Patriots of Nigeria cannot regale the world enough with the tragi-comic accounts of Buhari, Abacha, Obasanjo, Babangida, Abdusalami and company in the historical devolution of their national project.

A Hater by another name: Unmasking one of Nigeria’s several false heroes

by Chin Ce

DATELINE 2017: Speculations by the liege of Asari Dokubo and (conspiratorial?) company have been rife that their current president Buhari recently returned from United Kingdom on health exile is a clone of a brain dead original. So was the report in the Daily Post of October 3, 2017. But, clone or not, evidence abounds in this ‘hero’ of a hater using so called Nigerian unity to foist parochial northern interests to the detriment of the southern regions for which he had always had deep-seated contempt mingled with jealousy.

The evidence lies in his short lived military adventurism in 1984.

Buhari: hero of the North, hater of the South?

Buhari 1984: A sleaze of promotions to the ranks of generals in the Nigerian army was revealed by the BBC in 1984 as skewed in favor of mainly northern officers. No singularly qualified officer from the south east was deemed eligible for promotion, the BBC reported.

The gestalt was following the well laid jihadist script from their Sardauna to perpetually ‘hold down the not-to-be-trusted south so the north will dominate.’.

In response to the damming evidence, Muhammadu Buhari quickly did a face saving turn only two weeks later by having the then chief of staff Tunde Idiagbon decorate one or two Igbo officers to the rank of brigadier generals, but not without a swipe at BBC that the Nigerian Army was united and could not be divided along non-existing ethnic issues.

Such was typical of  the military of Nigeria in denial. Hadn’t it seemed grossly ironical the spirited remonstration of northern oligarchs against their own paranoia and ethnocentrism in the face of myriad factual representations?

For years to come, Nigerian patriots cannot regale the world enough with the tragi-comic accidents of Buhari, Abacha, Obasanjo, Babangida, Abdusalam and company, in the sad, historical devolution of the Nigerian project. The ignoble roles frequently played by these yokels regressing their nation from the egalitarian path of justice and equity for the constituent parts remains a curse of history. And on their names. project.

It was rooted in the lazy elite mindset foisted from the coup that eliminated a deluded General Ironsi but saw a colonel Gowon toting the gun as head of state upon the plan of northern supremacy in the jurisdiction and management of the country’s resources.

Thenceforth it seemed that every semi-literate that came to rule must hail from a conclave which rested its life force on the seizure and maintenance of political power via a vicious, ill- educated, ethnocentric army.

Even the versions of the constitution were skewed to allow mere primary school certificate holders to become presidents. It was as though a primary school seemed all that northern Nigeria could offer by way of modern education when the rogue military regimes of Obasanjo (1979] and Abdulkarim (1999] were drafting their martial ‘constitutions’ for Nigeria. Education had never not cut it for the North.

Always must we remember that Boko Haram meaning ‘Western education forbidden’ is a philosophy of an atavistic Northern Islam, and not just that of the murderous jihadists of the name. Till date, ‘Turenci’ (English) is something of anathema in core northern states and it is the dream of these fanatical jigoists that Hausa will one day be decreed lingua franca for the whole of Nigeria if Islam does not make it to be the only religion.

One only needed to read the sleight of hand of general Buhari in contemporary politics to interpret this essential national hypocrisy: One of his broadcasts to his nation as the president while ‘dead’ in the United Kingdom was in Hausa!

Yakubu Gowon did the same during the 1966 pogrom against the Igbo.

Using just Hausa in a multilingual multiethnic collective had always meant to reaffirm their mindset for northern indivisibility against an opposing south (east) whom they always dreaded would want to shake itself loose from the unitarist ‘one nation’ which few have been politically correct enough to query. In the incipient Buhari era this threat was perceived as coming from the rising profile of his vice (and often acting) president Yemi Osinbajo – from the south west!

Such was the hypocrisy of a retired major general who had ridden into Nigerian hearts with promises to fight the corruption, impunity and squandermania of the Jonathan years. But northern ethnicity at the expense of the disunited south was on hand to be exploited as soon as he was made president.

A hater, and the branding of IPOB

Many Buhari haters in the south east typified by the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, IPOB, were informed by his antecedents as a core-north Muslim prebendalist. The recent events unfolding across the spectrum of the former British colony, climaxing in the branding of these irate and unarmed youths as terrorists seem to have proven them right.

Only few idealists of unity had believed that the dawn of a truly egalitarian society for Nigeria was long overdue and could be realised under a regime that had promised accountability and change.

For now that idealism is Morning Yet On Creation Day, as the great father of African Literature, Chinua Achebe, himself a Biafra believer, had written years ago.

To even a casual observer, it would not take a clone of Buhari to implement the grandiose exploits of some hateful self anointed ombudsmen of Nigerian unity only intent upon their economic lechery of Niger delta fortunes.

It only requires the revival of self-same cabal of despots, and their parroting of unity (read unitarianism), to implement such sectional agenda that must continue to dictate the pace and momentum of Nigeria which, in their twisted logic, can only mean the nationalising of elite backwardness upon the fortunes that stupid major Lugard and the bloody British had bequeathed them in West Africa.

Fortunately that dystopian regression as envisioned by that breed of psychopaths may be coming to an end as, roused by the irreparable wounds of the south, Nigeria poises for the great spring of generations unborn.

Strident clamour against hate-induced Injustice

As the entire spectrum of southern nationalities clamour for restructuring, the bigots masquerading for one Nigeria are finally at the end of their tethers in the manipulation of historical hatreds and deployment of barbaric military tactics for unmerited seizure of land, property and mineral resources.

The nation they yearn for their grand exploits is clamoring for greater Nigeria through federation restructuring.

And, oblivious to even his finer instincts, the hypocrite of one Nigeria, president Buhari, had gone to the United Nations to further the African cause by calling for a restructured UN.

There again the leading hater by the name of (tribal) hero had also canvassed for the right of self determination of the Palestinian people.

Both cases of irony highlight their parallels with the southern debacle that faces the ignorant general.

President Buhari’s unmasking as a bigot is nowhere more graphological than in the IPOB agitation which he stoops to decimate by military fiat, while pampering his Fulani kinsmen to rape, loot, murder and terrorise the central and southern Nigeria under their variant herdsmen organisations.

However, the world calls on him to negotiate with the legitimate aspirations of those whom he had treated with implacable hatred all through the national disasters of his false hero hunting.

And negotiate must the north, south, east and west.

For the era of the band of deluded heroes who have ruled this country from Balewa through Buhari is finally at overdrive.

That era will soon be past and gone as renewed agitations by the nation’s youths engulf Muhammadu Buhari’s archaic vision from the nooks and crannies of every Nigerian nationality.

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