You don't send Donald Trump on a mission on monogamy and family values, because he is on his third marriage, and it's not because he was a widower. By that same token, you don't send Buhari on a democratic rescue mission, because he has a record for killing democracy.

There was a major national event in Nigeria on October 1, 1979. On that day, the whole world watched and celebrated with Nigeria as it reclaimed popular democracy from the clutches of a successive military oligarchs who had toppled and thwarted the first popular republic, plunging the fledgling nation into a three-year civil war with a human death toll in excess of one million. It was a healing moment, and everybody needed healing. But it would be the shortest convalescence for a nation.

December 31, 1983, two short months after he was reelected and re-inaugurated on October 1, 1979, Alhaji Shehu Shagari was chased out of government house, Lagos by a team of ambitious but self-advertised military patriots led by a gangly General from Duara. With that eerie early morning marshal concerto on the airwaves, democracy, as we knew it, died again, and Nigerians would step into the new year, corralled by the jackboots and koboko whips of a moralizing and paternalizing marshal disciplinarian.

From that moment, a young and promising nation descended into a horrifying spiral of costly coups, counter-coups, annulments, interim and provisional contraptions that frittered away a generational national fortune. It marked the beginning of the longest sixteen years of a national nightmare that saw the collapse of national institutions and the institutionalizations of corruption and allied vices. It was a season of locust plague that ate away at the very foundations of our national existence.

The greatest harm of that sixteen-year journey down the path of infamy, which was flagged off on December 31, 1983, is not the quantifiable economic losses, as humongous as they are; it is the permanent entrenchment of corruption as a national ethos in our national psyche. The former we could recover from, the latter we could never - not in the next hundred years. It is that bad, and President Muhammad Buhari triggered it, the key word being "triggered".

Reasonable people can have reasonable debate on the condition of the country in the twenty months of the Buhari-Idiagbon regime. Assessments will vary depending on who is making them and the matrix they are using. For those who believe in a disciplined citizenry, law, and order, Buhari's first stint in national leadership receives high marks. For those who believe in popular and constitutional democracy, that was not just a.....




Credit: http://ikengachronicles.com/buhari-in-gambia-right-message-wrong-messenger-vitus-ozoke/