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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.
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