Why President Buhari is wildly popular in the Muslim North

Someone suggested a few weeks ago on Facebook that PresidentBuhari’s irrationally wild popularity in the Muslim north would require an entire doctoral dissertation to explain. I disagree. It doesn’t require that much effort to explain. It’s simply the product of a mix of amnesic nostalgia, visceral emotions, and Muslim clerical tyranny in the north. Here is what I mean.

Nigerians generally have a predilection for sentimentalizing the supposed glories of bygone days. The past is always greener than the present, and the further a memory recedes into the past the more its putative glories are celebrated and romanticized. Add that to the fact that Buhari’s first coming was short-lived.

But you can actually map the genealogy of the myth of Buhari’s “Mai gaskiyaness,” which is the immediate trigger for the worshipful admiration he enjoys among the masses(and some elites) of the Muslim north. It started in the year 2001 after former President Obasanjo summoned a Council of State meeting in the aftermath of the Sharia-inspired sanguinary fury that drenched Kaduna in oceans of blood.

 The Obasanjo government, speaking through then Vice President AtikuAbubkar, said the Council of State, of which all past presidents and heads of state are members, had agreed that all Sharia states should revert to the “status quo ante,” basically meaning they should discontinue the implementation of Sharia.

Buhari disputed the accuracy of the Obasanjo government’s rendition of what the Council of State recommended. He said Sharia didn’t even come up in the discussions of the Council of State. For being the only person to openly disagree with the Obasanjo government, he began to be called “Mai Gaskiya.” 

Thereafter, he became an open advocate for Sharia and even went so far as to say the northern Muslim electorate shouldn’t vote anyone into office who wasn’t committed to Sharia. “I will continue to show openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is sweeping all over Nigeria,” Buhari said at a seminar organized by the Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria in August 2001. “God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the country.”

Although Buhari himself isn’t a deeply religious person, his open, full-throated but politically motivated (some would say opportunistic) support for Sharia (at a time no other former president of northern Nigerian Muslim extraction was willing to do so) caused him to be wildly popular among northern Muslim masses and the conservative clerical elite of the region.

Now, Islamic clerics in the north preach that Buhari is divinely ordained to be president and that criticism of his policies amounts to blasphemy. That’s why northern Muslim critics of Buhari like me are seen as heretics-or, worse, not even Muslim at all. I recall a northern Nigerian university teacher and foreign-based PhD student exclaiming “SubhaanAllaah!” when I first shared my criticism of Buhari to him during aWhatsApp chat. He was so distraught you would think I committed blasphemy.So it isn’t just northern Nigerian Muslim masses that literally worship Buhari.

Given the oversized influence of Islamic clerics in shaping public opinion in Muslim northern Nigeria, no amount of logic, evidence-based reasoning, economic hardship, etc. will make the littlest dent on Buhari’s popularity in the Muslim north.

In his widely shared articled titled, “Advice OnBuhari Media Centre,” Dr. Aliyu Tilde beautifully captured the complicity of the conservative northern Nigerian Muslim clerical establishment in the deification of President Buhari.

“The same thing applies to religious leaders who are invited to the villa (by the President, said one of them) for the same purpose of propaganda,” Dr. Tilde wrote.“They return and tell their followers all sorts of stories that they have met an angel there and witnessed miracles at the foot of Sinai. I just heard a Whatsapp audio of one of them from Sokoto who was telling his followers, amidst Allahu Akbar, this kind of stories: Buhariyayikira. Kuna gasai a zauna?…kun san da Nijeriyaba ta da uba. Yanzuna tai uba. Na je villa, nagaabin ban mamaki… What a shame.”

It’s interesting that Buhari was particularly unpopular with the northern Nigerian clerical establishment in the 1980s. He was resented for a number of reasons. His wife then, as now, made sartorial choices that didn’t conform to the clerics’ expectations of a Muslim woman. Buhari also banned open-air preaching, stopped/drastically reduced state sponsorship of Hajj, and forbade the building of new Jumu’ah mosques without the permission of emirate councils.

This put him at odds with Muslim clerics, particularly the emergent Izala sect, which now enjoys hegemony in northern Nigeria. SheikhAbubakar Mahmood Gumi, in fact, said during a preaching session that “Allah will not forgive the regimes of Shagari and that of Buhari because they blocked the way of Allah.”

Fast-forward to the 2000s and Buhari’s support for Sharia when it wasn’t politically wise to do so, especially by a former head of state,set the stage for his deification and worship by a clerical elite that a generation ago invoked curses on him. In a way, Buhari is reaping the “benefits” of the choices he made in 2001.

Now millions of people in the Muslim north would rather die than withhold support for Buhari, however much his government’s policies, or lack thereof,smolder them. Support for Buhari in the north isn’t just politics; it’s now religion. There is no precedent for this in Nigeria’s history.

Emir Sanusi II as President?

I picked up on the cryptic but devastating critique of Kano State Governor Ganduje’s government in Emir Sanusi’s wildly trending Kaduna speech and wonder if the emir is still interested in his job.

 Remember that the power to appoint and dethrone traditional rulers rests exclusively with state governors. Now, pissing off the federal government AND the state government AND an entire region’s conservative cultural elites with bitter, uncomfortable truth-telling is a lethally combustible mix.

I make no pretenses to possessing oracular powers (because I don’t), but I predict that, like his grandfather, Emir Sanusi II will be deposed. But, unlike his grandfather, he may end up becoming Nigeria’s president after his dethronement. Kano’s loss would then be Nigeria’s gain (or loss, depending on how he would turn out), which, in a strangely circuitous way, would also be Kano’s gain (or loss) since Kano is part of Nigeria.

Sanusi shouldn’t be Kano’s emir; he should be Nigeria’s president. I have strong disagreements with the neoliberal orthodoxy he subscribes to and his feudal and elitist detachment from the plight of the poor, but it would be nice to have a truly informed and educated man as president for once.