Celebrating Buhari’s death vs forgiving him

Two dominant narrative strands have emerged in Nigerian discursive spheres in the aftermath of former President Muhammadu Buhari’s death: whether it offends decency to celebrate his death (as many have done both online and offline) and whether Nigerians should forgive his betrayal of the country. I have slightly unconventional views on both.

The religious and cultural values that shaped me in my formative years and that I have internalized throughout my academic and interpersonal socializations have predisposed me to find no value in celebrating anybody’s death, although I admit that it would amount to discursive tyranny for me to insist that people who find value or cathartic experience in celebrating a death shouldn’t do so.

Here’s why, outside the realm of my religio-cultural socialization, I don’t celebrate anybody’s death.

First, death is a garment that every living soul, irrespective of their piety or depravity, will wear at some point.

Celebrating another person’s death, in my mind, is like a line of schoolchildren, all guilty of the same offense, awaiting punishment from a stern teacher. When an obnoxious child gets whipped, those farther down the line cheer and clap, momentarily delighted that it wasn’t them and overjoyed that the loathsome child had met his comeuppance, forgetting that the teacher is merely working through the queue.

The cane is coming, steadily and inevitably. Their distance from the front of the line is merely a delay, not a pardon. Their personal sense of righteousness or imagined innocence won’t save them. Death, like that teacher’s cane, is no respecter of position or moral superiority. It will reach everyone in turn.

So, to me, rejoicing in another’s death only reveals a foolish ignorance of your own place in the line. Still, I acknowledge and respect the right of people to celebrate anybody’s death, if that gives them even temporary emotional reprieve. It’s the same as the right of schoolchildren in a whipping line to chuckle when the cane lands on someone ahead of them, even if they, too, won’t escape the cane.

Every death is a sharp reminder that I, too, am just further down the line, waiting my turn, not exempt from the cane.

In a July 10, 2010 column titled “Grieving in America,” which I wrote in the aftermath of my first wife’s death, I pointed out that, “It is supremely ironic that it is tragedies and traumas, more than successes and prosperity, that bring out the depth of the humanity in us. Perhaps it is because these tragedies remind us all of our own mortality, our own frailty, our own vulnerability.”

Nevertheless, had Buhari died while he was inflicting pain on Nigerians with his harsh policies, it would be justified, I think, if people that were being crushed under the weight of his ineptitude and insouciance exulted.

But he died after eight ruinous years that reversed Nigeria’s little progress by decades. And he died in his 80s at one of the best hospitals in the world. The average lifespan in Nigeria is only about 54.  Buhari lived close to the highest life expectancy anywhere in the world. Most of us would be lucky to reach 70 before the inevitable, inexorable cane of death gets to us.

So, I see no karmic retribution in the death of a man who caused so much anguish to millions of people but who lived his best life at the expense of the country that gave him everything and that he devastated without remorse.

Now, should he be forgiven in the interest of posthumous clemency and reverence? Well, Buhari’s offense was to the Nigerian state. Speaking for myself, he never offended me as a person. We are so far in age, symbolic capital, and social symmetry for him to have offended me.

But if he did, as a Muslim, I would forgive him. Although the Qur’an and Hadith do not explicitly command Muslims to forgive the dead who wronged them, they strongly recommend forgiveness as a moral virtue, and there is no teaching that restricts forgiveness to only the living.

We are taught to forgive because forgiveness heals the heart from the toxin of resentment and removes the burden of grudge from our own souls. I simply don’t have the emotional and mental stamina to hate or nurse a grudge against anyone.

However, Buhari collectively offended the Nigerian state and its people. He became president when he knew he had neither the physical fitness nor the mental agility to navigate the complex contours of our nation. So, he left Nigeria hungrier, angrier, more divided, and less hopeful than he met it when he became president.

There is no mechanism to get the Nigerian state and its people to forgive him. The hurt he visited on the country and its people, both knowingly and unknowingly, is both unforgivable and inerasable. Forgiving him is beyond the realm of human capacity. Since he was a man of faith, only his Creator can choose to forgive him.

It is noteworthy, nonetheless, that Buhari’s entire adult life was marked by a stubborn resistance to forgive people whom he felt offended him. He had a remarkably gargantuan passion to feed and nurse grudges. Yet, somehow, most people he personally offended often forgave him.

There’s a long list of people that Buhari refused to forgive until his death for minor and major slights they committed against him, but perhaps his bitterest, most intense enemy was former military president Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB) who overthrew and jailed him in 1985.

 He never forgave IBB for that until he died. But former President Shehu Usman Shagari, whom Buhari also overthrew and jailed in 1983, forgave Buhari. I’ll come back to this point shortly.

Buhari was pretty petty and explicit in his vindictiveness. For instance, he deliberately shunned the launch of IBB’s autobiography even when several previous “enemies” of IBB honored it in the interest of maturity and late-stage reconciliation. He could never forgive IBB.

He desperately wanted to get back to power not because the benefit of hindsight inspired him with the vision to map out what he could do differently from what he did between 1983 and 1985 to make Nigeria better, but because he wanted to one-up IBB.

He wanted to prove that although IBB got him out of power through the bullet, he got back to power decades later through the ballot. One of his most cherished bragging rights, according to people who were close to him, was that he ended up ruling Nigeria for more years than IBB did.

I joked to someone a few days ago that if the dead could see and talk, Buhari would probably say his only regret was that IBB outlived him. Yes, he had that much consuming obsession with sustaining his grievance and one-upmanship with IBB, even after several efforts were made by northern elders to reconcile them.

For me, though, what was worse than Buhari’s inability to forgive people who offended him was his incapacity to requite the grace of people he offended who chose to forgive him. A classic example was President Shagari.

Although in the aftermath of reconciliation efforts by northern elders Shagari forgave him and was gracious about it, Buhari never quite requited this even when Shagari died. Buhari barely personally acknowledged Shagari’s death. He asked Boss Mustapha, a Christian, to represent him at Shagari’s Muslim funeral.

I recall the horror Buhari’s act evoked in Muslim northern Nigeria at the time. It was seen as symbolic, posthumous “F U” to Shagari. Elders of the region had to prevail on Buhari to pay a personal visit to Shagari’s house after the funeral to compensate for his symbolic blunder.

I doubt that it was a blunder because although he visited the house, he refused to write anything on the condolence register. He just signed his name and didn’t even get the date right. There were no delicately phrased words of condolence, the kind that IBB, his sworn enemy, wrote for him.

Members of the Shagari family took a screenshot of the blank page, which bore testimony to Buhari’s cold-heartedness and unforgiving spirit. I shared it on my website in a January 19, 2019, column I wrote titled “Buhari’s Physical and Mental Health is Now a National Emergency.”

So, it came as no surprise to me when a grandson of Shagari by the name of Nura Muhammad Mahe went public on July 16 with the hurt the family felt by Buhari’s conduct when their patriarch departed.

Drawing a contrast between the praiseworthy dignity with which the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration has treated Buhari’s death and the shabby, ice-cold contempt with which he treated Shagari’s, Mahe said although Buhari wasn’t out of the country when Shagari died, Buhari neither attended his funeral nor accorded him a state burial.

“It remains a painful memory that Shagari’s death occurred under the leadership of a man who many believe harboured political animosity toward him,” Mahe wrote. “Even in death, Buhari showed little public remorse or respect for his predecessor.”

In the end, Buhari’s death may have closed the chapter on his life, but it reopened the wounds of a nation he led with cold detachment and punishing indifference. The irony is that a man who struggled to forgive others now stands in need of forgiveness that only the divine can dispense.

For the rest of us still in line, perhaps the lesson is less about the man who has passed and more about the moral imprint we leave behind before the cane reaches us.

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