National Issues
Redeeming Osibanjo From The Buhari/Myetti Allah Presidency -By Emmanuel Ugwu
Vice President Yemi Osibanjo faces a monumental decision, ahead of the 2019 presidential elections: to hunker down and remain an appendage of the Buhari/Myetti Allah presidency or to pluck up the courage and detach himself as a conscientious defector.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLjEnMvBxDs[/embedyt]
With the politically charged threat issued by Myetti Allah to the effect that Senate President Bukola Saraki must resign or ”be forced out”, the terrorists have removed all doubts about their identity and agenda: they are a militia that has a valid and operational power sharing agreement with Buhari. This present threat is a refrain from the songbook of the paranoid camp of Buhari’s cult of personality. It clarifies the air of authority with which the presumed pastoralists rejected calls for Buhari to sack his incompetent security chiefs.
Myetti Allah boasts a capacity for mayhem which Buhari respects and aspires to benefit from. The genocidal operations of the mass murderers are underpinned by the semblance of a memorandum of understanding with mutually beneficial terms, to wit: the death cult is free to purge and occupy any land while they would be under obligation to reward their licensor with helpful electoral violence.
Buhari has a track record of calling violence and violent rhetoric into political play. When he lost the 2011 election, he cued his largely illiterate mob of supporters to embark on an orgy of wanton murder and destruction. He prepared the impressionable minds of his legion for action with the bombast that ‘’dogs and baboons will be drenched in blood’’ if he didn’t win the 2015 presidential elections. He has apparently positioned Myetti Allah as a standing army that would procure his re-election in 2019 with war.
So far, Osibanjo has not understood the handwriting on the wall. He has suppressed his scruples in order to coexist with a bigoted president who has assimilated ethnic cleansing into the directive principles of state policy. With the terrorists coming out to assert themselves as Buhari’s ruling partner, Osibanjo would have to decide if he is ready to tag along behind the Buhari/Myetti Allah regime and be eternally tarnished by his grave complicity, compromise and cowardice.
Osibanjo has been a frustrated but cooperative accomplice of Buhari and Myetti Allah. He cleans up after every episode of slaughter with damage control ‘’condolence visits.’’ He inures himself against blood and gore to watch mass burials after mass burials. He euphemizes war crimes as ‘’farmers/herders clashes.’’ He has never dared to call the systematic mass murders by the right name or challenged his boss, the president, to stop covering up for the killers.
Osibanjo suppresses his outrage. The man in him is timid. It’s a dying thing, coiled in a fetal position, paralyzed by fear.
Osibanjo has been unable to muster the audacity to be disagreeable in a callous regime indulges a vicious cycle of atrocities. He lacks the courage it takes to resign in protest against Buhari’ land-for-life doctrine. The only option left for Osibanjo is to salvage himself from the savage Buhari/Myetti Allah presidency by declaring his unavailability to stand as Buhari’s symbolic running mate for reason of conscience.
If he extricates himself from the Buhari/Myetti Allah administration and declines to endorse them for re-election, that act of withdrawal, although belated, may count as sufficient penance for his abiding the altar of human sacrifice that Buhari and Myetti gang has built for cattle speecism in Nigeria.
In the run-up to the 2015 general elections, APC strategists yoked Yemi Osibanjo with Buhari to compensate for the latter’s disqualifying defects and deficits. Osibanjo’s credentials, pedigree and persona were required to make Buhari somewhat electable. Without Osibanjo, the jinxed aspirant would have underperformed, as usual, outside his Northern muslim demographic and lost his fourth presidential contest.
As a professor of law with a significant name recognition, Osibanjo rescued a semiliterate Buhari who was damaged by a perceptual crisis arising from a controversy surrounding the history of his secondary education.
As a pastor in the Redeemed Christian Church of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in Nigeria, Osibanjo helped allay the unease of the Christian community towards Buhari, the sharia exponent.
As a son-in-law of the revered Yoruba legend, Obafemi Awolowo, Osibanjo pulled the sophisticated South West electorate to vote in lock step for Buhari.
In the build-up to the 2019 elections, Osibanjo is once again expected to help stitch together the coalition that made the 2015 win possible. He is seen as a mitigating influence on Buhari’s deplorable leadership. He must seriously ponder whether, in the narrative of history, extending his stay on the margins of the Buhari/Myetti Allah presidency will secure him a dishonorable mention in infamy.
Osibanjo does not have much to lose to abandoning the Buhari/Myetti Allah disaster. He is an internal outsider. He gets a chance to exert minimal influence only when Buhari goes on medical expedition. When Buhari returns, the in-group that runs the presidency relegates the self-effacing man to his inconsequential place in the echelon.
Sadly, Osibanjo will not quit. It is not in the character of the Nigerian politician to abdicate their position out of respect for their own personal ideals. They are essentially venal. The aphrodisiac of power rules their value system.
Moreover, Osibanjo regards himself as a guiltless saint. The presumption that informs his awkward comfort in the Buhari/Myetti Allah presidency is that he is not a direct sponsor of the hate crimes. He won’t be tarred, so he believes, with the same brush. He would come out of the administration smelling of roses.
Osibanjo is mistaken. There is no alibi that can acquit him of the charge of complicity in the massacre of innocent people by Fulani herdsmen. He is a major character in the Buhari/Myetti Allah presidency, even if he has a minor role. He is, therefore, partially accountable for the heinous atrocities that are flourishing under the power. The most charitable footnote that Osibanjo may get in history is that he was an enlightened but conflicted enabler of state sponsored terrorism and a moral coward.
On a visit to an IDP camp in Makurdi, he serenaded hundreds of children who had managed to escape the cruelty of the herdsmen. Many of them were orphans and had lost their closest adult relatives. They lived on starvation diets and faced the prospect of becoming a statistic in a country with the highest number of out of school street kids in the world.
Osibanjo sang and told the traumatized kids that ‘’going forward, they shall be winners.’’ He called it a prophetic song. His media aides shared the clips of his choirmaster act so widely it went viral.
Osibanjo’s priority has been to look more humane and empathetic than Buhari. He holds his nose to do the job of a condolence errand boy. He picks his way through the slaughterhouse, affecting solemnity, grief and helplessness.
Osibanjo must immediately disengage from the Buhari/Myetti Allah terrorism industrial complex.
He will assist in escalating and prolonging crimes against humanity if he sticks with Buhari and foists another round of four years of terror on Nigeria. The pogrom that is now a new normal will rise to a much more insane level if Buhari wins again.
It is difficult to imagine the heightened impunity with which the herdsmen will murder innocents after Buhari has bagged a second term and assured himself that he would not need votes or goodwill anymore. They would probably kill until all animals in Nigeria are soaked in blood.
Maybe Yemi Osibanjo may sell his soul in a Faustian bargain for power, prestige and privilege. Maybe not.
@EmmaUgwuTheMan
