By Jesutega Onokpasa
Apart from his recent June 12 gimmick, President Muhammadu
Buhari had hitherto never mentioned MKO Abiola or even June 12
in any positive light. In any case, since Gen Sanni
Abacha who stole Abiola’s mandate and whom Buhari happily, thankfully and
gratefully worked for remains Buhari’s hero, then that same Buhari cannot
deserve any moral credit on account of anything he does about June 12, however
laudable.
The bitter truth is that the only viable explanation for his
sudden volte face is that Buhari, seeing his Northern hegemony in tatters in
the Middle Belt thanks to his rampaging cattle herding kinsmen and clearly
perceiving himself to be a drowning man, now finds himself clutching to Abiola
(whom he hitherto never showed any regard for) and to June 12 (which he
hitherto never expressed any fidelity to) for sheer survival.
For whatever Buhari’s positives might actually amount to, any
emotionally detached scrutiny of his antics is likely to leave anyone quite
disappointed at the fellow. Even those very few and far between laudable ideas
that may chance to occur to him from time to time, his clannishness, nepotism,
provincialism and religious bias end up conspiring to render bizarrely corrupt
at every turn. The man seems pitiably incapable of doing any decent thing with
any degree of sustained decency and it is as though some dark and very
mischievous spectre lurks around him to twist his hands into ruining everything
they touch. |
| *President Buhari |
MKO Abiola once said: “Kingibe is a slave of money. The day I
picked him as my Deputy, I started paying him the salary and allowances of a
Vice President. Still, he dumped the struggle and became Foreign Affairs
Minister under the beneficiary of injustice done to us…a man like that can
sell his mother for cash.” It is this same Babangana Kingibe, the man who
betrayed Abiola, his boss – the same Kingibe who, as President Umaru Yar’Adua’s
Secretary to the Government of the Federation, tried to scheme himself into
power when Yar’Adua once fell ill and was flown abroad for treatment (and for
which reason Yar’Adua and Jonathan promptly sacked him) – that was found worthy
by Buhari of a national award on account of the annulled June 12 election!
And as if to add insult to injury, Buhari ensured he honoured
him right beside Abiola whom he betrayed at the behest of Abacha, Buhari’s
hero. Insult aside, it would appear that the only criteria for deeming Kingibe
worthy of the award by Buhari is that he is a fellow core Northerner and so
that not only a Yoruba man, Abiola, would have been honoured. As for Humphrey
Nwosu, he doesn’t get anything because he’s an Ibo man and while still willing
to gamble that he can con Yorubas into voting for him once again in 2019,
Buhari knows that contrary to the laughable bluster of already fossilized
political dead woods like Rochas Okorocha and Orji Uzor Kalu, the Igbo are not
giving him any more than the shorter end of his twisted 97 to 5 percent
electoral stick come 2019.
As for the Niger Deltans, he would have to be living on
another planet to expect in 2019, anything different from what he got from them
in 2015. What he doesn’t realize is that Yorubas are a very difficult people to
fool and he is only wasting his time expecting to be able to do so twice. Even
where one might admit Buhari’s June 12 surprise was a brilliant political move
on his part, we cannot in any good conscience pretend it was done according to
any logic other than the purely Machiavellian.
In the final analysis, it would appear that “Mr. “Integrity”
is learning the game, has descended into the gutter and is beginning to play
his politics in the dirtiest traditions of those whose game he claimed he came
to change. To anyone for whom June 12 was a ray of light, however faint, then
to that same person Buhari can only be located, hidden within the same cloud of
deep darkness that sought to extinguish it’s flame. If light somehow manages to
meet darkness come 2019, then I am sorry for Nigeria
*Onokpasa, a lawyer, wrote from Warri
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