In Nigeria of today, under the clueless leadership of Buhari, Pantamism has come to join the ranks of notorious “Isms” that afflicts the masses with the virulent disease of terrorism.
In 2017, Senator Shehu Sani pointed out that the ruling APC fights corruption by members of other parties with insecticide, while it uses deodorants for rampant corruption in high places by APC stalwarts. Buhari’s support for the minister of communication and digital economy, Isa Pantami, despite all evidence of his Salafi Jihadist views, is nothing short of the institutionalization of terrorism and religious extremism.
it translates to the legitimisation of the ongoing sectarian violence in the north and unfair vilification of thousands of those who have been killed, maimed or had their loved ones abducted by the Salafi Jihadist insurgents of Boko Haram and ISWAP.
Under Buhari’s regime, citizens are described as being anti-north simply for calling for the sack of a minister with concrete records of affiliation and support for Islamic terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda. Nigerians are regarded anti-Islam for calling for the need to protect the nations’ data from terrorists whom we can confirm have a sympathizer in a minister who handles the national data.
This government has not only justified our most “esteemed” position as the third most terrorized country in the world. It has also assisted the growth and spread of the dangerous narrative of “fulanization” and “Islamization” of Nigeria.
Meanwhile, this agenda in the real sense politically benefits the elites of all ethnoreligious background by helping to divide poor working-class people along ethnic, regional, and religious lines. It has also profited sections of the elite, particularly the well-connected rich Muslim bosses in the North and South who are empowered by the powerful bigoted persons in power, who happen to come from the Northern, like Maj. Gen. Buhari (retd), the country’s president.
We all know that state institutions are primarily meant to serve the interests of the bosses. But the situation under the administration of Maj. Gen. Buhari (retd.) takes this to the most repressive extremes. All government institutions have become instruments for terrorizing the Nigerian people.
The security agencies terrorize and kill young people on a daily basis. The ministry of labour and employment terrorizes workers in addition to being incapable of providing employment. The ministry of power terrorizes the entire country with darkness that is purchased at expensive and unregulated rates.
The ministry of housing terrorizes Nigerians with homelessness that has condemned millions of people to under-bridge settlers and street urchins that have now become child cultists and “hoodlums” that are available as government tools to foment election violence, as well as and ISWAP/Boko Haram fighters.
On a frequent basis, the regime dispenses policies of terror that have rendered the naira useless, sustained Nigeria as the poverty capital of the World, reduced the country to a situation where the law courts are shut down for weeks over issues that border on financial autonomy and independence of the judiciary. And it has now resorted to the printing of money not backed with value of any sort.
With Buhari’s Pantamism, we have lost our country to the rule of bandits and terrorists. But these beastly insurgents are not only organized in bushes. They have a full presence and adequate representation in government offices and sectors. They have now become emboldened by government patronage and empowerment to advance their nefarious activities from the highways to the schools and campuses.
And are now courageous enough to go after the national assembly; an institution built and sustained with taxpayers’ money but occupied by characters who have ensnared the working people in webs of poverty and hardship complicated by the institutionalization of insecurity and anomie.
There is no getting out of this awful mess if we fail as a people to put an end to this regime of terror and institutionalized poverty. There is no better time than now for the oppressed people of Nigeria, in the North, South and across all religious divides, to come together in unison demand #BuhariMustGo, clench their fists in struggle and for revolution and system change.
by Sanyaolu JUWON
