Buhari Is Dead? So, What?

 By Obi Nwakanma

Let me begin here by saying that Mr. Femi Adesina is a very dishonest interlocutor of Nigerian history. I really do wish to emphasize the word “dishonest.” Perhaps a stronger word might even suffice, but I am in no mood for invention. I would like it to be as clear, and as plain as possible, that Adesina, a one-time newspaper editor is bent towards hagiography. Buhari found his Shadwell in Adesina. His memoir of his time as Buhari’s factotum, for whom he spent eight in Aso Rock as Spokesman, Working With Buhari, is an annoying insult on Nigerians. In this book, Adesina launched an EMP on truth in aid of Buhari. 

*Adesina and Buhari 

Nigerians cannot recognize the Buhari in that book, nor fathom the credentials of the writer of that tome full of all kinds of subaltern cliches that no serious writer should now be caught using, e.g. “ straight as an arrow…clean as a whistle” Very elementary use of language.  Too many tired phrases that to me, indicate the stasis in which Adesina lived. But that is not the real point. The real point is that, that book, as much as its subject is a lie. When a book is a lie, it marks its time on the shelf. Eventually, it will end up in the dustbin of history; certainly not among the great chronicles of an era.

If anybody wishes to catch a glimpse of that true chronicle, they should leaf through the many public responses to the announcement, last week, of the death of the former president, Muhammadu Buhari. It was as if Nigerians were saying, ok, Buhari is dead? So, what? Much of the feeling did indicate, and record Nigerians thinking, “good riddance” to a man whose legacy now is consigned to the rubbish pile of history. It will sadly be said of Muhammadu Buhari, that he finally destroyed and ruined Nigeria. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is currently following in his footsteps, and will clearly, in the fullness of time, equally get his own just desert. But we speak now of Muhammadu Buhari. A man to whom much was given, but little gained. The nation of  Nigeria offered him too many opportunities and privileges. 

But Buhari’s public life and actions only indicated that he despised Nigeria and Nigerians. He loved his Fulani folk – and that is frankly no problem – but he honored their cattle, more than he cared for Nigeria as a multiethnic entity. It was Buhari of whom Nigeria’s greatest modern musician and exponent of Afrobeat, the inimitable Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, in his bristling song, “Beast of No Nation,” was quoting saying: “I have never heard this before/ When a government says, ‘My people are useless, my people are senseless, my people are indisciplined…” When the British Prime Minister, David Cameron said to the Queen of England, that “Nigerians are fantastically corrupt,” which should have ignited a diplomatic row, Buhari stood, not in defence of Nigerians, but in very sheepish and unstatesmanlike support of the British Prime Minister. 

The problem was not that he was telling an untruth; the problem was that he did not feel the obligation of the leader of a nation to a nation. There is the story of Dr. Peter Onu, the Nigerian diplomat whom everybody wanted to be the Secretary-General of the OAU. Buhari voted against his own countryman, in favor of another African diplomat.  His mission seemed like he came to this world to destroy Nigeria. Born in Daura, Northern Nigeria on December 17, 1942, according to his biographer, John Paden, Muhammadu Buhari did not truly know his father. 

According to the BBC, quoting a 2012 interview, Buhari’s most enduring memory of his father was being thrown off his father’s horse with his one of his many half-brothers. His father, Adamu, a Fulani migrant from Niger, already had 22 children before him, while he was the 13th of his Kanuri mother, Zulaihat. His father died when Muhammadu was only four years. This aspect of Buhari’s biography ought to yield enormous psychological detail, which ought to have been the basis of any psychiatric evaluation of his actions as a public figure. An early dreary, and mean existence, most probably, fashioned him into the man he became: he lacked empathy and had very little emotional intelligence. 

The cruel streak in Buhari was what was mostly mistaken for “discipline.” And Nigerians, suffering from Stockholm syndrome, fell for that fiction in 2015. But I’m ahead of the issue. We already know that Buhari attended the Katsina College. We also know that he was recruited straight out of Secondary School to Officers Training. It soon became an issue when it was required of him to present his basic educational qualification in fulfilment of the formal INEC requirements to run for president. 

Nigerians searched up and down, and there was no record that Muhammadu Buhari had completed secondary school. The fact of course is, he didn’t write the West African School Certificate exam in 1962. Muhammadu Ribadu, Minister for Defence in Nigeria’s first republic, as part of the bid to close the gap with the south, of commissioned officers in the Army of the newly independent Nigeria, went round Northern Nigeria, and recruited young men like Buhari, his classmate Shehu Yar Ardua, Ibrahim Babangida, Mamman Vasta, Abubakar, etc. Among the thirty-two cadets sent originally for officer’s training in Canada, Buhari was among the set of Northern boys, including Shehu Musa Yar Ardua, who were returned to Nigeria, because the Canada Military Academy could not accept their inadequacies. 

As it happened, they were wholly transferred to the Nigerian Military School, then quickly established in Kaduna, and in six months were commissioned as 2nd Lieutenants, while their Southern peers who had been accepted in the Canada program and at Sandhurst, were still undergoing full Military Training. It was the application of an unjust quota system, which upended merit, and disillusioned Southern officers. 

This “Northernization” policy, of which Muhammadu Buhari was a key beneficiary, and which marked his sense of entitlement all his public life, was one of the remote, underlying reasons for the January 15, 1966, led by Emmanuel Ifeajuna. Key Northern officers were brutally murdered in that coup, as was the Prime Minister of Nigeria, a minority Northerner, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and the powerful Premier of the North, and Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello. But then came the July 29, 1966 coup, Buhari was too junior to be in the heart of the conspiracy, but he was a very key and active operational part in the murder of his Supreme Commander, General Ironsi, and  a host of mostly Igbo Army officers. 

His group organized the pogrom of the Igbo in the North. That event spiraled into war. Buhari was a field commander in the theater of war against the secessionist state of Biafra, and at the end of the war, he was serially compensated. He was of that generation of soldiers that seized Nigeria, and ran it literally to the ground. Buhari was involved in every military conspiracy to seize the Nigerian state. He was governor of the North Eastern state. He was a member of the Supreme Military Council. He was Minister of oil in the military regime led by Olusegun Obasanjo, in which N2.8 billion Naira, the equivalent, approximately today of $30 billion, was reported missing. The missing oil money was the subject of a senate investigation, and an inquiry by the Irikefe Commission which was basically, allegedly pressured to botch the outcome. 

On the last day of December 1983, Buhari and co ruined the life of my generation. They staged a coup, which overthrew the elected, democratic government of Shehu Shagari, and introduced new, cruel, and devastating economic and social realities that continues to haunt Nigeria. He pushed the War Against Indiscipline. But he did not lead by example. He waged war against corruption. He also did not lead by example. The incident of the 53 suitcases was a tip of the iceberg. He put Nigerians under the grinder, and his military colleagues overthrew him in August 1985. General Abacha gave him a sweetheart appointment later as Chairman of the PTF. He botched it royally. I

n 2015, after four attempts, Nigerians elected him a civilian president, and gave him another chance to right the wrongs of which he was a terminal part. Buhari promised to end corruption, the Boko Haram insurgency, and rebuild institutions. But everything Buhari promised, he failed to pursue or achieve. He spent at least 65% of his time in power in London, and died in a London hospital. He was clearly an asset of a foreign government. Corruption grew under his administration. The Nigerian oil account which he managed became even more opaque. Nepotism became the first principle of government. He violated key constitutional guardrails, including invading the homes of Supreme Court Justices and arresting them at midnight, and also brazenly, unconstitutionally, removing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in an unprecedented move. 

Of Buhari’s many crimes against Nigeria, the worst was the importation of Fulani mercenaries who terrorize Nigerians and widen insecurity in Nigeria. Also, in his pursuit of vendetta against the Igbo who did not vote for him, he militarized the once relatively peaceful and prosperous East, and turned it into a vipers nest. His operation Python Dance targeted and killed innocent young men and women, and disappeared many. How about ENDSARS? There has to be, at some point, an independent inquiry into how Buhari misused power and targeted a very crucial part of Nigeria for destruction. 

Death should never free him from his crimes against the nation. Buhari needs to be posthumously investigated and tried. And the Tinubu administration must reverse the renaming of the University of Maiduguri after him. It is sacrilege against a pantheon of knowledge for a man who built nothing.

*Nwakanma is a Florida-based poet and academic