The arrest of human rights activist, journalist and pro-democracy campaigner, Omoyele Sowore, by operatives of the Department of State Services as ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari further explains them President’s oppressive and tyrannical nature against free press and constructive criticism. Strictly speaking, the President has gone mad again!
We have been here before under Buhari’s inhuman government as Head of State. Then, Buhari ruled the country with maximum brutality against dissenting voices with the obnoxious, infamous and draconian decree 4 that forbids journalists and media houses to report or publish anything negative about his military regime. Now, Buhari/APC failed government in a democracy, the irredentist dictator has abandoned the nation’s Constitution that accommodates free speech and association has started hunting citizens who are insisting and demanding for governance with human face.
It’s never that Nigerians ever belief that the tyrant who ruled the nation with iron fist as a military dictator between 1983 and 1985 would ever change his colour or his callous mindlessness. Nigerians know that Buhari’s ethnic proclivities, Islamic bigotry as a pure illiterate with insidious banalities against the rule of law can never change. They only assumed that having serially lost elections, he could at least fight the endemic corruption as witnessed under President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration.
But Nigerians did not take into account the fact that a nation cannot have proper democracy with an unregenerate illiterate like Buhari.
Many did not know that for democracy to flourish the principle of the rule of law must never be compromised. The DSS invasion of Sowore’s apartment in the early hours of this morning with four trucks, seizing his phones and other electronic gadgets is President Buhari and APC desperate and calculated attempt to muffle legitimate and authentic vices of the Nigerian masses who are at the receiving end of their directionlessness. It’s now clear to those who are still day-dreaming that the President who knew next to nothing about governance has pushed the nation to the edge.
How did Sowore’s arrest help the cause of APC/Buhari’s deceptive government that thrives on propaganda and disinformation? Where did Sowore offend the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for spearheading nationwide demonstrations to protest against bad governance in Nigeria under President Buhari’s failed government? Is it wrong to call for redirection in a failed government via national and international campaign when such government has virtuallycollapsed?
It’s glaring that Buhari/APC have murdered democracy; adopted rule of the thumb, aborted her own electoral premises, dramatizes unremitting failure, introduced primitive nepotism, archaic bigotry and authoritarianism.
From day one, President Buhari never showed determination to fixing Nigerian’s unresolved financial misdemeanor. He refused to truthfully tell Nigerians what happened to the report on the US$43 million discovered in an apartment at Osbourne Towers, Ikoyi, Lagos. He couldn’t tell Nigerians what happened to the allegation of award of US$25 billion contracts without following due process made against Dr. Maikanti Kacalla Baru, the Group Managing Director of Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) by the Minister of Petroleum, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu.
Presently, Nigeria is sinking on account of insecurity. Boko Haram has taken over the entire northern Nigeria. Criminal bandits have taken over nearly all the nineteen states in the north with twelve local government areas in ruins in Buhari’s Katsina home state. Of course, terrorist Fulani marauding breasts kidnap, rape and slaughter defenceless Nigerians on theirs farms, in their houses and on the highway on a daily basis.
Till date, President Buhari keeps deceiving himself that his government has reduced poverty with bogus claim that he has lifted five million Nigerians out of poverty. Statistics which states that over 13 million Nigeria children of school age (over 90% of that number from the north) are out of school, the highest number in the world has not changed. President Buhari’s government has refused to take pre-emptive action on the report that Nigeria would face hunger in a few years from now as a result of terrorist Fulani Herdsmen open declaration of war on farmer across the country.
Buhari’s pretences about national security is nothing more than regime security to protect and keep his ineptness, sectional and fraudulent government in power in his own personal interest and that of the entire northern Nigeria. Unfortunately, this is the basis for Nigeria unity so that northern Nigeria will keep pillaging and squandering southern oil wealth. Buhari and the desperate APC leadership are merely racing against time. Nigeria implosion is imminent, either now or later.
*** Erasmus Ikhide is @ikhideerasmus@gmail.com. Following on Twitter @ikhide_erasmus1
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