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President Buhari should apologise to Nigerians
By Patrick Dele Cole on October 2, 2015
I KNOW that for many, the headline is all they would read and I will forever be vilified as an enemy of President Muhammadu Buhari. Those who can will inflate a simple request into my calling for the President to resign. President Bill Clinton apologised to the Indians and African-Americans for the way they had been treated by other Americans.
The Emperor of Japan apologised for his people’s behaviour during World War II. But why should President Buhari apologise for his 1983 coup?
Basically such an apology will wipe the slate clean and allow him to progress along the route he has chosen. As he has found out twice now the easy part of his job is getting the power. The difficult part, which has confounded all those before him, is what to do after getting the power.
The government of Tafawa Balewa did not have the problem of what to do after winning the election and got to power. It had won the election on a proper party manifesto based on the desire for independence and a clear idea of what to do with that independence. It is true that it needed a coalition of two political parties with not dissimilar manifestos and ideologies. They worked together until the elections of1965-1966 when a peculiar madness took over some soldiers and they struck in 1966.
I have read every single word of all the soldiers who staged the coup of 1966 and not one word justified the coup. They were merely copying other coups in Africa and Latin America. In 1965, our economy was doing rather well, jobs were plentiful, the schools were excellent, agricultural production was at its highest, oil revenues were beginning to trickle in: so all the rubbish written by Major “Kaduna” Nzeogwu and other apologists remain just that – rubbish.
The 1966 coup unleashed upon Nigeria an army that was young and inexperienced; with no tradition to speak of, an ambitious, ignorant young officers, pampered in Mons, Sandhurst and other military courses etc but lacking in the most basic philosophical foundation of those respectable institutions – the subordination of the military to the Political Authority. Compare the men they overthrew with the ones they produced: the Sardauna, Tafawa Balewa, Awolowo, Osadebey, Michael Okpara, A. C. Nwapa, Dr. Okoi Arikpo, Chief S. L. Akintola and Mbonu Ojike. Musa Yar’Adua, Aminu Kano, Dipcharima, Mbadiwe etc.
These men were replaced by – well you know them. These popinjays, these sorry reflections of what an officer and a gentleman should be, took the fragile Nigerian political society and destroyed it. It had taken people like Herbert Macaulay, James Horatio Jackson, Thomas Payne, Dr. Ajayi Crowther, Da Rocha, Olorunminbe, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe etc –all drinking from the well laid open by the nationalists from1860 onwards, putting together the foundation of political life; for over 100 years putting together, amid fierce opposition, putting together the building blocks of democracy – the parties and their manifestos, freedom of the press, freedom of movement and religion and economic wellbeing and sustainability – cotton, palm oil, timber, groundnuts, cocoa, sorghum, millet corn, cassava, coal, tin, manganese.
By 1966, Nigeria was rich, as rich as India, had surpassed Malaysia, Ghana etc. This was what Kaduna Nzeogwu destroyed in a thoughtless melancholic coup mad move to set up what he called a coup to stop corruption. Which corruption? If Nigeria was corrupt in 1966, what do you call Nigeria in 2014?
There were political unrest in the West, 1964-66, between the Action Group and National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC), riots at Ife and Modakeke – some people were burned, Owegbe cult and its nefarious activities. Some ministers were reported to be fabulously rich. In the end, little was found to be true about their wealth or that what little wealth they had come from their office. Our political history and heritage were rich and dynamic – there were the Nigerian Youth Movement, NCNC, Calabar Ogoja Rivers Movement, Northern Elements People Union and Northern Peoples Congress.
True, some were ethnic parties but no one ethnic party can rule Nigeria. That is why Nigeria is a federation – a delicate balance between ethnicity, nationalism and political objectives. This balance was all unhinged by the 1966 coup. The impact was a pogrom in Northern Nigeria, widespread political instability in the rest of Nigeria and the attempt by the Ibos to secede. The result was a civil war.
The military ballooned from 30000 to nearly two million in four years; proper discipline was at best patchy, at worst minimal. The successors of the civil war settled to rule from 1970, the military stepped out of government in 1979. Four years later, General Buhari is back again in order that corruption must stop.
Now, if civil society had been allowed to grow strong with political parties, institutions and alliances since 1966, those institutions would have grown stronger. The loss of the chance to grow politically was catastrophic in geometric proportion. The first thing military governments do is to ban political activities. One year’s political inactivity is probably equivalent to 10 years’ loss of political experience times an indeterminate quotient.
Two years is equal to twenty, three to probably 40. This is why each time we are allowed to participate in politics, we start all over again. We buy new registers to write names of party members. Who pays for the party? What will it stand for? Who will organise it?
It is no wonder that we have no internal democracy without which there can be no democracy. It is no wonder rich people seeking power are the kingpins of the parties. It is a misnomer to call the APC or the PDP a political party. They are SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles) for the purpose of elections and hope to profit from their investments, some corruptly gained. They are the flight by night political adventurers about whom we know nothing except that they are bigwigs in the political party which is in the pockets of the governors who have hand-picked all the councilors, members of the state Houses of Assemblies, members of the National Assembly and federal ministers. How can there be democracy in such a set up?
What has President Buhari to do with all this? This is part of his legacy. He has ruled Nigeria as a military dictator and as such he, as well as all the military rulers, had harmed the progress of democracy irreparably. Specifically, President Buhari introduced draconian laws totally antithetical to human rights. He sent people to prison for 300 years, he imprisoned all politicians, he was head of NNPC and made little contribution to stop that runaway gravy train, the IOCs under his watch continued to bamboozle us as they still do today; he had people shot for possession of narcotics, Fela Ransome-Kuti was jailed for carrying $2000 as head of his 70-man band going abroad to play in a concert, soldiers were flogging civilians on the streets, people’s wives were forcibly taken by soldiers. I could go on. I ask him to apologise for all the above, including the 1966 coup, the annulment of M.K.O. Abiola’s election – they are all in the same continuum.
President Buhari is a personal friend with a lot of courage. I speak as a friend. That gap in the teeth could be seen more in smiles. People with a gap in their teeth when they smile seem to radiate an avalanche of mirth. Olu Jacob’s smile is as infectious as President Buhari’s that should fill us with hope not dread. Nigeria needs the strength of President Buhari but also his humanness – all of which he learned as Chairman of PTF. It is true that Nigeria is a difficult and frustrating place, it needs a firm hand but it does not need boots on its neck.
The President has to repair a broken economy, a broken electoral and political system with no internal justice and democracy. But the electoral system that brought him to power, despite all the reports of UN, EU, Commonwealth observers, was a travesty of a political system, financed and operated by corrupt political elite whose aim was merely to continue the unabated looting of the treasury. President Buhari may have stopped them at the federal level. At the state and local government levels, it is politics as usual. Let it be understood that Nigerians wanted Buhari to win. It is like reaching a desired place but getting to it by many wrong turns.
The therapeutic effect of his apology would be immense, his contrition magical. The President has leant how to be democratic. He still has to learn how to be political. An apology would be a first step.
•Ambassador (Dr.) Cole (OFR) is Consultant to The Guardian Editorial Board.
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