DAWN OF A NEW GENERAL

General Muhammadu Buhari rides on doggedness and integrity to become Nigeria’s new President, AKEEM LASISI writes

In many circumstances, any mortal above 70 years of age is seen, at best, as a symbol or agent of history. He is not the first person you want to consider when you are looking for an agent of change.

But, at 72, Daura, Katsina State-born retired General, Muhammadu Buhari, has upturned that philosophy. On Tuesday, he emerged winner of Nigeria’s most keenly-contested presidential election, thus making him the first person to sack a sitting President in Nigeria.

With this, Buhari appears to have completed the process of his professed conversion from a dictator to a democrat.

But the General’s victory did not come from the blues. While observers believe the accumulated failures of the Goodluck Jonathan administration constituted hazards for any candidate that the Peoples Democratic Party might have presented, it is Buhari’s integrity and doggedness, which inspired the people to fall in love with him, that have eventually paid off.

Thrice he had contested the presidential election, thrice he had lost. He had, indeed, somehow given up hope when shortly before the 2011 election, he betrayed his grey hairs as he burst into tears and said the attempt was likely to be the last he would make.

Yet, somewhere in his spirit, he appeared to believe that winners do not quit just as quitters do not win. And Buhari’s success was baked in the oven of towering odds.

The first is that he was up against an incumbency that was prepared to give the fight all it could. Apart from the fact that the PDP had been entrenched, having been in power since 1999, the Jonathan administration was determined to stay in power, with some of its drivers flaunting indices of desperation.

Of course, the opposition All Progressives Congress too are far from being angels. But many believe that the presidential election has been the most expensive Nigeria has witnessed, with the Federal Government, predictably, been the shining star in the dirty game of money the country has turned democracy into.

Besides, Buhari’s antecedents are loaded with both roses and thorns. In the negative side, he carried a baggage that would make his journey to Aso Rock as tight as passing through the proverbial needle’s eyes.

Here is a General that wanted to benefit from a system he and his co-coup plotters once truncated, having sacked the Shehu Shagari government in 1983.

His enemies were simply not prepared to care whether or not his regime had some pluses in terms of the discipline it wanted to instil in the social structure.

And apart from being an analogue man, as his age and opponents projected him to be, Buhari seemed to have a vault of utterances that portrayed him as a religious and tribal extremist.

That is why it was not too difficult for Jonathan’s campaigners to feast on these issues and projected the General as the worst thing that could happen to Nigeria.

They did these in vulgar speeches, hate adverts and several documentaries, one of which is so deadly that whoever survived it is likely to have something supernaturally working for him.

But while the case against him was that phenomenal, his supporters too were simply fanatical. To every person that was ready to cast the first stone, there were three or more disciples ready to anoint his feet with ballot oil.

That is why in the fight over Jonathan and Buhari, Twitter was rattled with infernal messages, Facebook friends became Facebook enemies, with spouses torn at each other’s throat, just as scores of people found themselves in graves.

The PDP too knew how tough the Buhari candidature would be. This is evident in statements made by some of its leaders when Buhari won the presidential primary of the APC.

Indeed, a Jonathan would do all he could to prevent Buhari from emerging as his opponent in the first place. But somehow, the man who actually had no money to compete with his opponents in the APC dusted the likes of former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Governors Rabiu Kwakwanso and Rochas Okorocha of Kano and Imo respectively.

The adversity was daunting, but the General’s time has come. The reason is that in him, people see a flicker of hope. They see a leader who has preached what he preaches in terms of his stance against corruption.

Jonathan ironically helped him when, several times, he laboured to teach the world the difference between stealing and corruption, and the fact that Nigerian politicians are not as corrupt as many people think.

If anything, it was during the extra time of the presidential campaign that the now Otuoke-bound man pointedly promised to fight the menace with digital mechanism.

Buhari has been a head of state, a minister of petroleum and head of the juicy Petroleum Trust Fund, but he did not come out as bogusly rich as many of his contemporaries are.

So, most people who chose him in the election genuinely did so, firmly believing that he will not steal their money. That is why when the PDP was campaigning that Buhari would send people to prison, many voters were very happy because they know that most Nigerian politicians are supposed to be behind bars.

Day and night, Buhari radiates the kind of seriousness and discipline that a leader should be synonymous with. He does not give in to frivolities and that is the kind of leader that Nigeria needs now. Will Buhari truly bring sanity to governance in this wealthy but impoverished country?

It has been noted that a tree does not make a forest, in terms of the kind of people he will work with. Latter Rain Assembly Pastor, Tunde Bakare, put it tactically when he said that he believed in Buhari’s capacity to deliver, but that he was afraid of the environment in which the General would work.

This seems to be an area in which not only Buhari, but also all Nigerians should work. Buhari has come to be the symbol of change that the country needs badly. But he must not only deliver, he must be moved and seen to do so.

At every point that he takes a wrong step, and that any agent of his government does so, as many people and organisations as possible should vehemently query them, so that the story of the change will not be a fluke.

Nigerians know he has enjoyed a kind of goodwill that, at times, one wonders if he merits. He dares not mess this up. This is the way Jonathan had it in 2011.

Posterity forbids, if Buhari too thus disappoints the polity, he and the entire APC can be sure that it is the same broom with which the incumbent is being swept out that they will be visited with. Will the General truly deliver and give the country the dawn of a new era? Time must tell.

-PUNCH-