There are the Buharis who are not Buharists. Credit to Nasir
el-Rufai, the most recent and most persistent proponent of the term ‘Buharism’,
‘Buharists’ can be used loosely without guilt — in this case to mean the
political heavyweights or followers in whose eyes Buhari can do no wrong and
must, therefore, never be criticised.
As there is still no proof of any ideological
struggle underpinning ‘Buharism’, we will have to fall back on el-Rufai to
precisely explain the concept. As the former FCT minister said last month,
there is “a group of Buharists among governors, ministers…” that “wants to
ensure that President Buhari runs in 2019”. But it seems some members of the
first family are, knowingly or unknowingly, ‘un-Buharistic’.
Zahra Buhari, President Muhammadu Buhari’s
daughter, unsettled the presidency with a late-September Instagram post
implicitly accusing the management of Aso Rock clinic of corruption. To be
honest, Zahra’s questions, asked with the hashtag StateHousePerSecPlsAnswer,
are valid.
“More than N3billion budgeted for the State
House clinic and workers there don’t have the equipment to work with? Why?”
read the post.
“Where is the money going to? Medication only
stocked once since the beginning of the year? Why? State House Permanent
Secretary please answer.
“Why isn’t there simple Paracetamol, gloves,
syringes… Why do patients/staff have to buy what they need in the state house
clinic?”
The supposed grouse
With the benefit of hindsight, there is real
possibility that Zahra was merely providing the voice-over to mother Aisha
Buhari’s thoughts, because roughly 10 days after her Instagram outburst, Aisha
fell just short of embarrassing Husain Munir, Chief Medical Director (CMD) of
Aso Villa Clinic.
At a stakeholder meeting on Reproductive,
Maternal, Nutrition, Child Advocacy and Health and Nutrition (RMNCAH), which
held at the banquet hall of the presidential villa in Abuja exactly a week ago,
Aisha said: “The Nigerian health sector is in very poor state, sorry to say the
least. I am happy the CMD of Aso Clinic is here, is here around? Dr. Munir or
his representative? Okay, he is around…
“If the budget is N100 million, we need to
know how the budget is spent… I’m sure Dr. Munir will not like me saying this
but I have to say it out. As the Chief Medical Director, there are lots of
construction works going on in this hospital but there is no single syringe
there, what does that mean? Who will use the building? We have to be good in
reasoning. You are building new structures but there is no equipment, no
consumables in the hospital and the construction is still going on.”
On the surface, Aisha appears to be primarily
concerned about the “poor state” of the health sector, and secondarily about
the clinic’s frivolous spending or possible corruption and misappropriation of
funds. The latter will be discussed later but analysing the real motives of the
twin outbursts can’t be deferred for a further second.
The real grouse
Although buried in the equipment-versus-drugs
criticism, Aisha’s real anger is that she couldn’t access the State House
clinic during her illness. Elsewhere in her speech that same day, she gave
herself out: “…as you are all aware, Nigeria wasn’t stable because of my
husband’s ill health. We thank God he is fully recovered now.
“If somebody like Mr President can spend
several months outside Nigeria, then you wonder what will happen to a common
man on the street?
“Few weeks ago I was sick as well, they
advised me to take the first flight out to London, I refused to go. I said I
must be treated in Nigeria because there is a budget for an assigned clinic to
take care of us.
“I insisted they call Aso Clinic to find out
if the X-ray machine was working, they said it was not working. They didn’t
know I was the one who was supposed to be in that hospital at that very time.
“I had to go to an hospital that was
established by foreigners in and out 100 percent. What does that mean? If
something like this can happen to me, no need for me to ask the governors’
wives what is happening in their states.”
It is obviously fashionable to criticise a
government, but lest we’re carried away, Aisha Buhari is fighting for herself,
for her “husband”, for the “governors’ wives”. Zahra and Aisha are both
fighting for the political elites, not for the masses, some of who are now
hailing them for speaking out.
Aisha and Zahra are part of the
government
Had the two women been fighting the cause of
the hoi polloi, they wouldn’t have waited for the first
family’s unsavoury encounters with the State House clinic before speaking out
against a government that they’re part of. Since their outbursts, neither Aisha
nor Zahra has, for example, visited some of the public health facilities in
Abuja, personally or through a proxy, to see how the poor are being
shortchanged daily by their government. Neither woman has told us what efforts
she made behind the scenes to get the President to investigate the Aso Rock
clinic.
Zahra may have tried to explain away her post
and why she would rather call out the Permanent Secretary than “ask my father”,
but it is still inconceivable that she cannot see the damage to her father’s
image. Zahra argues that “the President can’t be at every point… can’t be
monitoring everyone’s post”, but it’s the clinic inside the President’s abode
we’re talking about here. If Buhari cannot fix the Aso Rock clinic, how on
earth will Zahra or Aisha convince the people that he can fix the larger health
sector, or even the country itself? Their public upbraid of the clinic is
self-indictive, unless they can prove that they tried, but failed, to privately
get the presidency to address their complaints, which is itself a dent on the
plot of the Buharists to return Buhari to power in 2019.
Now that we’re here
A previous investigation by TheCable on
the difficulty of getting paracetamol or cotton wool at the clinic did not seem
to pique the interest of the presidency. But now that Aisha and Zahra have
spoken, what will be the President’s excuse for silence?
The combined N3.1billion budgetary allocation
to the clinic in 2016 and 2017 is higher than the combined allocationto all the tertiary healthcare centres in
the country! A State House clinic richer than all of the country’s tertiary
centres cannot be struggling with drugs. Who knows, Buhari may soon set up a
probe committee on the clinic. Never mind that the committee’s report may be
binned, eventually. If Dr. Munir and Jalal Arabi, the State House Permanent
Secretary who oversees the clinic, were worried about the outbursts from Zahra
and Aisha, somebody must have told them: “Keep calm, ‘baba’ will do a Babachir
again!”
Soyombo, Editor of the International Centre for
Investigative Reporting (ICIR), tweets @fisayosoyombo
Original piece via thecable
