Top 5 Lies About Buhari That Won’t Go Away

By Farooq Kperogi

Muhammadu Buhari is a magnet for both extravagantly flattering
myths and stubborn falsehoods. Here are the top five:

Muhammadu Buhari’s very name is wrapped in a curious omission.
In most parts of the world, people’s last names are usually either
their family name or their father’s first name. Not for Buhari.

Muhammadu (which his teachers spelled as “Mohamed” when he was
in secondary school) is his first given name and Buhari is his
middle name, not his surname. He was named after prolific
ninth-century Persian Hadith compiler by the name of Muhammad
al-Bukhari who was born in a city called Bukhara in what is now
Uzbekistan.

Bukhari isn’t a personal given name; it’s a demonym, that is, a
name given to people who come from a particular place, such as
Nigerian, Briton, American, Lagosian, New Yorker, etc. Bukhari
simply means a native of the city of Bukhara in Uzbekistan, a West
Asian nation that used to be a part of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR).

In Muslim and Middle Eastern linguistic traditions, the letter
“i” is usually added to the end of the names of villages, towns,
cities, and countries to form demonyms. That’s why someone from
Pakistan is called a Pakistani, someone from Israel is called an
Israeli, and someone from the UAE is called an Emirati, and so on.
If the demonym of Bukhara were to be given in Hausa, it would be
Danbuhara. In Yoruba, it would be Omobuhara. In my native Baatonu,
it would be Buharagi. (My last name, Kperogi, is a demonym, and it
means someone from Kperu, the short form of my hometown’s name,
Senru Kperu, but which Yoruba people call Okuta).

So how did Muhammadu Buhari come to be known by his names?
Because of the immense reverence that Muhammad al-Bukhari enjoys
among Sunni Muslims, Muslims have historically honoured him by
naming their children after him, so instead of just calling them
Bukhari (which they may literally not be since they may not be
natives of Bukhara in Uzbekistan), they typically combine the man’s
first and last names: Muhammad Bukhari.

Most Nigerian languages, including Hausa, don’t have the phoneme
“kh,” which sounds almost exactly like the sound you produce when
you are discharging mucus from your throat. The closest phonemic
approximation of that sound is “h,” which explains why “Bukhari” is
rendered as “Buhari” in many African languages.

Our Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t bear his father’s name even though
he is so proud of his paternal ancestry that he gratuitously
flaunts it. For instance, in his October 18, 1961 “Application to
sit for RNA Qualifying Examination,” he called attention to his
ethnic identity even when it wasn’t warranted. “I have the honour
to apply for regular service in the Royal Nigeria Army. My name is
Muhammadu Buhari and I am a Fulani. I am eighteen years old and I
am in Form Six at the Provincial Secondary School Katsina,” he
wrote.

Buhari’s father who gave him the Fulani bloodline he brandishes
(his mother is Kanuri) was called Adamu Bafallaje (or Bafalle in
Hausa). In fact, Buhari’s older brother who died in a car crash in
the late 1980s and whose Buhari-lookalike son, Fatuhu Muhammad,
represents the Daura/Sandamu/MaiAdua federal constituency in the
House of Representatives was called Mamman Danbafalle. (Danbafalle
means son of Bafalle in Hausa, and Mamman is the Hausa
domestication of Muhammad. It’s common in Muslim families to have
many siblings named Muhammad, but they’re often differentiated with
their middle names).

If you ask most Nigerians where Buhari is from, they will most
likely say he’s from Daura. But he is not. His hometown, by which I
mean the town where he was born and where his father lived and
died, is called Dumurkul. It’s a sleepy roadside village in
Katsina’s Maiadua Local Government Area, which is about three
kilometers from Daura and about five kilometers from the last
village in the Niger-Nigeria border.
A March 16, 2019 Daily Trust report on the village said Dumurkul is
a Fulfulde word, which means ‘settlement for herders’, “especially
for those who stay for at least a year.” After his father’s death
when he was little, Buhari lived with his mother’s Kanuri relatives
in Daura and adopted the town as his hometown.

But he hasn’t severed his umbilical cord from Dumurkul. During
this year’s Sallah festivities in July, he was knighted (or
“turbaned”) as the Hakimi (or district head) of Dumurkul even
though the village wasn’t officially a district.

In order to reconcile the contradiction of making someone a
district head of a non-existent district, on July 27, 2021,
Buhari’s village was mysteriously upgraded to a “district” and
taken out of Koza District of which it was a village after “an
emergency plenary to consider the request from Governor Aminu Bello
Masari” was convened!

The notion that Buhari is ascetic is another lie that has
refused to go away. Ascetics practice such self-denying habits as
sartorial modesty, resisting lascivious temptations, shunning
epicurean indulgences like drinking and smoking, etc. But Buhari
has always been a flamboyant dresser like most everyday people.

In Dele Sobowale’s book titled Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom
(Ibrahim B. Babangida 1985 – 1992), Buhari’s past notoriety for
unrestrained libidinal impulses was described this way: “He must
have been some sort of a sexual athlete. One officer who served
with him in two stations had this to say: ‘You can leave your
money, bottle of hot drinks or packets of cigarettes with Buhari,
go away for several months and return and find nothing would be
missing. But leave your girlfriend or sister with him and you might
return to find her pregnant.’ That might be an exaggeration but he
had that reputation.”

As the reader can see, even in describing his sexual
indiscretions, this quote couldn’t help but perpetuate the lie that
Buhari didn’t smoke or drink. There are public photos of Buhari
smoking.

That Buhari is a brutal, uncompromising, ethically untainted
truth teller is another enduring lie about him that appears to be
nourished by his taciturnity. But he has told many big lies in the
open. As a military dictator in the mid-1980s, he said Nigeria was
the only country we had and that we should all stay in it to
salvage it, but by his own admission he had never trusted the
Nigerian healthcare system to take care of his health since 1977.
He had always gone to London for his medical needs and is in London
as I write this.
In 2014, he lied that he was too poor to afford his own
presidential nomination form and had to take a loan from a bank. A
few months later, however, in a ridiculously opaque, half-hearted
asset declaration, his spokesperson said Buhari had “not less than
30 million naira” in his account (even N100 billion naira is “not
less than 30 million naira”!) without explaining how someone who
couldn’t afford a N25 million-naira nomination form in October 2014
suddenly had “not less than 30 million” when he took over power in
May 2015.

Also recall that at the time he claimed to be too poor to afford
his nomination form, several of his children were studying at UK
universities whose tuition costs add up to tens of millions of
naira.

Plus, as Petroleum Minister in 1977, he couldn’t account for
$2.8 billion, which the legendary Fela sang about. And a probe of
PTF, which he headed, showed that he squandered N135 billion.
Newswatch’s report of the probe revealed that N500 million
mysteriously disappeared from the coffers of the agency. It also
showed that Buhari used N800 million on his “personal estate” and
used N28 billion to buy “expired HIV/AIDS kits.”

It is now widely believed that Buhari has no school certificate,
but he does, and it isn’t fake. One of Buhari’s surviving
classmates in Katsina (who, by the way, doesn’t like him) swore
that Buhari did take and pass his West African School Certificate.
Although I had no reason to question the authenticity of his claim,
the late Abba Kyari caused Cambridge Assessment, which administered
the WASC exam in Nigeria in 1961, to release Buhari’s result.

He had 5 credits in the following subjects: English (C5),
History (A3), Geography (C6), Hausa (C5) and Health Science (C6).
He also had a P7 in English Literature. His grade in Mathematics
didn’t show in his certificate because got an F9. That was a great
result for the time—and even now. He could have gone to the
university with the result if he wasn’t in a hurry to enroll in the
military while he was awaiting his WASC exam result.

Top 5
lies about Buhari that won’t go away^[1]

By Farooq Kperogi

Muhammadu Buhari is a magnet for both extravagantly flattering
myths and stubborn falsehoods. Here are the top five:

Muhammadu Buhari’s very name is wrapped in a curious omission.
In most parts of the world, people’s last names are usually either
their family name or their father’s first name. Not for Buhari.

Muhammadu (which his teachers spelled as “Mohamed” when he was
in secondary school) is his first given name and Buhari is his
middle name, not his surname. He was named after prolific
ninth-century Persian Hadith compiler by the name of Muhammad
al-Bukhari who was born in a city called Bukhara in what is now
Uzbekistan.

Bukhari isn’t a personal given name; it’s a demonym, that is, a
name given to people who come from a particular place, such as
Nigerian, Briton, American, Lagosian, New Yorker, etc. Bukhari
simply means a native of the city of Bukhara in Uzbekistan, a West
Asian nation that used to be a part of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR).

In Muslim and Middle Eastern linguistic traditions, the letter
“i” is usually added to the end of the names of villages, towns,
cities, and countries to form demonyms. That’s why someone from
Pakistan is called a Pakistani, someone from Israel is called an
Israeli, and someone from the UAE is called an Emirati, and so on.
If the demonym of Bukhara were to be given in Hausa, it would be
Danbuhara. In Yoruba, it would be Omobuhara. In my native Baatonu,
it would be Buharagi. (My last name, Kperogi, is a demonym, and it
means someone from Kperu, the short form of my hometown’s name,
Senru Kperu, but which Yoruba people call Okuta).

So how did Muhammadu Buhari come to be known by his names?
Because of the immense reverence that Muhammad al-Bukhari enjoys
among Sunni Muslims, Muslims have historically honoured him by
naming their children after him, so instead of just calling them
Bukhari (which they may literally not be since they may not be
natives of Bukhara in Uzbekistan), they typically combine the man’s
first and last names: Muhammad Bukhari.

Most Nigerian languages, including Hausa, don’t have the phoneme
“kh,” which sounds almost exactly like the sound you produce when
you are discharging mucus from your throat. The closest phonemic
approximation of that sound is “h,” which explains why “Bukhari” is
rendered as “Buhari” in many African languages.

Our Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t bear his father’s name even though
he is so proud of his paternal ancestry that he gratuitously
flaunts it. For instance, in his October 18, 1961 “Application to
sit for RNA Qualifying Examination,” he called attention to his
ethnic identity even when it wasn’t warranted. “I have the honour
to apply for regular service in the Royal Nigeria Army. My name is
Muhammadu Buhari and I am a Fulani. I am eighteen years old and I
am in Form Six at the Provincial Secondary School Katsina,” he
wrote.

Buhari’s father who gave him the Fulani bloodline he brandishes
(his mother is Kanuri) was called Adamu Bafallaje (or Bafalle in
Hausa). In fact, Buhari’s older brother who died in a car crash in
the late 1980s and whose Buhari-lookalike son, Fatuhu Muhammad,
represents the Daura/Sandamu/MaiAdua federal constituency in the
House of Representatives was called Mamman Danbafalle. (Danbafalle
means son of Bafalle in Hausa, and Mamman is the Hausa
domestication of Muhammad. It’s common in Muslim families to have
many siblings named Muhammad, but they’re often differentiated with
their middle names).

If you ask most Nigerians where Buhari is from, they will most
likely say he’s from Daura. But he is not. His hometown, by which I
mean the town where he was born and where his father lived and
died, is called Dumurkul. It’s a sleepy roadside village in
Katsina’s Maiadua Local Government Area, which is about three
kilometers from Daura and about five kilometers from the last
village in the Niger-Nigeria border.
A March 16, 2019 Daily Trust report on the village said Dumurkul is
a Fulfulde word, which means ‘settlement for herders’, “especially
for those who stay for at least a year.” After his father’s death
when he was little, Buhari lived with his mother’s Kanuri relatives
in Daura and adopted the town as his hometown.

But he hasn’t severed his umbilical cord from Dumurkul. During
this year’s Sallah festivities in July, he was knighted (or
“turbaned”) as the Hakimi (or district head) of Dumurkul even
though the village wasn’t officially a district.

In order to reconcile the contradiction of making someone a
district head of a non-existent district, on July 27, 2021,
Buhari’s village was mysteriously upgraded to a “district” and
taken out of Koza District of which it was a village after “an
emergency plenary to consider the request from Governor Aminu Bello
Masari” was convened!

The notion that Buhari is ascetic is another lie that has
refused to go away. Ascetics practice such self-denying habits as
sartorial modesty, resisting lascivious temptations, shunning
epicurean indulgences like drinking and smoking, etc. But Buhari
has always been a flamboyant dresser like most everyday people.

In Dele Sobowale’s book titled Letting a Thousand Flowers Bloom
(Ibrahim B. Babangida 1985 – 1992), Buhari’s past notoriety for
unrestrained libidinal impulses was described this way: “He must
have been some sort of a sexual athlete. One officer who served
with him in two stations had this to say: ‘You can leave your
money, bottle of hot drinks or packets of cigarettes with Buhari,
go away for several months and return and find nothing would be
missing. But leave your girlfriend or sister with him and you might
return to find her pregnant.’ That might be an exaggeration but he
had that reputation.”

As the reader can see, even in describing his sexual
indiscretions, this quote couldn’t help but perpetuate the lie that
Buhari didn’t smoke or drink. There are public photos of Buhari
smoking.

That Buhari is a brutal, uncompromising, ethically untainted
truth teller is another enduring lie about him that appears to be
nourished by his taciturnity. But he has told many big lies in the
open. As a military dictator in the mid-1980s, he said Nigeria was
the only country we had and that we should all stay in it to
salvage it, but by his own admission he had never trusted the
Nigerian healthcare system to take care of his health since 1977.
He had always gone to London for his medical needs and is in London
as I write this.
In 2014, he lied that he was too poor to afford his own
presidential nomination form and had to take a loan from a bank. A
few months later, however, in a ridiculously opaque, half-hearted
asset declaration, his spokesperson said Buhari had “not less than
30 million naira” in his account (even N100 billion naira is “not
less than 30 million naira”!) without explaining how someone who
couldn’t afford a N25 million-naira nomination form in October 2014
suddenly had “not less than 30 million” when he took over power in
May 2015.

Also recall that at the time he claimed to be too poor to afford
his nomination form, several of his children were studying at UK
universities whose tuition costs add up to tens of millions of
naira.

Plus, as Petroleum Minister in 1977, he couldn’t account for
$2.8 billion, which the legendary Fela sang about. And a probe of
PTF, which he headed, showed that he squandered N135 billion.
Newswatch’s report of the probe revealed that N500 million
mysteriously disappeared from the coffers of the agency. It also
showed that Buhari used N800 million on his “personal estate” and
used N28 billion to buy “expired HIV/AIDS kits.”

It is now widely believed that Buhari has no school certificate,
but he does, and it isn’t fake. One of Buhari’s surviving
classmates in Katsina (who, by the way, doesn’t like him) swore
that Buhari did take and pass his West African School Certificate.
Although I had no reason to question the authenticity of his claim,
the late Abba Kyari caused Cambridge Assessment, which administered
the WASC exam in Nigeria in 1961, to release Buhari’s result.

He had 5 credits in the following subjects: English (C5),
History (A3), Geography (C6), Hausa (C5) and Health Science (C6).
He also had a P7 in English Literature. His grade in Mathematics
didn’t show in his certificate because got an F9. That was a great
result for the time—and even now. He could have gone to the
university with the result if he wasn’t in a hurry to enroll in the
military while he was awaiting his WASC exam result.

Top 5
lies about Buhari that won’t go away^[1]