But today, I witness a country where the state has become impotent, complicit, and totally incapable of ensuring the protection of the peoples trapped within her territories…
My heart is heavy. I would have loved to be able to shed some tears, self-indulgent as this may sound, perhaps it would have afforded me some relief. But the tears have refused to come.
In the absence of tears, I resorted to doing the only thing I know how to do, and the only thing that has offered me some measures of peace. Writing. I have always been blessed with the gift of the writing, but I did not know how therapeutic I could make my gift, until the dying days of GEJ, and Buhari’s emergence, left me so constantly traumatized, that I began to write, from the depth of my pains.
Several events in recent days, have left me even more traumatized than usual. I have been to the precipice of depression, and I have stared down despair. I lashed out with blurbs, little captions that pushed out thoughts, and demands for the readers to use their God given brains, to think about the path along which our country is headed.
The slaughter on the Jos Plateau, is the most recent of the events threatening my sanity at this point in time. Senseless slaughters of our fellow Nigerians, is nothing new in our country. These killings have been going on for over 10 years. The killings did not start with the ascension of Buhari to power, what has happened with Buhari’s ascension, is the defense of these killings, either wittingly or unwittingly, by functionaries of the state.
The single most damaging consequence of the alliances that created the APC, is the concession of the Tinubu propaganda machine, in the service of the Buhari project. The Nigerian press is just as corrupt as the police, and just as corrupt as every other expression of our national life. With Tinubu’s patronage, the institutionalized corruption and putrefaction in Lagos state, has for years been deodorized, and Lagos state has been held up as the model of good governance.
This propaganda machine, today works for the Buhari government.
Let us imagine, that Buhari does not have access to Tinubu’s network of compromised press, we would have been reminded of his well documented utterances during his visit to Lam Adesina at the Government House in Ibadan, in the wake of the farmers/ herdsmen clash in Oke-Ogun. The government would have had to explain the unsavory and patently callous remarks of the Minister of Defense, and Buhari would have had to explain his impotent and provocative demands, that the people of Benue, be their brothers keepers.
The Inspector-General of Politics, sorry, police, would have had to explain why he did not obey the presidential directive to relocate to Benue, the service chiefs would have long been rightly excoriated for what is either their sniveling complicity, incompetence, or both.
But today, I witness a country where the state has become impotent, complicit, and totally incapable of ensuring the protection of the peoples trapped within her territories.
I have no empirical basis for the conclusions I have drawn as to the complicity of Buhari and his government in these killings. But the circumstantial evidences are humongous, and the buck really must stop somewhere. We were told in the early days of Buhari’s government to read his body language. Well, I have read his body language, his utterances, those of his appointees, the actions and inactions of them all, and the inescapable conclusion is that our president is responsible for these killings. He is the president, and the chief security officer of Nigeria. He owns this.
Before the Buharists come to wail impotently on my wall, let me issue a clear warning; I will not hesitate to unfriend anyone who crosses the line of civility on my Zuckerberg assigned piece of real estate. I am not in the mood to suffer fools gladly today. I hold Buhari responsible for these killings.
May the blood of the innocents, haunt their killers, the supporters of their killers, and the ones who by their silence, energizes and enables the continuation of this madness. Amen!
DF
First published 26 June, 2018.
