Nigeria’s dictator Muhammadu Buhari expounded on the fatuous and doltishness punctuated with hypocrisy before the United States General Assembly on September 19, 2017.
It is a safe bet that none ever wished it were longer.
From beginning to end, Buhari’s words careened between banality, imbecility, hypocrisy, and deceit. Only the major flaws in his thinking will be exposed as a concession to the shortness of life.
Buhari cynically insisted that he spoke on behalf of the “people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” He was elected pursuant to an illegitimate constitution decreed by a military dictatorship in 1999. The “people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria” have never approved it. Moreover, as Buhari was speaking, he was simultaneously dispatching Nigeria’s armed forces and police to the South East to terrorize and plunder millions of Biafran Christians; and, endorsing a northern Nigerian Hausa-Fulani ultimatum to 11 million Biafrans working and living there to abandon their homes and businesses by October 1, 2017 or risk death or torture. Buhari no more represents Biafrans than a slave owner represents his slaves.
Buhari’s desultory remarks were intended to conceal Nigeria’s tireless persecution of Biafrans since its birth from British colonialism in 1960. He absurdly maintained: “[W]e often forget that what we have accomplished in the last 72 years is unprecedented in the annals of human history.” Was it an “accomplishment” to deny Biafran self-determination in violation of United Nations decolonization resolutions? Was it an “accomplishment” for Nigeria to renege on its 1966 promise of Biafran autonomy? Was it an “accomplishment” for Nigeria to provoke the 1967-1970 horrifying Biafran War by systematic persecution of Igbos?
While Buhari is slaughtering and immiserating Nigeria’s own Biafrans because of their Christianity and ethnicity, he made time to deplore Myanmar on its maltreatment of Rohingya Muslims as an anti-Muslim atrocity: “[T]he Myanmar crisis is very reminiscent of what happened in Bosnia in 1995 and in Rwanda in 1994.” In sum, Buhari cares more about non-Nigerian Muslims than he does about Nigerian Christians—which is treasonous to approximately half of Nigeria’s population.
Buhari opined: “The world may be badly governed, but the fact that there is a form of governance agreed upon by all is an accomplishment in and of itself.” According to Buhari, bad governance—even genocidal governance—is always superior to the alternative. That nonsense on stilts would have shipwrecked the American Revolution. It is indistinguishable from the barbaric policy of “might makes right,” i.e., the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Dictator Buhari fails to understand that justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It is constantly thundering like a hammer on an anvil to shake the foundations of every tyranny. A society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker is the very definition of lawlessness.
Buhari took hypocrisy to a new level in summoning the United Nations to “restructure” to remain “relevant” while fiercely crushing advocates for restructuring Nigeria around the unalienable right of all peoples to self-determination—including Biafrans held in bondage to Hausa-Fulani terrorists.
Buhari also hypocritically sermonized, “As we have learned in Nigeria, sometimes you need to change in order to remain the same.” Every Biafran except the quisling Governors sitting in the South East must have laughed into tears at that monumental lie. Like the French Bourbon rulers on the eve of their destruction, Buhari forgets nothing and learns nothing. He aims to fossilize Nigeria’s politics.
Buhari would profit by learning something more powerful than a gun. The clarion call of Amos 5: 24: “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”