This column engaged, last week, in a comparative analysis of the governments led by two former Nigerian Presidents, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari. The scrutiny continues today, including some of the challenges the two men failed to deal with during their tenures.
Over the years that Jonathan and Buhari governed Nigeria, the country lost its direction, its shine, and its appeal for which it was glorified across the world in the previous decades. Even within Africa, the country also lost the respect that other countries accorded it previously, including countries that benefited immensely from Nigeria’s generosity in terms of financial, military/defence assistance, trade, and peacekeeping duties.
Nigeria is now perceived in Africa as a king without a crown of honour or title. It is no longer seen as a leader or role model. It has been described more appropriately as a decrepit vehicle whose engine has developed major faults that require a disassembling of other parts. Without this major overhaul or service, Nigeria will remain an object fit for sendup comedy at national and international levels. No amount of caricature by the international community would pull the country together in the right path of honour.
Unrestrained criminality and breakdown of law and order have damaged Nigeria’s image and reputation. Even worse, the involvement of our people in criminal activities has not helped to burnish the country’s image at home and abroad. Anywhere you go, you will find all manner of callous criminals operating in different parts of Nigeria. Citizens and foreigners are caught in a desperate struggle to escape the environment in which political instability, poverty, kidnapping, banditry, and other forms of lawlessness have made life unbearable for many people. All these have terrified, alarmed, and unsettled foreign and domestic investors.
A country that frightens foreign investors cannot build a stable ground for socioeconomic development. Such an environment is hazardous for foreigners and citizens to operate freely. The situation is risky for everyone. Children cannot go to school without worrying about the possibility of being abducted and killed. Local businesspeople, transport owners, public hospital operators, market women, farmers, school and university administrators and students dread travelling by road because of fear of kidnappers.
Top on the list of issues that concern Nigerians are poverty, security and general welfare. Over the past 18 years, the situation has worsened rather than improved. No government at the federal and state levels has been able to overcome these difficulties. If government is meant to improve the social and economic conditions of citizens, you must wonder whether Nigeria has had any meaningful government for the past two decades. This is not to suggest that the previous decades were much better. Not at all.
Consider these paradox of life in Nigeria and the quality of leaders that governed the country. Both Jonathan and Buhari enjoyed so much goodwill and public support during their tenures, regardless of the circumstances that led to their emergence as Presidents. Soon after they vacated their high positions of power, they were trailed by controversies and angry feelings in the public sphere. These sentiments were triggered essentially because of the inability of Jonathan and Buhari to perform to public expectations.
Whatever Jonathan and Buhari do now that they are out of office, no matter how they evaluate the governments they led, they must take full responsibility for their failures and the blunders committed by senior officials of their governments, including serious cases of corruption that have never been investigated.
Both Jonathan and Buhari had character flaws and suffered from lack of management skills that exposed their inability to handle major national problems. You must add to these the atrocious counsel provided by their numerous special advisers, special assistants, and media aides. All these have spawned and continue to attract severe criticisms of Jonathan and Buhari. Both men are now characterised as weak and clueless men who hung on to power for the sake of it, while waiting for their tenures to conclude.
Everything Jonathan and Buhari touched, every decision they made, and every policy they rolled out was knocked back by individual citizens and civil society groups who used mainstream media and online discussion forums to deliver an adverse vote of confidence on Buhari’s and Jonathan’s governments.
Buhari in particular faced a highly cynical audience that lost faith in his government no sooner than he was sworn into office in May 2015. Between 2015 and 2023, Buhari’s public image had fallen. His profile was sullied and ridiculed. To some people, Buhari was a certified second-rate President who should never have been elected. He could not drop from his personal attributes his military background and dictatorial tendencies, as well as his prejudiced and inflexible style of leadership, including his personal hatred for some ethnic groups, all of which consumed the better part of his health during eight years of his presidency.
During his two terms, Buhari was unable to change his style of leadership nor was he able to initiate new policies intended to move the nation forward. Everything fell out of alignment for the man, despite the disorderly or higgledy-piggledy propaganda mounted by his dogmatic media aides to divert public attention from the shortcomings of the government Buhari led.
For Jonathan, his inability to curb insecurity by the Boko Haram insurgents, at least during his first term, blemished his government. But it was the abduction, by Boko Haram terrorists, of more than 276 schoolgirls from the Government Girls’ Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, on April 14, 2014, that marked the beginning of major security challenges for Jonathan. Nine years on since that incident, some of the girls are yet to be freed. Nigerians have forgotten the girls, the ordeals they suffered, their forced marriages to their captors, and the continuing nightmares suffered by their parents.
During Jonathan’s tenure, Boko Haram terrorists and other bandits and kidnappers struck with ease at any target on which they set their eyes. At a point, terrorists struck so close to the centre of government and the heart of the highest levels of security apparatus in the country, including military institutions that ought to be impregnable to terrorists of any kind. Perhaps Jonathan was an unlucky President. Perhaps he was weighed down by the adversities of governing at a time of rising insecurity and growing public discontent with national leaders. He was accused of being slow in rolling out policies to deal with growing insecurity. He was also portrayed as lacking the ability to implement key issues that should have positive impacts on citizens.
Both Buhari and Jonathan were assailed because they demonstrated unbelievable lack of commitment to the fight against corruption and also because they failed to move beyond rhetoric in their campaign to reduce poverty, to overcome the much troubled and intractable power sector, to improve the quality of teaching, learning, and research at the nation’s public universities, and also because both men failed outright to resurrect crumbling infrastructure.
At another level, we must acknowledge that Jonathan and Buhari were destabilised by their own uninspiring and lifeless leadership styles, their failure to demonstrate accountability and transparency in government business, their refusal to drop from their governments unproductive ministers, particularly those accused of massive corruption and blatantly converting government property to their personal acquisitions, and the general outrage by the public that Buhari and Jonathan made bogus promises but achieved little or nothing.
Painfully, Nigerians have experienced two decades of poor governance by Buhari and Jonathan. Everywhere you go today, you will find that many people are still disillusioned and angry with Buhari as they are unimpressed with Jonathan’s performance.