Judul : Buhari, the Igbo President
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Buhari, the Igbo President
Death, as a definitive and inescapable human experience, is humbling. It is humbling, first for the dead because it signals the ultimate equality of all humans. But death is also humbling for the living, or at least should be, since not a single one of us will leave this world alive, and all of us must leave it someday. This is why the death of another person is scarcely the occasion for gloating. Yet, the intensity and spread of the gloating over the passing of former President Muhammadu Buhari last week were perhaps unsurprising, if rather perplexing.
Nigeria is characterised by a general lack of social discipline, a society where moral codes are fluid at best, a society where citizens speak about their leaders in the most acerbic, denigrating, and derogatory terms imaginable, even though the reality is that all of us, leaders and followers alike, are jointly responsible for the mess we have made of our country. I was therefore scarcely surprised by the mass gloating that followed Buhari's death, if still reprehensible.
Secondly, Buhari died just about 26 months after leaving office, when the jury is still out on his leadership of the country. The late President Yar'adua is now universally acclaimed as one of the finest leaders we ever had. But he was most vilified at the time of his death by many of the same people who now hold him in high regard. Perhaps had Buhari lived a few years more after leaving office, perhaps few Nigerians would have had any reason to be merry over his death. Still, the number of Nigerians who genuinely mourned Buhari or at least did not delight at his passing is by far higher than those who did. This is not a consolation, but an indication that at least, the majority of us have not lost our moral compass, or thrown it away in the spur off the moment.
However, as I followed the issue actively on social media, I noticed that while the gloating was widespread across the country, it was, in my view, particularly intense and harsh among the Igbos, a geopolitical and ethnic group with whom Buhari had never really been on friendly terms. It would appear that many Nigerians from subgroup were happy with Buhari's death for the same reasons they were always unhappy with him in life: his perceived actions in the Nigerian Civil War, his perceived neglect of the South East region during his government, and in particular, his perceived "mishandling" of Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB issues.
The latter two perceived reasons bear a deeper engagement. When he lived, many Nigerians of Igbo extraction believed Buhari specifically hated Igbos, and that as President, he marginalised their region in both his political appointments and public policies. But to what extent are these accusations true then or now? In Nigeria generally, public sentiments about governments or individual leaders are easily formed, and are often formed by considerations other than facts or nuance, and once so formed, they tend to linger for so long that even the force of facts cannot pierce through them. This is particularly true for public sentiments formed by historical ethnic or regional grievances, which in Nigeria, are often the major drivers of public perceptions, certainly more than facts evenly weighed.
Otherwise, there is actually an important sense in which Buhari could be regarded as the most Igbo-friendly Nigerian leader, if not ever, then at least in recent memory. Buhari had his issues with the South East, no doubt, and he pointedly said that he would appoint people from the regions that voted for him than those who did not, a statement that would be true for any Nigerian president, even if they did not say so, since Nigeria is a country where most political appointments are driven more by politics and the flow of votes than other considerations.
Still, Buhari's political appointments were scarcely as anti-South East as often assumed, and in some notable instances actively promoted that region. For example, when Buhari appointed Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu as the NNPC GMD, and later Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, he was the first Igbo man to hold both positions in Nigerian history, hardly the sort of thing an Igbo-hating president would do. In fact, Buhari had wanted Kachikwu to concurrently hold both positions, even though Buhari had never even heard of him before the appointment.
Buhari also appointed General Lucky Irabor to the position of Chief of Defence Staff, again the first time an Igbo man would hold that office since it was created in 1980. General Irabor has said publicly that he had never met before that appointment. Moreover, Buhari also threw the weight of the federal government of Nigeria behind the candidacy of Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, as she herself said publicly just before his death. These are only a few examples, but they illustrate the point that Buhari was in fact an Igbo-friendly Nigerian leader who gave several Igbos the opportunity to hold high offices in Nigeria for the first time, and without knowing them personally before appointing them.
His public policies and infrastructure projects were scarcely anti-Igbo, either. Buhari, as everyone knows, built the Second Niger Bridge, a project that had been in the doldrums in Nigeria since the 1970s. He directed all branches of the Nigerian military to buy all their everyday vehicles from Innoson Motors, a private company owned by an Igbo man and located in Igbo land. That was effectively a direct federal subsidy in billions of naira for a single company, which simply saved the company from collapse. I doubt if Buhari favoured any private company anywhere in Nigeria to that extent.
Moreover, Buhari's targeted policies in the agricultural sector helped to revive palm oil production, marketing and export, particularly during his first term. These policies, in turn, directly helped to revive the fortunes and livelihoods of many farmers in the southeast, as they did for rice farmers in much of the north. Also, Buhari whole heartedly supported and pumped federal funds into the Ariaria Market Independent Power Project, which ensured its completion shortly before the 2019 election, after more than a decade in the making, even though he knew he would barely win nay hearts or votes in the south east still.
This brings me to thorniest of issues Buhari had, and even in death still has, with the South East and Igbos in Nigeria: IPOB and Nnamdi Kanu. This is a red-hot emotional issue among many Igbo Nigerians. Yet, given the dangerously subversive and destabilising activities of Nnamdi Kanu to the physical and political integrity of Nigeria, Buhari had no choice but to have the man face the wrath of the law. Indeed, any Nigerian president would have had little choice but to do the same, even if it were Peter Obi. There is a wide gap between a president and a presidential candidate. The latter can say what suits them in any given context, but the former must act decisively in the national interest on matters such as this.
Buhari's actions were also generally restrained when tens of military and police officers were killed by IPOB members during his term, unlike then President Obasanjo, for example, who razed down Odi and Zaki Biam for the same reasons. Moreover, the Nnamdi Kanu case, to any sober mind, is really simple: there is free speech, but there is also hate speech. The former is guaranteed, but the latter must be sanctioned under the law. After all, Finland is one of the most liberal and freedom-loving places on earth, yet, when they became aware of Simon Ekpa's obnoxious hate-speech, they were compelled to take action to bring him to justice, much less a fragile country with weak state institutions like Nigeria.
Overall, few leaders can meet the impossible expectations of Nigerians, and Buhari certainly had his problems, with the Igbos as with other Nigerians. But on balance, and in a manner of speaking, he was far more pro-Igbo than widely assumed. His reputation as an Igbo-hating president is certainly largely unfair. May Allah grant him Jannatul Firdaus.
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