted entire communities and
cultural systems began to probe at the heart of rural northern
communities for weaknesses. It found many. Thousands of Fulani had lost
their cattle and livelihood, and had discovered how easy it was to
acquire firearms, become rustlers themselves, fight peasants who
resisted them and establish control and presence in largely-unpoliced
rural areas and extensive forests.
Poor governance and
corruption created further distances between the citizen and the state,
and this became more pronounced under Buhari, a president ironically
elected to improve the security of the citizen. Dangerous official
denial of weak will and incompetence and the crude cultivation of the
perception among the poor that Buhari could not do wrong allowed gaping
holes in the security infrastructure to widen, as armed crime pitched
communities against each other and made many others hostage. Agriculture
suffered as farmlands became abandoned. Rustling increased, creating
new recruits for armed criminal activities. Kidnapping blossomed into
the only growing economy in the north, making overnight millionaires and
creating its own elaborate systems to survive and expand. Policing,
already severely stressed by a weakening state and corruption,
retreated. Millions of citizens were increasingly abandoned particularly
in areas that provided Buhari’s political lifeline throughout his
political career.
Jonathan lost an election because he failed
to protect citizens and curb corruption. Buhari won a second term
because peasants and the urban poor in the north thought he could still
fix their rapidly deteriorating lives. Bandits and kidnappers saw an
opportunity to dig in. They know what Buhari’s voters do not: his
capacity or willingness to stand up for the poor who stood by him is
severely limited. They may not have the sophistication to read security
maps very well, but they know about abandoned populations, vulnerable
highways, frightened relations of victims who prefer to pay millions in
ransom than go to the police, and a government that does little more
than lament and condemn. Today the bulk of Buhari’s voters are
threatened by both Boko Haram and gangs that routinely take over entire
villages for pillage or for the hell of it. Because they can. Those who
did not vote for him to return as president taunt those who did for
their current plight, but they do so from barricades. No one is safe in
Buhari’s Nigeria today. You would think you are in Jonathan’s Nigeria.
Only it is worse.
Nothing captures the routine, pathetic
lamentation of Buhari’s leadership than the statement released by his
aide while he wined and dined with world leaders in faraway Jordan last
weekend. “How can I be happy and indifferent to the senseless killings
of my fellow citizens by bandits?” he asks. ”I am human and I understand
the pains of the victims and their families who have been traumatized
and impoverished by constant ransom demands by bandits….I constantly
listen to our security personnel in order to understand their problems
and needs…It is therefore ridiculous to suggest that I am indifferent to
these killings”, he pleads. What is ridiculous is that President Buhari
expects that a nation that is bleeding from neglect is going to believe
that he is doing enough. If, all considered, President Buhari is
concerned about security and is not indifferent to the killings
particularly in the regions that just gave him a new mandate, then the
nation is in even worse trouble that it realizes. If he survives the
legal challenge to his re-election, the next four years will be tough
for the nation. A president who cannot understand that he is seriously
under-performing in managing security is a major liability for any
nation.
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