This is not the ideal place to discuss this. My subject this week is a person more known to radio listeners across the land, up and down the Niger, especially the Hausa Fulani. He may be known all over as well, courtesy of the APC that made Buhari President and made many other politicians, reputed or deluded, more popular than they should actually be or, than what they actually are. Thanks to the last campaign.
Buba Galadima does not need any form of introduction. He has his place, already, in the public realm. But for the purpose of reminding the faithful and the hopeful of public good, he is a Nigerian politician of northern extract, a north-easterner from Yobe – mark the characterisation – has been an APC stalwart ab initio, and was part of the three-time Baba Buhari politicking that proved a failure. Many thanks to their types.
He worked so much for Buhari and the opposition by his mouth only – vocal, assertive, emphatic and categorical – especially on radio and that makes him a key, main person in the then realm. Nigerians in the North remember him as one of the then close allies of the President, one who was a key voice for the then opposition. And to be fair to the man, he did his job well, enticing and assuring the people.
In the fourth time, intraparty balances, thoroughness, checks and verification identified many of the Galadima’s type as the sellers of Buhari’s previous Campaign each last election. In fact sources within the house pointed to their types as the hidden hands of the ruling PDP that hijacked the progress of the opposition. The poor people know that was not just a deception of Buhari. It was one of the north, its poor people and the entire country.
This may be dismissed as mere political accusation. I wish the poor radio listeners in the North can read this, because they know it is true. Those who knew this right in hand are the denying elite who withheld and hid every information from the north’s ‘illiterate people’ in order to keep them in the lurk of ignorance and misjudgement.
But it is obvious that he ceased from the public media and public domain since this Government assumed office. It was so obvious that some said he went into exile, noting his notorious atrocities, mischief, misinformation, betrayal, insincerity and dishonesty.
Any man stripped of the values negated by those words is doomed and rendered useless even in their family. The only possible thing for him then was to slip into self-home-exile, and that was more honourable than anything he would have done, except death.
Of course in the fourth coming, Buhari was shielded from such hypocritical northern politicians by a southwest alliance of high rated politicians who outdid and will always do. So people like Galadima naturally had no place nor word to contribute to the election that brought us to point. Thanks to the Jagaba Tinubu and others who made it possible for the renewed democracy.
What triggers this discussion is the truth that the man is back to the scene and with a huge bang in his trade-mark vocals. In his recent BBC Hausa interview, the man is back but with more frustrations than he was in hiding, exhibiting shame, perambulating around the issues and swallowing, mincing some of his words.
First, it was clear that the man wants a comeback, yes, into active politics now that drums for the next campaign started to beat for long. But then as he hinted, he is too big to ask to join anyone’s campaign without invitation. He needed a ‘lullaby’ from someone, obviously referring to the person in context – the honourable politician ever – most unlikely for this kind of kidding. This is why I was agape that all the while Galadima has not been a student of the man he claims to know best.
If PMB has no need for him in the first instance, why would he now? Even if it is decided he would contest the coming election, does Buba think, PMB will find him relevant to play a role for a second coming? When I harvest some of politicians’ remarks on air, I still hear the same tone of the past, and Buba has not made the difference he needs for a possible pardon.
I thought that with his knowledge of the man and the marks he left on the landscape, Buba should be the first to know that PMB’s disposition is not that of compromise, and not compromise of anything about the past for that matter.
Second, Buba’s remarks and inference to the President lacked courtesy, and are not in any way near remorse. If there is anything, he likes a comeback with the President, it is Buba’s time and chance squandered on public media. In the stead of going on air, it was better he traded the short, clandestine way of making political courtship, through his now refined colleagues working with, or have the ear of, the President.
He chose to go through the public, instead, the best, robust constituency of the Presidency. Politicians of Buba’s genotype will hardly repent. They will ever think and act in their dreams of the past. When will it down on them that in passing the stage of the last transition into PMB’s two and more years regime, we have changed so much that, I keep, saying, the past will be a total thing of the past, and for good. And the bedrock of this change is the massive, rural poor, pheasants, all over the country. They made it possible and they in custody of the evidences.
They, only they, first detected the good in PMB’s economic policy while orthodox ideas replete all the public platforms to form an agenda against the Government’s ‘pragmatism’ in seeking ways for the poor. Orthodox economic policies are the very reasons for the impoverishment of the populace. They have seen it.
And when the President was silent amid the cacophony of voices tearing the waves apart, the poor was quiet and observant. The translation of the campaign against the new economic policy was the practical lessons in farming. For the last two years, our rural farmers were, for the first time ever, rich from sweats of their own handwork.
It is the first time, a farmer has a reasonable price for his bag of maize and proceeds from the sale of a bag is capable to sponsor a daughter’s marriage or pay the annual fees of a child in public school. It happened. It was felt. It was seen. But all orthodox thinkers denied the facts.
They kept denying even as they read this. They are still working on the old, cruel economic measures that will always make it best for the better and worsen things for the worse. But the needy met their needs, right there, before their own eyes, in their own environment, within their every economic reach.
In Buba’s own home, Gashua, most of the people – as you know of typical north’s people – are generally farmers, who cannot see any economical definition outside their frame of idea about wealth. Buba ought to find out from them if Buhari’s economic idea needs replacement. And if, by the next campaign, we are due to turmoil just for the sake of confusing the people in order to steal a mandate from them?
Buba and many of his north’s brother elite – and even some down the Niger – are the cruel and sad thing that happened to the nation. They are humans’ worst tragedy and Nigeria’s unfortunate gift to Africa. They never see any benefit in anything that works for the poor, because they had lifted themselves above the sea of poor heads – and out of the vicious cycle of needs and the needy.
But unfortunately, Buba Galadima and his type are not – and that is sad – even members of the evil elite that matter in the political economy of the nation. He has done so much to break into the main cycle but failed because of their high sense of deception and hypocrisy.
They have mastered the art so much that they can easily bit the hand that feeds them. They are ingrates to themselves, to the nation and to whoever helped them. They are the classical types of mean men who can do dirty things for you and do worse against you next time.
In a way, his anger and frustration is also a demonstration of the disappointment and betrayal of the former elite feeding Party and its key members who promised Buba and his types of heaven if they succeeded. They didn’t.
And now, they can’t blame them because they lost. And the only way to be angry is to venge it on the man and the party that won, who are no nonsense to abuse of public trust and lootery.
With Buhari more than two years in power, you should know that no intimidation or political outbursts of old times can shake his principle or give any of his precious values for anything. And that is why Buba’s most unfortunate situation is his lost of mind about the same man then out of power that is now in power. And he remains himself.
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