President Muhammadu Buhari is no orator. That much even his admirers will concede. Luckily you don’t need a sharp or fancy tongue to run a profitable shop or rule a big country. There have been presidents who never were great with the spoken or even any good with words. Offshore, we have Chairman Mao Zedong. Yes, Mao could write but he never was so great speaking his words. And down here with us, we all may recall that neither Chief Obafemi Awolowo nor Dr. M. I. Okpara were fire-eaters when it came to words. Chief S. L. Akintola and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe were the grand speechmakers of their era. So, Buhari’s plain speech delivery patterns are neither assets nor deficits. Yet words matter. So, one can posit that Buhari has been careless with the substance and style of his speeches.
And nothing betrays this like his now infamous 95%-5% gaffe. But he appears to be adding to it by the day. There was his contra-indicated harangue against the judiciary and his dismissal of the Igbo with a haughty what do the Igbo want? And the latest, which appears to be unnoticed by the general public is alarming. To quote him: ‘’In order words, before you ask where is the change they promised us, you must first ask how far have I changed my ways.’’ And this is the punchline or takeaway phrase of the whole speech.
To repeat: The change they promised us! Is it not rather disturbing that a president could speak with such accents? Why is the president addressing his national audience in a third person capacity? He is speaking as if Nigerians are strangers or wards to him. In fact, we might as well have been herd, his herd. In that phrase it is evident he doesn’t feel any sense of partnership or even connect with the citizens. There is a sense he as president doesn’t feel he is in a contract, any social contract with citizens.
If he felt, he owed us a duty under contract of our electing him; he would have at an hour like this spoken to us as joint parties to the issues at stake. He would have said: When you ask where is the change APC/we and or I promised you…. That would have meant he has his skin in the game. But by prudently distancing himself by the use of third party modifier, he is almost journalistic. That is, he is like a third party agent or diarist of events. And of these events, he has only reportorial interest in. Yet, the matter is about a set of promises he and his party contracted with Nigerians, jointly and severally.
Unless the president is surreptitiously announcing that he has given up on these promises and that Nigerians are now on their own, it might be necessary to watch his turn of phrases next time. And he and his party should always remember that they are not messiahs. Messiahs are by the way unelected, and unelectable. So, they should speak to us as one of us and not as third parties or missionaries or higher beings who are beyond good and evil.
It is a game, not a mission; Niger Delta, a conclusion
The Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, is justly famous for his bluntness, especially when he is in office. Anyway, nobody ever heard of him while he was a private citizen. And in his latest major speech, he lived up to the billing. Titled: How Nigerian Government caused economic recession, he uses expletives or forceful words that reminded one of our former German schoolmasters.
And here is the Emir in his words: ‘’We have very many people in Nigeria, who you think are very rich. But, who are really bankrupt, because everything about them is being financed by bank debts. When one debt matures, they have enough connections to call another bank, borrow and refinance that debt.’’
However, it is that he knows when to restrain himself. He suggested that. He writes: ‘’Many of the arguments I see in newspapers, sometimes I feel like writing back, and I will remember I am an Emir and I am not supposed to.’’
The point is that despite the halo of a forthright man, Emir Sanusi, when it suits him, is a practised diplomat with words. And to his credit, he is so practised a speechmaker that it may take more efforts than pealing an onion to know that what his purpose really is – to distract you, to play you as game.
According to him in the same essay: ‘’So, those making noise about oil should stop making noise about it. People should stop being afraid, because oil is not critical. It is just a working capital. We sell it. We get the dollars that we use to import. If you can find another source of working capital, we can do without it. It is 15% of GDP.’’
‘’… Lagos has done very well. If I have money to invest, I will invest it in Lagos, because it is attracting investment. Lagos has realised a long time ago that the government cannot fund all it needs. And I just love what Lagos has done. The Lagos story is a story of what Nigeria can do with itself – transparency, consistency, regulations – and people can be rich.’’
‘’Lagos can do without the rest of this country. So, we must not let Lagos go. This country is better off with Lagos than with the Niger Delta. Let’s not make that mistake. We should be together as a country. Every part of the country is important. But, let us not be so obsessed by a resource, because we have had the commodity driven model, and we are blind to the potentials of an alternative model. Lagos doesn’t need oil. What is oil anyway? It is a raw material. You don’t drink it.’’
The implication of all he is saying is that Lagos is a creation of Nigerian ingenuity. Great. That is to say all what was achieved in and by Lagos can also be duplicated in Kano or Calabar. This is essentially because it is Nigerians that built Lagos he seems to imply. However, the question he neither asked nor sought answered was why and how is it that only Lagos that has achieved this? If it is ingenuity, is it peculiar to Lagosians? Or are there people called Lagosians in the entrepreneurial sense that are different from the rest of us?
The point is that the great man was prudent with his history. Lagos is Abuja plus Nigerian Stock Exchange. It was all built up just as Abuja by deliberate federal policy. And what was used were crude oil proceeds from the Niger Delta. And the fact of this is historically self-evident. Before the civil war for instance, all available statistics and extrapolations show that Lagos wasn’t a greater industry capital by any margin than Port Harcourt. And Lagos wasn’t consuming anything close to 15% of any national utility – petrol, telephone, etc. – by volume. Today the figure is about 5%. So, what accounts for the quantum leap? The fact is that the phenomenon of Lagos was a consequence of the studied ‘’transfer payments’’ that the dictator, General Gowon, and succeeding Gowonisms, passed on to Lagos at the cost and or robbery of the Niger Delta. And these things happened in the years in which the Niger Delta got zero revenue allocation/scaled up to an equally scandalous 3%. So, the wealth of Lagos to the extent there is such a thing, is not an entrepreneurial creation. It is actually built up on Federal Government subsidy. That the subsidy is now self-sustaining is another matter and logic. Not letting Lagos go is important. But more so is knowing how Lagos came to happen in the first place.
Today, it is the same federal subsidy regime that explains why Abuja is the closest we got to building paradise under the African sun. And the Abuja paradise happened because of the billions that was drained out of the Niger Delta. That is to say the Niger Delta is made hell by Nigerian dictators so that Lagos and Abuja can be paradises in the sun.
Today, Abuja is more billionaire-heavy than any other city in Nigeria. By the way, we mean billionaires, not their poorer cousins, the millionaires. And Abuja was founded just yesterday on subsidy and corruption. Perhaps, tomorrow, it will be indicated that a future Emir will be telling us tall tales of how Abuja is an entrepreneurial miracle and that Nigeria needs Abuja more than she needs Asaba. Anyway, this myth of entrepreneurialism is not fooling everyone. At least, President Buhari seems to know this. As reports show after the collapse of oil prices, Buhari confessed we have become suddenly poor, repeat, suddenly poor. The question is why? The answer is that no real enterprise is going on here in Lagos or Kano or Onitsha. We are all living off oil or the riches of the Niger Delta, even as we despoil her, even as we are in denial, posturing we are entrepreneurs or new found nationalists.
But one last question: If we needed Lagos and not Niger Delta, why did the Emir not immediately canvass that we give up their oil to them and have peace? The point is that he is playing a game while selling it to Nigerians, as a mission. So, if you believe in and play the Nigerian mission, you are fooled and gamed. Nigeria is a game. And at certain senior league levels, Nigeria is a joke. Remember that a General confessed that in their times coups were fashionable, like teenage sex and they did it, they raped Nigeria. Nigerians Ronu! Onye agholii ka agbaa!