This war must end!!! Muhammadu Buhari came to wage a war on corruption. He has been waging that war for close to four years now. In the space of four years the fate of the Second World War was determined and it was clear Hitler was going to lose. Few wars in modern times, have dragged on for four years – except you do not have the resources and instruments to wage the war or you, simply, lack the ideas to win the war. This war has been going on for too long and one is getting sick and tired of hearing about this war on an empty stomach. “A hungry man is an angry man and an angry man has no interest in a war that does not bring food to his table but tells him every day to forebear because better days are coming,” says a friend.
It reminds me of waiting for Godot! This is not the only war that Buhari has been fighting. He has been fighting Boko Haram for four years too. Dial back the clock and you would remember that Buhari told us that he would defeat Boko Haram in less than two months after ascending to power. Now his military top brass had told us that Boko Haram was technically defeated about a year ago. If you understand that then you are either a genius or a fool. Hitler was not technically defeated, he was totally defeated and the world had peace thereafter. Boko Haram is still raging like a bull and the war is still going on. We need for these people to defeat Boko Haram totally – not technically and semantically and propagandistically. So that we would have peace and Leah would come back home.
Ever since Buhari became the president of Nigeria in 2015, he had tried with Palestinian resilience and Jewish doggedness to convince the entire world that Nigeria and Nigerians were technically the most corrupt place and most corrupt human beings respectively. This was part of an attempt to internationalise the war against corruption. The story unraveled along the line that into this dark and irredeemable cesspool of corruption, a messiah had come to fix things up. Hail Muhammadu Buhari!
The holistic picture of the Buhari adventure is that if Nigeria was not such a corrupt country he would not have wasted his precious time to come and render the thankless job of running the country as its president. He is a knight in shining armour riding into the pit of hell to save it from itself and restore order. He is Don Quixote and he is not done fighting corruption yet. So…he is set to march on in 2019 to continue the war against corruption. But one needs to know how a man who could not lift a weight in four years of trying would succeed to lift it in the next four years. We do not need an eight-year war. Please let Buhari fight something else. He has lost this war and he should bring a clean white handkerchief out of his pocket and wave it as a sign of surrender.
We have suffered more in this war against corruption than we did in the Civil War. When a stereotype about a country has presidential support then you cannot complain about being subjected to dehumanising searches at airports and boundaries because of being a Nigerian. If you do not like it, change your citizenship to Benin Republic or even Togo. You may become a big fish there like Emmanuel Adebayo, who played for the Togo national team and might not have had a place in Nigeria. Nigeria has the distinction of being the only country in the world where its president reminds the world at every opportunity that Nigerians are so corrupt that between the time you bribe a policeman for not having particulars and want to walk down to your car, another policeman may arrest you for crossing the road without watching out for traffic.
The Peoples Democratic Party has been the lone voice claiming that Nigerians were not as corrupt as the world has been made to believe and that the president was not fighting corruption but fighting perceived enemies. The party maintains that there were too many persons with itchy fingers around the president for the said fight to be taken seriously. They claim that you cannot wage a war against snakes while keeping a black mamba and a king cobra. Somehow they have not succeeded in persuading the president to believe that there are corrupt people within his inner circle.
Now help has come from strange quarters. The former president of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, has risen in the defense of Nigeria and Nigerians. He claimed that the alleged corruption (as alleged by our president and the western press) was over exaggerated. That we always knew because if we were all corrupt, we would not have the number of churches and mosques we have in this country and all the men of God would of all men be most miserable. More so the Bible says that on the last day people from all tongues and tribes would be there, so from every tribe expect to see somebody.
Mkapa, who was delivering a keynote address during the 7th Zik Annual Lecture at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka titled “Taming the Monster of Corruption in Africa,” maintained that most western countries were more corrupt than African countries.
Just the kind of thing you would expect your president to say, right? But that is what our president is not saying. It would be wrong to give the world the impression that any other Nigerian has integrity – he has a copyright on it. Now that campaigns have started the saint may want the sinners to vote for him to continue in a war that he is not winning. That is the curious aspect of this election.
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