PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari is a good leader with a bad heart. Bad trees don’t produce good fruits and the fruits a man bears are from his heart. His fruits are out there for everyone to see. His immediate predecessor-in-office, President Goodluck Jonathan is a bad leader with a good heart. Unfortunately, a good tree not continuously pruned, will end up with tainted fruits. His fruits are out there for everyone to see. The heart of his immediate predecessor-in-office, late President Umaru Yar’Adua was too diseased to bear tangible fruits before he bowed out. But his signature amnesty policy remains a masterstroke. He was a fair leader with a fair heart. Fair trees produce barely-enough fruits. His “unripened” fruits are out there for everyone to see. The progenitor of this dispensation, President Olusegun Obasanjo is a bad leader with a bad heart. He buried all hope of redemption when he detached his “soul” from the spiritual, by denouncing his “Matthew” connection. Aremu’s life would be more meaningful and impactful, if he, by God’s grace, ended like Matthew, the tax collector who became an apostle of Christ. But since he isn’t Matthew for now, his fruits are out there for everyone to see.
Buhari is more of King Saul than David. God “employed” him but wanted to run his own errand. We pray he doesn’t end up not having a kingdom.
With a bad heart, you can’t ever be content with what you have. The president had 97 per cent and still sustained his malice against the five per cent (his incorrect computation anyway) he couldn’t have. He isn’t better than King Ahab. It is only a bad heart that will make the king of a whole nation seek the only inheritance of Naboth of Jezreelite. The decision to crush Naboth at all costs was a costly mistake.
When a man builds a paradise in his head, his heart must be fruitfully and truthfully engaged, before he could see such castle as an empty air. Try to destroy his soul and you will see his imagination getting monstrous.
Nearly every Ibo fellow, both young and old, lives the Biafran dream. When Leader Odimegwu Ojukwu fired the imagination of his people about a “working” nation 50 years ago, the rest of Nigeria responded with nay-saying. The attendant disdain broke the trust cistern. The “Biafrans” were never part of the nation again in the real sense. During Jonathan years when they appeared to be enjoying the best of integration, other zones, went for abandoned arms and did everything to end the “Igbo” administration of Jonathan.
I assume Nigerian leaders can’t be a simpleton in their assessment of the gangrenous state of the Biafran open wound, to believe mere words on the marble or wood, would assuage and send the current agitation into the cooler, for another generation to exhume.
For reasons best known to Buhari, he made no pretension spelling it out to Biafrans that Jonathan’s defeat was a conquest of their spirit. Statesmen will give a little to get higher returns from a people still hurting. Peace has no price ceiling. Team Buhari is learning now, the hard way.
Countless Nigerians feel Biafra is idiotic. Some of Nnamadi Kanu’s conducts and utterances are likely to prove this conclusion either prophetic or factual. The style of the main agitators, particularly youngsters with plenty brawn and little brainy content, could provoke worse commentaries and adjectives. But is disdain the effective remedy to idiocy?
The Buhari bug is catching like wildfire on the social media. Whenever Biafra, Kanu or Ndigbo are mentioned in public or media space, the rest of us go wild, throwing better-imagined acidic comments everywhere. How do you win peace and brotherhood this way? Beyond leaders who must appear as unifiers at least in public arena, it can be safely concluded that the rest of Nigeria is ready to let Biafra be. Such red flag will only make everywhere more crimson.
The options are becoming clearer by the day. If the present strained mindset is sustained, not even the much-mouthed restructuring would assuage both sides, except maybe in an extreme and unlikely case of a return to regional leadership. If then, it will be Ndigbo’s choice to have a Jew as the new leader. Biafra’s sore has been allowed to so fester that not even an Igbo presidency would heal. The best such would bring is the Jonathan scenario. The day the plum job ends, fresh agitation begins.
Without doubt, the current agitation thickly smells blackmail, helped by official indiscretion. Why handle a blackmailer in a way to get him public sympathy? That is the sense that has eluded this administration. This cancer is curable if the heart is right. If you sense blackmail, stop making it look as if the blackmailer is asking for the impossible. Throw a bone here and there and you will catch the blackmailer at his game. I doubt if a single intelligence gathering has been done on the intellectualism and feasibility of the agitation, except to sniff information on how to mow defenceless agitators down, which is pure military criminality.
Who even says a referendum in the “Biafran states” would be a run-away success if the whole land hadn’t received a plague-infestation treatment? But hope hasn’t completely gone to the dogs. Acting President Yemi Osinbajo is gradually showing a good heart and leadership. If he could get Wike and Amaechi to walk together with him, he could weave a masterstroke of a meeting with Kanu. Did you say ah? Buhari has made Kanu “big” already. A meeting with Osinbajo won’t make him bigger. Trying to further cow him, will make a legend of a vacuum-filler. Obasanjo did it with Gani Adams. A jingoist is today a front-runner for Yoruba’s highest traditional title of Aare Ona Kakanfo, beating his former persecutor OBJ, in probability scale.
and then