IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu and President Muhammadu Buhari
President
Muhammadu Buhari and Nnamdi Kanu are hucksters selling dreams preserved
in snake oil to a deluded crowd in search of a messiah.
After the initial revulsion at the words presidential aide,
Lauretta Onochie, used to describe the followers of the Indigenous
Peoples of Biafra leader, Nnamdi Kanu, one wonders what it is about the
man that makes him the wet dream of President Muhammadu Buhari’s
government. Why would a presidential aide cast aside every pretence at
executive neutrality to publicly declare that Kanu ought to be
permanently incarcerated, thereby unabashedly valourising injustice? Why
preempt the judiciary by subtly asking them to go beyond the
constitution in punishing him? Since no one has disowned Onochie’s
comments, I suspect the disdain she expresses for Kanu’s followers is
her paymasters ventriloquising their desires through her mouth. That
explains a lot and is, in fact, consistent with Buhari’s contempt for
Southeastern Nigerians.
My feeling is that Buhari’s “dis-ease” with Kanu relates the fact
that the latter is a lot like him. Both men are hucksters selling dreams
preserved in snake oil to a deluded crowd in search of a messiah.
Kanu’s followers are no less miserable than Buhari’s almajiris. Buhari’s
followers come from one of the poorest and the most illiterate regions
in the world. Despite their adulation of their “Baba”, he is implicated
in the larger systemic forces that have always impoverished them. They
deserve more than our sympathies; they need an awakening.
Buhari became President on the strength of a myth: that he is
pro-Talakawa, an incorruptible soul who abjures worldly goods so he can
be friends with the poor. Indeed, he has mostly shunned the company of
the rich and powerful class in Nigeria, preferring to fight the cause of
lowly herdsmen on behalf of whom he once threatened a sitting state
governor. Now that he has been propelled to power, his halo no longer
glitters. It turns out that if Buhari did not mingle with the powerful
corrupt class then, it was because he had little political capital to
trade with the members of the club. If he had never aspired to be
wealthy, it had less to do with his military training or a personal
principle of discipline but because he could live off welfare funds
creamed off the backs of hardworking Nigerians. His bills have been paid
by Nigeria for decades, so why should he have been bothered to strive
to rise above such placid condition?
Even more helpfully, he could live a “double life” — spending
enough of Nigeria’s money to send his children to school abroad, and
even buy himself good quality health care abroad while lapping up all
the adulation of his followers who think his seeming simplicity is proof
of avowed asceticism. They compare him with his former heads of state
colleagues living a less pretentious life and concluded that their
“Baba” shed his importance to be one of their lowly selves. Never mind
that he lives a far more secure lifestyle than they could dare dream
either for themselves or their children. Even before becoming President,
Buhari regularly travelled abroad for medical care but somehow his
followers keep believing he is on their side. It was when he was
attacked by Boko Haram in 2014 that we realised that our Mr. Simple
rides in bulletproof vehicles and has all the pomp and circumstance of
power he publicly condemns as “corruption.” And anytime Buhari needed to
contest an election, there had always been a shadowy figure whose
fingers dripped with corruption to pick up the tab.
Kanu, on the other hand, was just a regular guy who managed to make
a name for himself spewing inanities on a foreign radio. He was neither
a Thomas Sankara nor a Che Guevara, but his lack of tact in the age of
political correctness caught attention and fuelled by the resentment
generated by the 2015 elections, it propelled him to both fame and
infamy. Fortunately for him, Buhari’s government made a strategic
mistake by having Kanu arrested when he stepped in Nigeria. That made a
Mandela of him. Since his imprisonment, Kanu has flirted with several
incoherent ideologies. When he dabbled in Judaism, he accoutered himself
with the paraphernalia of the religion and culture. If Kanu was
enamoured by the parallel between Jew historical sufferings and the hand
Nigeria has dealt with the Igbo, he could at least have researched a
bit about the relationship between Jews and their Palestine neighbours
to understand the inherent contradictions of his acquired identity.
There was a time he wrote a letter to Donald Trump begging him that he
had a moral imperative to “liberate enslaved nations in Africa” and end
the neo-colonial enslavement of IPOB. Of all people to save Africans,
Trump, a neo-Nazi sympathiser?
Now, Kanu has morphed into a political cum spiritual leader. Like
our prosperity pastors, he too now delivers messages from the otherworld
and his poor followers grovel at his feet like the congregation of a
popular Lagos pastor. It did not take long for Kanu to unravel. He
started by being a freedom fighter, now he is Jesus Christ whose feet
are kissed by poor wretched “sinners” seeking to be free from their
misery. Tomorrow, who knows what he may be? No matter what we may think
of Kanu’s charlatanism, neither he nor his followers deserve to be
subjected to any kind of judicial injustice because they will not let
oppressive power be at ease. They are free citizens of Nigeria who can
choose to execute their political agency with whatever theatrics and
shenanigans that suit them as long as they are not putting the rest of
us in danger.
But here lies one key difference between Buhari’s supporters and
Kanu’s: bloodthirstiness. Buhari’s supporters are readily violent. In
2011, following the announcement of the presidential election which did
not favour him, they murdered about a thousand people, and destroyed
even many more lives. Given the recent episode in Wuse with Charly Boy,
anyone with half an eye knows they will not hesitate to kill again.
Kanu’s followers, on the other hand, have yet to kill anyone on his
behalf. In fact, their resilience in the face of state-sponsored
violence against them is impressive. Perhaps, if the rest of us can
stand up for what we believe with equal zeal and courage as Kanu’s
followers, maybe, we can still save our country. What one cannot
conclude yet is this: if things come to a head, would Kanu’s followers
be willing to kill on his behalf? Until then, I still worry more about
Buhari’s followers than I ever do about Kanu’s.
Kanu is now riling his followers up, asking them to raze Nigeria to
ashes if he is re-arrested. Underlying that charge is Kanu’s fear of
interminable incarceration, a measure the Presidency is openly
advocating for. Kanu probably knows that Nigerians have a short
attention span and their initial vehemence at his re-arrest will peter
out. The religious mysticism he is building up these days to shore up
his political authority will become stuff for Facebook jokes when he is
locked up like an animal in the “zoo”. Kanu’s followers will,
expectedly, put up a fight but we have been Nigerians long enough to see
how dissent is treated in this Hobbesian jungle of ours. Under the
military, people were either killed or permanently detained as Onochie
advocates. Under civilian government, protesters are tear-gassed and
mowed down like rabid dogs. Under Buhari’s watch, the army will make the
pro-Biafra protesters target practice as they have done in the past; as
the police did in Owerri recently during the demolition of the Ekeukwu
Market that resulted in the shooting and killing the 13-year-old
Somtochukwu Ibeanusi and nobody has, so far, been asked to account.
By now, even the most slow-witted Nigerian realises this
ineluctable fact: our lives do not matter. Our country has neither shame
nor conscience; people can be killed for nothing. We have seen that
with not only pro-Biafra activists but Shiites and the poor people
killed by herdsmen in Benue, Kaduna, and other parts of Southern
Nigeria. If Buhari is so worried about Kanu that his spokesperson wants
him put away, then they will have no qualms subjecting Kanu’s followers
to inordinate violence. They will wear them out until they eventually
simmer, and our Nigerian lives will go on like always.
-written by Abimbola Adelakun
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