BANJI OJEWALE FROM PREMIUM TIMES
Back to President Muhammadu Buhari. In 2019, he offered the ‘ideal’ approach to identifying the servant-leader.
So, after eight years, where do Buhari and the others who just gave way belong: in the class of those whose weight dropped while serving the fatherland or in that other group where the spirit of the sybaritic was at work?
A new race of men is springing up to govern the nation; they are the hunters after popularity, men ambitious…the demagogues, whose principles hang laxly upon them, who follow not so much what is right as what leads to a temporary vulgar applause. – Joseph Story (1779-1845), American Judge.
Let’s be guided by the former president’s own measuring rod to assess him and other public officers. We don’t need to go into any arcane research or some tongue-twisting grammatical constructions to determine whether our outgone leaders served themselves or served us. All we should do is to consider the body optics: has the office holder lost weight or gained extra flesh? A little bit of extrapolation: Is the ex-public officer poorer or richer? If he is still in office, do his airs suggest he is on the route to earning a mention in the club reserved for the likes of Aliko Dangote? What’s his sartorial disposition? Is his now a knack for Savile Row, London, the confluence of tailors and billionaires.
Back to Muhammadu Buhari. In 2019, he offered the ‘ideal’ approach to identifying the servant-leader. He took a non-forensic look at Mohammed Adamu, then Nigeria’s inspector-general of Police. Our president concluded that the gaunt security chief had been working hard, in the light of his diminishing weight. Buhari spoke when he was taken up on the frightening reports of insecurity here and there. We weren’t to worry, he assured us; the man he charged to deal with those giving us sleepless nights was himself suffering insomnia, leading, naturally, to the loss of weight.
The Police boss, in the estimation of the old military chief, had also emaciated because he wasn’t a glutton. It’s a contradiction to say of a gourmand that he is simultaneously slenderising. So, the IGP had been so busy battling the antisocial elements in our midst that he’d had no time to be a gobbler. There was nothing he had amassed from the golden trough of the tax payers; therefore, there was nothing to consume to make Adamu grow out and burst his uniform. After all, you’d prey on what you had. You’d eat sparsely, if you acquired sparingly. That should necessarily give you a lean figure, unfatty bank account, and above all, ascetic nights, so that like Obafemi Awolowo, the illustrious premier of the old pace-setting Western Region in Nigeria, “when most people in public office and in the positions of leadership and rulership are spending whole days and nights carousing in clubs or in the company of men of shady character and women of easy virtue, (you) like a few others, (are) always at (your) post working hard at the country’s problems and trying to find solutions for them.”
I believe these are neat and reasonable deductions we arrive at from the ex-president’s pronouncements on the police boss, as we judge him and others in their asset status on their exit.
The Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) had asked Buhari, his vice, Yemi Osinbajo, and a train of others to drop their asset scorecards with the Bureau before assumption of office and before receding from the scene.
