Buhari is a human being; please let’s see him as one

In the year 2003 during the registration exercise for the National identity card in one of the villages of my local government, a man came for registration. The NIMC official asked for his name, age, occupation and other personal details and he gave. He was then asked to put his fingers, one after another on the biometric scanner and he did. Finally he was asked to pose for a photograph after which the officer said, “that is all, you can go”. The man reluctantly stood up, walked a few meters away and came back. He looked into the eyes of the ID card officer and said, “Mallam, nifa Buhari na zaba” meaning, “Mallam, I voted for Buhari”. The officer and other people around responded, “Baba, this is not an election. But when the election comes we too shall vote for Buhari”. They then explained to him what a National ID card was meant for and the difference between what was being done there and an election. The man left satisfied.

Fast forward to 23rd February 2019. When villagers in the far North came to the polling unit, if they were not previously guided on the Buhari’s broom by an enlightened APC man in their village they asked to be shown Buhari’s party. They will vote for him even if their village was sacked by bandits. But Buhari did not help them. No, they believe it is not the fault of Buhari. It is people around him who are collecting money from him but they are not doing the work. But since he gave out money to fight banditry, is he not supposed to check and make sure that the work is being done? “I think Buhari should remove those bad eggs around him”. Thus, heads or tails Buhari is innocent and blameless. Drag farther you are an enemy of Buhari. You know what that means.

But those are villages who are distance away from Islamic and western education. So their behaviour is not totally unexpected. Ironically, even many educated people think that way. Buhari does not make mistake. If you mention his mistake you must be a PDP man, only that you don’t want to say it. There is a friend (a real known friend in and out of Facebook) who always responds to almost any post I make either by way of reaction or comment. However, when I started making posts on the banditry taking place in my local government he boycotted me. He only came back the day I said my family and I will vote for Buhari and Shekarau.

Two days ago when I faulted the power sharing formula of APC another friend sent a private  observation  that the PDP power sharing I mentioned was for looting not for National unity. But, we must always separate the wheat from the chaff. Looting is bad but power sharing that will give each of the two main religious groups a sense of belonging is noble. So if someone is doing it to make stealing easier for him why can’t we do it for the noble purpose?

This type of approach may make Buhari himself to believe that he is always right. Afterall power corrupts and when advisors are not helping matters it corrupts dangerously. I know of Islamic scholars who are close to the President but I don’t know the kind of truth they tell him, if they tell him any truth at all. Otherwise, how can anyone imagine that the killings we witness on daily basis in Katsina and Zamfara will continue for so long without any new strategy to address it from the Federal Government? Does Buhari know that Allah will ask him about every drop of innocent blood spilled while he is in charge? Don’t the scholars continuously remind him of the relevant Qur’anic verses and traditions of the Holy Prophet? Or do they behave like the scholars we saw paying a visit to Kwankwaso who simply mentioned his contributions to Islam without preaching to him on his blunders? But I respect the leader of that delegation, I believe he later met him and discussed the mistakes in private. Similarly, I believe those well known scholars who are close to Buhari are telling him the truth. Please let them continue and insist. We have lost a lot of innocent people who love Buhari more than they love themselves.

Please tell the President that he is not infallible. He is just another human being answerable before Allah on his stewardship as the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

Professor Abdussamad Umar Jibia

Power sharing: Mistakes APC must not repeat

Nigeria is a great country with a complex history. Our unique history has left us with a very large population, the largest in Africa and one of the largest in the world. To say that we are heterogeneous will be an understatement. We have at least 250 tribes with two main religious groups. Despite being multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious we have been able to live relatively peacefully. This is not by accident. We have carefully managed what makes people in many other African countries fight – power. This, we were able to do by adopting federalism in which each federating unit is carried along in running the affairs of the nation. Our constitution is clear on the appointment of ministers. Each state must produce at least one.

When our colonizers decided to bring us together in what is known as the 1914 amalgamation, little did they know that what they hitherto called Northern and southern protectorates were going to be a blessing for us in disguise. Today we have established the culture of power division between North and south to such a level that if the President is coming from the North the vice President will be produced by the south and vice versa. The same rule applies with respect to the religious affiliations of the President and the vice president. Although these rules are not written in our constitution, any political party that breaks them is not likely going to make it at the polls.

But the office of the President and vice president are not the only important offices in Government. The Government as we have it in Nigeria is made up of three arms, viz. the executive, the legislature and the Judiciary. I will talk about the executive and the legislature; appointments into the judiciary are only for the learned who have gone through formal law institutions and party politics play very little role in them.

Three pairs of offices can be identified in both the executive and the legislature for which, if power is to be truly divided in such a way that Muslims and Christians, Northerners and Southerners will have a sense of belonging then regional and religious factors must be considered. These are President/VP, SGF/Head of Service and Senate President/Speaker. The first two pairs are in the executive while the last is in the legislature.

As bad as the PDP may be, it has been able to share these offices among the two parts of the country and the two religions over the 16 years it was in power. Thus in 1999-2007 we had Obasanjo/Atiku, Ekaete/Yayale and Igbo (a good number of them)/Buhari- Naabba- Masari.  When ‘Yaradua took over we had Yaradua/Jonathan, Kingibe -Yayale/Okeke and Mark/Bankole. The same formula was maintained after Yaradua except for 2011 – 2015 when there was no acceptable Muslim candidate for the office of the speaker from the South and Tambuwal was supported to become the speaker. Many saw it as a compensation for the North West after Buhari was rigged out at the polls.

Of important note in PDP’s power sharing is the rotation of the offices of the President, SP and SGF with power shift. Thus when Obasanjo was in power these offices went to the south and when power shifted to the North, Northerners occupied them. We can also remember that the six offices mentioned above were distributed among the six geopolitical zones.

It is noteworthy that PDP has never announced or debated their sharing formula in public but Nigerians including people like me who are not in partisan politics could see what was happening and were largely satisfied.

What we saw over the last four years was President/VP (N/S, M/C), SGF/HOS (N/S, C/C) and SP/Speaker (N/N, M/C). This is vividly a wrong arrangement for a number of reasons. One, there are three Christians in the four most important offices in the executive. That is why when the President was away for medical treatment, there was visibly no Muslim in the executive corridor. But Nigerian Muslims are easy going; they did not make noise. The question here is, would the Christians ever accept that? Of course it would not happen in the first place. No Christian president will appoint Muslims to occupy the offices of the SGF and HOS at the same time. Secondly, both the speaker and the SGF are Christians from the North East where Christians constitute a minority.

Yes, the Chief of Staff is a Muslim from the North East. But he is only an aide to the president. That he is allowed to become prominent is not good for the personality of the President. Not many of us can remember the names of Chiefs of staff of past presidents even though they were always there.

If APC wants to retain power beyond President Buhari, and many of us will be happy it does, it has to put its house in order and take care of our diversity at the highest level of power play. There is no better time than now that the incoming Federal legislators were supposedly carefully selected to be loyal to the party.

I do not derive any pleasure in pointing at these mistakes and wish the APC had taken care of them and saved Nigerians from public discussions on things that divide them.