Ghanaian author and writer of the classic novel The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born, Ayi Kwei Armah, captured scenes in the political arena of the post-colonial Ghana and concluded, to put it in layman’s language, that the beautiful ones are not yet born, either into the Ghanaian society, or the post-colonial Africa. He depicted the struggles of The Man, his protagonist, in a society riddled with corruption and corruptible tendencies. The Man, a civil servant has got to make friends with politicians and even made a way for one to escape the wrath of the military when they took over in a coup. The classic was truly captured in the legend of the African bird, Chichidodo, which hates human waste with passion but feasts on maggots. Incidentally, maggots are housed inside the lavatory. Armah’s treatise to us all is that saints don’t live here. They are not yet born.
Flowing from such a reality, one cannot but therefore be riled in the spirit each time one listens to the public interventions of the immediate past Nigerian leader, President, Muhammadu Buhari, whose public posturing have always been about painting himself the only living saint in the nation’s political firmament, a man of the Talakawas, a symbol of transparency and accountability in public office, and one to be acknowledged as the Mai Gaskiya, just as his crowd usually would have it.
It should surprise many to discover that the only public interjections Buhari’s compatriots would see him make are self-serving homilies on righteousness and sainthood. And that’s from a man who has led his country on two distinct occasions, each time leaving the country in economic ruins and political quagmire. It is getting to the time he realised that his often high decibelled holier than the Pope preachments are constituting noise to the hearing of his countrymen.
On January 25, the former president was at it again in his home state, Katsina, when he hosted a caucus meeting of the All Progressives Congress at the Presidential Banquet Hall of Katsina State’s Government House. He told his listeners that he now sustains himself financially through rental income from one of his two properties in Kaduna State.
According to reports, the former president told his party men that he only owns three houses: one in his hometown of Daura, Katsina State, probably the acclaimed “mud house” as we were earlier told by his publicists, and two in Kaduna State. He added that one of the Kaduna properties has been rented out, with proceeds used to cover his daily living expenses.
He said: “After my eight years as a civil president, I have only three houses; one in Daura and two in Kaduna. I have given one out for renting where I get money for feeding.” He was to increase the volume of his presentation when he added: “I refrained from enriching myself illicitly during my presidency.” He also added the usual refrain that he was committed to the principles of integrity and accountability.
In truth, nobody has questioned Buhari’s avowed commitment to the principles he mentioned above-integrity and accountability. What many of his countrymen remained concerned about is the undying zeal for self adulation, even when no one has publicly challenged his commitments to those fields. Maybe our leader in Daura is imitating the proverbial lizard, which falls from an Iroko three and nods his head thrice in self praise-indicating that ‘if no one would praise me, I will praise myself.’
But as a man who has had the good fortune of leading his nation, both as a military leader and as a civilian president, utilising the constitutionally-allowed two terms of office, much more than self adulations are required from his public interventions. Here is a leader, who took up the mantle of leadership at the time Nigeria was getting some aroma of prosperity, who ended up plunging the country into the sewage of poverty. To the extent that the country is now recognised as the poverty capital of the world!
Here is a Buhari, who inherited a N12.6 trillion national debts in 2015 and balooned the same to N87.38 trillion in May 2023, without a significant improvement in infrastructure. The Federal Capital Territory, the seat of Buhari’s government for eight years is, as we speak, grappling to fix projects that were flagged off by the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan way back 2010. This is because Buhari’s government only left the projects in limbo, even though the National Assembly approved trillions of naira in statutory and federal budgets. A man who made it his duty to prepare poorly executed national budgets, while adding deficits at every turn, as he spent tomorrow’s money yesterday. We were even told after his exit that the government he superintended left the CBN with some N30 trillion in ways and means, millions of dollars of unpaid aviation money owed foreign airlines and multiple forward sales of crude oil that were still hundreds of feet below the sea level.
If he cannot join in mourning the mess Nigeria became under his watch, he should at least not mock his compatriots who are condemned to salvage a troubled nation he bequeathed to them.
It is, however, possible his penchant for self praise is in difference to the song of the popular Fuji Musician, General Kollington Ayinla, a General of music in his own right, who sang ‘K’a le mo pe ijapa re soosi, oni ogo ni fun Baba, ogo ni fun omo, ogo ni fun Emi mimo’… (so that you can see the tortoise as diligent church goer, you accost him on the street and he is readily reciting the Lord’s prayer).
Rather than batter his countrymen with arrant revisionism, Pa Buhari should have quietly retired to his Daura home. He should join in fashioning ways out of the dangerous socio-economic challenges, he left us with.
But this is not the first time Buhari is regaling his nation with stories of his legendary financial constraints. In October 2014, as presidential aspirant on the platform of the APC, Buhari expressed fears he might be unable to pay the N27.5 million nomination and expression of interest forms of the party.
He had said then: “It’s a pity I couldn’t influence this amount to be put down as in the case of ladies and the disable that intend to participate. I always look left and right in our meetings but I could not read sympathy, so I kept my trap. But I felt heavily sorry for myself because I don’t want to go and ask somebody to pay for my nomination forms, because I always try to pay myself, at least for the nomination. “N27 million is a big sum, thankfully I have personal relationship with the manager of my bank in Kaduna and I told him that very soon the forms are coming, so, whether I am on red, or green or even black please honour it otherwise I may lose the nomination.”
After paying for the 2015 nomination form through an agreement with his bank manager, Buhari got a freebie, so to say, in 2018, when a group called Nigerian Consolidation Ambassadors Network, led by Sunnisi Musa, paid N45 million on his behalf for the nomination and expression of interest forms in the 2019 election. Nobody has told us how President Buhari paid back the Consolidation Ambassadors or his bank manager, or whether such liabilities are captured in the Code of Conduct forms he submitted at the end of his tenure in Aso Rock as mandated by the constitution.
You can accuse Nigeria of anything, but you won’t be right to say that the country doesn’t take care of its generals. Any claim to the contrary would amount to undue exploitation of populism and a misuse of propaganda.
That aside, the former president needed to be told that perpetually depicting himself a poverty-stricken, retired general/head of state/president has become jaded and unwelcome. When he took charge in 2015, we were told he lived off the proceeds from his cows in Daura. Despite the availability of scientific knowledge he could leverage to multiply his herd, even as cows have become goldmine, Buhari’s cows are no longer productive to give him a living. What happens to his pension as a military general or the stipends approved for retired heads of government? What is also happening to the block of duplexes at 9, Udoma Udo Udoma street, Asokoro Abuja, which some groups have linked to the former President? No doubt Buhari has a riddle to crack on that jumbo plot of land. A group had in the build up to the 2015 election raised posers in the media about that structure, claiming that the land belonged to Pa Buhari and that he gave it to the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund PTF) to erect duplexes for its directors while he served as the boss of the interventionist agency.
According to the claim, the buildings, however, reverted to the owner of the land when President Olusegun Obasanjo terminated the PTF, because whoever owns the land, owns the structure on it! General Buhari did not respond to the posers raised on that structure, but what neighbours in the vicinity saw was that a small military outpost emerged at the gate of that house when Buhari took over at Aso Rock. That only showed that the owner must be influential indeed!
It was SaharaReporters on July 31, 2021, which claimed to have busted Buhari’s several claims in an article titled: BUSTED: Buhari Claimed He Couldn’t Afford Nomination Form While Paying Millions.
The article read in part: “President Muhammadu Buhari paid over N20 million for his two children, Yusuf and Zahra, who were studying in the United Kingdom universities in 2015, about the time when he declared to Nigerians that he could not afford the All Progressives Congress’ (APC) expression of interest and nomination form.
“Findings by SaharaReporters confirmed this, showing how Buhari rode to power on the propaganda that he was an average Nigerian – who could not afford the APC’s N27 million and lived a moderate life.” See the rest on: http://saharareporters.com/2021/07/30/busted-multi-million-naira-uk-schools-buhari.
Rather than longing to be beatified a saint among the living, Pa Buhari needs to do better than the self-centred conversations on the national scale. The Yoruba would say that no matter how clean a man is, when his anal area is dissected, some particles of excreta would surely emerge. Needless to lay claim to sainthood among the living. He needs to join efforts with the likes of President Obasanjo, General Abdusalami Abubakar, General Yakubu Gowon, President Goodluck Jonathan, and Bishop Mathew Kukah among others, in seeking national cohesion, regional and global peace.
(Published in the Sunday Tribune of February 9, 2025)
