The attention of the Presidency has been
drawn to unfortunate statements in the
media made by former Head of State and
presidential candidate of the Congress for
Progressive Change (CPC), Major Gen.
Muhammadu Buhari (rtd) in which he
allegedly predicted bloodshed in 2015 and
labelled the Federal Government led by
President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, as
"the biggest Boko Haram".
But perhaps the most unfortunate part of
the statement was the portion in which
Buhari said that, " Since the leaders now
don’t listen to anybody but do whatever
they wish, there is nothing the north can
do."
We find it very sad that an elder
statesman who once presided over the
entirety of Nigeria can reduce himself to a
regional leader who speaks for only a part
of Nigeria. We now understand what his
protégé and former Minister of the Federal
Capital Territory (FCT), Malam Nasir El’Rufai,
meant when he wrote in a public letter in
October of 2010, telling Nigerians that
Buhari remains "perpetually unelectable"
and that Buhari's "insensitivity to Nigeria’s
diversity and his parochial focus are already
well-known." Who can know Buhari better
than his own political associate?
Come to think of it, as the CPC presidential
candidate in the 2011 election, how many
states in the Federation did he visit to
campaign for votes? Buhari never bothered
to campaign in the southern part of the
country and consistently played up the
North-South divide to the chagrin of
patriotic and well-meaning Nigerians. As the
results revealed, Nigerians will never vote for
anyone who wants to divide the country. Is
Buhari going to continue to be a sectional
leader?
The Federal Government led by President
Jonathan is not Boko Haram. Boko Haram
means Western Education is sin. That being
the case, one wonders how a government
that devoted the largest sectoral allocation
in the 2012 budget to education could be
said to be Boko Haram. Between 1983,
when Buhari forcefully seized power from
the democratically elected administration of
President Shehu Usman Shagari, and 2012,
no other administration has committed the
same quantum of resources as the Jonathan
administration to education in the part of
Nigeria that has witnessed the most Boko
Haram-related insecurity.
Only on April 10, 2012, President Jonathan
commissioned the first of 400 Federal
Government Model Almajiri Schools,
equipped with modern facilities such as a
Language Laboratory, Qur'an Recitation Hall,
classrooms and dormitories as well as a
clinic, vocational workshop, dining hall and
quarters for the Mallams. As Nigerians read
this, more of such schools have been
completed.
We now challenge Major General Buhari
(rtd) to tell Nigerians what he has done,
whether in his capacity as the head of a
military junta or in his private capacity, to
bring education to vulnerable children. If
he cannot live up to this challenge,
perhaps he has to reassess who really is
Boko Haram.
Buhari claims that the Federal Government
does not listen. Such an accusation ought
not to emanate from a man overthrown by
his own hand- picked colleagues in the
military for refusing to listen to advice and
behaving as if he had a monopoly of
knowledge.
It is on record that the Federal Government
led by President Jonathan is a listening
administration hence its decision to pursue
all means of resolving the Boko Haram
insurgency including through dialogue.
When Buhari says that "if what happens in
2011 should again happen in 2015, by the
grace of God, ‘the dog and the baboon
would all be soaked in blood", we hereby
state that it is Buhari himself who does not
listen. He has obviously refused to listen to
the Nigerian People, the European Union,
the Commonwealth Monitoring Group, the
African Union and a multitude of
independent electoral monitors who
testified that the 2011 elections were free
and fair and "the best elections since Nigeria
returned to civil rule."
Indeed, such a reaction from Buhari is not
totally unexpected since he has become a
serial election loser who has never taken his
past election defeats graciously even when
such elections were generally acknowledged
to be free and fair.
Still on the issue of Boko Haram, we
wonder what locus a man whose party's
Secretary General, Buba Galadima, told
the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
in December, 2010, that the Federal
Government is underestimating the
support base of Boko Haram, has to
accuse a government that has been
threatened on camera by the leaders of
Boko Haram of itself being Boko Haram?
Major General Buhari (rtd) also boasts of his
knowledge of the Petroleum Industry
because of his time as Federal Commissioner
for Petroleum. We wonder why he did not
boast of the infamous scandal that occurred
in that ministry where under his watch
billions of Naira (in the 1970s) were
reported stolen, a matter which led to the
setting up of the Justice Ayo Irikefe panel.
Finally, we wish to make it known to Buhari
that given his reference to "dogs and
baboons", perhaps his best course of action
would be to travel to the zoo of his
imagination because President Goodluck
Jonathan was elected by human beings to
preside over human beings and it is human
beings who will determine what happens in
Nigeria at any material time not "dogs and
baboons".
REUBEN ABATI
Special Adviser (Media & Publicity) to the
President
May 15, 2012.
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