There is this saying that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead. It is actually a doublespeak. You can’t very well go before a dead person’s family members (especially during the deceased’s burial) to start mouthing off how “bad” the person was, even if he was the worst of creatures. But at the very periphery of that burial rite, some will still be discussing in low tones about the dead man’s wicked exploits, if indeed he was so.
My take is that we should never lie against the dead. Whether or not the person was a public figure as Muhammadu Buhari was, tell the truth about him, no matter how ugly. Tell it while he is still alive. Perhaps he will change. If not, others can at least learn from his evil ways.
I am now in my middle 60s. Buhari dominated my life for ten years – first when I was a student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1984/1985), and as a husband and father (2015/2025). These represented the worst years of my life because of the suffering that Buhari’s visionless and incompetent leadership imposed on Nigerians. On both occasions, Buhari suddenly changed the currency and starved people so much that men and women wept uncontrollably in banking halls for lack of access to their accounts. In 1984, “essential commodities” had to be rationed due to extreme scarcity.
I was appalled when otherwise knowledgeable people who experienced Buhari in 1984/85 joined in the campaign to bring him back as elected president between 2013 and 2015. I frantically warned, on these pages and elsewhere, that Buhari was not fit to rule Nigeria. A person like him should never come near Aso Rock except as a visitor. He had grown worse over the years compared to what we knew of him as military head of state. Buhari had become a radical generalissimo of Fulani ethnic irredentism seeking to re-enact its 1804 conquest of the Muslim North. They now wanted to launch new wars of conquests to take over the rest of the country.
The manner in which Buhari stormed the office of the Oyo State Governor, Lam Adesina, in Ibadan in 2000, along with other Fulani retired Generals and leaders (including Buba Marwa) over clashes between Fulani armed herdsmen and the indigenes of the Oke Ogun area of the state, spoke volumes. I pieced this together with Buhari’s well-advertised public undertakings to make sure that sharia was imposed throughout the country. This was obviously the strategy he used to amass his proverbial “locked-in” 12 million votes in the Muslim North. This attracted Nigeria’s foremost political speculator, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, to propose a merger that would give them both the presidency. I warned that Buhari as president would turn the Fulani herdsmen into Nigeria’s version of the Sudan Arabid Janjaweed, armed and supported by dictator Omar al Bashir, to subdue the largely black farmer population and seize their lands. Mine was the proverbial lone voice in the wilderness.
Once in Aso Villa, Buhari mindlessly pursued the Fulanisation/Islamisation agenda against Nigeria’s indigenous population. He threw the Northern borders open and invited Fulani from all over Africa to come and occupy territories in Nigeria. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, his administration condoned the trucking of able-bodied Fulani fighters into camps in forests all over the Middle Belt and the South to attack and capture communities. It was for this reason that Mazi Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, created the Eastern Security Network, ESN, to protect Igboland.
This was also what prompted Buhari and the Nigerian military to coerce the lily-livered South-East Governors led by Dave Umahi to proscribe IPOB, while the courts declared it a “terrorist organisation”. An administration that was protecting and facilitating herdsmen terrorists was calling a group set up solely for self-defence “terrorists”. They used our armed forces, police and security agencies paid with our money to shield these genocidal thugs and intimidated those who tried to defend themselves.
Buhari also championed through proxies many policy attempts to grab land to forcefully settle his nomadic kinsmen in indigenous communities. These came with funny monikers, such as “Ruga”, “Recovery of Grazing Routes”, “Grazing Reserves”, “Water Resources Bill”, “National Livestock Transformation Plan, NLTP”, and the reported doling of N100 billion to Miyetti Allah herdsmen groups without appropriation. Indeed, one of Buhari’s spokesmen, Femi Adesina, said in an infamous television interview about the Fulani killings: “Ancestral attachment? You can only have ancestral attachment when you are alive. If you are talking about your ancestral attachment, if you are dead, how does that matter?” In other words, if you don’t want to die, hand your ancestral land to Fulani herdsmen!
Is this what a government elected to defend the territorial integrity of Nigeria from foreign invasion and protect the citizens should be doing or saying? No other Nigerian leader had the guts and bravura to attempt such a heinous rape of our sovereignty as a nation to gratify his indigenous or foreign kinsmen. But Buhari did it and got away with it! Unfortunately, his successor, Tinubu, who is not Fulani, has proved incapable or unwilling to stop this diabolical scheme.
Buhari, whose father, Adamu Bafallaje, hailed from Niger Republic, saw himself beyond the map of Nigeria. His loyalty was not to the Nigeria defined by our Constitution. When he “won” the 2015 presidential election, he went to Niger to celebrate it. They welcomed him as a conquering Fulani warlord – with a white horse and bejewelled sword. He initiated a $1.2bn (without appropriation) railway project from Kano via Daura to Maradi in Niger through a Chinese debt which he has now left for you, I and our children, to repay.
I believe I have proved my point that Buhari was not qualified to lead Nigeria. He did not really belong here but to a tribal affiliation that was anti-Nigeria.
SEE YOU IN PART II.
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