General Muhammadu Buhari

General Muhammadu Buhari – unlikely politician, likely winner?

Mohammed Haruna

Until recently, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, one time military governor in Nigeria’s Borno State and former military head of state, was famous, some would say notorious, for his contempt for politics and politicians. As his country’s military ruler for over 20 months, he indiscriminately jailed politicians he had ousted from power in December 1983, some of them for several life-times over. Politicians, he often said, were inveterate crooks that deserved the harshest punishments for their misdeeds.

The former military ruler harboured similar disdain for journalists--the politicians’ poor cousins--presumably based on his nasty experience with the press back in 1978, when he was Minister of Petroleum Resources under the military regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo. Then, the press had circulated the story that 2.8 billion Naira had gone missing in the country’s oil account. It turned out that the story was a baseless rumour picked up in a bus by one of the country’s leading social critics, Tai Solarin. Buhari never seemed to have forgiven the press for that faux pass.

It was not surprising then that one of his first acts in office as head of state was to enact Decree 4 which criminalized the publication of any story which embarrassed a government official or caused disaffection among members of public, even if the story was accurate. Actually he had served notice that he was going to tamper with press freedom and he proceeded to do just that by jailing two reporters of The Guardian, a leading Nigerian daily, for publishing a story about planned postings in the country’s foreign service, a story which was accurate but which the government thought was a well guarded secret. This action had a chilling effect on the press throughout his 20 month reign.

For someone famous for his contempt for politics and politicians – and journalists – Buhari’s jump into the murky waters of Nigerian politics in April last year, came as a surprise to many, possibly even to himself. Inspite of his aversion for politics, however, he did indulge in a bit of it back in the early 90s. This was after General Ibrahim Babangida, his army chief who had ousted him in August 1985, had released him from over three year’s detention.

At the time of his release Babangida’s seemingly unending transition programme to civilian rule had become embarrassing to several retired generals, including General Obasanjo. Soon enough the generals, not surprisingly including Buhari, forged an alliance to force Babangida to end his military dictatorship. They succeeded in August 1993 when Babangida was forced to “step aside” (to use Babangida’s own words) after he had aborted the June 1993 presidential elections.

On stepping aside, Babangida installed a rather colourless Chief Ernest Shonekan, Chairman of UAC, to head an interim administration that was to complete Babangida’s transition programme by December. Shonekan never got the chance, as he was booted out of office by General Sani Abacha, the minister of defence and Babangida’s side-kick as veterans of coup making in Nigeria.

Abacha’s dictatorship proved brutal and became probably the most venal in Nigeria’s history. This brutality and venality soon attracted criticisms from human rights organisations at home and abroad as well as from Obasanjo who, since voluntarily handing over power to civilians in October 1979, had become regarded as the country’s conscience of sorts. Obasanjo probably expected Buhari to join him in his criticism of Abacha’s regime just like they had done against Babangida’s regime. This was especially because Abacha was actually Babangida’s lieutenant who announced the coup against Buhari.

If Obasanjo expected Buhari to be his ally against Abacha, he apparently miscalculated, for instead of joining forces with Obasanjo to force Abacha out of office, Buhari decided to accept the dictator’s offer to head the Petroleum Task Force which Abacha had set up to channel the huge increases in the pump price of petroleum products his regime had announced into the rehabilitation of the country’s poor infrastructure. Buhari’s collaboration with Abacha marked the parting of ways between himself and Obasanjo.

The gulf between the two increased when Obasanjo’s persistent criticism of Abacha led to the former head of state, along with his former deputy, Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’adua, who had joined those asking Abacha to go, being charged in 1995 with planning a coup against Abacha. Along with several other military officers and number of civilians, including two journalists, they received various sentences ranging from the death penalty for Obasanjo and Yar’adua, to several years in jail for others. Eventually the death sentences were commuted to life following international pressure on Abacha not to carry out the sentences.

All this while, Buhari already serving as Chairman of the PTF, did not raise a finger in protest at the humiliation of his former boss and ally in forcing Babangida out of power. For many observers, this was proof positive that Buhari thought pretty little of political freedom.

Which is why many have wondered why he chose to jump into politics in April last year. On record he himself has said the main reason is Obasanjo’s dismal record in the last three years as elected president of the country. However, many suspect that there are also personal and religious dimensions to Buhari’s decision. The personal aspect, many observers believe, has to do with Obasanjo’s unceremonious dissolution of the PTF and his seemingly vindictive pursuit of the Abacha family, whose close ally Buhari had become, over allegations that the dictator had looted the public treasury, like no head of state before him.

The religious aspect relates to Obasanjo’s systematic use of religion to causs disaffection between the predominantly Muslim far North and the largely Christian Middle Belt in order to destroy the region’s hold on power at the centre. This manipulation of religious began with a Christians only celebration of his victory in the 1999 presidential election in which Northern minority Christians like Chief Solomon Lar, the chairman of the ruling PDP, and Professor Jerry Gana, the minister of information, played prominent roles.

It was apparently in pursuit of this divide and rule strategy that Obasanjo purged the military of so-called political soldiers, most of them Northerners and Muslims, and also purged the federal bureaucracy of many Northerners under the guise that they were not appointed on merit in the first place.

For these and several policies perceived as anti-North by many Northerners, popular sentiments against Obasanjo soon swelled, and people in the region started calling on those who sold Obasanjo to the region in 1998 to check what they regarded as his betrayal of a region that supported him at a time his own Yoruba kith and kin had rejected him. Top of the list of those people looked up to to carry out this job were Babangida and Lt. General Aliyu Mohammed, Obasanjo’s National Security Adviser, and a longtime Babangida ally. It was an open secret that these two were mainly responsible for getting the North behind Obasanjo.

Babangida, it turned out, was not keen to challenge his former boss directly. He was suspected to be behind several schemes aimed at destabilizing and containing Obasanjo, including funding rival political parties and the formation of new ones and moves to impeach the President. Publicly, however, Babangida consistently declared that he will never undermine someone he helped to install and certainly he would never run for the presidency to wrest back power to the North, as long as Obasanjo was interested in second term.

Sources close to Buhari said it was Babangida’s reluctance to challenge Obasanjo which finally forced the former PTF boss to overcome his aversion to politics. For a long time, he had been under tremendous pressure to join the fray, particularly after he and former civilian President, Shehu Shagari, publicly challenged the President’s claim, early 2000, that a meeting of the country’s advisory Council of State, had instructed governors in the northern sttes who had adopted the controversial Sharia Criminal law, to stand down the law. Nothing of that sort happened, Buhari and Shagari had insisted. In any case, they said, the Council had no powers to instruct anyone to do anything since it was purely advisory.

Overnight Buhari’s popularity in the mainly Muslim North soared and many began to see him as the region’s only hope of containing Obasanjo, given Babangida’s stated reluctance to do so.

Buhari’s decision to join the political fray reportedly caused some anxiety in the presidency’s and the ruling PDP’s iner circles. Hitherto they had assumed that with Babangida reluctant, at least in public, to fight his former boss, the presidency was their’s to lose. Overnight Buhari’s entry changed all that.

Even then the inner circle s in the presidency and the PDP remained confident that inspite of Buhari’s grassroots popularity, he was unlikely to get the presidential ticket of the party. They reckoned that the presence in the party of many leading politicians of the Second Republic whom he had jailed, as well as the presence of others like Alhaji Umaru Shinkafi, a former security chief in President Shagari’s government and Admiral Augustus Aihomu, Babangida’s military vice-president, would make it impossible for Buhari to get the party’s presidential ticket.

Early last month, all these calculations fell apart as Buhari coasted home to victory very easily. There was a hitch when five candidates, three from the Igbo speaking South-East, and one each from the South-West and South-South, stormed out of the convention venue. All five had jointly alleged a conspiracy to impose a Northern candidate on the party. The truth was probably different.

According to some party officials what happened was that the party, worried about the logistics of conducting its presidential primary with more than a dozen candidates, advised the candidates to agree among themselves to prune down the number to something close to that of its bigger rival the PDP, which had only four candidates. Shinkafi, as the oldest and the most consistent presidential candidate of the lot, was asked to chair the meeting. As chairman, he reportedly decided that he could only be effective if he withdraw from the race. He then proceeded to do so. There is speculation that his real reason was different; he did not have the resources to contest and those who had promised to help, didn’t.

Whatever the reasons, Shinkafi withdrew and the other northern candidates, less Buhari and one little known contender from the region, also withdrew. All the southern candidates failed to agree among themselves on who will withdraw. The party then threw the contest open to all the remaining candidates. It was the fact that the withdrawal of all the other Northern candidates made Buhari a sure bet to clinch the ticket which the five southern candidates did not like and they apparently decided on a dramatic walk-out rather than face defeat. Here, it is instructive that when the five walked out not one of their delegates followed them. Instead the delegates stayed back and voted for Buhari.

For someone who was a political neophyte, how did Buhari clinch his party’s presidential ticket so easily? The answer probably is in the victory of Obasanjo at the PDP presidential primary which was held before ANPP’s. The failure of the North to stop Obasanjo in PDP, many political observers reckon, made Buhari a candidate of necessity for the ANPP, whose major strength lay in the North, especially in the North West.

Buhari has since become the rallying point of opposition to Obasanjo not only from the North but also from the South-East and the South-South, that is, those regions that have accused the president of neglect. Consequently in the mainly Muslim North, with 53 percent of the country’s 120 million people, Buhari is the candidate to beat, except probably in the North-Central State of Plateau, home of Chief Solomon Lar and a staunch Obasanjo ally, and in the North-Eastern State of Adamawa, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar’s home state.

In this region the only doubt about Buhari’s victory is a small one surrounding his cool relationship with Babangida. The signs, however, are that this doubt will soon vanish as the powerful emirs in the region have embarked on an effort to finally get the two to bury the hatchet over Babangida’s ouster of Buhari in 1985.

There are those in both camps who are opposed to such reconciliation. In Babangida’s camp these include General Mohammed, Obasanjo’s National Security Adviser, Air-Vice Marshal Hamza, one time military governor of Kano State and a minister of Federal Capital, Colonel Umar Dangiwa, one time governor of Kaduna State and a former commandant of the Army’s School of Armour.

Those keen on the reconciliation include Brigadier General Haliru Akilu, Babangida’s one-time military intelligence chief, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, Babangida’s military vice-president and retired Colonel Sambo Dasuki, a heir to the Sultanate of Sokoto and one-time military Aide De Camp of Babangida.

With the northern emir’s keen on reconciliation, it seems the pro-reconciliation group have the upper-hand. There are indeed indications that in a matter of weeks Babangida will honour an invitation by the Buhari campaign organisation to send his representatives to join it.

If Buhari is a sure bet in the North, he also has a good chance to win the South-East and the South-South. His chances in the South-East, with 12 percent of the country’s population, hinge on his seemingly strange choice of Dr. Chuba Okadigbo, former Senate President and a PDP decampee, as his running mate. Strange, because it is hard to image stranger bed mates. First, Okadigbo was Political Adviser to President Shagari whom Buhari ousted in 1983. Second, whereas Buhari has this image of an Islamic extremist, Okadigbo is well known to be a hard drinker and smoker and is generally Bohemian in his life-style. Apart from his choice of Okadigbo, who hails from the South East, as his running mate, Buhari’s chance to take the region may be enhanced by the decision of the PDP which controls all the states in the region, to revisit the automatic renomination of the governors after they had done a deal to support Obasanjo. The party’s decision to revisit the nomination is causing a lot of disaffection among the governors’ supporters and may cost the party considerable support.

If Buhari is a sure winner in the North and has a good change in the South-East, Obasanjo is the sure bet in his native South-West, with 20 percent of the country’s population. Here it is significant that the opposition Alliance for Democracy, which has a near monopoly of power in the region, has deferred the election of its presidential candidate because it is said to be rooting for Obasanjo as the region’s only hope of retaining power at the centre. Even then Buhari could fare better than the poor showing expecting of him in the region because of its large, even if dormant, Muslim population, especially in Ogun, Osun, Lagos and Oyo states where Muslims are possibly in the majority.

All of which leaves the South-South as the only region where it is probably a toss up between Obasanjo and Buhari. Which side wins the bet will very much depend on how Obasanjo handles the controversial onshore/offshore oil bill hanging fire in the Delta region. The National Assembly has since passed the bill Obasanjo sent to them with an amendment which has abrogated the distinction between oil mined onshore and that mined offshore, for the purpose of setting aside 13 percent of mineral revenue for those producing oil. Because of this amendment, Obasanjo has refused to sign the bill. This has generated enormous ill-will in the Delta region against Obasanjo.

Inspite of such resentment Obasanjo is very unlikely to sign the bill. In which case it will only become law if his veto’s over-ridden by the National Assembly. With the majority of the 36 states in the country being non-oil producing--only nine states produce the stuff, and fewer still have oil onshore, something which gives a state the clout to demand for a share of the oil off their shores non-oil -- this legislative over-ride of the president’s veto is very unlikely.

The resentment against Obasanjo may therefore persist right up to the election period. That should give Buhari some edge in the contest for the votes in the region. Even then it will not be an easy win for Buhari because his own region too does not support the abrogation of the distinction between onshore and offshore oil.

Apart from the religious and other primordial considerations that give Buhari a good chance to beat Obasanjo, Buhari’s supporters can also cite his record in office as head of state and as Chairman of PTF as good reasons why Nigerians should elect their man. They can point at the fact that in 20 months as head of state, Buhari brought a large measure of sanity and discipline to a nation which was already notorious for its corruption and lawlessness. They could also argue that his management of PTF’s funds was much more prudent and transparent than Obasanjo’s. They can argue, with good reason, that the PTF under Buhari made a far more positive impact on the lives of ordinary Nigerians with its allocation of about 200 billion Naira spread over four years, than Obasanjo’s government did with its income of over one trillion Naira in under four years.

Inspite of all this, however, there are many who do not believe Buhari has the ghost of a chance against Obasanjo, mainly because the incumbency factor going for Obasanjo and also because of Buhari’s image of an Islamic extremist and a Northern irredentist. These are images which the ruling party and the presidency, have, naturally, been only too keen to exploit.

Of these two factors, Buhari’s men are more worried about the incumbency factor. They fear that the government may manipulate the electoral commission, the police, the intelligence outfits and even the army, if the presidency senses that the popular will is going in the opposite direction.

These fears are not entirely unfounded. On several occasions such as the registration of new parties, the commission’s interventions in intra-party squabbles in the opposition parties, the compiling of the voters’ register and the sequencing of the general elections in March and April l. the commission had towed the government’s and the PDP’s line. Second, the police, the army intelligence, and even the civilian intelligence outfit, are all headed by southerners, specifically by Obasanjo’s kith, except for the external National Intelligence Agency.

A third factor in Buhari’s disfavour is the recent ruling by the Supreme Court. allowing civil servants to participate actively in party politics. This judgment clearly favours the PDP which controls the central government, 21 states out of 36, and over 470 local governments out of the 774. It is not difficult to image the PDP using the court ruling to beat civil servants into lining up behind it.

Given the foregoing, chances are the forthcoming elections will be bitterly fought.. The extent of the bitterness, however, will, no doubt, depend on Obasanjo’s commitment to a peaceful, free and fair election, similar to his commitment some odd 24 years ago when he was military head of state. The way he fought tooth and nail to clinch his party’s presidential ticket hardly suggests that he still has such a commitment.