The triggers came in quick succession. The Number One citizen himself said he is shocked by rising insecurity. The Number Three said security situation has deteriorated. A Senator then says the president should resign. Meanwhile, there is a thick insistence on doing away with the Service chiefs.
Buhari and his followers might think this is a joke but the direction of the conversation could be his unmaking. As at today, the demand for the president’s resignation as a solution to the generalised insecurity has been firmly put on the agenda. Depending on how this is articulated, this could be the beginning of a different unpacking of the Buhari Presidency. He could be so narrated to a point of zero legitimacy as to be incapable of reifying power. This happens all the time across the world.
It would be such an interesting paradox to see a Buhari who campaigned on bursting sources of insecurity booted out by insecurity challenges he could not handle.
The governor grumbled, the military reacted and Boko Haram reified itself in a most hurting way to the society
Many would say that if it were not the Buhari mystique, he should have received this treatment since. The entire country is under siege as insecurity manifests at an unspeakable pace, irrespective of whether it is from Boko Haram, political enemies, the war economy syndrome or even international fortune seekers.
For whatever ideological and political reasons, the president is unable to mobilise consensus on dealing with the crisis. He is relying only on formal security forces to contain a situation which demands more than the professionalism of men and women under arm. The name for that is dismal failure of leadership.
The Senate has basically taken over leadership, providing a calming intervention into the recent successes of Boko Haram in pushing their luck in battle.
Only God would know what has castrated President Buhari from rising to a challenge to the very heart of leadership, power and governance: generalised insecurity in Nigeria since 2016. Human beings can only guess what might have happened. So far, they are oscillating between those who think it is poor generalship, those who believe it is a deliberate identity strategy for disorder and yet those who argue that the president/Presidency is simply overwhelmed but too cocky to admit.
Meanwhile, with Amotekun for all by the year 2020 as the Northwest, Northcentral and Southeast prepares their own variants; compounded by a never before seen level of elite fragmentation and circumscribed by a huge anti-statist conscientisation in the advocacy for ‘true federalism’ and such other strange concepts, only a deceiver can claim to know what the larger security scenario unfolding might be. In a highly undecidable world, certainty and confidence are the greatest acts of foolishness!
