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“Kill them; kill them; kill them” – Candidate Muhammadu Buhari during the 2011 presidential campaign in Minna, Niger state.
Hate speeches and dangerous rumours are the emotive ingredients that give birth to pogroms the world over. Seeing both on the rise in this country, it makes sense that we try to nip them in the bud. It does appear, however, that the APC/Muhammadu Buhari administration is not getting the desired cooperation and support from the people in this regard. There is the suspicion that the administration simply wants to use hate speech as red herring and an excuse to clamp down on opposing views and opponents, just like it has tried to use its so-called war on corruption. Just like it has been selective in its war against corruption, this government has been selective as well in what it determines to be hate speech. It has narrowed it down to criticisms of the government or critical questions about what ails the president while completely ignoring the dangerous but patently false rumours circulating in the North that Buhari’s ill health was as a result of poison organised by an APC party chieftain from the South-west. The ground is therefore being laid for an attack on people of the South-west in case of any eventualities concerning Buhari. Government has done nothing to dispel and combat this dangerous rumour. Government appears to have also taken sides as Nigerians trade hate speeches; just like it has been one-sided in its critical appointments and in the allocation of resources, favouring the Muslim areas of the North against the Middle Belt and the entire South. Hate speeches by IPOB, Niger Delta militants and pro-democracy activists from the South must be viciously put down while Arewa “quit orders”, Fulani herdsmen’s atrocities, etc. are to be tolerated, even encouraged. This administration is seen generally to be hypocritical and dishonest. While it applies strict rules on others, it allows itself the luxury of laissez-faire. Many important members of this administration have been cited for double-speak and volte-face. The party itself has been accused of brazenly reneging on many of its election promises.
Talking of hate speech, President Buhari himself is a culprit. His campaign speech quoted above is one. With a spear swirling over his head in different directions, he called on his supporters in Hausa to “kill them” many times. His “monkeys and baboons will be soaked in blood” speech during the same 2011 presidential elections is also well known. It is likely that Buhari defenders will say he was trying to warn against rigging of the election but in the aftermath of those speeches, thousands of innocent Nigerians, mostly from the South and including Youth Corpers, were murdered in chilling and cold blood across the North. Had the South retaliated, we might not have had the Nigeria whose “unity” Buhari lately described as non-negotiable and is ready to kill to defend, judging by his marching orders on the country ‘s military chiefs last week! Physician, heal thyself! Buhari has got to purge himself first before he will be qualified to point accusing fingers at others. When some talk of the “harshness” of Gov. Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state on Buhari, have we forgotten how Lai Mohammed ceaselessly poured invectives on former President Goodluck Jonathan? Who invented the phrase “clueless and incompetent”? Fayose, Femi Fani-Kayode, and the PDP spokesperson, Dayo Adeyeye all rolled into one have not done half what Lai Mohammed did to Jonathan and PDP. Yet, he was not arrested; he was not even threatened. Why can’t APC/Buhari behave similarly to their own traducers? Rather than unleash the armed forces on those demanding self-determination – which Buhari supports and campaigns for, for the Palestinians and Western Sahara! – why can’t this government ignore them if it cannot dialogue with them, just like Jonathan/PDP ignored the then Rivers state Gov. Rotimi Amaechi when he threatened that APC would form a parallel government and make the country ungovernable if it did not win the 2015 presidential election? Amaechi is, today, a Minister of the Federal Republic. We can go on and on!
There are so many other statements that important members of this government have made that have returned to dog their steps; even as the embarrassing in-fighting between the various discordant power blocs within the Presidency show-cases absence of discipline, effective coordination, and coherence in the Buhari presidency. Witness, for instance, the dog-fight between the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation and the acting chairman of the EFCC! As they say: Divided, they fall! Triple-barrel Minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola, boasted he would fix power supply in six months; more than two years down the line, he has left us worse than he met us. APC chieftain, Tony Momoh, boasted that if they did not fix the country in one year, Nigerians should stone them. Two years gone, they have fixed nothing. They met fuel at N97 per litre and boasted it would be more than halved but now it is N145 per litre. They met the Naira exchange rate at less than N200 to a US dollar but is now closer to N400 than N300. What have they improved upon since they came on board? What pisses off many Nigerians is their lack of integrity to admit their shortcomings; own up to the promises they made; and plead with us for understanding, patience, and cooperation. Instead, they have always tried to be clever by half; play the sophist; and draw the wool over our eyes. This way, they have lost the respect of many and forfeited the cooperation they sorely need.
Tell me, how many Nigerians believe the story that rodents ransacked and ruined the president’s office in his absence? It is a possibility, though, but because of the pedigree of this administration, not many will believe this as anything short of tales by the moonlight. The late Oba Asanike of Ibadan land once cried out to a bewildered nation that rodents had sacked him from the palace. And there were reports of rodents invading the White House of former President Jimmy Carter. As embarrassing as the event may seem, it is possible that rodents had actually caused some havoc in Buhari’s office and sacked the president. Needless to ask questions concerning whether there were no cleaners opening and cleaning the office during the president’s absence. What secrets were locked up in there that the place was never opened? We are not a nuclear-power nation, or else we might say perhaps the nuclear button or control room was stationed there. Because of the secretive nature of this government many are suspecting that the rodents’ story, as critical as it may seem in this era of Lassa fever spreading across the country, is a ruse to buy the president more time to rest or continue his medication, which had seen him spend 104 days non-stop in London. Whichever is the case; we should err on the side of caution and not take the risk of adding Lassa fever to whatever may be ailing Mr. President. Besides, the Buhari we had seen in the last one week sure needs more rest and we should indulge him with it. Like I have said, this president has become a bull in Nigeria’s china shop or a tsetse fly that perches dangerously on a man’s scrotum. Care is needed to extricate it. I know that many Nigerians will be disappointed that Buhari has not lived up to their expectations as a patriot imbued with the love of the nation and ready to make sacrifices for it. We should not force him. If he does not have it, then, he does not have it.
Some situations are uncanny and have a way of going from bad to worse. We had thought Jonathan was the ultimate evil from which we should run – but two years of Buhari and we know better. There was still some order and cohesion in Jonathan’s administration. Soon, there could be fisticuffs between the Minister of Justice and the EFCC boss judging by the way things have deteriorated between them. And it does appear there is none who can call them to order. We never will be able to know whether matters would have been worse than this were Jonathan still the one in the saddle. APC boasts that the country would have collapsed – but we never can tell. Whatever we say remains firmly in the realm of conjectures. Why many now think we might have been better off with Jonathan, though, is the sheer cluelessness and incompetence – Aah! Those Lai Mohammed epithets coined specifically for Jonathan! – of the APC/Buhari administration; prompting many to conclude that they were mere power-mongers not prepared for governance in the real sense of the word. They keep shifting the goal post on when the economy will recover and get out of recession. They have got the country steeped in indebtedness with practically nothing to show for it in development terms. Crime waves are surging, with new entrants more than discounting the modest gains made on the Boko Haram front. Unemployment and suffering like never before experienced have submerged the land. Could it have been as bad as this – or could it have, in fact, been worse – had “Messiah” Buhari not come on board? Like I said, all such suppositions will forever remain in the realm of conjecture.
LAST WORD: “Eni kan l’o mo”, as my people would say. It is the same as what Rita Marley, widow of Bob Marley, referred to as “who feels it knows it”. People are dying – and many of it due to rampaging economic recession. Thursday before I sat down at Ikeja, Lagos to begin to scribble this in an office that has forgotten when last it saw power supplied by PHCN; I had stopped by at Shoprite to buy lunch and ran into a professional colleague who announced the passing away of another colleague. What killed him, I screamed. Economic recession, he announced without batting an eyelid. Two Saturdays ago, I was in Osogbo, Osun state for the burial of a friend’s wife, who got felled by marauders on the notorious Lokoja-Abuja road. I can go on and on. I dare to say that from what we read and from personal experiences, life gets cheaper by the day under this administration!
