Saturday, February 1, 2020

Insecurity Will Only Expand And Fester With Buhari

By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.

Twitter:@farooqkperogi

Buhari’s admission that he was surprised by the growing insecurity in the North, Senator Abaribe’s call for him to resign, and the House of Representatives’ non-binding call for Nigeria’s service chiefs to retire in light of the escalating flow of blood all over the nation recall my April 13, 2019 column titled “Why Buhari Can’t and Won’t Solve the North’s Growing Security Crisis.”

Except for the dates and a few facts, it could well have been written this week.This shows how the more things change in the Buhari regime, the more they remain the same.Enjoy:

The last few days have seen a hypocritical mass awakening to the dire existential torments the people of Nigeria’s northwest face and a dramatic diminution of Buhari’s unearned goodwill in the region.

People who had constructed Buhari as an unerring, irreproachable demigod who is worthy only of worship and unquestioned admiration have started to call him insensitive and clueless.

It took the unceasing escalation of kidnappings and the deepening and widening of the oceans of blood in the northwest for Buhari’s erstwhile unthinking worshipers to come to terms with what some of us have known and said since late 2015: that Buhari is an unfeeling wretch who is also irremediably incompetent.

For the first time since Buhari happened on the Nigerian political scene, Imams are now openly preaching against him.Northwestern Nigerian social media, which had functioned as the uncritical fortress for Buhari, is now suddenly viciously censorious of him.

Even Daily Trust that plays the role of Buhari’s comforter and afflicter of critics of his ineptitude is allowing critical articles to be published about Buhari on its pages.

Public protesters against government, who are a rare species in the northwest, are sprouting and giving vent to muffled, reluctant, tentative but nonetheless significant anger against Buhari.

There suddenly seems to be an epiphany in the region that Buhari is an inept, uncaring fraud who scammed the people into attributing to him qualities he never possessed & would never possess in a million lifetimes.

Nevertheless, this epiphany is hypocritical and self-centered.Evidence of Buhari’s inattentiveness to & blithe unconcern with the suffering of everyday people has always been there, and some of us have called attention to it countless times.

For instance, amid the tear-jerking humanitarian disasters that the Boko Haram insurgency has inflicted on Nigeria’s northeast, Buhari never commiserated with, let alone visited, the area until he was practically blackmailed into doing so in late 2017.

Even so, he only visited soldiers stationed in Maiduguri. When the Nigerian air force bombed scores of internally displaced Boko Haram victims in the northeast in error, Buhari didn’t issue a statement to condole with the people.Nor did he visit them.

In the aftermath of unprecedented bloodletting in Taraba, Benue and other parts of central Nigeria, Buhari was insouciant.It took massive media and social media pressures to get him to visit these states.

And when he did visit the places, he exacerbated rather than lessened the crises there by his incendiary, unpresidential utterances.He even chafed at being expected to condole with victims of episodic communal deaths & used the opportunity of these visits to tout his “achievements in security.” I once called that an example of presidential dissociation from reality.

As recently as during the last presidential campaigns, when Buhari visited Zamfara, he didn’t say a word about the intensification of death and violence in the state. Instead, he incited the people to more violence.

“Let us pray for rainfall so can we grow food, eat, and then cause trouble,” he told the people of Zamfara in Hausa in February 2019. None of the newfound critics of Buhari’s callousness saw anything wrong in that at the time.

It took the concatenation of widespread kidnapping in all parts of the northwest and the unremitting intensification of bloodletting in Zamfara for erstwhile worshipers of Buhari to admit that he is a crass, cold, heartless prig.

This hypocritical moral imagination is similar to the selective outrage some people in Kano expressed when Abdullahi Ganduje rigged himself back to power while being quiet about, even complicit in, Buhari’s own daylight electoral robbery in the same Kano.

To express outrage only when we are personally affected by injustice bespeaks a defective moral conscience. When other parts of the nation were drowning in rivers of blood and Buhari, as is his wont, turned the other way, many of the people who are excoriating him for his cold detachment from the insecurity in the northwest were his fiercest defenders against critics.

That is why some people can’t help but exult in perverse satisfaction that the enablers and defenders of Buhari’s incompetence and heartlessness are today the victims of the presidential vices they defended, excused, and justified.

But to gloat over the misfortunes of the people who defended Buhari when he ignored other parts of the country when they writhed in bloodstained agony is to be indistinguishable from and morally equivalent to them.

For one, there are victims of the bloodbath in Zamfara and other parts of the northwest who detest and didn’t vote for Buhari. Even those who voted for him don’t deserve the unspeakable cruelty that is their lot today.

I admit, though, that it’s hard not to see karmic comeuppance in the kidnap of a prominent fanatical Islamic “prayer warrior” of Buhari’s second term by the name of Ahmad Sulaiman who secured his freedom after nearly two weeks of captivity and hundreds of millions of naira in ransom payment.

Nevertheless, in spite of the heightened, unexampled outrage in Buhari’s natal region over his trademark insensitivity to the total collapse of security there, he won’t do anything substantive to attenuate the horrors that threaten the very life of the people there.There are at least two reasons for this.

One, Buhari is an inherently solipsistic narcissist.In other words, he is fundamentally and unalterably self-centered. The only person Buhari cares about is Buhari.That is why he spends billions of naira of the nation’s resources to treat even his littlest ailments in London while hospitals are denuded of basic medicines and ordinary people die of easily treatable illnesses.

It is the same solipsistic narcissism that explains why he has not built a single hospital even in Abuja in the last four years he has been president.

When his son had an accident with a multimillionaire-naira motorbike, he flew him to Germany. Yet, although neither he nor his family members use the clinic at the Presidential Villa, he recently said that henceforth no one outside the immediate families of the president and the vice president should use the clinic.

It speaks to the depth of his egocentricity and perverse self-love that he would deny workers of the presidential villa use of a clinic that neither he nor his family members use.

The second reason Buhari won’t do anything about the growing insecurity in the northwest is that the perpetrators of the crimes that have held the region hostage have been identified as Fulani. Buhari, as I have pointed out in several previous columns, is a knee-jerk ethnic jingoist.He has a twisted idea of ethnic solidarity that embarrasses even many educated Fulani people.

For instance, the only time he ever visited Zamfara to intervene in the security situation there was to protect what he perceives to be the interests of Fulani herders whose cattle were reportedly being stolen by bandits. He even donned military fatigues for this expedition. Now, he really doesn’t care because the victims aren’t people he self-identifies with.

The president’s puppeteers have caused him to express faux, impotent outrage to mollify the people of the NW but the truth is that he doesn’t care.That’s why his administration’s response has been discordant at best. It said the killings in Zamfara are caused by illegal gold miners in the same breath it said they’re caused by traditional rulers.  

The absurdity of these claims is the biggest proof that the government Buhari leads can’t and doesn’t want to stem the rising tide of insecurity in the northwest or anywhere else in Nigeria.

Racoon:


Buhari’s admission that he was surprised by the growing insecurity in the North, Senator Abaribe’s call for him to resign, and the House of Representatives’ non-binding call for Nigeria’s service chiefs to retire in light of the escalating flow of blood all over the nation recall my April 13, 2019 column titled “Why Buhari Can’t and Won’t Solve the North’s Growing Security Crisis.”
https://www.farooqkperogi.com/2020/02/insecurity-will-only-expand-and-fester.html?m=1#.XjUJRs75LXE.twitter

cc: Lalasticlala

1. For a president to say he's surprised by the growing insecurities especially in the North proves that those who voted this incompetence in, needs to apologise to Nigerians!

2. In case many of you have forgotten, one of the reasons he gave for closing the border is to curb their access and be able to capture those within!
How can he claim that he knows nothing

3. His submission shows, he has no solution

Shouldn't he resign or be impeached I believe this is the stage we should be at!!!

Wiseandtrue:

1.For a president to say he's surprised by the growing insecurities especially in the North proves that those who voted this incompetence in, needs to apologise to Nigerians!

2.In case many of you have forgotten, one of the reasons he gave for closing the border is to curb their access and be able to capture those within! How can he claim that he knows nothing?

3.His submission shows, he has no solution.Shouldn't he resign or be impeached? I believe this is the stage we should be at!!!

The second reason Buhari won’t do anything about the growing insecurity in the northwest is that the perpetrators of the crimes that have held the region hostage have been identified as Fulani. Buhari, as I have pointed out in several previous columns, is a knee-jerk ethnic jingoist.He has a twisted idea of ethnic solidarity that embarrasses even many educated Fulani people.

admit, though, that it’s hard not to see karmic comeuppance in the kidnap of a prominent fanatical Islamic “prayer warrior” of Buhari’s second term by the name of Ahmad Sulaiman who secured his freedom after nearly two weeks of captivity and hundreds of millions of naira in ransom payment.

12Monkeys:
This is what I told that zombie sarrki.That he must face the consequences of supporting & enabling the demon called Buhari.All zombies will suffer before Buhari is booted out.

TheFreeOne:
........ Whosoever supported and still supporting this evil administration should know karma is real....

Racoon:


"People who had constructed Buhari as an unerring, irreproachable demigod who is worthy only of worship and unquestioned admiration have started to call him insensitive and clueless...

There suddenly seems to be an epiphany in the region that Buhari is an inept, uncaring fraud who scammed the people into attributing to him qualities he never possessed & would never possess in a million lifetimes.."
Sarrki salvation comes to mind.

TheFreeOne:
That sarrki of a guy is an unintelligent chap.I remembered telling him he doesn't understand the true meaning of patriotism but he kept yapping like a parrot in defense of his unpatriotic, incompetent and nepotistic baba.

Now he's claiming repentance? I hope his deliverance from the spirit of zombeism is for real but karma never fails and evil doers and their supporters will not go unpunished either in this world or hereafter.

Racoon:

I always tell any mummified zombie who cares to listen that the below is the true meaning of patroitism;

Built2last:
Every tyrannical regime is premised on certain pillars from which it derive its oxygen. Sometimes, it is the religious Elites who make themselves available as a spiritual pillar to the evil regime.Other times, it is the traditional Elites.

But since Africa became hopelessly addicted to religion, bad rulers now prefer having religious leaders as their main backer. Because the govt knows they control the people by virtue of their claim to hearing directly from God, the govt no longer bothers trying to gain the trust of the people.They simply find a way of controlling the religious men who control the people.If you want to truly fight any autocratic and murderous regime, just identify its pillars and fight them first.

In Buhari's murderous and terrorist friendly regime, Pastor Enoch Adeboye is the religious pillar.Adeboye is not alone.There is another yahoo yahoo pigeon man in Enugu who goes by the name Mbaka.And there is another elderly clergy known as Kumuyi who once enjoined Nigerians never to criticize President Buhari.

If you are looking for three religious dealers providing the spiritual oxygen for the sustainance of the Buhari regime, don't look beyond these three men.But Adeboye & Mbaka are the most visible.

Of course, there are numerous Imams playing exactly the same role for the govt by brainwashing people in their mosque with the idiotic narrative that the insecurity in the North is a divine punishment from Allah for some unnamed sin.

It is not enough to bow to pressure and join the protest against insecurity, it's more important to do so HONEST-LY & GENUINELY by blaming the security problem on the President and Commander-In-Chief just like the CAN President did today instead of hiding behind God to shield Buhari from blame.

Let's face it, our Security challenges are man made.It is solely caused by President Muhammadu Buhari. When you are busy releasing arrested Boko Haram terrorists back into their business of terrorism and at the same time providing state cover for fulani terrorist herdsmen, HOW DO YOU EXPECT YOUR COUNTRY NOT TO BE BEDEEVILLED BY INSECURITY

Pastor Enoch Adeboye should stop that silly and deceptively hypocritical game of telling us that God is the only person that can solve the security challenges. God has nothing to do with this.

Adeboye should, instead, talk to his friend, Buhari and advice him to stop brazenly and blatantly empowering Boko Haram by releasing arrested members of the group in the name of rehabilitation.

Adeboye should prevail on Buhari to prosecute the Fulani terrorist herdsmen and label Miyetti Allah a terrorist organizations.There is no security problem we are facing that is not linked to either Boko Haram or the Fulani terrorist herdsmen.And THE BUHARI REGIME IS OPENLY IN BED WITH THESE TWO TERRORIST GROUPS. Is Adeboye not aware Why is he linking to God what is clearly Buhari's fault?

Sometimes, speaking truth works magic than insincere prayers aimed at deceiving the people.In the Biblical days of old, men of God were the conscience of the soceity. They feared no one.They spoke truth to power.

When King David murdered Uriah & took his wife, prophet Nathan came straight to him and told him his evil to his face.Jeremiah was called the weeping Prophet for a reason.Elijah, Elisha & even John the Baptist nko? Those men spoke truth to power.

Today, we have our own men of God who would rather tell us to pray to God to solve our Security problem because they are in some intercourse with the same govt directly responsible for the Security problem.

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed”-Psalm 31:8,

Where is Justice for Evangelist Eunice Elisha who was one of Adeboye's Pastor butchered right here on the street of Abuja for preaching in a street that houses a mosque with the Police releasing all those arrested for her murder?

Where is justice for Bridget Agbohime beheaded in Kano with the Kano state govt declaring that her killers have no case to answer, thus forcing the kano magistrate court to free those arrested for her murder.

As a stake holder in the Buhari govt, having 'donated' one of his Pastors as the VeePee, why didn't Adeboye insist on justice for the above victims since their killers are all known?? Of what use is his connection & frequent visit to Buhari of he can't use it to champion justice for victims of those religious killings??

See eh, we need to stop being foolish Christians who hand everything over to God because we are either too scared to talk to the govt enabling this killing or we are too compromised to care.

Buhari is doing exactly the job of an ethno-religious fundamentalist and that is why he remains popular amongst his fellow ethno-religious irredentists. Boko Haram is doing its own job of killing and maiming and beheading mainly people of opposite faith and moderate Muslims.

The Fulani herdsmen are doing theirs. Everyone of them is protecting their constituency. People like Adeboye who are Christian leaders and are supposed to act like the good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep are doing exactly the opposite. Why?

In a situation where human lives are being wasted, you can't afford to be here and there at the same time. It is either you are with the people in which case, you will join them in calling on the Commander-In-Chief to stop empowering terrorists killing innocent people.

Or you are on the side of the evil regime in which case, you will shy away from even mentioning the govt but be busy creating the devilish and misleading impression that the security breakdown is divinely inspired & would require divine intervention.Enough of this deception, please!