Before Tomorrow Comes By Akin Osuntokun | Nairalaw

In the attempt to prepare the ground for the unraveling of the
ulterior agenda of the present administration, the cat was
appropriately let out of the bag by the Minister of information,
Lai Mohammed about a month ago.

He surpassed himself in a characteristic belaboured insincerity
and infantile affectation. For readers to get a full measure of the
mendacious capacity of this government to mislead and deceive the
Nigerian public, I have taken the liberty to refresh our memory
with excerpts from the minister’s press statement and for
authentication. The question then arises, why would any government
construct an elaborate make believe conspiracy of armed
insurrection-made singularly deficient in logic by its attribution
to a demonstrably militarily incapable opposition?

Where would the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), find the
wherewithal and the logic to levy a massive guerilla warfare spread
over 10 states? Given that the alleged comrade in arms, the Boko
Haram terrorist group, is of active interest to the international
community (and under its intense monitor and surveillance) why
would a thinking opposition thereby foolishly risk becoming the
target and enemy of such a powerful vested interest? For anyone
whose imagination is not running criminally insane how realistic is
the presumption that the opposition is maneuvering for interim
government as the end point game? Yet all these imponderables
constitute the stuff of the ‘credible intelligence report’ on the
activities of the opposition. Here is Lai Mohammed:

“As you are aware, Nigeria goes to the polls just 27 days from
now. However, the federal government is in possession of credible
intelligence to the effect that widespread violence being
orchestrated by the opposition is threatening the 2019 general
election. Having realised that their fortunes have dwindled badly
ahead of the polls, the desperate opposition is orchestrating
widespread violence with a view to truncating the elections, thus
triggering a constitutional crisis that could snowball into the
establishment of an interim government. Before you accuse the
government of crying wolf, let me tell you, gentlemen, that we have
credible intelligence that armed bandits and Boko Haram insurgents
have been mobilized to engage in massive attacks and other acts of
violence in several states across the country, including Adamawa,
Bauchi, Borno, Benue, Kano, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Plateau, Taraba, and
Zamfara.

“The Benue-based armed criminal group, led by Terwase Akwaza,
also known as Gana, has been commissioned to strike soft targets in
Benue, Nasarawa, and Taraba States. In Kano State, a group of
notorious miscreants has been mobilised by some prominent
opposition leaders to provoke massive chaos before, during and
after the elections. There is also an international dimension to
the evil plan. Some armed mercenaries from Niger Republic have been
contracted to attack top government functionaries, including state
governors, across the North-west between now and the elections. He
assured them that the federal government would take pre-emptive
measures to ensure their safety before, during and after the
elections”.

Apparently, the government has proven so exceptional in
containing this uncovered subversive agenda-such that the
allegation did not survive beyond the dusk of the day in which the
earth shaking revelation was regurgitated. And like a confused
drunken sailor, the megaphones of the government have been
stumbling from one duplicitous allegation to another. Like a bolt
from the blues, the Governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir el Rufai,
suddenly erupted, in contorted outrage, threatening the
international community with murder and mayhem should they persist
in ‘meddling’ in the internal affairs of Nigeria. Two days to the
scheduled original date of the election, he materialised again in
front of television cameras to report the killings of 66 Fulanis (a
preferable identification choice for whatever agenda it was
intended to serve). The figure has since been revised to 130.

And then finally, the big masquerade himself capped it all with
the vintage Buharispeak to which we have tragically grown
accustomed “I really gave the military and police order to be
ruthless… Anybody who thinks he has enough influence in his
locality to lead a body of thugs to snatch ballot boxes or disturbs
the voting system will do so at the expense of his own life.”
Responding to the institutional peace initiative of the Kukah
committee earlier on in the campaign, I made the point that the
only presidential candidate who needed to be persuaded of the
imperative of peace and amity is no other than the APC presidential
candidate. He has a record as long as his years in the public
domain that speaks to violence in a way that no other Nigerian
public figure compares. Yet this was a President who was the unique
beneficiary of an unprecedented seamless transition from an
incumbent Nigerian President to the opposition candidate.

According to the exegesis of dialectics, where every tendency
generates its own contradiction-so has the lofty precedence set by
President Goodluck Jonathan being contradicted by the political
power obsession of his successor. Were Jonathan to be of similar
disposition as the ill-deserved recipient of his statesmanship,
Buhari would not have become president in the first place. As a
poorly equipped ideologue of the Fulani entitlement philosophy
(that was integral to the establishment of the Sokoto caliphate and
as received and programmed into Nigeria by the British colonialists
and Sir Ahmadu Bello) Buhari has done more harm than good to this
cause.

Buhari belongs to the class of the 1966 counter coup inheritors
of this entitlement mentality- with the significant caveat that he
is bereft of the requisite sophistication and exposure to handle
power with enlightened self-interest. Where Ahmadu Bello was
sophisticated enough to assimilate Northern Christians and other
regional cohabitants of different sub national groups, Buhari would
be remembered as the crude Fulani irredentist who went the extra
mile to foster and accentuate intra-regional schism. He has a
similar legacy of aggravating inter regional cleavages on the
larger Nigerian landscape. The story of his Presidency is the
perfect illustration of the logic that you cannot give what you do
not have. In terms of the capacity to govern, he is arguably the
most limited occupant of the high office of Nigerian President.

His violence-bound political personae took firm root at the
beginning of the fourth republic. For reasons that had to do with
the nationalistic level playing ground politics of President
Olusegun Obasanjo and relative decline in hegemonic influence, the
far North became fertile ground for angst ridden divisive politics.
The latent irredentist rebellion eventually found a lightning rod
in the Sharia predicated pseudo religious populist revolt. Buhari
seized the moment and rose to fill the leadership vacuum-holding
the teeming Northern underclass captive with his simplistic rabble
rousing demagoguery. In the interminable propensity of Nigerian
politics for chaos and confusion, his simple and single-minded
disposition has served him rather well. It has endowed him with the
instinct of easily connecting with the mob especially those whose
encounter with civilisation is limited to the back and forth
nomadic wandering from North to South in a vicious cycle of
poverty. The transition from this demagogic pedestal to the more
demanding political and bureaucratic leadership of Nigeria was
always going to expose his limited capacity for governance.

There was the supposition that this incapacity could be managed
with the cession of governance to a capable subordinate in the mode
of his short lived military dictatorship. The context (of an
inherent demand for public accountability) of civil democratic rule
rendered the model nugatory and exposed the lack of Buhari’s
preparedness for the office he so much coveted. Nigeria had since
being paying the exorbitant cost of the resulting interminable
crisis of governance. The failure was further deepened by the
prioritisation of hegemonic personality cult agenda as the
overriding objective of his presidency. This has resulted in the
breach of almost all the political norms that had kept Nigeria
going. In sync with the phenomenon of personality cult agenda, the
more physically indisposed he gets, the more paranoid and
personalised the agenda becomes.

Caught totally unprepared for the examination of re-election,
the Buhari camp has logically took recourse in the fabrication of
phantom achievements; applauding itself the nemesis of PDP
corruption while the whole world saw the exact opposite;
commissioning and laying claim to infrastructural projects that
were paid down by the preceding government. For a president at odds
with the tedium of contemporary governance, encumbered by short
attention span and the cognitive failure specter of rambling
incoherence -there is the distinct possibility that he may truly
believe all the fictive accomplishments attributed to him.

As age and debilitating health condition take their toll, the
crisis of governance plaguing his presidency has trended towards
the political psychosis of parsing fiction as fact; of pretending
that INEC took the decision to postpone the election (with
consequential security implications) without his prior knowledge
and consent; of loading the INEC hierarchy with his kith and kin
and then turn around to claim the opposition is using the same INEC
against him; of the self-indictment implied in the sudden awakening
to the escalating and catastrophic import of ballot snatching for
Nigerian elections-when in the past three and half years, all
elections have been conducted under his watch. Rare is the
president whose failure is self-explanatory as that of President
Buhari. And in the face of glaring demerit, he has a bloated sense
of self-importance that borders on the delusion of grandeur.

In framing the menace that Nigeria presently confronts (in the
Buhari Presidency) as a contest between APC and PDP or as Atiku
versus Buhari, Nigerians are living in self-denial. If it ever
existed, that limitation had since evaporated. Beyond the publicly
stated proposal to draft and direct the military to take no
prisoners in enforcing his will, you have to wonder what else he is
up to in private-if he can let this much out in the open. ‘There
seems to be a Buhari bug that makes intelligent people to sound
unintelligent, people of conscience to sound conscienceless, people
of justice to sound unjust, honest people to embrace falsehood,
people who are not bloodthirsty to become bloodthirsty, the moment
they start supporting Buhari’. The earlier the Nigerian public
comes to terms with the definition of tomorrow as Buhari versus
Nigeria, the better the prospects of overcoming the ordeal and
danger lurking around the corner.