The Post Mortem Verdict on Buhari's Regime

The Guardian in Nigeria has remained one of the most independent newspapers and has over the years become trusted for taking a stand with the Nigerian people. The paper's objectivity is noteworthy and deserving of accolades. As a student in secondary school, my class teacher initiated me into following the Guardian's editorial page. The language style, presentation of facts and argument has remained a voice in defence of truth in Nigeria.

The editorial reproduced here was the paper's objective commentary on a contemporary Nigerian issue at the time and thank God for it. Wole Soyinka, once said: records are not only kept to aid the memory but to guide men into the future. Before you do anything with your PVC on Valentine's day 2015 be informed about the APC's candidate and how a vote for him would be a disservice to Nigeria, an injustice and an end to the progress being made.

The Guardian: Editorial of Friday, August 30, 1985

The Arrogance of Power

It could be perfectly understandable if, in the wake of the most recent coup, Nigerians seem a great deal more skeptical about their prospects than perhaps they need be. Two coups in 20 months, separated from a long stretch of military rule only by four years of ignominious civilian administration, do not add up to any settled understanding of the essence of government. What they do create is a climate of uncertainty and instability, conditions that are hardly helpful to a nation so desperately in need of orderly progress and development.

Yet despite the havoc coups continue to psyche and our international image, the question does need to be confronted whether there are circumstances in which military intervention, even against a military government, may be justifiable. And the answer to that question must, in our circumstances, be a resounding yes.

It did not take long before the Buhari administration, so openly and so well received by Nigerians when it came to power, began to show its true and frightful face. Soon enough, it became clear that his administration had a conception of government in which the governed were regarded as a hostile, adversary force, and in which government was virtually and end in itself.

Laws were made, as much as through decrees as by administrative fiat, without any evident regard for the interest of the people, let alone their views. Regulations were casually put out, more as punitive devices than as measures designed to ameliorate the citizen’s condition. Practically every segment of society, except, perhaps, the uniformed forces, were antagonized, sometimes humiliated.

Civil liberties were always precarious in military regimes. But the Buhari administration perfected the attrition of elementary freedoms to the point where the average civilian was driven to see himself, often against his will, as a pariah. He had no rights that the government and its secret police were obliged to respect, and he lived in perpetual fear of being hauled into jail without even a token charge being made against him.

Criticisms, even if self-criticism, constructive or foul, was banned. Nothing could safely be said of a government that seemed determined to be remembered more for its self-righteous omniscience than for its decency or humanity.

Blackmailed into silence, Nigerians watched as the traditional foundations of the state were eroded. Ethnicity became the principle of state policy. The economy sputtered along. Educational policy was in a shambles. Our hospitals became graveyards. And all along we were invited to believe, as an article of patriotic faith, that we lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Ultimately, it was the arrogance of the Buhari administration that led to its downfall. For arrogance always leads to moral and political blindness. Blindness leads to isolation, and when any government is isolated from the governed, its end is always predictable.

General Babangida is yet to vouchsafe a detailed blueprint of his intentions. But he knows, as we do, that his task is well cut out for him. His preliminary statements suggest that he does have a sensible idea of the causes of his predecessor’s downfall. The more difficult project is to avoid the same pitfalls. No-one, least of all this paper, can lay rightful and exclusive claim to the answers to our myriad problems. We can resolve them through painful and collective application.

But the present government must provide the leadership. And that leadership cannot be genuine or legitimate unless it springs from the decisive conviction that this nation is one, and that the best government is that which, for the good or ill, carries the majority of the governed with it.