22nd September, 2015
Our newly-forged critics are on an overkill. They came through the historical electoral feat of March 28. They are over-charged; ready to pounce and kill. They are dripping with Viagra and venom and they have an unmistakable target: President Muhammadu Buhari. They don’t want to spare anything. They are not giving any chances, not letting any space. They wait on President Buhari like lascivious and hungry dogs, ready to attack his person, his policies, his actions and his pro-increments. Oh yes, he must be cut to pieces for daring to topple the sordid order from where they freely fed. Since he had the audacity to take on their carefully-erected Augean stable and turn it over, he must pay, so says our hyperactive critics.
Buhari must be toppled. He must be dealt with and he must be made to feel the heat through relentless pillorying. He must be made to regret ever taking on the most formidable, most potent and must fortified brood of freeloaders that had ever invaded the country and dealing them a bloody nose last March. Oh yes, Buhari has sinned for daring to topple the table from which our new-found critics and their sandpatters feed! When anger interfaces frustration, you get what our new critics in town have turned their unflagging businesses today!
Our new critics are angry- not hungry yet- since the hefty tranche they purloined from the treasury is still intact. They are sorely frustrated that they are just starting what promises to be a long and dreary night in political limbo, no thanks to Buhari. Like they never tasted opposition politics before, they have never tested life outside the corridors of power. They are inconsolable. When they remember that they have just started what promises to be a long, long life in the cold, a rash of goose pimples flush through them and they get more nastier and charged to deal with Buhari and his government. The pains of March 28 are still fresh. It is still an open wound and it is still dripping blood and whoever inflicted such gash must be made to pay. When our new critics recall the expensive, expansive and very desperate measures they put futilely in place to stop Buhari and continue in power, they get more flummoxed. When they remember how Buhari walked through all their mines to deliver them his killing punch, they get all the more angrier and more resolved that he will know no peace. This is the firing pin propelling the bland, purely sectionalized and clearly disoriented wave of criticism trailing every action by President Buhari today.
Try to make something out of their baleful cacophony of distraught expressions of frustrations over President Buhari’s leadership and you hit a confusing bend. Oh yes, Buhari is doing nothing, he is slow (possibly to loot and let loot). Nigeria has broken down, the economy has gone under, he promised to declare his assets and tarried to do so, all the sectors have gone down, he has refused to appoint ministers, the Naira is losing value, Buhari is probing his predecessors, Buhari sleeps wrongly, Buhari is not distributing milk and honey on the streets after three months in power, Buhari is causing so much rainfall … and there they go, blaring uncontrollably as if their lives depend on such silly vituperations. Oh yes, Buhari has given all the available appointments to his kinsmen, even his butler! To these fellows, all the good things the nation has pleasantly experienced since Buhari came were done by Jonathan while everything bad has been by Buhari yet these woe-criers don’t tell us why it will take the coming of Buhari for Nigerians to harvest the good things Jonathan purportedly did while the six years he was in power with billions of dollars flowing were all about woes, buck passing, relentless looting and infrastructural rot.
But the fact is that the newfound critics of Buhari remain the same minority freeloaders and their minions that so abused and denigrated power just the other day; so much so that Nigerua defied all their unorthodox tactics to vote them out of power on March 28. They remain the same practitioners of the same damned ancient regimen of plundering, impunity, mediocrity, profligacy who audaciously prosecuted Nigeria’s free fall through mendacious brigandage that they were thrown out of power few months ago. They are the same blood-thirsty apostles of prebendal governance that is rooted in mass privation. The newly minted Buhari critics remain those who fangled very desperate and dangerous means to prevent the emergence of Buhari and the rustication of the despicable regime where they freely fed from the monumental wealth that would have bettered the lots of the ordinary Nigerians. They remain the same rodents that plundered without let, stole, without compunction, purloined with impunity to set in motion the bleak pangs of decay Buhari is dealing with. Let us not forget that the tortured critics that spew forth all manners of inanities against Buhari today for daring to restore order to the messy stable they diligently prosecuted were the selfsame characters that employed every known crude tactics to stop Buhari just some few weeks ago.
Nigerians should recall that the same cries of woes masked as criticisms started even as these freeloaders sensed that Buhari will topple the apple art from which they generously fed. Let us recall that these vandals now masking as inconsolable critics of Buhari merely doubled their efforts when Buhari roundly defeated them on March 28. Let us all recall that our present day critics are merely ventilating a deep seated frustration that the sane order they have vowed was impregnable, was so toppled by Buhari in that epic election. Let us read through the mischief, those that have refused to be consoled by the humbling hiding Buhari dealt them last March are torturing themselves to oppose every move Buhari has made to retrieve a nation they cast to the swines in unprecedented leadership anomie. They mask as self-opinionated vendors of public opinion, ‘agbataekee’ columnists working covertly and overtly for the dethroned power hustlers that rue the prospects of life outside power. Some are cash and carry self-anointed activists who discovered their wrong choice of business as Jonathan’s corruptive nectars crossed their ways, while some dubious ethnic pressure groups, scam religious groups and men who were purchased slaves of the corrupt regime that was overthrown by Buhari’s emergence.
One serious fact that the Buhari antagonists will not reveal is that they are still the same minority that never wanted Buhari to come and upset their apple cart in the first place. They are the same fellows that propagated the credo that the rotten state of filth and internecine corruption Buhari replaced where their primitive interests reigned supreme was the best for Nigeria. So when they yell that Buhari is doing nothing by stopping the well of rot that favoured them and restoring order and decency in the conduct of statecraft, you should read their guile. They don’t want you to know they are still the loud, noisome minority that failed to stop his emergence last March. They cleverly want to mask their strength in the maze of loud noise and repetitive mendacity. They think it’s about what they profess or not profess, what they admit or failed to admit that people will judge Buhari’s government. It was the same fatal mistake they made during the campaigns when they kept repeating lies and embellishments against Buhari even when it was obvious that Nigerians were much more clever than their mischievous means. In the present, they think that shouting themselves hoarse on what Buhari did or did not do will sway Nigerians taunts the man they overwhelmingly elected just the other day to end their own profligacy, stealing, rank mediocrity which have devalued the lives of both Nigerians and country. Our new critics think that by their clearly disoriented outcries, we may be swayed to club Buhari to death. By blandly denying the huge landmarks Buhari has wrought in three months to clear the asphyxiating debris they heaped on the country for neon years, these fellows think we will follow them and navigate through their valley of self duplicity.
So when you read or hear the raucous and repetitive jibe of Buhari did this and did not do that, know you are hearing the tortured cries of the dislodged free loaders that have adamantly refused to be consoled after Nigerians voted for change they are experiencing today. When you hear the headless complaints by men that diligently prosecuted the deprecation of Nigeria in sixteen years, together with their coterie of minions that Buhari has not transformed Nigeria into the eight wonder of the modern world in three months, know where to best situate these programmed acts. Know that there is no truth, no fact, no reason in the tortured noise the critics of the wind of change blowing across the country today have made their daily litany. What you hear from Buhari critics are not an appeal to reason but a fervent effort by dislodged prospectors of power to steal our passion, loot our sympathy, plunder our emotions so as to resurrect their dying business of prospering on our collective depreciation. What is going on now as criticisms to the laudable actions Buhari has taken in three months to rescue the lost soul of a nation is merely the spent tactics of wearied but utterly frustrated power mongrels to derail our change and wet the ground for a contraction of their larceny. Theirs are what the legendary playwright, William Shakespeare dismissed as the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing. If their syndicated cries of woes mean anything, why was it that NOI Polls owned by Jonathan’s Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, put President Buhari’s favourable rating at over 70 per cent despite the self fooling antics of our newly minted critics?
So when you read the lost and confused columnists pouring bile and venom against Buhari, as part of an extensive mission for the dislodged power goons, when you read the distraught politician yodeling loudly what Buhari did against him, when you read warped ethnic zealots, religious bigots, self canonized rights activitists and non governmental individuals rail so vacuously and vainly against Buhari and his regime, do a check to find out such fellow has been on that same mission since Buhari was perceived as a potent threat to the reign of locusts and vandals. The change Buhari promised for which Nigerians voted for him, which he is bringing to the abused Nigerian polity is not and was never programmed for these woe criers. In fact, they are programmed as casualties who must give way for the masses to prosper.
—Oparah wrote from Ikeja, Lagos. E-mail: [email protected]