Postscript by Waziri Adio

Not unexpectedly, the death and the burial of former President Muhammadu Buhari have focused the attention of the country on his person and stewardship. The reactions and the comments, expectedly too, have been varied, from the sugary to the scathing. But leading members of the Nigerian political class have united in paying homage to him and even in undertaking pilgrimage to Daura, the hometown of the late president. They are not just obliging the usual respect to the dead or avoiding to speak ill of the dead. They are either angling to make political hay of Buhari’s passing or positioning not to attract the ire of Buhari’s still massive political following. 

In life and in death, the soldier who did not transition into afull politician in the Nigerian sense of it continues to stand out as the country’s most enduringly dominant political force. For the bulk of the Fourth Republic, and even across democratic dispensations, Buhari leads in the mass appeal column by more than a country mile. His is a peculiar phenomenon worth dissecting and understanding. 

Nigeria has had a few popular politicians. We have had Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (father of the Zikist Movement who at his height was idolised as the Great Zik of Africa), Chief Obafemi Awolowo (leader of the Awoists, famously described at death by Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu as ‘the best president Nigeria never had’), Mallam Aminu Kano (the radical opposition politician who in the first and second republics fired the imagination of the talakawas) then lately Mr. Peter Obi (whose Obidients, in 2023, disrupted the established voting pattern of the Fourth Republic) and Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso (whose red-cap Kwankwasiya movement rulesthe roost in present Kano State). 

Even among these wildly popular politicians, Buhari stood out, not just as the only soldier in the pack. He is the first and the only one, till date, to successfully convert the mass following to the desired electoral advantage as head of the federal government and the first and the only opposition politician, till date, to dislodge a sitting president. A fair but inadequate rebuttal would be to frame Buhari’s near religious following as localised in the Muslim north. True, the 12 million votes that Buhari routinely banked across multiple electoral cycles were largely restricted to the North West and the North East. But all the mass political followings that we have witnessed have a local/ethnic core. They are all largely concentrated either in an area (Aminu Kano and Kwankwaso)or in a zone (Awolowo) or in a combination of zone and region (Azikiwe and Obi).

One of the iron laws of Nigeria’s politics is that localised mass appeal would not be enough to win the highest office in the country. The divisive and distrustful nature of our politics always ensures that a politician with rabid support in his home zone or region also arouses deep suspicion from other parts of the country. A safer route to Nigeria’s presidency has been to stir the least objection across the country and be able to cobble together a winning coalition. A broad appeal is thus preferable to localised mass appeal, as demonstrated in 1979 by Alhaji Shehu Shagari and in 1999 by Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, with the latter remarkably snapping the ultimate prize without even the benefit of a respectable showing in his home zone.

Being able to completely lock down a base (ethnic or religious, or a combination of both) is a rare gift. Most politicians would pine for that, and no one with such a gift would willingly trade it for something less. It is not unusual for our massively popular politicians, by design or default, to be perceived or projected as the leader of an ethnic group or region (Aminu Kano and Kwankwaso are exceptions). But it is also a major handicap in Nigeria’s delicately balanced politics. The politicians with mass appeal got this memo too. While holding down their base, they would also seek alliances across the country to give them the required number and spread. But they always came up short, until it happened for Buhari. 

After three previous attempts, Buhari was able to overcome the handicap of localised mass following when between 2013 and 2015 he allied with others to build a winning coalitionthat expanded on his loyal base and offered a bridge into the southern zones and parts of the North Central. Essentially, the localised mass appeal was transformed into a broad, more national appeal. (By the way, Buhari attempted a similar alliance in 2011, and there were permutations along same lines even in the 2003 and 2007 elections but either the discussions fell through or the permutations were not consequential enough). In 2015, key segments of the political class and the electorate came together to create a national moment, the Buhari moment. 

That moment was possible because most of the voters either wanted, or had been mobilised to want, anyone but the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan. But ‘the-anyone-but’ thesis should be properly dimensioned: it was not just anyone that could dislodge an incumbent in a developing country like ours. A retired general with a stern visage and an ascetic lifestyle, Buhari offered a credible and persuasive alternative to the pervasive insecurity and corruption that a sizeable number of Nigerians wanted to move away from at that point. No other aspirant or candidate in the race of that season boasted of that combination. But Buhari had something else: a steady and sturdy bank of 12 million loyal votes. 

With such a candidate on its top ballot, the opposition stood a fairer chance of success. And not surprisingly, though a major historical shift, the 12 million votes swelled to 15 million votes in 2015. Being in office tested Buhari’s mystique and reduced his popularity and ratings, especially among those that swung to Buhari’s side in 2015 and some avid marketers who had projected the things they would like to see in a president unto Candidate Buhari. But my sense is that the core of his bank of 12 million loyal voters survived, and that most of the 2027 presidential aspirants hope to inherit Buhari’s mantle or at least do not want to excite strong negative emotions from the late president’s loyal base. It must be said that this attempt at appropriation or appeasement is not new, too: we saw similar aspirations after the passing of Awolowoand Azikiwe. 

How Buhari came to acquire his mass appeal should be of scholarly interest. His following didn’t come from fiery or rousing oratory. Unlike Azikiwe, Buhari was actually a man of few words and was soft-spoken. The appeal didn’t come from a documented body of thoughts or ideas, unlike an Awolowo whose books are still being read and cited till today. It was also not from a deeply ideological position, unlike an Aminu Kano. Buhari had some positions about certain things, especially on the economy, but those were not rooted in ideological postulations. And crucially, Buhari’s mass appealwasn’t created and nurtured by an entrenched political machine. Yes, there was a group called The Buhari Organisation but it doesn’t have the organisational muscle of traditional political organisations. 

Buhari was the organisation and his mass appeal, even when extended by a combination of factors and actors, was inherent in Buhari himself. It wasn’t about what he said or wrote, but it was in the story told powerfully by his lifestyle in contrast to others with a fraction of the opportunities that he had in public office. Buhari was governor of North Eastern State (today’s Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe Adamawa, and Taraba states), the minister of petroleum resources in the thick of an oil boom, a military head of state, and the head of a well-resourced interventionist agency, the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). 

Despite all these, Buhari was a man of modest means and simple lifestyle. For those socialised to worship wealth no matter the source or conditioned to see public office as a legitimate path for private advantage, there was nothing worth seeing here. But for the masses at the receiving end of the rapaciousness of the elite, Buhari was a refreshing oddity, a positive outlier. When Buhari decided to throw his hat into the political ring in the early 2000s, the northern masses took to him instantly, cast him in the garb of the long-awaited messiah, and the organic love-affair endured. However, the ecstatic crowd turning up at Buhari’s rallies also created a scare in the opposing camp. They started twisting his words and painting him as a religious zealot, and succeeded in confining his appeal largely to the Muslim north, until the crossover of 2015. 

The essence of Buhari’s staying force is captured in his best-known appellation, Mai Gaskiya, which roughly translates to the truth-teller or the honest one. In a way, the non-politician. It is an affirmation, or a veneration even, of the place of character and integrity even in the murky waters of Nigeria politics, and a loud repudiation of the dominant political order. It runs in parallel with another strain: the cash-and-carry model of politics. The two strains are actually two sides of the same coin: if you are seen as honest and someone that would do good by the voters, you don’t have to procure their votes; otherwise, pay in advance. 

Buhari’s loyal voters mostly stayed faithful to him. And even when as president he didn’t deliver on all the promises and expectations to them, they were ready to cut him a lot of slack. They are believers. Their faith and expectations were not lost on Buhari too. Doing well by and staying faithful to the commoners remained an abiding governance ethos for him as president. That’s why he would refuse to remove petrol subsidy or he would not undertake a massive devaluation of the Naira. Buhari was instinctively bothered about how the removal of the two subsidies would impact the generality of Nigerians, especially the poorest of the poor. With the severe cost-of-living crisis that most Nigerians are battling with at the moment, it is difficult to say Buhari’s concerns were misplaced. 

A proper debate, in the fullness of time, can be had about the totality of Buhari’s stewardship on his beloved masses and the entire country. But I refuse to buy his blanket deification or demonisation. I will acknowledge my limitation in this discussion: I served for five years in the Buhari administrationas the head of an agency. I will concede that Buhari could have done much more, could have been more involved and less trusting (or at least trust but verify), and could have been more sensitive to the need for inclusion in a heterogenous country like Nigeria. I will also concede that character is sorely important but not enough. 

But I have no doubt that Buhari’s heart was in the right place. He restored the fight against corruption to the top of the governance agenda. His administration pushed Boko Haram back from the North East and places like Kano and Abuja(where even key security institutions used to be blocked off), though other fronts of insecurity opened up across the country. He saw through some consequential laws and invested in physical infrastructure more than most presidents, despite low oil prices, and two economic recessions driven largely by external shocks, including a global pandemic. 

It was by no means a perfect record, and couldn’t have been. But Buhari did his bit, and there are lessons either way. Whichever way we feel about him and whatever lessons we choose to draw, what cannot be wished away is that Buhari attained and sustained a political mass appeal that is distinctly his and that, probably, cannot be transferred, even to his son.