“Those wanting secession, and restructuring of Nigeria, are dangerously naive”.
-Muhammadu Buhari
Nigerians screamed in disquiet, as a chicken ravenously pecked a mound of shit. Little did we know that, it was just a preamble. The brainless chicken heard us. But decided to jump into the shit with both legs.
This is the point, where people query the gods. Amadioha, the righteous one, seems to go on holiday, whenever his thunder is needed, to send our anger on an errand! That absence seems to empower the impudence and fatal arrogance of men of low intelligence and no ethics, on their march of folly.
Nigerians were screaming that Buhari had the tyrannical effrontery to ban twitter in Nigeria, for deleting his murderous and genocidal tweet. Little did we know, that he was just testing the microphone! He has now decided to let us know, that whatever Nigerians desire, means nothing to his ignorance.
Buhari’s statement above, reveals the tyrannical epistemology, upon which his whole conceptual universe was constructed. I doubt that the phrase “dangerously naive”, could apply to Nigerians, for whom this system has failed, and who desire a change to this diseased and unjust status quo. Some statements emanating from Nigerian politicians compels on to ask, whether some of them have any sense at all.
Talking about sense:
Ndiigbo of southern Nigeria, have adages revolving around human senses. Their profundity, attest to the wisdom, which only eons of experience could confer. They are some of their most ancient calabashes of wisdom. These are warnings from the dawns of time, to all well-constructed pairs of deaf ears, across time. These warn: Doom and decapitation await those necks, scaffolding foolish heads with ears of ornamental value. Appearance may seduce one into presuming, that ears with the diameter and circumference of a Mariachi’s Sombrero; would be adept at hearing and heeding wise counsel. Or learning from the tragedies of history. Time has unfortunately shown the obverse to be the case. Appearances are sometimes miles away from reality.
Ndiigbo would say: Nti ga anu ihe abughi ma o ha ka okpu ata- to capture, what I said above. This affirms the fact, that your ears must not be as big as a satellite dish, before you can use those ears.
Ndiigbo would also say:
Onwu ga egbu nwa nkiti, anaghi ekwe ya nuru isi nsi!
I won’t translate this. Sue me if you want! This is your opportunity to get yourself an Igbo friend or reconcile with your estranged Igbo neighbor, to help you translate and understand that. This is my civic contribution to peace-building and dialogue of cultures.
When the grim reaper pays any dog a visit, it first compromises its olfactory faculties. Muhammadu Buhari’s sense of history and reality have been dangerously compromised. He is now flailing like a historical accident looking for where to occur. He is thrusting and puffing like a corpse rushing to its burial sporting an erection. Such abominations never go down well.
Nigeria is at the cusps of a violent revolution, and Buhari has taken to the favorite pastime of all historical scoundrels; namely trying to stand in front of a moving train, flexing muscles of flesh, in the delusion that his insignificant words would bewitch a train not to overrun him. He is like a dangerously naive levee watchman, standing in front of a broken dyke, thinking that he can hold back a roaring tsunami, with his wooden incantations of superstitious provenance. Buhari ignores that sacred fact of history, that nothing can stop an idea, whose time has come. Nigeria is burning, and Buhari is yet to smell the coffee. He can’t smell it. His olfactory faculties have been compromised by illusions of omnipotence; just like that Igbo proverb warned of the dog, whom the gods have decided to kill.
Buhari has been deaf to the cries and discontent of a large section of Nigerians, who have come to the conclusion that they have nothing to lose except their chains. Buhari’s ears may be big, but they have shown themselves to hear nothing. His incompetence in being a good manager of contradictions, in a complex embrace like Nigeria, has pushed many aggrieved communities of voices underground. It has sent other marginalized platforms to the peripheries and dark grottos of unease, which has forever been the breweries of revolution.
His posture in the face of the gigantic clouds of violent discontent, slowly and certainly spreading all over Nigeria today, has ancient and modern pedigrees. Nero fiddled while Rome burnt. Louis XVI of France, was busy masturbating to the pornographic majesty of his feudal privilege, to realize that his subjects were pregnant with discontent, and were about to give birth to a revolution that would eat his head.
He and his nobles and estates of the realm, were busy oppressing the peasants, so that those rivers of tributes, and taxes would keep their unceasing flow into the royal coffers, to keep financing the debauched privileges at his court, while hunger terrorized the poor.
Privilege and empathy being most times mutually exclusive, especially in the hearts of those, who never merited it; the King and his court, never brought themselves to feel the pulsations of the aggrieved; the anger of the hungry; the groans of the weak, and the frustrations of the powerless. His policies broke them, like a promise.
He felt just like Buhari is now doing, that terrorizing his people, whipping them into line with his iron scepter, would douse the mounting tension, and keep the people forever imprisoned in their misery. He never read the signs of the times. For this culpable dereliction of the most basic duty of a leader, his head was destined to be eaten by the Guillotine. Those ears that refused to hear the agonizing cries of his poor, frustrated mass of powerless subjects; followed that head into the grave, immediately the Guillotine finished its job.
One would think that contemporary leaders, would have learnt from those self-inflicted misfortunes of the Sun-King. Alas, not our Muhammadu Buhari. This is why a people should never elect any leader to office, who is ignorant of history. Such a leader is dangerously uneducated. In Buhari, we have seen that ignorance in a leader, is a fatal poison that would disembowel the polity, and give wings to revolution.
Buhari would be deluding himself to think that sending an incapacitated army, into civilian spaces in the Southeast of Nigeria, to pacify the Igbos, whom he has been threatening with genocide, would make the army victorious, and confirm him on his seat in Aso rock, from whence he misgoverns Nigeria. Rome sending the 6th Legion under Varus into Germania, rather than pacify the German tribes, actually pulled them together to defeat one of the greatest superpowers the world has ever seen. Buhari’s army can commence the genocide he has been threatening, like they are doing at the moment. But nothing can stop an idea, whose time has come, as Victor Hugo said. He can shut the mouths of a people, but no power in the world can shut or muzzle their minds.
If he makes the peaceful restructuring of Nigeria impossible, like he is presently doing, he would definitely be making the violent break up of Nigeria inevitable. What Buhari forgets is that power, is based on opinion. Once the people withdraw their opinions from a power-holder, he is holding the memory of a reality that no longer exists. That is the definition of what it is to be dangerously naïve.
Gwazia ndi yard unu
