Dear Garba Shehu, you had it coming

Abimbola Adelakun

On Sunday, the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity
to President Muhammadu Buhari, Garba Shehu, responded to the trio
of the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union who
had expressed concerns regarding the purported suspension of the
Chief Justice of Nigeria, Walter Onnoghen. Though his statement was
a measured response, it was loaded with explanatory and
justificatory rhetoric, and peppered with both emotional blackmail
and an imperious pronouncement of Onnoghen’s guilt. Those to whom
Shehu responded were similarly temperate in their language; their
words were carefully selected to show they maintain the necessary
detachment from the situation. Otherwise, in the next few years,
after the election has been lost and won, another sore loser will
write a book blaming his electoral loss on the combo of the
conspiratorial US, the UK, and the EU. Nevertheless, their
intervention still felt paternalistic.

Shehu claimed the trio lacked the accurate picture of the
situation and their meddlesomeness was a condescension to Nigeria’s
sovereignty. On this one, I am divided. On the one hand, we must
acknowledge that given the amount of global power these countries
possess, we need their intervention in local matters to put a check
on the excesses of Nigerian politicians for whom Nigerian lives do
not matter. On the other hand, having these “big brother” countries
sort us out every election cycle is embarrassing. Our leaders
themselves have not helped with their habit of dragging themselves
before foreign adjudicators as if there is no legal system in their
own country.

In 2015, it was this same Shehu, as the Director of Media and
Publicity for the APC presidential campaign, that announced that
they were sending a petition against President Goodluck Jonathan to
the International Criminal Court at The Hague. They claimed some
armed pro-Jonathan groups attacked Lagosians under the pretext that
they were demanding the sacking of then Independent National
Electoral Commission Chairman, Professor Attahiru Jega. That same
year, they announced again that they were taking the First Lady,
Dame Patience Jonathan, to the ICC over the “hate speech” she had
used during the campaigns. The PDP too retaliated by threatening to
take Buhari to the ICC over the 2011 post-election violence. There
was a series of other incidents where the APC threatened to use the
ICC against their opponents. Just a few days ago, the PDP
presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, also petitioned France,
Germany, the UK, the US, and the EU over alleged constitutional
infractions by President Muhammadu Buhari. If we cannot manage our
affairs and we take issues that should be resolved with our
democratic jurisprudence tools to these countries for mediation and
resolution, why complain about their infantilising us?

Shehu’s reaction on behalf of the President shows at least two
things: One, by treating these countries as interlopers, they
demonstrate strength, assertiveness, and self-pride to their
hailing Nigerian supporters. However, considering how much our
country, or more specifically, our political class, relies on the
cultural power the like of the US, the UK, and the EU possess, such
African pride is a luxury they can barely afford. Two, their
response also shows that their government might be genuinely
rattled that their political opponents could wage – and win- an
international propaganda war against them, cause them to lose face
in international circles, and then suffer the attendant shame. This
fear by the APC is understandable considering how much the APC – as
the opposition – de-legitimised the Jonathan government using a
similar campaign of calumny in Washington.

Here is one thing for Shehu to think about the next time he
wants to make a plea about national sovereignty and respect: you
had this one coming. Yes, you begged for the insult, and you cannot
talk your way out of it by insinuating meddlesomeness and alleging
condescension on the part of these western countries. Your
government has been seeking approbation from western countries by
pandering to them, and you have been doing so by sanctimoniously
extricating Buhari’s pure persona from the people, the ethically
tainted Nigerians.

In December, when Buhari was booed at the National Assembly as
he presented the 2019 budget, he made a remark that was somewhat
revelatory. He said to the lawmakers who called him a “liar” for
the preposterous claims he had made about the economy, “May I
appeal to the honourable members that the world is watching us and
we’re supposed to be above this”. There are several off-the-cuff
statements that have given a quick snapshot of the kind of person
Buhari is, and this one was one of them. When he said, “the world
is watching us,” what he meant was that they should not embarrass
him by calling him out on the outlandishness of his claims. His
idea of “the world” was not about Nigerians and what they might
think of their President being booed; half of them have already
sworn their devotion to him, and the other half do not count. He
would rather look good before western observers who could be
viewing the event through their media than be truly good. To him,
“the world” is the white gaze and the symbolic investiture power
they confer on him as the morally pure leader who leads a nation of
“fantastically corrupt” people.

This anxiety about being seen as better than the rest of
Nigerians has led Buhari to curate himself as an untainted, yet,
the poor burden bearer of collective sins. His international visits
after he became the President, quickly became a means of staging
his virtues and making a concomitant annunciation of them before
the western officials. He went to the UK and superciliously
proclaimed that Nigerians’ penchant for crimes had made them
unwelcome in the west. Months later, and with the same smugness, he
announced that a lot of Nigerian youths are “lazy,” uneducated lots
who want free things. In his first Independence Day Speech as a
civilian leader, he referred to Nigerians as “unruly,” another
language that symptomises his disdain for his people. One might
ask, what kind of leader throws his own people under the bus and
drives over them like that? Well, the one who wants “the world” to
see him as virtuous, an ethical contrast to his people whose filthy
souls need his charisma – not democratic institutions – for its
refurbishment. It was a drive for legitimation of his person and
whatever actions he might want to take to straighten the people
out.

That holier-than-thou attitude led him to agree with then
British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who had said Nigerians were
“fantastically corrupt.” In a later interview, he told the Sky News
editor that asked him about the incident that Cameron did not owe
us an apology for his statement, that Nigerians were indeed
fantastically corrupt. That acquiescence, meanwhile, came after an
outrage by the same Shehu who claimed they were embarrassed Cameron
did not factor the good work Buhari was doing on corruption into
his assessment. Rather than reject the entire commentary outright,
they zoomed in on the portion that favoured Buhari as the sole
possessor of virtues; the one who was on a redemptive project to
whitewash our dirty poor souls. Today, their government seems
surprised they are no longer buying into the myth of Buhari’s
incorruptibility and are now taking on his government for its
transgressive actions on the rule of law. Their egos have been
bruised, they have started noticing western “condescension.”

Last year, when Buhari went to the USA for his White House
visit, Shehu addressed a press conference in Washington where he
announced that Trump had been more supportive of their government
than his predecessor, Barack Obama. I wrote then that the game
Shehu was playing was not wise, that he was too obsequious towards
Trump and his well-understood mission to obliterate Obama’s
legacies. The endgame of this ego-stroking, I surmised then, was to
get Trump’s support for Buhari’s re-election. Rather than maintain
a clear-headedness about their mission to Washington, they turned
the visit into political opportunism. Well, as he can see, their
games did not win them medals, only the embarrassment of being told
we are not mature enough to rule ourselves.