Buhari, President Of Criminals?

By Uche Ezechukwu

My people, the Igbo, claim that no mat­ter how well a mad man had been ad­judged cured of his mental ill­ness, he must, from time to time, wink and mutter to himself. While meditating on, and read­ing the many comments on the latest verbal flagellation of Nige­rians by – who else – their presi­dent, I started thinking that this proverb can be creatively applied to the case of Nigeria’s current helmsman and his regular talk-down on Nigeria.

*President Buhari 

I remember vividly in 1984 or so, when the gifted musical ac­tivist, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, re­leased that song, in which he described as ‘animal talk’, the tendency of the Buhari adminis­tration to routinely castigate and write off Nigerians, at every drop of the hat. The indefatigable Fela, like most other Nigerians at that time, were angry that Buhari had ruled all Nigerians as lacking in discipline, and had gone ahead herding them in the queues, with horsewhips, like herds of cattle. If Nigerians had been pained, they had mostly borne their pain with equanimity, as not many people had the courage – or fool­hardiness – to complain openly, as Fela had done.

For Buhari in those days, that horrendous indiscipline, against which he inaugurated the elabo­rate ‘War Against Indiscipline’ (WAI) was so pervasive that it even included saying anything that caused embarrassment – even it was true – to those in authority. Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson, The Guardian journalists that got imprisoned for doing their job, will forever, remain the living icons of the intolerance of the era of General Buhari’s first coming.

While Buhari prosecuted his quixotic battles against indis­cipline in 1984 and 1985, there were many people, in and outside Nigeria that had pooh-poohed the whole exercise as hypocriti­cal, arguing that the take-over of an elected government with the force of arms was, perhaps, the gravest form of indiscipline. Even if Nigerians had reluctantly ignored that fact, it was diffi­cult to excuse the fact that his ADC’s father was allowed to pass through the Customs gridlock at the Lagos airport, which was as narrow as the ‘eye of a needle’ with 53 suitcases of ‘whatever’, unsearched, when the coun­try’s entry points were under a vice-like lock, as the nation was embarking on the issuance of new currency notes. After that 53-suitcase saga, Buhari’s WAI campaign became less worthy than the paper on which it was scripted.

No matter how much Muham­madu Buhari has tried since his return to seek power under the democratic dispensation to prove that he has metamor­phosed into a born-again demo­crat, the vestiges of his past dis­dain for the people, has stuck out like a sore thumb. President Buhari has hardly stopped looking down on everybody else, in the typical manner of the military that had been inherited from colonial masters, on the people as mere subjects – idle civilians. He still sees himself as a koboko-wielding soldier, looking down on the rest of us, idle civilians, and wishing to ‘double’ all of us with a frog-jump.

Even though he is doing his honest and transparent best to bring succour to the nation eco­nomically by trying to convince foreigners to come and invest in our country, Buhari has proved to be the worst enemy of that possibility, because as Nigeria’s best and number one salesper­son, he has always presented his country and his people as those that should not be touched with a ten metre pole. Because Nigerians are corrupt, robbers, fraud­sters, cutthroats and other manners of criminals, with which foreign prisons are inundated, why would anybody bring his money and business here, only to be pillaged and out-foxed? After all, they were warned by – who else – their president himself!