General
Muhammadu Buhari, titled "Buhari and
2015" (Daily Sun, July 6, 2012, back page), made
an engaging read. Hardly does one find a
columnist of Adesina's high standing embarking
on such an unrestrained praise of a controversial
figure known to evoke extreme and contradictory
passions from his admirers and critics, like
Buhari. And among his critics is one of the most
credible moral voices of our time, the Nobel
laureate Wole Soyinka.
Soyinka's "The Crimes of Buhari," published by
Sahara Reporters on January 15, 2007, is
recommended reading for anyone who wishes
to balance Adesina's laudation of Buhari with an
informed, unsentimental assessment of the man,
one of whose transgressions in power – the
wilful spilling of what technically would pass for
innocent blood – should, I think, be indelible from
the mind of every true humanist as from our
history, despite our being prone as a people to
the affliction that Soyinka also has diagnosed as
"collective amnesia," a sort of Alzheimer's
syndrome that manifests on a national scale, and
erodes historical memory.
"…we should not commit the error of opening
the political space to any alternative whose
curative touch to national afflictions has proven
more deadly than the disease," Soyinka warns
with a telling allusiveness in "The Crimes of
Buhari."
Now, it is not hard to discern why Adesina writes
so passionately in favour of Buhari, not when
you think of the import of his declaring himself a
"Buhari forever" loyalist, adding that he will
"follow him into battle, even blindfolded." Buhari
is a charismatic figure, which explains why those
who love him do so with the type of uncritical
mind-set implied in these quoted phrases. But
one of the snags of abandoning ourselves
completely to the force of anyone's charisma is
that it soon begins to pull us in spite of our mind.
And so we may not understand that going into
battle for our idol, blindfolded, exposes us to the
risk of killing people inappropriately, including
defenceless women and children, since – thanks
to our blindfold – we cannot differentiate between
the enemy and such hapless casualties of war;
and certainly like the three men executed under a
retroactive decree by the Buhari regime, if we
would permit a different take on Adesina's tropes.
Even such an idol should worry for his safety
when we follow him to battle blindfolded, since
one of our "blindfolded" weapons might
mistakenly strike him. And one of the shots
Adesina fires in his piece turns out to be in
disfavour of Buhari.
For instance, when he says of Buhari: "Imagine a
former military governor, a former oil minister, a
former head of state, and a former chairman of
the Petroleum Trust Fund, yet he can't fund his
campaign because there's no money." Whatever
this statement was meant to achieve, it also
doubles as an unintended invitation to reassess
Buhari's blame of his poor electoral misfortunes
on rigging, which one admits is a lingering worry
with our polity. Yet it would make sense to
ponder, following Adesina's hint, if Buhari loses
elections because he is "rigged out" or because he
lacks the financial resources to run a proper
electoral campaign that can produce victory.
Even Barrack Obama apparently understood that
money plays a pivotal role in electoral success,
and so had to raise more funds for the
Democratic Party campaign than his main rival,
Hilary Clinton, to clinch the party's ticket, and
proceeded to win the US presidential polls. So if
"there's no money" for Buhari to fund his
campaign and yet he complains when his poorly
funded or unfunded campaign fails to produce
electoral success, is it not as unrealistic as a
farmer lacking the resources to properly cultivate/
manage his farm and yet is unable to understand
why he ends up with a lean harvest – of crops or
votes?
I admired the zeal with which Buhari embarked
on his moral reform of our country as Head of
State. But executing three men – Bartholomew
Owoh (26), Lawal Ojulope (30), and Bernard
Ogedengbe (29) – under a retroactive decree as
an expression of that zeal continues to haunt me
as an unpardonable act of murderous
highhandedness. And I remember expressing a
similar view in my reader's response published in
Newswatch magazine circa 1985, after that
painful – and unjustifiable – execution.
Curiously, the Buhari advocacy continues to beat
its chest.
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