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Title : Lessons from Buhari’s meeting with Trump Jideofor Adibe
link : Lessons from Buhari’s meeting with Trump Jideofor Adibe

Lessons from Buhari’s meeting with Trump Jideofor Adibe

Let’s give it to him. Buhari’s meeting with Donald Trump was a huge success.
Apart from the fact that President Buhari was calm and well-comported in what
looked like a meeting of equals, he also spoke well, in a less ‘Hausanized’ (or is
it Fulfulde?) accent than is usually the case with him. Those who prepared him
for the meeting did well. Was the meeting an endorsement of the Buhari
presidency? I will say it is a qualified ‘yes’. The fact that the meeting took place
at all despite the damming 2017 Human Rights Report for the country which
was released only a few days before the visit, was remarkable. For many
American Presidents, that Report would have been enough to give Buhari and
his government a wide berth. Apart from Buhari being the first President from
sub-Saharan Africa to be hosted by Mr Trump since his inauguration, Buhari
was also the first African leader Trump spoke to on phone after his
inauguration. Additionally, the sacked U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson,
visited Nigeria in March this year in a first of five-country African tour
embarked upon by any official of the Trump administration.

It will however be naive to regard the above warming up to the Buhari
government as evidence of endorsement. Trump is totally unpredictable in his
trajectory of relationships with apparent friends and foes – as we have seen with
President Putin of Russia and President Kim Jong-un of North Korea. Did we
not think he was such great friends with Putin that Russia was willing to rig the
US election in his favour? And did we not think that we were on the brink of
another World War when he engaged in militaristic rhetoric with the North
Korean leader? A week, they say, is like a life time in politics. And there are
still several months to the 2019 election!
Right now no one should begrudge Buhari and his party from enjoying the
momentum from that visit. But if I were Buhari’s strategist, I would caution that
at this stage in the run-up to the 2015 election, it seemed like a done deal that
Jonathan would be re-elected President. You remember the Transformation
Ambassadors’ of Nigeria (TAN)? They rolled out apparently ‘verifiable’
signatures of millions of voters from across the country begging President
Jonathan to seek re-election. The rest, they say, is history.
Apart from the above cautionary notes, there are other important lessons from
Trump’s meeting with Buhari:

One, in international relations, nations are driven by their national interest
(though given the fluidity of the term, different leaders also invoke ‘national
interest’ to justify their personal idiosyncrasies). For Trump, given his anti-
Muslim and anti-immigration campaign rhetoric, some groups in Nigeria like
IPOB enthusiastically endorsed him in expectations that he would ally with
them to fight their assumed political enemies. But politics does not often work
that way. It was the late Mario Matthew Cuomo, the 52nd Governor of New
York State, who famously said that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in
prose. Though Trump has remained faithful to the core of his right-wing beliefs,
he has also shifted grounds and embraced political realities in many respects.
Just as Trump has disappointed those who hoped that he would come and fight
their wars, Aisha Buhari, the President’s wife, also threw under the bus those
hoping to make her a rallying point of mobilization against her husband by
promoting the hash tag, #IStandWithAishaBuhari. Aisha was critical of
Buhari’s mode of governance, in particular of a so-called cabal that she accused
of hijacking Buhari’s government. The #IStandWithAishaBuhari was meant to
be a movement endorsing those criticisms. I was among those who refused to
stand with her on that matter. In an article in this column on February 1 2018, I
argued that I would be disappointed if Mrs Buhari re-tweeted any of my articles
critical of her husband because I would not tolerate such from my wife. On
April 30, 2018, after Buhari’s meeting with Trump, Aisha tweeted: “Dear
President, you deserve some accolades” and posted photos of her husband’s
meetings with President Trump. Good one Mrs Buhari!
Two, while Trump is quite unpredictable as President, he appears consistently
fascinated by ‘deals’, and constantly talks of offering countries ‘deals’ – a term
commonly used by business people, but rarely by politicians or Presidents.
Trump usually imagines himself as the ultimate dealmaker so only himself
probably knows what deal he had in mind by meeting with Buhari and agreeing
to sell 12 high-tech aircraft to Nigeria in the fight against Boko Haram despite
the damning 2017 Human Rights Report (the Obama government declined to
sell such hardware to Nigeria on similar human rights concerns). Ordinarily
such reports are used to brief American Presidents when they meet foreign
presidents and dignitaries and it is doubtful whether any other President would
have even invited a President who had received such a damning report to the
White House. What was Trump up to by agreeing to those sales? Perhaps we
can get a glimpse of the answer from this quote from his 1987 book, The Art of

the Deal: “I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. For starters, I
keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how
promising they seem at first.”
Three, never judge a book by its cover. In the run-up to the election of Barrack
Obama as the first Black President of the USA in 2008, Africans were literally
falling over themselves to offer him support as our ‘cousin’. With an African
father from Kenya, we appropriated him as a fellow African who can
understand Africa’s problem. But like the curse of identity politics oftentimes, it
is debatable if Africa really gained anything substantial from his presidency.
True, he organized a US-Africa summit and started the Africa Power initiative
but these were more of gesture politics than anything substantial.
In comparison with Obama, when George W Bush, a Republican, was
campaigning for US president in 2000, there was angst in the African American
community because he was thought to be a spoilt child, a C-average student and
a bit aloof, if not racist. His Democratic rival, Al Gore, was overwhelmingly
preferred by Africans and African Americans. Yet, under George W Bush,
African Americans were given choice positions in government as they never
had before - such as Secretary of State (first held by Colin Powell and later
Condoleeza Rice), and United States National Security Adviser ( held by
Condoleeza Rice, 2001-2005). For Africans, George W Bush set up the
President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR/Emergency Plan) to
address the global HIV/AIDS epidemic and help save the lives of those
suffering from the disease, primarily in Africa. PEPFAR is said to be the
largest health initiative ever initiated by one country to address a disease. The
programme has provided Anti-retroviral treatment (ART) to over 7.7 million
HIV-infected people in resource-limited settings – as of 2014. So far we can
argue that despite our concerns at his acerbic rhetoric, Trump has actually
proved more useful to us, at least in the fight against Boko Haram, than the nice
and urbane Obama government. One of the lessons from this is that our
political messiahs may not come from expected quarters.
Four, did the US president really pat Buhari on the back in the fight against
corruption when the 2017 Report talked about “massive corruption” at all levels
of his government and criticised the anti-graft agencies in strong terms? Trump
was reported to have said: “Nigeria has a reputation for very massive
corruption. I also know that the President (Buhari) has been able to cut that
down very substantially. We talked about that, he is working on it and they have
made a lot of progress and I think they will continue to make a lot of progress.”

Since it is not clear whether the above comment should be taken literally or
whether it was one of Trump’s famed ‘alternative facts’, I should leave it at that.
Suffice it to add that privately, and given the weight of the State Department’s
2017Human Rights Report for the country and the recent report from
Transparency International, Buhari must have realised that his anti-corruption
campaign – like those before his- is not working and needs re-thinking. In this
context, his constant talks of the corruption of the Jonathan government as part
of his anti-corruption campaign, not only will fail to mobilize the sort of citizen
anger he expects but will also make his government appear hypocritical.
Unfortunately the Vice President has also keyed into that mantra of bashing the
Jonathan government on corruption – a move that would only square him
against the anti-Buhari forces from his Southern base who have largely avoided
confronting him. Ironically, if these elements from his southern flank move
against him, it will also embolden his other enemies in the government to move
frontally against him, especially if Buhari wins re-election. The Vice President
earned accolades as Acting President by delicately balancing all interests in his
utterances and engagements (including loyalty to the President). It is ill-advised
to abandon a strategy that has served him and the government in general so
well.
________________________________
Email: pcjadibe@yahoo.com
Twitter: @JideoforAdibe

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