4
By May 29, 2023, Nigerians will be heaving a heavy sigh of relief as the eight-year tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari comes to an end. First elected in 2015 for a four-year term after three previously unsuccessful attempts, Buhari, who was also re-elected for another term of four years in 2019, would go down in history as the worst leader Nigeria ever had since its independence in 1960. As Buhari hands over to Ahmed Bola Tinubu, his successor, in less than a week, he will be handing over to him a deeply divided, traumatized, pauperized and terrorized Nigerian country of 130 million multidimensionally poor people that are barely existing and not living. In addition, Buhari will be leaving behind a desperately corrupt Nigeria whose national income has been swallowed by its excessively huge burden of debt.
Tired of the not-so-good, bad and ugly 16-year rule of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) since the advent of the fourth republic in 1999, the Nigerian people defied the power of incumbency and heavy monetary inducements to vote out the incumbent government of President Goodluck Jonathan and vote in the opposition Candidate Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015 as President of Nigeria. In a feat that was described as the first democratic revolution of Nigeria’s fourth republic, Buhari, a retired army general and former military head of state who had a rock solid reputation for discipline and incorruptibility, was propelled to power mainly on the willpower of the Nigerian people who identified him as meeting the leadership needs of a Nigeria ravaged by the twin evils of corruption and insecurity.
By 2015, then ruling PDP had reached its apogee of leadership incompetence, which left the country reeling from an incurable form of endemic corruption, heightened insecurity arising from the Boko Haram insurgency and a shrinking socio-economic space that excluded the overwhelming majority of the Nigerian people while serving the self-interests of a privileged few, thus setting the stage for a democratic revolution. Added to this was a power struggle within the political establishment of Nigeria over the issue of the violation of power rotation between the north and south of the country by the PDP, which fielded Jonathan, a southerner, as its presidential candidate going into the 2015 presidential election at a time when it was generally believed to be the turn of the North. To beat the incumbent PDP in the 2015 presidential election, a competent northerner who had the capability to defeat insecurity and cure Nigeria of endemic corruption was required. And no one was a better fit than Buhari, an incorruptible retired army general with a cumulative leadership experience as a former military head of state, military governor of the defunct Northeastern State, petroleum minister and civil war veteran.
In taking up the challenge, Buhari promised to bring “change” to Nigeria by containing insecurity, taming corruption and fixing the economy. His three-pronged pledge to do the aforementioned earned him enormous support and his long-standing reputation, leadership antecedents and experience earned him the trust of the Nigerian people as the right man for the top job of a country in distress. Unfortunately, the President not only failed to fulfil his key campaign promises of containing insecurity, taming corruption and fixing the economy but, through his actions and inactions, also made worse the bad situation he inherited. In addition to the still raging Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast of the country, Buhari will be leaving behind the scourge of killer herdsmen, which has turned sedentary communities across Nigeria into the largest human slaughter slabs in Africa. The murderous activities of killer herdsmen have also created a thriving rogue economy of mass abduction of Nigerians by armed groups for huge ransom payments in both local and foreign currency. According to a report by Vanguard newspaper of May 22, 2023, out of the 98,000 insecurity-related deaths recorded in Nigeria between 2011 and 2023, a staggering 68,000 happened between 2015 and 2023 under the watch of Buhari.
On the economy, Buhari will be leaving an economy of $440 billion in GDP down from the $500 billion he inherited in 2015. And by 2022, Nigeria overtook India as the poverty capital of the world as about half of its 200 million people are said to be experiencing “serious” hunger. According to the World Bank, every minute of the day, more than six Nigerians are plunged into extreme poverty as a result of double-digit inflation, increasing unemployment and persistent underemployment, rising cost of living amid stagnant wages that have been reduced in value by a free-falling national currency against major world currencies, among many other factors. The Buhari administration inherited an exchange rate of N190 to $1 but will be leaving behind an exchange rate of N750 to $1.
With a dwindling revenue arising from Nigeria’s inability to maximise its crude oil exports as a result of oil theft in most of the oil-producing communities, the unproductive Buhari government resorted to endless borrowing that saw Nigeria’s external debt rising from $10 billion in 2015 to $40 billion in 2022, just its domestic debt doubled from N8.8 trillion in 2015 to N16 trillion by 2021. By 2023, Nigeria’s public debt stock had reached N46.25 trillion, and, if the N27 trillion “Ways and Means” advances from the Central Bank of Nigeria are added, then Buhari will be leaving a debt burden of over N70 trillion behind as he departs from office in a matter of days.
In his eight-year rule, Buhari did not only betray the “change” democratic revolution that brought him to power in 2015 but also left Nigeria worse than he met it. Numerous reasons and excuses have been advanced for Buhari’s phenomenal failure in power by pundits, supporters and critics of his administration. However, the most fundamental reason for Buhari’s acute failure of leadership was his aggravated sectionalism, which he elevated to a near state policy of his administration. Buhari’s sectional tendencies, which saw him prioritising his sectional Muslim, northern and Fulani ethnic interests above national interest in the discharge of his duties as President and Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, were his greatest undoing.
His sectionalism promoted nepotism, favouritism, tribalism, religious bigotry, cronyism and all other elements of corrupt practices, which eventually resulted in economic and financial crimes. While Buhari maintained his posturing as a man of integrity who was incorruptible, his sectional tendencies did the right opposite, which resulted in unprecedented high levels of corruption, state capture and treasury heist under his watch as President of Nigeria. And because sectionalism promotes mediocrity over competence, Buhari mostly ran his administration with square pegs in round holes, leading to severe underperformance of the simplest of tasks in his government.
Apart from deeply dividing Nigerians along ethnic and religious lines, nowhere was the adverse effect of Buhari’s sectionalism felt more than in his inability to contain insecurity. At a time when Nigeria was confronted by the menace of killer herdsmen of mainly Fulani ethnic stock, Buhari, Nigeria’s President and Commander-in-Chief, could not rise above the primordial sentiments of his Fulani ethnicity in the overriding interest of national security to deal decisively with one of the world’s most deadly armed groups that turned a country under his watch into a killing field. Rather than deal with these mass killers as the terrorists they were, the Buhari administration designated their murderous activities as farmers/herders clashes, as though Nigeria was fighting a cow war wherein it was right to mow down human beings to pave way for cattle to graze. When it mattered most, Buhari chose his Fulani ethnicity over his Nigerian citizenship and that error of decision rendered the apparatus of state ineffective in the face of continuous killings by the marauding Fulani herdsmen across the country. And that failure of leadership drove Nigeria down the road to Sudan.
It can be said of Buhari that he came, he saw, but got conquered by Nigeria’s problems of insecurity, economic woes and corruption.