By Dr. Aliyu U. Tilde

Once, I was landscaping the backyard of the Kaduna house of Maj-General Muhammadu Buhari (rtd), a nephew of his approached me and sought my assistance to gain admission into the Nigeria Defence Academy. I answered him, “Sorry, I do not know anyone there.” Then I asked him a question that would reveal one of the most important hallmarks of Buhari. I said, “Why would you come to me when Oga is your uncle. Let him just give you a note to an officer there and you will surely be admitted into the Academy.” His reply was simple: “General does not issue note to anyone.” That was exactly twenty years ago, in September 1995, when Buhari was PTF Chairman.

Then came the building of the Kaduna Trade Fair complex in February, 1998. I begged the consultants, Afri-Projects Consortium, to consider me for its landscaping. They refused. I rushed to Buhari, for the first time, as his amiable Dr., to intervene on my behalf by “talking” to the consultants. Being a very shy person, I remember, Buhari did not answer me directly. He simply said, “Dr. I only hope it is not too late.” From then, I knew I have lost the job. It was the biggest job I dreamt of handling then. And so, helplessly and very bitterly, I saw it left in the bills the main contractor, G. Cappa, to whom it meant very little.

Since then, I continued to notice in Buhari the same hallmark of non-interference in affairs of others or tarkuhuu maalaaya’niihi as a hadith would put it. It became most glaring in the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, when different aspirants including those who were close to him thought that he will stamp his feet in their support during the contests for the party’s seats and the conflicts that ensued after the primaries of the 2011 elections. Each of them was disappointed that he did not come to his aid. He expects that people should do what is reasonable, obey rules and be honest in conduct. Agreed, many of them will resort to dropping his name at the party headquarters in order to edge their opponents.

It is this standard of conduct he set for himself and it is this bar that he expects others to reach, an expectation that led him many times to disappointment when many of his associates fail to live up it. “The conduct of some politicians is just horrible. I wonder how they even go about it”, he once told me, when Ivisited him to complain to him about an ordeal that I painfully went through for six years since the 2003 elections. Yet, despite the disappointments, Buhari remained where he has always been since his days in the military.

This policy of PMB does not go without its casualties though. There are many politicians, as he observed, that could really be horrible in conduct. When they are dangerously desperate, they will prefer to scuttle everything than give up to reason or accept defeat. This became manifest when his party, the CPC, went to the 2011 gubernatorial elections with multiple candidates in states that it expected to win easily. In my state, Bauchi, it had four on election day. This accorded the PDP an easy victory.

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