Mr. Muhammadu Buhari as the Hero of Aisha’s BBC Interview By Abimbola Lagunju

Aisha Buhari’s BBC Hausa Service interview is generating a lot of excitement in the polity. For some, her responses represent political opportunities to either self-glorify as prophets or to condemn the president for his political choices. For others the interview looks like a betrayal of a husband by his wife. And for the misogynists of all shades, the interview represents an abomination. However, irrespective of the judgment made of the interview, the freedom and frankness with which Mrs. Buhari fielded the questions surprised everyone as they do not match our mental representation of the President.

Our president cuts the image of a no-nonsense head of a household. His carriage and demeanor portend an aristocratic Fulani rooted in the firm tradition of patriarchy. His stern mien conveys the impression that his words carry more weight than his tall lanky frame. His background as a General in the army gives the impression that his is to give orders and for the others to execute without questions within and outside his family compound. Put together, all these characteristics show a person to whom dialogue within the household is an anathema. This is probably the impression that our president gives to many people inside and outside Nigeria.

But Aisha Buhari, his wife of almost three decades has, through her bare-all interview with the BBC, shown that we all have a wrong impression of our president as a family man and probably as a politician. Her responses demonstrated that Mr. Buhari is a liberal man who sees himself as an equal partner in a family relationship. Who would know him better?

The open-mindedness and the frankness of Aisha’s responses to BBC’s questions could not have been on the spur of the moment. Clearly, if Mr. Buhari had been a fierce household dictator, Aisha would have learnt over the years to rein in her independent thoughts. Women that live with dictatorial husbands will not dare bare their minds about the politics or the behaviour of their husbands in public. At least not in Nigeria. This interview gives an insight into Buhari’s household where, it appears, independent opinions and the freedom to express them are allowed. Mrs. Buhari has shown the world the humane and women’s rights-oriented face of her husband.

And the President’s responses confirm this suspicion. If he was surprised that his wife gave the interview, he did not show it and did not excoriate her. There are many ill-omened responses that the President could have given. A typical Nigerian man could have ominously said, “This is a family matter. I will deal with the situation when I get back home..”  But the President simply said, “my wife belongs to the kitchen, living room and the other room..”  A smart answer by all standards to massage the misogynistic ego of obsessed testosterone-driven Nigerians who would have taken him to the washers. He did not promise to clobber his wife as many would have done. How many Nigerian men hit their wives everyday for insignificant things? And he is being criticized for his response to Aisha’s interview by women’s rights groups!

Mallam Garba Shehu, his spokesperson, when first confronted by those that apparently took offence at the President’s response to his wife’s interview said, on twitter, “Mr. President respects the place of women in our society. He believes in the abilities of women.” This is logically true, given the freedom and honesty with which Aisha answered the interview questions posed. Under further pressure, Mallam Garba Shehu sought to further explain the President’s response by saying, “He was obviously throwing a banter….. My friends, can't a leader get a sense humour anymore? Mr. President laughed before that statement was made…” This shows that the President did not get worked up because his wife expressed her independent opinion on the situation of things in Nigeria.

It is my opinion that the President on his return back to Nigeria from his trip will not make a big deal out of his wife’s interview. He is not cut out for that. He will, probably over tea with his wife discuss the merits and the demerits of the interview and move on. Hopefully he will act on some of her concerns, and if he does not, it will not break up his family.

The true hero of this interview is not Aisha Buhari. She did not tell us many things that we did not know. And harping on what she said during the interview is immaterial and puerile politics. The true hero is the President who, in aberration of his social and religious environment as well as his military career proclivities has shown that the issue of the Rights of women is not just a political discourse but a way of life to be practiced both in private and the public. This is an opportunity for campaigners for Women’s Rights to leap in the other direction. It is the moment to celebrate the anti-thesis of their thoughts and representation of the President.

The import of this event should be seen vis-à-vis the gender equality bill in the parliament. There have been reports of some religious leaders warning against the passage of the bill for religious reasons. Mr. Buhari has, by the freedom of expression of independent opinion demonstrated by his wife shown on which side of the debate he stands.

I give Mr. Buhari all my respects as a head of a household ….I have been wondering what would be my reaction if my wife were to grant an interview to a news outlet in a way that expresses her independent thoughts and which directly or indirectly puts me on the spot…..Ask yourself this question.

Nigeria: When Facts Don’t Prove the Hypothesis, Change the Hypothesis, not the Facts By Abimbola Lagunju

There are many things profoundly wrong with our country. The hypothetical political, economic and existential frameworks on which the country is built do not fit the facts of our life as a nation. We have borrowed theories that are inherently faulty from source and have imposed them on ourselves as our desired metrics of governance and self-management. Borrowed theories cannot be twisted to produce a national vision. A vision of a nation can only be rooted in grassroots aspirations of the people and cannot be built on poorly-understood imported theories and frameworks. It’s not a surprise that successive leaderships of Nigeria have not been able to define the Nigeria-project and if there is a national vision, then I have not heard of it. What we have had and we have from different regimes and administrations that have ruled this country are ill-defined and unsustainable short-term objectives that get truncated either by coups or by elections. Nigeria is not only home to countless abandoned projects, but it is also the haven of abandoned dreams.

The theoretical framework of Nigerian politics is based on democracy and the rule of law. Democracy, a system inherently divisive, is the political choice in a country where the national substructure sits on an unstable tectonic plate. In an environment where abject poverty is not sufficient to seal the many faultlines that define our existence and instigate a common and popular demand from Katsina to Calabar, any talk of ideological alignments required by democracy is futile and the political parties in Nigeria have abandoned any pretensions at any ideology. On what leg then can democracy stand on the several faultlines of this nation if poverty, a common social enemy is not a decider of electoral outcomes?

The Nigerian democracy is premised on the fact that franchise can be bartered and purchased, and when the holder is unwilling, he must be discounted and ultimately discountenanced. The financial power to purchase people’s franchise is the new ideology.  It is a commercial transaction where the buyer completely dispossesses the seller of not only his electoral right, but also, of all his rights as a citizen and as a human being. It is a political ideology founded on a permanent disconnect between rights-holders and the political duty bearers as soon as the transaction is consummated. Thus, politicians need to amass wealth irrespective of the legality of the process and from any source in order to be taken as a serious contender for any political post.  The bottom-line is that the legitimate aspirations of the people do not count and indeed must be discounted in order for the Nigerian version of democracy to function. In the Nigerian system, the two arms of governments inhabited by politicians – the presidency and the legislature are products of any other system but democracy.

National institutions which are supposed to promote and protect democracy vis-à-vis the aberrant political system have been reduced to a case of ownership issue. Who owns the institutions? In the mindset of the Nigerian politician, all the institutions of the state belong to the political class. The people neither know nor understand who the legitimate owner is. The managers of these institutions, unsure of themselves, have yielded the control and ownership of the state institutions to the political class. Under this setting, the police heed the biddings of politicians, the central bank opens its vaults to prying fingers, the judiciary sells judgments, the civil service warps its mission, etc. Nothing works…. Nothing, because the superstructure of democracy does not fit and cannot stand on the defective substructure of this nation.

Can the rule of law bring some sanity into the warped political system? The rule of law has become a weapon in the hands of the political class to fight each other. When the existent rules are insufficient for their purposes, they rewrite or invent new ones to fit their immediate desires. In many cases the rules are completely forgotten.  The wigs and gowns, all guided and inspired by the large amounts of money to be legitimately or otherwise made, go into a frenzy of interpretations and misinterpretations. The recent arrests of senior judges in Nigeria and the disclosure of their illicit cash accumulations are an indication that the guardians and the final arbiters of the rule of law are unreliable.

The multiple criticisms visited upon the different aspects of our political and economic life presume the workability of the hypothetical frameworks on which the Nigerian political system is built. However, this is not the case. Attacking symptoms does not cure a disease. The criticisms may highlight the rot, but do not put the disease under spotlight. The blatant indifference of the Nigeria political class to scandals that would have sent even the most hardened criminal politician under cover in western countries is a sign that questions have to be asked about the adoption of this political framework.

How low will Nigeria descend before our intellectuals stop mutilating facts to fit the imported political and economic hypothetical frameworks? We must understand that when facts don’t fit a hypothesis, it is time to change the hypothesis. When will we honestly sit down to work out autochthonous systems that will serve our aspirations and build superstructures on this defective substructure? It will be a failure of imagination and intellectual laziness to resign ourselves to this system that has created monsters of politicians. It is not everything that glitters in other climes that can be gold on our shores.

When eventually the process of working out the appropriate political system with inbuilt accountability measures is engaged, it will be a great mistake to involve this present political class, the progenitors and beneficiaries of chaos in the process.