What is the
significant significance of President Muhammadu Buhari to us in contemporary
Nigeria? For readers who possess a medical or psychological or religious or
even chauvinistic perspective he is Mr. President, who, always in his Northern
medieval-like chausses, impresses or tries to impress as an answer to the
illness, to the sickness of our contemporary times.
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*President Buhari |
For those readers with
a forward-looking view he is a mere undertaker, who proffers no constructive
plan to living Nigerians who are being denied living wages and fabulous
education and bodily and economic health they direly need. The man has simply
fluffed his three years plus pre-presidential election promises and wishes. And
his new next level theory – which I won’t bother to read – will not make him
the saccharine president of our dreams. His next-level wishes must enter our
Nigerian psyche as those of a political and presidential homunculus.
Politically, his
next-level theory is not one which we should believe and accept uncritically.
We can’t step into the same river twice (Heraclitus must be turning well in his
super-ancient Greek grave!). If previously we believed and accepted our
president uncritically, this time we should question sincerely his pious
wish-fulfillment as that of a con president of homuncular morality and sapless
or energy-less religiosity.
But some persons there are who view not the
president as a con man of impeccable democratic credentials or of morality or
of integrity or of religiosity. They want us to direct our resentment at
members of his exclusive cabinets – that is, members of his respective kitchen,
parlour and mosque cabinets. These are the cabinets of the presidencynologists
of illusions, half truths, faked, fussy emotions, lamentable morality, bogus
patriotism, and grotesque religiosity, and great destroyers of our democratic
and cultural values. Our president sees and acts as his negatively
pussy-footing cabinets of incompatible presidencynologists force him to see and
act.
The only exception is our president’s bed-room cabinet consisting only of
his dearest and dearestpretty, pretty, who has always itched sincerely to
liberate the masses of her countrymen and countrywomen from the unwholesome
pressure of our Nigerian world of rotten habits. She is the only rebel and
revolutionary in a gathering of “hyenas,” as she wants us always to view her
husband’s presidential predicament. The thrust of my preoccupation is yet to reach where it must reach. Buhari’s is
a regime that thrives on gossip. And the gossip derives from rumours. Thus
consciously and unconsciously, we may read and interpret this presidency as one
in which the players have put Buhari under the compulsion that enables thorough
investigators of Nigerian politics and our contemporary psychology to focus on
the rumour fabric of his presidency. Indeed, rumour, or gossip is an
overwhelming characteristic of Buharistic Buharism.
This thrust goes home.
It is perhaps the principal significance of a presidency in which a
pre-presidential election celebrity who became president consciously forced his
presidency’s readers, historians and interpreters squarely to view his
celebrity-status as a slip-up of his military ego and years of soldiery service
and “impartiality” which culminated in his briefly brief soldierly
head-of-state-tenure. This is not news. What perhaps is news is that Buhari has
forced us to abandon the science of his presidential politics and governance
for the gossip of his presidential politics and governance. And a sumptuous
gossip of Buhari’s presidency relates to his knack for prisoners. Yes, the man
loves to take prisoners, especially from the camp of those who offended his
neurotic psychology since his military years of service up to the former
President Jonathan dispensation.
Presidential rumour-mongers, who are poor
managers of rumours (and gossips) allege that Colonel Dasuki who has been in
detention or prison since President Buhari ascended the presidential throne is
being given more than the dose of medicine the colonel dispensed to Buhari when
“Maradona” Badamosi Babangida torpedoed PMB as military head of state in the
nineteen eighties. Colonel Dasuki’s current travail thus must have its origin
in the doctor’s consulting-room – if ever he was taken there – that Buhari, the
over-thrown general, visited in his years of psychological deprivation when he
fell flat from military power and glory. Dasuki, the rumour-mongers and
gossip-barons stressed, was Buhari’s psychological tormentor-in-chief. Buhari
hear am well well. The man see oba for Dasuki hand!
This rumoured or alleged fact brings out with
dazzling distinctness Dasuki’s detention neurosis or negative prison dreams
based on, or better, fathered by an un-enlightened presidential prejudice. This
alleged pleasure principle of despotic or presidential vindictiveness should
have no place in our polity- and jurisprudence. Why take prisoners when they
will not be allowed to enjoy the jurisprudential enlightenment of modern
societies?
Until he is proven guilty we must accept that
Dasuki is indispensably entitled to be treated decently as an innocent and free
man who must not be a victim of any of his victimizers hell-bent on
manipulating the science and practice of our jurisprudence and courts. Is it
not more than axiomatic that our jurisprudence and courts strive for an
“impartial, unbiased and inclusive truth” and fact? Dasuki rightly and richly
deserves all his human rights. It is a rare curiosity that Dasuki’s bosses – of
the remote past and recent past – are escaping the power drive of his gaolers
when they should have been taken as prisoners as well.
Or was – or is -he the
only “looters” in the land, in this land of lands? Why the dazzling
distinctness of the one-sidedness of the Buharistc theory of punishment or of
justice or of vindictiveness? If Buhari must take prisoners, he must do so
comprehensively and in such a manner that should not allow us to view him as a
clear picture of the resentment against the spirit of our contemporary society
of might is ever right. He was voted to right the wrongs, malformations and
sicknesses of our country without being prejudicial, vindictive and untrue to
his psychological, political and historical task.
Perhaps he is waiting
to win the next presidential election for another term of four years before
taking the really big and mighty guns in and outside his party as prisoners who
have in varying degrees desecrated our democratic, political, historical,
economic, educational and cultural values. But he and his presidencynologists
are gregarious animals of abnormal ethics and values who cannot win the ear of
the multitude even if they unfortunately win the next presidential election,
which unfortunately, they likely will win again. But they will have the almighty
Boko Haram insurgents to contend with, the almighty Boko Haram dare-devils, it
is tragically too late for them – Buhari and his cohorts – to give the worst of
it. (The recent Metele massacre of our brave and courage soldiers, who went to
battle, it is alleged or rumoured, with seventeen century weapons, speaks
volumes). Yet to gain everlasting fame which he may fully deserve Buhari, our
relentless commander-in-chief, may instruct – no, order, command – his troops
to kill them all, to kill all the Boko Haram bastards, and come back alone with
no prisoners if the worst comes to the worst – a task enough for a whole life’s
work.
But he will come; he will come, the
lion-hearted messiah of justice and ripe and rich values. He will come to
cleanse our land. Like this writer, he is not a taker of prisoners.
*Afejuku, scholar and
poet, is Professor of English and Literature at the University of Benin
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