AS President Bola Tinubu pretends to be providing leadership for our beleaguered country, one question remains unanswered: what to do with former President Muhammadu Buhari. In the eight years that Buhari, a putschist and former military head of state, held sway as civilian president, he destroyed the country, literally.
In recent times, those who knew he was a disaster in Aso Rock but dubiously claimed that he was the best thing to happen to Nigeria are beginning to sing like a canary.
First, it was Nuhu Ribadu, former chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, and current National Security Adviser, NSA, who said Tinubu did not create most of the problems Nigerians are complaining about. “Most of the problems we are talking about are not the creation of this government … We inherited a very bad situation,” he said two weeks ago.
Then, speaking with journalists after a meeting with Vice President Kashim Shettima on Tuesday, Senator Adams Oshiomhole, erstwhile governor of Edo State said Tinubu inherited “a terrible economic situation”.
Oshiomhole, former national chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, who currently represents Edo North Senatorial District in the National Assembly, said: “The government inherited an economy in which the total national revenue was barely enough to service our debt burden. Spending 96 per cent; which is to say every one hundred naira Nigeria earns, 96 kobo is to pay debt. Nothing can be worse.”
He is right. It cannot be worse. But what really jumps out at anyone who cares to interrogate Oshiomhole further on why Nigeria is at a crossroads is his disingenuousness – the attempt to distance the APC from the Buhari mess. After the failure of their subterfuge to ensure that they are spared the task of having to account for the apotheosis of Buhari, there is now a seeming willingness to throw the former president under the grinding wheels of his own iniquitous bus. But in doing so, there is also a deliberate attempt to insulate the APC from blame and the reason is simple.
Every election is a referendum on the party in power. If the APC took Nigeria from top to bottom, as Buhari assured they will, how did the party win the 2023 election? They did when Prof Mahmoud Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, did his abracadabra.
In the eight years that Buhari ruined the country, no day passed without the APC blaming the country’s woes on the 16 years of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. But having realised how irrational it would be to continue blaming PDP for the country’s woes after eight disastrous years of APC, those who made a singsong of the PDP mismanagement of our commonwealth are now shielding the ruling party.
To be sure, this is not an allocutus for Buhari. Far from it. But the question also needs to be asked: When did Oshiomhole and his co-travellers realise that the Buhari administration was a curse to Nigeria? Just now? Of course no! They knew all along that the man they packaged as the country’s saviour is, indeed, an undertaker – a fraud. They simply dealt Nigeria a bad hand. But the bigger tragedy is that Buhari will, most certainly, get away with his perfidious acts in office.
In Nigeria, there seems to be a rule that anyone who occupies the office of the president enjoys Section 308 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended), which provides immunity from trial for the President, Vice-President, Governor and Deputy Governor not during the subsistence of their tenure as envisaged by the law, but for life.
The fact that Nigerian presidents are not accountable in and out of office is perhaps the biggest incentive to impunity and corruption. In democracies, the idea that power belongs to the people and they could deploy it maximally in cutting short the jolly ride of a nonperforming president, enhances accountability and good governance. And if a leader knows that even out of office, he could be called upon to account for his stewardship, his excesses are reined in. When a leader is assured by precedent that even out of office, he is above the law and untouchable, he is bound to misbehave.
Nigerians would have been able to swallow the bitter pills that Tinubu is forcing down their throats without much ado if they are convinced that Buhari, who ran, unarguably, the most corrupt government since 1999, will be held accountable. Elsewhere, presidents are called upon to give account of their stewardship and those found wanting are punished. In 2022, Argentina’s vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was found guilty of fraud in a case dating back to when she was president from 2007 to 2015. She was sentenced to six years in prison and received a lifetime ban from holding political office.
In 2011, former French President, Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, was convicted of corruption and handed a two-year suspended jail sentence and ten years later, Nicolas Sarkozy became the second former French President to be convicted of corruption and sentenced to three years in jail, two of them suspended.
Former Israeli President, Moshe Katsav, was handed a seven-year prison sentence in 2011 for rape and four years later former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was convicted of fraud, breach of trust and tax evasion. Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is serving his sixth term, is on trial for fraud, breach of trust and corruption, having been indicted in 2019 for receiving gifts from millionaire friends and granting regulatory favours for media tycoons in return for favourable coverage.
Najib Razak, former Malaysian Prime Minister, is currently serving a 12-year prison sentence, which began in 2022 after he lost an appeal in a corruption case. In 2020, he was found guilty of criminal breach of trust, abuse of power and money laundering.
Former South Korean President, Park Geun-hye, the first woman to hold the position, was sentenced to 24 years in jail for corruption in 2018 on charges related to bribery and coercion and her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, was jailed 17 years for embezzlement and bribe-taking in 2020. Lee’s predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, who was president from 2003 to 2008, killed himself a year later amid an investigation by prosecutors into allegations he accepted more than $6 million in bribes from a South Korean businessman while in office.
Here in Africa, former South African President, Jacob Zuma, has been jailed for being contemptuous of court.
In an article in The Guardian of London on April 9, 2023 titled “From Trump to Sarkozy: the political leaders who have been prosecuted”, Jon Henley noted the interesting case of Geir Haarde, former Prime Minister of Iceland, who was tried and convicted for not doing his job well enough. “Geir Haarde was the only politician in the world to face prosecution over the 2008 financial crisis. He dodged three more serious charges, but ended up being convicted, in essence, of not doing his job well enough,” Henley wrote. Right now, former U.S. President Donald Trump, who is aspiring to stage a comeback to the White House, is facing 91 criminal charges stemming from four criminal indictments filed against him this year by both state and federal authorities.
Jeremy noted that across the globe, 78 countries have jailed or prosecuted leaders who left office since 2000. So, why must Nigeria be different? Even if no criminal charges are brought against Buhari – I don’t see why not having presided over a criminal enterprise in the name of governance – he should be put on trial, like the former Iceland Prime Minister, for not doing his job well enough. And everyone agrees that he willfully did a very poor job in Aso Rock. Unless and until leaders realise that there will always be a day of reckoning, good governance will continue to be a mirage.