Though I have not met the good, old ex-General before, the closest I have been to him was to enter the same lift at the Hilton Hotel. I was on my way to the gym. You could touch his simplicity and the absence of unnecessary airs around him. No security details followed him with all the choking paraphernalia. That was sometime in 2006. I voted for him in 2007 because I always follow my heart. He won Abuja but ‘lost’ overall. But this time, I want Nigerians to help me and help themselves and make the deserving person the president later this year.
Those who know me as a staunch Yar’adua sympathizer should not be surprised. I did not sign on to the Yar’adua bandwagon until I saw he was a rather decent guy (confessing that his own election was very flawed, declaring his assets without being prodded, even as he put the current president on the spot to reluctantly do the same) and my sympathy heightened when he fell irretrievably ill and all Nigerians could do was trample on him on his death bed.
But Buhari has been yearning to impart something into the leadership of this floundering country for the past eight years. As against the stream of reluctant civilian presidents that Nigeria has been having, Buhari has consistently shown that he truly has something to offer and will hit the ground running from the first day. In contrast to Buhari, Chief Obasanjo was begged to be president from prison. He was out of touch with reality and did not have any agenda. Yar’adua too wanted to return to academics (and that was a good man, a true academician) and President Goodluck, in his own confession to American diplomats, admitted that he did not have what it takes to rule the country and being a president was the furthest thing from his mind. Why, with the almost insurmountable problems facing this country, are we always begging people to lead us, while spurning those who are set to make a difference? Do we truly desire a change in the country, or are we just kidding?
But apart from the clear and present indication by Buhari that he has a genuine message to deliver to Nigeria, the other aspect to look at is… antecedents. Buhari’s first coming will be looked back on as a truly golden time for Nigeria. It was the era when Nigeria was finally drifting back to normalcy, when we were forced to reconsider and improve our humanity, when we were beginning to find out that a great country is not made solely by political leadership but by all and sundry contributing their quota. After that era, Nigerians have gradually lost more and more of their humanity. Now we willfully degrade our environments and ourselves. And the public and the private sectors have turned into a free-for-all street fight in the evil business of corruption.
That forgotten era was the time Nigeria stood its ground against the marauding ‘international community’. Nigeria refused to borrow money from them and questioned the basis of the interest rates they charged us, but kept ALL its obligations. Nigeria also fought the wanton use of its territory and airports as a conduit by an eerie combination of American secret service agents, South American rebels and criminals, to funnel hard drugs to the poor people in the ghettos of America and beyond. For this, Buhari was removed. And since then, Nigeria has gone back to being a seedy country, inhabited by some of the most hated black people on earth. All that must change.
It was under Buhari’s leadership of the oil sector that two or three of our existing oil refineries were built and commissioned. And for his headship of PTF, the legacies are still there for all to see. In many parts of Nigeria, the roads built by the PTF are the only ones passable today. In spite of all these, Buhari is not known to be ‘stinkingly’ rich like his colleagues. He owns no home in Abuja, and is not known to own any petrol station, not to talk of oil wells. So why are we not allowing this man to show us some examples in leadership? Is it because he is not spraying money around like a drunken sailor?
It is therefore sad that some people, even from Buhari’s own constituency in the north, spurn this man’s efforts. Many times they say he is ‘rigid’. But I tell you, we need a rigid person to govern this country, not someone who will enter into every unholy alliance with the people who have held us down forever, both locally and internationally.
Some are rejoicing at the cacophony of dissent emanating from that constituency. Some think it is a thing of joy to know that the ‘north’ is not united. And the present government has exploited the divisions in that region. But I believe that even if northern unity is a myth, Nigeria is better off having that mythical example than relapsing into a Hobbesian scenario, where we are all disunited, from north to south, east to west. For northern ‘disunity’ does not translate to southern unity. It can only lead to the total collapse of the Nigerian structure. That said, what is lacking in northern cohesion is being compensated for in a truly Nigerian alliance of all right-thinking people, who will surely vote for Buhari in the forthcoming elections. I visited some of the online blogs recently and found that 60% of commentators across the board, irrespective of ethnic and religious orientation, believe that we need a change more desperately than the Middle Easterners and they believe Buhari, a honest and simple man, will be that change agent. That is a representative poll. And it means Buhari is in good stead!
More importantly, the difference between Nigeria and a country like Ghana is simply… discipline. They don’t have our much-touted resources. In every country I have been, there is nowhere like Nigeria where people deliberately litter the streets and defecate on the expressway. We need to return to sanity. And if the PDP government could do anything about our present situation, they had 12 straight years to do that. But look at us today…
Finally and most importantly, the present government is under the vice grip of moneybags. A cursory look at the donors and advisors to the PDP campaign will show that the same wheeler-dealers who have been contributing to the ‘success’ of the PDP (and by extension the failure of the people), for the past 12 years, are all present! They are only protecting their own interests and that interest is to continue to maximize their own profits by impoverishing the people and bribing government. When these businessmen donate to the PDP, they turn around and obtain import-duty waivers and concessions that are 100 times what they donated. These concessions and waivers are monies that should have accrued to the general purse of Nigeria. So, I say let us free ourselves from the shackles of corporatocracy (the government of businessmen, for businessmen by their cohorts in the PDP). Let us go to our own Tahrir square on voting day and enact the change that we deserve!
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