By Prof Farooq Kperogi
Scores of people send me email and Facebook messages every week to say that although I give expression to the anxieties and frustrations they feel about Buhari and his government, they can’t risk “liking” or commenting approvingly of my columns on Facebook, lest they be labeled "infidels" or even killed. And smearing Buhari critics with intentional, libelous falsehoods is now a religious duty.
I don’t recall any moment in Nigeria's history when a political leader was ever deified and worshipped with as much fervor and religious excitation as we’re seeing now. Even otherwise intelligent people stand in worshipful awe before Buhari and lose their basic reasoning capacities when he is criticized.
A northern Nigerian university teacher whom I used to consider a friend and who loved the choice adjectives I used to criticize Jonathan instinctually exclaimed “subhanallah!” when I expressed a critical opinion about Buhari. You would think I blasphemed God.
On September 23, Presidential spokesman Femi Adesina took the godification of Buhari to a whole new level when he told reporters in New York that if Buhari’s critics “mistakenly get into heaven, they will complain about God.” An exceptionally smart Nigerian medical doctor, whose name I will conceal for now because I don’t have his permission to reveal it, captured Adesina’s deification of Buhari this way:
“We apparently live in a time of perfect big men and their highly-inspired spokespersons,” he wrote on my Facebook timeline in response to my column on Nasiru El-Rufai.
“Femi Adesina was so eager to present his boss as unchallengeable that he uttered a string of attenuated Kano market blasphemies:
1. that people who criticise his boss persistently could also criticise God (which therefore places his boss in divine territory),
2. that those who persistently criticise his boss will ordinarily not get to heaven (a declaration that only God can make),
3. that some undeserving persons may get into heaven by ‘mistake’ (a divine mistake is surely unheard of in our God-fearing nation).”
By Prof Farooq Kperogi
Comments
Post a Comment