Kukah, Pantami, and Self-Interested Government Critics

[Farooq A. Kperogi]

Saturday, January 9, 2021

Kukah, Pantami, and Self-Interested Government Critics

 By Farooq A. Kperogi

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Bishop Matthew Kukah’s Christmas message, which called attention to the deepening depths of death and despair that Nigeria has been dangerously degenerating into in the last few years, attracted the commendations of critics of the Buhari regime and invited the condemnation of regime honchos and defenders.

The impassioned, partisan responses the bishop’s message provoked was predictable, which explained why I didn’t think it was worth commenting on it even though several of my readers asked for my opinion.

However, Professor Jibrin “Jibo” Ibrahim’s January 1, 2021 Daily Trust column titled “Bishop Matthew Kukah: Can a Partisan Tell Truth to Power?” inspired this intervention. Ibrahim, who is a Christian (or at least a non-Muslim) from Kano (and an apologist for the Buhari regime, I should add), argued that Kukah’s criticism of Buhari’s incompetence isn’t disinterested since he not only didn’t criticize PDP governments that were headed by Christians, he also condemned people who did exactly what he is doing to Buhari now.

To back up his claim, Ibrahim reproduced a 2014 exculpatory and excusatory Kukah quote about the Goodluck Jonathan regime’s incompetence in securing the county. The quote uncannily mirrors what Lai Mohammed, Femi Adesina, Garba Shehu, or any Buhari regime propagandist would say today in defense of Buhari’s own incompetence.

 “Nigerians love to criticize their country perhaps far more than any nation I know of in the world,” Kukah was reported to have said during Professor Wole Soyinka’s 80th birthday lecture in 2014. “The President and the security agencies have become the objects of attacks and vilification and yet, there is very little that is being done to point at the way forward. I know that as day follows night, we shall pull out of this tragedy that we face as a nation. But the least we can do is to stand in the comforts of highways and homes that someone else constructed and thrown stones at ourselves and our people simply because we are living off someone else’s sweat.”

In other words, when Kukah’s co-religionists are in power, he chafes at social criticism of governments, but when people he doesn’t share the same religious faith with are in power he not only countenances criticisms of governments, he actually uses his pulpit to censure them in the severest forms possible. That’s not disinterested criticism; it’s self-interested criticism.

Bishop Kukah is my friend, and I had always assumed that he was an equal-opportunity critic of all bad governments, but now that I think about it, I frankly don't recall him being as severely censorious of Jonathan—or even Obasanjo— as he has been of Buhari even though Jonathan was the absolute worst president we had had until Buhari came to beat his record.

Was Bishop Kukah benign to Jonathan because he benefited from his government in either symbolic or material terms? I don’t know, but it’s entirely legitimate to be suspicious of the intent of his very accurate and unassailable assessment of the Buhari regime. If he wasn't nearly as critical of Jonathan when he also supervised Nigeria's descent into anarchy and precarity, which made Buhari’s emergence possible, his motivation can't be attributed entirely to telling truth to power.

Anyone who defended—or, worse, still defends—Jonathan has no moral right to criticize Buhari and expect to not invite ridicule or a questioning of their motives.

Nothing in Goodluck Jonathan's temperaments and comportment suggests that he is different from Buhari. Like Buhari, he fiddled and engaged in crackpot conspiracy ideations while the country burned. Boko Haram’s fury not only raged in Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Gombe, Bauchi, and so on, bombs periodically went off in places like Kano, Kaduna, and even the federal capital territory.

Instead of confronting the widening insecurity that engulfed the country, Jonathan sulked—and sucked. He said the insecurity was a plot by the elites of the North to get him out of power, a silly conspiracy ideation that has been undermined by the escalation of the same insecurity—and its intensification in the North— on the watch of a northerner.

"Some of them [Boko Haram members] are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary,” Jonathan said on January 8, 2012 at the interdenominational church service to mark Armed Forces Remembrance Day in Abuja. "Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won't even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house." 

That was an astonishingly astounding level of presidential cluelessness and irresponsibility that Kukah ignored, defended, or excused.  

 Recall that Jonathan also defended the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) when it carried out a terrorist attack in Abuja that it owned up to and even forewarned—similar to Buhari's defense of Fulani murderers and mollycoddling of Boko Haram terrorists.

As I pointed out in my October 16, 2010 column titled “A MENDacious President!” MEND had bombed the venue of a two-day “post- amnesty” dialogue organized by Vanguard Newspapers in Warri and even Jonathan’s own home in his hometown of Otuoke on May 16, 2007 after he was appointed Vice President. Why did he insist they didn’t bomb Abuja on October 1, 2010 when they—and even British intelligence agencies—warned that they would strike?

Does anyone who either ignored or defended Jonathan's disaster of an administration, which has been made only more tolerable in hindsight when compared with Buhari's, deserve to be shielded from having their motives questioned when they criticize Buhari?

In other words, if Buhari's successor turns out to be even worse than he is (the one thing no one can say with certainty about Nigeria's leadership is that it won't get worse than it is now), should people who ignored or defended Buhari be allowed to criticize his successor without having their motives questioned? I don't think so.

Bishop Kukah’s defense of Jonathan in 2014 isn’t different from current Buhari apologists’ defense of Buhari’s incompetence. He shouldn't be allowed to get away with selective outrage.

The truth is that every previous administration often benefits from a kind of cognitive bias that psychologists call rosy retrospection, which is the tendency to remember past times more positively as they recede into distant memories. Even Buhari will benefit from rosy retrospection years after his tenure. Should people who defend or ignore him now be given a pass if they come down hard on his successor?

But Kukah is not alone. My good friend Sheikh Dr. Ali Isa Pantami is now the object of Twitter attacks by young educated northerners who remind him that his cold detachment from the horrors that afflict northern Muslims today is such a disconcerting contrast from his erstwhile persistent, shrill, and lachrymose attacks on former President Goodluck Jonathan from his pulpit.

 In a widely circulated audio tape, he tearfully told Jonathan that, as president and commander-in-chief, he should take responsibility for the daily mass murders of Muslims in the North.

Today, more Northern Muslims are dying and being violently kidnapped than at any time in Nigeria’s entire history, but Sheikh Pantami hasn’t placed the blame for this on Buhari in whose government he served as DG of NITDA and serves as minister of Communication and Digital Economy.

Like Kukah, Pantami’s criticism of Jonathan wasn’t disinterested; it was self-interested. Although they have a right to their religiously tinged selective outrage against governments, those of us whose chronicling and censures of missteps in governance isn't animated by partisan or primordial impulses also have an obligation to call them out.  

Yes, Buhari is worse than Jonathan, but that doesn't erase the fact that Jonathan was also terrible president. No one who defended—or defends—Jonathan has moral superiority over current Buhari defenders.

Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

School of Communication & Media

Social Science Building 

Room 5092 MD 2207

402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University

Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com

Twitter: @farooqkperogi

Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World

Nigeria's Digital Diaspora: Citizen Media, Democracy, and Participation

"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

Interesting, but the conflation of GEJ on MEND and Buhari on Fulani militia terrorism and Boko Haram is not sustainable.

GEJ's one excusing of MEND, bad as that was, is not equatable with Buhari's personal support and that of his security agencies for Fulani militia terrorism-which is 100 times more dangerous than MEND- nor for his policy of integrating Boko Haram -another world class  terrorist group in its deadliness, into the Nigerian army as a means of rehabilitating  supposedly repentant Boko Haram members, with these supposedly ex-Boko Haram being informed by their handlers that they can become Presidents of Nigeria. 

I'm puzzled at the limitations demonstrated by Farooq's reading of the development of the ideological, demographic and institutional penetration  of the Boko Haram phenomenon.

Between its 2011 revival in opposition to the GEJ govt and before the  2013 state of emergency, Boko Haram was once a terrorist  movement with broad sympathies  in the  Muslim North.

It was so bad, even Bamanga Tukur, then chairman of the President's party, the PDP, declared Boko Haram were freedom fighters. 

Sheikh Gumi, a leading Northern Muslim cleric, declared during the state of emergency, that the govt should leave Boko Haram alone with the Muslim population, since they shared fundamental religious affinities.

The then Adamawa state governor and Buhari, the most prominent Northern Muslim politivcian, respectively  described the anti-Boko Haram war as genocide and war agst the North. 

A prominent Northern Muslim public intellectual-dont recall his name right now- expressed dismay on his blog, not at the carnage of Boko Haram, which he urged them to direct at the govt, from what i recall, but to their letting it loose on the populace. 

Members of the Northern Muslim populace who informed on Boko Haram were recurrently betrayed by the security services and assinated by the terrorist group.

So, GEJ's declaration that 

"Some of them [Boko Haram members] are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary,” Jonathan said on January 8, 2012 at the interdenominational church service to mark Armed Forces Remembrance Day in Abuja. "Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won't even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house." 

was perfectly insightful.

Also insightful was the understanding of Boko Haram as an arm of the radical wing of the Muslim North, as represented by Atiku Abubukar's provision of the ideological platform on which Boko Haram built in its 2011 revival, in Atiku's threat of violent change to Nigeria because a Muslim Northerner, represented by himself, was not made 2011 PDP Presidential candidate in line with the expectations  of some in the Muslim North about rotation of the Presidency.

The bitterness articulated and fomented by the likes of Atiku gave legitimacy to Boko Haram as they waged what they shaped as a war agst an infidel govt and the  Christian orientations of its leader but avoiding attacking  the general populace and Muslim places of worship-bombing and machine gunning military barracks, govt establishments  and churches but leaving the general populace and mosques alone, even insisting Christians must leave the North or face the consequences and even once insisting the President must become a Muslim, a strategy of selective attacks they sustained until the Muslim populace turned agst them after two years of carnage, upon which they attacked everyone. 

Buhari, in particular, maximized the crisis for his own advantage in describing Boko Haram as the war of the GEJ govt and never criticizing the group by name till his APC nomination when that approach became unsustainable, thereby sending messages to different ideological orientations in his own interests.

So, the idea that Boko Haram was enabled covertly, ideologically, logistically and perhaps in terms of material resources by radicals in the Northern Muslim civil society is perfectly  valid.

I also wonder if Farooq does not need to refine his analysis of comparative culpability in styles of criticism in this context.

I continue to wonder how Farooq, a person who takes great pride in his professional mastery of the English language, was able to defend Buhari's threat that if what happened in 2011 , when he lost the Presidential elections, happens again in 2015, ''the dog and the baboon would be bathed in blood.''

I was shocked to read Farooq defending that as a harmless  statement of merely merely  value without any sinister  intentions.

A person trained in the skill of interpreting  the various levels of significance of language and its evocative, mind shaping power in relationships between images and the contexts in which they are used, , excusing an invocation of blood, of deadly violence, of fatal conflict, by a politician in response to the possiblity of his losing an election, a politician whose supporters went on a murder spree of innocents when he lost the election being invoked by the same politician, an orgy of murder which the commission that investigated the bloodletting partly ascribed to this same politician's unqualified utterances before the elections?

That support from Farooq for Buhari, like that from various public intellectuals, is something I still struggle to understand the logic of.

How did Farooq move from a defender of such a shocking declaration to the Farooq of today?

Understanding that  could help in understanding the various motivations of the various actors in the Nigerian public intellectual space.

thanks

toyin 

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