INTRODUCTION
My closing disappointment for 2018 was when a whole incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari travelled all the way from Abuja to Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, on December 28, 2018, with several governors and VIPs to kick off his re-election campaign. I watched with shame how, in the over-one-hour event, no single speaker was able to articulate the gains allegedly so far made in the current unexpired term nor present a clear road map warranting a fresh term being sought for.
I felt that, if no one could speak on his achievements, at least, President Buhari, being the vision carrier, ought to have justified why he is seeking the mandate of Nigerians again. Rather, he felt it was the perfect time to drop his same old bland and worn-out lines on corruption, security and economy, all of which he has abysmally failed on. I watched, with pain and anger how one speaker blamed the PDP for what he called its 16 years’ failure. I was perturbed. Because the said speaker was a PDP commissioner for four years and PDP governor for eight years, making a total of the 16 “wasted” PDP years he gleefully mouthed. But, because blaming the PDP is a convenient escape route from the ignoble failure of the PMB/APC government, the less than mammoth crowd for a flag-off presidential election clapped, with what I consider some form of idiocy and queer sense of historical revisionism.
There is an acclaimed acceptance by Nigerians that President Muhammadu Buhari has failed for the second time in his headship of Nigeria. First, as a military dictator, this time, as a presumed democratic leader. The failure is not just visible nationally, but even the international community has recognised it and is not leaving anyone in doubt about their observations. They now relegate diplomatese to the background and attack the government frontally.
The US, UK and EU countries have just done so. Rather than officials of the clueless government shutting up, it uses its attack dogs to bark and bay at these powerful nations’ blood. I laughed. I am still laughing.
The global backlash under reference here is not the recent remark of the American President Donald Trump, which captured the Nigerian President as “lifeless,” neither is it on the new revelations by two of the world’s leading financial houses, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and International Monetary Fund, as well as the Economic Intelligence Unit of the Economist, which harmoniously agreed that “a second term for Mr. Buhari raises the risk of limited economic progress and further fiscal deterioration prolonging the stagnation of his first term particularly if there is no move towards completing reform of the exchange rate system or fiscal adjustment that diversify governments revenues away from oil.” The government, assailed on all sides by mass failure and citizens’ disenchantment, now resorts to reckless statements, using bellicose and belligerent posture against foreign countries.
Garba Shehu, SSA to PMB on publicity, warned US, UK and EU countries to keep off our internal affairs because we are a sovereign nation. Nasir El-Rufai, Kaduna State governor, has just told the international community that their citizens will be carried to them in “body bags,” if they meddle in the coming elections, which they have programmed for rigging.
Recently, Amnesty International, in a report titled “Harvest of Death: Three years of bloody clashes between farmers and herders,” found that 57 per cent of 3,641 recorded deaths occurred in 2018 alone. The report stated: “the security forces were often positioned close to the attacks, which lasted hours and sometimes days, yet were slow to act. In some places, the security forces had prior warning of an imminent raid but did nothing to stop or prevent the killings, looting and burning of houses.” This is gory.
In a previous report by Legit.ng, Amnesty International found that nearly 4,000 people lost their precious lives in the crisis between herdsmen and farmers in some parts of the country.
The international human rights organisation also blamed the Nigerian Federal Government for not securing the lives of her citizen, noting that the primary duty of government is to protect the sanctity of life and property. Going further, the organisation asked if anyone has ever been prosecuted, as over 4,000 people lost their lives. Of course, the question was merely rhetorical, as no one has ever been prosecuted, in spite of Nigeria being turned into a bloodbath field.
To many who had any hope of peace and security in this administration, it is now crystal clear that, in 2015, the public overestimated the capacity of the President, who had promised to lead from the front, being a former military ruler. PMB had in turn underestimated the nation’s ailments and what ‘change’ was needed cure them.
PMB simply mouthed it without any indepth analysis. Buhari has not met the expectations of even his most ardent, vociferous, obsequious, cheering and uncritical supporters, including his own wife. Buhari unbelievably believes he has run a difficult race well. He thinks he deserves another chance despite self-inflicted wounds, like the odious cases of Abdulrasheed Maina, Babachir Lawal, NNPC, NHIS, Adeosun, and a multitude of other avoidable gaffes and “gates.” But most Nigerians and lovers of democracy are convinced that PMB has frittered away undeserved opportunities, exhausted his governance capacity and has reached his human limit.
Never before in the history of Nigeria, since 1914, has any government been run with such tired feet and befuddled head as is visible to all Nigerians under the leadership of Buhari. If only he had kept focus and not wasted useful time and energy on lamentations, blame game and vindictiveness, he perhaps would have received accolades from his wife and other Nigerians. Obama met a prostrate America after the 9/11 catastrophe that befell America under President George Bush Jnr. But, he trudged on, unfazed by the monumental rot he was confronted with. Within three years, he had already taken America out of recession. Buhari, on the reverse, has spent three and half years blaming PDP and Jonathan. We thought he saw the “failure,” hence he mouthed “change”? So, what has changed?
Nigerians are totally fed up with Buhari’s once-upon-a-time mythical reputation and the well-oiled propaganda built on it. They are tired of unfulfilled promises, sheer narcism, endless self-congratulation and self-glorification. They are nauseated by PMB’s never-ending sanctimoniousness and assumed sense of redemptive messianism. The self-deceptive suggestion that the current failed administration could suddenly and inexplicably spark to life in its second term is a superstitious nonsense. I cannot help pity the naïve incredulity of its supporters for the farce. It is a fairy tale from the Arabian nights. It is what, in Macbeth, Act 5, scene 5, by legendary William Shakespeare (1616), Macbeth called “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
The sinking economy and the failed fight against corruption orchestrated by the government against its political foes and critics are resoundingly disheartening. If the only failure of President Buhari was in the glaring lack of infrastructural development, Nigerians may probably not have been so eager to change the “change.” However, the masses are aggrieved that, since PMB cannot find any project to commission, he should at least have commissioned peace. He has done neither.
Insecurity has grown new wings and new arrogance. Citizens who leave their homes are no longer certain of returning alive, or meet their loved ones. The former Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, and former Chief of Administration of the Nigerian Army, Maj-Gen. Idris Alkali, were gruesomely murdered within four months of each other. Alkali was allegedly killed by a gang of protesting youths along Abuja-Bauchi-Jos road on Monday, September 3, 2018, while Badeh was gunned down along the Abuja-Keffi road by suspected assassins on Tuesday, December 18, 2018.
ISSA, a non-governmental organisation with a worldwide membership of professionals involved in national and international security and strategic policy, stated in its special report of Friday, December 28, 2018, that the two men were killed to hide what it described as the pattern of corruption in the current military leadership in the country. Specifically, the report obtained by The Punch alleged that Badeh was murdered to prevent him from divulging in court the details of corruption, which it said had grown even more rampant in the current defence leadership. The murder of both officers was, therefore, not a mere coincidence, it observed.
Even as an accused in a pending trial in court, Badeh had a right to life. It is for this reason that many believe that it was too much a coincidence that the four soldiers detailed to protect Badeh were said to be conspicuously absent, some kilometers far away from where the Air Chief Marshal was horrendously killed like a chicken. Even a villain has right to life. Fortunately, Badeh was not a villain. He was never so pronounced by the court. He was a patriot who had served his fatherland meritoriously, rising to be the first Chief of Air Staff and the 18th Chief of Defence in Nigeria. He died a victim of our dysfunctional system that could neither protect him nor our children routinely kidnapped and carted away like goats and sheep from their schools by insurgents. Farmers are killed most grisly, or driven away from their farms by marauding herdsmen. Travellers are kidnapped for rituals or ransom and, of course, thousands die a slow death following consumption of fake drugs. Our cities and villages are ravaged, taking on the form of Hobbesian Leviathan society, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and cheap, ghastly and horrifying.
Nobody deserves to die in the manner Alex Badeh and Maj-Gen. Idris Alkali were killed. His death, beyond the mere rhetoric of “presidential order” for the arrest of the attackers, should be investigated and his murderers immediately brought to justice.
Going by this prevailing state of insecurity in the nation, one would have expected that President Buhari would by now have wept himself to voluntary resignation or retirement. He is rather campaigning for re-election.
(To be concluded next week)
Thought for the week
“The one sure way of participating in the process of nation-building is to vote on the Election Day.”
(Mohit Chauhan).