President Muhammadu Buhari
hehehehe.........Abiodun
Ladepo, here, joins many Nigerians in calling for the resignation of
President Muhammadu Buhari, citing interesting reasons.
There are no better ways to say this: The release of that
Eid-el-Fitri message to us through the BBC Hausa outlet, in Hausa
language, convinced even those of us who are your diehard supporters
that you are no longer sentient; that some people around you are taking
advantage of your compromised medical situation to fulfill their own
selfish agendas. If you were in charge of all your faculties and firing
on all cylinders, you would not have allowed such a message to be used
to prove that you were getting better. Because, that audio message, in
which you clearly sounded as if you were struggling to breathe - rushing
through the reading of a speech in Hausa (for it was clear that you
were not speaking extemporaneously) and generally sounding like a man
laboring to put things together - just solidified one thing: that you
are not well at all.
And if you are not well, sir, if you are as sick as you appeared to
be the last time we saw you - gaunt and wilting - then as a man I
revere for being honorable, patriotic and candid, you need to resign as
President of Nigeria and allow Nigeria to move forward. Being unwell is
not a thing about which one should be ashamed. What is shameful is
forgetting the ephemerality, vainness and transience nature of power,
and indeed of life itself by holding on to what you did not bring into
this world the day you were born to the detriment of the rest of us. As a
devout Muslim, what did you learn about how each of us on earth will go
home to our Maker? I am sure you learned that we will all return to Him
as ordinary folks…the same way we came.
Another thing that is shameful is this now common thing for our
leaders, from the president on down to local leaders, to opt for medical
care overseas when we have expert medical personnel and many university
teaching hospitals in Nigeria. It is the shame of your administration
(and I know you have been there for only two years) and that of all your
predecessors that our health sector has been left to degrade to the
point that young women routinely die from fibroids surgery and
childbirth; that men routinely die from hypertension and prostate
cancer, and that while you people spend undisclosed amount of public
funds on overseas medical care, we the ordinary folks are left at the
mercy of unmotivated medical practitioners who are working in decrepit
medical centers, with depleted laboratories and pharmacies.
Before any of your rabid supporters jump all over me sir, for
asking you to step aside, please let me remind them that I was the first
person to write you after you won the election. In my letter here,
which was published before you were sworn in, I exuded hope and
goodwill, the kind that all patriotic Nigerians who put our nation above
all divisive and destructive strictures felt. I didn’t wait till the
#SaiBaba bandwagon came to town before putting my hopes in you, as you
can see from this piece that I wrote long before the election.
And I didn’t just write. I was not just an armchair critic or
Cybertiger. I put my money where my mouth was. I put my family in the
air and we all came to Nigeria all the way from California to do
whatever we could to get the Clueless One out of there and get you in.
You can imagine our disappointment when the elections were postponed and
we had to return to the U.S. without voting for you. But when it was
rescheduled, guess who came back to Nigeria and to Ibadan to help elect
you: me.
So you should understand sir, why I should expect more from you. As
president of 180-plus million people, shrouding the nature of your
illness in official secrecy is antiquated. There is no national security
interest served by not telling your own people what afflicts you and
how badly, especially when you are being treated by foreign doctors in a
foreign land! How embarrassed were we when foreign intelligence
operatives knew more about the state of Yar’Adua’s health before ours
did? It is also grossly disrespectful and condescending to the people
who trooped out in inclement weather to give you their mandate when they
are left in the lurch like this. I am in my mid-50s and I know that my
body today is not what it was 20 years ago, or even five years ago. But
you are 75 (or more)! Who amongst us does not have a septuagenarian in
his family? Nigerians are not idiots. So please, you and your acolytes
need to stop treating us like we are. We know you are not without an
ailment.
Sir, this idea that without you, the war on corruption will be lost
is mute. The war is already lost. With you being out of action for the
better part of this year…with nobody providing the moral leadership and
the heft and authority of a substantive president to wage the war, the
enemies have cobbled the nation into a supine position. We have returned
to shopping for judges and buying justice like we used to do before you
came to power. Between the NASS and the judiciary, Nigeria and
Nigerians are being serially dry-raped and tossed violently between the
two. Only a president who knows he is wielding the power of the office
in his own name and for his own legacy can stand a chance. With you
medically sidelined and chronically so with no obvious light at the end
of the tunnel, VP Osinbajo can only tepidly exercise the powers of the
office. There is a huge difference between being THE President and being
just an Acting President. Nobody should be deceived by the notion that
since you handed over to him to act on your behalf, he can go ahead and
do everything you can do. I haveheard you and your spokespeople say that
yours is “one presidency” and the Vice President, acting on your
behalf, can conduct everything like you could. Could he, for instance,
unilaterally dissolve the cabinet and send new names to the Senate?
Could he unilaterally sack any Service Chief and nominate someone else? I
bet he can’t. And the enemies of the nation know this.
By many of your actions and the actions of those by whom you are
surrounded, you have almost caused people like me to question whether we
had not been conned into electing you! Talk about big time buyer’s
remorse! I remember vividly how your detractors warned us about handing
over Nigeria at the stage we were in 2015 to an old, sickly dictator who
was also nepotistic, ethnocentric and vindictive. Do you remember, sir?
Do you remember those who said you were brain-dead? We pilloried them
for playing God and wishing bad things on you. But no sooner had you
become president than their warnings became our realities. I started
getting scared when you took nearly six months to put your cabinet
together. To come to terms with my disappointment, I chalked that up to
the possibility that you were having difficulty finding smart and
energetic people with integrity. And you were looking all around the
country for such people. But when you finally came out with your list
and it was peopled by mostly mediocre entities, I knew something was
wrong. Was this the same Buhari we thought we were electing?
Then you started skewing your appointments to the north in arrogant
and flagrant disregard for the complaints of folks from other parts of
the country. We all knew you suffered from an ear infection. But we knew
it should not have caused you to have been so tone-deaf. The mother of
all surprises to me was when you went abroad and remarked there that
people (Northerners) who gave you 97% of their votes should expect to be
treated better than those (Easterners) who gave you only 5% of theirs.
Alarmed by such myopic vindictiveness, I rushed to the press.
Were we dealing with a sectional leader with ignoble and parochial
inclinations or were we dealing with an altruistic and patriotic
national leader who was too sick to grasp the enormity of the harm being
done to the country in his name? I hope the answer is the latter rather
than the former. I hope that I have not been ignorantly hailing you and
defending you from your most virulent critics. I hope I was right in
placing my hopes in you. How could I have not been? The choice was
between Goodluck Jonathan and you! Nobody in his right mind would have
voted otherwise. So, if the answer is the latter…that you are an
altruistic leader who is just too sick to function well, then please do
the needful; resign honorably today. Even if you get a “clean” bill of
health this minute from your British doctors and return to Nigeria on
your own feet, the damage has already been done. In our psyche, we will
always see you as feeble, maybe even vegetative leader being propped up
by a cabal. It is more honorable for you to say to us that you are
grateful for the privilege we gave you to serve; for reposing our
confidence and hopes in you, and that you would retire to private life
to rest and recuperate better, but that you stand ready to offer advice
as an elder statesman whenever called upon to do so. That would be
classy.
And if the time comes that Allah calls you home as He shall one day
call each of us, Nigeria will rise as one to give you a befitting
goodbye and immortalize you as a national leader who left an indelible
mark in the fight against corruption in our country. If we carve a
national day for you as holiday, it will not be too much and you will be
a legitimate honoree.
So, please find the strength to release your stranglehold on our country and let us breathe. We are waiting to exhale.
*****
Abiodun Ladepo
Ibadan, Oyo State
Oluyole2@yahoo.com
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