Buhari, most insensitive in managing Nigeria’s diversity – Kukah

 

BY KAZIE UKO

Catholic Bishop of Sokoto State Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, may not have an AK-47 rifle or much deadlier arsenal, but when he picked up the microphone on Monday in Kaduna, at the funeral of a young seminarian, he chose his target right and took a direct shot.

“This President has displayed the greatest degree of insensitivity in managing our country’s rich diversity,” he fired at President Muhammadu Buhari.

Bishop Kukah literally laid the corpse of 18-year-old Seminarian Michael Nnadi, abducted and murdered in cold blood by insane terrorists described as bandits, at President Buhari’s feet.

The Catholic Bishop chose his words properly, identifying the President by his military title, “Major General”.

President Buhari had won his first election in 2015, on the strength of his credential as an army general, even though retired. He had promised to lead from the front if elected, during the campaigns.

Almost five years in the saddle as the president, Bishop Kukah does not believe that Buhari remembers his promise, made on the global stage, in that historic speech at Chatham House in London, that “the world will have no reason to worry about Nigeria.”

The diminutive clergyman floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee when he declared to his thousands of grieving audience, saying: “Nigeria is at a point where we must call for a verdict. Nigeria needs to pause for a moment and think. No one more than the President of Nigeria, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, who was voted for in 2015 on the grounds of his own promises to rout Boko Haram and place the country on an even keel.

“In an address at the prestigious Policy Think Tank, Chatham House in London, just before the elections, Major General Buhari told his audience: ‘I as a retired General and a former Head of State have always known about our soldiers. They are capable and they are well trained, patriotic, brave and always ready to do their duty. If am elected President, the world will have no reason to worry about Nigeria. Nigeria will return to its stabilizing role in West Africa. We will pay sufficient attention to the welfare of our soldiers in and out of service. We will develop adequate and modern arms and ammunition. We will improve intelligence gathering and border patrols to choke Boko Haram’s financial and equipment channels. We will be tough on terrorism and tough on its root causes by initiating a comprehensive economic development and promoting infrastructural development…we will always act on time and not allow problems to irresponsibly fester. And I, Muhammadu Buhari, will always lead from the front’.”

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Bishop Kukah’s verdict of President Buhari and his regime is damning. For him, the President has indeed led from the front as promised, but not towards one nation bound in freedom, peace and unity.

He said: “There is no need to make any further comments on this claim. No one in that hall (Chatham House) or anywhere in Nigeria doubted the President who ran his campaign on a tank supposedly full of the fuel of integrity and moral probity. No one could have imagined that in winning the Presidency, General Buhari would bring nepotism and clannishness into the military and the ancillary Security Agencies, that his government would be marked by supremacist and divisive policies that would push our country to the brink.

“This President has displayed the greatest degree of insensitivity in managing our country’s rich diversity. He has subordinated the larger interests of the country to the hegemonic interests of his co-religionists and clansmen and women. The impression created now is that, to hold a key and strategic position in Nigeria today, it is more important to be a northern Muslim than a Nigerian.”

Kukah described Nigeria under Buhari as a rudderless ship where politicians and political office holders are willing to die to keep their positions but cannot do the same for the nation that gave them such offices.

“Our nation is like a ship stranded on the high seas, rudderless and with broken navigational aids. Today, our years of hypocrisy, duplicity, fabricated integrity, false piety, empty morality, fraud and Pharisaism have caught up with us. Nigeria is on the crossroads and its future hangs precariously in a balance. This is a wakeup call for us.

“Nigeria is at a point where we must call for a verdict. There must be something that a man, nay, a nation should be ready to die for. Sadly, or even tragically, today, Nigeria, does not possess that set of goals or values for which any sane citizen is prepared to die for her. Perhaps, I should correct myself and say that the average office holder is ready to die to protect his office but not for the nation that has given him or her that office. The Yorubas say that if it takes you 25 years to practice madness, how much time would you have to put into real life? We have practiced madness for too long,” he said.

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Bishop Kukah raised the bar even higher declaring that not even President Buhari’s religious and tribal constituencies were fairing better in the present circumstance, as the gods appear to have rejected him and his government.

He said: “Today, in Nigeria, the noble religion of Islam has convulsed. It has become associated with some of worst fears among our people. Muslim scholars, traditional rulers and intellectuals have continued to cry out helplessly, asking for their religion and region to be freed from this chokehold. This is because, in all of this, neither Islam nor the north can identify any real benefits from these years that have been consumed by the locusts that this government has unleashed on our country. The Fulani, his innocent kinsmen, have become the subject of opprobrium, ridicule, defamation, calumny and obloquy. His north has become one large grave yard, a valley of dry bones, the nastiest and the most brutish part of our dear country.

“Why have the gods rejected this offering? Despite running the most nepotistic and narcissistic government in known history, there are no answers to the millions of young children on the streets in northern Nigeria, the north still has the worst indices of poverty, insecurity, stunting, squalor and destitution. His Eminence, the Sultan of Sokoto, and the Emir of Kano are the two most powerful traditional and moral leaders in Islam today. None of them is happy and they have said so loud and clear. The Sultan recently lamented the tragic consequences of power being in the wrong hands. Every day, Muslim clerics are posting tales of lamentation about their fate. Now, the Northern Elders, who in 2015 believed that General Buhari had come to redeem the north have now turned against the President.”