Ethnicity, religion, culture, race, civilisation and place are powerful discourses and since discourses are, in the last instance, constitutive of reality, nobody makes sense who dismisses them. More so in the Nigerian context which Patrick Dele Cole and Chuba Okadigbo have most powerfully captured in a way that one cannot avoid quoting repeatedly. In his June 6th, 1988 interview with Newswatch, Dele Cole identified this as part of the problem: The Southerner has the perception that something that is his birthright is being taken away from him by some Oligarchic group that sits up there in the North and reaches Lagos (now Abuja) every four years in uniform or agbada and take it away”. On the other hand, the North, according to Chuba Okadigbo, has the mistaken belief that it must control political power because economic power has resided in the South.

However, after the Chibok girls tragedy, we no longer have the luxury of this kind of politics. It is no longer a crazy socialist but commonsensical idea to insist that the multitude in Nigeria and their intellectuals need to rethink our imagination of the country in favour of who, where and what is posing the question of what a country with 200 million citizens should do with such a power resource. Let characterising and critiquing the Buhari presidency continue to the game in town. It cannot be otherwise given the primacy of power, particularly in our type of society. Nobody should be shouted or shut down or be earmarked for punishment for the reason of his or her views in such conversation just as no one might be allowed to take it as a licence or what Gbolabo Ogunsanwo would refer to as ‘Magna Carta for mandibular wakabout’. Nwabueze, therefore, with all eyes open, offered himself to be mauled by a Mohammed Haruna which he did via a remarkable upper cut by describing the professor’s analysis as less dignifying than pepper soup joint stuff. It ought not to have come from anybody who knows Nigeria as Nwabueze does to pose such an intellectually embarrassing argumentation because what obtains today is that even if Buhari has it in mind, he would find it impossible to Islamise the North, not to talk of adding the rest of Nigeria.

Nobody wants to Islamise or Christianise anybody in Nigeria beyond instances of elite experimentation with divide and rule tactic. Even as diseased as our level of development, Nigeria has advanced beyond the radius of a Theocracy. A Theocracy would be as messy in Islam as it would be in Christianity. We must make a distinction between the religious character of contemporary protestations against the distressing nature of modernisation in the developing world and the theocratic imagination. Only such a sociologically distressed scholar would fail to make that distinction after examining Liberation Theology in Latin America and much of recent political Islam. Instructively, the US, for example, has analysed Boko Haram in terms of modernisation failure.

More importantly, Islamisation of Nigeria is not the politics of the elements of the fraction we are talking about and of which Buhari has been a member since 1983. As a class fraction, they certainly haven’t advanced Nigeria qualitatively but we have no way of knowing what might have been the alternative if they have not been the dominant fraction. And even now, it is a cause for worry given the average age of the key actors here being 70+. Where is the next such coherent group in whom, individually and collectively, we can take Nigeria and its existence as settled, whatever the class rascality? It’s more a case of preferring the devil you have experienced to the angels yet to be encountered! So, it is not the excellence of this fraction but their attitude to the idea of Nigeria even as they are unable to transcend problem solving.

Once again, what the Chibok girls tragedy illustrates is how it is the multitude (both in the sense in which it is used in the Bible and by ‘dissident’ scholars) that suffers. This is true of the civil war as well as of June 12 and of Boko Haram. There lies the imperative for privileging as critical but more emancipatory discourse of every regime or presidency hence with a view to constructing it so. Is there an example of such a constructive discourse? Yes.

At the NLC Leadership Retreat in Calabar from August 25-27th, the chairperson of one of the sessions prefaced his tenure with the announcement that he had been told that President Buhari had finally launched his development strategy the previous day. He said he still didn’t have the core direction of the strategy as at that time and could, therefore, not make any substantive comments. It turned out that no such thing happened. But when Alhaji Hassan Summonu, the pioneer president of the NLC, rose to comment on the main paper of the session, he came to a point where he said bluntly that labour would not co-operate with neoliberalism.

Speaking much earlier, Ali Chiroma, Summonu’s successor, gave a sharp narrative of the substance of the battle between labour and the Babangida regime in 1986. His narrative is so graphic and powerful that one is almost certain the NLC information management machinery must have transcribed that aspect separately for a full page advertorial. This is because no summary or abridgment would do justice to Chiroma’s presentation that Monday noon as far as Nigeria’s search for direction is concerned than such an advertorial, no matter the cost implication. It is the briefest and yet the most coherent portrait of the ideological context and character of the IBB regime, (not IBB as a person) including its global setting.

The NLC, like the ASUU, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, (MAN) and its sister, the National Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture, (NACCIMA) and like each and every one of us has its own fears about the Buhari presidency but it is not seeing Islamisation where there is none. The NLC is fearful and preparing for combat if the president were to launch a development strategy or an economic blueprint today and we are to find that such a strategy is neoliberal in essence. It would regard such as so sad and depressing a day just as it would be a great day were he to launch a blueprint today and it is a decisive critique of neoliberalism.

Buhari who once said that “the IMF aroused the indignation of all self-respecting and patriotic Nigerians when it started insisting …that the government must carry out its dictates” will hopefully not go the way of neoliberalism. The NLC way is, therefore, our best model of engaging this presidency: critical but constructive. Remember the classic constructivist credo: Anarchy is what we make of it. So will it be in this case: this Presidency too would be what Nigerians make of it.