That news about Northern Elders’ indecision over Buhari’s candidacy

By BASHIR ADEFAKA

“Instead of seeing one traditional ruler or a community/political leader/elder or person in that Arewa Land as working for opposition against him, the enigmatic leader of pragmatic sort, Buhari, should just draw everybody nearer because, although his victory is non-stopping 2019 but, those leaders – in truth – have no alternative to him as presidential candidate in the coming elections, in the face of what has now become glaring that killings that Northern Fulani and Muslims have been tagged with bad names for were actually sponsored by desperate politicians whose major reason for doing so was for the hate they have for their own (Fulani) man in power to be removed at all cost. This Mr. President must see as must-do.”

My attitude to the recent report that Northern Elders are either indecisive or decisive on non-support for President Muhammadu Buhari candidacy is that, the President or any APC leader should not see any Northern leader or elder as hater of his party or presidential bid but as a person who has only ventilated at dire period of election to be listened to.

Recall I was first (if not the only) Nigerian journalist who had “predicted” this on my online column article published in The DEFENDER on January 27 this year and titled, “My fear for President Buhari as 2019 politicking thickens”. Referenced: http://www.thedefenderngr.com/fear-president-muhammadu-buhari-2019-thickens-bashir-adefaka/

In that article I pointed out to Mr. President as follows:

“Again, in the area of religion and ethnicity, President Muhammadu Buhari is being unfair to his Muslim and Hausa/Fulani people, which is understandable.  But, Mr. President cannot continue to please man and displease himself.  At 75, he should have nothing to fear other than to put his acts together and be higher in doing good based on justice, equity and fairness to enable him end well and meet his Lord, Allah with face beaming with joy.  The Hausa/Fulani and the Muslims of this country have persistently been pushed to the defensive by Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and their agents in government and other public institutions.  If the President now says because he does not want to be seen as supporting people of his own tribe and religion such that when even those people of his are being persecuted he refuses to open up and let the public know that he cannot be so blackmailed to unfairly damage the same people he will return to after government, alas! I fear for him, seriously too.

“After all the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), whose mischief he probably fears, can never be pleased with him no matter how much good he pushes towards Christianity at the expense of his own Islamic religion.  He needs to realise that majority of Christians in Nigeria know Muhammadu Buhari – right from his days as Military Head of State, Federal Commissioner for Petroleum and Natural Resources, Chairman, Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) and now democratically elected President – to be an exceptionally detribalized, highly non-religiously biased person.  It was he that told Muslims that since it is not in the Qur’an that Muslims should have holiday on Friday he would have no reason to grant the rising population of Muslims in Nigeria a work-free Friday.  The same Buhari he is that has Igbo man as his pilot and surrounds himself with people from other tribes and religion.  Majority of Nigerian Christians know him to be above board as far as all of those ones and integrity are concerned.  But Mr. President should please – for the sake of Allah, his good name, the today and tomorrow of good great people that work with him and who flaunt his good course from outside the government – stand up to whatever atrocity the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), in collaboration with some kind of politicians, is engaged in against Islam and the Hausa/Fulani of this country and deal a big blow to them.  It is then the entire populace including many more sincere Christians will know that the President is truly doing rule of law.

“I mean, what is he afraid of, that he so much plays a non-balancing policy that ends him up in virtually destroying the tenets of Islam whereby he cancelled “Amirul Hajj” at pilgrimage just because some kind of unscrupulous elements are saying government should remove hands from religion?  The day he declared that he would lead a country where Muslims and Christians would practice their religions without fear of attacks and in peace, all Muslims jumped up in joy.  That should please CAN but since it does not please them, Buhari should know that truth and justice have no eyes and so he should have just done his own thing in his own fair way and leave the judgment to the people to make, under the watch of Almighty Allah.  I can assure him that even up till today, Nigerian people who still love and are still ready to die for him as Muslims, Christians, Northerners and Southerners remain on the high side, although only Allah will decide who picks it again in the coming presidential contest. Then why afraid of taking steps to order the arrest of killers of over 1,000 Fulani killed across three states of Plateau, Taraba and Benue in the North?

“Why afraid of ordering the arrest of those elements in the Nigerian Law School who caused public embarrassment and infringement of rights of that University of Ilorin Law graduate, Firdaus Abasa, who are known by the countenance of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) to have been sponsored by them?

“What then is the President going to bank on, much as he is being asked to re-contest for 2019, if the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) he has tried to please at the expense of his own religious people have continued to incite public chaos against him and his government with huge and very terrible allegation of Islamisation and Northernisation, which The Nigerian Press are even helping them amplify? Yes, you are father of all Nigerians but you must not be seen as destroying your own people before you can prove your spirit of balancing, fairness, justice and equity.  It is sad!

“I mean, how does the President therefore convince the over 90 million Muslims and more millions Hausa/Fulani of Nigeria that he has protected them from the onslaught of CAN and its elements across the place with the continued oversight of persecutions and killings of their respective people, whether in the Northern states of Plateau, Taraba and Benue or South West of Nigeria?  Is there no way by which you think politicians of Benue have more questions to answer than the wrongful allegations and persecutions against your own people just because you think CAN would come up and do what?  Praise you?  No. CAN will praise you only on the day you renounce your faith in Islam and announce your conversion to Christianity and then you begin to spill the blood of Muslims in the country and by then automatically make Nigeria a Christian State.

“All of these make my fear for President Muhammadu Buhari as 2019 politicking thickens,” I stated all of these and more in my January 27, 2018 online column published by The DEFENDER and I believe the President remembers I did.

I made it clear that the danger was that the Northerners where the bulk of the votes of any Nigerian presidential office seeker resides are waiting till elections time in 2019 to express their grievances to the President, who, most of them even said, has never granted audience as tribesmen or religious group like he did to Southerners and Christian groups since he came to office in 2015.

One of the notable leaders of the North even said it and I heard him say “President Buhari has been accused of plotting to Northernise and Islamise Nigeria.  Yet, it never happened that he sat us down to say anything like this to us because I believe he can never do that.  But why is he not sitting us down to let us know his plans and programmes so that when mischievous allegations like these are being leveled against him we can defend him?” He was worried.

I then said in that article that the President understandably might be acting the way the Northerners complained about to prove to Southerners and Christians of the country that he is far from the tag of ethnic jingoism and religious bigotism made of him.  I however noted that, despite many ways to satisfy the Southerners and Christians, the many challenges that his government suffered since May 29, 2015 came from no other areas than from the very tribes and religious people he devoted all his attentions to at the expense people of his own tribes and religious communities where he indigenously belongs.  President Muhammadu, son of Adamu, Buhari, is first and foremost Nigerian but surely of Northern and Muslim Ummah extractions.  When his tribes and religious people complain he should also listens to them.

I then asked how he would do to save himself from the angers of his tribes and religion when the time of seeking re-election comes in event that he is unable to secure their assurances away from these grievances.  And, surely the prediction came to past.  Olusegun Obasanjo, his closest ally particularly since 2015 who became the worse enemy of his person and government, is from the South and a Christian.  Obasanjo went round Yoruba Land where he got the Afenifere to preach to Yoruba people that he had always made mistake of being stogy of the Fulani oligarchy but that he was now ready to liberate the Yoruba people from them.  That was what he did in Yoruba Land against Buhari and then moved to the South East and rubbed minds with people who were supporting separatism and terrorist Independent Peoples of Biafra and then moved to the South South and teamed up with elements who sponsored Niger Delta Avenges bombing the nation’s oil installations which plunged the country into total economic recession in furtherance to what the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) left it at the point of their exit.

That was when we began to know that there were some people in Nigeria who were Retired Christian Generals working together with Northern Christian Elders Forum (NCEF) at a time Nigeria was virtually collapsed into ethno-religious crisis with intent to create problem for the Buhari (Fulani)-led Administration while some of the politicians under the Obasanjo coalition making attempts sponsoring killings in their respective states and rushing to the National Assembly to claim they were Fulani herdsmen and thereby calling for the President to declare his own tribesmen as terrorist group for doing nothing just suffering the stigma that they come from the tribe of the man in power. 

Obasanjo led those things supported Lt. Gen. Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, who went to the Taraba State University’s maiden convocation to give a very jeopardizing accusation against the Nigerian Army that they were supporting Fulani herdsmen to kill Nigerians as if the Fulani people are not part of Nigeria.  It was from the same venue where he first donated N100 million that Danjuma called to arms struggle in his statement asking the Taraba and Benue states people to rise up and defend themselves.  But against whom?  Against the Army and Fulani people!  We are still waiting for the action that will be taken on the Army Report on that Danjuma’s action.

So, what Buhari should do now is to move beyond party line and the thought that he is certainly the most popular leader not only in Northern Nigeria but in the entire country and by extension now in the whole of Africa (which is indisputably correct) and reach out to the complaining Northern leaders and elders and pacify them.  Then he should change for better in manner of relationship with them.  He should also not forget that even members of his support group, the Buhari Support Group (BSO) had always complained too that he neglected them in appointments as he packed-full his government with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) people who sabotaged his government efforts to fix Nigeria as quick as possible.

Instead of seeing one traditional ruler or a community/political leader/elder or person in that Arewa Land as working for opposition against him, the enigmatic leader of pragmatic sort, Buhari, should just draw everybody nearer because, although his victory is non-stopping 2019 but, those leaders – in truth – have no alternative to him as presidential candidate in the coming elections, in the face of what has now become glaring that killings that Northern Fulani and Muslims have been tagged with bad names for were actually sponsored by desperate politicians whose major reason for doing so was for the hate they have for their own (Fulani) man in power to be removed at all cost.

This Mr. President must see as must-do.  The peace of his Nigeria is paramount on our minds and success of his Regime of Change our major interest.

God Bless Nigeria!

*Bashir Adefaka, an Osolo Prince of Akure, Ondo State capital, is a media practitioner.  You can reach him on his email: omope72@gmail.com or text/whatsapp him via 08163323906.