Editor’s note: Since President Muhammadu Buhari left Nigeria for the UK on a 10-day vacation, there has been rumour circulating of his death
In
this opinion
by Abimbola Adelakun, she notes that Nigerian leaders have
failed to live up to expectation and make citizens happy which is why
they don’t mind whatever happens to them.
The Abacha story
When
former Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha, died in June 1998, I was one of
those who took to the streets to celebrate the nation’s liberation from
his murderous grip. These days, I look back at that infamous Monday and
wonder the point of rejoicing at someone’s death when none of us is
beyond mortality. Abacha’s death, we know, resolved a conundrum and
cleanly freed us from the bonds with which he held us. Also, given the
timing of his death, it did in fact seem God heard Nigerians’ cries for
liberation. However, death by natural causes is no punishment; it is one
of life’s many realities.
In the past
few days, both the “fake news” and refutation of President Muhammadu
Buhari’s “death” have seized the airwaves and “bus-stop parliaments.”
Since the President’s announcement
of his annual vacation and “medical trip” to the United Kingdom, folks
eager to script Buhari’s obituary have been beating an elegiac gong. In
the post-truth world, rumours and fact-free truths travel the world
without a visa and debunking them, unfortunately, sometimes assert their
validity.
President Muhammadu Buhari
To
make a revolting matter even more shameful, Buhari’s media aides, Femi
Adesina and Garba Shehu, two spin doctors who never muster enough
professional dignity to overlook the temptation of wading in murky pools
with every species of human, seized their social media handles. They
announced – with puerile peevishness- that the President was alive and
well! From their interaction with cybercitizens, one deduces they
imagine that those who wanted the President dead are malevolent souls
who are still sore Buhari defeated their candidate in the 2015 election.
Adesina and Shehu might well be right. In
the run-up to the 2015 election, the sitting governor of Ekiti State,
Ayodele Fayose, started the guessing game about Buhari’s health and
death. Other “wailers” picked up the baton and have continued to run
with it since then. What both aides have probably not considered is that
such rumour mongering is also a response to the failures of the
government to properly communicate with people. Over the years, the
Nigerian government has proved to be thoroughgoing dishonest on even
simple and insignificant issues. When people cannot get reliable
official information, they make up their realities and hawk them around
until they acquire some truth value.
Leaders and their health
Besides,
our nation has a long history of leaders lying about their health. From
Abacha to the late Umaru Yar’Adua, to the wife of the former President
Goodluck Jonathan, we never get an accurate picture of anything. Till
now, we cannot tell with confirmed certainty if it was liver cirrhosis
that killed Abacha or the mysterious “Indian escorts.”
Did
Yar’Adua speak regularly to his ‘Kitchen Cabal’ or his communication on
his deathbed was a case of ‘Esau’s hand, Jacob’s voice’? How did
Governor Danbaba Suntai govern Taraba State after his accident? What was
the nature of Dame Patience Jonathan’s illness and how did she get
mysteriously healed after leaving Aso Rock?
Former presidents, Goodluck Jonathan and Umaru Musa Yar'Adua
What is Buhari’s actual condition of health? In these times where the traffic one successfully drives to one’s website
translates to financial gains, “fake news” mongering will not abate.
Until our leaders learn to preempt rumours by making their health
conditions public information, they will expend themselves putting out
fires.
Rather than stamp their
petulant feet on the ground and moan the immorality of wishing one’s
leaders dead, they should ask why the people they govern want them dead.
Beyond the obvious reasons of
poor communication between the leader and the led, is the reality of
spite on the part of the citizens. People wish their leaders dead
because they want to transpose some of the pains those leaders inflict
on them back to the leaders; they want everything that brings them joy
obliterated
While I am in no way
justifying this s*dism on the part of the people, I also think a mere
resort to flagellating them will not help our leaders to introspect. The
question they should in fact ask themselves is why things should be
otherwise.
Why should people care?
Why should people care if their leaders live or die when those leaders themselves do not care if their people die or live?
Why
ask people to demonstrate empathy towards a leader who grabs the public
wallet and goes abroad to see well-trained specialists in well-funded
hospitals? Why ask impoverished people to show humane feelings towards
such a person when the system that the leader runs at home cannibalises
them and their children?
Why would
people who live, move, and have their being amidst dehumanising
conditions be concerned about the ethics of wishing death on someone
else? The conditions of their own existence already bespeak death, yet
they are supposed to writhe at the pain of a leader whose privileges are
funded with their blood?
If they must
know, wishing our leaders dead is moral revanchism. Those death wishes
are like the stone from David’s slingshot. They might not have achieved
the desired aim of hitting Goliath in the head and watching him drop
dead, but is nevertheless a ready weapon of warfare available to the
agonised poor, the helpless victims of the nation’s necropolitics, the
forgotten and silenced majority, and the historically and structurally
dispossessed.
Trying
to ramp up religious or cultural sentiments about the immorality of
wishing our leaders dead will not abdicate the reasons people wish death
or evil on their leaders. Such shaming will only repress the instinct
to publicly express it. Under that surface sneer of “I wish Mr.
President soonest recover” will remain a seething rage that can only
find some cathartic outlet through their deaths.
I
dare say that this feeling of “go and die!” as it was once tactlessly
voiced by a former Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, is mutual
between the leaders and the led. In Nigeria, we eat death for breakfast,
lunch and dinner. Life is cheap here and there is little evidence that
our leaders think that our lives matter. Ours is a country where a bomb
will “mistakenly” drop on a refugee camp, death toll will rise to 236
and not a thing has changed one week later. No lawmaker is currently
sitting to review the gross incompetence that led to such a massacre and
propose changes to the conditions that made it happen.
Ours is a country where
protesters are shot by security agencies whose heads have been addled
and nobody, not even their state governors or legislators, will shut
down the system and demand that their deaths be redressed. From Benue to
Enugu states, people have been gruesomely killed by rampaging herdsmen,
but what have our “dear leaders” done other than toss the
responsibility of accountability elsewhere?
The
blood of the Shi’ites who were dumped in graves dug at night still
cries for justice, but it flies past our deafened ears. The many victims
of violent deaths vociferously cry for redress; their vain pleas drain
us of psychic energy. If our lives are treated so cheaply, why are they
surprised wishes of their own death are cheaply trafficked?
We are gradually becoming a society where
death is meaningless because life itself has been sapped of meaning.
When people look at their leaders and wish them dead, they are trying to
infuse some meaning into a meaningless order.
Just
like we thought of Abacha, if this person — who represents ethical and
spiritual corruption, decadence, executive aloofness, oppression of the
poor by the rich — drops dead, then maybe it is proof that there is a
God; He exists and in fact cares about alleviating our pain.
Buhari
is not the first president who will be rumoured dead; and if the one
that comes after him makes our lives miserable too, people could wish
him/her dead as an expression of their inner rage and frustrated
helplessness. It is nothing personal.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial policy of mvienterprise.blogspot.com
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