Right from the onset,the master sculptor;the supreme creative divinity seemed intent in conveying through him,the perfect model of the paradox idea.
To be sure,the dangling-gangling frame; and tummy, so
precariously flat-clasped all ordinarily converged towards the art form of one
incapable of hurting a fly.However,in that description lurks a confounding character
of composite complexity; a strongly willed persona,with unflinching obduracy in whatever he believed in,and diametrically untameable in his avowed resolve.
Indeed, his pathological streak of ruthlessness could not have been more aptly unraveled than in the incident in the eighties,when some trigger-happy Chadian gendarmes killed hapless innocent Nigerians for no just cause, other than the primitive savagery to satiate their blood-thirsty impulse.
On the occasion in question, Buhari left the generality of Nigerians in utter stupefaction as he sprang forth to action without any enabling authorization from superior quarters, and almost embarked on over-running the Chadian territorial space before he was called back.
Indeed was it bandied, and on reliable authority too, that in the wake of the opportunity which emerged with the lacuna of the position of the Chief of Staff Supreme Headquarters, which needed to be filled, following the demise of the then military ruler, the Late General Murtala Mohammed,he Buhari, otherwise loomed larger on aggregate point of merit,but unfortunately lost out on account of this same famed stigma-cross of unbendability.
If the capacity for intrigues,is held to be incidental to the index of sheer frame especially the belly-size known to harbor those variants of human emotions, then the protagonists of this theory may soon languish in the disappointment that within the context of this precariously clasped-tummied Daura-born General this theory looses every sauce of credibility.
Once upon a time,the ex-soldier, then the General Officer Commanding the Third Mechanised Division in Jos, had sounded what benignly portended a warning alarm to those gifted with the doodlebug to sniff beyond the lines, when he charged that the army should start reading the constitution in preparation for an unfolding role as may behove on them in future.
Indeed must it be stressed that on this score,the then UPN spokesman, Ebenezar Babatope with a fossorial rig of esoteric discernment seemed ahead of us all, on his vantage point of observatory, when he sounded in an unfolding turn of prophetic accuracy, that Buhari was a man to watch, adding that if tomorrow, Nigerians are woken up once again by the familiar slogan of “good morning fellow Nigerians” we would have known that the signal for the dramatic power-swap had long been given.
Not quite long after,an
army officer, attached to
the Third Mechanised
Division of which Buhari was the GOC,had allegedly alerted the then civilian governor of Plateau State, Chief Solomon Lar,of a military coup surreptitiously looming in the brew amidst an underground conventicle of some elements within the army, strictly bound by a conspiratorial code of omerta.
Lar, taking a logical
cue,did not hesitate to relay to the then President Shehu Shagari,the potentially explosive “dynamite” incubating in the conspiratorial foundry of the coup plotters.
Shagari in a pro-active move,quickly allegedly took up the lanky General on the matter; which in predictable matter of course, he nailed on the canvas of vehement denial.However the matter did not stop there,as he reportedly made back to Lar,to whom he gave a good piece of his mind.
An embarrassed Lar, severely exasperated at this point, at Shagari’s mortal naivety, quickly gathered himself together to muster some diplomatic tinkering with which he assuaged the feelings of the aggrieved General or so he thought.
Thus was it, that on that fateful day of December 31 983,the journey had already gone beyond the rubicon as Nigerians were again jolted to another resonating martial awakening that unfurled the curtain for the advent of a supremacist tough-guy duo of “one” Major-General Muhammed Buhari and his Second-in-Command, Tunde Idiagbon.
Then began a regime, remarkably conquistadorial and jacobinical in its incredibly scary coloration – cutting as it did a rejuvenative similitude of the Robesperrian “Reign of Terror” in the Revolutionary France, as politicians of all hues were hurled on indiscriminately blanket fiat into the gulag.
Lar indeed was to suffer for his petulant effrontery through a jail-term of 25 years magisterially foisted for no ostensible charge proven against him, even inspite of the intimate relationship hitherto existing between him and the General known to affectionately refer to him then as “Uncle”.
Indeed what was more and exasperatingly bizarre as well,was that twenty-four hours preceding the pronouncement of judgement,upon Lar, General Hananiya was reported to have declared through the BBC the exact fate which precisely turned out to befall Lar.
Babatope himself, for daring to sensitise the generality to the adroit build-up which eventually was to culminate in that momentous unfolding of martial inter-regnum was mortally dragooned with similar grievous reprisal meted out against Lar. To be sure, unfortunate lots in the ilk of Busari Adelakun of Oyo State,died in that Buhari-imposed gaol, while not a few broke down in debilitating spell of ill-health, from which they never recovered.
Indeed the Press, before they knew it were already in for it.The evocative touch-stone in this regard,was the Irikefe Panel in 1980, when the Press gave a vigorous publicity mileage to the allegation that Buhari as Federal Minister of Petroleum had embezzled to the tune of 2.8 million Dollars of oil money.
This,Buhari never allowed lost in his memory-fore of vendetta.To be sure,the Daura-born General was feign far from making pretence of this,in his emphatic declaration of his resolve to tamper with the otherwise sacrosanct two-worded phrase:”Press Freedom” of which Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor,both of the Guardian Newspapers were to turn out as heroic casualties.
Next on the line,was the Decree 2 which empowered the state under the dovish-countenanced gangling General, to hound into the gulag,with unquestionable fiat, any malfeasant soul as might tickle his fancy.And as if the bouquet was not full enough running and running over – then came a most grisly specie, that saw the execution of three young men Benard Ogedegbe, Bartholomew Owoh and Akanni Balogun,by firing squad, thus dispatching them to the world beyond,for mercantile dealership in hard drugs.To worsen it,in a dramatic twist that elicited intensely expressed disapprobation, was the fact that such draconian reprisal demanding the ultimate prize with irreplaceable dear life,was unfortunately back-dated for a retroactive effect. What a horror!
Even the legendary Afro-beat King, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was not immune from the dragnet of the Buhari fang. The illegal foreign currency deal preferred against him, which ultimately fetched him the wrath of the law summarized it all.
It was true that these epic despotism was to incur popular opprobrium, particularly from the respectable Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka,who described it as a deaf government; however,this as it turned out,was not enough to turn the table of goodwill,and credibility rating;at least in the absolute sense of it,against the junta.
This was because for one thing, the popularly acclaimed, though botched attempt to crate Umaru Dikko, the fore-most court jester at the corridor of power during the Shagari regime;from his hiding shell in London and to boot, the luciferous embodiment of the disaster that was the other name of the accursed Shagari-regime, was a move, which elicited popular acclamation from the generality of the people,irrespective of the diplomatic row it engendered in its wake, especially between Nigeria and Britain.
To be sure,the saga as it were at the moment in question,was such which seemed to a considerable extent,to conjure for the regime,an imagery of a government that loomed beyond parochial tribal bent,which to boot, was least respectful of the sacred cow syndrome.
Indeed, even the erudite lawyer,the irrepressible Gani Fawehinmi particularly noted for his rabidly implacable stance against the instituted order of martial dispensation in governance, uninhibitedly harbored a considerable measure of soft spot for the regime.
Indeed in this connection, he could not be said to be alone because not a few Nigerians believed that the accumulated atrocities of civilian politicians which attained a peak especially under the notorious Shagari regime,were such that actually demanded no less than an iron hand,deservingly necessary to tame their excesses.
However, the regime was to take an abysmal plunge into infamy, when the proverbial Carmel bordering on an allegation of 52 suit cases of foreign currencies belonging to an emir in the Hausa/Fulani North, was allowed to pass through the needle-eye of the tightly-knit security apparatchik at the Ikeja airport, without any action taken, allegedly in a deliberately calculated move at a cover-up;in an unseemly development that began to provoke intensely deep suspicions of the tribal bend of the then incumbent military hegemony.
Indeed, this may probably not have come as a surprise, because even the sensational,but popularly applauded attempt at Dikko’s crating hitherto adjudged as actuated by the sanitizing ethics of probity and accountability might seem to have been stripped bare in its true naked anatomy.
The fore-going may seem to earn a convincing plea in the theory coming later to the effect that it was an act borne out of a vengeful bilious angst,arising from a wrong perceivably wrought against him by Dikko.
The clue to this may perhaps be seen through Shehu Shagari,who in his book “Beckoned to Serve” did reveal that Buhari coming on the heels of his arrival from a course abroad,was posted to the Lagos Garrison as GOC, however Dikko was to put pressure to bear on the military authorities to post Buhari elsewhere,on the ground that coup-mongering people like him, should not be spared an inch within the corridor of power.This,Buhari never forgot as he awaited the appropriate time to extract his pound of flesh.
Another fatal undoing was the fact that the junta had everything but provision for a return to civil democratic polity in its dictionary of affairs .
The fore-going in particular, coupled with the tyrannical pigmentation for which the regime was; renowned and its perceived unfairness as particularly indicated in its inexplicable lack of response to the 52 suit case saga – which was exactly the alleged malfeasance that saw Fela gaoled in penal imurement – coupled with the tragic despatch of the three young men to an untimely world beyond,by public execution on charges of peddling with hard drugs;worsened all the more by its retroactive effect – were some of the short-comings cashed upon by the gap-toothed General Ibrahim Babangida to Marshall his way to the center-stage of power via a coup in which the Buhari-Idiagbon duo were ousted on Sallah day in August 1985,while his number two man,Idiagbon was away on pilgrimage to Mecca.
For the Daura-born General,the ouster impacted like one terrible bombshell devastatingly too many as he recoiled into his cocoon and for a long span of time,turned a quintessential recluse, exclusively keeping to himself;shunning any meddlesomeness into state affairs.
The June 12 saga – a culmination of the amoebic equivocation of the gap-toothed General was to provide a pretext which saw Buhari roused from his long spell of slumber.Indeed, right from that point in time, he was unsparing in every opportunity he had, to ruthlessly lampoon and lambast the Niger-born Maradona.
Buhari was again to swing into public reckoning when with the inception of Abacha on the saddle of power, he appointed him chairman Petroleum Trust Fund. (PTF) however it was believed even on this note,that he brought the benefit of his office to bear in literally flooding the entire North with the benevolent presence of PTF goodies at the expense of the south.
Aside from this,Haroun Adamu, the man appointed to supervise the winding up of the PTF was reported to have discovered certain irregularities in the affairs of the Task Force,which was allegedly brought to Obasanjo’s notice.The later in turn was reported to have asked some questions.It was believed that it was for this point that Buhari would throw every reason to the wind with such unabashed display of woolly sentimentality as to rate the Abacha regime higher on the performance gauge over and above that of Obasanjo.
Of course as popularly well known, the sight should also not be lost to the effect that all this while,the ex military ruler,had discarded his hermetic seal – unilaterally self-imposed – from politics and public activism of any sort,as to assume the arrow-headship and inspirational driving force of the Arewa Consultative Forum the acclaimed organ of the Hausa-Fulani micro-nationalism
It was in this connection that he jolted the entire nation into a state of acute shock when he issued a clarion call on muslims to ensure as a cardinal article of faith, that come 2003,they must only vote for a muslim and emphatically none else but muslim.
This aside,his continued agitation for the entrenchment of the sharia legal code in every parts of Nigeria had never ceased to occur as a disconcerting point of exasperation to discerning Nigerians who had never ceased to wonder what offence Sharia might have wrought on him when as the number one man in the country he had the power to sanction by military fiat, his pet scheme of Sharia ubiquity,but refused to exercise that power.
Another occasion that provided yet a veritable test case, was the alleged killing of 68 Hausa-Fulani herdsmen by native farmers at Shaki, Oke-Ogun in Oyo State in agitation against the depredatory despoliation of their farm-crops by their ravaging herds of Cows.
On a particularly momentous occasion,the entire nation woke up to the acute pang of embarrassment this incident was to stir, as a supposed statesman of Buhari’s stature,sprung forth in an unguarded spur of impulse to lead some Arewa delegations to Oyo State,threw caution to the wind as he pointedly accused the Oyo State governor, Lam Adesina,whose people according to him, had continued to kill his own people for no just cause.
At the end of the episode,it became apparent that the actual situation on ground was far from the grave picture grievously indented in the Arewa’s imagination.It wasn’t unlikely that Buhari may have gone home on the occasion in question,bowed in the abysmal depth of self-guilt into which the incident might have plunged him.
However from the balance-sheet of rewards, Buhari’s rabid Pan-Arewaism seemed to have worked to pragmatic effect in terms of the immensely added gravitas to his stature and its leveraging political advantage that dramatically shot him to the avian height of the political champion of the North,the pedestal on which he rode to earn the reckoning and subsequent backing from formidable big wigs like Tinubu,under the unifying umbrella of the APC – in the hippodrome for presidential contestation that was eventually to see him coast to victory,for a mantle of leadership at the presidential apex of authority that would last out the maximum tenurial distance of two terms,co-terminus with an equivalent eight-year span.May His Soul Rest In Peace.
*KOLA JOHNSON IS A WRITER AND JOURNALIST.
