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President Emmanuel Macron of France was in Nigeria recently. One of the things his trip achieved was bringing out his host, President Muhammadu Buhari, to speak to Nigerians at a press conference.

It is ironical that Nigerians needed the French leader to prise their President out of his hiding place, but the reality is also that our current batch of leaders think any accountability to the people is beneath them. The Muhammadu Buhari Administration is particularly guilty in this respect and history will record him as one of the most reclusive and arrogant leaders that ever afflicted the country.

Up till the recent past, our leaders still managed to hold regular presidential media chats where they directly addressed issues as they arose in the polity. From Olusegun Obasanjo who punctuated those dialogues with his trademark habit of throat clearing to Umaru Yar’Adua, even Goodluck Jonathan who said the most outrageous things, they still deigned us worthy of occasional interactions.Ideally, in democracies, the President is expected to regularly speak to the media, grant them interviews, address press briefings and even hold town hall meetings. The leader is supposed to be accessible and relate to the people on issues of public policies as it affects them. No responsible leader hides in the presidential palace indefinitely, leaving his clueless proxies to speak his mind.

The media chats were not the best examples of leadership accountability by the way. Their village square format often gave the President the chance to make some upsetting remarks without being appropriately grilled over them by the questioners, but it gave us an opportunity to hear their thoughts on important issues, at least. Presidents took impromptu questions and communicated without his gatekeepers polishing his ideas.

Buhari appeared on the media chat just once, performed poorly and he has never been able to summon the courage to sit down with local journalists since then. His appearance on that programme was a disaster in every respect and the blowback he received must have been so much for his ego that he has fled from that circuit ever since. Now that the general elections are looming, he will probably re-open that channel once again and once they are over, he will pull back on his veil. For a man who was once a soldier and loves to claim that Nigeria remains an indivisible entity because he fought a war to keep the country together, he can be somewhat cowardly when it comes to meeting Nigerians.

The few times Buhari has addressed Nigerians, it has been a one-way communication: he speaks to us remotely through the silver screen where there is no room for feedback. He relates to Nigerians the same way military leaders talked to us pre-1999 – by reading prepared speeches on TV. Those speeches were almost always wooden, lacking any passion and the soldiers’ demeanour as they read the speech was as starchy as their uniforms. Up till now, Buhari – or any of his civilian predecessors – has yet to outgrow that disconnective method of relating to the citizenry.

More:- http://www.lekkigists.com.ng/2018/07/macron-brings-buhari-out-of-purdah.html

Mynd44