MUHAMMADU BUHARI IS A REGIONAL CANDIDATE - an article by Ayo Osuntokun

I PUT a call through to a senior friend in Kaduna for a routine social and political chit chat. The call caught him in the thick of a mob crisis. It transpired that President Good luck Jonathan was in Kaduna to meet with a crucial pressure group and General Mohammadu Buhari also happened to show up in kaduna the same day. In response, a mob quickly materialised and took to the streets of the city chanting sai Buhari, sai musulumi, sai arewa!( nobody but Buhari; nobody but a Northern Moslem). They demanded of passing motorists to join their exhortation barring which substantial damage would be visited on their vehicles. My friend quite rightly noted that every tendency generates its own contradiction and that Nigeria was thus being set up for a national fratricidal crisis. The logic of cause and effect would probably result in counter ethno religious mobilisation in Niger delta for instance.

Buhari, without a shade of doubt, has attained the status of a cult hero among the segment of Nigerian population identified above.

Some have gone as far as claiming there has been none like him since Shehu Othman Dan Fodio. It was similarly said of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo that there was none like him in Yoruba land since the Yoruba mythical progenitor-Oduduwa. What follows from this comparison is that Buhari and Awolowo are starting the Nigerian Presidential race with a deficit. Non caliphate and non Yoruba Nigerians are not likely to fancy Dan Fodio and Oduduwa as President of Nigeria. At different times Chief Awolowo wanted to be the Prime Minister and President of Nigeria respectively. He wanted to be Prime Minister in 1959/60 on the platform of the Action Group, AG. He scaled the first hurdle by getting elected to the House of Representatives, where he could not muster sufficient support to scale the final hurdle. Perhaps there was a contradiction in aspiring to become the Prime Minister of Nigeria from the platform of a political party that started and was largely sustained as a Yoruba political organisation(the same of course could be said of the Northern People’s Congress, NPC).

The sequence of events from 1962 to 1966 consolidated Awolowo as a Yoruba hero and martyr. In 1967 he was adopted as the leader of the Yoruba leaders of thought-hence his subsequent proclamation as Yoruba leader. In 1979 he was presented as the Presidential candidate of the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN and came to terms with his lack of national acceptance by defiantly picking a fellow Southerner (and a political lightweight) as running mate. Unfortunately he was unable to live down this image till his death in 1987. In a vivid demonstration that non Yoruba Nigerians were more comfortable with him in death than alive, President Ibrahim Babangida and Ikemba Odumegwu Ojukwu eulogised him as the “main issue of Nigerian politics” and “the best President Nigeria never had”. Regardless, I believe these two personalities and many other Nigerian genuinely admired Chief Awolowo but their admiration fell short of preferring him for the office of the President of Nigeria. Comparatively I also would want to enter a caveat that it is possible to admire General Buhari without preferring him for the same office.

Before 1966, it was plausible to think of the Nigeria Army as a pan Nigeria institution. Subsequently it fractured along ethno regional cleavages and to a lesser degree remained as such. Roughly and generically speaking the Nigerian Army was divisible into a Northern Hausa Fulani category at one end of the spectrum; the Eastern Igbos at another and the South Western Yoruba in the middle. (A thousand apologies for the tendentious treatment of the minorities as of little consequence-of course we now know better). This was the context that produced General Olusegun Obasanjo in his deliberately cultivated image as a detribalised Nigerian nationalist.

It was on this platform and recognition that he was elected Nigerian President in 1999 albeit substantially underwritten by the Northern political establishment. Obasanjo then went on to initiate crucial political and economic reforms of Nigeria in a manner that was contrary to the perception of him as a proxy ruler for the “North”. There were rumours that he refused to sign a political MOU that would have rendered him a ceremonial President. It was not however a rumour that he caused to be retired all who qualified to be identified as political soldiers. This and other symbolic acts and gestures resulted in tension between Obasanjo and his Northern promoters so called. In this light it was believed that the sharia insurrection represented a covert declaration of hostilities.

It was against this background that Buhari went to a quranic recitation ceremony in Sokoto and declared (according to all media reports) that Moslems should vote for Moslems. It was against this background that Buhari initiated a quasi-political pressure group called the Pastoral resolve. It was as the chief ideologue and motive force of this group that he went to Ibadan to complain to Governor Lam Adesina of Oyo state about the death of a Fulani herdsman in a scuffle between nomads and Yoruba farmers in Shaki. Governor Adesina reportedly admonished that as a former head of state Buhari should not be limited to the welfare and wellbeing of Fulani. He subsequently emerged the Presidential standard bearer of the largely Northern Moslem dominated All Nigeria Peoples Party, ANPP, in 2003 and 2007 respectively.And recently in a mood of self-adulation, Pastor Tunde Bakare, running mate with Buhari, gleefully threatened the eruption of a “wild wild North” analogous of the “Wild Wild West” if the polls are rigged against his ticket. This was in reference to the pervasive and widespread violent protest against the massive rigging of the 1965 polls in the Western region. It is indeed apt to recall this precedent but it is also a sad commentary and an unambiguous advertisement on the status of Buhari as a regional candidate.

President Obasanjo recently opined that a Buhari Presidency would make a big impression on the fight against indiscipline and corruption and I cannot agree more. The frustration of Obasanjo is echoed across the land especially among the intelligentsia and there seems to be an auto mobilisation of this frustration in favour of Buhari. On further reflection I differ to the extent that a nation must exist before we can do battle against corruption or any sickness ailing such a society. I do not believe that a nation exists in what constitute Nigeria today and neither do I believe that given his antecedents and instincts, Buhari is in pole position to advance Nigerian nationhood.

I do not believe, for instance, that the choiceof a Yoruba as vice presidential candidate within the present context of political anxieties in Nigeria demonstrates an instinct for national consensus.  Given that Obasanjo was President from 1999 to 2007, sensitivity to nationhood should require that South East and South South be given priority over the South West in constituting a Presidential ticket. This qualification is no less applicable to the AC-the extenuation being that the Party is rooted in the South West. It is fair to conclude that, of all the three leading candidates, Buhari is the least qualified for the task of welding a nation out of Nigeria.


• Osuntokun, a former Managing Director of the News Agency of  Nigeria (NAN), lives in Abuja, Nigeria.