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Why we wish our presidents dead

Why we wish our presidents dead New York[RR]Abuja–When former Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha, died in June 1998, I was one of those who took to the streets to celebrate the nation’s liberation from his murderous grip. These days, I look back at that infamous Monday and wonder the point of rejoicing at someone’s […]

President-Buhari-in-Yola-for-Atiku's-daughters'-wedding-November-2015

Why we wish our presidents dead

New York[RR]Abuja–When former Head of State, Gen. Sani Abacha, died in June 1998, I was one of those who took to the streets to celebrate the nation’s liberation from his murderous grip. These days, I look back at that infamous Monday and wonder the point of rejoicing at someone’s death when none of us is beyond mortality. Abacha’s death, we know, resolved a conundrum and cleanly freed us from the bonds with which he held us. Also, given the timing of his death, it did in fact seem God heard Nigerians’ cries for liberation. However, death by natural causes is no punishment; it is one of life’s many realities.

In the past few days, both the “fake news” and refutation of President Muhammadu Buhari’s “death” have seized the airwaves and “bus-stop parliaments.”

Since the President’s announcement of his annual vacation and “medical trip” to the United Kingdom, folks eager to script Buhari’s obituary have been beating an elegiac gong. In the post-truth world, rumours and fact-free truths travel the world without a visa and debunking them, unfortunately, sometimes assert their validity.

To make a revolting matter even more shameful, Buhari’s media aides, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu, two spin doctors who never muster enough professional dignity to overlook the temptation of wading in murky pools with every species of human, seized their social media handles. They announced – with puerile peevishness- that the President was alive and well! From their interaction with cybercitizens, one deduces they imagine that those who wanted the President dead are malevolent souls who are still sore Buhari defeated their candidate in the 2015 election.

Adesina and Shehu might well be right. In the run-up to the 2015 election, the sitting governor of Ekiti State, Ayodele Fayose, started the guessing game about Buhari’s health and death. Other “wailers” picked up the baton and have continued to run with it since then. What both aides have probably not considered is that such rumour mongering is also a response to the failures of the government to properly communicate with people. Over the years, the Nigerian government has proved to be thoroughgoing dishonest on even simple and insignificant issues. When people cannot get reliable official information, they make up their realities and hawk them around until they acquire some truth value.

Besides, our nation has a long history of leaders lying about their health. From Abacha to the late Umaru Yar’Adua, to the wife of the former President Goodluck Jonathan, we never get an accurate picture of anything. Till now, we cannot tell with confirmed certainty if it was liver cirrhosis that killed Abacha or the mysterious “Indian escorts.”

Did Yar’Adua speak regularly to his ‘Kitchen Cabal’ or his communication on his deathbed was a case of ‘Esau’s hand, Jacob’s voice’? How did Governor Danbaba Suntai govern Taraba State after his accident? What was the nature of Dame Patience Jonathan’s illness and how did she get mysteriously healed after leaving Aso Rock?

What is Buhari’s actual condition of health? In these times where the traffic one successfully drives to one’s website translates to financial gains, “fake news” mongering will not abate. Until our leaders learn to preempt rumours by making their health conditions public information, they will expend themselves putting out fires.

Rather than stamp their petulant feet on the ground and moan the immorality of wishing one’s leaders dead, they should ask why the people they govern want them dead.

Beyond the obvious reasons of poor communication between the leader and the led, is the reality of spite and sadism on the part of the citizens. People wish their leaders dead because they want to transpose some of the pains those leaders inflict on them back to the leaders; they want everything that brings them joy obliterated

While I am in no way justifying this sadism on the part of the people, I also think a mere resort to flagellating them will not help our leaders to introspect. The question they should in fact ask themselves is why things should be otherwise.

Why should people care if their leaders live or die when those leaders themselves do not care if their people die or live?

Why ask people to demonstrate empathy towards a leader who grabs the public wallet and goes abroad to see well-trained specialists in well-funded hospitals? Why ask impoverished people to show humane feelings towards such a person when the system that the leader runs at home cannibalises them and their children?

Why would people who live, move, and have their being amidst dehumanising conditions be concerned about the ethics of wishing death on someone else? The conditions of their own existence already bespeak death, yet they are supposed to writhe at the pain of a leader whose privileges are funded with their blood?

If they must know, wishing our leaders dead is moral revanchism. Those death wishes are like the stone from David’s slingshot. They might not have achieved the desired aim of hitting Goliath in the head and watching him drop dead, but is nevertheless a ready weapon of warfare available to the agonised poor, the helpless victims of the nation’s necropolitics, the forgotten and silenced majority, and the historically and structurally dispossessed.

Trying to ramp up religious or cultural sentiments about the immorality of wishing our leaders dead will not abdicate the reasons people wish death or evil on their leaders. Such shaming will only repress the instinct to publicly express it. Under that surface sneer of “I wish Mr. President soonest recover” will remain a seething rage that can only find some cathartic outlet through their deaths.

I dare say that this feeling of “go and die!” as it was once tactlessly voiced by a former Edo State Governor, Adams Oshiomhole, is mutual between the leaders and the led. In Nigeria, we eat death for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Life is cheap here and there is little evidence that our leaders think that our lives matter. Ours is a country where a bomb will “mistakenly” drop on a refugee camp, death toll will rise to 236 and not a thing has changed one week later. No lawmaker is currently sitting to review the gross incompetence that led to such a massacre and propose changes to the conditions that made it happen.

Ours is a country where protesters are shot by security agencies whose heads have been addled and nobody, not even their state governors or legislators, will shut down the system and demand that their deaths be redressed. From Benue to Enugu states, people have been gruesomely killed by rampaging herdsmen, but what have our “dear leaders” done other than toss the responsibility of accountability elsewhere?

The blood of the Shi’ites who were dumped in graves dug at night still cries for justice, but it flies past our deafened ears. The many victims of violent deaths vociferously cry for redress; their vain pleas drain us of psychic energy. If our lives are treated so cheaply, why are they surprised wishes of their own death are cheaply trafficked?

We are gradually becoming a society where death is meaningless because life itself has been sapped of meaning. When people look at their leaders and wish them dead, they are trying to infuse some meaning into a meaningless order.

Just like we thought of Abacha, if this person — who represents ethical and spiritual corruption, decadence, executive aloofness, oppression of the poor by the rich — drops dead, then maybe it is proof that there is a God; He exists and in fact cares about alleviating our pain.

Buhari is not the first president who will be rumoured dead; and if the one that comes after him makes our lives miserable too, people could wish him/her dead as an expression of their inner rage and frustrated helplessness. It is nothing personal.

Credit: PUNCH

Also read: President Buhari And His Rumoured Death By Paul Onomuakpokpo

An impediment to the quest for the full return of history to schools is our fear of excavating the seamy past of our heroes. We want history to be returned to our schools so that we can learn about our past and its avatars and draw some useful lessons for an effective response to our contemporary challenges. But we are trapped in the tragic paradox of the fear of being confronted with the foibles and peccadilloes of the past heroes who shaped our history. This paradox is amply expressed in the warning not to speak ill of the dead.

We are even forbidden from speaking ill of the living. Fawn on the living, credit them with the virtues they are crassly bereft of and there would not be any problems. But attempt to draw attention to their less than stellar qualities and a kerfuffle is provoked. There is a grimmer possibility of this if the subjects are public office holders. They would deploy all their might to teach the daring offenders the lessons that they should not traduce a big Nigerian. With the complicity of the police, they would throw them into jail where they would be forgotten.
It is in this context that we can situate the developments around the rumoured death of President Muhammadu Buhari. To be sure, it is wrong to wish anybody dead. For neither do we have the power to take the life of someone we did not create nor know when that person would die. Again, we are reminded of Michel de Montaigne’s warning that we should not consider anyone happy until his death. In other words, no human being, no matter his or her station in life is immune from the storms and tempests of life. Thus, we must not be deterred from discussing the rumoured death of the president and appropriating some useful lessons from it.
After all, other leaders like Nnamdi Azikiwe were said to have died while they were still alive. Even in Zimbabwe, there have been many rumours of death about Life President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe who is amused at the rumours has quipped that he has resurrected more often than Jesus Christ. And just recently, one Pastor Patrick Mugadza prophesied that the 92-year-old Mugabe would die on October 17, 2017. And unsurprisingly, Mugadza has been taken to court. But the joke is on Mugabe as Mugadza’s lawyer has said that the pastor was only relaying a message from God and the police had to prove that God is not its originator.
The reactions of Nigerians to the rumoured death of the president are a mix of genuine shock and barefaced humbug. How dare malevolent persons claim that the president is dead? hollered some. If our president had reacted like this to the recurrent wastage of lives in the country, we would have disincentivised the propensity for willful killing by fellow citizens or through government neglect. We glimpse our president’s lack of respect for human life through his protection of those who allegedly stole the money meant for starving and sexually exploited internally displaced persons. Obviously, these lives are not as precious as the president’s. This is why despite the outrage at the sleaze of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Lawal Babachir, Buhari is begging the Senate to allow him to stay in office.

If the president loved other Nigerians as he loves himself, there would have been better health services. The president would have equipped all the hospitals under his care and made them to function optimally. The staff of government hospitals would have been well treated so that they would not go on strike for months and allow the poor citizens who cannot afford private medical treatment to die. For it is because the president loves his life that he often goes overseas at the slightest threat to his health.
How much does the president really care about the lives of the citizens when he allows them to be slaughtered by herdsmen in southern Kaduna and in other places? Or are those being killed less human than the president? The sense of urgency the president demonstrates in rushing overseas whenever he is sick should have been shown to tackle the crises that have triggered the killings by herdsmen. Or the president values cows more than the citizens’ lives?
This is why he can watch as religious bigotry is claiming lives and hundreds of citizens are dying daily because of his mismanagement of the economy. Some are dying out of starvation while others are being wasted by diseases and taking their own lives out of frustrations. Still, others are wasted on our neglected roads and transportation system.
Since the president’s neglect and complicity have made life worthless in this country, some citizens were unabashed as they rejoiced at the rumour of his death. They did not see the vacuum that his death would have created in the polity. Rather, they saw his possible death as what was needed for the development of the country. This is where the importance of being rumoured dead lies. It affords one the opportunity to know how much positive impact one has made on others’ lives. No one wishes dead a person who has been of help to one. They only wish dead a person who is like a plague to them.
As long as our society continues to fail to put in place measures to make life liveable for the citizens, they may not sympthise with any leader who is rumoured or actually dead.
In this regard, the president and his friends do not need to curse anybody who wished him dead. What the friends of the president should do is to get all the reactions of the citizens to his rumoured death. Using these reactions, let him weigh himself on a scale and see how much the citizens think he has served them. After this, the president should reinvent himself and plunge himself into the pursuit of those policies and projects that would make life meaningful to all. He could start by acknowledging that he understands the importance of good health to himself and the rest of the citizens. He should vow to equip the public hospitals in the country in such a way that he and other citizens would not need to go overseas for treatment.
If the president does not have confidence in the nation’s institutions how does he expect other citizens to do that? It is because of this lack of trust in our public institutions that is making our leaders to send their children to schools overseas while destroying the ones at home. Yet, we want the citizens to believe that their leaders are serving them and when they are rumoured dead they should only mourn and not rejoice. With the president now knowing clearly how poorly he is rated by those he claims to be working for, we really hope he would return home with better health and renewed vigour to serve the citizens and bequeath memorable legacies to the nation.

Credit: Mr. Onomuakpakpo.
Dr. Onomuakpokpo is on the Editorial Board of The Guardian

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