As I write this, the nation is still awash with relief six days after President Muhammadu Buhari returned home. For 103 days we and our nation were on tenterhooks. Th e pilgrimage by the important people to London to visit the ailing president did little to reassure us, the common people, of the true health condition of the president. All we could do was hold our hearts in our mouths. Th e quirky ways of illnesses are full of surprises and shocks. We just hoped we would not be surprised or shocked. Eventually, hope defeated fear and anxiety.
Welcome, Mr President. When Buhari returned on Saturday, August 19, to a large cheering and jubilating crowd all the way from the International Airport, Abuja, to Aso Rock, the burden of fear and anxiety was lifted off our hearts. I am willing to bet that despite the typical stoic nature of the military man, there was just no way Buhari would not have been touched by the spontaneous outpouring of the people’s joy at seeing him back and the fl ood of goodwill fl owing towards him. And so, to borrow from Senator Shehu Sani, the hyenas and the jackals, and if I may add, the rats and mosquitoes, would now leave the stage to the lion king.
A president’s illness is not a personal illness. It is a national trauma. When the president ails, the nation cannot sit pretty. It ails too. A president is entrusted with the key to a country’s future. When an illness creeps up on him, the cloud of anxiety dims the light of that future, hence our fear and our anxious days. Buhari was the reason, the sole reason, that we, the common people, used our people’s power resident in the ballot paper to end the long reign of the PDP in 2015. We believed he could do titanic things. We believed he would start the process of forging a united nation from this mere geographic expression.
We believed he had the moral stature to make this great gathering of tribes with divergent interests, pursued at the expense of the nation itself, one nation, one people, one destiny. We believed he has the capacity and the will to do those things that would make us proud once more to be Nigerians, Biafran agitators not excepted. We believed that by the time he has served his two terms in offi ce, Nigeria would distance itself from the league of the most corrupt nations in the world; he would make our nation work again; he would make respect for the rule of law the guiding principle of our collective national aspiration.
And then, illness struck. And it began the corrosive process of browning the colour of hope, our fervent hope, in a new nation built by Buhari with his unstained blocks of honest intentions and patriotic ambitions. Buhari has given whatever is ailing him a good fi ght. Even doubting Ayo Fayose, governor of Ekiti state, now accepts that the man who returned home on August 19 was not a Buhari clone. I believe it was his ambition to give our nation a strong, purposeful and focused leadership. His illness may not have aff ected that ambition but it has cost him valuable time. Buhari returned last week to a country he least expected: a more fractious country with ethnic champions heating the polity with drums of misguided zeal.
Th ey seem determined to put the country asunder. Th ey create the sad impression that the fate of our country now and for the future is theirs to decide. In his broadcast to the nation on his return, Buhari expressed his sadness at this ugly development in the country. He said, “I was distressed to notice that some of the comments, especially in the social media, have crossed our national red lines by daring to question our collective existence as a nation. Th is is a step too far.” At the beginning of his quest for the presidency in 2003, Buhari told Th e News magazine that the country was in a mess.
It has since gotten pretty messier some fourteen years later. Our security challenges have become more critical: Boko Haram, kidnapping, herdsmen’s atrocities, cult groups wrecking mayhem on innocent people, among the many security challenges that make both day and night a nightmare no nation would wish on its citizens. Th e most insidious of these challenges lies in the fact that some of our compatriots are not only championing ethnic interests at the expense of the nation but drumming up the fact that they no longer believe in Nigeria. It is diffi cult to deal with a belief because it is not against the law for anyone to believe whatever he wants to believe. In his broadcast, Buhari assured us that “Nigeria’s unity is settled and not negotiable.
” I hope it sinks in. Between 1967 and January 1970, more than a million of our people, men, women and children, paid the supreme sacrifi ce for that unity to be sanctifi ed and preserved non-negotiably. Was that a dress rehearsal for a shaky-shaky nation? Th e ethnic champions have since challenged the president, insisting, as they have always done, that the country’s unity is negotiable and must be negotiated on the basis of their warped formula of, if my tribe is ok, Nigeria is ok. Th e pity of it, of course, is that nothing is settled in this country. Not our form of government; not the structure of our federation; not the nature of our federalism; and not the nature or practice of our democracy. Ours is a state in permanent fl ux.
It impairs our national progress because it permits our individual frustrations to be turned into a club for battering the nation. Nigeria is not the only former British colony in Africa; nor is it the only country with a large number of tribes. All African countries, east and west, north and south, except Somalia, are saddled with diff erent tribes and tongues. But ours is the only African country of quarrelling tribes. Th e failure of the state to do well by its citizens is reason enough for them to look back, fault the colonialists and, armed with revisionist tribal history, insist that the British cobbled the nation together without the due consent of the tribes. Yet, what is so fantastic about this is that those whom the nation had favoured and continues to favour believe they have something to gain from reducing themselves to ethnic champions because there is a personal political and business gain in setting themselves up in opposition to the Nigerian state. To whom much is given, the least is expected, abi? Inverted patriotism in action. Buhari, of course, has no illusions about a) public expectations b) that it is he and none other who must tackle the cocktail of challenges and c) get our nation down from sitting precariously on the wall like Humpty Dumpty. His thought on these challenges raises some hope. He said, “We shall not allow irresponsible elements to start trouble and when things get bad they run away and saddle others with the responsibility of bringing back order, if necessary with their blood.” Amen.q`
