By Elempe Dele, Edo.
After three times of trial and being successful the fourth time, Buhari has shown his inability to adjust to life in power. And that’s what I have termed ‘power shock’ like culture shock. He has not been able to respond to his ‘powerful’ new environment after 5 year, rather, he has gained and dovetailed into abject absence in spite of supposed tight schedules and assignments.
The timing for Buhari to resign from power to Daura could not have been badly ordained expecially when the sprockets of the security wheels of the country have almost all broken down completely. He is neither angry nor happy receiving truckloads of human dead bodies like debris from bandits, kidnappers, terrorists as some inflict mayhem on the people from multiple directions, even from his home town, Kastina. Even when such as the near daily explosion of deaths makes one wonder, Buhari seem to be absent from these deathly scenes. No, Buhari has not been able to suffocate or neutralize the inconveniences and ill-feelings the citizens have daily with bad news from the situation of insecurity in the country.
Ironically, he is a contradiction to clamour – silence. No day hardly passes that the country does not record a fatality from these misguided elements who kill in the name of Allah, ironically, the Merciful.
Not only has Buhari not been able to justify why he was elected twice, his huge absence is constantly questioning his legitimacy to continue on the throne of the gerontologist. Even with the unfamiliar #EndSars crowd agitation; a kind of national eruption that took the world by storm, Buhari was not abled to real life. His 10 minute pre-recorded speech was evident he didn’t know what the matters were, he was told what to read like a 3D image made in the image of the cabal.
Buhari happen to be a compensation for the innuaguration of our collective wrong decision occasioned by our votes – which happened twice. Some few close friends have the previlege of viewing his activities from the front seats of power, majority of Nigerians are just there trotting about not knowing what aspect of governance concerns them.
We are mostly scrabbling to discover which vantage viewing point we can access his policies and economics that seem to be opaque and coded like ancestral scriptures. There are no opened avenue to dispel the notion where some think of him as once President Buhari, but not any longer.
Yes, his activities are delayed or none existence and I don’t see them hastened up in the next three years that his time will be over if it is not extended beyond 2023, as it were. His pace is not only slow, it is like a traffic light that is permanently on red – no urge for movement.
In a desperate attempt to avoid responsibility or further his appetite for vengeance against the nation, he has sidewalked to Daura to relapse while the people are gathered in groups like hunting parties pursuing to know the reason he has fled from the nation yet again to tend his cattle.
Oh no, I seem to know why he is gone – he has fled the crime scene call Nigeria which he has used as a battered ritual. He has broken free from the ills of Aso Rock, crawling into safety in his home town. Nothing can drag him out for the now except his own feet. He has refused to be joined to the mayhem inflicting the country as blood and tears smear the sands while the air reek of sufficiently suffering people.
I don’t envy him, I don’t envy his transfiguration into a veiled president that cannot be confronted by the media or even the National Assembly – he has earned it. There is a christaining for this acts; The Fleeing. Even Aisha has disappeared siting insecurity.
The citizens who are now spectators to this magical realism having sprained their ankles and bruised their body trying to capture a glimpse of their fleeing president will eventually retreat to the discomfort off their minds when they are tired and some will tell each other in whispers, “I nor tell you say the man nor be am?”
