‘Has anyone ever seen Buhari laugh?’ All our military
heads of state were largely insensitive, corrupt, almost illiterate,
self-appointed tyrants who seized their stripes of honour (dishonour is
probably more appropriate) through coups rather than the rigours of
formal training, experience or war.
Each one of the military heads of state simply got up from bed one
chosen morning, pistle on the hip, jackboots on the ready to besmear our
constitution to loot our treasury to their hearts content. Of course,
they soon made up on the job for their lack of proper war or soldiering
experience by detaining, tear gassing, shooting and bombing citizens
protesting against their high-handedness and misrule. Everyone of our
coup Generals aspired to be the richest lazy fool in the world sitting
like an over-fed baboon atop the tallest tree in our devastated and
rotting vineyard, savouring their exploits amidst squalor, hunger and
decaying corpses. General Muhammadu Buhari was one of such military
heads of state.
Shagari’s regime (1979-1983), incurred Buhari’s wrath when it decided
to investigate the US$2.8 billion that disappeared from the Midland
Bank, London account of the Nigerian National Petroleum Cooperation,
(NNPC), during General Obasanjo’s era as military head of state that
preceded Shagari’s. Dr. Olusola Saraki, Turaki of Ilorin, was the
majority party leader of the Senate at the time and he headed the Senate
Committee set up to trace the stolen money after some three years of
clamour for such an investigation by members of the civil society. The
money was traced to the Midland Bank London branch fixed account of
Obasanjo’s appointee as military head of the Nigerian National Petroleum
Company. The Committee’s report was presented to the Senate during the
tail end of Shagari’s regime in 1983, so the House decided to deal with
the matter and expose the rogue military head of the NNPC soon after
the 1983 general elections.
The attempt at civilian-to-civilian transition provided the fillip for
mayhem at the time. The elections were marred by massive rigging
because incumbent political office holders were refusing to slacken
their stranglehold on Nigeria Plc., mortgaged as the leaders private
property.
On the 31st December, 1983, Buhari struck under the cover of the
political commotion that trailed the presidential election results.
Buhari generally had no agenda for leadership but vendetta against those
he called critics and rabble-rousers. Buhari did not see any moral
wrong in his conversion of our oil money into his personal use. Rather
he railed at the press and what he described as the self-righteous
sections of the country for making a big deal out of the issue. He
locked up without trial, politicians and critics including Fela
Anikulapo-Kuti, notorious for clamouring for the exposure of the oil
money rogue. Satire saved my neck at the time. Vera Ifudu, who was an
NTA reporter then, was sacked through his prodding as military ruler,
for reporting what Dr. Olusola Saraki had told her in an interview about
how the missing money was traced to Buhari’s account at a Midland Bank
London branch. Vera eventually won her case of wrongful dismissal in
court against the NTA and was financially compensated.
Buhari’s ‘War Against Indiscipline’ was obviously a swathe to
camouflage his moral decadence. He did not see anything wrong with the
over 50 suitcases an Emir smuggled through the Muritala International
Airport without routine checks. And as a master of selective justice, he
refused to convict Shagari, claiming not to find direct evidence
against him but making a mountain out of a mole-hill on the indulgencies
of Shagari’s lieutenants. His regime’s master stroke to divert
attention from his moral ineptitude was exemplified by his crating of
Umaru Dikko to airfreight back to Nigeria from London.
Despite his moral degeneracy and his high handedness and intolerance
of dissent, his regime was not a total disaster. He maintained a vibrant
foreign policy with Africa as its principal focus. Nigeria was already
a failed state economically when he seized government from Shagari. We
had a staggering foreign debt load of US$18 billion, so Buhari stopped
all further borrowing, and in defiance of the IMF and World Bank,
provided a home-grown alternative to the IMF’s SAP and pegged the
exchange rate of the naira at one to the US$1.50. He stopped all further
borrowing from abroad; instituted counter trade for essential or
desperately needed commodities and put a ceiling (or an upper limit) on
the amount of foreign exchange earnings to be used in servicing foreign
debts. After sorting out and rejecting all the dubious and unverifiable
foreign debts in our portfolio, he paid off nearly 50% of the genuine
debts by the end of his regime in 1985. Even Britain was already
scheming to enter into counter trade agreement with Nigeria when
Babangida was sponsored in 1986 by the West to sack Buhari in a military
coup that reversed our limited economic gains.
Not much is known about Buhari’s family background. Not a great deal
has been heard about his educational qualifications either. As head of
state, he was a recluse to the core. At least, that was the image he
portrayed. His deputy, the late Gen. Idiagbon, was considered by most
Nigerians to be the star of Buhari’s regime. It is to Idiagbon that any
credit due to that regime is generally attributed. Idiagbon was the
defacto head of state. He was honest, upright, disciplined, and like
Murtala Muhammed before him, he succeeded briefly in introducing order
and sanity to our lives.
After consigning the vexatious matters that brought him to power, to
administrative oblivion with the help of Shinkafi, his Secret Service
guru, Buhari announced his readiness to quit office. Idiagbon, as
Buhari’s lieutenant, naturally insisted on taking over as head of state
from his apparently prematurely retiring boss. Babangida, who was Chief
of Army Staff at the time and a member of the Supreme Military Council,
insisted it was his turn to rule because he had been involved in
virtually every military coup up to that time. The quarrel split the
Supreme Military Council members almost equally behind the two principal
combatants and eventually led to the overthrow of Buhari’s regime by
Babangida. America, Britain and the other leading western nations
hailed Babangida’s coup and immediately sent emissaries to strategize
with him. President Reagan went out of his way to send him gifts
including books such as Niccolo Machiavelli’s: the Prince, advocating
the destruction of civil freedom to strengthen despotism.
The June 12 annulment provided Buhari with the opportunity to publicly
wear a messianic toga while quietly pursuing private vendetta against
someone he considered his enemy. He attended meetings at Ota to join
with others to condemn Babangida’s decision and as soon as the decision
was reached to ask Babangida to step down, he stopped attending further
meetings. He had achieved his revenge.
Abacha rehabilitated Buhari with the chairmanship of the Petroleum Trust
Fund (PTF) before he (Abacha) died in 1998. When Obasanjo returned to
power in May 1999 as civilian president, he found that over 2.5 billion
naira had not been properly accounted for in the PTF and that there was
not much on the ground to show for the colossal expenditure the agency
was claiming. On the day Obasanjo announced the scrapping of the PTF, a
non-staff brother-in-law of the boss, allegedly serving as his conduit
on some PTF projects, died suddenly from what appeared to be heart
failure. Most of what he was able to achieve in the PTF, was focused in
his backyard. Haruna Adamu, who was appointed by Obasanjo to
investigate the PTF before finally consigning it to the dung heap,
quickly pocketed one hundred million naira of PTF’s money before
operating table could be set up for him, thus forcing Obasanjo to
hurriedly close the place down without further investigations. Buhari
has been trying desperately since to return to power, perhaps to get a
chance to shred the PTF documents?
Buhari is a tribal and religious bigot. When he lost the
presidential election in April 2003, he threatened the nation with mass
action and refused to go to court. He organized a rally in Abuja, as
one in a series of such civil acts of disobedience to protest what he
described as the massive rigging of the election that brought Obasanjo
to power the second time.
He almost succeeded in launching his Jihad. The alleged taped sermon
of an unnamed pastor at an unidentified church in Adamawa claiming
that: “Whether Muslims like it or not, Obasanjo must continue” and that
“any Muslim who does not want that, can die or move to Niger” was
obviously a blatant forgery. It was very likely to be the handiwork of
the ‘Crater of Dikko brigade. For a start, the language of the sermon
was too brash to be true, especially coming as it was claimed, from a
Christian minority likely to bear the brunt of the consequences of the
offensive sermon in a predominantly Muslim state. The Christian
minority would have had to be mad to the last man, to call for their own
annihilation in such a careless and irresponsible manner.
It is not logical that the Christian cleric would send hundreds of
his suicide sermon tapes, not to Christians, but to Muslim clerics and
the media around the country. Someone who desperately wanted to kill
Nigeria must think we are all morons and I suggest we look for him at
the backyard of our current number one Jihadist. Where else to look
when Buhari was threatening he must occupy the Presidency whether he won
the election or not. We begged him to go to the Electoral Tribunal to
settle the matter but he insisted that he would rather clubber us to
death, with religion than subject himself to the in indignity of being
judged by another man. That is how badly he cares about our welfare and
survival.
One is not always sure if he is truly a Nigerian because let’s face
it; no true Nigerian would hate Nigeria so much as to threaten her with a
Jihad. May be the problem is of a mental nature considering the gutter
snipes often credited to the supposed statesman on the Hausa service of
the BBC and other foreign media about his fatherland. He seems to love
to speak before he thinks. There is something definitely troubling
about the mind of this crater genius because it is probably not just
Nigerians that he hates but life itself in its totality. In other
words, we are probably all trapped in the vicious grip of a cool and
calculating sadist. In fact, I am told that no one has ever seen him
smile or laugh.
Sam Omatseye, writing about Buhari in the Sun newspaper at the time
said: “He (Buhari) uses sharia to justify his worldview; to justify a
certain selfish view of the world that serves his interest at a
particular time. He played that card in the presidential election in
order to secure a base for himself. But he needed more than his
northern base to become president. You must be flexible to pull
non-sharia base with you and the man has no flexibility in his bones so
when he tries to play the chameleon, he fails. He tries to carry a
veneer of a man of principles but falls short when selfish interest is
involved.”
Buhari has no respect for democracy. Under his behest, the ANPP
humiliated five highly respected South-Eastern Presidential aspirants at
their primary for the 2003 presidential election despite having Dr.
Okadigbo as Buhari’s running mate. After rigging his party’s primary to
become its presidential candidate, Buhari then felt he stood on moral
grounds to preach election morals to the world. Buhari ignored the
South-West completely, as if it did not exist and offered the
South-South, the unattractive, legally diminished constitutional option
on derivation. To rob salt into injury, he threatened to swap NDDC with
PTF. If he wasn’t playing with words, he betrayed his selfish ethnic
agenda because we all know what happened in his PTF. It concentrated
its activities in the North.
Buhari definitely was not a sellable presidential candidate across
Nigeria. What happened was that the incumbent ANPP governors needed a
Buhari to help them hold on to their states on religious grounds. Even
in the area of public debate, Buhari was not articulate or detribalized
and he lacked charisma. He ignored all entreaties to explain his
programmes to the ‘bloody civilians.’ Arrogant and condescending, he
was unable to climb down from his high horse as a former military
dictator. Infused with the moribund myth that Nigerian leadership was
the sole property of his ethnic group, he assumed he could cow the rest
of us with a jihad. If that failed, some said, military coup was a
possibility because a kaferi must not continue to rule. He concentrated
his campaign (if it could be called that, because he said very little
at every stop), in the North-East and North-West of the country. The
little he said, was only in the Hausa language to titillate the warrior
nerves of his jihadist gang.
With 19 states in the North, he was convinced he could, at least,
force a re-run in the elections, forgetting that the North Central
states are already a little weary of jihad. Even the core North itself
has some 30% Christian population. Awolowo and Zik exposed the fallacy
of the monolithic north by winning elections all over the place during
their time. Abiola proved that religion is not the cocoon the Buharis
think it is in modern Nigerian politics.
He prostitutes his political ambition by moving from party to party,
with the sole aim of becoming the presidential candidate of any party he
joins. He is not prepared to serve under anyone else, definitely not
under a southern candidate. On seeing that he would not be able to
realize his selfish ambition in the mega party he initially joined with
others to form, he hurriedly formed a break away party where no one
would challenge him as presidential candidate. Since there is no hope
of his legitimately ever becoming the Nigerian president or head of
state again, Nigerians need to be preparing now for a possible jihad led
by this man in the not too distant future.
According to Decree Number 2 of 1984, the state security and the
chief of staff were given the power to detain, without charges,
individuals deemed to be a security risk to the state for up to three
months.Strikes and popular demonstrations were banned and Nigeria’s security agency, the National Security Organization
(NSO) was entrusted with unprecedented powers. The NSO played a wide
role in the cracking down of public dissent by intimidating, harassing
and jailing individuals who broke the interdiction on strikes. By
October 1984, about 200,000 civil servants were retrenched.
The regime also jailed its critics, as in the case of Nigeria’s most
popular artist and one time presidential contender, afro-beat singer Fela Kuti.He was arrested on September 4, 1984 at the airport as he was about to embark on an American tour. Amnesty International
described the charges brought against him for illegally exporting
foreign currency as “spurious.” Using the wide powers bestowed upon it
by Decree Number 2, the government sentenced Fela to 5 years in prison.
He was released after 18 months when the Buhari government was toppled in a coup d’etat.
In 1984, Buhari passed Decree Number 4, the Protection Against False Accusations Decree,considered by scholars as the most repressive press law ever enacted in Nigeria.
Section 1 of the law provided that “Any person who publishes in any
form, whether written or otherwise, any message, rumour, report or
statement […] which is false in any material particular or which brings
or is calculated to bring the Federal Military Government or the
Government of a state or public officer to ridicule or disrepute, shall
be guilty of an offense under this Decree”.The law further stated that offending journalists and publishers will
be tried by an open military tribunal, whose ruling would be final and
unappealable in any court and those found guilty would be eligible for a
fine not less than 10,000 naira
and a jail sentence of up to two years. Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor
of The Guardian were among the journalists who were tried under the
decree.
Decree 20 on illegal ship bunkering and drug trafficking was another example of Buhari’s tough approach to crime.Section 3 (2) (K) provided that “any person who, without lawful
authority deals in, sells, smokes or inhales the drug known as cocaine
or other similar drugs, shall be guilty under section 6 (3) (K) of an
offence and liable on conviction to suffer death sentence by firing
squad.” In the case of Bernard Ogedengebe, the Decree was applied
retroactively.
He was executed even if at the time of his arrest the crime did not
mandate the capital punishment, but had carried a sentence of six months
imprisonment.
In another prominent case of April 1985, six Nigerians were condemned
to death under the same decree: Sidikatu Tairi, Sola Oguntayo, Oladele
Omosebi, Lasunkanmi Awolola, Jimi Adebayo and Gladys Iyamah.
In 1985, prompted by economic uncertainties and a rising crime rate,
the government of Buhari opened the borders (closed since April 1984)
with Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon to speed up the expulsion of 700,000 illegal foreigners and illegal migrant workers.[49] Buhari is today known for this crisis; there even is a famine in the east of Niger that have been named "El Buhari"
One of the most enduring legacies of the Buhari government has been
the War Against Indiscipline (WAI). Launched on March 20, 1984, the
policy tried to address the perceived lack of public morality and civic
responsibility of Nigerian society. Unruly Nigerians were ordered to
form neat queues at bus stops, under the eyes of whip-wielding soldiers.
Civil servants
who failed to show up on time at work were humiliated and forced to do
“frog jumps”. Minor offences carried long sentences. Any student over
the age of 17 caught cheating on an exam would get 21 years in prison.
Counterfeiting and arson could lead to the death penalty.
His regime drew criticism from many, including Nigeria’s first Nobel
Prize winner Wole Soyinka, who, in 2007, wrote a piece called “The
Crimes of Buhari” which outlined many of the abuses conducted under his military rule.
The Umaru Dikko Affair was another defining moment in Buhari’s military government. Umaru Dikko,
a former Minister of Transportation under the previous civilian
administration of President Shagari who fled the country shortly after
the coup, was accused of embezzling $1 billion in oil profits. With the
help of an alleged former Mossad agent, the NSO traced him to London
where operatives from Nigeria and Israel drugged and kidnapped him. They
placed him in a plastic bag, which was subsequently hidden inside a
crate labelled as “Diplomatic Baggage”. The purpose of this secret
operation was to ship Dikko off to Nigeria on an empty Nigerian Airways
Boeing 707, to stand trial for embezzlement. The plot was foiled by
British airport officers.
Buhari mounted an offensive against entrenched interests. In 20
months as Head of State, about 500 politicians, officials and
businessmen were jailed for corruption during his stewardship.
Ahead of the 2015 general election, Buhari responded to his human
rights criticism by saying that if elected, he would follow the rule of
law, and that there would be access to justice for all Nigerians and
respect for fundamental human rights of Nigerian
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