Tag: Jibrin

By now, Nnamdi Kanu, the fugitive impostor who owns the ‘Jibrin’ patent must be giggling with pride over the unexpected success of the laughable and absolutely diversionary narrative. It is, to say the least, shocking that a silly story that was told by a self-seeking pseudo ideologue from the cozy comfort of a foreign land did not only spread like wildfire but has also become a subject for national discourse to the point that the target of the dubious news, President Muhammadu Buhari, had to announce, in tenses dripping with frustration, that he is still alive and not a cloned image of a Buhari that was said to have died in a London hospital months ago. See, the more I try to understand how and when we became this petty, the more ludicrous it becomes. It is even worse when those I had taught should be wiser and more discerning due to the level of their experience begin to display incredulous gullibility in their belief in the moonlight tale that one Jibrin from Sudan now occupies Nigeria’s seat of power being a perfect-fit, cloned version of our ‘late’ President. That, in a nutshell, is the new sleaze in town and quite a number of dumb people will swear on their ancestral graves that nothing could be farther from the truth!

You ask how and when we started treading this path and I will tell you we have always been like this since we allow the double-edged sword of ethnic and religious bigotry to control our sense of reasoning. When you add that to the steaming hatred some categories of Nigerians have for the Buhari Presidency, you would understand why commonsense sense has taken a flight from our lexicon of political discourse. And so, a man whose escape from administrative bail from our shores to Israel would have a brainwave and dish out some illogic of a cloned Buhari and reasonable citizens would help in its propagation? Unreal as that sounds, it is the reality that confronts us today in Nigeria. And to tell you how serious it is, the jejune theory has been extended to the stable of the former Governor of Abia State, Dr. Orji Kalu, who was alleged to have died in a Wiesbaden hospital in Germany after undergoing a surgery while one George from The Gambia now parades himself as Kalu. Funny? No. It can’t be funny when the wild rumour gained fervent momentum such that the state’s Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress, Ben Godson, had to issue a rebuttal, pointing out, among many other things, that it amounts to wickedness to wish the living dead in the name of playing politics Kalu, he noted, is not only alive but he is also getting set to win the Senatorial seat on the platform of the APC for Abia North district. But I digress.

Back to Buhari, even after he had made it clear at a resent interactive session with Nigerians living in Poland, that there was no Jibrin al-Sudaniya in his physical body and spirit, the tasteless, callous joke of death and cloning is yet to abate. Listen to him: “It’s real me, I assure you. I will soon celebrate my 76th birthday and I will still go strong. A lot of people hoped that I died during my ill health. Some even reached out to the Vice President to consider them to be his deputy because they assumed I was dead. That embarrassed him a lot and, of course, he visited me when I was in London convalescing. It’s real me; I assure you.”

To those who think the narrative provides an opportunity to gain political mileage, Buhari’s assurance counts for nothing. They, the same person who paraded his death certificate on the social media, would gingerly tell you that the President was not anywhere near the venue of the Paris Peace Forum where he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow world leaders in November. At that forum, Jibrin it was that demanded stringent actions from the gathering against perpetrators of illicit financial flows which must include a determination to crack down on safe havens for slush funds in billions of dollars from Nigeria and other Africa country. It was Jibrin, not Buhari that accused the Nigerian elite of tolerating the fall in standards of education for years with a shoe string allocation that can barely buy the needed tools, pay salaries or construct befitting structures for learning. This Jibrin must be conversant with our political temperament that he advised these Nigerians living in the diaspora to forget the thought of participating in the 2019 general elections because we are yet to get to that sophisticated level. Jibrin! Oh, Jibrin!!

It is depressing that otherwise educated persons could easily buy the Jibrin scam such that Buhari’s assurance didn’t sway their twisted minds to, at least, appraise the truth. That being the case, the only rational alternative is for us to expand the Jibrin scam to its ridiculous low. On this matter, Jibrin has become a metaphor for all that is wrong with our national psyche and personal fixation to self-destruct. We loathe the truth while we embrace fantasy or any semblance of it. Buhari’s greatest personal flaw in a society that is used to window-dressing is his stubborn commitment to saying it as it is. Those who want him dead can’t wait to ‘kill’ him before God’s appointed time. Therefore, telling them he is alive is sheer waste of time. To them, he is dead and Jibrin from Sudan is in charge, foisted on the nation by the powerful hawks that surrounded him. I just laugh.

Yet, Buhari is not the first Jibrin in our national consciousness. Some years back, at the height of the sickness of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua, the rumour mill was abuzz with news of his death whilst a powerful cabal allegedly hid body so that they could govern the country by proxy. This wicked twist of the tale lasted for months until the then ailing President was flown back from Saudi Arabia and his eventual demise was made official. It was that bad that Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, as he then was, was allegedly fenced from seeing his ailing boss throughout the period by these powerful ‘Jibrins’ hovering round the corridors of power.

These ‘Jibrins’, I want to assume, must be behind former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s earlier belief that nothing good can ever come out the pouch of his then deputy and current presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. In those perilous and better-forgotten days of political antagonism between these two strange bedfellows, Obasanjo had described Atiku, among many other things, as someone with a “propensity for corruption, tendency for disloyalty, inability to say the truth, propensity for poor judgment, believe and reliance on marabouts, lacks transparency, trust in money to buy his way, always ready to sacrifice morality and integrity, willing to sacrifice truth and propriety, proclivity to national interest for selfish interest and someone with a parental background that is somewhat shadowy.” As they say in my side of the hood, wetin come remain na? Obasanjo has said it all. So it seems.

That was then. Today, things have changed. The good news is that the Atiku of that era has died with the times. The one Obasanjo had adopted as his candidate in the forthcoming presidential election is the new Atiku, the Jibrin that is not only squeaky clean but who can never be wrong. This new Atiku-Jibrin now sits with Obasanjo to strategise on how to inflict the meanest political defeat on Buhari in the 2019 elections.

This, I want to also assume, also explains the reason why some of the persons who have been publicly indicted for one form of corruption or the other have suddenly shot into our political space again, vowing to send the cloned Jibrin in Aso Rock back to Sudan or Daura as the case may be. However, the difference is that these cloned versions in the opposition party are better criminals when compared to the one that was brought from the dead in London to impersonate Buhari. They, a coterie of ‘Jibrins’, have got their mojo back and they would not relent until they fix the new ‘Jibrin’ Atiku where he rightfully belongs——the presidential villa.

Indeed, we live in interesting times where different versions of Jibrins have begun to show their real colours like that clown in Abeokuta who has been ranting about working against his party’s gubernatorial candidate even while holding on to the same party’s senatorial ticket. Talk about pissing inside your own bedroom with your eyes wide open and that state chief executive fits the bill like a sore wound on the buttocks. Is that not what you get when you have a conclave of delusional people holding an abused nation by its dangling testicles?