The enigma that was Muhammadu Buhari sprung up again for reckoning. In his new book: From Soldier to Statesman, Dr. Charles Omole intrudes on our understanding of the man. He thereby has nudged the tall, angular figure with an ascetic carriage and rare, beguiling smiles from the solemnity of his grave.
From the grave? Great men do not rest in peace when they leave. They are summoned now and again for eulogies and more elegies. They return for a moment, a seminar, or a political event, a comparison, an inspiration, to rebury them, or to historicize them into heroes or villains. We distort their words, reappraise their deeds, send them to Golgotha and back. We cast them in our image by reimagining the past itself as though it is now.
Men like Caesar, Solon, Napoleon, Mandela, Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln, Awo, Sankara, Lumumba rise out of their epitaphs to be redressed or perfumed. Also, Hitler, Pol Pot, Franco, Mobutu, Idi Amin, and the sawdust Caesar also known as Mussolini help illuminate us even when they pollute. So, Shakespeare may have overplayed the ritual of death when he wrote in Hamlet, “Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
No rest for Buhari this season. We have Buhari today back to the forge or forgery of a censorious nation. Omole’s book reminds us as Ralph Waldo Emerson does in his line that “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.”
Maybe Buhari was great. Maybe not. But two principal things strike one in that book, even as excerpts steal out to the public eye. First is the lament of his wife and former First Lady Aisha Buhari. And it relates to the man’s illness on the throne.
Aisha said it all began when the former president abandoned his medical regimen because some of his folks insinuated that she wanted to poison him. A great charge that none of them have denied or even have tried to undermine. She said the regimen kept him in good health. But once he leaned to the so-called cabal, he abandoned the regimen, and his health began to fail him.
Because of that he was out of the country for over 150 days. We recall that time as precarious for governance. Osinbajo took over and made a ‘royal’ misstep and fell into the doghouse of the power game. There were those who stoked underground intrigues and eyed a new berth as president for themselves. A certain small man from a power state up north and a certain mouthy man from the south-south were dreaming a tie-up as possible president and vice president. They are together again in a coalition in the same furtive game of futility.
Meanwhile, stories of death or near so were exaggerating Buhari’s health. Not many of the intriguers were happy he returned to the éclat and applause of his adoring followers. But what bothers one is how a few advisers could destroy a throne because of their greed for influence and filthy lucre.
They turned husband against wife because they wanted to turn a profit. They did. They twisted democracy in their own favour. They were political families and blood families against the greatest bond between two people: man and wife. They stabbed the first unit of the first unit of society in the country. Sociologists say the family is the first unit, and the president’s family is the first of the first units. One of cohorts, a fuddy-duddy, took over and felt entitled to hold court in Aso Rock as though elected. Another one, Abba Kyari even made himself NNPC board member and said with familiar impunity that it was Buhari who put him there to represent him. The chief of staff told the lie to Buhari, even when the president did not say so. He was the man trying to play double. He was a metaphorical Jibrin. The fuddy-duddy a family man; Kyari a political associate. Both led him to near death because they broke a family.
Aisha was no goddess in Aso Rock. Neither did anyone expect her to be. But she was his wife. Before her, Yar-Adua had Turai as first lady who served as the garrison of the president’s heart. No cabal could push her down. She was the cabal, if there was one. In fact, a prominent woman today once asked in those days what Yar-Adua did to his wife that Turai would not forgive him but allow him to undergo public ridicule and trial? In other words, the man was dying, so why not let him go in peace rather than egg on the tempest of stories about his good health and return to power?
Aisha irked the Cabal for trying to be the husband’s garrison. They took her down. She complained about Buhari’s lack of gratitude to those who helped him to the office after three tries. She was referring to now President Bola Tinubu and many a foot soldier. But the man who mocked the other room would not listen. She also said her husband was listening to the wrong voices. She was challenging wickedness in high places and principalities in the vault of power.
She lacked Turai’s or Maryam Babangida’s influence with the man. She also did not have the wiles of the wives of ancient Greece and Rome, who turned themselves into matadors. It was because the man did not love his wife enough. He almost died because he abandoned his great asset. He had to return to her in a way because she resumed, in her confession, by slipping new medicines into his porridges. The man revived but time had been killed. “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity,” noted Thoreau.
Losing over six months, of course, injured his legacy. How did that time affect his ability to operate with physical and mental confidence? How did that affect how he handled power, or ethics, or education or the other high imperatives of office? We shall never know.
So, if someone tried to poison Buhari, it was not the woman who revived her. In fact, we might say, the cabal poisoned him. They took him off work, derailed his focus and undermined his legacy. In the end, you will not blame the cabal but the man who made them his trust.
The other point in the book was Dr. Yemi Osinbajo’s ambition. It is clear that he might have betrayed his naiveté. His team said he met Buhari about his ambition. To say he supported him showed the novice the former vice president was. If the man encouraged him to run, it did not mean he supported him. If he approved, it was not the same thing as endorse. Godfathers don’t ask anyone not to run. In fact, the father often is the initiator of the project. He clasps to his chest his favorite, and it was not President Tinubu. Tinubu was not naïve to rely on Buhari. Hence his Abeokuta rhetorical uppercut. If Osinbajo was wise, he was not street smart, nor politically savvy. He went to battle with a hole in his armour. The don was undone.
He should have known that Buhari was propping up Lawal. If he did not know, he was not a politician. His associates, especially a professor, was gung-ho about Buhari’s support. The Katsina patriarch was cracking the nuts for the former senate president and Osinbajo thought himself the darling of the gods.
He was entitled to his own failure as other hopefuls in the APC top perch who were hoodwinked and suborned into delusions of grandeur. The cabal filled its pouch. In that regard, though, Omole reveals nothing new.
Omole’s book also shows that Buhari, for all the hero worship, was made of flesh and blood. And as Sophocles notes in his play Ajax, “He was just a man before this, wasn’t he?”
