My Yoruba people say, Ilé àiyé ilé asan, which translates into “The world is a transient/empty dwelling.”
In this column, we have done our best to drum it into the ears of African mis-rulers that power is transient and everything in the world is just vanity. We have advised them to spend their time in office serving their people, as that would be the best possible legacy.
Cocooned in their presidential palaces and detached from reality, they did not listen to us.
Surrounded by the pomp, the pageantry, and the shiny appurtenances of their office, African misrulers regard themselves as the Alpha and the Omega, with humility banished from their hearts.
That is, until the cold hands of death snatch them as it will all living things, as Biology 101 dictates.
So, Nigeria’s former stern, aloof, Muscular Dictator, the one with zero emotional intelligence, Muhammadu Buhari, died in faraway London and returned to the country he abused as a corpse. He has been buried.
May Allah forgive him his many sins! And there were many!
A video of him asking Nigerians to pardon him went viral. The question should be asked what he was thinking when he recklessly ran roughshod over his fellow compatriots and fellow humans in violation of the religion he made a song and dance about following – Islam.
So, once again, Nigeria mourns another “Great Leader.” State flags are lowered. The Federal government declared a public holiday in addition to seven days of mourning. President Tinubu led government officials in mourning suits and somber faces while giving television interviews about the “towering legacy” of a man whose most significant contribution to the country was to pack his citizens into sacks of misery.
The spectral figure of Muhammadu Buhari, who, after turning Nigeria into a graveyard of hopes, died in London, not in Daura, his hometown, or Katsina, his state of origin, or even Lagos, the former capital, but in the land of the same colonialists he spent his life pretending to hate.
We are asked to mourn. We are told to forgive. We are warned not to speak ill of the dead. But what happens when the dead did no good deed for the living? What do we do when the corpse in question left millions of Nigerians poorer, hungrier, and more broken than he found them?
Are we to join the hypocrites in mourning the destruction of our future?
No, not while the people who ruined Africa return as cargo. We are not in the business of playing the hypocrite.
Let’s imagine this tragicomic scene: Nigeria, the so-called “Giant of Africa,” has three former presidents in London at the same time – one dead, one receiving “treatment,” and the other there to “grieve” the deceased colleague. You can’t make this up. It’s not a scene from a B-rated Nollywood farce. This is a real-life indictment of our post-colonial tragedy. These men spent decades in power, controlled hundreds of billions of petrodollars, and could not leave behind a functioning hospital capable of handling their retirement afflictions.
And for them, we are asked to rent our garments in mourning.
After 65 years of nominal independence, Nigerian rulers have not built the most basic institutions necessary to sustain human life. And then, when their diseased bodies finally rebel against the cruelty they meted out to their fellow citizens, they flee to the West like rats escaping a sinking ship. Only this time, they do not return as saviors. They return as corpses in cargo holds.
When would African plantation supervisors masquerading as presidents begin to learn lessons?
Let’s name names. Here are five Nigerian officials who died abroad while Nigeria rotted under their watch:
Umaru Musa Yar’Adua – Died in 2010 after receiving treatment in Saudi Arabia – a sitting president, unable to access adequate care in his own country. Abba Kyari – Chief of Staff to Buhari, died in 2020 in a Lagos hospital—yes, but only after seeking initial treatment in Europe. His death from COVID-19 laid bare the collapse of Nigeria’s health infrastructure. Ibrahim Dasuki – Former Sultan of Sokoto and NSA, died in Abuja, but spent significant time receiving care in London. Michael Okpara, Premier of Eastern Nigeria, died in London in 1984, after Nigeria had already been exporting crude oil for decades. Alex Ekwueme – Former Vice President, died in a London hospital in 2017—a “grateful nation” paid for his flight abroad with no ICU for its leaders.
And now, Buhari has joined them – forever remembered as a man who pauperized Nigeria and then died in a hospital, paid for with the taxes of the people he spent his life brutalizing.
So what exactly are we supposed to mourn? Is it the fact that the same man who told his people to “tighten their belts” was flying around the world receiving medical care on taxpayer funds?
Is it the man who spent over 200 days in London between 2016 and 2022 receiving medical treatment while Nigerian doctors were on strike, unpaid, and unappreciated?
Are we to shed tears for a ruler under whose rule thousands, if not millions, of Nigeria’s brightest brains left the country in frustration? It is possible that some Nigerian emigre doctors were among the team that attended to Buhari.
Should we shed tears for a man whose tenure ended with Nigerians buying their currency at black market rates?
Or should we mourn the fact that Buhari’s rule left the 200 or so million Nigerians in multidimensional poverty, with inflation galloping while public institutions withered?
Perhaps we should list some of Buhari’s most egregious sins, lest posterity mistake silence for forgiveness:
1. Fuel Subsidy Fraud and Confusion: After building his campaign on removing subsidy “fraud,” he kept it in place, clandestinely funneled billions to cronies, and left it for the next government to clean up.
2. Nepotism Elevated to State Policy: Buhari brazenly filled key government positions with his northern kinsmen, violating federal character principles and fanning ethnic distrust like dry bushfire.
3. Total Collapse of the Naira: Under Buhari, the Naira crashed from ₦199/$1 to over ₦750/$1 (official) and over ₦1000/$1 on the black market. Nigerians were forced to buy their currency at one point!
4. Mass Youth Unemployment: During his rule, youth unemployment rose to over 42%, creating a hopeless, volatile population ripe for crime, migration, and madness.
5. Police Brutality and #EndSARS: Buhari’s silence and contempt during the #EndSARS protests showed his disdain for the youth. His regime spilled the blood of unarmed protesters—Lagos will not forget.
6. Medical Apartheid: He spent millions of dollars flying abroad for treatment while underfunding Nigerian hospitals, allowing doctors to emigrate in droves, and leaving ordinary citizens to die in dingy corridors.
So who, in their right mind, declared a public holiday for this man? A nation on life support took a day off to mourn its executioner.
Is there any greater madness?
With Buhari, what, exactly, are we honoring? That he lived long enough to bankrupt us? That he pretended to fight corruption while surrounding himself with world-class thieves.
That he ruled like a ghost, rarely seen, barely heard, and utterly detached from the everyday suffering of his people?
Buhari treated Nigerians with disdain and contempt.
Weep not for Buhari, fellow Nigerians. Weep for yourselves. For your hospitals that lack gloves. For your doctors earning ₦80,000 a month. For your schools without roofs. For your youth wasting away in Europe’s oceans and deserts. For the insult of being led by men who trust the West more than their people.
The question is no longer, “Who bewitched us?” The question is: When will we snap out of this collective psychosis and stop glorifying the men who ruined us?
It is not “un-African” to tell the truth about the dead. It is un-African to glorify betrayal and misrule. Those who remember our traditions will know that our ancestors did not sing praise songs for thieves. During festivals, they shamed them, ostracized them, sometimes even cursed their lineages.
Let us therefore say it loudly: Buhari failed. Catastrophically. Monumentally. And history must record it as such.
There is a lesson here, if only Africa’s mis-rulers would care to learn.
The Chinese, once colonized, now dominate global manufacturing and technological production. Why? Because they believed in themselves. They invested in their brains, built cities, and trusted their engineers and scientists.
The Iranians, under brutal sanctions and isolation, have built world-class universities, medical centers, even weapons systems that make even the Pentagon shiver with fright – all homegrown. They do not fly to Switzerland to die in peace. They live and die in the land that birthed them.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, we are building churches and mosques on every street corner while the elite, including the charlatans in priestly cassocks who pretend to speak to the gods on our behalf, fly first-class to hospitals in countries that mock us behind closed doors.
When will the plantation supervisors, whom we call presidents, realize that they are neither god nor king; they are public servants who were handed a chance to uplift their people and failed miserably.
To them, we say, stop worshiping the West or anybody and start investing in your people. Build hospitals for yours, the woman selling tomatoes, the boy hawking gala in Lagos traffic, and the teacher earning peanuts.
Your compatriots deserve the same service you ran abroad to obtain. They deserve leaders who live and die in the same land they ruined or redeemed.
African leaders: Try to develop national pride. Learn from China, Iran, and even Cuba, or wherever. Educate your people. Feed and provide them with quality health services. Put them to work and together build your nation. Do these things and stop dying abroad while demanding praise from those you impoverished.
History will be most unkind to those misruling our continent. We continue to write to urge them to change their hearts and rewrite their legacies. They can keep pretending but must remember this: the day will come when even the cargo planes will refuse their corspse.
No, this True Born African is shedding no tears for Buhari, a malevolent and implacable ethnocentric tyrant. Buhari did not hide the fact that he was a Fulani, and not a Nigerian leader. He did nothing to foster the unity of the country that is being forced to pay him undeserved homage.
Femi’s Dictum: “Africa will be free the day it stops worshipping the men who destroyed it.”
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Polemicist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Chronicler of collapsing empires.)
My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!
I am an unapologetic Pan-Africanist who is unconditionally opposed to any form or manifestation of racism, fascism, and discrimination.
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