I don´t Blame Buhari

I don´t blame dictators for their tyranny.

It is in the metaphysic of power, that it corrupts; and corrupts absolutely; when it is absolutely exercised.

Besides, fickle human nature, in the courts or around the tribunes of power, is a dog that forever needs a leash. If this leash fails, this dog is commissioned to eat the bones, hung round its neck for safe keeping. And that is when disaster knocks on the gates of the city, and politely invites the nation, to destroy itself, since its leaders have become her rapists.

I don´t blame dictators. I blame the cheerleaders.

This is because power is nothing, but opinion. David Hume was right. That explains, why power fights, claws, bites, flays, and even dissimulates, to have public opinion view it favourably. Without that opinion, power is gobbled up and eaten for lunch, either by a revolution, a discontent, or disregard.

I don´t blame Muhammadu Ibn Buhari, for his mismanagement and mis-governance of Nigeria. I blame the vuvuzelas that hoisted him on us. I blame those obnoxious mercenaries of avarice and cant, who chose him as their man-Friday, to confuse Nigerians, while they readied the country for plunder.

I don´t blame him.

Buhari is the recycled catastrophe, selected by elitist greed, dry-cleaned by naïve intellectuals, dressed in messianic rhetoric, to appeal to the base instincts of an impoverished populace caressing their bigotries and atavisms; and dumped on the Nigerian presidency, to do the country to death with his nepotism and rank incompetence; while the bandits and rapists of our commonweal are smiling to the bank.

I blame the rest of us, who bent our backs to be ridden, by this inglorious cluelessness.

I blame those who should know better, and yet decided that a whitewashed sepulchre of incompetence, is Nigeria`s bridge to uhuru.

I reserve my harshest rebuke for those of many talents, who even when Buhari has left the closet and ceremoniously outed himself, with obscene pomp and pageantry, as a thoroughgoing and irredeemable failure-in-chief, continued to insult our intelligence that this dangerous buffoon, who has run Nigeria aground on the reefs of insecurity, is the very best thing after amala and Ewedu soup.

I love talented men.

I fear talented men as well.

I love those men of talent, who always aspired to leave the world a little better than they found it. Those men have purchased my gratitude and eternal veneration.

Their industry, their pioneering into frontiers unknown, plucked light and knowledge out of the jaws of ancient ignorance. They made us better. They left our world better. Where they met bricks, they sculpted marbles. Where they met ignorance, they blazed the trails into the unknown, to teach us ways to go. Where they met thickets of superstition, they taught us to look fear in the eyes and question with courage. What is there not to love, about those greats, and giants, on whose shoulders, we stand today to stake our own claims in this universe of ours?

Be that as it may, talent and neurosis are Siamese twins. Many talented men are neurotic men. St. Paul the great founder of Christianity, was superlatively neurotic. His manifested itself across his letters pontificating over a whole landscape of issues, that were beyond his competence. He claimed to be doing it in God´s name.

Sigismund Freud was a neurotic man. He saw sex everywhere, colouring our whole psychological architecture, with its tentacles. I am sometimes compelled to agree with Freud. The list of other great talented neurotics, is so long, that I cannot even begin to scratch the surface. Little doubt that we owe civilization, warts and all, to such restless madness, whose craniums couldn´t contain their wild dreams.

But the talent that frightens me, is that which is inordinately plagued by complexes. We seem to find an overabundance of such characters, ambling around every court of power, like vultures circling around dead carrion. Such talents grow to become the Little Fingers of every Game of Thrones. They are gigantic sociopathologies on two legs. They are thoroughly Machiavellian in their amorality; murderous in their pursuit of the crumbs falling off power´s tables. So much so, that they are ready to sell their mothers to acquire those. They are kissers of repute. They are excellent ass-kissers, and very proficient in planting kisses of betrayal on cheeks, they have concluded plans to slaughter or betray. They are very flexible. They fear neither God nor man. They create gods to enslave men. They are never afraid of those creatures of their hands. They have no allegiances to anything save their narcissism. They are pliant enough to genuflect in subservience to kiss the dirty asses of power, for a plate of messy porridge, sordid lucre or for even as little as a pat on the head.

And nothing is as dirty as talent, in service of malice. History boasts enough records of this tragedy, across various times, ages, and epochs. It spilled a lot of blood, sanctified a lot of abominations, and canonized a lot of rogues.

I will give you a few examples!

The Dominican vanguards of the medieval inquisition, were talented men. They prided themselves as The Order of Preachers. And Oh Boy, Preach, they did! Theirs were litany of homilies! They preached violence on the torsos of unfortunate men. They pierced bodies, picked bones apart, and broke the souls and righteous indignation of many innocents. They massacred many classes of people, whom were undesirable in their version of God´s holy kingdom on earth. They wrote murder on the bodies of the powerless, spoke damnation and hell on their souls, tortured and tattooed symphonies of misogyny on the frames of hapless young women; decimated intellectuals, hunted down anyone, who dared disagree with the official theologies of the medieval church. Don´t forget that these men, were holy men, if I am to employ Mark-Anthonian irony. They preached and tortured for God‘s Kingdom. Theirs, unfortunately, was the ruthlessness native to holiness. Or their idea of it. These talented men, possessed murderous neurosis, masquerading as the fear of God´s wrath. In thraldom to that, they pretended to holiness, and sat in tribunes of judgement, against their fellow men; projecting all the darkness native to their tortured souls, on hapless others. This gave them the inglorious smokescreen to crucify their brothers and sisters, in the neurotic bid to rid themselves of those iniquities terrorizing their neurotic existence.

Josef Ibn Goebbels was a talented half-cripple, who graduated top of his class, as the valedictorian. His oratorical prowess was second to none on the side of a deranged Fuhrer. Without meaning to psychoanalyze him, one could see that his semi-disability fought a battle of Armageddon with his brilliant mind. This battle produced a Frankenstein monster, who laid his talent at the disposal of evil. I won´t regale you, with the rousing appearances he entered in the service of a machinery dedicated to the industrial genocide of peoples.

These are two examples of the talents that frighten me. Men, who claim to speak for God, frighten me to no end. And men, in whose lives, talents battle infirmity either of mind or body, frighten the bejesus out of me. This is why Lai Mohammed, Femi Adesina, Garba Shehu, Femi Fani Kayode, and El Rufai frighten the bejesus out of me. These men are excellent ass-kissers of power. They are ready to eat shit, to be in the good graces of power. They are the Little but leprous fingers of a Buhari`s semi-dictatorship, which has out-classed itself in incompetence and perfidy.

I fear such characters. I don´t envy them. Theirs remain an inglorious vocation. Goebbels spoke himself into eternal disrepute, holding court for one of the greatest evils of the 20th century. These men, have written their names in infamy, as they essay, and dissimulate, to steady the rickety scaffold, still keeping Buhari´s incompetence afloat.

Over and above these, I blame Nigerians.

I am yet to see a talented people, that are as superlatively naïve as Nigerians can be. In 2015, they allowed some well-regarded Nigerians, who were ambitious to write profiles in stupidity, serenade them with brainless nonsense. They listened patiently as they were told that they should vote for Buhari, even if he presented utility bills as his certificates. They knew Buhari was not qualified. Yet they voted for him. Nigerians knew that Buhari was a chameleon. They knew that his pretences to democracy was just that. They knew he was tyrant, yet they became alarmed when he banned twitter, for flagging his genocidal utterances. But they were witnesses in 1984 as he, under the ruse of a Decree 4, clamped Nduka Irabor and Tunde Thompson in jail, for going about their journalistic job of being watchdogs of society. I wonder who told them, that a mad man in recovery, would ever give up on talking to himself?

Today, his government has been wielding the NBC as a cudgel, to bludgeon any news organization, which dared allow any view, critical of government. Journalists are routinely clamped in jail. Protesters are shot and murdered in broad daylight; and the government gaslights the people with such brazen lies that would challenge Goebbels for supremacy.

I don´t blame Buhari though. I blame that convocation of amoral men like Tinubu and his co-wayfarers, who feel that it is their turn to eat at the table, even if Nigerians were to become the meal eaten on those tables of political iniquity. Tinubu has always been a thug. He took his regional thuggery to the centre, borrowing copiously from Lamidi Adedibu`s playbook.

Nigeria under Buhari is a sociopathology. The country is like an army equipped for epic battle; with every ordnance it requires to triumph, but which cannot rise above the pettiness of its Commander-in-chief, whose greatest ambition has been, to snatch a pyrrhic defeat, out of the jaws of victory.

In spite of all these, I don´t blame a man, who cannot rise above himself. I will praise he who can. But I blame those, who pushed a man, who couldn´t swim into waters with deadly undercurrents. I blame those who hoisted Buhari and his festival of incompetence on us. The hottest parts of hell, are reserved for them.

Gwazia ndi yard unu!!