President Muhammadu Buhari’s action through his goons at the State Secret Service, aka Department of State Services, has clearly shown that we are dealing with a paranoid leader with a deep distrust for both rule of law and the judiciary. He is behaving like a loose horse at the old Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos. For a converted democrat to complain about civil protests is like a sailor complaining about the sea. He is behaving like a coiled cobra ever ready to spew its deadly venom on anything that crosses its path. This president is behaving like a Dracula elected to be the custodian of a blood bank.
What is unravelling within the interior working of this administration is the spirit of dictatorship. And that spirit has one nature and whatever name we give it, it is recognized instantly by blind devotion and a zealotry that is most often militant, lethal, and is driven by a kind of personal narcissism that sees, adores and accepts no alternative orthodoxy but its own. The spirit is thuggish, reckless, destroys lives, divides the nation, retards progress and stymies the positive evolution of democracy. And, dictatorship spirit, as it is coiling on President Buhari, brings with it its own abuses, horrors and gross inhumanities all in the name of national security.
The President’s action, again, through his goons, has given birth to a kind of ferment; a passion, a kind of thinking on the side of nihilism which is translating onto a raging desire for the very revolution Omoyele Sowore is agitating for. Everybody now wants this revolution – bloody or peaceful. The universal sentiment does not favour neutrality anymore but a total re-description of our democracy and society. The unethical desecration of the court of justice and its jungle absurdity further reinforces the tropes of Fulani/Hausa coloniality that have so long presented Nigeria as deficient, backward, barbaric, brutes, corrupt and a lawless society that is incapable of sound and progressive governance that could lead to genuine transformation of our society.
What is further emerging from President Mohammadu Buhari’s ugly list of disregard for rule of law is a new movement among Nigerians for nascent self-determination through mass civil disobedience and disorder. Also, Sowore’s travails and his state persecution is daily building more solidarities, sympathy and spontaneities for his revolutionary cause.
Sowore, a man of audacious and courage reflex, gained through his old street activism who later morphed into the online scourge of this nation’s looters through Sahara Reporters is, as I write, everybody’s canonical superhero.
President Buhari’s daily consummation of primitive lawlessness and hatred for the tenets of rule of law and democracy is astonishingly shocking. He is seeking to put Nigeria under a firm arm lock of despotism, brutality and police state. He has a desire to dominate, control, seize and capture the nation’s institutions and turn them as loots to be shared by his cabalised Fulani hegemony. Public office appointment has been turned into a shrine where we all have to sacrifice to Fulani/Hausa demon of nepotism.
Under this president, Nigeria has entered into a dark anxiety. His idea of democracy is to molest Nigerians with suspicion, curtail freedom of speech and association, rein in dissenters, pursue impunity and vendetta, tribalised public offices and the total lock down of Nigerians through Police, Army and DSS.
Democracy, under President Buhari’s watch, has been drained of its noble value of allowance for opposition, access, freedom, respect for rule of law, fairness and its protective structure. Rather, this president has converted the power of his office and deployed it to cause trouble, fear, uncertainty, offence, alarm, vex and bring our parliamentary democracy to disrepute through his anti-democratic reflexes. Under Buhari, Nigeria is now shipping into a red zone where we have to live with the death of reason and the imminent disappearance of nuanced conversation through the social media because the banalisation of the political and social space is here. Anybody who write critical comment on his administration will have to contend with endless gun fights with his attack dogs called DSS.
President Buhari who is today very cocky of his own rectitude was, in past incarnation, a believer in changing society through revolution. He used to be a resistance apostle. He was once a revolutionary. That moment of historical blunder in which he called for a bloody Armageddon needs to be replayed here. Before we all become political somnambulist, it is necessary to stay awake and re-enact President Buhari’s explosive call to national mayhem and disorder. This was his May 22, 2012 warning, “If what happened in 2011 should again happen in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in blood.” His desire for victory was what drove his inner demon to sign for revolution. This was Buhari’s hyper radicalism.
If President Buhari who promised fire, brimstones, mayhem and lynching for whoever will dare rig election in February 2015 could be left alone to enjoy a climate of free expression under former President Goodluck Jonathan, why is he denying Omoyele Sowore the same liberty of expression for making a raw cry for revolutionary awakening? Before his victory in February 2015, many Nigerians voiced concern over his tendency to dictatorship. They voiced their concern over his religious intolerance and the desire to turn Nigeria into a fundamentalist Fulani caliphate. Also, there was invisible but powerful suspicion and fear that he is a Jihadist. At heart. In his gesture. These lingering character pollutants were enough to give us a pause and make us rethink.
But for the Yoruba alliance!! The Igbo were more circumspect and restraint. All my Ndigbo friends rejected President Buhari with such a zeal that did not allow for any compromise. Igbo kwenu!!! The Yoruba vision that was fundamentally limited to short term gains guaranteed Buhari’s victory.
The rest is now history. Today we are going through Buharification which is nothing but a byword for tyranny, lawlessness, anarchy, rape of rule of law, use of coercive instruments to suppress freedom of expression, dissent, fascism, dictatorship, tribalism, cabalism, Fulani domination and brutality.
In my column of August this year in a piece, titled: “Fulani Fury: Buhari’s Radicalised Autocracy Against Nigerians,” I made this observation: “Rather than engage, Buhari the ditherer, is meeting every opposition with tyrannical instinct. He is the leopard that cannot change its skin. Liberal democracy has not offered Buhari the deliverance he sore needs from the demons of Decrees 2 & 4 he once used as instruments of terror on helpless Nigerians during his jackboot reign as a military leader – an administration that was shaped by irrational brutality.”
Today, President Buhari has repackaged, reloaded and recalibrated Decrees 2 and 4 to muzzle, maim and shut down Nigerians in their quest for an equitable, just, safe, fair, progressive and peaceful nation. Clannish affiliation to his Fulani stock has hardened him to other voices of wisdom calling for solutions to the existential problems besetting Nigeria”.
Under this government, Sowore has spent over three months without any charge. Under this government there has been primitive abuse of power and processes. Under this government, democracy has been reduced to fascist dictatorship. Under this government, the DSS has been turned into masked Mafia enforcers, gangsters, attack dogs, hounds of hell, lawless Gestapo, rule breakers, Fulani defenders, enemy of democracy and enemy of court orders.
President Buhari, his government and the DSS’s shameful desecration of our temple of justice are the ugly mirror of this nation’s democratic poverty. He has refused to learn from history and the same history will convict him. He has to understand that where freedom is marginalized, unrest and revolution are the first response. Friday 6, December 2019 is Nigeria’s blackest Friday. It shall remain a day of historical tragedy.
. tajutijani@hotmail.co.uk.
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