Why Buhari Should Not Resign, By Festus Adedayo

The Nigerian parliament regained its balls last week. Before now, it was coasting home to victory as the most supine legislature in Nigeria’s recent history, especially with its leader’s effeminate claim that parliament would rubber-stamp every leaflet with presidency’s imprimatur, including any trash-receptacle from President Muhammadu Buhari’s lavatory. Minority Leader, Enyinnaya Abaribe, it was, who burst Senate’s empty balls sack and stuffed it with some guts and grits, thereby resituating the parliament’s typecast as an assemblage of sissies and yes-men.

While parliament was discussing worsening state of insecurity, Abaribe stood up and declared: “Nigerians will go to the government and ask (it) to resign because they did not elect the Chief of Staff, the Police IG, service chiefs and others. Nigerians voted a government in power. We are going with stones to stone them now because they have failed,” he said matter-of-factly. Presidency’s lickspittle, Garba Shehu, stung by this unusual sting from a hitherto conquered territory, rushed inside the sewage and grabbed a handful to splash on Abaribe. He emerged with a troll on the information highway, propelling the debate whether it was not acute indecency for the presidency to deploy the usage of an indecent word as “fool” on a federal legislator. Apparently propelled by a valiant Enyimba spirit, the legislator proudly told Garba and his minder that an Igbo man bows before no cow but his chi.

Since then, the conversation in Nigeria had trended along this pathway: Should Buhari resign as President of Nigeria? Should he be made to resign or forced to resign his office, especially taking into consideration his apparent inability to secure the country he swore to protect? Second, has the Buhari inactivity or incapability, become so irredeemable that resignation is the only redemptive decision he could take in this circumstance? Was Abaribe propelled to make the pronouncement he made on account of politics or was he speaking the mind of an average Nigerian and his frustration with this government?

Evidence weighing against Buhari’s continued retention of his office is very huge. Since he emerged from the debilitating ailment that unceremoniously took him to the United Kingdom on treatment a few years to his presidency, Buhari had remained a total opposite of what he was perceived to be. His alertness, composure, mental grip and general state of health have become suspect since his return to office. He appears even gaunter than he used to be. This prompted the very demeaning, even if illogical, narrative of the probability that the current man in the Aso Rock Villa was a clone of the Buhari who left for that UK infirmary.

On countless occasions, Buhari had disgraced Nigeria in and out of the country, on account of his manifest bereftness of the ordinary mental acuity needed in international discourses. His responses to conversations from his colleague world leaders and riposte to questions at global meets all point to a vacant mentality that is likely propelled by a health challenge. This ostensibly prompts his aides to package him away from national and global stare whenever they can, through some ingenuous but demeaning redefining of globally acknowledged process of world leaders’ interfaces with the world.

You would recall that in October, 2016, on a visit to Germany, while he stood beside the world’s most powerful woman, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buhari was asked to react to his wife, Aisha’s consistent harangue of his government. He had replied: “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and zi oza room.” If you watched the telecast of that event, fix your gaze at Merkel: She seemed to glare at this inappropriateness from a fellow world leader. How could any perceptive leader denigrate womanhood in the presence of the most powerful woman? To me, it was not just inappropriate; it was a disconnect somewhere. Buhari’s aides and any Nigerian at that forum would plead with the ground to swallow them.