By Dahiru Hassan Kera
Ordinarily, silence is advised in the face of political tantrums masquerading as public intervention. It is pretty much PR 101 not to afford every accusation oxygen. It is settled practice that not every rant deserves a reply.
Yet, there are moments when silence becomes dangerously expensive, especially when distortions are repeated with such confidence that the unsuspecting may begin to mistake repetition for truth and bitterness for patriotism. This is one of such moments.
Captain Bala Jibrin’s recent press conference against what he claimed is the planned imposition of Barrister Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar is unfortunate, not merely because of its tone, but because of the poverty of substance beneath the outrage.
While he marketed the rant as a warning to party leaders and a patriotic intervention on behalf of the people of Bauchi State, the news conference was, in reality, a collection of bogus claims, hearsay and half-truths.
Jibrin’s outburst was simply a cocktail of selective memory, emotional grandstanding, carefully curated outrage and unmistakable political anxiety. Where one expected facts, what emerged instead were conclusions in search of evidence — a typical military instinct of shooting first and asking questions later.
For instance, Captain Jibrin repeatedly raised alarm over “accountability” during the M. A. Abubakar administration, yet somehow found no room to present verifiable evidence to sustain such grave insinuations.
This is rather curious because accountability, after all, is not a slogan to be casually thrown around at press conferences to excite applause lines. It is a serious claim requiring proof, documentation and specificity. You cannot cry wolf and disappear when asked where the footprints are.
Then there is his curious reminder that internal friction within the APC contributed to the party’s loss in 2019. I must say, he hit the bullseye on this point and many would agree with him completely. Yes, internal sabotage played a devastating role. Barr. Abubakar himself agrees.
However, there remains one small but consequential point of divergence: what caused the friction? Captain Jibrin does not say. Perhaps because saying it would lead us into uncomfortable territory.
For years, M. A. Abubakar has consistently maintained that elements within the party, interested less in governance and more in unrestricted access to state resources, revolted against an administration unwilling to surrender public funds to political freeloading.
By his account, once it became clear that the treasury would not become an open buffet, some turned the guns inward, sabotaging both government and party from within. Whether one agrees entirely or not, pretending the 2019 fracture emerged from nowhere is intellectual laziness at best and deliberate manipulation at worst.
Captain Jibrin also performed what can only be described as an impressive mathematical exhibition regarding foreign-trained medical graduates sponsored by the state.
He expertly calculated training costs, converted exchange rates and dramatised figures into billions. I must confess, one could even admire the arithmetic discipline. But strangely, the mathematics stopped halfway. And you’ll see why.
He accused the state under M. A. Abubakar of reportedly refusing to employ the graduates trained at such huge cost. Let’s assume M.A Abubakar did refuse to employ these graduates. Did he know why? One would have thought that he’ll put his arithmetic mind to work crunching the numbers for what the employment of these graduates would cost and point listeners to the state of the treasury at that material time.
Sadly, he failed to tell Bauchi people whether the state had the fiscal capacity at the time to absorb them into the payroll without compromising other obligations. This shows that Jibrin simply wanted to create an emotionally satisfying story. Unfortunately for him, governance, even for political dramatists, is not conducted by emotion or arithmetic cherry-picked for headlines.
Since, neither he nor I can independently confirm that M. A. Abubakar outrightly refused to employ these graduates as claimed, time to make him understand, that every responsible government must confront hard questions of affordability before embarking on employment exercises.
This is a matter of fiscal discipline. You do not merely employ because sentiment demands it; you employ because the books can carry the burden.
Then came the emotional centrepiece of his presentation — the case of a female medical student who reportedly incurred an additional $9,000 in costs following pregnancy, childbirth and study extension in Egypt. The story was touching, but touching stories alone do not answer administrative questions.
Captain Jibrin, in his usual flourish, carefully narrated the emotional dimensions of the incident but failed to tell Bauchi people whether due procedure was followed before this lady deferred her study? Was the government properly informed? Did relevant authorities authorise the extension? These are questions he carefully left out of his polished-English news conference.
This is the point where we must respectfully remind the former military officer that in public administration, sympathy cannot replace process. He, of all people, should know this. More tellingly, even his own account betrayed uncertainty. According to him, the government “reportedly” refused to clear the balance. Reportedly? Really?
Since when did hearsay become evidence? One need not be heartless to recognise that unfortunate situations do not automatically impose financial obligations on government, especially when those situations arise from deeply personal decisions. It is regrettable that the young woman experienced difficulties. No decent person celebrates hardship, no less a governor sworn to advance the welfare of the people.
But Bauchi is home to thousands of ambitious youths desperately waiting for educational opportunities. State sponsorship, as we know, is a privilege, not a limitless insurance policy against private life decisions.
Therefore, one cannot unilaterally interrupt a publicly funded programme, expand its financial implications and assume taxpayers must automatically shoulder the consequences without scrutiny. This is not done anywhere.
And since Captain Jibrin brought morality into politics, let us expand its frontiers. Where was the husband when she signed the bond to complete the programme within a stipulated timeframe? Pregnancy, unless science has changed overnight, is not an individual enterprise.
Therefore, if two adults, one of them a medical professional in training who can’t be said to be unaware of processes for controlling pregnancy jointly made decisions leading to prolonged academic interruption, especially one capable of gulping huge sums of taxpayer money, why must the burden automatically become public responsibility? One is genuinely surprised that, unlike typical military men, Captain Jibrin failed to interrogate what role personal accountability played in this matter.
Jibrin also proudly informed us that it was Babagana Umara Zulum who eventually settled the outstanding cost. While I’m not sure why he shared this piece of intel, I believe Governor Zulum deserves appreciation from the people of Bauchi. Curiously, however, Jibrin failed to tell us when this payment was made. Was it before or after M. A. Abubakar had left office, and under what circumstances? Again, since we are talking morality, the people may reasonably ask why his supposed outrage never translated into personal intervention if the matter was so morally urgent.
If $9,000 was convenient enough as a political talking point at a press conference, one wonders why it was not convenient enough to mobilise support for the woman.
Seriously, it is disappointing when people who should know better decide to play the ostrich by burying their heads in the sand. The fact that the young woman was sponsored abroad using scarce public resources is privilege enough. Now Captain Jibrin is suggesting the state should normalise study extensions occasioned by personal choices — and he says this with a straight face. Does he even understand how many students $9,000 could sponsor in Nigerian universities, even for medicine and allied health fields? Perhaps he does not understand that governance sometimes demands difficult priorities.
On this count, everything he said in the press conference could easily have passed for misunderstanding of governance, all of which can be forgiven.
Well, that was until he descended into gutter politics by theatrically asking what M. A. Abubakar had left in Government House that would warrant a return, as though ambition has suddenly become illegitimate when exercised by political rivals. With this argument alone, Jibrin exposed both fear and desperation, as I am sure the people of Bauchi understand him clearly.
It’s shocking that anyone seeking political office would make such a statement. Nigeria’s constitution allows a governor two terms of four years each. M. A. Abubakar served one. So the question becomes: is Captain Jibrin challenging the supposed guber ambition of M.A Abubakar on grounds of constitutionality or on what exactly? Because unless it has suddenly become unconstitutional, immoral or suspicious for Abubakar to seek another mandate, then Jibrin should, if any decency remains, apologise to both Abubakar and the people of Bauchi for such an uncharitable remark.
For someone who has repeatedly contested elections, one wonders whether Captain Jibrin himself would ever settle for a single tenure should fate ever smile upon him.
Everyone already knows the answer. Frankly, it is always amusing when serial contestants suddenly develop philosophical objections to political ambition once the ambition belongs to someone else.
Finally, it is, again, unfortunate, the needless dragging of respected figures such as Isa Yuguda and Muhammad Ali Pate into what is clearly a deeply personalised rant. If Jibrin’s fear will not let him sleep easy with M. A. Abubakar’s ambition looming on the horizon, must he conscript respected individuals into his diatribe? These are accomplished personalities, fully capable of independent political judgment without lectures from an ex-military self-appointed gatekeeper of morality.
Perhaps these wild shots in the dark are some military manoeuvre designed to mask fear in the face of a formidable opponent. Maybe such evasive flying techniques served him well during his days in the Air Force.
Unfortunately, politics obeys different rules. Here, every desperate attempt to mask fear often exposes weakness.
But truthfully, no one can entirely blame Captain Jibrin for entertaining fear that M. A. Abubakar remains politically relevant. No one will blame him for fearing that M. A. Abubakar’s grassroots appeal may outlive elite discomfort, or that the former governor’s return to political reckoning may make quick work of carefully nurtured governorship ambitions.
After all, people rarely spend this much energy fighting ghosts unless they have seen possibility. The real fight is always with what may yet happen. And if I were M. A. Abubakar, I would, assuming there was ever uncertainty about contesting again, consider Jibrin’s desperate salvo as the final ink sealing that decision.
Dahiru Kera, a journalist writes from Abuja