By: Cham Faliya Sharon
“Kukah to Nigerians: Reclaim the Nigeria we knew before Buhari”
Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah has never ever hidden his disdain and contempt for the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari and the APC. At any given occasion, especially during Christian festive seasons, he never ever misses the opportunity of wasting that opportunity to express his fictional thoughts on the administration in order to tar it in the image and likeness of his fictional thoughts instead of utilizing those opportunities to implore and redeem his listeners from the darkness that has engulfed them due to the failure, or refusal, of many clerics in Nigeria to live up to their calling of reconciling mankind with God.
In a nation so famished of truth and honesty even in ecclesiastical quarters, Bishop Kukah fancies being labelled by a section of the press and public commentators as one who “speaks truth to power” even when the so called truths are usually a mere repetition of concocted tales, always elegantly presented with such gusto that makes them appear compellingly truthful, especially when the concoctioners and expressers of the concoctions do so in ecclesiastical gowns. You know, people mostly rever persons that are always dressed in clerical robes because they look on them as symbols of purity, integrity and truthfulness but, which, unfortunately, it is not often the case since, historically, all manner of characters have gotten to dressing themselves up in such robes, which explains the dictum that says the hood does not make the monk. In fact, if you watch Mafia movies and other crime action movies, you wouldn’t miss scenes where hit men often dress and disguise like clerics in order to execute certain hit jobs, sometimes even in cathedrals.
In another barefaced tirade, which he labelled as his Easter 2023 message to Nigerians, and which could rank as one of his most ridiculous tirades always aimed at delegitimizing the Buhari administration, Bishop Kukah is now calling on Nigerians to reclaim the Nigeria they knew before Buhari became President, which made me shudder and shiver as memories of thick plumes of smoke, occasioned by regular bomb blasts in Abuja, Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Zaria, Gombe, Alkaleri, Bajoga, Yola, Mubi, Damaturu, Maiduguri, Potiskum, Lokoja, Okenne, etc, flooded my mind. It also made me recall how people were always scared of walking near any unattended bag in fear of IEDs that were probably primed by “suicide bombers” to blow off hundreds of people in public places!
Maybe the reign of palpable fear, agony, and total bedlam that pervaded Nigeria prior to May 29, 2015 always gave Bishop Kukah intense pleasure, which could be why he now wants us back to when he has to be scanned for explosives by his church’s security unit before entering the church building at any given time. Not only that, the Nigeria before Buhari, which Kukah wants Nigerians to reclaim was the same Nigeria in which “Fulani Herdsmen” were in constant bloody rampage in Benue, Plateau, Taraba, and Kogi states, including parts of Kaduna State – his homestate. Mass abductions, kidnappings, and armed robberies were also the order of the day across the country, with bandits taking total control of Birnin Gwari forests in Kaduna State, where they were always receiving supplies with helicopters.
In 2013 through to 2014, the Emir of Birnin Gwari has been reported several times in the media talking about these heavily armed bandits and their helicopters, and calling for help from the federal government to send in troops to take charge of the forests and dislodge them, calls which always fell on deaf ears, and which only points to one fact: that the booby traps meant to undermine the security and territorial integrity of Nigeria has already been carefully put in place by certain vested interests in collaboration with public officials who would rather loot and share funds meant for the procurement of arms among themselves long before Buhari became President in 2015.
But when you meet garrulous rabble rousers like Bishop Kukah today, they might even swear by their cassocks that banditry and “Fulani Herdsmen” attacks only started after Buhari became President, as part of their carefully woven scheme to undermine his popularity and deligitimize his administration, perhaps, for the “offence” of lawfully overthrowing the PDP kleptocracy that probably served them well while the entire nation bled profusely on all fronts. At that time, even cities like Mubi were captured by insurgents, with several other Local Government Areas in the Northeast also captured from the Federal Republic of Nigeria by them. Eventually, more than 2 million Nigerians became refugees in Niger Republic, Chad, and Cameroon, with several Emirs in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states also fleeing their towns and thrones.
It was after Buhari became President and began investing heavily in military procurements that our troops began gaining the necessary military muscle, which turned the tide of the war, and the rehabilitation process of the Northeast commenced in earnest. Maybe Bishop Kukah has been missing all the news reports of the steady return of refugees from those neighbouring countries back to their homes, and he may have also missed the news that those Emirs who fled in 2014 have returned to their thrones – some in 2016 while some returned as recent as 2021. Kukah may have also missed the massive infrastructural projects, including hundreds of houses, already built by the Buhari administration to rehabilitate those returning refugees. And for the first time in over 10 years, a lot of markets, schools, roads, and worship places in Borno and Yobe states have been reopened for public use. So, which Nigeria before Buhari is Kukah talking about?
Actually, it is even so nauseating that anyone could use any platform or some kind of bully pulpit to say that Nigeria has not made any progress under the Buhari administration, so much that they could even claim to be asking Nigerians to reclaim their country and turn it in the way it was before Buhari became President on the 29th of May 2015. But if we are to toe that line of ridiculousness, sane Nigerians are bound to also ridicule them with the following posers: If Nigeria were to be “reclaimed” and turned the way it was before Buhari became President, how do we undo the salvation Buhari brought to federal and state government workers who were being owed up to 14 months wages when crude oil was selling at around $120 per barrel, but whom he (Buhari) bailed out when oil was at $27 per barrel?
Do we also have to undo the 58 fertilizer blending plants built under the Buhari administration within just 6 years, considering that before May 29, 2015, there were only 4 fertilizer blending plants in all of Nigeria? How about the 62 rice mills built within the same period of the Buhari administration, considering that there were just 8 such mills existing throughout Nigeria by May 2015? Does Kukah and his co-travellers want us to dismantle them, including the tens of thousands of jobs gained from them, so that we can be the way we were before Buhari became President? By media accounts, over 2,000 factories closed down in Nigeria between 1999 and 2015, resulting in massive job losses to the tune of millions, which laid the foundation for Nigeria’s high poverty rate. So, is that the Nigeria Kukah is missing and desperately yearning for – the kind that was a net importer of rice and other edibles that can be grown here, but which preferred to make foreign farmers wealthy while ours remained paupers?
How do we also undo the 8,352.94 kilometres of roads built by the Buhari administration across Nigeria within 7 years (as at October 2022), which created 339,955 jobs in the road construction sector? The figure has even grown bigger because since then till now, there are additional kilometres currently being built, but do we now get hold of bulldozers and destroy them so that we can be like the Nigeria Bishop Kukah wants prior to May 2015? Apparently, he loves it that only 800km of roads were built in all of the 16 years of the PDP, isn’t it? Which goes to say, we also have to undo the Second Niger Bridge, the Loko – Oweto Bridge, and several other bridges, including the railways and deep seaports built by the Buhari administration, right?
I am also wondering how we are going to undo the record-breaking thousands of mass housing projects done by the Buhari administration in all the 36 states plus the FCT, which also created a big boom in construction jobs and sales of construction materials in order to meet Bishop Kukah’s Talibanistic standard of development! Are we to also call in the bulldozers for that, or to revive “Boko Haram” and have them blow them off with IEDs? Well, in Kukah’s recent Easter diatribe, which is what is under reference in this piece, he half-heartedly acknowledged the progress made in infrastructural development by the Buhari administration but quickly sought to undermine the achievements by quipping that all the talks about dividends of democracy are mere “cheap talk” and that we must first be kept alive “because only the living can enjoy infrastructure.”
In other words, Kukah wants us to forget – or he may have actually thought that we have forgotten – that during his favourite era, which he wants us to go back to, we neither had any infrastructural developments going on while we were also being killed like flies, either by car bombs or by “suicide bombers” in motor parks, markets, mosques, churches, shopping malls, schools, offices, and even in military barracks. There was no infrastructure, and there was no security. In fact, contrary to the untiring efforts of revisionists like Kukah to rewrite Nigeria’s history with their fictional narratives, Nigeria was more insecure before Buhari became President – it was so insecure such that even the Police Force Headquarters and the DSS Headquarters, which were all within the range of 500 metres from the Presidential Villa in Abuja, were attacked by “Boko Haram” and Buhari himself escaped by the whiskers from being blown to pieces in Kaduna in 2014 when he was a candidate for the 2015 presidential election.
The more I think of Kukah’s bizarre claims and demands the more I recall how in 2014 our soldiers were running away from fighting “Boko Haram” and then escaping to Cameroon for LACK OF BULLETS, which falls into the kind of era Bishop Kukah wants us to reclaim. But then, seeing how the Buhari administration has broken all Nigerian records in arming the country’s military, which runs contrary to Kukah’s favourite era of arms funds bazaar among corrupt elected public officials and their non-elected collaborators, it is easy to figure out why Bishop Kukah is yearning for that inglorious past. He isn’t interested in the security of Nigeria just as much as he isn’t interested in the country having any solution to its socioeconomic challenges, otherwise he wouldn’t have been travelling to Washington D.C to twist Nigeria’s internal crisis in religious terms before US Congressmen and other cabinet officials, with the intention of lobbying them not to approve arms sales to the Buhari administration, which is even treasonable if we care to look at it exhaustively.
By going overseas to blackmail your country with one-sided (and usually fictional) narratives just because you hate the administration in power, and also because you don’t want arms sold to it to quell the insecurity which you always use as a propaganda tool against it, isn’t this then sufficient proof that you don’t actually want the situation to end so that you can continue playing the game of victimhood and propaganda just so that you can deligitimize the administration’s power and authority on behalf of the vested political interests you are working for? Which citizens of any country go on foreign campaigns against arms sales to their own countries in times of great crisis if not treasonable, subversive elements?
We thank God’s goodness that the western nations where Kukah and his ilk often go to “report” Buhari’s administration over their concocted tales of “religious genocide” in Nigeria appear to have an excellent understanding of what the true narrative is in Nigeria, for they have chosen to continue to do legitimate arms deals with the administration, which has helped a great deal in restoring the prestige and capacity of our military to counter any domestic or external threat. We have suffered badly as a nation from the mischief of our country’s internal traducers, but we are now seeing the investments done in our military establishment by the Buhari administration yielding great results, and that’s why we can confidently tell the likes of Kukah today that, yes, we are making giant strides in infrastructural development in the same way that we are no longer being killed like flies as it was during the era when we had neither infrastructure nor security.
Finally, while in just under 2 months, President Muhammadu Buhari will end his remarkably successful 8-year tenure and rest from the acerbic bigotry and hypocrisy of Kukah and his colleagues in his field, it is important to state that I foresee a pretty ignoble future for Kukah, and that’s because I know that he will continue his hateful lies and bigotry against the incoming administration of Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu due to the fact that Tinubu shares the same Islamic faith with Buhari, and I am acutely mindful of the great possibility that Tinubu’s media team and administration entirely will not give this unrepentant rabble rouser the comfort of silence and non-rebuttal he has been enjoying from Buhari’s administration.
It is on record that Kukah has been the chief defender of the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan administration and the Obasanjo administration in spite of the fact that those administrations were the benchmark of Nigeria’s descent into backwardness in all indices of development, as highlited in this piece. The only reason why he was their mouthpiece of defence was their religion. He lacks the strength of moral character to attribute Nigeria’s backwardness to them because he shares the same religion with them, and in the same deficiency of moral character, he lampoons President Muhammadu Buhari at any given opportunity and refuses to acknowledge the remarkable successes he has made in pulling the country out of the abyss Obasanjo and Jonathan plunged her into because he does not share the same religion with him.
For this reason, the incoming Tinubu/Shettima administration should get adequately prepared. Facts should be facts, and they should always be presented with ferocious vehemence against subversive persons who love the limelight, and who will always want to subvert the narration of success with their fiction of failure because they think the world owes them subservience to their primitive whims.
Follow me on Twitter @ChamSharon
