There are those
who couldn’t bear the thought of President Muhammadu Buhari recovering
from his illness, returning from his medical leave in the UK and
resuming duty as President. A brief journey into cyberspace would prove
this, with their posts on some social media platforms affirming it with
or without giving reasons for their ill-will. One
of the reasons – for those who bother to give any – is the position the
President had taken when the late President Umaru Yar’Adua was in a
similar situation to his, having travelled abroad for medical reasons, a
journey from which, unfortunately, he did not return alive. They
remind us that President Buhari, then a serial contestant for
Yar’Adua’s position, the Presidency, had insisted that the best thing
was for the latter to be impeached, having become incapable of
discharging his duties as President due to illness.
Well, I think that was harsh of Buhari,
whom experience would have made wiser with the lesson that anyone could
become incapacitated by sickness. And that baring the grace of
Providence and the dedication of the best doctors giving him the best
medical attention in the UK, his story might have ended like that of the
“rival” for whose impeachment he had called in a manner reminiscent of
hitting a man when he is down. Then, it would seem that, besides spite,
those who give this reason are driven by a lust for vengeance, despite
their hint that they understand that Buhari’s reaction to Yar’Adua’s
incapacitation due to ill-health was inhumane and therefore wrong.
But, what I don’t understand is that they
seem unaware that it is a more grievous wrong to repeat a wrong
deliberately. That, to choose to commit the same sin against Buhari that
he had committed against Yar’Adua, is a worse moral violation than the
original sin. And I would like to be contradicted on this by any of them
who, being incapacitated by sickness as a public servant, would prefer
people wishing for them to vacate their office or be ejected from it, or
for their death, rather than their recovery, whatever their past or
current sins or shortcomings. Any of them who would rather that the
admonition to do to others as we would have them do to us – found in the
scriptures of the ten major religions, including Christianity and Islam
– applies to them as a death wish in a time of illness may indeed
contradict me.
The bitter and divisive politics
prevalent in our country, on the crest of which Buhari rode to power and
apparently stoked with some of his unfortunate remarks – recall the one
about his being voted by 95 percent and 5 per cent of sections of the
electorate and his hint of his wish to reward them accordingly – which
portray him as an ethnic champion rather than a statesman, is a
plausible reason for such strong antipathy towards him.
But it is a reason that falls short of
being a justification. Rather, like the reason of what Buhari said
about Yar’ Adua, it would only create a vicious cycle for the
perpetuation of hate-driven calls for regime change that may be
injurious to our country if adopted as a justification for such calls.
And, unless we terminate the insidious emergence of this vicious cycle
in the present times, we may be creating a situation where political
adversaries of our leaders would constantly seek to profit from such
calls for the precipitate termination of their tenures when they fall
sick, worsening the resultant tension as we now have in our country,
even as it is hard to determine which leader would fall sick and be
incapacitated as a result in the future.
But, more important than the foregoing
are the lessons Buhari may bring back with his return and if he would
put them to use, as one would expect of him, in improving himself and
our country as a leader. Would he, for instance, act with the sobriety
expected of a survivor of what appears to be a near-death experience to
unite our country and govern it with a sense of equity rather than
instigate divisiveness and treat it – as some of his detractors allege,
and not entirely without justification – as a conquered fiefdom for his
ethnic group, exhibiting triumphalist attitudes?
Would his long sojourn abroad for medical
care, as the President of “the giant of Africa”, strike him as a
compromise of his and our country’s dignity, and a mockery of
rationality, especially considering the billions of naira in the 2017
Budget for the Aso Rock clinic to which he should have unfettered
access? Would the fact that other self-respecting leaders (like him) of
other self-respecting nations (like ours) would consider such a journey a
humiliation inspire him to strive to improve our health sector in order
to prevent a repeat of such journeys, if only to save some of us the
anguish of imagining our President “like a patient etherized upon a
table”, to adopt an image from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”, and left at the mercy of foreign scalpels, especially those
of our colonial masters from whom we are supposed to have gained our
independence more than 56 years ago?
Would he return, having won a long and
difficult fight to keep his own life, which apparently underscores his
appreciation of the value of life, show more dedication to securing the
lives of all Nigerians in fulfillment of his constitutional mandate, not
only by seeking to end the menace of Boko Haram in the Northeast but
also that of the alleged Fulani herdsmen known to have spread murder and
carnage in the Middle Belt and the southern parts of our country? Would
he, in addition to genuinely seeking to end the menace of the herdsmen,
ensure that the perpetrators are identified and brought to book,
bearing in mind that leaving such killers at large is tantamount to
spreading terror?
Would he, in all, dedicate himself to
bringing real development to our country in an evenhanded manner that
reverses the impression of his provincialism that threatens to blight
his legacy?
Perhaps, Buhari’s long medical sojourn
abroad would vindicate Shakespeare saying in Hamlet that “there is
nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” if he has returned
with a genuine commitment to provide good leadership for all Nigerians,
regardless of their ethnicity, religion and the percentage of votes he
received from their states or ethnic groups.
No comments:
Post a Comment