Permit me to begin the second part of this essay with a word from Dr. Shuaib Musa Zaria, who is a leading member of the Shiite Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) and who is a close confidante and associate of Sheik El Zak Zaky, the wounded and detained leader of the Shiite Muslim community in Nigeria.
I have his permission to share his thoughts and words. On 4th March 2017 he wrote,
“Since the brutal clampdown on innocent people of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria in December 2015, things went out of Buhari’s hands. The economy went haywire and everything deteriorated. In December 2016 the court declared that Sheikh Zak Zaky’s detention was unconstitutional and he must be set free. Rather than order for his immediate release, the court gave 45 days within which he must be released. At the time many of us felt it was an unnecessary delay. The grace period nevertheless slowly passed and elapsed on the 16th of January 2017. Now Buhari didn’t comply with the court order. We reached out through well-meaning people but the tyrant would not concede. He was quoted as saying “either him or me”, reference to the fact that it would be only over his dead body that Sheikh Zakzaky would be free. Now note that from the very day the grace period given by the Court elapsed, Buhari never functioned as the President again. It ended on a Monday. Even the Federal Executive Council meeting of the18th never held. He was flown out the following day, where he remained incommunicado as well. The blood of over a thousand innocent Shiite Muslim citizens that he massacred and buried in mass graves is haunting him. He will never know peace. He will never be well. Vengeance is of the Lord indeed”.
This is a frightful testimony and contribution and it is indeed food for thought. One wonders what lessons we can learn from Dr. Shuaib Musa Zaria’s profound insight and moving account. Surely there are many.
Again one wonders what lessons we can learn from the story of the great Julius Caesar’s pitiful end as our President is struck down by a strange, undisclosed and unidentified illness and lies incapacitated, incommunicado and indefinitely in a London hospital as we approach the ides of March?
In this case it appears that it is not Marcus Brutus and the sixty treacherous Roman Senators that have plunged their knives into an ageing body but rather the angels of the Living God.
It happened to others that ruled our country in the past who had a similar dictatorial disposition to President Buhari and who trod the same vicious and ruinous path.
Yet sadly few will remember that because few read history in Nigeria and even fewer are ready to learn from its lessons.