By Jude Ukachukwu
Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State has added an interesting dimension to the on-going 2015 election campaign by informing us that the great grand-mother of the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Alhaji Mohammadu Buhari hailed from Imo State. If Okorocha intended to score some political capital by that disclosure, he would have failed woefully. For nothing in Buhari’s track record points to the recognition, on his part, of any filial bonding with the Igbo race.
Rather, his utterances, policies and body language suggest either utter disdain for the Igbo race or at wholesale dismissal of the group. Perish the argument that, on two occasions, he picked Igbo candidates as his running mates. The Igbo race was not, and still cannot be fooled by that. Not even if his great grandmother indeed came from the cradle of Igbo land.
To put the Buhari-Igbo relationship in perspective, it is important to answer the question: What do the Igbo want from Nigeria?
The Igbo raison d’etre can be encapsulated within three broad considerations: First, the Igbo want a country in which relationships are underpinned by freedom, fairness, equity and justice. Second, being highly enterprising in the areas of commerce and industry, the Igbo desire a public policy environment that encourages competition and guarantees a level playing field for all.
Finally, as very highly mobile people, they crave for a socio-political order that will guarantee freedom of movement, freedom of association and citizenship rights wherever they find themselves.
Some Buhari apologists, intent on scoring a cheap political point, argue that he has not been put to test unlike Jonathan whose four years in office provides basis for assessing his suitability for re-election. Unfortunately, such a deception cannot stand. Buhari has a track record.
He was Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria between December 31, 1983 and August 27, 1985. Similarly, he was Chairman of the very strategic intervention agency, Presidential Task Force (on petroleum) PTF under the late General Sani Abacha. It is therefore pertinent to scrutinize how the Igbo fared under the general and to extract from him an explanation for the derogatory treatment the Igbo race was subjected to under his watch.
When Buhari overthrew the legitimate government of Shehu Shagari, he constituted a Supreme Military Council (SMC) that did not have a military officer of Igbo extraction. The outrage that greeted that impunity was so deafening that for once, people thought that Buhari was not aware that the civil war had ended. Can Buhari explain that glaring insensitivity to a race that had made tremendous sacrifices to the country if not the fact that to him, the Igbo race should be consigned to a beggarly status in Nigeria?
Still on the immediate post-coup dispensation, Buhari placed President Shehu Shagari, the man at whose desk the buck ended, under house arrest while the vice president, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, an Igbo man, was consigned to Buhari’s gulag at the Kirikiri Maximum Security Prison. But in a curious twist of fate, Buhari’s probe panel not only found Ekwueme clean, it returned the uncommon verdict that the former vice president left office a poorer man than when he started out.
In some countries, Buhari’s military junta would have promptly arranged to return power to the civilians with Ekwueme as president. He did not. Can candidate Buhari explain to the Igbo race why Ekwueme was treated with so underserved disdain and wickedness?
Let us now examine his key economic policies: the import license regime and price control. With the exception of the post civil war policy of General Yakubu Gowon that reduced every post war bank deposit of an Igbo person to twenty pounds, no other policy has done greater havoc to the Igbo business elite as Buhari’s import license policy and price control.
It was a simple policy: to import goods into the country, businessmen and women must obtain an import license from the ministry of commerce. As it turned out, award of import license was skewed heavily in favour of people in agbada, many of whom had neither any knowledge of importation or even a fixed address.
Left without any option but determined to keep their businesses going, groaning in pain Igbo traders paid heavily to purchase import licenses from middlemen of northern extraction. It is on record that by that singular act, Buhari swept many enterprising Igbo traders out of business. Pray, if Buhari does not think that the Igbo are daft would he glibly canvass for their vote without a formal apology for the extermination of the Igbo business class by his highly sectional and ill-conceived policies?
If the 80s were terrible for the Igbo under Buhari, the 90s were no better either. It was as if the former leader of the military junta was hell bent on making the word ‘marginalization’ a permanent lexicon in south east affairs. As head of the PTF, for large parts, the south east was denied the dizzying network of good roads and other infrastructure provided by the multi-billion naira agency in the north.
Up till today, Buhari is yet to provide a satisfactory answer to the lopsided provision of infrastructure against the south east or the almost complete exclusion of consultants from the zone from the list of those who handled plum jobs in the agency. By asking for their vote, is Buhari not inviting the Igbo to legitimize their oppression and further marginalisation?
As the leopard cannot change its spots, so it is that Buhari cannot change his disdain for the Igbo. By his utterances and unspoken words, by his actions while in government and public office Buhari has acquitted himself as an ethnic champion and a religious bigot. Evidence of the later can be deduced from his loud silence each time fundamentalists unleashed mayhem on Christians.
By being an advocate of Sharia nationwide, Buhari’s religious fundamentalism violates the constitutional freedom of religion and exposes the itinerant Igbo to the risk of discrimination and religious persecution (including decapitation of limbs) under a Buhari presidency. It has been suggested in some quarters that Buhari could have changed his views over time and would be reined in by the National Assembly. That is debatable. From our experience in this country, we now know that despotism can well thrive even in a democracy.
Let us face the fact. At 72, Buhari cannot change. Watch him closely: nothing in his utterances or body language suggests that we are not dealing with the same old discriminatory despot, who struck terror into all of us by his draconian decrees; who sent many to their untimely graves through massive retrenchment of workers, who micro-managed our lives by rationing of “essential commodities” and stifled Igbo business men and women by denying them access to the almighty import license.
It is to these people that Buhari owes an explanation in the countdown to February 14, 2015.
It will be a great surprise if he convinces them. That is why he will not get their votes. And that is why he will not be elected.
Ukachukwu, a retired civil servant, writes from Ikwuano, Abia State.
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