WHY BUHARI IS ‘MAN OF THE DECADE’ -BY MARTINS OLOJA
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| President Muhammadu Buhari. |
I want to plead again for understanding about the many inconclusive issues here. The issue of ‘questions to our governors’ and ‘the launch of free and compulsory basic and secondary education in Kano state’ at this moment deserves to be rounded off. But again, there is a more current and weightier matter of governance and leadership we should reflect on before the momentum fizzles out.
It is the credit I think most of us deny President Muhammadu Buhari. I mean that the taciturn, lanky General and President of the most populous black nation on earth at this time deserves some respect even as some of us wailers keep saying he didn’t go to school.
Buhari just like Winston
Churchill, who was to be later recognised as an incomparable, world-class
orator, didn’t go far in acquiring many higher certificates of knowledge. But I
think our leader should be respected as an oracle at this juncture. As I was
saying here, orators speak the minds of the people while oracles speak the
minds of the gods and when they say to even the orators, ‘do this’, it is done.
At our editorial board meeting consisting of
six world-class professors and four other professors in their own callings,
among others, we get involved in seminal discussions every week on the
difference between ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’. One of them, Professor Wale
Omole, former Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, set the
tone of the distinction between the two – ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ about
three years ago and the word comes up every week while discussing the many
complex challenges arising from the polity and indeed the business world.
From the download every
week, members of the editorial board are familiar with the distinction this way
as I have also researched: that Knowledge is something that you accumulate
through learning while ‘Understanding’ is something that you know because you
have lived through it. So, learning and gaining knowledge can be very useful,
but the really important experiences are when you actually understand the
experience for yourself by living through it.
So, it can be inferred
that some knowledgeable and educated people may not have enough understanding
of some subjects because they have not lived through them.
In the same vein, if you
ask clerics to speak to this context they will ask: what is the place of
‘Wisdom’ in the same context? This is also the way men of God have consistently
explained it in the journals. ‘Wisdom is the ability to discern and judge which
aspects of that knowledge are true, right and lasting, and applicable to your
life…In a nutshell, if knowledge is information, wisdom is the understanding
and application of that knowledge…’
In this regard, many
seminal men of God are likely to quote some scriptures, especially Proverbs
4:7-9, which says, ‘Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom. And in
all your getting, get understanding. Exalt her, and she will promote you; She will
bring you honour, when you embrace her. She will place on your head an ornament
of grace; A crown of glory she will deliver to you’.
It seems to me here that
most of all educated people, especially in the southern parts of the country
assume we are very educated as professors and members of the power elite. We
are orators. We are wealthy and loquacious professionals. We are senior
advocates, veteran journalists, erudite analysts, world-class scholars and all.
But it now seems to me that we actually lack understanding of the times. It
appears to me that despite our scholarship, we lack wisdom to frame winning
strategy (I didn’t say development strategy). You have to win first to do
that.
In our crass ignorance, we
went to town and court to proclaim everywhere that ‘Buhari is clueless. Buhari
is uneducated. Buhari has fake school certificates. Buhari is brain dead.
Buhari can’t speak good English clearly….’ But when we began to talk about
certificates and elections, did I not ask here if we had read our constitution?
Did our law professors and constitutional lawyers tell us that the 1999
constitution does not specify that aspirants to the office of even the
president should have been to school? Read my article here titled, ‘Have you
read our constitution?’ on this.
As I make progress in my
pilgrimage (apology to John Bunyan) to meet with my creator someday, I have
been making inquiries too on how to finish well and strong. So, I am beginning
to understand that the best (spiritual) gift a man can get from the God of all
grace is ‘discernment’. And that is why it has been revealed to mankind that
‘where there is no vision, the people perish’. And this background has shaped
my conviction that most of us have perished in our expectations for lack of understanding
of the man Buhari who can vaunt today that: ‘I came to Nigeria’s political
beat, saw and conquered while most citizens dozed off’. Are we awake yet?
But more important, as the
final arbiter on political recruitment and election of leaders in Nigeria, the
judiciary, is rounding off election petitions, we need to ask ourselves some
rhetorical questions – on consequences of over slumber. We need some
introspection too on where the rains began to beat us in the country.
First, where did we go
when the ‘clueless Buhari began to prepare election strategy? Where did we
hibernate when the ‘uneducated Buhari’ surrounded himself with some of the
brightest and the best in the north? Did you know that the people we often
dismiss as members of a ‘cabal’ even the wife of the president often describes
as bad people around her husband are very, very educated? Don’t ask (me) about
their character and consequences of their actions.
We are talking about a
leader who has chosen and depended on them to good effect for himself – and we
call them uneducated. We will return to some details about them. Where did we
go when the presidency began to deal ruthlessly with the leadership of the last
(8th) national assembly? When the president appointed the security, intelligence
chiefs, service chiefs, the IGP, the national security adviser (NSA), defence
and interior ministers, three critical paramilitary chiefs (customs,
immigration and prisons), etc from his zone where did we go?
As I had asked
here before, did we need to ask for the resurrection of Gani Fawehinmi before
filing a case against the president in court? Didn’t we think the man was
clueless and uneducated when the intelligence chief, (DSS, DG then) went for
the jugular of even some Supreme Court justices in a night raid? Was the raid
that brought down some strong house doors of the affected justices not hailed
as a well co-ordinated strategy to fight corruption in the judiciary? Did you
ask questions when suddenly, Justice Walter Onnoghen was appointed Acting Chief
Justice of Nigeria? Did even our senior lawyers know that Section 231:
Subsection 5 of the 1999 Constitution was curiously inserted there by some
‘uneducated seers’ in 1999 for such a time like this? That section targets any
Onnoghens that bold leaders would not want to be confirmed. After three months
in an acting capacity, the name (of Acting CJN) can’t be submitted to the
Senate. Anyway, where were the educated bureaucrats and law professors from the
south when the constitution was being drafted and ‘Interpretation Sections’ (of
the constitution) where ‘school leaving certificate’ interpretation the (Court
of Appeal) Presidential Election Tribunal relied on last Wednesday, 11
September judgment?
Decent sources from the
presidency confirmed to me long ago that while the Justice Niki Tobi’s review
committee was working on the draft constitution then, political leaders and
‘monitoring spirits’ we call clueless and uneducated today were vigilant then
with the drafters of the constitution. They had looked into the seeds of time
then and inserted some not-so-visible but significant wordings in the drafts
before General Abdusalami Abubakar transition regime promulgated the draft into
the 1999 constitution.
Behold, some of the
redrafted sections have today become weapons in the hands of people we say are
uneducated but have enough understanding of the power of vigilance during
‘constitution drafting’. This sensitive job (drafting) was going on when the
president-elect (1999)(from a very educated region) Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was
flying around the world to inform world leaders he would return to power and
office on May 29, 1999. Had the letter-writer-general of the federation had
some power of discernment, he would have commissioned some experts to scan - to
detect some strange landmines in the draft constitution.
Let’s also examine this
less travelled road by the widely educated. When the president bluntly refused
to sign the 2010 Electoral Act Amendment Bill before the 2019 election, and we
in the civil society including the media shrugged our shoulders in complacency,
should that masterstroke on the part of president and his men be classified as
cluelessness? So, did we expect the Tribunal to blast the APC presidential
candidate for that last Wednesday? Has that refusal to sign the bill into law
not been a masterstroke?
Lest we forget, the Buhari’s ‘clueless
presidency’ met the Chairman of Code of Conduct Tribunal as Alhaji Danladi
Umar, from Bauchi State. They got in Professor Isa Mohammed from Jigawa state
as Chairman of the Code of Conduct Bureau. They were aware the Attorney General
of the Federation, Abubakar Malami hails from Kebbi State. They were aware that
the Head of the Executive Arm of Government, the President hails from Katsina
State (North West). They were aware that the Head of the Legislature then,
Senator Bukola Saraki hails from Kwara State (North Central) and the Head of
the Judiciary then hails from Cross River State (South South). The powers in
Abuja could have thought that removing the only southerner and Christian
heading an arm of government, Justice Walter Onnoghen could trigger trouble for
the federation. But they were ‘courageously clueless’ enough to go for him
(Onnoghen) to teach us some lessons on the difference between ‘knowledge of
power and resource sharing’ and ‘understanding’
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