He was unfit.
We told them.
His antecedent was a summary of grotesque incompetence.
We screamed and clawed. We jawed and fought. Friends left. Strangers cursed us. They called us unprogressive. We were gaslighted into reviewing our position. We considered all the variables once more, seeking for a redeeming attribute. We found none. Our prior conclusion couldn`t be dislodged by the facts. The facts were stubborn in their insistence. Buhari was not competent to govern a complex society like Nigeria.
We couldn’t perjure our conscience. We stood our ground. We told it like we saw it. The facts backed our stance. The cacophony of purchased voices, kept peddling incompetence as a replacement for a democrat, battling waves of disloyalty, in order to steady the ship of state.
The deep was more attractive. Darkness kept calling.
We were intrigued.
How could a people be so intransigent in their bid to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory?
What was wrong with Nigerians?
My heart was broken, like Caesar’s was by Brutus` dagger-thrust, when my brother, joined the bandwagon supporting him. I warned that he was unfit for office. Anger tempted me. But reason came to counsel me. I was reminded that diversity of opinions, is the spice of democracy.
I respected his right to support, whoever he wished and wanted. I cherished our brotherhood. Our differences in opinion was there to enrich our perspectives.
But the facts kept insisting that Buhari is ignorant of what it means to govern a country under a democracy. The more we ventilated our discomfiture, was the more they repackaged him.
They dressed him in messianic robes. He was the Daniel come to judgement, bellowed the Lagos-Ibadan press axis. Someone that was supposed to have a brain sitting on top of his neck, announced to Nigerians, that even if he presented NEPA Bills (Utility Bills) as his certificate, that he would vote for him. It sounded like what one hears from a cult-leader. We kept warning. But Nigerians were beyond care at this time, as everyone kept jumping over themselves to be on that bandwagon. They posted pairs of deaf ears to our jeremiads. We were kill-joys in their “venerable” opinion.
The night of a thousand daggers was already under way. The fisherman from the Niger-Delta must be removed from office, come rain or high water. He saw the handwritings on the wall. It needed not be “Mene mene tekel Upharsin.” He understood too well, that those who believed that they are the owners of Nigeria, are demanding that he hand back the presidency to them.
For them, it is their birthright. For them he was an usurper, husbanding a presidency on borrowed time. For them, he came from the tribe of vassals, for whom the presidency was an unaffordable luxury.
Tinubu, their man-Friday from the west, was busy purchasing all the compromised voices, and turning them into shrill vuvuzelas; massed as an inglorious armada of cant, singing the songs of a goat, in a castrated support of a failure.
I wasn’t actually in support of Jonathan. But Buhari was such a placard of screaming failure as his first missionary journey into power, showed, that I was loath to touch him with a spoon stretching from here to the moon.
There was no way a leopard was going to change its spots.
I supported Engr. Martin Onovo in the first elections, and Prof. Kingsley Muoghalu in the second.
I saw something in their youth and courage. I never support those, who are statistically dead, to govern a nation that has 70 percent of her population as young people under 30 years of age.
Such men, were museum pieces, that should be displayed as fossils to be seen and admired, but never given power over the present and posterity of a generation of younger people.
That was the reason why I would never support a 72 year old or a 74 year old Nigerian for the presidency. They have at that age, reached their retirement age. They should be on their rockers, toothpick in-between their teeth, scouring for those ancient bits and morsels of meat, that kept terrorizing their aged teeth.
They should never be saddled with responsibilities that their old and infirm frames would find progressively exhausting, as the demands and exigencies of the office come for its pound of flesh, which it definitely will.
Today, Buhari has shed those pretenses of even appealing to our democratic ethos. He has morphed into an absentee-landlord, that has lost control of his holdings; just descending occasionally from the Olympian heights of his aloofness, to come increase the rents, that his serfs must cough out, to appease his tyrannical instincts.
I don’t blame Buhari.
It is difficult to transcend yourself, once you are already fossilized at those portals of conceptual infirmity, which old age, and half education inflicts on the mind.
I also don’t blame those who cast the votes that elected him or those who helped steal the elections.
I am happy that Buhari happened upon us.
He has exploded those myths of being a man of integrity. We have tasted his incompetence again, and we can now rest easy, that the easily deceived Nigerian mind, has gotten to savor the tastes his self-deception thirsted for.
Next time anyone asks you to vote for anyone, you would have realized that elections have consequences.
As for Muhammadu Buhari, his relationship with Nigerians remain like the song we used to sing in the Enugu of my childhood. Uwa m na Theresa…
You can complete the song if you know the rest.
Ndi yard, I don talk my own
