I think that the rise of Mr. Buhari to the presidency should be a blessing to all Nigerians. Having sought the coveted office for longer than any other Nigerian, his convictions should be clear to him, one of which should be national cohesion. It will amount to a grave insensitivity if he doesn’t see that his responsibility extends to every Nigeria, especially as he once pledged from the beginning.
The renewed agitation for Biafran sovereignty has once again brought to the fore the question of inclusivity in Nigerian politics. This is also a question of justice. President Buhari’s inaugural speech in which he claimed to belong to everybody and to nobody is a positive gesture if it is anything to go by. By that statement he was set to disprove those who see him as an uncompromising bigot.
Unfortunately a few weeks after his take-off as Nigeria’s President, during his visit to the United States, Mr. Buhari seemed to have thought over this popular statement and dramatically reversed it by saying again that it will amount to an injustice to treat all Nigerians equally; that is, to treat those who voted for him and those who did not vote for him equally. In other words, he takes the new position that those who did not vote for him should not expect as much benefits from his government as those who voted for him. This new position seems to be an invitation for trouble.
Since the South-East, the home of the Igbos, and some part of the South-South did not mainly vote for him, it now means that they should not expect much from his government. If we read these developments in the context of a country torn apart by insurgency and ethnic agitation a la Boko Haram and Niger Delta militancy, then President Buhari’s later comment is particularly disquieting and disingenuous, to say the least. But even if Buhari’s comments are not anything to go by, his actions in office in the first two months of his reign put paid to what could be his true convictions.
In the first crucial appointments after he assumed office, Mr. Buhari clearly disregarded the South-Easterners. But even when a South-Easterner managed by hierarchical superiority to secure the head of Nigerian Maritime and Safety Agency (NIMASA), President Mr. Buhari reversed it, and put someone else in that position. The length and breadth of the social media was awash with criticisms of the public perception of Mr. Buhari’s emerging sectional politics.
Perhaps it is possible to understand the emerging ethnic agitations as response to the rise of sectional politics. Since Mr. Buhari’s rise to office as President, Niger Delta militants have convoked and threatened to resume their agitations. Some politicians and public commentators have come as well to interpret Boko Haram as a political and not a religious struggle. If we add all these together, it means that Nigeria’s cohesive existence is on trial, and politicians especially at the national level must be careful in what they say or do, irrespective of how they gathered their votes, because in the final analysis President Mr. Buhari is president not of himself but of Nigeria in its diversity. I believe he owes a responsibility to all whether he likes it or not.
The reason why the choice of offices in Nigeria should be balanced is because it achieves two important things for national cohesion. Less importantly it stabilises distribution. More importantly appointment is a form of recognition of the people’s right to be a part of the system. There is justice in the recognition of the people’s membership consists justice because it is at the core of inclusivity. To run Nigeria in a way that disregards other people’s sense of self-worth or sense of belongingness, for me, is an invitation for agitation.
The PDP adopted a zoning formula of rotational presidency as a strategy to justice. This strategy is a shame because it implies in principle and in fact that Nigerian politicians are incapable of achieving justice for all at once, hence justice can only be done to you if your own man is in office as President. Against a backdrop of over 150 ethnic groups in Nigeria, this assumption is a faulty one. We should not hope for a country in which every section will one day be president, rather we should evolve a country where everybody’s interest, irrespective of which section you come from should be protected. This is not impossible, even if it is difficult. What we need in Nigeria are brave politicians who can heal, not open the wounds of this country. And this brings me back to the Biafran question.
We may wish to disregard or even condemn the Biafran struggle or its new leader Nnamdi Kanu who was recently arrested. The aim of this piece is not to adjudicate on the matters of his method or the implication of his actions, rather to draw attention to the fact that Nigerian politicians are losing the battle if they make careless utterances and take decisions that show in fact that some sections of the country have a basis to doubt if truly they belong to this political space.
The reason why the choice of offices in Nigeria should be balanced is because it achieves two important things for national cohesion. Less importantly it stabilises distribution. More importantly appointment is a form of recognition of the people’s right to be a part of the system. There is justice in the recognition that people’s membership constitutes justice, because it is at the core of inclusivity. To run Nigeria in a way that disregards other people’s sense of self-worth or sense of belongingness, for me, is an invitation for agitation.
I think that the rise of Mr. Buhari to the presidency should be a blessing to all Nigerians. Having sought the coveted office for longer than any other Nigerian, his convictions should be clear to him, one of which should be national cohesion. It will amount to a grave insensitivity if he doesn’t see that his responsibility extends to every Nigeria, especially as he once pledged from the beginning.
Ikechukwu Odigbo is a doctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of Essex, UK.
