KENNEDY EMETULU: BECAUSE HE IS FULANI

The problem with us is that we do not appreciate history. That is why we keep making the same mistakes, turning in a circle. That is why 2014 sometimes looks like 1966. 

I’ve been seeing excerpts of Ben Gbulie’s Five Majors making the rounds. Coincidentally, I read that book two weeks before the Buhari’s coup. 

I can say it is one of several books by Nigerians and informed foreigners that have aided my understanding of the military establishment and the leadership at the time. 

When men like Ben Gbulie and other Southerners with superior qualifications were spending two years at the prestigious Sandhurst to be commissioned officers, Buhari and his Northern brothers were spending less than six months in Aldershot to attain the same thing and on return they were having accelerated promotions ahead of their Southern counterparts for no other reason than that they were Fulani or Hausa. 

Buhari’s certificate saga is making people go back to their history to see the horrible things they thought they had left behind stare them back in their face from our contemporary national pages. 

When a young university graduate who’s pounded the streets for three years without a job reads that Buhari joined the army with a letter from his secondary school principal and in a few months became an officer, what is he to think? 

Would we be telling him this was years ago when we know that this still obtains today in the same Nigeria under which we all claim equal citizenship?
 
It is precisely for these reasons we have been clamouring for a genuine National Conference, so we can sit down and discuss the basis of our unity as a country and fashion a fairer way forward for everybody of any ethnic nationality within one nation. 

We know that there are people Nigeria has invested in, but who have used that investment against Nigeria and other ethnic groups but their own. 

We see these people running things and treating other Nigerians like second-class citizens. Buhari belongs to that class. 

We saw it when he was head of state in the way he humiliated Southern leaders and we’ve seen it since he left office in the way he championed divisive Northern causes against the rest of Nigeria. 

For a long time now, he has effectively been the political spokesperson of Boko Haram. He had declared to us that an attack against Boko Haram is an attack against the North; he has attacked the Nigerian Army for defending the nation against their threat, yet he’s been the one shouting loudest against President Jonathan over insecurity.
 
President Goodluck Jonathan has superintended a National Conference, the first of its kind without any underhanded political agenda and whose result we’re pleasantly looking forward to begin to implement in the near future. Is that not how modern nations develop? 

But what are we hearing from Buhari? Nothing on the National Question, just a cold, calculated desire to implement Sharia all over Nigeria! 

The Buhari who joined the army on the strength of a mere note from his principal because he’s Fulani, the Buhari that was promoted ahead of his more brilliant and more qualified mates and who was and still is a beneficiary of the dark history of the Civil War and the unjust, corrupt and unfair quota system forcefully put in place by him and his forebears wants to lead our new nation with new dreams. 

With Arab money, money stolen by his associates from states’ coffers nationwide and foreign spin-doctors earning their dollars, they are turning the ordinarily visionary young people of our country into robots maniacally chanting his name, ready, able and willing to deliver Nigeria to him without a thought as to what happens thereafter! 

They have worked themselves into a frenzy of hate against Jonathan in their blind love for Buhari and the fairytales he’s coated in. 

The die is cast! We can smell the burning flesh already, can’t we? Good! Let’s just keep in mind that the victims of history are not those who lived or didn’t live it, but those who refuse to learn its lessons. 

A word is enough for the patriot.