Buhari, Awujale and Legacies…

By Olusegun Adeniyi

The death of former President Muhammadu Buhari and the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, just hours apart last Sunday, left many Nigerians grieving.

These two prominent figures—one a political leader, the other a traditional ruler—meant different things to different people and their passage has elicited conversations about what each represented and will be remembered for.

In assessing Buhari’s legacy, especially in a hypocritical society like ours where everybody becomes a saint in death, we must appreciate the complexity of human nature.

It often encompasses both virtues and flaws. The late Awujale, of course, offers a more straightforward introspection so I begin with him.

In a tribute he personally signed, President Bola Tinubu described the late monarch as “a towering natural ruler who served his people with dignity, panache, class, and an unmistakable sense of duty.”

But it is this line that resonates more with many: “In a time of national crisis and uncertainty, he stood firmly as a voice of reason.”

As many of us still remember, during the dark days of the late General Sani Abacha’s regime when politicians and traditional rulers were being herded to Aso Rock to watch ‘coup videos’ of the late General Oladipo Diya and given hefty envelopes as their ‘popcorn’, Awujale stood apart.

He rose in defence of his errant subject and against the tyranny that stalked our land.

Throughout his long reign, Awujale exhibited uncommon curiosity and was ever eager to challenge unproductive orthodoxy, including those shrouded in tradition. For him, customs are not static and should evolve from the people “according to their needs.”

And he illustrated this very point in his highly revealing memoir, ‘AWUJALE: The Autobiography of Alaiyeluwa Oba S. K. AdetonaOgbagba II’, where he shared his own experience on the rites associated with the coronation of traditional rulers: “…As part of the coronation process, the Odis (aafin attendants) embarked on the various rituals that would lead to my installation as the Awujale of Ijebuland. Personally, I can say here that there is nothing about these rituals that could not be made public… All the secrecy that they maintained about the rituals was, therefore, as I saw it, simply a ploy to extort money from the public, just as their fathers did before them. They deliberately made the rituals look very mysterious.”

I am not surprised that a number of traditionalists were turned back from his burial on Monday.

The late Awujale had scant regard for the kind of superstitions peddled by such men. “…at the Owa Stream, the Elese of Ilese carried me on his back across the stream as custom had it that my feet must not touch the water.

Also, at Odo Esa, I passed an Iroko tree which, again by tradition, I was told I must never see again. Indeed, I was forbidden to ever pass that very road again or, according to tradition, I would die,” the late Awujale recounted about his 1959 coronation.

“I did not believe any of this of course and I have since travelled that road and passed the Iroko tree on several occasions… So much for all these unnecessary taboos!”.

I had the privilege of visiting the late Awujale a few times and we communicated on phone regularly until recently.

He was a much-admired monarch who lived by worthy examples. At age 78 in 2012, for instance, he enrolled to study Law at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN).

“Age cannot be a barrier to learning for me. It is what I desire and I assure all of you that I will study very well and come out of the university in record time without fail,” said the late Awujale at the time as he joined 200 other students admitted for the 2012/2013 academic year at NOUN’s Awa Community Study Centre, in Ijebu North Local Government area of Ogun State.

By that move, he sent a powerful message that learning should be a lifelong enterprise, and that it is never too late for anyone to set a goal for themselves. The revered Ijebu monarch will certainly be missed.

Now to Buhari. Examining his legacy requires a nuanced perspective that neither idolizes nor condemns, if we must be true to history.

And journalists should not indulge in the kind of fantasy that moments like this elicit in Nigeria.

For someone who ruled our country for 18 months as a military head of state and eight years as an elected president, we must seek to understand the full scope of his contributions and shortcomings.

“We tend to lionize or demonize our presidents,” the Los Angeles Times editor wrote in the introduction to a report, ‘Mixed Legacies’, which ranked American presidents.

“But even our greatest heroes occasionally failed, and the worst presidents could boast of some worthy accomplishments.”

The same, of course, goes for Nigeria. Even his most implacable foes would admit that Buhari emerged from a sterling military career during which he fought in the civil war and held command and political positions—including as Governor of the North-Eastern State (now Borno, Bauchi, Yobe, Adamawa and Taraba), Federal Commissioner for Petroleum and Natural Resources (now Minister), and Head of State—with his integrity intact.

Almost two decades after he was toppled, Buhari also had the discipline to submit himself to the democratic process.

Despite his modest financial means, he was able to attract huge followers of genuine supporters in a nation where pollical influence is often dictated by money.

And Buhari will go down in history as the first man to defeat an incumbent president in Nigeria.

However, any commentary on Buhari must assess his presidential stewardship.

For the moment, it is worth remembering that on 29th August 2015, just three months after he was sworn-in, Buhari disowned two ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) campaign documents containing promises of what he would do in his first 100 days in office.

But we were also informed of how Buhari’s ‘body language’ had become a moral compass within the polity at the time. “He didn’t put a Kobo to finance the power sector.

Yet, reading his body language alone and knowing that there are things you cannot do and get away with under Buhari, electricity supply all over the country has risen to unprecedented heights,” his spokesman, Mallam Garba Shehu gleefully told Nigerians.

While Buhari’s journey to the pinnacle of power in Nigeria was helped by a well-oiled propaganda machine that sold a myth, his handlers forgot that posterity records only concrete achievements.

Unfortunately, the myth died long before the man who came to power with the promise to restore the economy, fight corruption and tackle general insecurity in the country.

On corruption, there was no scandal around the person of Buhari hence no dent on his ‘Mai Gaskiya’ image, but he didn’t ‘fight corruption’ in the public space as promised.

On the economic front, some of the choices made by his administration have left the nation in a quandary, even though the situation is now far worse under his successor.

But it was on national security that Buhari disappointed the most.

A retired army General who arrived the presidency with a fearsome reputation, Buhari allowed a situation in which those who manned the security sector were not only bitter enemies but also fought openly to subvert one another and the system.

And there was no record that he ever called any of them to order—not even after publicly admitting, as he did on 12 March 2018, that then Inspector General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris, disobeyed his directive to relocate to Benue State.

Such was the level of indiscipline that when Buhari nominated Ibrahim Magu for the chairmanship of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), his State Security Service (SSS) Director General, Lawal Daura, sent a damning report to the Senate, asking the lawmakers not to clear the presidential nominee. Mum was the word from the Villa.

On 21 November 2017, the in-fighting among security chiefs became a threat to public order, following a fierce street battle in Asokoro, Abuja that was reminiscent of gang wars between cult groups except that the combatants were state agents.

In the attempts to arrest a former SSS Director General, Ita Ekpenyong and his National Intelligence Agency (NIA) counterpart, Ayo Oke, EFCC operatives were confronted by armed personnel from these sister agencies.

Gunshots were fired by the opposing teams as residents scampered for safety. While the Senate intervened with an investigation, there was a deafening silence from the Villa.

The military thrives on hierarchy of command, yet Buhari appointed Mansur Dan-Ali, who had then just retired as a Brigadier General, as Defence Minister in his first term. This despite Dan-Ali’s undistinguished military record.

Instructively, then Chief of Army Staff, Lt General Tukur Yusuf Buratai started his cadet training on 1st January 1983 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant on 17th December 1983.

Meanwhile, Dan-Ali who was appointed to boss him and others started his cadet training on Short Service Commission on 5th March 1984! And his lack of experience and exposure was evident throughout his period in office. In January 2018, as many Nigerians would recall, Mansur Dan-Ali said:

“Since the nation’s Independence, we know there used to be a route whereby the cattle rearers take because they are all over the nation.

If those routes are blocked, what do you expect will happen?” Despite public uproar to what was clearly an irresponsible justification for the killings that were being attributed to herders at the time, Dan-Ali was not sanctioned. I can cite numerous other examples.

The consequence of such an aloof and distant disposition to leadership was that under Buhari, insurgents, bandits and sundry criminal cartels practically had free reign—even in his home state of Katsina.

But as I said, there will be time to properly examine the legacy of Buhari, including his achievements in office.

We must also be able to distinguish between the man whose virtues are being extolled by his army of supporters, and Buhari the leader who left a mixed legacy.

Meanwhile, it is remarkable that Buhari and Awujale passed the same day. I understand they were also friends.

At the end, what the lives and times of these two iconic personages whisper to us is a sobering lesson: Legacies are not determined by myths or good intentions but rather by what individuals did with the opportunities they were given.

In the words of that Christian hymn writer, Horatius Bonar (1808–1889), we are ‘only remembered by what we have done’.

May the memories of the late President Buhari and Awujale of Ijebuland be both a witness and a warning. And may God comfort the families they left behind.

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