What Buhari must do to win 2015 election (I) Category: Notes from Atlanta Published on Saturday, 04 October 2014 05:00 Written by Farooq Kperogi Hits: 2305 0 Comments 0 inShare Moses E. Ochonu Moses Ochonu, Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, USA, wrote this thoughtful and insightful piece on the enduring problems of General Muhammadu Buhari’s perennial candidacy for Nigeria’s presidency that I feel compelled to share with my readers. Given the space limitation of this column, I’ll serialize it. Please wait for the article’s conclusion before you react. As General Muhammadu Buhari prepares to declare his fourth run for the presidency of Nigeria, it is important that this campaign departs radically from previous ones, in which the General’s supporters and aides treated the election as a perfunctory exercise in the crowning of their candidate rather than a contest for votes and support. For one thing, the stakes are higher this time, with Nigeria teetering. For another, there are many more people in Nigeria today who are willing to give the candidate of the opposition a serious look than there were in 2011, what with the current state of the nation. The country’s repertoire of problems has expanded since 2011, and President Jonathan has squandered the goodwill he enjoyed in 2011. Given this convergence of factors, for this writer and many Nigerians, any alternative political path is preferable to the failed PDP paradigm. Yet, that does not mean that General Buhari, were he to emerge as the APC’s presidential candidate, would automatically get their votes. The General cannot win by default; he will have to earn the votes of those who are disenchanted with the status quo. He will have to give them a reason to embrace change, to choose an unknown future over a known, if tortuous, present. It is not enough to convince people to abandon Jonathan; you have to give them a reason to support and vote for you. Buhari’s supporters — most of them — are escapists and habitual evaders. They don’t recognize the importance of outreach and platform. For them, you win an election by simply presenting yourself as an alternative to a failed status quo. They trade in their candidate’s inevitability to boot. In 2011 they even created alternate arithmetic universes in which, we were told, Buhari only needed the vote of the Northwest and parts of the Northeast to win the presidency since the two zones are, according to official census figures, Nigeria’s two most populous regions. This strange arithmetic convinced many of the General’s supporters that their man could win even without campaigning in the rest of the country, that the only way he could lose was if he was rigged out by the infamous rigging infrastructure of the PDP, and that, given this certainty, if he lost he would have been denied an office for which he was solidly poised. It was a narrative of entitlement. It informed the swagger, arrogance, complacency, and subtle threats that became commonplace in the less enlightened physical and online corners of Buhariland. A bellicose army of Buhari supporters strutted cyberspace with a huge chip on their shoulders, declaring with finality and certainty that their man was destined for Aso Rock. Realists wondered about the preemptive triumphalism. Those not sold on the General and those who supported then candidate Goodluck Jonathan sniffed something offensive and presumptuous about the tenor of that curious campaign tactic of the General’s supporters. This attitude was puzzling because the electoral map and the shenanigans of a failed opposition merger barely a week before the election put Buhari at a marked disadvantage, making a Jonathan victory all but certain. Given the real, as opposed to the imagined, electoral calculus of 2011, Jonathan, who at the time commanded much goodwill as a relatively fresh face, would have won the election fair and square, but typical of the PDP, they could not let their rigging arrangements go to waste so they rigged a clearly winnable election and tainted a clear and imminent victory. By rigging, the PDP confirmed the fantastical theories of Buhariland, enabled the General’s supporters to shift the blame of their candidate’s loss, and prevented Buhari and his camp from engaging in the necessary soul-searching. It is always the case that Buhari’s supporters take his support among the electorate for granted, and work from the premise that their man is entitled to the presidency because the incumbency is putrid and because Buhari is magnanimous enough to put his vast reservoir of integrity and can-do energy at Nigeria’s disposal. How could Nigeria’s beleaguered masses not recognize a messiah when they see him? How could they, Buhari’s supporters always seemed to wonder, not gravitate enthusiastically to the very antithesis of the ongoing corruption bazaar? Convinced of the General’s inherent goodness, his supporters have always reasoned that a good soup does not advertise itself — except that, contrary to their logic, in politics, it is goodness that often needs to prove itself as an alternative to a familiar badness and not the other way round. In politics a familiar badness is often preferred to an unfamiliar, untested goodness. Buhari is a political lightening rod in Nigeria, and as long as he harbors the ambition of governing the country again, he will continue to be scrutinized, as he should be. Many of his supporters are usually unquestioning and sheepish in their adulation of their man. As a result they loathe hearing some truths about the man and his political methodology. In this respect, Buhari’s most ardent supporters are, ironically, similar to the hardcore Jonathan supporters they loathe with passion — the so-called Jonathanians who are receptive to praise for their man but resent criticisms of him. I often take a philosophical view of this monologic approach to political conversation in Nigeria. The behavior of Buhari’s supporters is, in my opinion, a reflection of the desperate order of things (apologies to Michel Foucault) in Nigeria today. They are projecting messianism and their own anxieties and hopes onto Buhari because he is a different kind of politician, and because, whatever you may think of Buhari, you cannot question his personal integrity. As corruption has ravaged Nigeria, the moral aptitude to discern and resist corruption has become a rare political asset, considered metonymic, rightly or wrongly, for other political qualities like competence, vision, statesmanship, and sound governing temperament. But Nigeria has regressed to a degree that personal integrity alone cannot salvage her. Buhari’s supporters have yet to catch on to this reality.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 05:45:49 +0000
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