The Condition Of Buharists Is Crying For Help
The Oasis Reporters
November 17, 2017
Buhari’s supporters are of two categories. There are those who think the President has failed sufficiently enough, and there are those who refuse to accept this reality. Of this second category, I won’t say a thing for now, except that you should be considered lucky if you marry anyone of them because they will stand by you peradventure you become useless.
But of the first category that we will talk about, there are two types. Those who think they are done with the fake trust and have called it quit, and those who continue to nurse a hangover of a pre-election El Dorado, finding it hard to own their disillusionment with the government of Buhari, and so have to continually look for ways to reinterpret their tumbled conscience into something they can cope with, a kind of drug…an opium.
Yet of the first of these two groups are revolutionaries, whose energy and vibration used in championing a miscarriage in 2015 they have recruited for banishing Buhari from Aso Rock come 2019. They are in near millions. The second camp is not a camp per se since they presently stand for a silence. In the wake of the candidature of Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, they have been wary of following the same make of foolish train they followed in 2015. They do not want to canvass for a lesser evil this time around, and they are not willing to slid into the ridicule of revalidating the already invalidated Buhari mishap. So the Nigerian dilemma has rendered them mute and obsolete, redundant and… otiose. In this class is Professor Soyinka, whose serial miscalculations in home and American politics in less than four years have not only detracted from the quality of political result in Nigeria, but also from his personal oracular status. Reverend Father Mbaka does not seem to know what to say either, though some may say the parish transfer served on him by the Catholic authority may have incapacitated his political or, call it civic clout.
The silence of this Soyinka camp is both significant and dangerous. It signifies an amputation of intellection, of reason, a decapitation of knowledge, done already or looming. Dangerous nations kill their intellectuals, for dangerous nations present their intellectuals with hard and unintelligible situations—dilemma and comedy mixed in a pot of arrant nonsense, out of which the intelligentsia must make a sense if they want to remain useful and relevant. In very dangerous nations, very conscientious intellectuals would most time choose the anguish of becoming irrelevant than try grappling with the sense in perfect nonsense, because in this they achieve their peace. Nigeria is such a nation that can make its best brains lose confidence in their capacities. So the dilemmas of the state are best left for bare propaganda and heel-bruising to settle. Nigeria seems to loiter at this juncture in the moment.
The tragedy does not lie, however, with those who have drunk an oath to support a useless government even when it’s no more useful for uselessness, neither does it lie with those whose voice is lost due to an overwhelmed intellection. The tragedy is with them who know quite well that the Buhari government has failed them, but would put the blame on ‘those who surround the President.’ They have been heard in low tones muttering, “the president means well for Nigeria but the problem is those who surround him.” Others would say “he has good intentions but bad advisers”. This excuse serves them the best opium in the world. This manner of creatures do not mind sounding just like the only minions of humanity, not by nature but by their own choices, for no one has to be a native of Dumbford. Dumbness alone can distract one from the fact that the quality of a thing is revealed not in its manual or inaugural speech but in its functionality. If your leader is so good that he has to choose a bad team for himself, then you the follower must be from Dumbford. Machiavelli stressed this fact when he remarked that the quality of a Prince must be seen in how he chooses his ministers. Your president cannot manage a block industry if he chooses by himself incompetent and ill-minded patriots to run the affairs of the country with him. He’s evidently not a good employer and a poor employer can only ruin a company. No wonder!
But there is more brutality in dumbness. The dumb one cannot know that an unwise king cannot be wisely advised, for how will an unwise king distinguish a wise recommendation from an unwise one? The unwise leader must rely solely on the wisdom or unwisdom of his advisers, and thus be controlled by the advisers. So, when these people say the problem of their leader is bad advisers, they only need someone to hint them they are only amplifying the incompetence of their leader. For if he was competent in the first place, government wouldn’t have been hijacked from him.
Would this not explain why in terms of the vaunted fight against corruption, Mr. Buhari is like a tree stump dressed in human clothes in the midst of a rice farm, to scare waster birds away? One daring bird realized that the figure in the farm is a lifeless thing, and a whole fleet of avians made a touchdown.
Written by Deji Adesoye