Buharism and Its Discontents

Muhammadu Buhari’s emergence as the opposition challenger ahead of next year’s polls has set the stage for a keen contest. Buoyed by a morale-boosting primary win, and with his street popularity now hitched to a well-oiled political machine, Buhari has a firm base upon which to mount his fourth presidential bid.

For sheer persistence, Buhari most resembles Obafemi Awolowo, who also serially sought national leadership unsuccessfully. Like Buhari, Awolowo was of somewhat ascetic bearing, Spartan self-discipline, inflexible will and dogged conviction in his worthiness for high office. However, despite his intellectual and administrative acumen, aspects of Awolowo’s political record undermined his chances of national leadership. His political platform was deemed too provincial to generate a national following. A similar limitation arguably accounted for Buhari’s previous electoral failures.

Unable to gainsay Buhari’s reputation for honesty, his adversaries have resorted to the favoured tactic of smearing him as an ethnic and a religious extremist – a bogus charge which endures because of some of Buhari’s own inopportune gaffes. This time though, the politics of smear and fear is of limited utility. The incumbent is running not only against Buhari but also against his own dismal presidential record.

The allegation that Buhari is a closet ethno-religious bigot is simply not borne out by his record as Head of State. Though he and his deputy, Major General Tunde Idiagbon, were both Muslims, they were favourably perceived by the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN). In his book, A Dangerous Awakening: The Politicization of Religion in Nigeria, Catholic priest and scholar, Iheanyi Enwerem cites a 1988 publication by CAN’s northern zonal chapter which hailed Buhari’s regime as the first to acknowledge “that the North was not predominantly Islamic.” It also expressed satisfaction with the fairness of Buhari’s political appointments and praised him for carrying out his war against indiscipline “without fear or favour.”

Ironically, Buhari’s most implacable opponent from the religious fold was the influential Islamic cleric Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, who earned the regime’s wrath for opposing its draconian punishment of Second Republic politicians. Arguably, the two principal victims of Buhari’s ascent to power were northern Muslims – the deposed President Shehu Shagari and his ally, Umaru Dikko, who very narrowly escaped being abducted from Britain by the regime’s agents to stand trial at home.    

Unlike Awolowo who wrote prolifically, Buhari’s decades-long public career has yielded little literature in his name outlining his ideas, convictions and policy preferences. This literary deficit has aided the character assassins and libelous hacks commissioned to defame him. But this gap is offset by the fact that Buhari’s opponent is by no means a fecund intellectual colossus.

In a 2002 essay, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi coined the term “Buharism” to capture the ideals extrapolated from Buhari’s time as Head of State and argued that Buharism is an ideology of bourgeois nationalism that aims to replace a political economy dominated by parasitic elites beholden to global capital with a new order in which a nationalist and productive class gains ascendancy. Buhari certainly has the credentials to tackle elite impunity and the rent-seeking political culture that is now in kleptomaniacal overdrive. Indeed, the persistent slandering of Buhari as a bigot stems less from his occasional tin ear for Nigeria’s polyphonic diversity than from kleptocrats’ fears of a certain reckoning for their crimes should he clinch the presidency.  

As a battle-tested infantry corps veteran, Buhari will surely frontally confront the terrorist insurgency that has killed conservatively over 9, 000 Nigerians, displaced over 1.5 million more and claimed vast swathes of Nigerian territory. As an officer who famously led a military incursion into Chad in pursuit of rebels, he will be especially concerned by the institutional weaknesses that have brought the armed forces into disrepute. Having crushed the Maitatsine insurgency as Head of State, he will certainly bring a warrior’s resolve to the office of the commander-in-chief. Regarding the key issues of security and corruption, Buhari’s record is compelling.                     

Buhari’s near obsessive focus on graft may be an insufficient critique of all that ails Nigeria but his unequivocal anti-corruption stance is a welcome departure from the incumbent’s bizarre insistence that corruption is not Nigeria’s problem or his much lampooned attempt to articulate a little known distinction between corruption and stealing. Buhari’s policy-lite deportment suggests that his main interest is cleansing the Augean stables. Restoring propriety to public life is vital. But his party has an impressive cast of policy wonks and its campaign battle cry of security and jobs is gratifyingly current.             

Buhari’s support is more pan-Nigerian than in previous campaigns. Popular disgust with the incumbent’s ineptitude competes favourably with whatever phobia for Buhari that the ruling party can marshal. Opposing partisans have taken to feverishly reminding Nigerians of Buhari’s previous failed candidacies. Their frenzied negative attacks are telling. Rarely have so much time and effort been expended to convince an electorate that an aged “serial loser” that supposedly has no chance will lose again.

Those who argued before the primaries for a younger opposition candidate than Buhari (as I did) had a point. But clearly the incumbent is not an advertisement of the radiant possibilities of youth. Given the available options, Buhari, warts and all, is the viable alternative. The resort to a figure who last led Nigeria thirty years ago indicates the scale of our predicament. That liberal elites who ordinarily should be opposed to an ex-dictator have made common cause with him suggests that we have reached that nadir at which extreme necessity sires creative expediency. This may not be the contest we want but it is the contest we deserve.

Images sourced from premiumtimesng.com and bellanaija.com.   

The Invisible Conflict

The headlines do not lie. There is an ongoing war between Nigeria and Boko Haram, an ultraviolent jihadist group seeking to establish its own version of an Islamic state. What the headlines frequently fail to capture is the other dimension of the same conflict – an ongoing battle to define Islam in Nigeria. This is an invisible conflict largely unreported by the media and unexplored by pundits.   

Long before its outrages earned it transnational infamy, Boko Haram was killing mostly Muslim ward heads and community leaders in Northeastern Nigeria, and it has made a special point of murdering opposing Islamic clerics. Since then, Boko Haram has bombed churches and killed Christians; it has also killed emirs, imams, agents of the state and civilians. Like all jihadist groups, it claims the right to solely define what Islam is.  As Reza Aslan has observed, “Jihadism is a puritanical movement in the sense that its members consider themselves to be the only true Muslims. All other Muslims are impostors or apostates who must repent of their hypocrisy or be abandoned to their fate.”  

In 2004, Boko Haram’s leader Mohammed Yusuf established the Ibn Taymiyyah Mosque in Maiduguri, an ominously named separate centre for his then fledgling sect. Ibn Taymiyyah was a 13^th century Islamic theologian, revered in Jihadist circles, who famously broke with the traditional view that the leader of an Islamic state, whether a caliph, a sultan or an imam, is divinely-ordained and must therefore be obeyed regardless of his deeds. Ibn Taymiyyah argued that if a Muslim leader failed to uphold Islamic principles then he was not really a Muslim but an unbeliever and his rule was invalid. Rebellion against such an impious ruler was a religious duty. Indeed, he declared that any Muslim who was willing to abide by the rule of an infidel was also an infidel. By choosing this name for his mosque, Yusuf served notice to the Northern Muslim ruling class which he saw as apostate.

Boko Haram’s attack on the Kano Central Mosque in late November which claimed over a hundred lives was a significant signpost. It was clearly a response to the call by the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, to communities to arm and defend themselves against the insurgents. Since his ascension to the throne, his vocal opposition to Boko Haram and his emergence as an advocate of popular resistance against the insurgents has placed him in their crosshairs.

In parts of the northeast, most notably Maiduguri, citizen-led self-defence and vigilante units have been instrumental to repelling Boko Haram. The key to militarily defeating the group lies in strategic cooperation between the Nigerian military and such local self-defence groups. Popular resistance may throttle the insurgents in the same way that Iraq’s Sunni awakening defeated al Qaeda in 2008.  

Sanusi embodies everything that Boko Haram reviles; an Islamic scholar yet also a yan boko (western-educated) former banker, urbane, learned and savvy in the ways of the West and the East, dangerously comfortable with pluralism and unjustifiably cosy with infidels. In the extremists’ eyes, he has drunk too deeply from the fountains of Western decadence and his acumen as an intellectual in the Western and Eastern sense compounded by his authority as an Emir, makes him symbolic of the sort of apostate mongrelism that the group seeks to eradicate. In the Emir, the insurgents’ dastardly thesis has located an antithesis. In a recent video, Boko Haram threatened to kill him. The battle lines could not be any clearer.

Kano was once an ancient cosmopolitan terminal on the trans-Saharan trade route making it a cultural and commercial confluence of sub-Saharan, Sahelian and Maghrebian influences and migrations. For centuries, Kano has retained this pluralistic character until recent decades. From the mid 1980s onwards, Kano became identified with a violent prejudice. Chronic eruptions of sectarian violence were seared into its reputation. Extremism rose against a background of deindustrialization, urban poverty and economic collapse with opportunistic politicians cynically playing the religious card.

In a 2004 lecture in Kano, Sanusi lamented the “creeping parochialism in Kano” which contradicted its “accommodating and cosmopolitan character” and its traditional demonstration of “the best Islamic values of tolerance, of diversity and hospitality to guests and travellers.” He identified lack of education as a key factor in Kano’s, and by extension, Northern Nigeria’s, decline and urged his audience to “fight against parochialism and retrieve our Nigerian identity, and realize that a narrow mind closes off opportunities to excellence.” Sanusi has since signaled his willingness to spearhead this fight as Emir.

Boko Haram is violently opposed to nation-states, national boundaries, democracy, pluralism, western education and civic diversity – all concepts that are affirmed by Nigeria. Thus, the current conflict is also about what sort of Islam will prevail in Northern Nigeria. Will it be progressive and tolerant? Will its future be written in the ink of scholars or the blood of martyrs? Will it overcome the residual distrust of Western education and empower millions of Muslims to be productive citizens and yet remain true their faith? Or will Boko Haram’s nihilistic atavism prevail?

It is important to highlight this invisible conflict, to support leaders like the Emir of Kano, to encourage mainstream Muslims in their ideological struggle for hearts and minds. The federal government should promote and protect moderate clerics who are at the frontlines of this battle of ideas. We must also condemn the sort of Islamophobic paranoia and bigotry in non-Muslim circles which inadvertently strengthen Boko Haram. In the contest between moderation and extremism, we should be vigorously backing the former.

(Images sourced from www.osundefender.com and www. nigerreporters.com)