“When the wicked perish, there is jubilation.” — Proverbs 11:10
“And all the people of the land rejoiced. And the city was quiet, because Athaliah had been put to the sword at the royal palace.” — 2 Kings 11:20
James Shirley 1596-1666 in: “Death the Leveller,” wrote thus:
The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.
Some men with swords may reap the field,
And plant fresh laurels where they kill:
But their strong nerves at last must yield;
They tame but one another still:
Early or late
They stoop to fate,
And must give up their murmuring breath
When they, pale captives, creep to death.
The garlands wither on your brow;
Then boast no more your mighty deeds;
Upon Death’s purple altar now
See where the victor-victim bleeds:
Your heads must come
To the cold tomb;
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.
Death, by staging a theatrical intervention has removed one of the pillars of Nigeria’s democratic sores – the Shua Arab called Mallam Abba Kyari. Nigerians have endured his happy incompetence as this nation’s Chief of Staff to our kakistocratic leader, President Mohammadu Buhari for many years, and this is the time to heave a sigh of relief. The sacrosanct liturgy of not speaking ill of the dead so long lauded by mostly African cultures has been met with a stiff existential confrontations as aggrieved Nigerians are lashing furiously at the death of a man perceived to be a con, manipulator, dictator, smooth operator, tribal jingoist, Fulani defender, oppressor, wicked and irrational despot.
The despotic tiny elites who are variously incapable of responding in any humane and civilised manner to the pain and sufferings of the majority of helpless Nigerians are now sympathy enforcers, asking us to share in the loss of one of their spoilt brats. And as if to add a layer to their class pretences and dormitory hypocrisy, they are offloading sugary panegyrics to a Fulani tyrant who succeeded in desecrating our democracy by shutting the door to alternative ideas that might move this country forward.
What is encircling the public space is a kind of high praises for shameless political actors like Abba Kyari and his dedication to Fulani hegemonic control and his total arm lock on the kakistocratic government of President Muhammadu Buhari. Geoffrey Onyeama, Nigeria’s External Affairs Minister, a man whose ministry has been locked down by the duo of Buhari and Kyari before death, paid a long, flowery and overly sugary tributes to Kyari. Both were friends since 1977 and got on well like a match and petrol. He never saw nor heard anybody say anything bad about Abba Kyari. Here, I could recognise a bizarre code of solidarity among charlatans.
Onyeama rubbished the corruption allegation levelled against Kyari that he was making money and that he collected N500 million from the fine imposed on MTN. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the so-called Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and other talking heads have equally sent out effusive praises for Saint Kyari. Kano State Governor, million dollar man, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, in a shameless allegiance to hierarchical modes of political operation, sacked his Commissioner of Works and Infrastructure, Engr Mu’azu Magaji, for his public euphoria over the death of Kyari.
Indeed, this COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the lies, incompetence, cruelty and despotism that have been wobbling our democracy in stark ways than we ever could imagined. All the declarative registers and the parade of compassionate voices for Abba Kyari in the public are gross display of nauseating hypocrisy and the original sin of Nigeria’s failure as a great nation. From the digital warriors, social media thugs to Agege housewives, Nigerians jubilated over the death of Abba Kyari. Here, stealing is not corruption. Here, hypotheticals become reality. Here, white becomes black.
The Kyarification of Aso Rock was never a myth but reality. Kyarification as political orthodoxy became a monstrous absurdity in the life of Buhari’s presidency. Abba Kyari was the single flaw that undermined the presidency of Buhari. The moment Kyari emerged from the shadows of his taboo status of incorrigibility, he overwhelmed a mesmerised Buhari and within months of his presidency, Kyari ambushed and pushed aside Buhari and became the de facto president of a kakistocratic administration.
Kyari became an evocative figure with peerless power of life and death over all appointed and elected members of Buhari’s government. Kyarification shut off Aso Rock to any meaningful production of social, political and economic exchange which are the core markers of social democracy. What we witnessed under Kyarification was the schizophrenic articulation, domination, promotion, defence and large scale of enthronement of Fulani hegemony over a multi-polar nation of diverse tribes, nationalities and limitless talents.
Kyarification locked down any discursive alternatives to nation building, but rather preferred the normative Fulani worldview with its fixed perspectives of how Nigeria should be governed. Five years on, the Buhari administration has been communicating its consistent failure in all areas of social, economic, political and security indexes. The Kyarification of Aso Rock which surreptitiously morphed into kakistocracy (rule of the worst, the most inept and most vile) has not been able to supply uninterrupted power, roads are impassable, unemployment have reached pandemic stage, infrastructure are lacking, corruption is still endemic, insecurity has rendered Nigeria a failed state, lack of transparency and above all, nobody has been able to disentangle cheerleading from genuine leadership.
Today, Nigeria is a nation in decline. We are prostrate, impoverished and divided along tribal lines. COVID-19 has blown open the Fulani government and its lack of patrician sympathy for the underdogs. There is little to be said of the corruption and inefficiency that dogged the palliatives meant to be given to locked down poor Nigerians. COVID-19 has rattled the senses of our rulers and exposed their superficiality towards real governance.
COVID-19, the microbial killer has removed a man who was at once powerful, immovable, omnipotent, larger than life and impregnable. The death of Kyari will now expose the cynical, corrupt All Progressives Congress that elected President Buhari, a kakistocratic tribal oligarch – a venal Orwellian monstrosity who cannot pronounce Corona virus – into Nigeria’s most powerful office, the Nigerian presidency?
Kyari in life wove his magical spell on Buhari. He was a super predator who unfurled a novel Kyarification ideology into Aso Rock and made it his own seat of authority, bravado and power. Like all great imperial figures, Abba Kyari built mythologies around himself and through aggressive loyalty to a lame duck president, he became a formidable pillar in a Fulani-oriented government known for kakistocracy.
If Abba Kyari was the Judas who betrayed us and held our destiny down; if he was the figure clogging this nation’s aspirational arteries, if he was the head of Fulani cabal that reduced our democracy to comical farce, we just have to thank COVID-19 microbial leveller that removed this impregnable pillar from the democratic process.
President Buhari is now free from the ossifying power of Abba Kyari and his Kyarification assault on Aso Rock. Now he has to repaint his administration of Fulani colouration; refashion a government of true federalism by removing his social tribe that dotted his government and return us back to evanescent optimism much anticipated by all Nigerians.
. tajutijani@hotmail.com.