By SKC Ogbonnia
December 30, 2019
Once a dictator, as a military Head of State, Muhammadu Buhari sought
democratic power, preaching change; and we embraced him, believing that
nothing could be worse than the regime of Goodluck Jonathan. But we are
finding out the hard way: the obvious change the Nigerian people have
seen since Buhari came back to power is a change to a “next level”
of dictatorship that is wildly uncouth and acutely primitive to relate
to the genius of changing times and its digital age.
Buhari’s freefall, or rather his renewed dictatorship, is traced
squarely to the time he disavowed his oath of office by deploying the
worst form of political vendetta against the Eastern Nigeria for the
simple reason that the people voted en masse for their native son in
2015 elections, similar to the electoral gesture accorded to Buhari
himself by his native North in 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019
electoral cycles. This apparent warpath heightened a call for secession
and the tacit support given by the East to the Indigenous Peoples of
Biafra (IPOB) led by Nnamdi Kanu. After all, different forms of Biafran
movement had existed in every administration in the current Fourth
Republic, from Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, to Jonathan.
Instead of dialogue, as accorded other dissident groups, including even
the Boko Haram, Buhari isolated the crisis as an Igbo palaver and thence
pounced on the IPOB with brute force. I quickly admonished the President
that his move was “nothing but a scheme to rekindle the zeitgeist of
the Biafran war—hoping to regain his waning popularity within our
party and the nation at large.” There I reminded him that the Nigeria
of 1967 is not the Nigeria of today.
Yet, General Buhari did not listen. Rather, he declared the Biafran
activists as terrorists. It is worth saying, however, that while the
president was busy “crushing” the Biafran activists with land army,
he gleefully condoned the deadly Fulani Herdsmen, an organization
recognized worldwide as a terrorist group since 2014.
It didn’t take long before a legion of Nigerians in the Diaspora, some
of who may not necessarily subscribe to the style or visions of IPOB but
are conscious of the scale of injustice in the homeland, were provoked
to unleash a worldwide campaign that sufficiently painted Buhari as a
dictator and bigot. And the world took note! The toll of the IPOB crisis
on national economy, particularly with foreign investment, is well
chronicled.
Upon his being sworn in for the second term, I followed with an innocent
piece: “Second Term: A Leadership Lesson Buhari Must Learn”. Here is
an excerpt:
“The days are gone when the Nigerian government can preach justice
abroad, while promoting injustice at home. The inconvenient truth is
that the country now boasts of millions of independent ambassadors,
strategically entrenched in all the nooks and crannies of the world, who
tell it as it is. Some of these Diaspora Nigerians have also become
Biblical Josephs of sort and thus play influential roles in the
nation’s foreign exchange, foreign trade, foreign investment, the
media, as well as other socio-economic relationships. Needless to remind
us that the same Josephs are the leading block contributors to the
yearly amount of foreign money remitted to Nigeria, which is ironically
more than the national budget. As they go, so goes the national image
and much more.”
But an Igbo adage goes that the sickness that typically kills a dog
hardly allows it to perceive the odour of faeces. Thus, the biggest news
out of Nigeria since Buhari assumed second term has been the morbid
audacity to frame and detain Omoyele Sowore, a renowned anti-corruption
and human rights activist, journalist, and his opponent in the 2019
presidential election. Sowore’s sin remains the term
#RevolutionNow”, a mere plan to protest against bad governance in his
homeland. But the Buhari regime would charge him for treasonable felony.
I warned of the consequences, noting that “Only a poon ignores the
potential of the heavily funded but regional IPOB, with a worldwide
membership, fusing with a broad-based national outfit like
#RevolutionNow” The president countered with a mundane temerity of
deploying the trio of Ministry of Information, Ministry of External
Affairs, and the Nigerian Diaspora Commission to peddle false
information on Sowore to the international community. Not surprisingly,
Buhari could not recognize that, besides the Nigerians in the Diaspora
and social media; the ever-vibrant Nigerian press and the core of the
Nigerian Civil Society now have global reach.
Today, Nnamdi Kanu, the “terrorist”, is celebrated in the
international community as a paragon of justice. Today, Omoyele Sowore,
the “coupist”, is seen worldwide as a mystical mixture of
conviction, courage, and stoicism in the course of the Nigerian
liberation. Today, the General and his brigade are on the run, with
Buhari once again widely viewed as a maximum dictator and the most
lawless leader Nigeria has ever known. The stubborn tsetse fly, we say,
follows the corpse to the grave.
SKC Ogbonnia, a 2019 APC presidential aspirant, is the author of the
Effective Leadership Formula.