Going into the rescheduled 2019 presidential election in a few days, Nigerians are presented with clearly contrasting choices in the two frontline candidates. Before investing their democratic capital in either President Muhammadu Buhari of the ruling APC or Atiku Abubakar of the opposition PDP, Nigerians should be fully aware of the implications of the actions of their thumbs on voting day in the next four years and beyond. For those who are either undecided or contemplating voting for APC’s Buhari, it is important to ponder an a few realities associated with his presidency thus far.

In APC’s Buhari, Nigerians are served a dish of a far-right political figure whose candidacy is buoyed by the most conservative ethno-geographic and religious elements from the Muslim North and a sprinkle of desperate power-mongering collaborators from other parts of Nigeria. This is notwithstanding the fact that northern Nigeria currently bears the greatest burden of Buhari’s four-year misrule. As far as these conservative elements are concerned, its power for its symbolic ethno-geographic and religious domination of others only, even at the expense of socio-economic development of their part of the country.

Buhari enjoys the endorsements of a faction of the ultra-conservative Izala Muslim sect, which is an offshoot of the Wahhabi-inspired Sudanese brand of Salafism and is generally considered to be the ideological incubator of the current Boko Haram insurgency. For several decades, the Izala sect has been the vanguard of puritan Islamist revivalism in northern Nigeria and has been the vessel of mass radicalisation, wherein the ideals of a global Islamic state beginning a cluster of Sharia-administered geo-entities. To achieve this ideal of a global Islamic state, the scriptural status of Christians and Jews as people of the book [believers] had to be changed to unbelievers while also equating actions they interpret as innovation by fellow Muslims to disbelief. These are the ideals the Boko Haram insurgents are struggling to forcefully achieve through warfare. Recall that President Buhari was an ardent supporter of the Sharia movement in Nigeria in the early years of the Fourth Republic.

President Buhari is also supported by Miyetti Allah, the pan-Fulani socio-cultural group, on whose behalf it is believed that killer herdsmen drawn from all over the Sahel are ravaging farmer communities throughout Nigeria to allow for more grazing land for cattle. The group has variously justified mass killings in the Benue-Plateau trough on either the encroachment on ancient grazing routes or the enactment of anti-open grazing laws by affected state governments. President Buhari, himself an ethnic Fulani, appears to share these sentiments as discernable from statements from his government as well as the clear lack of political will to rein in the killer herdsmen.

As a result of President Buhari’s unrepentant provincial proclivity as reflected in his elevation of northern sectionalism to a near state policy, he has been able to inspire a wave of ethno-geographic and religious populism, leading to mass hysteric support in the Muslim North for him. Deploying his dishonest integrity as a façade, President Buhari has been able to retain the conviction among his support base that every of his bad actions are predicated upon his good intentions.

As with typical far-right political figures, President Buhari considers differences in opinion as dissent, which must be crushed, as seen in his government’s intolerance of criticism and opposition. If Buhari abhors fundamental hallmarks of liberal democracy such as the competition of ideas on good governance, then he considers the legislature and judiciary, which are the superstructures of democracy, an anathema to his own definition of good governance.

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At every opportunity, Buhari demonises the principle of rule of law as the main enabler of indiscipline and corruption. It is as though Buhari is frustrated by democratic structures of governance and in turn determined to frustrate Nigeria’s democracy. Buhari’s disdain for the due process of rule of law is an open secret.

The media is not also spared the President’s contempt. Openly ignoring, maligning and demonising the mainstream media, President Buhari has greatly diminished its influence as the mirror of society, and is fast losing its hold the accountability of government to the people while paving way for hate speech to thrive through the vessel of alternative but mostly fake news media. President Buhari has displayed an impervious disposition to local news reportage thereby rendering the free press impotent much like a dog, which barks but can’t bite.

Going into election with a basket of rotten mix of far-right fruits has heightened tension in the polity with hate speech flowing freely from the pulpit and ethnic champion’s positioning for electoral victory through every means, including violence. Few days to the presidential polls, President Buhari has refused to take the now famous Goodluck Jonathan message of peace, which clearly elucidates that his or anyone’s ambition is “not worth the blood of any Nigerian,” while also making a commitment to concede victory, if defeated at the polls. Rather, President Buhari has declared that he is undefeatable ahead of the polls at the APC caucus meeting and in what can be best being described as grandstanding, pronounced a death sentence on “ballot box snatchers” in what many observers believe to be a veiled reference to an opposition he feels can only resort to election malpractices to win. This refusal to commit to the Jonathan doctrine may be a strategy to keep his base irately agitated enough in the event that the polls result goes the wrong way. Therefore, a victory for Buhari will have far-reaching negative consequences for the Nigerian state beyond 2019. Apart from the fact that a victory for Buhari will mean a vote of confidence on his leadership of the current state of the Nigerian nation, which has been reduced in worth to the poverty capital of the world, the third most terrorised nation on earth with escalating corruption permeating the entire system, there are other lethal consequences. The unlikely renewal of Buhari’s term as President in the coming polls will be tantamount to an endorsement of his provincial proclivity with its attendant sectionalist tendencies that promote mediocrity over expertise, thereby derailing the Nigerian state. This would translate to the triumph of Buhari’s armada of far-right forces whose disruptive and retrogressive aspirations will influence the directive principle of state in Buhari’s post-2019 Nigeria.

A victory for Buhari in the coming presidential poll will most certainly extinguish the light of liberality in Nigeria’s fledgling democracy. Having come under a barrage of executive harassment and humiliation in Buhari’s first term, the legislature and judiciary as well as other ancillary democratic institutions are most likely to cave in under the mortal fear of renewed, high-intensity oexecutive bullying. This will greatly blur the lines of separation of power, resulting in a rubber stamp legislature and a judiciary that will interpret laws not according to the Constitution but in line with the body language, mood or utterances of President Buhari.

Buhari’s seeming inability to make a clear distinction between issues of political party and government as demonstrated by his drafting of partisans to head sensitive ministries, departments and agencies of government in his first term may assume his victory at the coming polls is a green light to stretch this abnormality further by conscripting heads of security agencies into the National Executive Committee of his ruling APC. With the advantage of a well-oiled fascist propaganda machinery, the opposition, which has been consistently demonised as “looters” and “enemies” of Nigeria, will most certainly cease to exist.  The on-going mass systemic “Buharimania” indoctrination that has created a mob of robotic supporters for President Buhari, to whom he is infallible and does not falter nor fail will in a feat of triumphalism drown any remaining reasonable voices of rational minds. Now forced to shut down or join the “Buharimaniac” choir of ignorance, Nigeria effectively transforms into the most populated Black Animal farm in the world, where Buhari is always right.