Satire is a literary device often employed when there is foolishness, wickedness and evil to be censured in an indirect way. Hurtful and fatal most of the time, like one who hurls his spear at an opponent, satirists weaponize words, so much that early Irish literature was renowned to be the turf of extraordinary poets who deployed their verses like Generals wield guns in war. They brought death and disgrace the way of their victims. Seventh century Greek literary satirist and poet, Archilochus, renowned to be the first to use satire in Greece, had composed verses that attacked his future father-in-law, Lycambes.
In Africa, satires were and are also deployed to censure governments, especially vengeful ones that can come after the work of literature. AyiKwei Armah used his Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born to talk about the rage and disgust of Ghanaians towards the rottenness and decay in Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah. So also did Chinua Achebe satirize the decadence in the politics of the First Republic with his A Man of the People.
Last Friday, while fielding questions from the Arise TV, self-styled President Ibrahim Babangida attempted to borrow the tool of satirists to analyze the decay in Nigerian leadership. Unbeknown to many, IBB merely zeroed in on this art form to critique the government of Muhammadu Buhari while ostensibly dwelling on the maneuvering, undulating fate of Nigeria’s leadership curve. His most subtle but profound pillory of Buhari in that interview was his satirical analysis of the persona of Nigeria’s widely vilified president from Daura. If you discover the satire in that analysis, you would realize that, not for nothing did the Nigerian media nickname Babangida the evil genius.
Asked what caliber of persons he envisaged in a Nigerian leader, IBB replied: “I have started visualizing a good Nigerian leader. That is a person who travels across the country and has a friend virtually everywhere he travels to and he knows at least one person that he can communicate with. That is a person who is very vast in economics and is also a good politician, who should be able to talk to Nigerians. I have seen one, or two or three of such persons already in his sixties. If you get a good leadership that links with the people and tries to talk with the people; not talking on top of the people, then we would be okay. I believe so if we can get him.”
Now, begin to break down these qualities, one after the other. There is no doubt that a divided country like Nigeria needs every inch of those qualities outlined by IBB. No doubt too that if Nigeria does not have one who possesses those qualities post-2023, she will wallow in stagnation. Of all Nigeria’s leaders in time past, none suffers an austerity of persona as much as Buhari does. Even Shagari, shot to the presidency from his school teacher world, was more national in orientation. The Daura-born soldier is known, even among his restricted coterie of admirers, to be hugely circumscribed, limited in horizon and network and inhabits the cell of a world whose affiliation is sparse.
No, we are not talking of a rich repertoire of associates, the like of which Shehu Musa Yar’Adua paraded; one who was able to eat amala in Lamidi Adedibu’s Ibadan home; eat ofeonugbu in Enugu with Jim Nwobodo and dance dadakuada with Olusola Saraki in Ilorin. We are talking of somebody passably national in outlook and network. Not only is Buhari largely provincial and a closet president with shrunken horizon, one can count his friends and associates on fingertips. This is why the CPC became Buhari’s identifier and marker for association immediately he became president in 2015. It was also why membership of that political party was the umbrella he hid under to determine who got what on his assumption of Nigeria’s presidency. Babangida knew this; knows that no divided country like ours should have such restricted mind as leader. This was why he satirizes it as his foremost prescription for Nigeria to get out of the hole it has been plunged into in the last six years.
Nigeria’s president must travel wide; so said IBB. Those close to Buhari know that even as president, travelling is an anathema to him, except his predilection in frequenting his infirmary in the UK, where he is recorded to have travelled for 200 days since he became president. Sources claim that once the president locks himself inside the fortress of Aso Rock, not even his fura and nunu can stampede him out of his closet. Villa sentries would be glad if they ever catch a glimpse of him by the gate of the fortress. If travelling is indeed education, you can then imagine the ounce of education that our president has scooped up or his knowledge of the life lived by the over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria. Yinka Odumakin, God rest his soul, once told me that while he was publicist to Buhari and he was holed up with him in Kaduna, Buhari’s most prized intellectual property was his daily New Nigerian newspaper. He was so dismissive of reading books or scooping any other piece of knowledge outside of the Kaduna-produced pamphlet. That is why when you pin him down extempore, Buhari’s oft riposte is to West Germany, grazing route and allied knowledge of a distant yore. His thinking is in a glazier.
Now, Nigerians know that Buhari ranks the least among leaders who talk to them. The ‘presidency’ says it is his style. The truth, however, is that, Buhari’s queer taciturnity is so counterproductive and barren that it has caused several untold havocs in Nigeria. On few occasions when he journeys out of his shell, Buhari, to borrow IBB’s word, talks on top of the people. Imagine if IBB was presented with characters like Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho to manage. He would deploy the Gramscian model of co-optation, so much that these two fellows would be eating from his table and there would be less seismic shake as we have now in the polity.
Take for instance the issue of corruption, amply raised by IBB in the said interview. Political scientists have long submitted that Babangida’s government set up the first official incubation machine for corruption in Nigeria. But listen to Babangida, notorious for his ice fish slippery maneuvering which landed him the sobriquet, Maradona: Corruption under the military, when comparatively placed beside successive civilian governments’, is child’s play. “You can’t compare it with the facts on the ground now. From what I read, from analysis, I think we are saints when compared to what is happening under a democratic dispensation. I sacked a governor for misappropriating less than N313,000. Today, those who have stolen billions and are in court are now parading themselves on the streets.” The humongous corruption under Buhari is IBB’s satiric weapon here as well.
As repressive as the IBB military government got against the media, he couldn’t stand the Buhari government’s attempt to enact laws curtailing media freedom, maintaining that the media and the people would resist it. “The media and the people will not allow that to happen. They will talk, they will make noise. It is silly to attempt to muzzle the press.”
President Buhari and his sidekick, Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) Boss Mustapha and Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, seem to be the ones the above was directed at. Largely frozen in the Antarctica since 1903 when British colonialists promulgated it, Buhari recently brought out the Newspaper Ordinance Act No. 10 from the glacier. In 1984, he similarly brought it to the sun to thaw in the form of Decree No. 4 of 1984, (Public Officers Protection against False Accusation Decree).
Yola, Adamawa State, was its place of reincarnation. Dimas Gwama of the Magistrates’ Court IV had sentenced IkamuHamidu Kato, a youth leader of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to two years imprisonment. Kato’s crime was his temerity to insult two budding emperors – Muhammadu Buhari and his sidekick, Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Boss Mustapha in a Facebook viral video. Kato had condemned the attack on his native Hong by armed men suspected to be Boko Haram insurgents. Kato, who shared his Hong nativity with Mustapha, was riled that, after the attack, Boss flew in and out of Hong, with scant empathy for casualties and their families. He alleged that similar calamities, traceable to government’s failure, had befallen his people without a word from Mustapha. In the Facebook post, he called Mustapha a bastard. This was, of course, a harsh one to use.
In May, 2020, the Katsina Police equally arrested three persons on allegation that they insulted Buhari and state governor, Aminu Masari, on the social media. In a statement issued by Gambo Isah for the Katsina Police Command, entitled “Conspiracy and intentional insult against the President and Governor of Katsina State,” the police accused Lawal Abdullahi, 70; Bahaje Abu, 30 and Hamza Abubakar, 27 of committing the said offence.
To colour it in its right Decree No. 4 of 1984 complexion, the complainant in the Kato matter was the Department of State Services (DSS). Though sedition is said to have been expunged from the Nigerian law, its portents still hide in some of her laws, like the Penal Code under which Kato and the Katsina crew might have been tried.
About this same time, Guwahati, biggest city in the Indian state of Assam, largest metropolis in northeastern India, was struggling to free itself from the hold of this 1903 Ordinance. India had similarly been colonized like Nigeria and one of the bequeathals of Britain to it was this sedition law. Indian journalist, KishorechandraWangkhem, who got arrested by the Guwahati authorities on same charges as Erendro’s, is currently in jail. Indian Supreme Court submitted that, in a significant manner, sedition was an archaic colonial relic and wondered if the Indian government still needed it, 75 years after it gained independence from Britain. Minister Mohammed, apparently a prisoner of his boss’ highhandedness, admires the manacles of jailers and is fascinated by the sedition law. All over the world, this law is seen as a serious threat to the functioning of democratic institutions.
In the Kato case, it is obvious that the sedition act, which even Britain, the origin of the draconian law, did without since 1998, was brought back to life, tucked from attention in the Penal Code. Buhari and his boy, Boss, will do well to realize the saying that, if you can’t take the heat, don’t go in the kitchen or, as Bob Marley said, don’t jump in the water if you can’t swim. In exchange for the free house they sleep in, the free meal, the sickening allowances they scoop at the expense of the state, all the people require of them is the right to say it the way it should be said. It may be unpleasant or scathing. If they feel offended, they can sue for defamation in their personal capacity rather than unfreeze the Newspaper Ordinance Act No. 10 of 1903 from where it is kept in the Antarctica. Sedition has been found to have a chilling effect on press freedom and freedom of expression. It has no place in a democracy. Even in the UK which brought this repressive law, has long been abrogated. What Boss apparently caused the DSS to do, which was activated by the Yola Magistrate Court, is analogous to a shameful act of the 16th century when, precisely in 1534AD, King Henry VIII married a second wife on the pretext that his first was barren and was rightly vilified by the London press for what it called the king’s chicanery.
On the whole, after listening to the interview, the question you will ask yourself is, did Buhari or the presidency get the satiric drift from the Prince of the Niger?
Source: Festus Adedayo