To many Nigerians, President Muhammadu Buhari is a phantom, taciturn Jubril from Sudan; to the president himself, and his traducers from the outlawed Republic of Biafra will agree, he has been hibernating but has only just woken up sometime last week; to Boko Haram insurgents and insurrectionists, he is a Muhammed Yusuf from Niger Republic; and to bandits and kidnappers, he is an unserious perjurer. Dynamism of this sort either makes a leader enigmatic or miasmic. This is a choice which the now awakened president must make over the next two years to counterbalance the past six somnolent years of painful governance.
But, bandits not only think him unserious, they appear keen to emasculate him for reneging on certain nebulous promises they claim he made to them. Represented by his Chief of Staff, Ibrahim Gambari, the president has in the past week noted that criminals should be dealt with as criminals, that they will not be granted amnesty (cleverly evading the Gumi complex), and that criminals should be dealt with without ethnic profiling. These are excellent standpoints, except that the bandits have called his bluff and advised him to appear before them in person for a dialogue or they would continue apace to wreak havoc. Making judicious use of surprising media coverage, the bandits said last week: “The president should personally come and preside over the talks. When he was campaigning, he travelled all over, why would he not do it now? He does not take these peace talks seriously and everyday people are being killed. There is no day that someone is not killed between Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna, Sokoto and Katsina. There is no tribe that is spared, gunmen kill, soldiers kill, and vigilantes kill. Whoever you see with a gun today in Nigeria, he uses it to kill people. You may not know but if I were to tell you the situation of things in this country, you will cry. Even the president will cry.”
Criminal or otherwise, the bandits make a strong case; they just may not know they are making it. They clearly do not regard the president seriously. Bandits are not usually this bold, despite their daring and callousness. But with the Buhari-led presidency, and going by the comments of several misfiring governors and hyperbolic clerics, they are emboldened enough to think that they can get away with anything. Indeed, they kidnapped students in Kaduna, right under the president’s nose and virtually in his own backyard. They carried on about their usual damning enterprise Thursday night by invading a school in Zamfara and spiriting away 300 female students. Despite the Chibok and Dapchi episodes, Nigerians are still not used to these things and the scar does not tingle like a déjà vu. No, the wound opens afresh as the country sorrows with the affected parents while the emasculated presidency continues to be all bark.
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