Mai Gaskiya: The unmaking of a myth

Olatunji Dare

To millions of adoring followers in the core North, he was Mai Gaskiya, the truthful or honest one. His sincerity, his integrity, his forthrightness and his honesty of purpose, were beyond questioning. His word was as good as money in the bureau de mallam, and damn all those syndicated rackets that pass for legacy and new-generation banks. His asceticism sealed the deal.

This perception of General Muhammadu Buhari was not shared in the South, however; where he was largely regarded as a dour, closet jihadist, and where memories of his brutal rule as military head of state from January 1984 through August 1985 still rankled. Nor was his conversion to Democrat seen as more than skin-deep.

His massive following in the core North could not propel him to victory in three back-to-back presidential elections over grudging, patchy support in the South.

In 2015, Buhari decided to run for president again, for the fourth time. Citing Buhari’s unflattering record on human rights, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka stood implacably against the quest, as he had done in Buhari’s previous bids.

As Buhari campaign to supplant the clueless Dr Goodluck Jonathan trudged on, one of its key strategists, later Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, called me. What could the Campaign do to take some of the edge off Soyinka’s devastating critique of Buhari’s record?

I suggested that they schedule a campaign tour that would include paying a courtesy call on the Nobelist at his home. A picture of Soyinka welcoming Buhari and his cohorts to his Ijegba Forest home, it seemed to me, would be a priceless asset to the Campaign, even if the visit did not result in a formal endorsement.

Abba Kyari was ecstatic, and so was Garba Shehu, the Campaign’s director of publicity. They asked whether I could bring the matter up with Soyinka. I thought Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was better placed to arrange the visit, but amidst the innumerable issues crying out for his immediate attention, he asked me to handle the matter.

I sent an email to the Nobelist outlining the proposal and asking whether he would be willing to accord Buhari and his team a welcome, at a date and place of his choosing. The reception, I said, would not be construed as an endorsement.

He replied, saying he was not sure it would serve any useful purpose, but that Buhari and his team were free to visit. They would have to propose an itinerary very soon, however, so that he could fit it into his busy international travel schedule.

The Buhari Campaign did not move quickly on the matter, and in retrospect did not avail itself of the opportunity.

But here is the really significant thing about my story. A few days after our correspondence, Soyinka issued a statement that presented Buhari in a much softer hue. Buhari., he said, must have a purpose in running for president for the fourth time. That purpose could well be self-redemption, an atonement for the missteps of his previous coming, a chance to chalk up a more wholesome legacy.

This was the closest thing to a formal endorsement, and it loosened the chokehold that Soyinka had placed on Buhari’s candidacy at home and abroad. He won a landslide victory on the platform of the APC, a coalition of parties claiming to subscribe to various aspects of the progressive agenda.

Some eight years later, in the twilight of his two-term tenure, Buhari is enmeshed in a legacy of dissembling and working up a legacy bereft of piety and empathy. The myth of the Mai Gaskiya has been shattered.

Cracks opened up on the myth right from Buhari’s Inaugural Address when he declared that he was for “no one” but was “for everyone.” Constancy, keeping faith with those who had made enormous sacrifices to get him elected was no longer a core value in the ideology of Mai Gaskiya.

Key appointments went for the most part to persons whose contributions to Buhari’s presidential bid were marginal at best. As if to spite the very elements who had enabled his ascendancy, he stood by while rogue elements in the ruling party grabbed by stealth and deception, the post of Senate President, the third highest in the national order of precedence, with help from the disloyal Opposition.

The arrangement diluted the President’s power and influence, but it suited him, since, more importantly, it virtually neutered the National Leader of the APC. His dilatoriness allowed farmer-herder clashes across the country to fester. He was not the hands-on chief executive Nigerians thought they had voted into office and power. Rather, a Svengali and his acolytes exercised power with their accustomed deviousness and disregard for consequences.

The myth of the Mai Gaskiya took a severe pounding in the presidential primaries, as Buhari seemed to be for everyone except the front-runner, the party’s most formidable figure and its greatest electoral asset.

And so, they dredged up Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank, a technocrat with no political base or assets, and pressed him into the race for the APC’s presidential ticket, without his having to stand down from his post. They even contemplated calling Goodluck Jonathan out of retirement to run for president, his contemptible record notwithstanding.

Anyone but the front-runner.

Irony of ironies, it was when they commissioned Emefiele to re-design, print, and issue new banknotes to replace those being withdrawn from circulation that the myth of the Mai Gaskiya finally unraveled.

-If the concept was unexceptionable, the timing was suspect, the messaging was inept, and the execution was abysmal. The time frame for the changeover was impossibly short.

It plunged Nigerians into unspeakable misery. Ordinary citizens could not draw on their bank deposits to meet their daily needs. The new banknotes that were supposed to be released existed only in Emefiele’s media briefings and in the CBN’s press releases and tweets.

The banking infrastructure could not handle the crush that followed. In vast swathes of the country, there was no banking infrastructure to speak of. In the absence of cash, barter became the system of exchange. The cash crunch conflated with a fuel shortage that had dragged on for months to produce a perfect calendar of woes.

Driven to desperation, hungry and angry citizens took to the streets, blocking highways and torching bank buildings. Confusion reigned in place of clarity. Even the attentive public could not say at any given moment just what the policy was and for whose benefit it was being pursued’ with such frenzied determination.

Buhari’s national broadcast on February 16 did little to restore calm and confidence. He said he was addressing Nigerians as their “democratically elected president” – in case they had forgotten in the heat of the moment. He wished “to identify” with them and to express his “sympathy with the “difficulties being experienced” in the implementation of the new monetary policy.

The CBN would make new banknotes “more available and accessible” through the banks and other platforms and windows. And so on and so forth, with platitude after platitude.

To an audience facing an existential threat, he talked on and about “strengthening macro-economic parameters,” about “exchange rate stability,” and about “deceleration of the velocity” of money in the economy. It was as if fidelity to economic jargon mattered more than people.

When Buhari spoke about what the public was going through as a result of the administration’s policy, he did so in clinical, antiseptic language that did not reflect their privations. It was a disembodied outing that lacked what counted most at that moment: a human touch. It did not connect with the people.

Hours after the broadcast, he jetted out to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a summit of the African Union. That was unfeeling, to say the least. The streets were boiling with rage and the country seething with discontent, and the President flew out to yet another talk jamboree. What would he have lost by delegating the Vice President or the Minister of External Affairs to stand in for him?

Across the world, the attentive audience must be asking: What manner of president is this?

While in Addis, he took time off to videotape a message for the folks back home, perhaps in contrition for deserting them.

Back from Addis Ababa after a four-day trip, Buhari has given what appears to be a full-throated endorsement of the APC candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, and has urged voters to turn out in huge numbers for the February 25 poll. He is scheduled to campaign in Lagos today with Tinubu.

Will this dispel the pall of uncertainty, the dark foreboding, the funereal ambiance that his policies and pronouncements and his studied silences have cast over not just the elections but the future of Nigeria?

A week, it has been said, is a long time in politics. In Nigeria, a week can seem like an epoch. Any number of things can still go horribly wrong or be programmed to do so.

The days and weeks ahead will test Buhari’s bonafides as never before. But the myth of the Mai Gaskiya has been eviscerated.

The Nation Newspapers