By Adeyemi JohnsonTHE emotions and sentiments which build near the Nigerian elections compels one to further contemplate the awesome creativity of William Shakespeare in capturing the universality of the human mass psyche.Reflecting on the sentiments being built in hyperbolic terms on the candidacy of Buhari by some sections of the public, one cannot help but quail at the comparison of the situation to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. When the senators like Cassius who sought power needed justification for their cause just as being orchestrated now against President Goodluck Jonathan, they tried to sway the public by calling Julius Caesar a tyrant.In graphic terms, they described Caesar as a power hungry man who wanted to become King by destroying the Roman republican state just as some ‘’born to rule’’ consider Jonathan’s constitutional right to contest election as a threat to national ‘stability’ and should have in fact been a ‘hero’ according to Alhaji Ibrahim Coomasie and a handful of northern elders, if he had not contested the 2011 election and would not be a ‘hero’ if he goes ahead to contest the 2015 election. But and like in Rome, Mark Antony brought the public back to reality to separate facts from opinion, to compare Caesar’s contributions in his quest for greatness for Rome to the public, reminding them how he refused the offer to be crowned king. As always, Shakespeare, master wordsmith, brings to life, the length to which those who plot to rise to power will go to erase public memory which is often shortened by any loss of physical comforts or prevailing welfare conditions.In the same way, the emotive hyperbole being created around the Buhari candidacy as a disciplined strongman, is capable of inducing mass amnesia in the Nigerian public into problematizing their present condition as the work of Jonathan by blurring the facts of our history and the measured responses of President Jonathan to change the rot and psychological damages created by decades of military rule in Nigeria that Buhari is part of having truncated democracy that would have taken a firm root by now.Some present welfare discomforts are capable of inducing national amnesia. For instance,when we forget that under Military rule, the head of state answers to no one, no legislature and makes laws for the courts to follow. It is capable of erasing our memories of Chief Bisi Onabanjo and Pa Adekunkle Ajasin, honest politicians who were detained for corruption by Buhari, and jailed for several years without proof that they corruptly enriched themselves in power. The hype of some current discomforts can make people lure us back to dictatorship, as power seekers tell us that what we need are strongmen.To induce national collective amnesia, they will attribute all the ills of society to the federal government and not a faulty federalism. They will ignore how state and local government responsibilities in their jurisdictions also failed to ease these discomforts. How they did not make university fees affordable, how they did not open government contracts to open bidding to create opportunities for all at state and local governments, how local roads are riddled numerous pot-holes until they started scrambling near elections to get these holes filled. But to foist a return to a forgotten dictatorship of three decades, they will want us to forget the good works of Jonathan.They will want us to forget that Jonathan raised the minimum wage from 7,500 naira to 18,000 naira despite resistance from many of them, placing a minimum of 11,500 naira in the pocket of most workers. That he erased petrol queues and saved billions for SURE-P funds which many of them now spend at state and local government levels even though they left Jonathan alone to defend the subsidy removal they all agreed should be removed.To induce a national collective memory of military dictatorship, they want us to forget that all the promises of reviving railway lines only became prominent as the Jonathan administration made it a core part of the transformation agenda, that travelling by rail from Lagos to Kwara or Lagos to Kano had been forgotten even though individual military dictators had over 450 million United States Dollars in over 10 accounts. That obtaining agricultural inputs from government was a scam for enriching friends, and distribution of fertilizers was reserved for powerfully connected friends of dictators until Jonathan’s government introduced the eWallet policy.They will hype Buhari as a phenomenon, urging us to forget that in 2001 in Kaduna, he promoted religious intolerance by advocating for the practice of Sharia all over Nigeria; that he has compared the religious supremacist demands of Boko Haram to the economic demand of Niger-Delta militants. They will like us to forget that Jonathan built the first transformative schools for rehabilitating Almajiris, that Jonathan built 10 universities in northern Nigeria in three years between 2011 and 2013, more universities than all northern leaders built in the north between 1960 and 1998.They will want us to see Buhari as a clean uncorrupt leader, without drawing our attention to the fact that when he was in charge of the petroleum ministry, 2.8 billion dollars went up in smoke, that he worked under the most corrupt military dictatorship in Nigeria under Abacha, administering funds from petroleum, yet he used the funds for only the northern parts of the country, leaving all the consultancy for all projects under the care of his relatives (Afriproject Ltd) without any enduring project in the South of Nigeria. But they will like us to ignore how the Jonathan government has ensured an even spread in the rehabilitation of roads across the country, how the power sector reforms will transform every section of the country generating jobs and opportunities and cutting down out-of pocket spending for generator fuel when the new operators steady power supplies.In hyping Buhari, the power seekers, will want us to forget Decree no 2 and Decree no 4 which Buhari used to detain people like Ajasin and Onabanjo indefinitely and gag the press. No one compelled Buhari to sign these laws, even if he signed reluctantly he did not hesitated to use them, he even killed three Nigerians using retroactive decrees. But the new power seekers will want us to see this as necessary to create order and discipline. They will rather not want us to see possible law and order when we use laws like the Freedom of Information Act signed by the Jonathan government something the Obasanjo regime for eight years rejected.They hype Buhari as the strongman required for security against Boko Haram, but the nation is not told that a strongman is in charge in Russia where the Chechnyan rebels are still bombing train stations in Moscow, that strongmen who hold nuclear weapons control Pakistan where bigots shoot passengers at the national airport and health workers during polio immunization.If we believe these hypes, we will not need to fight Boko Haram because in voting for Buhari, the nation will have capitulated to dictatorship and Sharia zealots without firing a shot.

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2014/01/buhari-jonathan-national-amnesia/