By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi Buhari’s administration is shaping up to be perhaps the most intolerant and petu...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
Buhari’s administration is shaping up to be perhaps the most
intolerant and petulant civilian administration in Nigeria. But it isn’t the
intolerance and petulance in and of themselves that are disquieting; it is the
crying incompetence of this government’s handling of dissent, which often ends
up popularizing and lionizing nonentities.
It started with Indigenous People of Biafra’s Nnamdi Kanu. He
was spewing his rib-tickling inanities on the fringes of the Internet and on a
barely known radio station. Then, suddenly, when he started attacking President
Buhari, Nigerian authorities moved in swiftly to contain him. They announced
that they had successfully jammed his radio station, but came back a few days
later to refute an alleged libelous falsehood the station made against Buhari!
Of course, news of the “jamming” of the radio and the press
release refuting what the station reportedly said against Buhari (after it was
supposed to have been jammed!) caused the station—and the ideology it
espouses—to make national and international headlines. And there was an enormous spike in the number of searches for “Radio Biafra” and “Nnamdi Kanu” on Google
and other search engines.
This, combined with Buhari’s unambiguous antipathy toward
the southeast, has sparked a resurgence of Biafran and neo-Biafran movements
and periodic sanguinary communal upheavals. This was completely avoidable. If
the government had ignored (or quietly diluted) Kanu and his Radio Biafra and demonstrated
even token large-heartedness toward the southeast (and the deep south) in the immediate aftermath of
Buhari’s epochal electoral triumph in spite of opposition from the region, we
wouldn’t know of Kanu and IPOB. But Nigerian authorities couldn’t stomach an insult
at Buhari.
Now another man by the name of Joe Fortemose Chinakwe has
become an international celebrity. He has been arrested, detained, imprisoned,
and charged to court just because he named his dog Buhari. This is the height
of petty intolerance.
Worse bile was directed at previous civilian presidents in
the country. Tafawa Balewa, Shagari, Obasanjo, Yar’adua, and Jonathan were
often at the receiving end of so much thoroughgoing hate, but the world didn’t know
about this because no one was arrested and imprisoned. (Comedian Ali Baba said
he named one of his dogs “Obasanjo” during Obasanjo’s administration and
publicized it. In northern Nigeria, Jonathan and Attahiru Jega were called some
of the vilest names I have ever heard—and in songs, too.) Public office is not
for huffy crybabies.
I have read many Muslim commenters point out that giving a
dog a Muslim name was offensive in and of itself. I agree. The problem is that
the name wasn’t given to the dog to spite Muslims; it was given to make a
political statement. If Buhari’s name was Smith Punapuna, the dog would be
named precisely that.
But Buhari isn’t even a Muslim name in the strict sense of
the term. As I pointed in previous articles, the name Bukhari (which we render as Buhari in Nigeria because many
Nigerian languages don’t have the guttural consonant that the phoneme “kh”
represents), is derived from Bukhara, which is the name of a town in what is
now Uzbekistan in the former USSR.
The person who popularized the name is a 9th-century author
of hadith collections known as Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Ismā‘īl ibn Ibrāhīm
ibn al-Mughīrah ibn Bardizbah al-Ju‘fī al-Bukhārī.
In Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi, “i” is added to the name of a
town to indicate descent from the town. So “Bukhari” simply means someone from
(the town of) Bukhara, what Hausa speakers would call “Dan Buhara.” It’s like
someone taking offense because someone named his dog Dan Kano, Dan Daura, Dan
Hadejia, etc., which, though names of towns, are borne by some northerners as
last names (without the “dan”).
But that’s not even the most important point. How many
people will the Buhari administration arrest for getting under the president’s
skin? In other words, how many people will this administration make
undeservedly popular because of its intolerance and incompetence? Many
frustrated people who feel they have nothing to live for in light of the
present economic crunch in the country are going to name their dogs after
Buhari. Watch out. It’s now the surest way to cheap popularity, and the
intolerance and incompetence of this government will ensure that they get all
the attention, and possibly financial benefits, they crave.
But it isn’t only
after Buhari that dogs will be named; dogs will also be named after key
ministers of the government.
As I am writing this column, I read that a woman by the name
of Ada Ogbonna has named her dog after the comically loudmouthed Lai Mohammed.
“Meet my dog, Lai Mohammed,” she wrote on Facebook. “I named it after someone I
admired.”
There will be several such publicity baits. A competent
government with some clue won’t swallow such easy baits. This is all part of
democracy. I live in America where the president of the country is called all
sorts of dreadful names without consequences. For instance, many racists named their dogs
Obama, but Obama disarmed them by naming his dog Bo, which is short for Barack
Obama.
We can’t pretend to be practicing democracy and clamping down
on people for merely saying hurtful things that get on our frail nerves.
This is particularly telling coming from a government that
is caught flatfooted in almost everything, a government that daily inflicts
misery on its poor citizens while its power structure feeds fat on the misery
of the poor. It’s troubling when a government that took six months to appoint a
predictable cast of characters as ministers wastes no time to arrest a person
for naming his dog Buhari. It is concerning when a government that is mute in
the face of the horrendous mass murder of hundreds of Shiites in Zaria arrests
inconsequential people because they got under the skin of the president.
Maybe Buhari is not even aware that someone has been
imprisoned because he named his dog after him. Maybe. But people who are close to and love
the president should tell him that the emerging pettiness and intolerance of
his administration are becoming intolerably embarrassing.
You can’t be paying over-sized attention to minor,
inconsequential irritants while the country burns under your watch.
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