By Louis
Odion, FNGE
Ten
years ago, yours sincerely received an unforgettable call on a certain Sunday
afternoon. It was the ebullient Jimoh Ibrahim that was on the line. The
youthful billionaire, though already a friend, was in a combative mood over the
day's edition of this column published on the back page of Sunday Sun which I edited
then. His beef stemmed not necessarily from the substance of my thesis, but lumping
him among those he considered a tribe of the "unlettered".
 |
| *Buhari |
In the piece, one took potshots at the fierce infighting among the emergent
club of Obasanjo oligarchs. It would seem, one surmised, that whereas OBJ
mentored them on the art of making cheap money by being the biggest
beneficiaries of an opaque privatization programme, they had failed themselves
by not imbibing the apostolic virtue of peaceful co-existence.
At the end of his friendly fire that lasted several minutes, Araba characteristically teased: "My yeye friend, I'm sure you took a strange coffee before writing that. Well, hold on for General."
To my biggest shock, what echoed next in my ears was the clipped, unmistakable voice of General Muhammadu Buhari: "Louis, I just read your article now. Very, very interesting and humorous. In fact, I read and reread some portions that were most humourous. Like the part where you said some went to the university of buying and selling. Keep it up."
I recall the memory of that phone encounter today to partly dispel certain myths about President Buhari and, more crucially, underline the urgency of remedial steps needed by a leader needlessly buffeted by rising dissent from sections of the country on account of what seems a self-derailment or gradual abandonment of habits that had served him so well.
Fleeting as our conversation was that day, I was left with the portrait of not the implacable ethno-religious bigot which his then political rival, OBJ, had splurged fortune to project over the years; but a genial grandee at home anywhere in the country. From my findings later, the phone call was made from the home of Ibrahim, a full-blooded Yoruba from rural Igbotako, a riverine community in
After the 2003 presidential polls which OBJ notoriously won by a "moon slide", not only did the negative profiling of Buhari become official policy, ostracization of any business tycoons suspected of ties with him also commenced pari pasu. Indeed, a good number of the northern business/political elite who seem in a hurry today to form an ethnic ring around him were the same characters Obasanjo had recruited to lead and sustain that dirty campaign.
It was therefore from such a narrow circle – pan-Nigerian nonetheless – who refused to be intimidated or blackmailed that Buhari had to draw for emotional balance and funding of his protracted legal battles against those who "cheated" him in the 2003, 2007 and 2011 polls. Among that fraternity was Tam West-David, a decorated professor of virology, who would cap his cult-like loyalty by writing and launching a book in his worship at personal cost when no one was yet sure Buhari could become a president.
