By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi President Muhammadu Buhari’s supporters are frothing at the mouth with impotent r...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
President Muhammadu Buhari’s supporters are frothing at the
mouth with impotent rage because the Financial Times reported President Donald Trump to have told his aides “he never wanted
to meet someone so lifeless” like Buhari again.
The same Buhari supporters who are calling attention to
Trump’s moral foibles and erratic personality to impeach the validity of his opinion
on Buhari actually praised Trump and even affectionately called him “Baba
Trump” (à la “Baba Buhari”) when Buhari’s social media aide by the name of
Lauretta Onochie fabricated a transparently fake and hilariously error-ridden
quote of Trump putatively praising Buhari’s “integrity” and “anti-corruption”
fight.
"I stand with you the number one African president,”
the fake Onochie-generated quote reported Trump to have said of Buhari in
private. “I support you my fellow president. Your integrity is second to none.
I am at your back [sic] in spirit, physical and in faith [sic]. Go on with your
anti corruption [sic] fight against crooks in your country. I support you
President Muhammadu Buhari. God is also with you."
In my May 13, 2018 grammar column titled “Nigerian and American English Clash in Fake Pro-Buhari Trump Quotes,” I showed that the
quote was decidedly fictitious, but Buharists insisted it was real and said I
dismissed it as fake because I “hate” Buhari and couldn’t live with the fact
that Trump thought highly of Buhari.
Buhari’s media aides also bragged on social media about
Buhari being the “first African president” to be invited to the Trump White
House—as if being invited to the White House was anything other than a mere
self-interested, strategic diplomatic courtesy on the part of the Trump White
House. (Egypt’s president was actually the first African president invited to
the White House).
So the Buhari media team—and the president’s supporters— set
themselves up for the anger and letdown they feel over Trump’s admittedly
unkind dig at Buhari. It's hypocritical to exult in Trump’s putative praises
and approval of Buhari and then turn around to insult the same Trump for his opinion
on Buhari that ruptures your presumptions.
If you so desperately desired the approval of Trump that you
felt obligated to intentionally cook up fake quotes and attribute them to him in
order to shore up notions of the “integrity” of Buhari, you can’t dismiss the selfsame
Trump’s condemnation of Buhari as inconsequential and not come across as
laughably infantile in your hypocrisy. It cuts both ways: if you think Trump’s
positive opinion of Buhari is worthy, his negative opinion of Buhari can’t be
worthless.
At any rate, what Trump said about Buhari isn’t fresh information.
By “lifeless,” Trump meant Buhari was dreary, laidback, lacking in enthusiasm,
passion, and energy. This is consistent with what I wrote in my column of May
5, 2018 titled “Buhari’s American Visit: The High and Low Points.”
"My guess is
that Buhari was tongue-tied with excessive restraint because he was overly
scripted,” I wrote. “He appeared to be intimidated by Trump who has a
reputation for antagonistic brusqueness. Buhari probably also didn’t want to
risk being publicly tongue-lashed and humiliated by Trump, so he towed the line
of least resistance by being unnaturally meek.” That’s many words to convey the
sense that he was “lifeless.”
But why does what
Trump say about Buhari matter? Buhari is the president of a sovereign country
like Trump is. What Trump thinks of another president is irrelevant,
particularly because the lone person Trump thinks highly of is Trump. The only
reason this is a subject of national conversation is that we are hostages to
what I have called xenophilia, that is, the irrational, unjustified, inferiority-driven
love for the foreign and a corresponding sense of low national self-worth.
Buhari, for instance, is an unapologetic Anglophile. When he
won election in 2015, the first place he flew to was England. It’s also where
all his children went to school. It’s where he goes to treat even his littlest
ailments “since 1978 when I was in Petroleum,” according to a transcript of his
interaction with Nigerians in London, as reported by the Punch of February 6,
2016.
The Amerophilia of the late Umar Musa Yar’adua and Goodluck
Jonathan were also noteworthy. When Yar’adua was elected president, he visited
America and told George Bush that his visit to the White House was “a rare
opportunity” and a “moment that I will never forget in my life.” I know of no
elected president of a sovereign country who ever said that to another elected
president.
When Jonathan was made acting president in 2010, he sought a
stamp of legitimacy for his acting presidency by visiting America. He also gave
more weight to the empty diplomatic compliments of Obama than he did to the
genuine feelings of the people he governed—just like Buhari and his supporters
who are always fishing for endorsements of Buhari’s “integrity” in foreign soils.
The Vanguard of September 26, 2011, for instance, reported Jonathan as saying
“I just got back from the US. The President of America is like the president of
the world because it is the most powerful country…. Obama, when he spoke,
commended Nigeria but back home we are being abused.”
As I pointed out in my March 23, 2013 article titled, “State Pardon: 5 Reasons Jonathan Can’t Appeal to Sovereignty,” “all post-independence
Nigerian governments, with the exception of the late General Murtala Muhammed
military regime, actively and slavishly seek the approval of Washington almost
as a state policy.”
And I said of former president Goodluck Jonathan on March
23, 2013 that, “He accords more value to the empty extolments of the White
House than he does to the genuine judgment of his administration by the people
who elected him.” This is also true of Buhari.
You can’t go to another country to invoke the social and
symbolic basis of your legitimacy—and even tout invitation to the country as a
badge of honor and as a bragging right— and turn around to accuse that same
country of insulting your president or of undermining your sovereignty when it
tells you something you don’t want to hear.
When Samuel Johnson, the self-taught pioneer of English
lexicography, said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” he had in
mind people like butthurt Buhari supporters who are lashing out at Trump and
proclaiming empty patriotism.
Johnson’s statement, made on April 7, 1775, wasn’t a
denunciation of patriotism as such; it was only a critique of false patriotism,
of opportunistic, politically convenient patriotism, such as the kind being
displayed now in the wake of Trump’s reported gibe at Buhari. If you believed
Trump’s judgement that Buhari has “integrity” (even though he actually never
said that) you should have no difficulty believing his description of him as “lifeless”
(which he probably also didn’t say).
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