Buhari and the Tyranny of Perception
The other day, I casually and light-heartedly sounded out a colleague at work, a well-educated Nigerian, just like me, of Yoruba extraction, what he thought of Buhari’s victory in the Nigerian presidential election. And before I could finish the question a seemingly hackneyed answer popped right of his lips as if a kindergarten regurgitating some crammed line: Why wouldn’t he? His man won and like many he was still basking in the afterglow of victory celebration.
“He will fight corruption and insecurity and make the country better”, he gushed, his eyes glittering, with a rather triumphant smile playing on his lips. Like most Nigerians who voted for the APC presidential flag bearer, this educated but seemingly politically naïve Nigerian, had rooted for Buhari solely based on his perception of the man as an incorruptible corruption fighter, albeit with pretty scanty evidence of that at his disposal.
If my memory serves me well, UPN leaders of the Yoruba, who were herded to the polls by Bola Tinubu had suffered the most from Buhari’s Kangaroo special military tribunals that had been pre-programmed by Dodan Barracks, headquarters of Nigeria’s military junta, to return only guilty verdicts against UPN governors while giving a pass or at worst a slap on the wrist not only to former President Shehu Shagari and his infinitely corrupt NPN governors and ministers. Rather than deal with President Shehu Shagari who was presiding over the most corrupt administration in Nigeria’s history then, it was Chief Obafemi Awolowo himself, founder and leader of the UPN and UPN governors, such as Chief Bisi Onabanjo and Professor Ambrose Ali that Buhari hounded and pounced on for allegedly funding the UPN from their state coffers.
It is interesting to note that contrary to time-honored standard tenets of criminal jurisprudence, Buhari’s special military tribunals shifted the onus of proof on the defendants rather than the prosecution to prove their innocence. It was no surprise then that the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) boycotted the Kangaroo tribunals working to an answer. Needless to state that both Ambrose Ali and Bisi Onabanjo later died from the traumatic experience visited on them by Buhari, who never executed a single project anywhere in Nigeria during his two-year tyrannical rule.
I am not here to re-litigate the election but to point out the delusions that produced its outcome. Even the trillion naira PTF programme said to be equal to the Federal budget solely administered by Buhari could not produce any lasting developmental legacy worth mentioning save perhaps for earth roads that couldn’t survive the rains as everything seemed to have gone away with Abacha leaving only Buhari to permanently fix his gaze on the presidency, which a nation suffering from degenerative dementia and amnesia has so callously handed over to him and his Western backers.
Buhari’s election will go down in history as the dumbest vote ever-in Nigeria’s electoral history. In addition, to explain it away in terms of his purported anti-corruption disposition is to rob salt into an injury. That might be the perception of the average Joe, but perception is different from reality. The real anti-corruption Nigerian leader known to history, was Gen. Murtala Mohammed of blessed memory, not General Muhammdu Buhari, the pretender with a phony War Against Indiscipline (WAI).
Yet Buhari found time to cause, through his military administrator in Lagos, the cancelation of former UPN Governor Lateef Jakande’s Lagos Metroline project that would have cost the state a mere $4bn at the time under the pretext of fighting corruption. Needless to add that the state is now executing a vastly scaled down version of the project at astronomical costs setting the nation back 35 years. Yet it’s these junta template kangaroo trials, which almost every military junta had carried out that earned Buhari his anti-corruption moniker that swept him into office after three previous fruitless attempts as if Nigerians suddenly woke up from their slumber.
This is what I called the tyranny of perception, which has ensnared and enslaved many a Nigerian, even supposedly educated ones amongst us into voting for the past rather than the future. It’s an anachronistic mindset of mass delusion that is certain to come back to bite them in their behinds, and pretty soon, too because a vote for the past cannot deliver the future. Before long the scales of mass delusion will fall off their eyes and reality will set in. I dare say that Nigeria will not rise beyond Buhari during his tenure, which means that his poor development records will define Nigeria’s progress in the next four to eight years depending on when he leaves office.
