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We Want A Domestic President: A Rejoinder By Emmanuel Uchenna Ugwu

December 1, 2015

My first reading of Spokesman of President Muhammadu Buhari Garba Shehu’s op-ed caused such feelings of disbelief, dismay, and disappointment that I forced myself to read the piece multiple times in order to make sure I understood Mr. Shehu’s point correctly.

My first reading of Spokesman of President Muhammadu Buhari Garba Shehu’s op-ed caused such feelings of disbelief, dismay, and disappointment that I forced myself to read the piece multiple times in order to make sure I understood Mr. Shehu’s point correctly.

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The piece, written in reaction to the public outcry against President Buhari’s ceaseless overseas junketing despite the numerous issues Nigerians face at home, begins with the tone-deaf headline: WE DON’T WANT A DOMESTIC PRESIDENT.

This headline choice implies that Mr. Shehu believes Nigerians desire a nomadic President who only visits home to warm himself before he flies away once more! Such an assertion is ridiculous in the extreme, and very worrisome if it truly reflects the position of President Buhari.

If our President wishes to remain a nomad, then Nigerian must begin to prepare themselves for his disastrous administration.  

President Buhari’s recent actions are even more confusing when one compares President Buhari to Candidate Buhari. Candidate Buhari packaged himself as the man who could fix Nigeria. Throughout his campaign, he stressed that his administration’s focus would be on insecurity, official corruption, and the collapsing economy. In other words, President Buhari would “hit the ground running”.

If he divulged that his true intention was to hit the tarmac, Nigerians would not have given his candidacy the time of day.

The "we" to which Mr. Shehu refers to in his headline is also confusing.  Which plurality is he referring to? Perhaps the “we” Mr. Shehu is referring to are the men in the corridors of power. They are the ones who would be disposed to discuss in the privileged language of ‘’want’’. They are the ones who need a ‘domestic’ President the least.

They live in fortresses in high brow neighborhoods: they fear no terror. Their livelihood is immune to the crash of the naira. They are more equal than other Nigerians. They have little or nothing to lose if President Buhari dedicates himself to non-stop global expedition.

Mr. Shehu seems to have written his piece to their elitist dictation. Because he started out with the most snobbish opener a Presidential communication could possibly bear. ‘’ I have been amused reading a number of jokes concerning the frequency of the President, Muhammadu Buhari’s foreign trip.’’

What’s the joke? Nigerian citizens expressed their heartfelt alarm about their new leader’s penchant for junketing when he is needed to stay more at home and score quick wins!

Mr. Shehu laughs at Nigerians who cannot afford the commodity of ‘’want’’. Nigerians who live in the desperate zone. Nigerians who contend with weekly terrorist attacks, metastasizing secessionist protests, looming economic depression, spiraling unemployment, and fuel scarcity. Nigerians waiting for redemption.

Mr. Shehu possesses a perverted sense of humor. What cracks his ribs is not Basketmouth’s order of comedy. What makes him laugh is scanning through the written anxiety of Nigerians, their worry that the man they empowered to transform the country is letting the opportunity slip through his fingers.

If Mr. Shehu was, indeed, upfront about laughing when he encountered that surging stream of public concern, then he has revealed his poverty of humanness, his lack of sensitivity, and empathy. Moreover, he has declared that he is a sufferer of that coarsening disease that often makes the average Nigerian presidential aide deride Nigerians when they wince in pain.

Reuben Abati, the man who held Shehu’s position in President Jonathan’s regime, read the social media, the bellwether of trends, and arrogantly dismissed the youths venting their frustration with the direction of the Jonathan administration as volatile ‘’children of anger.’’

Those youths sacked President Jonathan and elected Mr. Buhari. They are Mr. Buhari’s employers. Six months into the job, they call him out, but Mr. Shehu would not transmit the tenor of their anxiety to Buhari. Mr. Shehu would not take them seriously. Mr. Shehu calls them jokers. They are kids. They are kidding!

This pejorative labeling fits the pattern of how aides sabotage their principal by tuning out the feedback that would have helped him gain perspective. This is how fawning advisers commit drawn-out, bloodless regicide.

The aides kill the leader when they alienate him from the people. They bury him, when they put out their antenna, gauge the mood of the nation, and report to the leader that the chatter of the ordinary people does not matter.

The leader is finished because he carries on in the blissful misapprehension that the people are following him when he is really leading no one else but his own vanishing shadow.

It’s ironical that the hierarchy of democratic leadership makes the person at the apex the farthest stranger to the grassroots. This seals the fate of the leader who does not operate channels for interfacing with his constituency. He or she is sooner out of touch and winds up a voter’s heartbreak.

For President Buhari, his success depends on the quantity and quality of vox pop that aides like Mr. Shehu filter to him.

Now, the thread that runs through Mr. Shehu’s paragraphs basically says that the destiny of Nigeria is in the hands of other world leaders and that Nigerians have in President Buhari a responsible leader who is going out of his way to shake those hands and cajole Nigeria’s greatness out of them! Needless to say, that sounds like rubbish.

In my last article, I acknowledged that globalization has altered the conduct of twenty-first-century diplomacy. The interests of nations overlap and segregate and clash. Every country must devise a way to continually evaluate its priorities and bring that knowledge to the arena where nations contest for pride, power, and prosperity. It’s a fluid challenge that demands suavity, skill, and sense.

But it’s stupid to advocate that the president of a nation that does not aspire to diminish itself to a banana republic apply himself to endless chasing and courting of leaders of other countries.

There is no scrap of wisdom in making foreign trips your primary strategy for developing your country. No leader has ever quantum-leaped their country through globetrotting.

Mr. Shehu mentions that President Buhari would not be a ‘’sit-at-home’’ president like General Sani Abacha. That’s an incongruent comparison. General Abacha is the worst ballast to build such notion on.

General Abacha, for all his bloody dictatorial tendencies and kleptomania, was a dutiful head of state. He inherited a drooping economy and a suffering population. He tamed inflation. He increased fuel price, established Petroleum Trust Fund and appointed Mr. Buhari to preside over the allocation of the gains in oil revenue to the building of roads and equipping of government hospitals across Nigeria.

General Abacha’s taciturn temperament and authoritarian profile shackled his legs to his office table. He was a fairly competent administrator of the homeland, nonetheless. He was not a ‘’sit-at-home’’ idler. He was a work-at-home ruler!

Mr. Shehu mentions that we ought to celebrate Buhari’s foreign junket because this helmsman travels with a leaner team than the immediate past president, a notorious lover of a huge entourage.

Did Mr. Shehu mean that this president’s ultimate goal is to do a little better than Jonathan? That’s not what Nigerians yearn for. Nigerians didn’t elect Mr. Buhari to make some token incremental adjustment in Jonathan style. They voted for a paradigm shift. A new orientation in the presidency. A trained, relentless focus on the nation’s business.

Mr. Shehu concluded very dramatically. He said ‘’to answer those who ask all the time, what is he bringing back home? We are not a country of beggars…the most important task for the President at this time is to reset the image of Nigeria abroad…’’

That’s an explicit admission that Buhari comes back empty-handed. The junkets are about cosmetics and optics.

I have news for Garba Shehu. He misjudged ‘’the most important task for the President at this time’’. It is not launching charm offensive overseas, as Mr. Shehu claims. President Buhari’s most important task is sitting down in Abuja and being a dutiful domestic president.

Mr. Shehu was right on one point, though: ‘’we are not a country of beggars.’’

President Buhari likes to say we are a beggarly nation. He likes to reiterate that Nigeria is broke. This Nigeria that has been casually underwriting his endless junkets!

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Politics