By Kelechi Deca
Cultures where the dead are automatically beatified and their sins washed away will never grow the courage to hold the living accountable, and neither will it have men who care about leaving worthy legacies.
That is why the efforts by former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon to paint the late President Muhammadu Buhari as a paragon of fairness and unity, is a grotesque insult to the memory of the countless Nigerians who were victims of the failures of his administration.
To canonize a leader whose tenure was defined by catastrophic security failure and systemic corruption is not just historical revisionism; it is a blatant act of public gaslighting.
Gowon’s claim that Buhari treated all regions equally collapses under the weight of empirical evidence to which his supporters upheld that he has the right to appoint those he trust into positions of power. It was that excuses that encouraged the present administration to take the issue of nepotism to heights unimaginable.
Buhari did not just fail to secure the nation; he also presided over the deregulation of terror and banditry in the country leading to a persistent and widening gap between his administration’s rhetoric and the reality of escalating violence.
Even as bandits and terrorists rampaged, the government engaged in performative counterterrorism, leaving the security architecture in tatters.
He was chronically unaware of what were happening under his nose which gave rise to the numerous dramas and gave his aides opportunities to create their own fiefdoms within the presidency.
The corruption during his watch was not just an aberration, or a momentary blot, it was a feature. To praise a man whose ministers have questions to answer either with EFCC or ICPC is to mock the very concept of accountability.
The scale of the looting is staggering, with a very conservative estimate placing the investigations at over N3.47 trillion, figures like Hadi Sirika, Saleh Mamman, Timipre Sylva, and Malami who amassed huge numbers of property too numerous for the EFCC to take note of.
What of the minister for humanitarian affairs whose activities were never humanitarian in any way are currently embroiled in scandals involving billions of naira .
The former Minister of Aviation brought unspeakable shame when he hired an aircraft from Ethiopia to launch a national carrier that never was just to mislead and scam the nation.
To imagine that the livery design of an airline that never existed ran into millions of dollars was unthinkable.
Can Hadi Sirika honestly take a look at some changes within the aviation sector today and still be proud of his eighth years stewardship?
The rot even extended to the Central Bank of Nigeria, which, under Buhari’s watch, saw the former governor accused of arbitrarily allocating $2 billion in foreign exchange and operating a network of over 500 accounts.
Thanks to Buhari’s incompetence, we are still dealing with the relics of the failed naira notes redesign, trapped with two different notes for three of our highest denominations, and creating an aberration where Nigerians use money to buy money via the institutionalization of the POS industry.
The most damning indictment of the Nigerian political sphere, however, is the hypocrisy of the present administration. Almost 90% of the officials currently in power were not just supporters of Buhari; they were part of his enablers.
During his reign, sycophants praised him as the nation’s savior, but today, many of these same figures mock his failures to distance themselves from a failed legacy they stood solidly behind and celebrated for eight years.
This is not governance; it is a political class trapped in a cycle of self-preservation where loyalty to a failing system trumps service to the people.
Their silence when Buhari’s ministers were looting the treasury was complicity, and their current outrage is nothing more than a calculated performance to suit new political realities.