Prospects of a Buhari third term

No, Zahra, nobody is asking for the impossible; good leadership does not mean omnipresence. What it does mean is that the leader governs by a set of standards and values-as opposed to a different set-which then percolates throughout society. Where Mr. Buh

No, President Muhammadu Buhari has not announced he will seek a third term. But remember, he is a former military man, and Nigeria’s political history is littered with military men, in or out of uniform, seeking additional years or illegal tenures in office.

Mr. Buhari has not even announced he will seek a second term in office, but history counsels us all he would be the exception should he sometime in the next year say he has nothing left to give.

If he runs for a second, or if his friends insist on maintaining him for it, my point here is that his daughter, Zahra, may be responsible for the “necessity” then for him to seek to stay in power beyond 2023.

Here is the calculation: Zahra is the one who, recently on Instagram, queried where the funds being voted for the State House Medical Centre (SHMC) are being spent, given that the place is medically empty. Remember: in 2016, Buhari’s government proposed to spend more on capital projects at the SHMC for the government’s 16 teaching hospitals put together.

“More than N3billion budgeted for the State House clinic and workers there don’t have the equipment to work with? Why?” she asked. “Where is the money going to? Medication only stocked once since the beginning of the year? Why?”

Affirming that the clinic lacked even paracetamol, gloves and syringes, and that patients buy what they require, she wagged a finger: “State House Permanent Secretary please answer.”

Enter then, Jalal Arabi, the Permanent Secretary at State House.

Actually, it was The Cable which, on August 18, first demystified the place, reporting that the clinic, which treats members of Nigeria’s most powerful families and staff of the presidency, lacks common medications and even cotton wool.

“The patient has to buy from outside. Syringes? Not available. X-ray? Sorry, the machine is out of order. Ambulance? Well, if the patient can buy the fuel…”

That is, the patient buying fuel for the ambulance, rather like the property-owner whose home is burning buying water for the firemen.

But as is nearly always the case with Nigerian governments, that press report was ignored, a situation which changed when the president’s daughter posed her question on Instagram.

Mr. Arabi is said to have been “riled” at the state of things in the place, as if he does not live and work in the place or use the facility, and to have commenced an investigation.

First Lady Aisha Buhari then waded in, describing a personal experience of being told, when she needed an x-ray at the SHMC, that the machine was not working. At the time, the hospital was not told the enquiry was being made on behalf of the wife of the president.

“I had to go to a hospital that was established by foreigners in and out 100 percent,” she said in a speech on October 9. “What does that mean?” she asked. First, it must be remembered that the presidency alleges the centre as having such departments as pediatrics, lab medicine, medicine, and obstetric and gyneacology, and as being a “training facility” for various medical personnel.

In the 2016 budget, N3.219 billion was provided for the facility. Said Mr. Arabi to a Senate committee in defence of that lavish proposal, “The anticipated improvement of the medical centre will propel it to serve as a centre of excellence and also reduce medical tourism.”

It is important to observe that Zahra returned to Instagram the day after Mrs. Buhari’s speech to defend herself against those who have said she ought to complain to her father, asserting that her father cannot be everywhere.

“…The thing is that many people are appointed at different stages and they make sure that whatever they are in charge of works out well and they monitor properly,” she explained.

Days earlier, Mr. Arabi, perhaps unwilling to be on record as having ignored The Boss’ daughter, announced that the government would “among other things seek the commercialisation of the centre to boost its revenue and augment the appropriation it receives from the government”.

I think Mr. Arabi was looking for a different word. Concession, perhaps. Or privatization. In effect, he was explaining that once again, a government facility, even one as close as possible to an ailing president, has again been mis-managed into irrelevance. The answer: sell its services to the public.

But that was not the question, which is: explain where the funds meant for running the place in years past.

At which point I return to the question posed by Mrs. Buhari: what does this mean?

There are several meanings. An obvious one is that, should President Buhari fall horribly sick in the middle of the night, he would have to be taken to some foreign hospital in Abuja before the presidential jet flies him to London.

A second is that SHMC has no equipment. They ought to have several x-ray machines acquired over the years, for instance, but it does not even have a functional one. An audit of its equipment would be fascinating.

But the most important thing the SHMC does is confirm that contrary to the propaganda of Buhari and his political relatives, nothing has fundamentally changed in Nigeria.

No, Zahra, nobody is asking for the impossible; good leadership does not mean omnipresence. What it does mean is that the leader governs by a set of standards and values-as opposed to a different set-which then percolates throughout society.

Where Mr. Buhari has failed is that he has not delivered on his promises to put such a scheme in play. The president inherited a system in which incompetence, indolence and mediocrity triumphed. The SHMC is confirmation.

Think about it: even the language of the SHMC budget-defence is the language not of performance, but of ostentation, arrogance and budget-padding: “…pediatrics, lab medicine, medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, training facility…centre of excellence…” You load it up so they will vote it up.

And all of this is possible because the SHMC always seemed assured, somehow, the president would never come in there for treatment.

This is why our public institutions, whenever they come to attention, often do so for negative, if not nefarious, reasons. A leader running off to another country for medical treatment, his own expensive facility in disuse right under his nose, is a signal to all public institutions that incompetence, indolence and mediocrity are okay.

For this purpose, I offer in evidence as a portrait of Nigeria through its public offices the scandalous Report of the Auditor-General of the Federation 2015 (I) dated December 2, 2016, and the Report of the Auditor-General of the Federation 2015 (II) dated May 31, 2017, which I am sure the government has not read.

Leadership is not about what is said. It is about what is done. And practically all this government has done is preach.

That’s why Zahra may have inadvertently started the road to 2023. Because like Mr. Buhari’s friend, one Olusegun Obasanjo, he is going to need a third term to remember the first.