The Buhari in You

Since President Muhammadu Buhari made remarks at his first media chat days ago indicating that he was personally inclined towards a situation where those accused of graft and misdemeanour continue to remain in custody without bail irrespective of what the law says, there has been justifiable umbrage all across the land and beyond with the President being roundly criticised for demonstrating an anti-democratic temper.


For Buhari, the road to democratic correctness has really been a long one. From his first-time out as a military head of state to his Chatham House declaration of now being a reformed democrat, it has clearly not been a piece of cake. But from his remarks during the chat, and particularly as they have to do with this contentious issue of the best methods of fighting the pervasive indiscipline and graft that has contributed its own fair share in the current hobbling of the giant of Afrrica, it is clear that there is still some more way to go.


Without as much as explaining away the president’s gaffe, it however has to be stated that the president in his blunt expressions on this subject was in a sense only being typical of large swathes of Nigerians, military, retired military and civilian alike who very sadly continue to support extra-judicial and a-constitutional paths to resolving disputes and challenges in the society.


Last week for example, your correspondent was returning home at about 7pm and had to pass by a military checkpoint set up as part of measures to contain pipeline vandalism and oil theft in his neighbourhood


On approaching the checkpoint, he met two truckloads of soldiers blocking the roads and two other security operatives on mufti a few metres away. He briefly paused for the road to be cleared but seeing that the soldiers were not in a hurry to go anywhere, he voted to veer of the main road and walk past the space between the standing operatives and the trucks.


‘You, yes you, where are you coming from; don’t you see that there are soldiers here? Don’t you know that somebody can blast your head off now and nothing will happen….’ With or without their superiors knowing it, the soldiers who had been drafted to fight a menace have themselves now become a threat to innocent residents and passers-by. It was indeed some very chilling encounter.


The fault indeed is not in our stars. It is in the way we have ordered our society up until this moment. And it is an aberrant ordering that has to be corrected. As the late Burkinabe resident, Thomas Sankara put it, without political education, a soldier is not better than a criminal. The truth of our situation today is that quite a large number of our military personnel, serving and retired, see nothing wrong with using their tax-payer-funded ‘tactical advantage’ to ride roughshod over ‘idle civilians,’ and many times with the uncritical acquiescence of many civilians themselves!


For years, many Nigerians could be heard to say: ‘what this country needs is a Rawlings; a bloody revolution that will wipe away all looters.’


When you have a traffic dispute with a fellow citizen and pick up your phone to call that military acquaintance of yours to 'come and deal with the bloody fool’ you are indirectly acquiescing to the errant mindset that the President displayed on national television in his inaugural media chat.


So to help Buhari continue to make much needed progress on his democratic conversion experience, we, even we, must continue to make the case without any equivocation at all, that our society must at its base be ordered in a civic, democratic format, where the rule of law must be followed to the latter at all times.


Mercifully, the Presidency has now come out to reportedly distance the President from those limitations.
And while we are at this, it will be good for the President/Presidency to urgently realize that he/they need (s) to openly commit to a programme of reorienting his own military base. And the way to do this is not to rush into providing soft-landing for them when they are accused of extra-judicial conduct. Let the law take its course, always. And let this President always remain a leader ‘for everybody and for nobody.’