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Jonathan and Buhari are not chalk and cheese 10 Dec 2015

By Jide Akintunde

It is the nature of politics to create polar opposites out of sameness. Politics does fatally pitch citizens of the same country against one another. Although global market realities and our common aspirations to prosperity, safety and connection have blurred ideological differences, political parties still insist on unidentifiable differences. As such, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which launched to national scale by drawing a pool of established members of the People’s Democratic Party, is “progressive” while the PDP is “conservative.”

In spite of running a floundering administration so far, there are those who still strongly believe that President Muhammadu Buhari is markedly different from his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, who ran basically a lacklustre government. This reveals politics is more than a tool for governance; it actually hoodwinks the people.

Love of Power

It should be surprising how unprepared for governance President Buhari appears. His lack of readiness is confounding for a man that was only the fourth time lucky running for president. Coming into office since mid-year, his government has yet to finalise the 2016 budget in mid-December, whereas his first budget should have simply been straightforward conveyance of his fiscal plan as a presidential candidate.

What was announced earlier this week, beyond the tweaking of the coordinates of the existing rolling plan – the Medium Term Expenditure Framework 2016 - 2018, is the speculation of the government of its own budget for 2016. This view is supported by the provision of a near-round-figure of N6 trillion as next year’s budget. Similar round figures of “N7 trillion to N8 trillion” provided by the Vice President four weeks earlier, now jettisoned, couldn’t have been anything but a speculation.

President Buhari has made a similar hash of international diplomacy. He made an official visit to the United States without ministers, who as state functionaries, move forward the business talks that constitute the substance of such high-level diplomatic contacts these days. He routinely runs down the country abroad; and he is fond of first announcing domestic policy decisions abroad.

Considering it took Buhari 12 years to realise his presidential ambitions, these and his other bloopers within six months of office, suggest he simply fancied himself as president. It must have been similarly fantastic to Goodluck Jonathan that he became president. After five years in office, his steps were still uncertain on the international stage. Yet, he wanted to be president of Nigeria – Africa’s largest economy and most populous African country -- for another four years.

President Jonathan stamped his authority in very little ways as President of Nigeria. He prevaricated on fighting an insurgency against the state. The abduction of over 200 Chibok school girls from their dormitories attracted no immediate response from him as president. The need to rescue the vulnerable young Nigerians became obfuscated by a conspiracy theory under his watch.

Assembling the best technocrats as ministers and special advisers, as President Jonathan did, doesn’t make up for the deficiency in a Nigerian President, because of weak institutional culture. As a result, the people around the president exposed him to the notion some people had of him as “clueless.” Some of his aides ran riot and are now facing allegations of monumental corruption, unsurprising since President Jonathan said “stealing is not corruption.”

His aides could not even sell his achievements in office. The governing party, on which he ran for a constitutional second term of office in March, was on the back foot to the opposition during the campaign. In the end, he lost the election; partly because the imperfections that were tolerated by his government in the electoral process disproportionally worked against him.

Bad Negotiators

Both Buhari and Jonathan cut the image of bad negotiators as president. Whereas President Buhari appears to give too little away in negotiations, President Jonathan gave too much away. In trying to consolidate power after riding the crest of his agglomerated APC party, President Buhari made overwhelmingly disproportionate discretionary appointments in favour of the north where he hails from. This is insensitive to the geopolitical dynamics of the country which require delicate negotiation.
 
In a matter of months, President Buhari has not left it to conjecture whether he still reckons with Bola Tinubu, the facilitator of both the APC party and his candidacy. Those who are Tinubu’s political enemies are President Buhari’s top strategists in government. The reports of disrespect of Vice President Osinbajo by those who are close to the President is not helped by the annulment of the N8 trillion budget he hinted to the public. It was not deemed necessary to prevent embarrassment of the VP by making him announce the new N6 trillion estimate or for the government to explain why it had to drop the N8 trillion budget proposal.

President Buhari has refused to negotiate a more inclusive government with the Igbos, because as he said, they gave him only five percent of the votes that won him the election. This stance, with the longstanding marginalisation of the Igbo people since the civil war ended in 1970, is fuelling a secessionist sentiment to which President Buhari has so far responded ungraciously.

As for President Jonathan, we started to see heavy draw down on the Excess Crude Account in 2011 as he bargained to run for his technical first term of office after succeeding President Umaru Yar’Adua who died in office. The governors became more powerful under him and completely overwhelmed the need for the country to build and maintain a decent fiscal buffer. They regularly demanded the sharing of money in the ECA without appropriations and hopelessly moved against setting up of the Sovereign Wealth Fund. He effectively negotiated away the treasury to stay in power.

President Jonathan failed to solidarise with ordinary Nigerians of the Northeast in their experience of the horror of regular bombing and other forms of deadly attack by Boko Haram insurgents. For a long spell of these attacks, the president did not visit the region. He only visited Maiduguri in January during his electoral campaign. It would appear President Jonathan felt the insurgency should run its course in the northeast; after all, his political opponents were, allegedly, the ones fuelling it in attempts to discredit him and win power from him.

Undeniable Positives

President Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan also have in common the possession of a positive attribute, each. President Buhari’s repudiation of corruption makes him a decent human being. Even if he doesn’t succeed much with the prosecution and recovery of loots by past and present government functionaries – partly because of the incompetence of the prosecutors, the judiciary that is not known to be forthright always and the international system that prevents repatriation of stolen assets – President Buhari remains a moral force in public governance.

Corruption is more likely to recede during his administration than balloon, irrespective of the constraints of working with ill-reputed politicians. And if we all buy into his public scorn of corruption and indiscipline, the country would be better for it.

Goodluck Jonathan loves power quite much, but clearly he would not acquire it at all cost. His restraints are twofold. One, he has respect for life. Attainment of power by hook or by crook entails disregard for human lives. President Jonathan said repeatedly that his ambition for power was not more important than the lives of Nigerians. He had to demonstrate this in an extraordinary way by accepting electoral injustice against his ambition, as with the process and outcome of the 2015 election.

His other restraint is the democratic principle of tolerance of the opposition. Under President Jonathan, the opposition flourished, so much so that he gave us the chance to experience, for the first time in the country, the transition of power from the incumbent to the opposition candidate through the ballot. This is a legacy that has earned him his undeniable statesmanship.

Presidential Material

Nigeria’s development challenges, especially in the context of the complexities of the 21st century world, require the president to have multiple skills and well-rounded values. This ideal president would not emerge if we remained polarised: supporting a leader based on ethnicity and other reasons but abilities to exercise effective leadership of the country for the benefit of all the people and to the possible extent.

The current division of public opinion for or against the two leaders have had very little to do with what we actually deserve. If this continues, we may be moving towards foisting on the country in 2019 same limited choice for leadership.