In East of Eden, a novel inspired by the Biblical Cain and Abel story, the character Charles Trask drugs his brother Adam and takes his wife to bed. Betrayal is not a new commodity in human affairs. Long before John Steinberg’s Adam, there was the Et tu, Brute? (“Even you, Brutus?”) cry of King Julius Caesar in that eponymously titled play of William Shakespeare’s. Caesar is dispatched to Hades with a knife stuck in his stomach by his loyalist and friend Brutus. But it was not the physical knife which shattered his intestines that did the greatest damage; it was the spiritual knife of betrayal that cut deep into his soul as he went down at the Capitol. Like Brutus, the Muhammadu Buhari administration is infinitely brutal. Which is why, in fulfillment of its December 2021 vow to inflict more misery on Nigerians this year, it unveiled its plan to slam a N10 surcharge on every litre of soft drinks last week.
The soft drinks—Seven Up, Coca Cola, Pepsi, etc– are a core part of the little enjoyment that the masses have access to, but they will now be overpriced and beyond reach. The masses do not require much, just something to chill and step down with. Coca Cola, in particular, seems to agree very much with Agege bread, preferably oven-hot. Having virtually stripped the masses naked with punitive policies, Buhari is now going after soft drinks. Nigerians “drinking responsibly” because pure water now costs N20 in many places had better prepare for harsher days. It will be a luxury item very soon.
But do not shout betrayal yet. Consider the case of Saidu Faskari, the Katsina farmer who recently removed and sold his roofing sheets in order to raise money to facilitate his eldest son’s release from the dungeon built by bandits in the state, a metaphor for the state of affairs in Buhari’s Nigeria. Faskari, who had himself been kidnapped in December last year and had spent 13 days in captivity, was left shattered when the outlaws seized his son, who had come to pay the N50,000 ransom demanded to secure his (Faskari’s) release. There is a man who rules on the high waves of Abuja pretence, but the real powers in this moment’s Nigeria are criminals. Citizen Faskari, betrayed by the government elected to protect him, is struggling to free himself from the maze woven by terrorists masquerading as bandits in the state. He has sold his only protection from the elements to godless and opportunist neighbours, but at least that is a moral issue.
There’s much more than a moral question when year 2015 comes to mind. Buhari came to power vowing to lift the masses from the morass of poverty and despondency. Hope was high in the air: the former decisioners had been stupendously corrupt and a new Sheriff, per presidential spokesman Femi Adesina, was in town. Prior to the election, Buhari’s name became affixed to even the months of the year: the FeBuhari (Love Buhari) crew who saw the month of February 2015 as their date of freedom from slavery proclaimed their candidate’s holiness and perfection to the world. When the elections were postponed to enable more people to obtain voter cards, they Marched for Buhari, serenading the third month of the year, and the party when victory came was wild, ribald and raucous!! Remembering the dystopian pangs of 1984 and the brutal overreach of Buhari’s government that had brought George Orwell’s novel of that title into bold, if distressing, relief, I had been one of the naysayers and had in fact embarked on a three-day fast to prevent the calamity that now struts the land. My hands trembled on the steering as I drove from Ile-Ife, where I was a doctoral candidate in English Language, down to Ibadan, as the results were being announced.
Power won, our Public Mail Bag pretended to be a patriot: “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody.” The crowd went wild! What a declaration! What joy! But bitter tears soon cascaded down their faces as their god soon unfolded his mission as a betrayer of the long-suffering populace. He began treating the law with contempt, throwing, as Tanure Ojaide quips in his poem The owl wakes us, “questioners to hyenas.” In no time Nigeria had become a police state. And a soulless jungle: on a New Year day when herders staged a genocidal attack on the people of Benue State, the president discarded humanity and asked the terrified, stunned and disconsolate people to accommodate their killers. Today, thousands of men and women lie buried in the soil of this land, cut down by the fire of Fulani rage.
In Graham epochal novel The power and the glory, a Catholic priest fleeing state persecution in the Tabasco province is brought back into the waiting arms of the police by a fellow commoner, the mestizo. The mestizo persuades him to return to the site of persecution to hear the confession of a dying man and although he is aware he is being betrayed, he deliberately courts death like Thomas Becket in T.S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, hoping against hope. Like our unnamed priest, Buhari’s crowd knew they were being betrayed but chose to risk their lives and future by gifting the Daura General yet another term.
No longer flowing and glowing in pretended Marxism, Buhari became luciferically brutal in his capitalist bent. He increased fuel price, reduced interest on savings accounts and, in 2021, placed 7.5 VAT on gas importation while the masses groaned, stamping the wicked policy with the pen of retroactive effect. Importers, stunned by the ungodly sums they were now to cough out over deals long concluded, took out their rage on the poor masses. A cylinder of gas as which cost N3,500 in January became N11, 000 in September. This year, he has promised, and is implementing, higher taxes, dispensing higher misery to his beloved country(wo)men who dare not even say Cry, my beloved country. When you can no longer cry you laugh, and when you can no longer laugh you run mad, relieved of the agonies of a wicked world. Many will run mad this year.
and then