A stunner
Former military ruler vows to fight militants, corruption
KANO, Nigeria — Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler who jailed journalists, critics and one of Nigeria’s most famous musicians, Fela Kuti, seems an unlikely figure to rise 30 years later as the country’s savior.
Dour, austere, introspective and defeated in three previous attempts to be president, Buhari has promised Nigerians that he’s now a democrat who has come a long way since he was ousted as a military dictator in 1985.
But ironically, it is Buhari’s stern, forbidding side that many Nigerians now admire, after decades of corruption and five years in which the nation drifted under President Goodluck Jonathan’s affable but ineffectual rule.
Nigeria ns continued wild celebrations Wednesday over Buhari’s win over Jonathan. Many wore thick, old-fashioned Buhari-style glasses, painted themselves all over in the national colors of green and white, waved brooms and carried coffins to symbolize Jonathan’s political demise.
In 1983 Buhari ousted a democratically elected government, accusing it of corruption. He was soon overthrown himself after his controversial crackdown on critics, jailing of journalists and bans on strikes and demonstrations. The unpopular charges against the beloved king of Afro Beat, Kuti, were politically motivated, Amnesty International said at the time.
But in this election, held amid a violent Muslim insurgency campaign, Buhari’s uncompromising stance on corruption and his promise to take a tough stand on the militant group Boko Haram made him attractive again.
Buhari hammered at those two t hemes i n his first televised address as president-elect Wednesday.
“Boko Haram will soon know the strength of our collective will. We should spare no effort until we defeat terrorism,” he said. He also vowed to fight corruption, saying it undermined democracy a nd made some people unjustly rich. “Corruption will not be tolerated by this government.”
“A leader with his reputation for anti- corruption will be a huge benefit to Nigeria,” Clement Nwankwo, an analyst with an Abuja-based think tank, the Policy and Legal Advocacy Center, said in an interview. “We hope he will be able to bring his own officials to account, and where there’s been obvious cases of corruption, he will be able to prosecute people who abused public trust in terms of their financial duties.”
Nwankwo said Nigeria’s vibrant civil society, its vocal social media and human rights organizations would protest if Buhari tried arresting critics.