How are Nigerians savouring the multiple ironies, paradoxes and aberrations that are unravelling under a demagogic and effete despotic President Muhammadu Buhari administration that is daily detonating grenades across Nigeria? Of a truth, we can now reveal that President Buhari apparently understands the domestic political benefits of unhinged despotism as a tool to crush the persistent geopolitical tensions that have coiled themselves around Nigeria like poison ivy. He has re-imagined autocracy, and at the same time, valorized the democratic process and set himself up as a man fighting a civil war with Nigerians. The untethering of his once concealed fang against urban and suburban activists, agitators, rights advocates and human rights campaigners is emerging as a self-legitimating pretext to shred rule of law while re-introducing military absolutism into our liberal politics.
First, let me start by stating that societies are mostly redeemed by the actions of individually good leaders and at the same time exposed when such leaders morph into wickedness, tyranny, despotism and wholesale suppression of voices of dissent. Today, this lame duck president is caught in the eternal dilemma of his own making. Four years into the Buhari presidency, he has rolled down the road of infamy, antagonistic resistance to alternative pathways, intolerance, absolutism, dictatorship, oppression and the lionization of libertarian democracy. Have you been keeping an eye on his despotic odometer? Then let us go for a drive.
Those who have been maltreated under his murderous lordship will include Sambo Dasuki, El-Zaky Zaky, Deji Adeyanju, Jones Abiri, Joachim Iroko, Luka Binniyat, Midat Joseph, Abubakar “Abusidiq” Usman, Ahmad Salkida and Samuel Ogundipe to name a few. Yes, the optimism and hope his coming generated in 2015 have been depleted by his rabid anti-democratic tendencies and the slide into virulent lawlessness. People are now questioning the long term viability of our liberal democracy. Under Buhari, democracy looks more fragile and the fragility is further compounded by his stubborn rejection of rule of law as a safeguarding tool against tyranny.
He one said: “Rule of law must be subject to the supremacy of nation’s security and national interest.” Nigeria, as a nation, I must say, is ripe for permissible deviants. Omoyele Sowore is the torchbearer for that trajectory. Evil, in the quotidian sense, is everywhere in Nigeria. How long Nigerians would then continue to be robbed and plundered by the very government elected to meet their welfare? Millions of Nigerians are snared in shitholes and may die unsung in dehumanizing conditions. Nigerians are programmed to be preyed upon without deliverers. Now, that determined Estherian cry of “if I perish, I perish” is written large on the subdued faces of Nigerians. The plundering, they say, is enough! The death, they say, is enough! The incompetency, they say, is enough! The impunity, they say, is enough! The insecurity, they say, is enough! The unassailable argument in our local halls, living rooms and food joints is that Buhari was elected to rescue this nation from the myriad of its horrible aberrations. Nigerians are no longer fooled by his grossly exaggerated and imputed integrity that has been badly eroded by the characters of his ministerial appointments.
In addition, helpless Nigerians are being made prey to rampaging kidnappers who are running amok through the length and breadth of our dear nation. Even in South Africa, Nigerians are sitting targets for xenophobic rascals in collusion with the local police who daily make mincemeat of Nigerian lives. Till date, Buhari has no answer to all the gruesome butchering of his own citizens in Nigeria, South Africa and other foreign lands. Therefore, the conventional wisdom suggests that Nigerians have the right to pour the fury of their anger and encapsulates it into a revolution.
Why? Nigerians have waited too long to be delivered from the hand of hunger, unemployment, power outage, zero infrastructure and brazen killers known as kidnappers and Fulani herdsmen. They have waited to be delivered from the grip of executive inaction to fight corruption, stem bloodbath, stop uniformed criminality, stop Gulag-styled dictatorship and the audacious misuse of state – no, deep state – power in order to stifle public rebellion along with their legitimate protestations. 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 and 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 Muhammadu Buhari has repackaged, reloaded and recalibrated Decree 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.
Nigerians are fighting an undeclared warfare with the Fulani herdsmen. Their diurnal and nocturnal activities have neutered the social existence of the South Westerners and travelers passing through their territories. Professor Wole Soyinka’s intervention and the call on Buhari to declare a state of emergency in the region has been ignored. South West governors are contemplating resorting to self-help. Buhari has continued to legitimatize Fulani’s kidnapping through inaction, body language, partiality, clannish solidarity and his hidden agenda to make Nigeria a colonized Fulanised land. He has never hidden his gleeful display of tribalism and belief in the ethnic superiority of Fulani over and above other tribes in Nigeria. For live evidence of this, check out his appointments – Customs, EFCC, Police, Army, NNPC, DSS, Immigration, etc. He has reinforced, through his appointments, what is now a conventional wisdom among Fulani hegemonists: we do not trust southerners with some appointments in Nigeria.
. [email protected].
