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Soyinka And Buhari's Presidential Ambition By Anthony A Akinola
Briefly summarised, Professor Wole Soyinka recently called on Nigerians not to vote for General Muhammadu Buhari in the 2007 presidential polls. Soyinka's main disagreement with Buhari has to do with the latter's human rights records as Nigeria's military dictator between 1984 and 1985, as well as his perceived divisive standards in the politics of a divided nation. This article is a further appraisal of what can be called the "Buhari question"
Not many informed and non-partisan Nigerians will fault Professor Wole Soyinka’s honesty and consistency on the Buhari question. In fact, there is nothing the Nobel Laureate has been saying recently about General Muhammadu Buhari that is not well-documented in my small book, The Search For a Nigerian Political System (1986). General Buhari would need to mount the rostrum and convince his critics that the Buhari of 2007 is, in some acceptable respects, much different from the Buhari of 1984-85. One assumes he accepts the criticisms.
General Buhari can be admired, especially when one pitches his relative financial integrity against the greed and filth of his successors. He may not perpetually be held to ransom over past dictatorial antics, not least because we are now in a democracy where there are things a democratic leadership cannot get away with. The more fundamental problem with General Buhari has been his seeming sectarian nature or predisposition. The Buhari of 1984-85 appeared to have one standard for the north and another for the south. In this regard, it might not be much of an exaggeration to classify him as a sectional leader – a stigma which does not provide a good platform from which to seek the democratic leadership of our nation.
Disturbed and angered by their perception of General Buhari’s double standards, it is well-documented that some of the great heroes in Nigeria’s war of unity, Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle and General Alani Akinrinade in particular, came out publicly to express what amounted to regrets at participating in that war. Their call for a confederal arrangement -a proposal the secessionist leader Lt. Col (as he then was ) Odumegwu Ojukkwu had put forward before the out break of war - was, perhaps, the greatest indictment of Buhari’s style of leadership.
Politics, according to Stokeley Carmichael, is "war without violence". Of course politics is not always without violence but that is what it should be in domestic politics, an arena where the war of words prevails. Wole Soyinka has fired his own salvo in the honest and fearless manner we have come to associate with his great name. One believes General Buhari, unlike someone else, is not too presumptuous of his own importance; he can dispel whatever fears many of his compatriots entertain about his possible second-coming as Nigeria’s political leader.
General Buhari’s chances of success at the polls, if elections are free and fair, are a lot more robust today than they were in 2003. He could be the beneficiary of resentment directed at the manner in which President Olusegun Obasanjo more or less single-handedly determined the presidential candidacy of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Many people believe Obasanjo intended on carving a powerful supervisory role for himself after he might have left office, something which the erudite scholar and writer Dr Edwin Madunagu described as "Ayatollahism"-a refrence to un-elected Ayatollah Khomeini's once paternalistic domianation of Iranian politics.
President Obasanjo and the leadership of the PDP might have succeeded in putting paid to the ambitions of Vice President Atiku Abubakar to be president in May 2007, not least because the latter has been reported to have been disqualified from participating in the presidential election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). If that decision prevails, Atiku could still wipe the smiles off the faces of Obasanjo and PDP supporters in April with the option of a spoiler that he could be left with.He will not be supporting the South to retain the Presidency. otherwise he will be personna long grata in his Northern constituency. Teaming up with a candidate who already poses the greatest threat to the PDP and who else can that be other than Buhari, could mean we are in for an exciting two-party contest in April and President Obasanjo may not have yet found the "worthy successor" of selfish choice.
With so much riding for General Buhari, Professor Wole Soyinka would appear to have done all of us a good service by bringing his character and orientations into the theatre of public scrutiny. A people can shape the character of leadership and indeed their own future and that of their society if they do not sweep fundamental issues under the carpet. The President of the Nigerian federation must accept, that at least for the duration of his term of office, the Nigerian nation is more important than religion and region in whatever he does.
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