In an exclusive interview with Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Social Media Ms Lauretta Onochie in Abuja last week Wednesday, she gave a good and convincing calculation of how her boss’ popularity is far more soaring than what opposition among political opponents and #CorruptionFightBack elements want Nigerians home and abroad to know. Onochie, who like Customs Comptroller-General Col. Hameed Ali, is a member of the Buhari Support Organisation (BSO) said 20 million Nigerians are on standby who will vote for Buhari in 2019 if he contests. The same projection was done ahead of 2015 presidential elections which came to past. BSO had said Buhari would ordinarily have 18 million votes but that after plus or minus, abracadabra, he would eventually have a little above 15 million votes. Reason no one can comfortably fault or doubt the new BSO’s 20 million projected votes this time. That is a popularity undoubted! The President’s Political Adviser Babafemi Ojudu and Minister of Communications Abdur-Raheem Adebayo Shittu also held the similar positions in their own interview.
However, to make President Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity more popular, there is one particular injustice committed by the immediate past administration of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, which nobody is talking about but which we will want the Africa’s most revered anti-corruption, anti-impunity, anti-insecurity, anti-inequity personality that Buhari represents to thoroughly look at and ensure that justice is done to whomever justice is due. That as done by Jonathan was spelled out clearly in a Punch’s published article titled, “Hypocrisy, the recipe for chaos.” Corroborating that, Chief Bode George also said in an interview with Vanguard before the 2015 general elections that injustice is the very bedrock for insecurity as nobody or society, he said, would ever be at peace in situation of injustice. This is germane in the subject of the moment. President Buhari was not the maker of the injustice being talked about, but The DEFENDER is challenging him to see how an already existent popularity can be more popular if, even the indecency or wrong that he did not commit or he was not part of how it came about, he becomes the one that addresses it.
What we mean by popularity becoming more popular? Yes. There are popularities but there is popularity. Many people have popularities that are not really popular. If the popularity of some people in recent past were that popular, they would not have required the extent of dolarisation they did against this nation to contest an election against an opponent – they still lost. Buhari’s popularity has been tested from 2003 through 2007 to 2011 and the fact that he was able to consistently garner 12 million votes under a government as hugely impunity-prone as the one on ground at those periods is certificate that the husband-of-Aisha’s popularity is undoubted. The proof of it all came with the huge unprecedented experience where the Nigeria’s politically “most hated” retired General, former Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces defeated the incumbency that embedded in Goodluck Jonathan and his Africa’s biggest party-led electoral offensives despite the dolarised approach to that election conduct and misuse of powers where the powers of State were deployed for no other but checkmating the opposition that All Progressives Congress (APC) represented. If it was not to be called impunity, how best to describe a situation where soldiers arrested a sitting governor in Odudu Akure, Ondo State capital because he left Rivers State to attend a governorship campaign in Ado Ekiti and nothing was seen as wrong with that? Yet, members of the party of the man in power passed by the scene of the arrest and they went to attend the governorship campaign of their own ruling party’s candidate. That is not the issue of moment.
BUT Your Excellency, President Muhammadu Buhari! Your popularity can be more popular if you can revisit the pardon that President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GCFR) Ph.D. did in 2013/2014 which saw Lieutenant General Oladipo Diya (GCON), who was the major (if not only) factor of the 1997 fathomed coup of General Sani Abacha era, pardoned along with Jonathan’s friend and “political godfather Dipereye Alamieyeseigha”, while people that even Oputa Panel revealed as knowing nothing about the coup other than they got to know about it at a point but failed to report were left out of the Jonathan pardon. Recall that Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who was pardoned and granted PDP presidential ticket to enable him contest the 1999 presidential election was also accused of getting to know about 1995 fathomed coup involving the Gwadabes, the Gabriel Ajayis with Lieutenant Ishaiya Bamaiyi also pointed as chief fathomer.
Some people called it the prerogative of the President to choose whom to be granted pardon or amnesty. If it was the prerogative of then President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan to do selective justice against the innocent thereby giving glorious honour to the “most guilty” like it is now seen today in how about 10 soldiers are providing security to General Diya – which is legal – while other General, Colonel and Lt. Colonel left out of the presidential favour and their families are sleeping and waking up sad, feeling dejected and almost unNigerian in a country that they served with all the hearts some of them from the Civil War era, President Muhammadu Buhari’s popularity can soar further to the state of being more popular if he can steal this show, in the spirit of his being a kindhearted leader, and grant pardon to those of 1997 coup allegation that Jonathan left out without any justifiable reason.
This is coming from The DEFENDER at a time the President has publicly said one of the reasons he cannot sack the PDP appointees in his APC Federal Government, despite their sabotage of his progress, is because they are first and foremost Nigerians before they are members of PDP. These General, Colonel and Lt. Colonel who are feeling dejected in their own country, no matter what they were said to have done which is nothing near what General Diya that has been enjoying his military protection and regular collection of his entitlements did, are first and foremost Nigerians before they are whatever is causing the inequity that even a government they so much supported with fervour reigned upon them.
The DEFENDER hereby calls on President Muhammadu Buhari to rise to this challenge and do the needful in the best interest of Nigeria and to the pride of his diehard supporters who have remained “unrepentant Buharists” in the eyes of those they described as elements of the Wailing Wailers Association of Nigeria.
This Editorial came about due to a push by a section of our readership community and we have no choice than to deliver it because we cannot afford to lose the confidence of our readership which may result from their seeing us as not being holistic in our pursuit of “…defending the truth and national integrity.” Even the affected people the injustice is done against may not be anywhere near knowing the pushers of this Editorial because they are miles apart: affected people were of PDP while the pushers are confirmed APC and “Buhari supporters”.
