New Telegraph

Buhari’s barrel of blood

In the last one week, it has been a theatre of war with cake of crimson. In the midst of that, Muhammadu President Buhari also conducted some interviews which exposed his peculiar problem with comprehension.

 

His delivery and responses to some of the nagging questions were as drab and uninspiring as the government he has led in the last seven years. Leaders all over the world use the power of language and communicarion to build confidence in the minds of their citizens, use the power of language to build cohesion and a sense of belonging amongst a people that are apparently divided.

 

In the case of President Buhari, he leaves his audience awed by a concatenation of incomprehensible, disjointed, and convoluted thoughts, that often exposes the weakness of a leadership that is farflung from reality.

 

It is understandable that at 79, President Buhari’s cognition has gathered some webs, reason why he said spending 6 to 8 hours a day, is no joke.

 

And that exactly is the albatross of our present situation. Nigeria actually needs a president who can work round the clock, a leader who can stay awake while the rest of the country is asleep.

 

The Nigerian economy ought to be growing at night, to be able to gather enough momentum to fill the gap of economic downturn that presently stares us in the face. Rather than inspire us,

 

President Buhari’s interview further separated him from the rest of the country. His response to the nagging issue of herder’s onslaught and his insistence on going back to the outmoded and out-of-fashion grazing routes of the 60s, exposes him as a nepotistic president who is only interested in a trade that has gone out of sync the world over.

 

In 2022, President Buhari is still detained by the past and the nomadism that defined those early adventures of the pastoralist. He still talks about a trade, a culture, a tradition that has become stone-age.

 

How can a president be so enamoured by a trade such as nomadic cattle farming, when ranching has provided all the answers to such barbaric practice?

 

A young Fulani boy, who ought to be in the classroom to acquire formal education, is left to the hazards of the forest, rearing cattle from the extreme northern environment to the southern part of Nigeria, in search of pasture for his cattle. Education does not appeal to president Buhari.

 

He does not want the poor herder to be taken to school and make his business of herding more sophisticated through ranching. What has been his investment in the area of education in helping the poor Fulani boy to gain access to formal learning, rather than continuously remain in the forest with his cattle?.

 

What generation of leaders are we grooming from the categories of herders who trek from the north to the south with their cattle? I was expecting to hear President Buhari tell Nigerians about his policy to remove the average poor Fulani herder from the forest to civilisation where his mentality would be put to better use than calling out his herds.

 

I was expecting to hear the president explain to Nigerians what his government is doing to provide formal education for the nomads, or expose them to modern way of doing cattle business. His insistence on the grazing routes is the reason why the Miyetti Allah Association has continued to defy all known logic in their primitive business of animal torturing, called animal husbandry.

 

How on earth can a president still talk about grazing routes in this 21st century world? What about the issue of restructuring? The president in his typical hypocritical fashion, feigned ignorance about what restructuring was all about.

 

Restructuring was captured in his party’s manifesto as the number one item to be executed once given the opportunity to preside over the country. When the victory songs were rendered, they lowered the chorus on restructuring. When the murmurs were becoming unbearable, the party set up a committee chaired by Mallam Nasir El’Rufai, the Governor of Kaduna state, to work out the modalities for decluttering the subject matter with recommendations for implementing the restructuring.

 

The report was submitted to President Buhari in 2018. That was the last we heard about it. Rather than scrutinize and implement the recommendations, President Buhari has consistently played the ostrich. Each time he’s confronted with this very important issue, he parries it as though he doesn’t seem to understand what it entails. What level of hypocrisy is that? Talk about state Police, he tells you it wasn’t an option.

 

Provide security to lives and property as required by the constitution, you will start hearing “divine intervention”. What manner of a leadership is that? What is wrong with state policing at a time when we now “discharge” barrel of blood instead of barrel of oil.

 

How do you explain a situation where in one fell swoop, over 150 persons were reportedly slaughtered by terrorists, yet you are not seeing the urgency to have state police? How do you reconcile that? Imagine the argument between the casualty figures of government and the media report.

 

The media reported over 150 bodies while the the government is talking about 58 bodies. What is the difference? We are talking about human beings in such numbers and not chickens that were slaughtered for Christmas, for God’s sake. When are we.going to come out of this crisis?

 

If we cannot restructure, what then is the solution that president Buhari is bringing to the table? President Buhari has little or nothing to lose being President of Nigeria.

 

At 79, his stakes in the country are abysmally low. Our destinies are tied to his weakness and incompetence, at least for the next 17 months. His leadership style has compounded our sense of communalism. His capacity has become a cause for concern.

 

When he speaks to us, we see his gaffes as comic relief, but they have since become the ugly narrative of a system that is fixated on old tell tales. When we rush to our television sets to listen to his responses to questions, what we get, are often the copious signs of a waning memory, crumbling mentality, and intellectual apathy of the subject matter.

 

His nuances are contradictive of the main course of the discourse. He dramatizes with our collective follies, and chuckles at nothing, just to confuse his interviewer that he understands what he’s talking about.

 

A president of president Buhari’s age has no business in leadership in a multi-ethnic Nigeria with dysfunctional systems, with so many diversities. The president should represent our collective values; values of hard work, intellectuality, capacity, and rich understanding of our peculiarities. But with President Buhari, the standards have been lowered.

 

The value system is near absent. We import refined petroleum products from our exported crude oil. The barrels of oil we export run into millions. We dwell with barrel of blood, from daily carnage that dominates our land.

 

Mass graves have become the metaphorical verbiage of a country in a state of permanent flux. Imagine burying 58 or 150 dead bodies in just one retaliatory operation. Our military personnel appear over-stretched.

 

Our police are equally suffering from inadequate manpower. And the blood continues to flow ceaselessly as if we are helplessly imprisoned. The president, rather than put on his thinking cap, is seeking divine intervention, where capacity is lacking. God will not come down to effect change, he will use leaders who have capacity to provide the needed solutions to problems.

 

Prayers must be backed by action. Action must be backed by strong political will to take altruistic decisions without sentiments, fear or favour. What appears to be the exportable commodity from the North to the South is barrels of blood. Zamfara is the killing field. It is a daily occurrence followed by terse statement from presidency each time the bombings and bullets are fired. A presidency of mourners and condolence letter-writers.

 

They already have a template, all they need is to cut and paste. Truth be told, President Buhari has dealt a mortal blow on the psyche of Nigerians. Nigeria is bleeding because the resource of effective communication is lacking. His Spokesmen, rather than address the issues, often times, rain abuses on their critics.

 

They show you visuals of infrastructure which they claimed were the end products of billions of debts weighing down on our neck. When life has become cheap, and there is no guarantee of seeing the next day, in whose interest are the infrastructure? Where are the infrastructure? Where are the roads? You want us to go back to the farms, yet the farmlands are being irrigated by blood and blood.

 

Forests taken over by bandits, kidnappers and terrorists. I had thought since the president expressed so much confidence about farming and agriculture, he would set a good example by telling his son to take up such occupation. Alas! It is all about rhetorics. Many unanswered questions. That is our lot.

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