The legacy of Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, who died from complications related to Covid-19, helps us understand how powerful and yet constrained Nigeria's presidency is, writes dvmilola.
Until Muhammadu Buhari won presidential elections in Nigeria in 2015, the general consensus was that the most powerful and visible representative of the state was the president. Buhari, of course, spent months at a time outside the country and has very rarely been seen in public. Most recently he has been criticised for his invisibility during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The idea that governance was hijacked by Kyari and/or a cabal within the presidency, has acted as a convenient foil to evade the current realities facing the presidency. The reality is that the office is not the all-powerful force that outsiders may think. Claims of a government being in the control of renegade forces are hardly new to Nigerian politics, but there are slight differences between those narratives and those around Kyari’s legacy.
President Buhari in a speech at Chatham House in 2015, during his campaign for the presidency, stated that much of his thinking changed with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. It is not far-fetched to believe that one of the noticeable influences on Buhari’s economic thinking was Kyari, who also happened to have served as his economic adviser.
The most visible implementation of these ideas by the government Kyari worked in, are the National Social Investment Programs in 2016, and the work done to institutionalise these and ensure that they endure beyond the administration’s time in government. Previous social intervention schemes have often been treated as pet projects, some created just before the electoral campaign season to serve as patronage networks for politicians seeking re-election.
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