OUR DAURA NERO

Abídèmí Jimoh

In July of 64 A.D., a great fire, as it was later called, ravaged Rome for six days; destroyed about 70 percent of the city, and left half of its population homeless. According to a now popular expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, who was at his villa at Antium, around 35 miles from Rome, “fiddled around while Rome burned.”

Though he later helped put it out and put relief measures in place, people still didn’t trust him. Some even believed he knew about the fire, especially after he had the burnt area cleared to build his Golden Palace. Nero himself blamed the Christians (then a relatively tiny religious sect) for the fire and had many arrested and executed. The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that the tale of Nero’s fiddling as his people suffered was unconfirmed by eyewitnesses, but the expression has come to stay. The expression has a double entendre: not only did Nero play music while his people suffered the horrors of the fire, he was also an ineffectual leader in a time of crisis.

President Buhari is also enclosed in Aso Rock, cross-legged with a toothpick in his mouth while the country burns. Terrorists and bandits control large areas in the north, some even say they collect tax from citizens before allowing them to farm or move around. There are calls for secession in the southeastern part of the country and many people in the southwest have joined the fray. We have the highest food inflation in decades with youth unemployment at its highest since the nineties; all these burdens upon the citizens in the middle of a global pandemic and the worst security indices only second to war-ridden areas like Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria. Despite the uprisings, the president remains unmoved by the tensions ravaging the nation nor is he making policies to soothe the pain of his citizenry. Instead of being a figure of cohesion, he is in fact the one pulling apart the threads of unity of this very country. My favourite musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti once sang and I quote “This uprising would bring out the beast in us.” But in the Nigerian parlance, may God forbid bad things.

If Emperor Nero is such a distant figure the president cannot learn from, he knows about the Prime Minister during our first republic – Tafawa Balewa, a fellow northerner. A leader just as lackadaisical as Buhari about the fire on the mountain, Balewa ruled over this nation not only at its very beginning but also at the time the unity and dexterity of its leaders were put to test. Needless to say that he failed woefully. Like Buhari, he was at the helm of affairs at a time when an entire section of the country was literally afire and political uprising was at every part of the country – Operation Wet E, Tiv uprising, the 1962/1963 Census Fiasco, the 1964 Election Violence, and even the Awo Treason Trial. How did he react? Like Nero, Balewa sort of fiddled, while Nigeria burned. In October 1965, as Balewa departed Nigeria for Accra to attend an OAU meeting, he was asked by journalists at Ikeja Airport (now Murtala Muhammed International Airport) what he was going to do about the fire raging in Western Nigeria. He chuckled, looked around, and cynically declared; “Ikeja is part of the West and I cannot see any fire burning.” Three months later, on January 15, 1966, he and some other top politicians of the day, were killed during the first coup d’état led by Major Kaduna Nzeogwu and the rest is history. Like Asa once said, “one day the rivers would overflow and there would be nowhere else to go, and we would run, wishing we had put out the fire.” The rivers overflowed for Balewa, and I am sure, he wished he had put out the fire.

The current attitude of the president mirrors the attitude of Prime Minister Balewa. Balewa was swift in moving a motion and declaring a state of emergency while opposition government Dauda Adegbenro was in power in the Western Region in 1962, but was reluctant to do the same during the regime of Samuel Akintola, a political ally, even when it was clear that he was not in control of things in 1964. Buhari and his administration have shown such favouritism in handling the situations of the country. From lopsided appointments in government posts to his not-so-disguised tribalistic support of the Fulani people, he is adding more flesh to the story of a Fulani Agenda to take over the country in an Uthman Dan Fodio manner.

His inactions have further pushed the people into the waiting hands of people of questionable intentions and characters like Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu. But how do you convince the people otherwise when the president would rather bury his head in sand like an ostrich while other ethnic groups in the country are feeling alienated?

The happenings of these past years have proven beyond doubt that Buhari shouldn’t be the leader of a multi-ethnic society like Nigeria and his reactions to the agitations of people show his demeanour is not suitable for the role. I mean, he even believed the #EndSARS protest against police brutality was to depose him. The more he stays in that office, the more the balkanisation of the country seems like an eventuality.
Let us hope that our Rome doesn’t burn totally, while Emperor Buhari continues to pick his teeth.

Abídèmí Jimoh is a teacher and writer based in ìbàdàn.