By Adagbo Onoja
In spite of everything, General Muhammadu Buhari managed to commandeer so much national attention to himself since his death in London on July 13th, 2025. He must be a strong man to achieve that, irrespective of whatever is the condition of possibility behind it. Certainly, the Tinubu administration has tried to read the death from its own calculus. But it would be foolish if it didn’t do that. In any case, that is what everyone else is doing. No one who spoke for or against the late General was doing anything less than politics. There is no pure memorial.
Symbolically powerful national good bye to Gen Buhari
Still, there is a sense in which General Buhari could not have been a subject of national reckoning at death. The fact that he put on uniform and fought for One Nigeria at the prime of his life is one reason for that. His ability to return to power is the second reason. How he was able to do it and what he did while in power are besides the point. They are because there will never be consensus in those areas. There are those for whom he is the best, the permanent model. There are those for whom he is the very worst of them. Nothing will ever resolve this divide as long as both sides are engaged in a contest of narratives.
But a time will come when one side will prevail, depending on which of the sides is able to keep nourishing its own narrative at the expense of the other. It is only such side that will win by always pointing out each contradiction that pops up in the narrative contending it’s. That is why it is said that truth is a political project. Unfortunately, majority of our country men and women have been brought up to think that there is something called the truth worth fighting for or defending. There isn’t such truth.
It is in this context that there is something of an achievement to Buhari’s name that he became a subject of grievability debate. He would be happy over there to learn that some Nigerians didn’t feel he is grievable while other set of Nigerians feel otherwise. Only a dead country would everyone have felt the same or in one direction about one political leader. Such can only be possible about a cultural, military or business leader, hardly a politician. Not even General Murtala Mohammed, the only Nigerian Head of State student activists have ever mourned across the nation, had that consensual memorial.
The really worrisome dimension that has not featured so far is how Buhari – someone with a known tendency antecedent – did not end up as a transformative leader. For those who understand the Kaduna Mafia in the same way that the late Balarabe Musa did as opposed to the frightening imagination of it in the newspapers, this should be the key question in the aftermath of Buhari’s death. Of all of them popularised in the media: the Ikenne Mafia, the Lagos-Ibadan financial oligarchy, the Langtang Mafia, etc, the Kaduna Mafia best positioned itself for power. The quality of training of its ideologues (most attended some of the most prestigious Western universities or Ibadan of those days), their coherence, capacity for propaganda, construction and consolidation of its base and its self-understanding as the protectors of that base are the bases of the claim that they steeled themselves for the project of superintending the modernisation of Nigeria compared to others. It was very good in organising debates and harvesting the fruits of such debates in its interaction with its Others. It understood politics almost in the rather clinical sense that Carl Schmitt conceptualised it as a contest between ‘friends and their enemies’. To that extent, it was a contrast to the self-defeating others endlessly subject positioning themselves as victims and ending up creating self-disempowerment. Well founded as the grudges of such groups may be, positioning oneself as a victim is a thoroughly bad strategy. In contrast, the Mafia appreciated power and power resources and worked at assembling them – from universities to the media to technocracy, religion, recruitment, appointment and disappointment, alignment politics and what have you.
In all these, it wasn’t doing anything out of sync with the political. The Mafia was evoking the Schmitt image of politics whether they were aware of it or not. And this inference is interesting, with particular reference to Schmitt’s survival of his Nazi entanglement to return to centrality in political thought (at least in the West) unlike his fellow German, Martin Heidegger who never did. Heidegger’s misstep were in ever joining the Nazi party aside from marrying Hannah Arendt who was his student. Although they had a love life only philosophers could handle, he lost the acclaim for his brilliance in Philosophy (phenomenology), till today. But not Schmitt. Such is life!
As a voracious reader, Baba must be itching to read David Harvey’s “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction” essay again
What else did the Kaduna Mafia need to transform Nigeria other than a core of well educated and technocratically minded to achieve or, at least, pose the question of transformation of Nigeria? While it is true that the Mafia had suffered rupture under IBB and loss of cadres by the time Buhari returned to power in 2015 – Adamu Ciroma, Ibrahim Tahir, Mahmud Tukur, etc – the residue of precepts and practices still remained. In fact, it was Buhari’s belonginess to that caucus that was any basis for optimism about Buhari for those whose class analysis of the mafia didn’t and doesn’t come from the sort of things one reads about them in the popular press. Today and very unfortunately, Buhari and, by implication, the mafia was overwhelmed.
Throughout the eight years in power, industrialisation was not even on the agenda. That should worry any thinker about Nigeria’s future for those whose knowledge of the mafia is beyond pedestrian, fear – inspired and unrestrained phobia about such creatures among its outsiders. If such a thinking caucus and all the development strategy options and blueprints they had assembled through debates they organised and invited other Nigerians to participate vigorously could be so overwhelmed, then where or what is the guarantee that any other caucuses would not be overwhelmed?
This question is apt in that, beyond the Kaduna Mafia, what used to be the Nigerian Left exists now only as a shadow. Its own disintegration is worse than the Mafia’s. Again, the question how such a caucus could evaporate so totally? There is nothing in its fights with the Babangida, Abacha and Obasanjo’s rule to make anyone peg the explanation to such fight. It was far too established for those battles to explain its non-existence today.
This is the question that Buhari’s death should have triggered. Perhaps it is still coming. Since there can be no reality outside of its imagination, the question of why hitherto existing centres of imagination or visualisation of Nigeria have crashed out, be it the Nigerian Left, Ikenne Mafia, Langtang Mafia, the Kaduna Mafia, the Northern aristocracy, the Lagos-Ibadan financial oligarchy, the universities, the think tanks, the research centres and the individuals who achieved referential status collapsed. For it is because of the absence of that we came to have presidential candidates who are hailed for their personal, religious or ethno-regional qualities rather than scrutinised in terms of which tendency they come from. The implication is that this country confronts a danger not even acknowledged yet as any and all of them seeking presidential powers will be bowled over by the local and external pressures on power and the current crisis will intensify. General Buhari is our best example of this crisis so far. There is no doubt that he would have wished to be reckoned with as Nigeria’s own Mustafa Ataturk. Unfortunately, he lost it. Rather, his regime became more known for superintending increased actual poverty, intensification of diverse identity contestations, multiplication of insecurity, corruption of high state officials and the making of medical tourism as state policy. The combination of these elements so unmade the very individual whose own austere life positioned in popular psyche as the ultimate Messiah. What a pity! But the outcome compels what the Mafia was seeking in all its numerous battles with the Northern aristocracy, the Ikenne Mafia and other mafias if it was not about demonstrating exceptionalism in power? How would its alliance with Chief Awolowo ended if Awo had won in 1983?
Ahead of a Pauline scale conversion from ‘renewed hope’ dogma?
Interestingly, Buhari’s scorecard will be the scorecard of any past, present and future leader of Nigeria who did not strike the chord. The chord is that Nigeria as an agrarian economy makes the industrial transformation of Nigeria the central essence of the state as in all such societies, including India which seems to be experimenting with a non-industrial pathway. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo who had the fortune of starting the ball rolling argued that the route to this target point lie nowhere else outside a private sector led economy. He stuck to his guns even when some of the country’s best brains – Prof Sam Aluko in particular – told him that he would ruin the economy by choosing that pathway. Today, the country is in ruins.
Alhaji Umaru Yar’ Adua who succeeded Obasanjo will be skipped in this assessment because it seemed something like Aluko’s regime of ‘Guided Deregulation’ was unfolding under him. Yar’Adua did not live long enough for anybody to make any conclusion on where he would have landed in terms of that move.
Although Dr. Goodluck Jonathan has been elevating himself through his pronouncements in addition to his surprising statesmanship in 2015, his capture by the so-called reformers as opposed to the ‘transformation agenda’ ideologues in his government means that he and Obasanjo ended up with the same unacceptable score as far as moving Nigeria near anything called industrialisation is concerned. He privatized what used to be called NEPA, for instance. Today, electricity supply is worse. Energy is so costly in Nigeria relative to the wage system.
President Bola Tinubu is still on. Unless he experiences a Pauline-scale conversion as to be able to ‘see’ the light and inject a more grounded ideological centre of gravity to his “renewed hope” paradigm, he is sure to end up like any of his predecessors, if not worse.
The point is Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was the one with the located-ness and pedigree to have asked for and got or negotiated a breathing space for Nigeria from her patrons to enable Nigeria speak to industrialisation. Chief Obasanjo’s refusal to do so has given all his successors the license to preach reform recklessly. Baba’s restlessness today has all the features of penance. Great, however, if he could, together with some others, put the question of social transformation at the centre of politics in Nigeria, that would be the only condition of possibility for any promising future. Tragically, no one is talking about that, not even the ADC has even mentioned it. Yet, the country is imploding on all fronts!
Let’s mourn Buhari, of course, but do so from the possibility of constructing and converting his death into the politics of remaking Nigeria.
