AS Nigeria grows dizzy with pain as one giant killing field, almost every voice of note across the country has been calling on President Muhammadu Buhari to arrest the slide. But it is a hopeless call. A look at the world of literature in dissecting Nigeria’s current misery would no doubt throw up Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a gripping seafaring novel where the character Ahab, captain of the Pequod, wants to find and kill the white whale that had grievously injured him during a previous voyage. He seeks revenge instead of commerce, putting the lives of his crew in constant peril: his only concern is the whale. Even when he realizes that his 40-year seafaring has been a waste, he cannot retreat. Here is his moment of enlightenment: “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me?” In spite of this flash of brilliance towards the end of the novel, Ahab remains a flat character. Nothing but the whale matters to the man who says “ I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” But when he finally encounters the whale, the hemp line of his harpoon lodges around his neck, plunging him tragically into the depths of the sea.
Nigeria’s current leader is a low-budget Captain Ahab, and the villain that caused Nigeria’s present crisis is IBB, the man who aborted his previous voyage on the sea of power. In our tale the whale is power lust, and it is the demon with which Buhari grapples. Buhari is not a fox like his long-time boss OBJ, who ate pounded yam at a man’s house and danced with his wife, only to remove him as party chairman hours later. Buhari lacks guile: he is transparently mean, focused on his white whale. He does not pretend to like his enemies: he wants to take them down. He sought power four times just because of the “injustice” in taking it away from him in the first place, not because he wanted to make Nigeria great. His megalomania is sea-vast.
Those who mouth their obsession with power don’t do any good with it: the fire in them goes out as soon as they have it. Then, they see foes to take down instead of policies to make and problems to solve. Buhari, the myth that uninformed Nigerians latched unto for redemption in 2015, ended with the May 29, 2015 inauguration ballad. He had avenged the injury of 1985 and everything beyond that point was just “cruise.” If the professional comedian in Ukraine rules like a General and the General in Nigeria rules like a professional comedian, it is because the former did not seek power because of power lust, and has no white whale to hunt down.
Pray, what project did Buhari promise? He only spoke for a few seconds on the campaign trail, and about power and very little else. The campaign manifesto was written by the criminals behind his back whose real aim was to use that favour as a means of fulfilling their own power lust. In his inner mind, Buhari could not contemplate being removed from power, and so he sought it back at all costs, including worshipping at the shrine of money magicians. The essence of politics, said Arthur Nzeribe, is the pursuit of power. TELL magazine in an edition whose title I cannot recall charged Nzeribe with “lucidly articulating his satanic point of view”, a reference to his vow to outspend the late MKO Abiola at the SDP presidential primaries, but he spoke Buhari’s mind on that point about power. If you see a man who openly tells you that his ambition is to grab power, take him at his word and do not play the fool expecting grand projects.
If anything, Buhari’s legacy of blood, tears and economic frustration illustrates my hypothesis very clearly. Even before returning to power, he had told the nation that an attack on Boko Haram was an attack on the North, and was it any wonder then that while reacting to the genocide perpetrated by Fulani herders on New Year Day in Benue State in 2018, he implored the grieving people to “accommodate their countrymen,” that is, their killers? For seven years now, Buhari has been leading Nigeria down the drain, his brutal crackdown on the legislature and the judiciary an upshot of his power lust: when he looks at these arms what he sees is a challenge to his authority, not institutions. Do not marvel at the fact that he recently donated the princely sum of $1 million to the Taliban, a terror regime. Nigeria’s air, sea and land have, especially in recent months, been criminally unsafe, with innocent blood dripping like water. Attacks on military formations are routine. And if corruption was what crippled the counter-terrorism fight pre-2015, what has crippled it ever since?
Two years ago, Generals fearing death avoided road travel, but the rails now drip blood. The bandits who invade military institutions at will have made rail travel a voyage for the brave. ESN murderers are fast making the South-East a jungle. The land has not known peace since Buhari came back on the scene carrying a bag of fake promises packaged by criminals. The Nigerian flag is drenched in blood. Depersonalized cruelty and brutality reign supreme: the youth have become desensitized to bloodshed by state anomie. Nigeria has lost more souls in peace time than some countries did in war. Reports say that some 12,000 people were killed by Boko Haram, herders and bandits or highway kidnappers from 2015 to 2020. Between 2017 and May 2, 2020, Fulani herdsmen conducted 654 attacks, killed 2,539 persons and kidnapped 253 people in Nigeria, as reported by ThisDay newspaper. In November 2018, Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom, lamented that about 137,000 residents and over 100 security personnel had been killed by bandits in the state.
My thesis: those who spend a lifetime searching for power become execrably impotent and de-juiced when they get it. Because of the sheer venom of their vaulting ambition, they encounter mental exhaustion at the sight of glory and become rooted to a spot intellectually, unable to go any further in terms of humanitarian engagements. This is the reason Buhari has expended more energy going after perceived opponents than going after the country’s problems. It’s all about his mental script. Hitler sought power all his life and got it, but look what he did with it. Men without mental moisture can only plunge this land into the sea.
and then