If you are a Nigerian who receive daily abuse from the APC/GMB Army for calling yourself a neutral in the current political debate; Or for not falling for their very caustic and obliterated propaganda, the article below may be of some encouragement......... The Author gives me hope. Unlike Tinubu’s supporters who are trying to sell a political orisha because their principal is trying to consolidate an empire rather than openly jostling for an elective office, General Buhari’s supporters are trying to sell a political candidate jostling for the office of President. They insist on the General’s personal capital: simplicity, integrity, leadership, zero-tolerance of corruption, sound moral and ethical stock. According to this narrative, corrupt politicians would scamper out of Nigeria were General Buhari ever to be elected President for he would not spare them. So far so good. Things get a bit more complicated for General Buhari and his loyalists the moment you move beyond the General’s impeccable personal capital to other things you need to be acceptable to all Nigerians irrespective of tribe and creed. General Buhari’s loyalists are quick to insist that he is a pan-Nigerian statesman. His statements and actions suggest otherwise and when concerned Nigerians insist on raising that significant issue, the General’s loyalists, like Tinubu’s supporters, recourse to ‘eebu tins’ to sell their product. They curse and curse and curse. They rain insult upon insult on Nigerians for being simpletons who just can’t understand the General. One wrote an article in Sahara Reporters advising the General to withdraw from politics because he is too good for Nigeria or Nigerians aren’t good enough for him. The stupidity of claiming that 160 million of us are not good enough for or are undeserving of one of us was not apparent to this Buhari loyalist. I’ve encountered more bellicose variants of that insult coming from General Buhari’s army of online loyalists. Nigeria, they insist, is not ready for him because Nigeria is not good enough for him. But the Nigerians who are being insulted by Buhari’s loyalists are not the people responsible for the persistent question mark on the General’s pan-Nigerian credentials. The General is and the blame must be placed firmly and unequivocally at his doorstep. General Buhari has done more in the last two decades or so to forge an image of himself as a closet geopolitical irredentist and very little to encourage perceptions of himself as a pan-Nigerian statesman. This is not limited to his healthy syllabus of northern and Islamic irredentist statements – his supporters are ever ready to insult us that we are just not intelligent enough to understand those statements – but also to his inaction. I will explain the bit about inaction presently. Suffice it to say for now that the insults and curses rained on Nigerians daily by Buhari’s supporters are far worse than the treatment we get from Tinubu’s supporters. My stomach churns whenever I encounter pro-Buhari statements starting with such illogicalities as “Buhari is the only living Nigerian capable of this and that”. Really? Please! There are 160 million of us. There must be limits to hyperbole. And there is no greater insult than saying that 160 million of us are either too mischievous or too unintelligent to understand the repeated careless statements of your hero. Personally, I’m loath to have a President of Nigeria who constantly needs the service of the extra-talented geniuses in his core support base to explain his constant stream of misstatements and misspeaks to 160 million unintelligent simpletons. We must ask the question again: why is it that only fundamentalist loyalists have found the key to understanding General Buhari’s statements? Now to Buhari’s inaction. We must ask his supporters: exactly where is Buhari’s national presence, say, since 2011? His statements, careless or reasonable, mostly get to the south of the river Niger whenever local journalists are lucky enough to monitor an interview he granted the Hausa service of BBC or VOA from his Kaduna base. I know that he was at my friend, Nasir El Rufai’s book launch in Lagos and was, also, recently at the funeral of Asiwaju’s mother in Lagos. There may be other unreported low-profile ventures outside of the north by the General. However, if I were in Buhari’s shoes, I would have been all over the Nigerian map physically since 2011. My social and political calendar across Nigeria would have been very busy and active. I would have been attending well-publicized events all over the country, delivering speeches on critical national issues in Universities all over Igboland, all over the south-south. I would even have ‘invaded’ Professor Bolaji Aluko’s fief in the Federal University, Otuoke, by delivering a significant lecture on critical national issues from that pregnant location. I would have been all over the southwest, the MiddleBelt – everywhere – engaging people and issues, strategizing about the way forward with critical stakeholders. Newspapers would be reporting that some of my national statements and interviews were monitored in Isanlu, Kabba, Amawbia, Nnobi, Calabar, Nsukka, Enugu, Okene, Owerri, Osogbo, Ore, Ibadan, Abakaliki, Ogwashi-Uku, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Ijebu Ode, Akure, Uyo, Ikot Ekpene, Warri, etc. If , rather than cultivate this broad national praxis in the service of my presidential ambition, I cocoon myself mostly in Kaduna, releasing northern and Islamic irredentist statements to the rest of the country in interviews granted the Hausa service of BBC and VOA, going as far as to carelessly equate a legitimate clamp down on Boko Haram with a war against the North, I should be prepared to accept responsibility for a certain perception of myself and work very hard to address the issue. Genuine supporters of General Buhari have serious work to do. I know many of them, patriotic compatriots working tirelessly for Nigeria, convinced that General Buhari is a far better option than the disgrace currently residing in Aso Rock. They are not into the business of insulting Nigerians to sell their product. They are my friends: Adebayo Adeneye-Adejuwon, Marian Iyabode Awolowo, Kizito Agba-Injo. One of them, Tunde Asaju, is my cousin. What these believers in the Buhari project must understand is that their genuine efforts to sell Buhari online is largely crowded out by the ill-reflected strategies of the more fundamentalist Buhari supporters who believe that the best way to sell their product is to constantly insult and bully Nigerians. Adebayo Adejuwon and co must understand that they have their work cut out for them. Not only must they continue to try to sell their product using the time-tested strategies of democratic debate and superior argument, they must also work harder to convince those who are trying to sell the General via insults that they are damaging Buhari’s brand – to borrow a way of speaking made popular by my sister Bamidele Ademola-Olateju. And unless they believe that General Buhari is infallible, they must be prepared to reach out to their hero, engage him, and see how he could work on the statesman and de-emphasize the northern irredentist. Accusing those asking questions of ill-will or inability to understand the General will not cut it. Personally, I’m not on the Buhari train because I am not convinced that we cannot find a Nigerian in the age bracket of 40-55 among 160 million people who fits the bill for 2015. As a friend of mine, Kemi Sisi Eko, once observed, there is something fundamentally wrong with you if you are a Nigerian in your 20s, 30s, or 40s and you insist that a septuagenarian is the singular and the only answer to your problem in the age of Obama, Cameron, Merkel, Harper, and Hollande. If I raise this issue, it is your responsibility as a Buhari loyalist to engage or confront me with superior logic and try to persuade me. Don’t come hurling insults at me, avoiding serious issues by claiming that I harbor some undefined animus against the General. That is the lazy strategy that General Buhari’s loyalists often deploy to kill genuine debate. Building democracy is not just about the struggle to rid our country of a corrupt, comatose, and visionless leadership such as we currently have in Goodluck Jonathan; it is not just about the struggle to build credible and genuine institutions; it is also mostly about the need to forge, inform, and instruct a critical and civic-minded followership. A democracy without a followership that questions is doomed. And questioning does not mean criticizing Jonathan endlessly while being intolerant of any criticism of your own political orisha. By resorting ever so often to ‘eebu tins’ in the marketing of their heroes, too many supporters of Asiwaju Tinubu and General Buhari are endangering democracy. They are part of the problem. They are tolerating democracy only to the extent that their respective heroes shall neither be critiqued, questioned, nor engaged. Those of us whose singular premise is Nigeria – and not sacrosanct heroes – shall not allow this to happen. We shall continue to question, to critique, to engage. Perish the thought that we shall ever allow the emergence of a Nigeria in which it would be possible for some citizens to crown political orishas that are deemed too good for some undeserving 160 million people. If you belong in the group of workers for Nigeria who are not beholden to any political orisha, then by all means continue to raise very pertinent and critical issues whenever and wherever the loyalists of Tinubu and Buhari sell their heroes on social media. That is the stuff, the essence of democracy. Followers must be able to ask legitimate questions of other followers without being intimidated or insulted. That is the Nigeria we envisage and envision. If Buhari’s or Tinubu’s loyalists insult you for asking questions, shrug your shoulders and tell them that insults do not grow on the forehead of the insulted or, as the Yoruba would put it, “eebu o so”.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 12:08:22 +0000
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