Muhammadu Buhari failed to build a better Nigeria, twice

Stepping off the ferry in Liverpool, Muhammadu Buhari was struck by the city’s orderliness. People obeyed the rules, observed the 18-year-old, who had won a competition to spend the summer in Britain. The rules didn’t even have to be written; society just worked. Order was also paramount at military college in Nigeria and the English town of Aldershot. The austerity of officer training, the career of choice for bright young men from the newly independent country’s north, suited the former head boy. He thrived in the repetitive drills, the hikes across unknown terrain in the dead of night.

Nigeria needed a good dose of military discipline, he thought, when thrust to the head of a military government by his fellow senior officers on the final day of 1983. It was an apparently unexpected appointment, but one that he took to with his usual rigour. The problem was not the country’s weak institutions, worn down by a flood of oil wealth, he thought. No, the enemy was the laziness and greed of Nigerians and their feckless civilian leaders, who had ridden the wave of black gold since 1979. In the War Against Indiscipline tardy civil servants would be forced to do frog jumps, queues whipped into line and hawkers who dared despoil the streets swept away.

But Nigeria refused to bend to Mr Buhari’s will. Almost 500 politicians and businessmen were arrested for corruption and sent to jail by military tribunals. A new currency was issued to flush out the stashes piled floor to ceiling in the homes of the elite. For many military men this purge was too close for comfort—and too uncompromising.

With Mr Buhari unwilling to bow to the IMF and devalue the naira, the economy groaned under the weight of low oil prices and external debt. Journalists were locked up, drug dealers executed and diplomatic relations with Britain broken off when a British customs officer discovered the previous regime’s transport minister trussed up in a Lagos-bound crate marked “diplomatic baggage”. When Ibrahim Babangida, the wily chief of army staff, announced the bloodless overthrow of Mr Buhari in August 1985, he complained that the stern general had opened a gulf between the military and the masses.

After more than three years under house arrest in the south of the country, Mr Buhari was released to his family farm in Daura, Katsina state. Detention destroyed his first marriage, with Safinatu, the mother of his first five children. But he quickly found a new wife, Aisha, who gave him five more. Several years of tending to his cattle and orchards followed; then some years chairing an oil trust fund under Sani Abacha, a military dictator far more brutal than Mr Buhari. As Nigeria moved towards democracy, so too the former general proclaimed himself a born-again democrat. It was no longer soldierly discipline that would save his country, but a rigid deference to the law.

Mr Buhari lost three successive presidential elections, his support never breaking out of the Muslim-dominated north. Each time he unsuccessfully appealed against the result, suffering the interminable court process, he said, to head off anarchy and bolster Nigeria’s nascent democratic institutions. That did not stop his supporters turning on southern Christians in 2011, leading to more than 800 deaths. He succeeded on the fourth go in 2015, the first time an opposition candidate had defeated an incumbent at the ballot box in Nigeria. But while the promise to once again wage war on corruption resonated with a jaded populace, victory came only in a coalition with politicians from the south-west.

What was never in doubt was his personal probity, an ascetic egalitarianism first nurtured at boarding school, where the British teachers favoured boys with good grades over those with gold wristwatches. When he came back to power in 2015 he reported just $150,000 in a single bank account, a drop in the ocean of wealth hoarded by Nigeria’s elites.

But though he never wavered in his crusade against corruption, Mr Buhari took a different approach second time round. In the 1980s he had been in a hurry. Thirty years later his nickname was “Baba Go Slow”, as he took months to name a cabinet and graft cases inched their way through the courts. This, his supporters argued, was deliberate, a strategy of gradual reform. Others saw a tired old man, lacking energy. When he announced he was leaving Nigeria for medical treatment in London at the beginning of 2017, his tall, already rail-thin frame was shrinking further inside his calf-length tunics, his high cheekbones painfully prominent.

Meanwhile, as in the 1980s, low oil prices were taking their toll on the Nigerian economy. And, once again, Mr Buhari ordered the nominally independent central bank to defend the naira, stamping out a nascent devaluation in summer 2016 when it was clear the currency had further to fall. Dollars were rationed and imports of everything from toothpicks to rice banned. Inflation soared and growth was choked off. The brutal jihadists of Boko Haram were pegged back, but continued to mount hit-and-run attacks and send young girls to blow themselves up, regardless of the government’s claim that the Islamist rebels had been “technically defeated”. Money-hungry militants returned to sabotaging oil installations in the Delta, after Mr Buhari cut short an amnesty programme. And Christian farmers and Muslim herders clashed over land in the country’s febrile centre.

Mr Buhari would occasionally break into slight gap-toothed smiles, but his jokes were invariably of the lecturing variety. His wife, when she publicly criticised political appointments, was told she belonged in “my kitchen, my living room and the other room”. Journalists were “too inquisitive” and should get on with some more investigative work. But, as hard as he tried to mould his countrymen in his image, Nigeria, his beloved, unruly country, could never be tamed. 

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