HAVE YOU MET AN AVERAGE BUHARIST?

You’d pity Buhari when you meet an average Buharist.

There’s a more cancerous misfortune bedevilding Nigeria right now than the apology of a president Buhari has become and it is unfortunate many of us got the memo pretty late. Perhaps if we’d known earlier, piety and not vilification would have been our emotional response to the way Buhari has presided the country so far.

After making effort to break the Guinness book of records for most gaffes in fewest days made by a 21st century President of an independent nation , it became evident to any genuine critic of Buhari’ misgovernance that the man has become puppet in the hands of some powerful cabal. He doesn’t remember when he was sworn in as the President of the nation he governs. He addresses a gubernatorial candidate of his party as Presidential, Senatorial and finally Governatorial. He slips like Aiyegbeni at campaign rallies. He dodges Presidential debate to avoid embarrassing his party e.tc. Yet some people continue to package him as the next best creation after slice bread.

The general suspicion is that the people packaging the Dauran just need him as a poster boy for integrity while they continue to pilfer the country into the kind of impoverishment that’d make Abacha look foolish.

This is not strange. Government anywhere is a product of interest. What is strange is that despite his glaring incompetence, oratorical deficiency, mental infirmity and physical debility, Buhari’s appeal as sustained by fierce packaging from Bourdillon has also bewitched people whose parents struggled to see through school so that they can have sense.

Almost everyone you’d expect should be the one to wake their neighbour from the collective slumber the cabal has cleverly plunged us are fiercely committed to perpetuating the cabal’s design, a next level for a man yet to be convincing in the present level.

Few days ago after Buhari and his Fulani brother, Atiku decided we were unworthy of their time by not participating at the President debate, I took to my social media page to accuse our leaders of not taking us seriously. I specifically mentioned Buhari and Atiku. To my shock and chagrin, two men I considered literate came under the post to make useless comment below the reasoning of a primary five pupil. One simply commented with, “4+4”, a snide symbolism of two terms for Buhari. The other, an older man that should know worse, came with a ‘copy and paste’ that painfully captures how Atiku traveled with the Senate President’s entourage under diplomatic immunity and whataboutery. I spent a wasted one minute trying to reconcile my post with the comments. I couldn’t connect the dot. Nothing has ever painted Buhari’s predicament more graphically than this experience.

This incident set an alarm in my head. If supposedly learned persons could become so enchanted they are unwilling to even have intelligent engagements on social media, what is the fate of millions of almajiris? Are we not in soup already? How will Buhari ever know he is in the wrong when he is goaded on by the closest people to him including so called intellectuals?

Apparently all the time Buhari had to deny knowledge of sensitive development in his government, he might be genuinely unaware. Those that’d rather bring it to his consciousness wouldn’t and when some of us protest, Buharists rise above our voices to assure their Dauran saint that all is well and there’s no cause for alarm. We can now take it for granted that Buhari has no idea the grave implication of his refusal as a President seeking reelection to participate in the Presidential debate. How would he when in the aftermath of his absence, every Buharist justifies and rationalises the decision? How would the President understand the callousness of attending political rallies while herdsmen or bandits are snuffing lives off another village in the North? How would he when his praise singers are more concerned about large turn out of jobless youths at such rallies?

These blind followers presently constitute more danger than we ever imagined before now! They are not different from those mad enough to kill for politicians!