Nothing is working in Nigeria. There is no doubt any more about it. What many persons had said before, long before now, was recently underlined in, of all places, President Buhari’s home city of Daura and home state of Katsina. The terrorists of terrorists visited without qualms the city of Daura and the state of Katsina to give Nigeria the slap of slaps. I hope Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, our one and only “WS our WS” will not mind my re-framing and re-phrasing his pertinent statement a few days ago in this wise.
The greatly great dramatist, poet and critic of myriad thoughts and remarks that have given us myriads of blessings, did not mince words when he said that the abduction of Kankara school boys in Buhari’s home state just as he visited his home city in the state is a slap on the president’s face and a “challenge” to his administration. In fact, it is worse than that. The “challenge” is “merely the latest in the serial stinging slaps across the face of the nation and it draws blood from every sensing citizen.” Well said, more than nicely said, Wole Soyinka, dramatist of dramatists, social critic of social critics and gad-fly of gad-flies. Not only do I desire here and now to express my obligation to our Nobel laureate but also to the kidnappers of the Kankara school boys. Why? Why am I expressing my obligation to the terrorists?
Without mincing words, the terrorists have proved their integrity to us; they have proved to us the integrity of terrorism and its acts in the manner that they have revealed to us that Buhari is not interested in remaining, in continuing any longer, as the current president of Nigeria where nothing is working under his presidency. How could the terrorists dare the president in his den and left softly and easily? The answer is simple. Buhari is no more interested in this presidency. Buhari is no more interested in his presidency, I repeat because he is no more interested in his presidency where nothing tangible and glorious is happening. He gives us the impression that some persons or some forces are forcing him to hang on against his will and wish and whether or not he is fully fit as a fiddle.
The man is in a poor state of quandary. He did not or could not proceed to Kankara to see things first hand. He did not or could not go to Kankara from his nearby Daura home to have on-the-spot assessment of the so much that happened in the secondary school of abduction. Has the president not turned his presidency to the presidency of amusement in the face of the wrath of the havoc his presidency has visited upon Nigeria? And if the president is not well enough or courageous enough to bundle the Kankara terrorists into Black Marias straight to detention places and centres in Katsina, why must we expect so much from him during #EndSARS protests and killings in Lekki? Perhaps that was too difficult a place for him to go to all the way from his bunker in Aso Rock in Abuja.
He didn’t have the patience and stamina to hop or fly or kite his way to Lekki. As a matter of fact, this reason was seemingly why he could not jet to Maiduguri enroute to the rice farm in Borno State where very many rice farmers where mercilessly killed by Boko Haram terrorists or so. Perhaps our great General of yester-years who tamed all bad animals in all jungles and forests in and outside Nigeria is now too faint-hearted to see the sight of blood. This cannot but be an amusing statement to make verbally or in writing. If you deny this and call it anything other than this you are likely to define or call it something else, something more deniable – which cannot but be something false.
In our present circumstances if we think of the nature of amusement that is tragically so or more than tragically so, then we cannot by-pass Buhari and his presidency and our country where nothing works, where nothing is working, where life is meaningless except to his partisans and ministers such as Chris Ngige who is killing our universities and monstrously demeaning Nigerian workers and crushing the will of the masses. So long as the partisans he is too feeble now to control, whose attitudes he is too absent-minded to repudiate mill around him, nothing can ever be right again in Buhari’s presidency
In any case, we cannot but picture him as a president who cannot make any statement ex tempore or address a press conference, or anybody, any official visitor, or audience logically, coherently and chronologically seemingly for even a duration lasting thirty to fifty minutes. Believe it or not, I present, allegedly, rightly or wrongly, this as the reason why, for instance, he did not go to Port Harcourt in the recent past to meet with South-South governors in flesh and blood. After his absence from the initial (first) meeting, a botched one, he made amends by sending his chief of staff at a later date to meet with the governors. He resorted to his now well known style, his well known technique, of not appearing in person to speak first hand to persons and on issues of peculiar or un-peculiar national importance.
Now, the other day, hoodlums were dispatched to Kaduna to harass patriotic Northern Nigeria’s citizens holding a security meeting regarding particularly how to end security challenges in the North. The meeting ended abruptly – in a fiasco. The menace of the hoodlums recalled similar but far worse actions of hoodlums in Lekki and elsewhere during the #EndSARS protests. So what are the true morals, sensibility, religion, politics and algebra of this presidency? They are those of a president, a Nigerian president in whose presidency nothing is working.
Nothing related to the social life of our time in every ramification in Buhari’s presidency is right or working right. And unfortunately, there seems to be no one in the current political circle or class or dispensation that possesses the genius to make Nigeria truly work again as we saw in the nineteen sixties of the Obafemi Awolowos, Nnamdi Azikiwes, Tafawa Balewas, Ahmadu Bellos, Festus Samuel Okotie-Ebohs, Anthony Enahoros, Joseph Tarkas and other impeccable nationalists of the period who were patriotically committed to developing Nigeria. We wasted them all in different guises and gave and surrendered Nigeria to monstrous soldiers and to persons “with a history of opportunistic dependence on other citizens and the country.”
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059
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