by Moses Ochonu
My favourite Buharist is Maiwada Sanusi. We’ve never met in person but I like him. He sends me occasional private messages on Facebook extolling Buhari and declaring his undying adulation for the president. He tells me to temper my “Buhari bashing,” as he calls it, with an acknowledgement of what he argues are mitigating alibis. He never tires of telling me that Jonathan and his people stole the country into recession. He once told me to advise my friends, Farooq Kperogi and Okey Ndibe, to stop their “Buhari bashing” because it would not have any effect on Buhari diehards like him. He pleads with me to be objective and to assess Buhari sympathetically. I like Maiwada. I always look forward to reading from him. We have forged a strange bond despite our disagreement. Here is the latest message he sent to me.
“Hi Moses. You have been relatively quite on Buhari bashing in recent weeks. I don’t know why. I’m sure you have seen pics of another courageous EFCC cash haul in Lagos yesterday where incredible sums of money were recovered.Today I’m not going to tell you looting such as this caused us into recession. Rather I want to you to be objective and reveal where would Nigeria have been Jonathan had won the last election.”
As you can see, Maiwada is a polite, mild-mannered, and witty Buharist. Perhaps it is this style of his that endeared him to me. He is disagreeing with me vehemently but he is decorous, respectful, and even funny in the way he approaches me. He is not cantankerous. In negotiation and conflict management, there is a concept that describes people like Maiwada. They are firm and principled. They know what they want and believe and will not shift. However, even while disagreeing or insisting on their point, they couch their position in a non-hostile, non-confrontational, and friendly language, so that their interlocutor is encouraged to engage and even make concessions to them. It is called playing an N (NO) card in a Y (Yes) tone. Maiwada gets me every time with this strategy, so I have to keep reading him even though I disagree with almost everything he says in his little notes to me. The more I read him, the more I like him.
Maiwada is not your typical Buharist in this respect because a typical diehard Buharist is confrontational, rude, and impervious to truth, evidence, and logic. But Maiwada is a model Buharist and others should emulate him. With Buharists like him, perhaps we can bridge the divide and get more critics to at least lend Buhari a sympathetic ear.
The most recurring trope of Maiwada’s notes to me is the recovery of looted funds by the EFCC. Every time the EFCC announces the recovery of funds or successfully raids the money vaults of suspected treasury looters, I know I’ll get a private note from Maiwada about it and that he’ll apprise me of it as though I am not on the internet and, for good measure, ask me why I have not posted an update on it.
I often do not respond to the messages but I like reading them because they expose the bubble mentality and navel-gazing of Buharists. Plus, they’re innocuously witty. There’s an accidental comedic genius to them, which I love.
Maiwada only contacts me whenever there is loot recovery, an event he considers favorable to Buhari’s image, and which he thinks helps his argument that Buhari is not responsible for driving Nigeria into recession.
He never contacts me about the many negative developments in this administration. Which means that our epistolary online relationship is punctuated by long pauses and moments of silence from Maiwada. When corruption scandals break, Buhari’s appointees misbehave or are caught in a gaffe, and when the vast propaganda apparatus of the administration is exposed and truths that contradict its claims are laid bare, I don’t hear from Maiwada.
He only contacts me when he feels there is something positive to report on Buhari and when he’s trying to get me to publicize it on my social media platform. In this respect, he is a typical Buharist, lacking self-reflection, incapable of self-critique, unable to objectively critique the status quo, and unwilling to put national interest above personal admiration for Buhari.
Take his latest message to me quoted above. He did not even wait for the EFCC to resolve the mystery of who owns the money, a mystery which is deepening and may eventually reveal that the money actually belongs to a government Intelligence Agency. In his desperation for pro-Buhari news that would dilute or cancel out what he sees as “Buhari bashing,” Maiwada has come to the conclusion that this is is loot stashed away from Jonathan’s tenure. He has not even contemplated the possibility that the looting may have occurred under this administration, which has had its share of corruption scandals.
Maiwada is a typical Buharist is his escapist adulation of the president, but his temperament makes him approachable and easy to engage. He is tolerant of opposing views, unlike most diehard Buharists. He has been my Facebook friend for some time now. Many Buharists have since unfriended me because of my criticism of the present administration. Maiwada has stuck around.
Maiwada has never attacked me personally or imputed personal or primordial motive to my criticism of the Buhari administration. He is persistent but polite. Unlike other diehard Buharists he does not even deny the facticity of my criticism of President Buhari and does not justify, dismiss, or defend the president’s failures. All he pleads for is that the failures be put in perspective in light of what he sees as the liabilities Buhari inherited. I can live with that. That is exemplary political magnanimity. It is maturity. It is a temperament I recommend to other Buhari diehards. In fact, both sides of the Nigerian political divide can learn from the attitude and temperament of Maiwada.
And that is why Maiwada Sanusi is my favourite Buharist.
Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Moses E. Ochonu is Professor of African History at Vanderbilt University, USA. He is the author of three books, the most recent of which is Africa in Fragments: Essays on Nigeria, Africa, and Global Africanity (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2014).
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