Buhari, President Of Criminals?

By Uche Ezechukwu

My people, the Igbo, claim that no mat­ter how well a mad man had been ad­judged cured of his mental ill­ness, he must, from time to time, wink and mutter to himself. While meditating on, and read­ing the many comments on the latest verbal flagellation of Nige­rians by – who else – their presi­dent, I started thinking that this proverb can be creatively applied to the case of Nigeria’s current helmsman and his regular talk-down on Nigeria.

*President Buhari 

I remember vividly in 1984 or so, when the gifted musical ac­tivist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, re­leased that song, in which he described as ‘animal talk’, the tendency of the Buhari adminis­tration to routinely castigate and write off Nigerians, at every drop of the hat. The indefatigable Fela, like most other Nigerians at that time, were angry that Buhari had ruled all Nigerians as lacking in discipline, and had gone ahead herding them in the queues, with horsewhips, like herds of cattle. If Nigerians had been pained, they had mostly borne their pain with equanimity, as not many people had the courage – or fool­hardiness – to complain openly, as Fela had done.

For Buhari in those days, that horrendous indiscipline, against which he inaugurated the elabo­rate ‘War Against Indiscipline’ (WAI) was so pervasive that it even included saying anything that caused embarrassment – even it was true – to those in authority. Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson, The Guardian journalists that got imprisoned for doing their job, will forever, remain the living icons of the intolerance of the era of General Buhari’s first coming.

While Buhari prosecuted his quixotic battles against indis­cipline in 1984 and 1985, there were many people, in and outside Nigeria that had pooh-poohed the whole exercise as hypocriti­cal, arguing that the take-over of an elected government with the force of arms was, perhaps, the gravest form of indiscipline. Even if Nigerians had reluctantly ignored that fact, it was diffi­cult to excuse the fact that his ADC’s father was allowed to pass through the Customs gridlock at the Lagos airport, which was as narrow as the ‘eye of a needle’ with 53 suitcases of ‘whatever’, unsearched, when the coun­try’s entry points were under a vice-like lock, as the nation was embarking on the issuance of new currency notes. After that 53-suitcase saga, Buhari’s WAI campaign became less worthy than the paper on which it was scripted.

No matter how much Muham­madu Buhari has tried since his return to seek power under the democratic dispensation to prove that he has metamor­phosed into a born-again demo­crat, the vestiges of his past dis­dain for the people, has stuck out like a sore thumb. President Buhari has hardly stopped looking down on everybody else, in the typical manner of the military that had been inherited from colonial masters, on the people as mere subjects – idle civilians. He still sees himself as a koboko-wielding soldier, looking down on the rest of us, idle civilians, and wishing to ‘double’ all of us with a frog-jump.

Even though he is doing his honest and transparent best to bring succour to the nation eco­nomically by trying to convince foreigners to come and invest in our country, Buhari has proved to be the worst enemy of that possibility, because as Nigeria’s best and number one salesper­son, he has always presented his country and his people as those that should not be touched with a ten metre pole. Because Nigerians are corrupt, robbers, fraud­sters, cutthroats and other manners of criminals, with which foreign prisons are inundated, why would anybody bring his money and business here, only to be pillaged and out-foxed? After all, they were warned by – who else – their president himself!

 If the way President Buhari has presented Nigeria from out­side our shores – in the USA, South Africa, India and else­where – had been adjudged con­demnable and undiplomatic, his performance in the United King­dom, recently, has been without comparison. Speaking to The Telegraph, a key news organisa­tion, our president was quoted as saying that Nigerians were so criminally-minded that they hardly deserve being welcomed into the United Kingdom. Most Nigerians, especially those who are in the Diaspora, working very hard daily, performing marvellously in different areas of human endeavour, to earn a liv­ing and place Nigeria’s name and reputation on the world map, had felt very insulted at such a presidential faux-pas that indiscriminately threw saints and crooks alike in the same pit.

Many of them, as well as Nige­rians at home have been speak­ing out angrily, pointing out that we are anything but criminals. Yes, Nigeria, like any other coun­try with endless years of clueless of poor and incompetent lead­ership must have criminal ele­ments in its midst, but that hardly qualifies the country to be tarred in a wholesale hue of criminality. Nigerians all over the world have taken to the social media to slam Buhari for being so unpresiden­tial in his stereotype of a country whose interests he had sworn on the Koran to defend and correct. One is often wont to wonder whether it is inferiority complex or lack of understanding of the obligations of a national leader or even the failure of informa­tion managers that makes our president to so often sell our country short before the world.

Perhaps, unknown to our president, Nigeria, with all our current domestic problems is not anywhere near one of the worst countries, crime-wise, in the world. Leaders of such countries like South Africa and Brazil where criminals and cut­throats reign supreme never tar their people in putrid colours. At a time, where you could be murdered by merely walking alone on the street in Durban, Johannesburg or Cape Town, their leaders like Mandela, had marketed the country so well to the world that everybody want­ed to go there and invest. They even became the first nation in Africa to be awarded the host­ing rights of the Mundial. I have never heard or seen any leader that castigates his country before foreigners. I would be happy to see anybody point out one such leader to me.

In spite of the havoc the likes of Buhari wreak on Nigeria’s im­age, there are still some ‘daring’ foreigners and journalists, who have held their breath and come to Nigeria, with gritted teeth, only to discover to their pleas­ant amazement that Nigeria has been sinned so much against, through the types of vile stories that are told about it.

One cannot blame Buhari’s handlers too much if one under­stands the difficulty in handling ‘these people’ who believe they know what to say and how to say it – an ailment that affects most people who are and have been in uniform. Something tells me that his handlers would be writhing in pain. Perhaps, it would help them if they manage to inform him that the title coined for him, after his Telegraph outing, by a Nigerian blog, to wit, the ‘president of criminals’, is gaining currency.

And if he does not like that ti­tle, he should desist from seeing and addressing his countrymen and women, as criminals.

*Ezechukwu is the Chairman of the Editorial Board of The Authority newspaper. He writes a weekly column for the paper published every Monday (ezechukwu1@gmail.com)