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The problem with Buhari’s candidacy

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BY JASON OGUEJIOFOR
It was the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo who once said, in an­swer to the late zik’s assertion that we should forget our differ­ences, that it was better instead for us to understand our differences, as a more sustainable path to nation-building. Awo’s argument was that it was difficult to wish away our differ­ences because they did, in fact, ex­ist and that, in the end, a man would be a good Yoruba man, or Igbo man or Hausa man first before identify­ing himself or being identified as a good Nigerian.
One couldn’t agree more with Chief Awolowo. For, every one of us, indeed, comes from a tribe– from President Goodluck Jonathan, Olusegun Obasanjo to Muhammadu Buhari. The problem arises when, because of several factors, including lack of personal depth and apprecia­tion of the demands of co-existence in a plural society, we allow our tribal sentiments to becloud our sense of duty and obligations to, and respect of, others with whom we share a com­mon destiny as citizens of one coun­try. It becomes even more tragic, for both the individual and country, if the one who has such limited understand­ing of life outside his or her tribal do­main is an aspiring national leader.
That is the problem I find with the candidacy of APC presidential flag bearer, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari. It is the fact that, by actions and utterance, he seems to exhibit scant national sentiments. With all due respect, the man, in my view, is too much of a proud and self-righ­teous sectional hero who sees others as culturaly and religiously inferior. The examples are legion–of how Bu­hari has demonstrated over time, in actions and words, that he lacks the the sentiments of a national leader and the predisposition, even grooming, to work with others and treat them as equal partners in a plural setup such as ours.
Dr. Femi Aribisala eloquently captured what he called ‘Buhari’s crimes’in his Tuesday column in Van­guard which ran under the broader headline ‘Time to disgrace the self-appointed godfather of the South- West. I will borrow a lot of the exam­ples in that write-up. But, first, let me start from the one I know very well. Gabriel Owoh and I were classmates and friends in Community Second­ary School, Udi, Enugu State, way back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. His elder bother, the quiet, good look­ing Bartholomew Owoh used to come visiting and Gabe, as we used to call him, would call us his friends to come greet his brother. Imagine, then, the anguish all of us, Gabe’s friends that is, felt when Buhari’s high-handed military government, acting on an obnoxious, retroactive law, snuffed the life out of the young man for drug trafficking, acting on the provision of an obnoxious, retroactive law! It’s like making a law in 2016 to punish a crime committed this year, just to make so-called examples of three hap­less young men who probably didn’t know what they were getting into. And you know why? Because Saudi Arabia after which Buhari wanted to model Nigerian law and jurispru­dence, had already started beheading drug traffickers.
Alex Ekwueme was Vice Presi­dent to Alhaji Shehu Shagari (the old man has, by the way, conducted himself rather admirably as a former president and elder statesman). After he overthrew Shagari’s government, Buhari, in a most grotesque reversal of roles, sent Ekwueme who had no executive powers to award contracts or steal money, to Ikoyi maximum prison while Shagari was kept under house arrest in a government guest house in the same Ikoyi. Military tri­bunals that he set up sentenced Jim Nwobodo, Sam Mbakwe, then gover­nors of Anambra and Imo States, to hundreds of years in prison on charges of corruption that were not properly investigated. Similarly, they jailed cerebral Professor Ambrose Alli, then governor of Bendel State and Bisi Onabanjo of Ogun State; both of them never recovered from the ill-treatment meted out to them in prison by Bu­hari’s soldiers. His regime sent Chuk­wuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, who never held public office, to Kirikiri Maximum Prison where he was until the Babangida coup of August 1985. The late Michael Ajasin, the first ex­ecutive governor of old Ondo State was kept in Prison even after they were discharged and acquitted by the same court set up by Buhari to try politicians for corruption.
Aribisala recalls that while Buhari jailed the legendary Fela Anikulapo- Kuti for ‘non-declaration’ of foreign currencies he had legitimately ob­tained for the upkeep of his band abroad, he conveniently allowed the Emir of Gwandu, a prince of the Caliphate, to bring in 53 suitcases whose contents were not declared to Customs, while a currency-change exercise was going on in the country. “He did not just brutalize Chief (Olu) Awotesu (Shagari’s minister of state for agriculture who was detained for nearly two years without trial) and his family,” Aribisala further wrote. “He did the same to Tai Solarin, who was denied medication for his asth­matic condition while in Buhari’s gulag; Ayo Oyewunmi who became blind in Buhari’s detention and Busari Adelakun who died of chronic ulcer, complications developed in Buhari’s jail.” He also recalls that Buhari’s Su­preme Military Council (SMC), the highest military ruling body in the country had 16 members, comprising 11 northerners and 5 southerners, in­cluding one Yoruba.
Unable to garner enough votes to defeat President Jonathan in the 2011 Presidential election, an angry Buhari vowed that the “dogs and baboons will be soaked in blood.” And verily verily, his vow came to pass. The post elec­tion violence in Northern Nigeria on account of Buhari’s transparent loss to Jonathan destroyed lives and prop­erty worth billions of naria. Needless to say, the incident again set the North back by many years.
At the outset of the war against Boko Haram, Buhari was quoted on several occasions as declaring that a ‘clampdown on Boko Haram was an injustice against the North.’ He was specifically quoted by Thisday On­line thus: ‘Buhari: Military Offensive against Boko Haram, Anti-North’.
In 2001, in the heat of the Sharia crisis triggered by the ‘pure’ imple­mentation of the Islamic law in Zam­fara State following the cutting-off of the hand of a thief named Jangebi, as punishment for stealing, Buhari, a former head of state, reportedly told a seminar in Kaduna: “I will continue to show openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is sweeping all over Nigeria…God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the country…” Why would the promotion of Sharia law through­out secular, multi-religious Nigeria be the primary occupation of a former military head of state and an aspiring democratic leader, you would ask.
Other examples abound–of Gen. Buhari’s seeming rigid commitment to the cause of the North and Islam in Nigeria such that he appears un­able to place himself over and above his primordial interests. As a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country, Ni­geria requires a God-fearing leader who will not pander to his ethnic and or religious interests but will be firm in ruling over the country on the basis of equity, justice and fair play. Given such history of bias against people of other faiths and cultures in his official and private conduct, can Buhari be trusted to lead plural Nigeria? At 72, a man is set in his ways. The question is, at 72, can Buhari change? As they say, ask the leopard.
.Oguejiofor writes from Lagos.