PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and Buharism

Mohammed Haruna

Penultimate Tuesday, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the brilliant economist-turned-banker, Islamic scholar and a prince of Kano to boot, made a not surprising but nonetheless brilliant intervention in the debate that has surrounded the decision by former Head of State, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, to “jump into the murky waters of Nigerian politics”, to use Sanusi’s own words. He (that is, Sanusi) has been compelled to intervene, he said, because the discourse between those for and against Buhari’s entry into politics, had been “impoverished through personalization...” The objective of his intervention, therefore, was “to raise the intellectual profile of the discourse beyond its present focus on personalities…”

Sanusi’s full-page intervention was carried on the back page of the Daily Trust. He called it “Buharism: Economic theory and political economy”. The banker’s initial remarks gave the reader the impression that he was a disinterested judge in the debate. He ended up clearly as a Buhari partisan. “There seems to be”, said Sanusi, “a dangerous trend of competition between the two opposing camps, aimed at glorifying him beyond his wildest dreams or demonizing him beyond all justifiable limits, through a selective reading of history and opportunistic attribution and misattribution of responsibility”. Rather than the image of an impartial judge that these remarks sought to create, Sanusi ended up not merely taking sides with those who have tried to glorify the former Head of State beyond his wildest dream, Sanusi himself ended up doing exactly the same.

In making his intervention, Sanusi made a short-list of the so-called protagonists in the debate. The pro-Buhari side, he said, included (1) “the political adviser to a late general (who) has transferred his services to a living one” (Alhaji Sule Hamma, former Secretary to Kano State Government and former political adviser to General Sani Abacha, (2) his “dear friend and prolific veterinary doctor… (who had) taken a leading emir (the emir of Gwandu, Alhaji Musapha Jakolo) to the cleaners based on information of suspect authenticity” (Dr. Aliyu Tilde, the popular columnist with Weekly Trust), (3) “a young northern Turk (who) has made several interventions and given novel expressions to what I call the PTF connection” (Sam Nda-Isaiah, probably the hottest columnist, this side, possibly both sides, of the Niger and a close friend of the managers of Afri-Project Consortium, PTF’s mega-consultants, and (4) some readers and writers who have done Buhari “incalculable damage by viewing his politics through the narrow prism of ethnicity and religion”.

On the cons side seems to be this lone figure of a friend of Sanusi’s who “has contributed an articulate piece, which for those in the know, gives a bird’s eye view into the thinking within the IBB camp,” namely this writer.

Other than his category of those who have unwittingly portrayed Buhari as an ethnic and religious bigot, it is not clear from his comments whether he thinks the rest of us are among those who have tried to deify (the pros) or demonise (the cons) the general. I don’t know about those in support of Buhair but speaking for myself as someone who is supposed to be against Buhari, I can say that I have never regarded him as a demon, nor did I ever portray him as one. I have had, and still have, tremendous respect for him as someone whose word is his bond and someone whose personal lifestyle has remained modest compared to most people who have had the opportunities to hold public office at the levels he did, beginning as a governor to that of Head of State.

My main grouse against him, however, is his self-righteousness. Perhaps I have perceived him wrongly, but it is difficult, if not impossible, not to see Buhari’s behaviour as Head of State as the behaviour of someone who is a self-righteous despot. Indeed, most of his defenders, including Sanusi, admit as much, the only difference being their apparent belief that Buhari had no choice in the matter. Sanusi, for example, argues that Buhari’s despotism “was historically determined, necessitated by the historical task of dismantling structures of dependency and launching the nation on to a path beyond primitive accumulation”.

“Buharism”, Sanusi had argued earlier “represented a two-way struggle: with global capital (externally) and with its parasitic and unpatriotic agents and spokesmen (internally). This was vicious struggle and thus required extreme measures. Draconian policies were a necessary component of this struggle for transformation and this had been a case with all epoch in history. The ‘tiger economies’ of Asia such as Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand, are not exactly modes of democratic freedom”. Missing in Sanusi’s list of tyrannies was Singapore, probably the most successful Asian “tiger” whose leader for over 30 years, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, was probably one of the world’s biggest despots between the sixties and nineties. Mr. Lee, it was who, among other things, heavily penalized residents of Singapore for littering streets, even banned the importation of and sale of chewing gum on the excuse that it was difficult and costly to clean up, heavily penalized Singaporeans for smoking in public and for not flushing toilets. He even banned long hair on male government workers and tourists.

Mr. Lee and his Asian colleagues could justify their despotism on the grounds that it paid off in the end. Lee for example, was able to transform Singapore, a small island of about 2,000,000 people, from one of the poorest countries in the world, riven by ethnic and religious divisions, into one of the most united and richest countries in the world in about three decades. Sanusi’s argument was that Buhari would have replicated Mr. Lee’s miracle in Nigeria, if he had not been betrayed by “fifth columnists” in his government.

The argument that despotism is a necessary condition for development may have an appealing ring to it but, inspite of the examples Sanusi has given of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the Meiji Restoration in Japan, among others, despotism have ended up more in misery than in happiness. Lee’s despotism may have transformed Singapore into a rich country, but Philip Marcos’es despotism in Philippines only drove the country into the ground. The same is true of the despotism of many a Latin-American tyrant and, of course, African tyrants like former Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko, not to mention what Communist tyranny did to East Europe and the Soviet Union.

The bottom line is that it is a toss up whether a despotism will land a country on its feet, as with the Asian tigers, or belly-up, as with Zaire. Therefore, for Sanusi to justify Buhari’s self-righteous despotism on the grounds that it “would have provided the bedrock for a new society”, in other words, that it was guaranteed to transform Nigeria for the better, even when he himself was not sure whether Buhari would have ended up a Bonapart or Bismarck, on the one hand, or a Hitter or a Mussolini, on the other hand, is to ask Nigerians to share his apparent blind faith in Buharism with no questions asked.

Sanusi is apparently certain that Buhari’s despotism would have led Nigeria to a happy ending because the bedrock of Buharism was a foreign exchange, which, for Sanusi, was a patriotic defiance of the IMF and the World Bank, the twin scourges of every developing country. Buhari, he said, refused to devalue the Naira because it was not in Nigeria’s interest; the assumptions that devaluations encourage exports and discourages imports do not, he rightly argued, necessarily apply to Nigeria. There is, however, paradoxical twist to Buhari’s apparent patriotism, which is that the local elite, Sanusi’s so-called agents of international capital, like Buhari, also preferred non-devaluation because they could then get their foreign currencies on the cheap for their own copious consumption. For Buhari, therefore, to devalue or not to devalue was a Catch 22 situation.

But this, really, is besides the point, which is whether Buhari’s refusal to devalue the Naira is necessarily a patriotic act, and therefore anything to the contrary is, by definition, unpatriotic. Sanusi obviously believes it is. There are, however, economists who are no less patriotic than Buhari who would support the contrary position that although devaluation may be a bitter medicine, it is inevitable for an economy like Nigeria which produces little of what it consumes. For such economists, it does not necessarily follow that if it is good for the IMF or the World Bank, then it must be bad for a developing country. For such economists therefore, the sooner a sick country takes its bitter pill, the lesser the chances that its sickness could lead to death.

Nigeria, Sanusi would argue, quite rightly, has since taken its bitter pill of devaluation, but it seems to be getting worse, not better. Devaluation, therefore, could not possibly be the correct prescription. But then the problem with social behaviour, is that it is impossible to predict with certainty, for the simple reason that too many variables are involved in such behaviour, variables which are difficult, if not impossible, to control simultaneously.

Sanusi may be wrong in his assumption that a fixed exchange regime is the only patriotic option for fixing Nigeria’s economic ills, especially as he admits that this option can, and does, engender official corruption, but his intervention in the debate surrounding Buhari’s entry into politics ought to raise the quality of the debate. I disagree with his assumption that it is possible to conduct the debate, any debate, without some degree of personalization; though individuals alone do not make history, it cannot be denied that some individuals do leave their imprimatur on history. After all, who we are often times determines what we do. This is why Sanusi is within his right to coin the concept of Buharism, meaning a socio-political-economy that derives from the character and personality of Buhari. This is why Muslims protest when outsiders call their religion Mohammedanism and not Islam, because they believe their religion came from God and is not merely the personal idiosyncrasies of Prophet Muhammad (SAW).

However, even though it is trite to denounce the personalization of issues, Sanusi is right to say too much personalization can becloud the issues. Now that he has intervened with the right emphasis on the issues rather than on the personalities involved, hopefully the debate, not just about Buhari’s entry in politics, but the debate about the coming elections will move away from who the key actors are to what they can do to eliminate the country’s poverty and its divisions.