Showing posts with label General Dwight Eisenhower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General Dwight Eisenhower. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Buhari ‘Bankrupted’ Nigeria, But Who ‘Made’ Him President?

 By Olu Fasan

Last week, I wrote about the lack of accountability in Nigerian politics. I submitted that most Nigerians are unquestioning about their leaders, and uncritically accept whatever they’re told. Nothing proves this better than the self-serving narrative that Bola Tinubu’s government pushes about what it inherited from the Buhari administration, and the sympathy some Nigerians profess for Tinubu.

*Tinubu and Buhari 

Recently, Nuhu Ribadu, National Security Adviser, said the Muhammadu Buhari government bankrupted Nigeria. “We have inherited a very difficult country, a bankrupt country,” he said. Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State later said: “Tinubu inherited an administration that was almost comatose.” Tinubu himself set the tone earlier in a speech titled “After Darkness Comes the Glorious Dawn”, saying: “We are exiting the darkness to enter a new and glorious dawn.” Unmistakably, the Buhari administration he succeeds is “the darkness”. 

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Buhari: When Silence Means Contempt

By Sam Omatseye
The president has always seen silence as a mark of dignity in a time of crisis. When he opens his mouth eventually, he spews out venom that neither gives him nor the office he occupies any form of dignity.
*President Buhari with Baru
Tall, gaunt, lean of face with a straight stare and loping strides, his smile comes across more like a lickspittle than a royal. Yet, behind that simpering exterior is a granite heart. However, little cunning or high thinking dresses up his hearty resolves. So, in the final analysis, what we have is not the Buhari of nobility but a pretension to the high moral act. Sometimes that façade confronts us in the form of silence.
Occasionally he does speak. When he breaks his silence, he ruptures not only peace but logic. As I have noted in the past, Buhari’s soul is a battle between the martial impulses of his breeding and the entitlement of his ambience as a Fulani hierarch. And then there is a third. He has managed, since his ouster from power as head of state, to cultivate the talakawa. So, he sees himself as a sort of royal with a common touch. He is simultaneously on top and at the bottom, a prince and pauper, a head and herdsman, at once erupting from the floor and swooping down from heaven.