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The Seven Solitudes Of President Buhari By Pius Adesanmi

August 25, 2015

If President Buhari truly loves Nigeria, he must be prepared for huge sacrifices, including the possibility of forfeiture of a second term - if a second term was ever on the cards for him.

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This first term must be a fight to finish between him and corruption. It is a fight in which there has to be a victor (Nigeria) and a vanquished (Nigeria). There can be no fence sitting here. No middle ground. The only possible outcome is the victory of Nigeria over corruption. 

If Buhari fights corruption the way we expect him to fight it, the only option left for corruption will be to rue the unintended consequences of allowing him to become President in the first place and to spend billions to prevent him from getting a second term. 

President Buhari has started well. The first real casualty of his anti-corruption war is Sambo Dasuki. He has now been charged with illegal possession of weapons. I expect more charges, including illegal possession of yams. I expect this particular goat to go to prison. This would be a huge symbolic and psychological win for Nigeria.

In essence, President Buhari has started this business in his own ethnic, religious, cultural, class, and geo-political bedroom. Sambo Dasuki is from the top of the shelf in the Caliphate. Now, listen up and listen good, you Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, Idoma, and Edo irridentist: when the war reaches your bedroom and consumes your own goats, do not dredge up your predictable ethnicist alibis to protect your goats and scream persecution o. Ehen. We shall enter the same trouser with you and remind you that Buhari started this in his ethnic bedroom. Hey, listen up, you fundamentalist Christian: when the war begins to consume your goats, don't bother to mobilize your religious bullcrap in defense of your own Christian goats o. Ehen. We shall remind you that Buhari and Sambo Dasuki are both Moslems.

Having checked the ethnic and religious boxes on the anti-corruption war front by making sure that Sambo Dasuki is no sacred cow, Buhari must consolidate the legitimacy of this war by seeing the unbelievable opportunity that the battle of the pigs in Lagos presents. 

The political party box also needs to be checked in the anti-corruption war so that we are sure that no goat in APC is more equal than the goats in PDP. The dramatis personae in the battle of the pigs in Lagos are all the President's party men. If I know Nigeria very well, the Ambode who today is exposing Fashola's yams is already eating his own yams and farming out yams to his own cronies and the Godfather he shares with Fashola. Tha is hwo Nigeria rolls. 

I say amen to the open season of yansh opening in Lagos. I expect the full weight of the law to land on Fashola's back. The EFCC should be investigating the revelations by now. I am particularly angry that he spent more on renovating the residence of the Chief Justice of the state than he spent on building secondary school classroom blocks in one instance. It goes to show our perverse priorities in that country. And we thought that Ganduje in Kano and the mad guy in Adamawa were the worst advertisements we have in the priorities department!

Anyway, Fashola cannot be investigated and prosecuted in isolation. He, in turn, must spill the beans over the yam eating propensities of the administration before him. The unraveling in Lagos is presenting an opportunity to clean up that morass completely. If the anti-corruption war can consume Sambo Dasuki, it sure well can consume Fashola and Tinubu.

Pox on anybody's supporters and whatever reasons they may mobilize to support their own goats!

Ambode currently has immunity. We will have to wait till 2019 to find out the yams he is already eating with one hand while exposing Fashola's yams with another hand. When we do, he too is toast.

Nobody - absolutely nobody - should be above investigation and prosecution.

If Buhari allows the anti-corruption war to clean up Lagos before moving to Adamawa to see what the mad men up there are up to, he would have started a war in which a big fish in his ethnic and religious family was consumed; a war in which a ginormous fish in his political party was consumed (Tinubu); a war in which one of Nigeria's best advertisements for governance in recent years (Fashola) was consumed.

If these things happen, let me see the baba nla of anybody who would come out to declare President Jonathan and his architecture of corruption untouchable. Let me see any yeye peace committee that would dare disturb the peace of the country on Jonathan's account any further.

Buhari would have secured so much popular support for the war that Halliburton and Siemens would no longer be off limits...

Once and if we do get to Halliburton, it means that an obstreperous somebody could return from Guinea Bissau to teach his cellmates in Kirikiri Portuguese. If we can dream it, it can happen.

But if you allow your anti-corruption war to prosecute Sambo Dasuki and his ilk, Tinubu and his ilk, Obasanjo and his ilk, you must brace up for the possibility of only one term for when it comes to deadly class interest in the top 1% of Nigerian society, there is no ethnicity, there is no religion, there is no political party. There is just one happy, united, and indivisible happy family. This family will declare you a mistake they allowed to happen to Aso Rock and will do everything to correct the error in 2019.

The only force capable of stopping them is the poverty-stricken 99% below. But in their poverty, they are Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Ijaw, Igbira, Tiv, Idoma; in their hopelessness, they are Moslems and Christians, too ignorant to understand that those divisions don't exist in the class above their heads.

If you go after these Godfathers, the 99% will not have your back. They will have the back of those who divide them to eat their yams.

You will be lonely and alone.

But you must fight this anti-corruption war. It must consume every yam eater irrespective of status or party affiliation. Many of those who sponsored you to power will have to be consumed by the war.

But you must do it.

For Nigeria.

For posterity.

For you.

I wish you the solitude of the righteous warrior.