The Buhari revolution
En route the polls, contemporary boondocks legend mooted parables of him as a warrior in wolf-skin vest, brandishing a shield of steeled morality and a stone-axe, forged to hack down monuments, that, the corrupt ruling class built to entrench corruption.
On February 27, when electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission , pronounced Buhari as Nigeria’s new president-elect, pundits described it as a befitting climax for what was a hard-fought electoral contest. For instance, the New York Times opined that it “was in many ways a referendum on honesty, as voters once again embraced a candidate who held up a broom at rallies, declaring to sweep away the graft that has given the nation a bad reputation worldwide.”Buhari’s recent victory at the polls, no doubt, ventilates the phenomenon which he has become. In 2003, 2007 and 2011 when he vied, unsuccessfully, for the presidency, his votes were confined to the North, most especially the North West.
Of course, the big merger that crystallised into APC helped to boost the revolution but the party was only a platform to give that ‘revolution’ that he is now, an expression. Politicians, hitherto known for their sagacity and cult following were humbled and stripped of their clout, in the wake of the Buhari revolution in 2015.
Likewise, Governor Saidu Nasamu Dakingari of Kebbi State’s plan to proceed to the Senate failed unlike his former boss, Adamu Aliero, who contested in Kebbi Central Senatorial District. Dakingari sought his failed Senate ambition in Kebbi North. In 2019, however, there were fears, that, the PDP might stop Buhari, especially because of the propaganda and negative campaigns that had painted him in bad light as a fundamentalist, and a president who encouraged killer-herdsmen because they were supposedly his people.
A series of unfortunate events, including the APC’s acrimonious primaries en route this year’s general elections and subsequent conflict of interests among the parties juggernauts deepened forebodings of Buhari’s feared rout at the polls. The political slogan, ‘O to ge’ meaning ‘Enough is enough,’ adopted by the APC, assumed a life of its own among Kwarans at home and abroad. The term, which simply means that the people have had enough of Saraki, and were ready to hop on the APC’s political train which assured them of untrammelled socio-economic progress and departure from the Saraki fiefdom.