Wailing For Buhari's Waning Popularity

By Suraj Oyewale

Abdulhakeem is the name of my two-year-old son, but we fondly call him Baba from birth due to his resemblance of his grandparents.  At the height of President Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity before and shortly after the March 2015 presidential elections, my neighbors added ‘Sai’ to this alias, to form ‘Sai Baba’, the phrase used to hail President Buhari, which means ‘only Baba’.

*Buhari 

A few days ago, while having a walk on my street with the boy, I came across two of such neighbors, and while one, as usual, was hailing my boy as ‘Sai Baba’, the other interjected, with fury: “Please don’t call the boy Sai Baba again, Sai Baba is in Abuja doing nonsense.” That was how my neighbors stripped my boy of the alias they gave him.

I walked away thinking: So this is how life is? The same Buhari that these gentlemen were proud of just last year to voluntarily want to share name with, is now the man they despise so much that they don’t want their neighbor’s beloved son to take after again? The reason is simple: they had just come back home after hours of queuing and fighting at the fuel station to buy petrol to fill their generator, which is what they had to resort to due to the power outage they had been experiencing for weeks. They had thought that, with Sai Baba in power, the era of spending hours at the filling station was over, or that there would not even be the need to resort to their generator every day.

The above experience is one of the many I come across everyday in the last three months. From the market woman in Obalende to the tricycle operator in Ajah, the story has been the same: things are hard, this is not the change we voted for, we expected a better deal from Sai Baba.  

Expressing my worry to a Buharist friend, he tried to downplay this pulse of the street, I dared him to go the nearest newspaper stand or board a BRT from any point in Lagos and try to say Buhari is doing well, and see whether he would not be literally skinned alive! That’s how angry people are.

As someone that believed in the Buhari project and expended a great deal of intellectual resources to actualize a Buhari presidency, I owe it a duty to express my worry through the same open medium I used to sell him.

The common men on the street are the easiest to lose support of, because they’re usually unidirectional, and they care probably only for things that affect them directly. The trader in Isale Eko or the barber’s shop operator in Apapa does not care whether one looting general is going to prison, he only cares about fuel availability, transport fare, power supply and water – at least, before anything else. Herein lays the problem with the current trend of things.