President Muhammadu Buhari
Punch
columnist, Ikeogu Oke has addressed issues surrounding the return of
President Buhari to Nigeria after about 104 days in the United Kingdom
on medical leave.
There are those who wouldn’t bear the thought of President
Muhammadu Buhari recovering from his illness, returning from his medical
leave in the UK and resuming duty. A brief journey into cyberspace
would prove this, with their posts on some social media platforms
affirming it with or without giving reasons for their ill-will.
One of the reasons – for those who bother to give any – is the
position the President had taken when the late President Umaru Yar’Adua
was in a similar situation to his, having travelled abroad for medical
reasons, a journey from which, unfortunately, he did not return alive.
They remind us that President Buhari, then a serial contestant for
Yar’Adua’s position, the Presidency, had insisted that the best thing
was for the latter to be impeached, having become incapable of
discharging his duties as President due to illness.
Well, I think that was harsh of Buhari, whom experience would have
made wiser with the lesson that anyone could become incapacitated by
sickness. And that baring the grace of Providence and the dedication of
the best doctors giving him the best medical attention in the UK, his
story might have ended like that of the “rival” for whose impeachment he
had called in a manner reminiscent of hitting a man when he is down.
Then, it would seem that, besides spite, those who give this reason
are driven by a lust for vengeance, despite their hint that they
understand that Buhari’s reaction to Yar’Adua’s incapacitation due to
ill-health was inhumane and therefore wrong.
But what I don’t understand is that they seem unaware that it is a
more grievous wrong to repeat a wrong deliberately. That to choose to
commit the same sin against Buhari that he had committed against
Yar’Adua is a worse moral violation than the original sin. And I would
like to be contradicted on this by any of them who, being incapacitated
by sickness as a public servant, would prefer people wishing for them to
vacate their office or be ejected from it, or for their death, rather
than their recovery, whatever their past or current sins or
shortcomings. Any of them who would rather that the admonition to do to
others as we would have them do to us – found in the scriptures of the
10 major religions, including Christianity and Islam – applies to them
as a death wish in a time of illness may indeed contradict me.
The bitter and divisive politics prevalent in our country, on the
crest of which Buhari rode to power and apparently stoked with some of
his unfortunate remarks – recall the one about his being voted by 97 per
cent and five per cent of sections of the electorate and his hint of
his wish to reward them accordingly – which portray him as an ethnic
champion rather than a statesman, is a plausible reason for such strong
antipathy towards him.
But it is a reason that falls short of being a justification.
Rather, like the reason of what Buhari said about Yar’ Adua, it would
only create a vicious cycle for the perpetuation of hate-driven calls
for regime change that may be injurious to our country if adopted as a
justification for such calls. And unless we terminate the insidious
emergence of this vicious cycle in the present times, we may be creating
a situation where political adversaries of our leaders would constantly
seek to profit from such calls for the precipitate termination of their
tenures when they fall sick, worsening the resultant tension as we now
have in our country, even as it is hard to determine which leader would
fall sick and be incapacitated as a result in the future.
But more important than the foregoing are the lessons Buhari may
bring back with his return and if he would put them to use, as one would
expect of him, in improving himself and our country as a leader.
Would he, for instance, act with the sobriety expected of a
survivor of what appears to be a near-death experience to unite our
country and govern it with a sense of equity rather than instigate
divisiveness and treat it – as some of his detractors allege, and not
entirely without justification – as a conquered fiefdom for his ethnic
group, exhibiting triumphalist attitudes?
Would his long sojourn abroad for medical care, as the President of
“the giant of Africa”, strike him as a compromise of his and our
country’s dignity, and a mockery of rationality, especially considering
the trillions in the 2017 budget for the Aso Rock Clinic to which he
should have unfettered access? Would the fact that other self-respecting
leaders (like him) of other self-respecting nations (like ours) would
consider such a journey a humiliation inspire him to strive to improve
our health sector in order to prevent a repeat of such journeys, if only
to save some of us the anguish of imagining our President “like a
patient etherised upon a table”, to adopt an image from T. S. Eliot’s
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, and left at the mercy of foreign
scalpels, especially those of our colonial masters from whom we are
supposed to have gained our independence more than 56 years ago?
Would he return, having won a long and difficult fight to keep his
own life, which apparently underscores his appreciation of the value of
life, show more dedication to securing the lives of all Nigerians in
fulfilment of his constitutional mandate, not only by seeking to end the
menace of Boko Haram in the North-East but also that of the Fulani
herdsmen known to have spread murder and carnage in the Middle Belt and
the southern parts of our country? Would he, in addition to genuinely
seeking to end the menace of the herdsmen, ensure that the perpetrators
are identified and brought to book, bearing in mind that leaving such
killers at large is tantamount to spreading terror?
Would he, in all, dedicate himself to bringing real development to
our country in an evenhanded manner that reverses the impression of his
provincialism that threatens to blight his legacy?
Perhaps, Buhari’s long medical sojourn abroad would vindicate
Shakespeare saying in Hamlet that “there is nothing either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so” if he returns from it with a genuine
commitment to provide good leadership for all Nigerians regardless of
their ethnicity, religion and the percentage of votes he received from
their states or ethnic groups.
With half of his four-year tenure already gone, it is obvious that Buhari is running a race against time.
Ikeogu Oke, a poet and public affairs analyst, wrote in from Abuja via ikeogu.oke@gmail.com;
Tel: +234-803-453-1501
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