On the scale, how has Buhari performed?
On present evidence, there is no better way to capture the stewardship of
Buhari as Nigerian President than a betrayal of all who have bent over
backwards to give him benefit of the doubt.
Let us provide some corroboration in the
collective wisdom of two respected Nigerian newspaper publications-one of which expressly
endorsed the Buhari candidacy.
One year into his incumbency the Punch newspaper adjudged: ‘Buhari’s
sectionalism is not only unprecedented, it could not have come at a worse time.
The reality today is that Nigerians are deeply divided. Seventeen years of
dashed hopes of progress under a democratic dispensation have reopened the deep
fissures in the polity and polarised the populace into mutually suspicious
camps.
Sectarianism and ethnicity have been rearing their poisonous heads.
It is in this combustible mix that Buhari stubbornly presses ahead with
appointments that weigh heavily in favour of his northern regional base. He
struck again when he removed Ibe Kachikwu as head of the Nigerian National
Petroleum Corporation to put a Northerner. Named another, Hadiza Bala-Usman, as
managing director of the Nigerian Ports Authority along with three executive
directors, two of whom are also Northerners. Before then, he had ring-fenced
himself with appointees from his northern constituency at the Presidency,
thereby deepening the long-held fears of many Southerners that he has not
overcome his well-known insularity’.
‘In spite of public opinion, he replaced the immediate past
Inspector-General of Police, a Southerner, with a Northerner, an assistant
inspector-general whose ascension induced the retirement, in one fell swoop, of
21 DIGs and AIGs who were senior to him. This is beyond absurdity.
It can be declared emphatically that this
is corruption. It is wrong to view stealing of government funds as the only
form of corruption. A former member of the House of Representatives, Junaid
Muhammed, alleges that not only is Buhari sectional in his appointments,
several appointees are actually his relatives. Buhari should be told that
sectionalism and nepotism are also acts of corruption’.
Six months later the Guardian lamented
‘The Southern Kaduna killings are only a chip of the entire narrative of a
sinister threat to the lives of many Nigerians. As a matter of fact, the entire
Middle Belt, Southern Kaduna and parts of Southern Nigeria have been at the
receiving end of chilling killings by herdsmen which many government spokesmen
often claimed are aliens.
These deliberately systematic killings demand the awakening of
Nigerians across the country with a view to saving the nation from a seemingly
sinister plot. The current killings and dynamics have a parallel in the Darfur
crisis in Sudan where government’s complicity with migrant Arabs displaced
indigenous people and consequently led to an armed rebellion for
self-determination by such groups as the Sudan Liberation Army/ Movement
(SLA/M) and the Justice and Equity Movement (JEM). The impunity with which the
so-called herdsmen wield automatic weapons and the magnitude of their violent
activities without much intervention from any arm of the nation’s security
forces legitimately opens the state and federal governments up to accusations
of official complicity’.
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