By Emeka Alex Duru
(08054103327)
If an objective count of the genuine friends of President Muhammadu Buhari is done, Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, deserves a robust mention. He is everything a good friend is, to the president. Genuine friends, in this instance, need not be close. A good friend is not one with whom you indulge in orgies and oddities. He is not the type that humours you with a false picture of what you are. A good friend does not tell you what you wish to hear. He tells you what you should hear. He also, does not only condemn but proffers advice. These are what the cleric represents in his seeming combative remarks on the President.
Every King, it is said, needs a prophet. For Buhari, Kukah is his prophet. He tells him the truth, he offers alternatives, he proffers solutions.
For quite some time now, the Bishop has been trenchant in drawing the attention of the President to the dangers his opaque style of leadership is posing to the corporate existence of the country. Like the Biblical John the Baptist, he has been shouting in the wilderness of Nigeria’s State, asking for things to be done aright. But his calls have largely gone unheeded.
Kukah raised the same issue in Kaduna on Tuesday (February 11), at the funeral mass of Michael Nnadi, a young seminarian who was abducted and murdered by members of the Boko Haram terror group, recently. In summing up the tragedy that has befallen Nigeria, he blamed the trend on the years of hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality and fraud which have caught up with the country. Being the President, Buhari could not be excused from the mess.
The Bishop blamed the President for contributing to the problems confronting the country by allowing petty considerations affect his criteria for selecting people for national offices. He wondered how the President who ran his campaign on the wings of integrity and moral probity, would on coming to office, bring nepotism and clannishness into strategic sectors of the national being, including the military and the ancillary security agencies, to the point of his government being marked by supremacist and divisive policies that are pushing the country to the brink.
“This President has displayed the greatest degree of insensitivity in managing our country’s rich diversity. He has subordinated the larger interests of the country to the hegemonic interests of his co-religionists and clansmen and women. The impression created now is that, to hold a key and strategic position in Nigeria today, it is more important to be a northern Muslim than a Nigerian”, Kukah lamented.
Foot soldiers of the president, have been trying to fault the Bishop on this. But try as they do, this is not the best of time for the president. He may, perhaps, be trying his best to get things right. But there seems to be a jinx in most, if not all his moves, lately. For some inexplicable reasons, he seems to be putting every foot wrong. He appears to be making one step forward and many, backwards. In short, his rating has dropped considerably.
This is not what the President’s image handlers would want to hear. The fact, however, is that Buhari is presently, a hard sell, if not a bad product, entirely. In 2014, I did a piece titled, “Interpreting the Buhari phenomenon”. The write-up was informed by the audacious move by Buhari on February 6 of that year, when he took a trip to Maiduguri, Borno State in course of his campaign as presidential candidate of All Progressives Congress (APC). Many likened the move to hunting in a lion’s den – a risky gamble of sort. And they had their reasons.
Maiduguri and other towns in Borno and by extension, the entire North East, were then in a near state of war, on account of Boko Haram insurgency. Security agents that had been dispatched to quell the insurgency, had clearly been stretched by the terrorists. Thus, when the retired general embarked on the trip, it appeared a suicide mission of sort.
But he was not deterred. In fact, to the surprise of many, the turn-out by his supporters, was tumultuous. And the security agents stationed at the Maiduguri Stadium, were overwhelmed.
A national daily, Leadership Newspaper, which captured the visit had then reported; “At a point, the apparently exasperated soldiers and policemen were forced to shoot into the air and release some canisters of tear gas in a failed attempt to keep the crowd at bay.”
That, did not work. Rather, as Buhari’s motorcade snaked into the ecstatic crowd, it became more difficult to maintain order. The Paper described the situation further: “The crowd went wild when Buhari had to walk through the elevated isle of the mega podium. Fans went out of control as they broke through the iron barricade that fenced them out and rushed towards the stand. The friendly show of support and love for the APC presidential candidate suddenly became a threat as all pleas for them to calm down fell on deaf ears. Sensing that it would amount to a waste of time if he should insist on speaking, Buhari took the advice of his aides and quickly allowed them to whisk him out of the venue.”
That was the Buhari phenomenon. It was then, a mystic of sort. Buhari had in his campaign, pledged to give corruption, unemployment and insecurity, a frontal attack. Taken from the fabled impression of a no-nonsense General – a notion that had trailed his short-lived term as military head of state between 1984 and 1985, traumatized Nigerians had pinned their hopes on him.
In coming to office however, most of the promises of better life to the citizenry, have been kept in breach. Insecurity seems more pronounced now than the era the President ran for the office. Cost of living is at all-time high, with Nigerians divided along ethnic and religious lines, more than any other time.
In many ways, the President has lost it. That was the message in the youths booing his convoy during his visit to Maiduguri on Wednesday (February 12). The incident marked an irony of sort. Six years ago, the president literally rode on human traffic in Maiduguri. He was seen as a messiah in the making. Today, he is no longer wanted in the city. Next to Kano and Kaduna, Maiduguri, was a town Buhari commanded near cult followership. In the three cities, candidates for various offices were known to have tucked in their photos in bigger pictures of Buhari to win elections. The presumption of enjoying the support of Mai Gaskiya (the honest one), as the President was referred to in the cities, was all that they needed to win the votes from the masses. Times, however, seem to have changed. The loved is appearing to be the loathed. This is the extent, things have changed for the President.
But it is not too late for him to make amends. With the remaining three years in his second term, he can still regain his bearing and popularity. All he needs is to go back to the drawing board and identify where he got it wrong. Above all, he needs to listen to voices with the best of intention for him and the nation. Kukah is one of them