Buhari’s Ice breaker interview

During his Presidency Olusegun Obasanjo had a monthly interview programme with journalists selected from various print and electronic media every month.

Every month Nigerians looked forward to being briefed by their President on the state of the nation as he got grilled by the journalists selected to do battle with him. He was a military Head of State before becoming a civilian President. But before his ascension into the presidential office he had schooled himself in the nitty-gritty of democracy by organising what he called Farm House Dialogue at his farm in Otta, Ogun State.

Many prominent people in civil society and the professions were invited to this Dialogue and the summary of those dialogues were published in booklets. These meetings must have prepared Obasanjo for the exacting demands of democratic governance in terms of the people’s right to know. Since then no President has considered it a matter of duty to expose himself regularly to public scrutiny by way of interviews.

President Muhammadu Buhari who had been a military Head of State before coming back as a civilian President is exceptional in his patent lack of interest in granting interviews to the media. In the last six years, I don’t think he has done more than just a few interviews with journalists. Most of the time issues that the public expect him to lend his presidential voice to have been dealt with by hired hands in interviews or write-ups or press releases. The public is never certain whether those fellows have his authority for those views or whether they are actually saying what they are saying based on how they read his body language. But body language can be misleading because it is nonverbal communication.

For many Nigerians, it was a pleasant surprise when Buhari decided to grant an interview to Arise Television and the next day to the NTA. Then two days later he addressed the nation in a televised broadcast on June 12. Nigerians may have been happy that the man that they describe, not exactly fondly, as taciturn had decided to open his speech tap and let his words run like water. Was this supposed to be a form of compensation for the speech famine of many years? If it was, thank you. However, in terms of strategic thinking three major speaking engagements by the President within four days was far from smart because the three events could have yielded more fruit if they were not bunched together. In any case, the issues likely to be raised in all three sessions were largely the same. No wheel was likely to be invented and no wheel was invented. It was likely to be, and it was, more of the same thing, nothing really new. Still, it was good to hear his own views coming out of his own tongue.

A presidential interview always comes with its inbuilt constraints which may include duration of the interview, seating arrangement, crowd of cheerleaders, summit interview etiquette and the fact that it is an attempt to beard the lion in its den. The Arise television had an eminent panel of four which is a problem too because the large number of interviewers separated by the demands of COVID-19 makes coordination and follow-up questions difficult. In settings like that every participant seeks to put in his question even when it was more appropriate to nail down a question whose answer was hanging in the air. However, given these constraints, it is fair to say that the Arise team did a good job, asked the right questions even if the public didn’t get the right answers because the answers showed no depth or creativity or empathy and left no room for a possible middle of the road solution to the problems under discussion.

It was a brutally either or nothing episode, a stern adherence to jaded ideas. Eitherness or nothingness has no viable place in a democracy, especially in a multi-cultural, multi-religious and multi-ethnic country such as ours. In a democracy, stiff-necked and rigid positions are anathema because they compound problems. The interview responses lacked any trace, any ingredient, any iota, of statesmanship. In a democracy, rigidity is not necessarily a virtue. In an interview, the question is as good for public consumption as the answer. Once you ask the right question you might get the right answer. If you don’t get it the public cannot blame you because they have got the answer, anyway. Even if an interviewee says “no comment” to a question that answer is even more profound than a lengthy verbalisation of an answer.

It cuts a long story short and the listeners will get the message and the meaning, which is either that he has something to hide or he is guilty of something. The President didn’t display any enthusiasm to be seen and perceived as a democrat. He seems to see democracy as a hindrance, a roadblock to achieving what needs to be achieved. Democracy, of course, has its constraints because it is a system that has to be run by many people through discussion, agreement, concessions and sometimes consensus.

The beauty of democracy is that it can restrain elected leaders from being dictators. Buhari is beginning to realise this without admitting it. Two examples will suffice. In the heat of the Twitter ban and the uproar that followed it, the Federal Government is now ready to have a conversation with the leadership of Twitter. That is the equivalent of putting the cart before the horse. But it is fine. The second example is that last week the Federal Government sent a delegation to Enugu to have a meeting with South East Governors and other leaders after Buhari’s incendiary reference to the civil war killings attracted a robust rebuke to him. This conversation with South East leaders ought to have been done a long time ago even though these leaders have repeatedly said that they do not support secession.

In any case, the President ought to have noted that these South East leaders have been insulted, taunted and harassed by these young Turks who are mouthing secessionist slogans today. The view has been expressed by some persons in the north that apparently the elected leaders from the South East are surreptitiously supporting the secessionists as a way of getting the presidential seat allocated to their region. That seems to be a piece of blackmail. Several Ibos have contested for the presidency since 1999 without nicking it. It is obvious to discerning and perceptive Ibo politicians that if they want the presidency they must be ready to fight for it like anybody else. The Nigerian presidency is too meaty, too juicy, too delicious, too tasty, too luscious to escape the attention of those who cherish its meatiness, its juiciness, its deliciousness, its tastiness and its lusciousness. That office is power-packed. That is why there is always cutthroat competition for it.

The President’s posture in the Arise television interview was not really surprising to many except those who thought, wrongly, that he had changed from being a wartime general to a civil and conciliatory facilitator of democratic values. The interview merely solidified the view of those who have known him over the years as an uncompromising and conservative ideologue who has no interest in allowing superior argument or information to dissuade him from his degraded and ancient values even in a modern era. There is hardly anything anyone can do about that. The only regret is that he is giving democracy a bad name and Nigerians a bad deal. Such statements as “fire for fire,” “shoot at sight” are obviously the very opposite of proper expressions by a statesman in a democracy because it reduces everything to war. Certainly, we are in very difficult times but our leaders must, by their words and deeds, make the times less difficult by accepting that words are the clothes for thoughts. Decent words only reflect decent thoughts while wild words reflect wild thoughts. If the President chooses to say only a few words from time to time statesmanship demands that those few words should be statesmanly and not savagely arranged.