Date: 2017-09-04

When he settles down to write his memoirs, President Muhammadu Buhari may wish to title it after the blockbusting movie, 'Sleeping with the Enemy'! The president has truly been sleeping and dining with enemies since he assumed the presidency in 2015. It is, indeed, an irony that a well-intentioned president could have the misfortune of being surrounded by serpents, hyenas and jackals. Somehow, the vampires have provided revealing materials to justify an eye-catching title!

President Buhari will not be the first leader to sleep and dine with the enemy. What distinguishes him, however, is that unlike others, he is alive to tell the story. Central to the story is that the president's improved health and his return to his post has been the worst nightmare for pathological thieves and traitors whom the president has been sleeping and dining with! In a way, the hatred that enemies have for the president will increase and Nigerians will do well to brace for more open display of defiance by those the president assumed were partners in progress.

It is now clear that Nigerians who said the Buhari/Osinbajo administration has been sleeping with the enemy were not unduly hysterical. Since the 2015 conspiracy that threw up the current leadership at the National Assembly, the Senate has constituted itself into an opposition-controlled chamber where members of the president’s party have consistently displayed an incurable, though not an entirely surprising disdain, for the administration’s anti-corruption campaign. As a mark of their pliancy, some senators even attempted to replace Vice President Yemi Osinbajo with their blindly desperate and controversy-ridden leader when the president was undergoing medical treatment in London!

The effort to get the administration's leading lights out of the way has been taken to unlikely places. Tongues waggled uncontrollably few months back when a photo of a baleful and bile-filled Senator Bukola Saraki, with a barely-concealed, contemptuous scowl in the direction of President Buhari, went viral. If Nigerians needed further proof, the photo was yet another that the Buhari/Osinbajo administration has been sleeping with the enemy! In a society where conspiracy theories thrive, some Nigerians even linked Senator Saraki’s inexplicably disdainful scowl with President Buhari's sickness! As well as being a wake-up call, Senator Saraki's disdainful scowl is a warning shot and whoever captured the scene deserves commendation. Nigerians have cause to be suspicious because many readily admit that whoever disgraced his doting father in the name of politics, as happened ahead of the 2011 general elections will gladly sell someone else's father for a bowl of porridge! Nigerians cannot tire from reminding themselves that the Senate president hatched the worst form of conspiracy when he made life impossible for Dr. Abubakar Olusola Saraki, Wazirin Ilorin, a situation some insist hastened the passage of the much-loved politician.

It was natural for Senator Saraki's inexplicable and despicable scowl to set tongues wagging. Had a similar photo of Defence Minister, General Iliya Danjuma Bisalla, been acted upon in 1976, chances are the bloody military coup that claimed the life of Head of State, General Murtala Ramat Muhammad, would have been squelched! Sadly, General I.D Bisalla's give-away scowl went ‘viral’ after the deed had been done! Whoever captured Dr. Saraki's scowl might have saved the nation another high-profile conspiracy.

It is instructive that Dr. Saraki's scowl was captured inside a mosque; that of General Bisalla was at a meeting of the ruling Supreme Military Council! But, for freewheeling coup leader, Colonel Bukar Suka Dimka, director of the Physical Training Corps of the Nigerian Army who fingered 'sponsors' of the botched coup to include General Bisalla and General Murtala's predecessor, General Yakubu Gowon, chances are the Bisalla give-away photograph would never have been made public. It was the same Bisalla who, as mourner-in-chief, was at the head of the federal government delegation to burial of the slain head of state!

Senator Saraki's barely-concealed mean scowl is a signal for Nigerians with the faintest idea of the February, 1976, Dimka conspiracy to be more vigilant! Just like renegade General Bisalla who did not have to verbalise his disdain for then Head of State, General Muhammad, the famed Bukola Saraki scowl goes beyond the surface and could only be translated to be the expression of his deep-seated disdain for the administration’s anti-corruption war. To dubious and dishonest Nigerians who have corruption cases hanging on their necks, among them a sizeable number of senators, the anti-corruption campaign is a foreboding noose dangling overhead.

As Nigerians have come to realise, dishonest people in the public and private spheres who joined the Buhari/Osinbajo train, in the belief that their crimes will be swept under the carpet, are now up in arms against the administration. The realization that there is no safe haven for criminals in the emerging Nigeria has been reason why highly-placed jesting and risible characters want to pull down this administration. Nothing could be frustrating as a well-intentioned government being forced into an unholy alliance with traitors, common criminals, forgers and freewheeling dopes and lechers!

The treacherous and lecherous fly-by-night characters in the senate who issue vacuous threats and disgrace themselves by the depth or otherwise of their reasoning do so because they have been compromised by their leader to see President Buhari as an enemy; a clog in their plans to bring the country to its knees and who must be forced to tow their line. After all, the comical, 'man-god-man' characters are aware that an effective anti-graft war and successful prosecution of treasury looters represent a foreboding hammer dangling overhead!

As 2019 beckons, let perpetually-inebriated roughnecks continue to prowl the streets of Ilorin and its environs to breathe threats down the neck of imagined enemies of 'Sai Bukky'. Let well-motivated red-eyed hoods continue to issue death threats as a way of forcing people to tow the 'Sai Bukky' line. As the environment gets charged and rival killer gangs go after each other in an attempt to impress and reposition the 'leader', the day will come when the people will constitute themselves into a mountain.

That day is not long in coming!

Magaji <234-805-138-0793> lives in Abuja