OF LEADERS AND CHARLATANS: The presidency is probably the most influential institution on earth today. In most countries, a president would get away with nigh everything. This is why more attention is paid to the number one man in the land. This is why selecting a president is the most important business in a country’s life. And this explains why stringent rules – and indeed, forensic devices are daily deployed to ensure that misfits are kept far away from that gilded seat.
Let’s also state upfront that there are three types of leaders.
The natural leader forged in the crucibles of the heavens and let down on earth for special duties. He is perfect in character, carriage and care – leadership is first about love and care for others. All the elements are full and complete in him.
The second type are brilliant men who have trained to lead. They do their best but their best would always fall short. The simple reason being that nature will always trump nurture.
The third type of leaders are the charlatans and egomaniacs. Just because my friend is leader, I can also lead. Recall Thomas Sankara and his friend, Compaore.
BUHARI FAR BETTER: Coming back home, let’s consider Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Tinubu. While Buhari would pass more as a natural leader, the category President Tinubu falls into is left to your guess. This column has however, determined that Buhari’s a better leader than Tinubu. A few examples will suffice.
One, upon assumption of office in 2015, the first action Buhari took was to quietly cast into the dust bin, the Jonathan 2014 National Conference. Restructuring Nigeria was the buzz and the conference was all about it. The report gave Nigeria the best break to rework the entity for the good of all. But Buhari thought otherwise. He is a caring leader who thought the world of his Fulani people. His people came first before the Nigerian people. Buhari thought the 2014 report wouldn’t favour an itinerant herder nation.
Buhari simply made sure nobody around him mentioned the report. When pressure mounted across the country, Nasir el Rufai, the enfant terrible, mooted an APC review committee. It was a ruse of course; a ploy to buy time and quieten the uproar. Thus restructuring was killed and buried by Buhari and the All Progressives Congress, APC.
Back to now. When Tinubu was coronated on May 29th, he off-handedly tossed away the so-called subsidy on petrol. When heat was flashed on him, Nigerians were told Buhari administration had structured fuel subsidy to end in June 2023. They said it was indeed not captured in the budget therefore, nothing could be done. Fine.
However, a few months down the line, the same budget was tinkered with via a supplementary bill. The same budget that could not be tweaked to avert removal of ‘subsidy’ and save Nigerians from excruciating pains is now supplemented to buy Presidential Yacht, to make over an illegitimate Office of the First Lady and buy posh SUVs to appease the National Assembly.
Didn’t we say earlier that leadership is primarily empathy for majority of the people? For eight years, Buhari resisted enormous pressure from abroad to cut subsidy and float the naira. He knew that it would portend HELL for his already impoverished people. But Tinubu has no concept of the people. Leadership for him is to keep power for its sake.
TWO PRESIDENTS, TWO AURAS: Buhari came as a man of integrity. Positive changes began to manifest in the country immediately he was announced winner. Errant civil servants started to do the right things even before he was sworn in. Power supply improved. A new sheriff was truly in town; his body language spoke for him and a new lease of life was here at last. Though Buhari was to suffer benign physical and mental incapacity leading to a woeful era, he started with a promise. Even in a recent interview with the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) last week, he said he had deep affection for the people.
We cannot say the same for Tinubu. He came with all sorts of taints and smudges. He hasn’t shown any form of brilliance. Not even on basic things. No new broom clearing old cobwebs, no fresh breath, no rigour in policy development and no clear directions after six months. What we have is a bumbling bee heaping misery on the populace.
THE CHARLATAN IN THE VILLA: Many authorities have said that it doesn’t matter how you win power, that what’s important is how you deploy it. This may explain why some have canvassed for soft dictatorship if it helps development.
But the great Nigerian challenge today is that Tinubu is not a leader possessed of vision or inspiration, he’s a mere charlatan who has nothing to offer. If he were not only about himself and his ego, there are a thousand and one things he could have done in the first few week to set the country on the right path and prove his bona fides.
Here are some of the things a more perceptive leader would have done:
RECONCILE THE PEOPLE, HEAL THE COUNTRY: Buhari took the country to the brinks . We have said that he loved his Fulani tribe more than Nigeria. He shovelled all the goodies in the land, including appointments, to the Fulani. He opened the borders for them to troop in from all over Africa. He watched as they killed, maimed and occupied Indigenous lands. Reversing this trend and healing the land ought to have received some urgency.
But Tinubu seems to have adopted Buhari’s crude playbook. He has skewed major appointments in favour of his people. He has craftily released Sunday Igboho through some back door political settlement and left Nnamdi Kanu in illegal detention.
He has beefed up the besiege of the southeast by the military and sustained insecurity therein (why is a certain Simon Ekpa not reined in if he’s not sponsored by the FG as being conjectured). Why are Igbo properties being wantonly damaged in Lagos, etc?
WITHER RESTRUCTURING? One expected Tinubu to have made a statement on restructuring immediately. He clamoured for it, it was in the APC manifesto. It was their campaign mantra in 2014. Why has he been silent on restructuring? Did Buhari also place embargo on him discussing it?
HAS CORRUPTION WON THE WAR? At least Buhari made a show of fighting corruption. The Tinubu government is not even discussing it. The impression is that corruption has now won the war. Corruption is now in your face. It is in-house and it is done with the kind of impunity that can only be presidential. You would expect some high profile oil thieves to be in jail already. You would expect that those finagling with petrol subsidy would have come a cropper. You would expect that the same zeal with which Godwin Emefiele and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) is being pursued would be applied to the NNPC for instance? No.
Apparently, corruption cannot fight corruption.
The judiciary seems to have taken a cue and gone gung-ho! The corruption in the judiciary has become a bazaar that even children are discussing Supreme Court judgements perjoratively.
INSECURITY AND TERROR FIGHT: If Tinubu were half a great president, among the first actions he would take would be to release the names of about 400 suspected financiers of terror as supplied to Buhari by the US and UAE governments. But no way. Terror on Nigeria has heightened and more Nigerians are dying under Tinubu’s watch. Only new figher jets have been hastily procured, no new thinking has been brought to bear on the terror war.
PROBE THE NIGERIA AIR ODIUM: Why has the Tinubu administration been silent on the Nigeria Air scam? This must be the most odious scandal in modern Nigeria. Why is this singular international scam not being probed in spite of the odium it brought upon the image of the country?
IN SUMMARY: It is of course an affront on the psyche of Nigerians to compare one terribly poor and inept leader with another. It suggests that Nigeria suffers serial debasement by the APC. But Tinubu’s administration, unlike Buhari’s, is bugged down by a dodgy mandate ab initio, thus seems to have no redeeming value from outset.
