By Remi Oyeyemi
President
Muhammadu Buhari, has shown that he enjoys sycophancy. He appears to revel in
it. He swims in it. He eats and drinks it. He definitely loves it a lot. The
echoes of praise – singers are sonorous in his ears. The cacophony of
sycophants translates to rhythm of rhymes in his ears. He adores the way
boot-lickers make his shoes shine. The cringing around him seems to make him
feel whole. It is a revelry not grounded in reality. And if he continues with
this attitude to governance, it is easier to see how he would end up. Any
president who is already accepting any form of nomination for a second term
towards the end of his first uneventful year in office has to be less serious
minded than expected.
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| *Buhari |
The party leaders who are behind this are not friends of President Buhari. To
begin to offer him the ticket of the Party three years out at this point in
time is premature, sycophantic and inimical to the country’s progress. It is
aimed at bringing the President down and ensuring his failure. But Buhari himself,
cocooned in self aggrandizement, inebriated in self importance and intoxicated
by egoism could not see the danger of the Greek Gift. His crapulent myopia
could not avail him the opportunity to see how such a decision was not in his
own best interest.
The implication of this is very
huge. It suggests that President Buhari wants to be president just for the sake
of it and not for the interest of Nigeria
Rather than focus on the
challenges of putting Nigeria Nigeria
According to a recent report in
the media, the combined worth of Presidential Fleet is $390.5 million (NGN
60.53 billion). This fleet includes two Falcon 7X Jets, two Falcon 900 Jets, a
Gulfstream 550, one Boeing 737 BBJ, one Gulfstream IVSP, one Gulfstream V,
Cessna Citation 2 Aircraft, and Hawker Siddley 125-800 Jet. The President’s
party APC criticized the previous president, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan for
profligacy. Refusing to dispose some of these Jets to recuperate some money and
put an austere style in place makes the President to look like a hypocrite.
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| *Remi Oyeyemi |
Not only that, it has also been
reported in the media that Buhari’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources ,
Dr. Ibe Kachikwu and the Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank have been riding
the “top-rated Canadian made private Jets chartered regularly by the immediate
past Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Allison–Madueke.” If one
knows President Buhari very well, he would not do anything about this. He would
keep silent and hope that this goes away quietly. With everything that have
manifested so far in this Buhari administration it is becoming more evident by
the day that President Buhari is as profligate as former president Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ).
All this is apart from the
increasing lack of salary payment to workers across the country; non–payment of
pension to retired workers across the country; increased degeneration in power
supply knee-capping industries; increased scarcity of petrol; high cost of
food; breakdown of law and order as evident in increased kidnapping, armed
robbery and assassinations; worsening religious crises as evident in the
massacre of the Shiite faithful in Kaduna and adopted guerilla warfare by the
Boko Haramites. Put into this mix the active war of the Fulani herdsmen against
Nigeria
It is in the middle of all these
woes that an insensitive caucus of the ruling party, All Progressives Congress (APC),
is already offering the second term candidacy to President Buhari. Is this a
reasonable course of action? How is this helpful to the country? How is this
supposed to move the country forward? Is this party about the welfare of
Nigerians or just holding power for the sake of it? What is the objective of
this kind of action at this point in the administration of Buhari? Does it mean
that the sufferings of Nigerians do not bother the leaders of the ruling party?
Which of the sycophantic party leaders is behind this opprobrium?
In addition to the insensitivity
of the leadership of the APC, some of the supporters of Buhari just keep
defending him as he stumbles from one incompetent act to the other,
gallivanting from one foolish act to the other and moving from one error to the
other. The supporters of President Buhari do not really care whether people are
dying on the streets because of lack of petroleum or because of high cost of
food. They do not care if millions of government workers have not received
salaries. They do not care if Nigerians are dying in hospitals across the
country. They keep using GEJ as a whipping boy at every turn and for
everything. And if one remembers correctly, GEJ was President of Nigerian
before Jesus Christ was born!
The supporters of Buhari are
like Islamic Jihadists who believe in things not seen but things hoped for.
They are like the fundamentalist Christian crusaders who are ready to kill like
Emperor Charlemagne who murdered over 4,000 women and children in a single day
because they were not Christians. The Buhari supporters come across as
indoctrinated, narrow-minded, tunnel-visioned, fascistic and oblivious to
reality. They refuse to accept the right of any Nigerian to criticize their
man. The label and name-call even the most fair-minded critic of President
Buhari. They shriek like shoats in search of slop. To them, facts do not
matter; reason does not matter. And neither does logic.
Nothing matters to the
supporters of Buhari except to support him faithfully and blindly. With their
attitude they are making it difficult for President Buhari to have second
thought about his mistakes and correct them. With their attitude they are
making Buhari to believe that he could do anything and he would still get their
support. They are trying to make Buhari believe that he could do no wrong while
is he is going from one perverse act to the other. Yet the right attitude is to
praise the President when he has done anything right and hold his feet to fire
if he goofs or is not making the right call.
We all know that Buhari is not
perfect. We know that as a human being he would make his mistakes. We expect
that he would be wrong on some issues. But the least Nigerians could do is to
remain engaged. They should praise him when he does well and should criticize
him when he goes off the track. But the challenge here is that President Buhari
is accomplishing more wrongs than successes. Buhari supporters, nevertheless,
are not more patriotic than other Nigerians regardless of their party
affiliations. Every Nigerian has a duty to watch the acts and the behaviors of
the president and his men. This is what democracy is all about.
What the party leaders did by
endorsing President Buhari for 2019 is like embarking him on a cockroach while
convincing Buhari that he is on a horse. They are humiliating him while they
make him believe that they are praising him and that he is indispensable to the
future of this 170 million people. The supporters of Buhari are dragging Buhari
around with his behind scrubbing the dirty floor while making him believe that
he is having the best ride of his life. The Buhari supporters think they are
being loyal by supporting him blindly when they are actually engaged in active
betrayal of the president. They are making a fool of him and he not realizing
it, is ironically wallowing in it.
In the parlance of Yoruba
cosmology, a cockroach ride is a concept to describe someone who is deceiving
himself or allowing himself to be deceived. What is presently happening to
President Buhari is analogous to this concept – riding a cockroach in the
pretentious belief that he is riding a horse. When you ride a horse, your feet
are held aloft on the two sides of the horse and the move is smooth. But when
you ride a cockroach, your sitting format is not only discomforting, you are
immovable, stagnant like a statue without any hope of progress. There is the
need for President Buhari, his party and supporters to get real.
“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have
been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do
not shrink from this responsibility – I welcome it.”
- John F. Kennedy, in his
Inaugural Address January 20, 1961
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@OyeyemiRemi
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