oyb:

dude, only one misstep, really ?

what about asking us to pray that the december bombers confess?

what about attributing the october and december bombings to 'demons'

what about his callous 'the show must go on' disregard for nigerians in the october 1 bombing
(MEND had issued a warning at least a week before. our government did not issue any warning, or alert whatsoever, but engaged in a clandestine bungled ' i can't stand the rain' attempt at containment. in any other nation gej would have had to resign for such high handed disregard for his constituents. in nigeria, he tried to turn it political attempting to rope in his perceived competitor, ibb )

cap28:


I also agree with what  you say about Buhari's personal qualities - he does come across as disciplined and reasonably honest in comparison to the likes of OBJ and Jonathan  - thats why i added a further comment above about who i would chose if it were between Jonathan and Buhari.  On the whole we need  a fresh and younger more radical breed of leaders who have not been corrupted by power as i think its now time for these old men to accept that they have nothing new to offer the nigerian people.  

bisiaet:

I'm most dissappointed in Buhari I can not belief it that someone of Buhari in the present dispensation in Nigeria could say this so that means this man is one of the faceless supporters of this mad stuff called sharia wonders shall never ends now I can see why some state remain adamant on this issue now I now who was the big guy behind it.

So in this present world in Nigeria where the margin between christain is not that wide nearly 50/50 someone who is aspiring to be the president can say this and at the end put Nigeria into dissarray and tumble it upside down?

Buhari you dissappointed me in fact you are mad I just hate you from this moment for supporting this unecessary pain, mutilation of human limbs, stone to death and all sort of satanic rule on fellow human that goes with evil sharia madness then you could support terrorism or even be a funding father for terrorist if sharia is normal to you. Buhari must be mad come heaven & earth  Buhari will not smell power again till he die. I'am so enrage and angry with this man because I so much respect him a lot for his stand point and rigidness but not knowing he is one of those believers of wickedness shame on you Buhari. May you rotten in H E L L I thought before you are human beign not knowing you are just one of those A S S H O L E.

Jakumo:

Oyb, the only rationale that I can discern for seeking to assign blame for every criminal act that occurs while ANY given president is in office would be a futile hope borne out of desperation, to discredit that leader, by political opponents who are reduced to clutching at straws in search of non-existent scandals to bring the object of their displeasure down.  Extrapolating the logic of your argument further into absurdity, should we also blame President Goodluck for all home-invasion and bank robberies that took place in Nigeria since he assumed office ?

From day one of his tenure as Nigerian president, there has never been a shred of proof linking incumbent Nigerian President Johnny Goodluck with any act of terrorism within Nigeria's territorial boundaries, and beyond that, there is absolutely NO reason why a sitting president who is well on his way to earning a second term in office would sponsor bombings or any other destabilizing act of terror.  

By the way I join you in mourning the untimely passing of Nairaland contributor Bawomolo, whose sense of humor I greatly miss.

Barkono:

The arch bishop of canterbury suggested a similar thing for Britain.
Archbishop of Canterbury argues for Islamic law in Britain. ww.timesonline.co.uk/tol, Read full text of Archbishop's lecture on Islamic Law in Britain

We have all over england access to islamic banking, which is coded and guided under islamic sharia jurisprudence. Charity organisations etc.
We want an open system in our country. Like you said, you are neither a muslim or a christian, what you desire is your "freedom". Allow the muslims of nigeria say what is good for them.

Jakumo:

I often wonder why those Bin-Laden bearded Muslims, who IMMIGRATE to the UK in swarms, feel so compelled to try and IMPOSE their own culture on a nation that is largely Christian, and whose women are NOT obliged to go about dressed in comical Batman costumes. All such immigrants who clamor for Islamic law in the UK, or in any other largely Christian nation in Europe and beyond, should be politely shown the door, so they can be deported back to their camel-herding wastelands where they can stone women and amputate petty thieves to their heart's content.

These fundamentalist fanatics flock in droves over to the UK to abuse the welfare, education and medical care system, over-burden the unemployment benefit programs, and live in free or subsidised housing, but then, to show their gratitude for all those freebies, they insult their hosts and try to forcibly convert entire neighborhoods into little Afghanistans or Pakistans. Such ungrateful parasites should be kicked the phuck out of the UK, to go back where they came from.

Jakumo:

I often wonder why those Bin-Laden bearded Muslims, who IMMIGRATE to the UK in swarms, feel so compelled to try and IMPOSE their own culture on a nation that is largely Christian, and whose women are NOT obliged to go about dressed in comical Batman costumes.  All such immigrants who clamor for Islamic law in the UK, or in any other largely Christian nation in Europe and beyond, should be politely shown the door, so they can be deported back to their camel-herding wastelands where they can stone women and amputate petty thieves to their heart's content.  

These fundamentalist fanatics flock in droves over to the UK to abuse the welfare, education and medical care system, over-burden the unemployment benefit programs, and live in free or subsidised housing,  but then, to show their gratitude for all those freebies, they insult their hosts and try to forcibly convert entire neighborhoods into little Afghanistans or Pakistans.  Such ungrateful parasites should be kicked the phuck out of the UK, to go back where they came from.

Barkono:

@Lagosboy:
Don't mind that unrepentant slave master, Jakumo.May the blood and spirit of our fore-fathers, from senegal to bight of benin to gold coast, who were carted without their will in Jakumo's slave ships, and thrown to sharks in the oceans,all in the name of slave trade torment and punish Jakumo for ever and ever, amen.

cap28:

YOu are an african who has been forced to adopt a foreign culture, speak another another mans language and practices another man's religion and yet you accuse a tiny minority of muslims in the UK of trying to impose their culture on a majority white population who live in seperate communities away from these minorities - how did you work that out?

Jakumo:

Cap28, in the immortal words of Benny Hill, when you ASSume, you make an AZS out of U and ME.

safari SA:

I hope you guys will not be too lazy to read this. and watch the words in bold. Maybe we call Sanusi a Jihadist!!!!!!!!!!

BUHARISM: Economic Theory and Political Economy
By

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi

[LAGOS]

July 22,2002

(All views are strictly personal)

lamidos@hotmail.com



Some readers and writers alike have done Buhari incalculable damage by viewing his politics through the narrow prism of ethnicity and religion, risking the alienation of whole sections of the Nigerian polity without whose votes their candidate cannot succeed.

The reality, as noted by Tolstoy, is that too often history is erroneously reduced to single individuals. By losing sight of the multiplicity of individuals, events, actions and inactions (deliberate or otherwise) that combine to produce a set of historical circumstances, the historian is able to create a mythical figure and turn him into an everlasting hero (like Lincoln) or a villain (like Hitler). The same is true of Buhari. There seems to be a dangerous trend of competition between two opposing camps aimed at glorifying him beyond his wildest dreams or demonizing him beyond all justifiable limits, through a selective reading of history and opportunistic attribution and misattribution of responsibility. The discourse has been thus impoverished through personalization and we are no closer at the end of it than at the beginning to a divination of the exact locus or nexus of his administration in the flow of Nigerian history. This is what I seek to achieve in this intervention through an exposition of the theoretical underpinnings of the economic policy of Buharism and the necessary correlation between the economic decisions made and the concomitant legal and political superstructure.

Buharism was a stage the logical outcome of whose machinations would have been a transcendence of what Marx called the stage of Primitive Accumulation in his Theories of Surplus Value. It was radical, not in the sense of being socialist or left wing, but in the sense of being a progressive move away from a political economy dominated by a parasitic and subservient elite to one in which a nationalist and productive class gains ascendancy.

Buharism represented a two-way struggle: with Global capitalism (externally) and with its parasitic and unpatriotic agents and spokespersons (internally). The struggle against global capital as represented by the unholy trinity of the IMF, the World Bank and multilateral “trade” organizations as well that against the entrenched domestic class of contractors, commission agents and corrupt public officers were vicious and thus required extreme measures.

Draconian policies were a necessary component of this struggle for transformation and this has been the case with all such epochs in history. The Meiji restoration in Japan was not conducted in a liberal environment. The Industrial Revolution in Europe and the great economic progress of the empires were not attained in the same liberal atmosphere of the 21st Century.

The “tiger economies” of Asia such as Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand are not exactly models of democratic freedom. To this extent Buharism was a despotic regime but its despotism was historically determined, necessitated by the historical task of dismantling the structures of dependency and launching the nation on to a path beyond primitive accumulation. At his best Buhari may have been a Bonaparte or a Bismarck. At his worst he may have been a Hitler or a Mussolini. In either case Buharism drawn to its logical conclusion would have provided the bedrock for a new society and its overthrow marked a relapse, a step backward into that era from which we sought escape and in which, sadly for all of us we remain embedded and enslaved. I will now proceed with an elaboration of Buharism as a manifestation of bourgeois economics and political economy.

The Economic Theory of Buharism

One of the greatest myths spun around Buharism was that it lacked a sound basis in economic theory. As evidence of this, the regime that succeeded Buhari employed the services of economic “gurus” of “international standard” as the architects of fiscal and monetary policy. These were [b]IMF and World Bank economists like Dr. Chu Okongwu and Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, as well as Mr SAP himself, Chief Olu Falae (an economist trained at Yale). At the time Buhari’s Finance Minister, Dr Onaolapo Soleye (who was not a trained economist) was debating with the pro-IMF lobby and explaining why the naira would not be devalued I was teaching economics at the Ahmadu Bello University. I had no doubt in my mind that the position of Buharism was based on a sound understanding of neo-classical economics and that those who were pushing for devaluation either did not understand their subject or were acting deliberately as agents of international capital in its rampage against all barriers set up by sovereign states to protect the integrity of the domestic economy. I still believe some of the key economic policy experts of the IBB administration were economic saboteurs who should be tried for treason. When the IMF recently owned up to “mistakes” in its policy prescriptions all patriotic economists saw it for what it was: A hypocritical statement of remorse after attaining set objectives. Let me explain, briefly, the economic theory underlying Buhari’s refusal to devalue the naira and then show how the policy merely served the interest of global capitalism and its domestic agents. This will be the principal building block of our taxonomy.[/b]

The argument of Buharism, for which it was castigated by global capital and its domestic agents, was that these conditions did not exist clearly enough for Nigeria to take the gamble. First our major export, oil, was priced in dollars and the volume exported was determined ab initio by the quota set by OPEC, a cartel to which we belonged. Neither the price nor the volume of our exports would be affected by a devaluation of the naira. As for imports, indeed they would become dearer. However the manufacturing base depended on imported raw materials. Also many essential food items were imported. The demand for imports was therefore inelastic. We would end up spending more of our national income to import less, in the process fuelling inflation, creating excess capacity and unemployment, wiping out the production base of the real sector and causing hardship to the consumer through the erosion of real disposable incomes. Given the structural dislocations in income distribution in Nigeria the only groups who would benefit from devaluation were the rich parasites who had enough liquidity to continue with their conspicuous consumption, the large multi-national corporations with an unlimited access to loanable funds and the foreign “investor” who can now purchase our grossly cheapened and undervalued domestic assets.

In one stroke we would wipe out the middle class, destroy indigenous manufacturing, undervalue the national wealth and create inflation and unemployment. This is standard economic theory and it is exactly what happened to Nigeria after it went through the hands of our IMF economists under IBB. The decision not to devalue set Buharism on a collision course with those who wanted devaluation and would profit from it-namely global capitalism, the so-called “captains of industry” (an acronym for the errand boys of multinational corporations), the nouveaux-riches parasites who had naira and dollars waiting to be spent, the rump elements of feudalism and so on.

Buharism therefore was a crisis in the dominant class, a fracturing of its members into a patriotic, nationalist group and a dependent, parasitic and corrupt one. It was not a struggle between classes but within the same class. A victory for Buharism would be a victory for the more progressive elements of the national bourgeoisie. Unfortunately the fifth columnists within the military establishment were allied to the backward and retrogressive elements and succeeded in defeating Buharism before it took firm root. But I digress.

This raises a question I have often been asked. Do I support Buhari’s decision to contest for the presidency of Nigeria? My answer is no. And I will explain.

First, I believe Buhari played a creditable role in a particular historical epoch but like Tolstoy and Marx I do not believe he can re-enact that role at will. Men do not make history exactly as they please but, as Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire, “in circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” Muhammadu Buhari as a military general had more room for manoevre than he can ever hope for in Nigerian Politics.

Second, I am convinced that the situation of Nigeria and its elite today is worse than it was in 1983.Compared to the politicians who populate the PDP, ANPP and AD today, second republic politicians were angels. Buhari waged a battle against second republic politicians, but he is joining this generation. Anyone who rides a tiger ends up in its belly and one man cannot change the system from within. A number of those Buhari jailed for theft later became ministers and many of those who hold key offices in all tiers of government and the legislature were made by the very system he sought to destroy. My view is that Nigeria needs people like Buhari in politics but not to contest elections. Buhari should be in politics to develop Civil Society and strengthen the conscience of the nation. He should try to develop many Buharis who will continue to challenge the elements that have hijacked the nation.

Third, I do not think Nigerians today are ready for Buhari. Everywhere you turn you see thieves who have amassed wealth in the last four years, be they legislators, Local Government chairmen and councilors, or governors and ministers. But these are the heroes in their societies. They are the religious leaders and ethnic champions and Nigerians, especially northerners, will castigate and discredit anyone who challenges them. Unless we start by educating our people and changing their value system, people like Buhari will remain the victims of their own love for Nigeria.

cold:

Was it not this same Buhari that came out in strong support of the Miyeti Allah Association of which he is the chairman after members of his association went on a killing spree in the remote town Biu in Jos,slithing throats of women and children and razing buildings?Was it not this man who insisted his members did the right thing cuz the natives drew first blood?Is this the same man running to be elected as a democratically elected president in Nigeria?Wonders shall never cease.