PMB: Let the blood of the poor, weak and vulnerable speak

By Ben Osawe

“But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream”- Amos 5:24

The biggest talking point this week is the death of former President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB), who was Nigeria’s President from 2015 to 2023.

Now, as to the controversy over whether this Buhari is the original one from Daura or the one from Sudan, otherwise known as Jubril, is not the point of this write-up. Since the announcement of his death,  as usual, the media space has been taken over by hypocritical political wailers as we are being treated to all kinds of politically correct statements aimed at whitewashing the Sepulchre. The question is, can this Sepulchre be whitewashed? 

The first attempt at historical revision of PMB’s legacy of blood, sorrow and tears was started very early by one of the Presidential spokespersons. Remember that spokesperson? A supposed pastor of a  Church who looked the poor, weak and vulnerable in the face and warned subtly during a television interview that the poor, weak and vulnerable should be eager to give up their ancestral settlements for livestock grazing as part of the administration’s solutions to the killings under President Muhammadu Buhari’s watch. In his words, “Ancestral attachment? You can only have an ancestral attachment when you are alive. “If you are talking about ancestral attachment, if you are dead, how does the attachment matter?”  It didn’t end there, just eight months after the handover of President Muhammadu Buhari, this same spokesperson went to press to set the foundations for the revision of history when he continued his dancing on the graves of the poor, weak and vulnerable by publishing what he claimed were the true narrative about the years of blood, sorrow and tears in the period 2015-2023.

A year and six months later, another spokesman launched his account of his whitewash, continuing in the footsteps of his colleague. Unfortunately, at that occasion, he gave the impression that all the ‘media hype’  around the former president’s health was exaggerated and not as critical as portrayed, but barely four days later, it was announced that President Muhammadu Buhari died in a London Clinic.

In the characteristic style of portraying the former President as a very disciplined frugal leader and a man of integrity a selling point deployed to deceive unsuspecting Nigerians during the run up to the 2015 elections, the spokesperson continued in the deception and white wash to push the narrative that his principal ate ‘ tuwo (dough-like dishes made from grains), pap, akara (bean cake), beans, wheat, plenty of salads, poultry and mutton and rejected an increase of  N10 million to his food budget’. He further rubbed it in when he said that Buhari rejected new cars.

This nauseating national predilection to white wash and falsehood has assumed another dimension this week with the announcement of the death of President Muhammadu Buhari to the extent that a former adviser of President Muhammadu Buhari driven by a lack of the fear of God, said in her words that  ‘He is the greatest of them all and has become a patron saint’. No matter the verdict from men and women,  the blood of the poor, weak and vulnerable shed in the land will speak, and the real verdict of heaven will supersede any human whitewash. This was a man who enabled the death of the poor in the land, under whom state capacity to protect was abolished to the extent that a revered statesman who was the Professional military man in his right ( General T. Y Danjuma,) said unequivocally that the state was complicit in the killings of the poor. How can we forget! Between 2018 and 2023, under the watch of President Muhammadu Buhari, over 4,758 fatalities were reported in just Zamfara and Kaduna states alone due to bandit violence, surpassing deaths caused by Boko Haram and ISWAP in the northeast during the same period.

Overall, violent deaths in Nigeria during Buhari’s tenure reached approximately 63,111 from 2015 to mid-2023, covering all forms of violent attacks, including bandits, Boko Haram, kidnappers, and others. Bandit attacks increased dramatically, with a 731% rise in the northwest from 2018 to 2022, making banditry a major security threat. In 2021 alone, Kaduna state recorded 1,192 deaths at the hands of bandits. The northwest, where banditry is most prevalent, accounted for 34% of violent deaths in 2022, reflecting the spread of insecurity beyond the northeast. In the robust research work by the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON) published under the title  “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter” we note that from 2000 to 2020, approximately 17,284 people were killed by militant bandit attacks across Nigeria, with 13,079 of these deaths occurring in the states of the Middle Belt such as Benue, Kaduna, Plateau, and Taraba’. 

Tragically, the current President said he will continue in the legacy of President Muhammadu Buhari. So, the killings have intensified with the  Nigeria Bureau of Statistics reporting that between May 2023 and April 2024, a total of 614,937 persons were killed nationwide. These are not mere numbers and statistics but the poor, weak and vulnerable whose lives have been reduced to the price of a scandal in terms of their worth as we see in Amos 8:6: “That we may see may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.”

Section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution (as amended) states that the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government. This section emphasises that the government’s core responsibility is to ensure the safety and well-being of its citizens.

Unfortunately, in our recent history under President Muhammadu Buhari’s years of blood, sorrow and tears, this section of the constitution seems to have been struck out completely. Hence, consistent with Emile Durkheim’s thesis and Evert Lindquist’s competing values framework, we have witnessed in the last couple of Muhammadu Buhari years the fact that ‘without a common frame of reference, society dissolves into competing factions and groups’, resulting in anomie.

Today, as political jobbers, hypocritical liars, and their crowd raise their voices in praise of President Muhammadu Buhari and as all roads lead to Daura for the burial, the verdict of heaven stands sure as the Lord hearkens to the cry of blood of the poor, weak and vulnerable in Nigeria.

May Nigeria enter into its season of rest, and may the poor, weak and vulnerable enter into rest from afflictions that have prevented them from fulfilling God’s eternal purpose for their lives.

Osawe writes from Jos, Nigeria.

Please follow and like us:

20