Sule Lamido On President Buhari:

The Death Of Nigeria By Pius

Adesanmi
BY PIUS ADESANMIFEB 19, 2018

I have on occasion chastised the Nigerian media, especially Premium

Times and Channels TV, for offering prestigious platforms to EFCC
graduates and assorted political recidivists to wade in on national affairs,
interviewing and seeking their opinion on national issues, thereby
normalizing and legitimizing them.

Sule Lamido is a career EFCC indictee with an illustrious legacy of looting

under his cap. He finished off Jigawa as Lamido & Sons. He should not be
receiving national airtime and his presidential declaration on Saturday
ought to be treated as a marginal joke to be discussed only in the warrens
of Dutse. To be fair to Premium Times, they mentioned his EFFCC rap
sheet this time in their coverage of his presidential declaration. Allah be
praised.

Given my sentiments about political recidivists on the national stage, it

would appear odd that I am devoting an entire op-ed, even if negative, to
Sule Lamido. I plead guilty. I crave your indulgence to make this one
exception and reflect on Sule Lamido before we consign him once and for
all – if Premium Times and Channels TV allow us – to the bottom of the
dustbin of history. What he had to say at his presidential declaration rally
on Saturday is of national significance and should be taken seriously as a
teachable moment if we are ever to understand the deleterious instincts
and the perverse mental universe which continue to make it impossible for
Nigeria to quit the state of nature and make baby steps towards civilization.

Listen to Sule Lamido, speaking to the crowd at his presidential declaration.

He is establishing why he is infinitely more qualified than the incumbent,
Mohammadu Buhari, to be President:

“The 2019 presidential election is undoubtedly going to be between an

original Fulani man and a fake Fulani man who was governor and minister
at different times.”

The original Fulani man, the pureblood, is, of course, Sule Lamido. The
fake Fulani man is Muhammadu Buhari. Lamido is not done yet. He is a
thorough man. According to Premium Times, to leave nobody in any doubt
about Buhari’s ethnic impurity and, therefore, his unworthiness of the
Presidency, Lamido spoke in Fulfulde and challenged Buhari to translate
his sentences, guaranteeing his audience that Buhari could not do it
because he is not a real Fulani man.

Lamido is also, of course, implying that Buhari is not a pure Fulani man
because he is from Katsina and there has been a lot of blood mixture along
the way. Lamido is performing the one-drop rule on Buhari and Buhari has
been found wanting. Buhari’s blood has most probably mixed with one drop
of inferior Hausa blood along the way – something unacceptable to this
Fulani ethnic and racial-supremacist moron. (Wikipedia is your friend.
Check out the terrible history of the one-drop rule in segregationist and
racial supremacist USA)

No adult Nigerian can claim not to be familiar with Fulani ethnic superiorist
discourse which at various times in our chequered postcolonial history has
often dovetailed into outright racist condescension for every other ethnicity,
starting with the Hausa, their favorite punching bag. No adult Nigerian can
claim not to have been marked by the political consequences of these
ethno-superiorist inclinations for the intractable fault lines of our national
being and experience have been fed since 1960 by the will to domination
(fed by unquenchable racism as expressed by Lamido) and the will to
resistance. The tension generated is of course further fed by Igbo and
Yoruba ethnic supremacist discourse for those too must be acknowledged
and condemned.

If we are on familiar terrain, why are Lamido’s statements so galling? Why

does his stupidity merit evaluation? It is surprising that somebody can still
openly mount a podium in February 2018 (this is the 21st century for
Allah’s sake!) and declare that ethnic purity - the purest Fulani bloodline –
is the first pre-condition for the Presidency of Nigeria! I was hoping that
Sule Lamido would eventually meet his comeuppance and rot in jail after a
fair corruption trial but now I think we should put him a zoo as an exhibit of
the worst form of racism. It could be that he feels emboldened to come out
now that we are in the age of Trump and white ethnic supremacists in the
United States and Europe.

The real tragedy is that it must take extreme stupidity and mental laziness
to run to ethno-racist politics as the basis for undermining Buhari’s potential
run in 2019. Nobody has made the case against Buhari better than Buhari.
He is a colossal failure, a nightmare from which Nigeria needs to awake in
2019, after sending him to Daura, never to be heard from again.

You can delegitimize Buhari because of his irredeemable clannishness,

failure to fly, and failure to deliver. He has betrayed every promise he
embodied and set Nigeria back by a century. He has failed on the
economic, security, and socio-political fronts. He is also a failure on ethics,
ethos, and morality, his words always dissonant with his actions. His war
on corruption is a sick joke. His integrity has turned out to be a puff of
powder. He superintends a state of anomie. He set out on a foolish, self-
destruct course the moment he won the election. He is supremely arrogant
and doesn’t care. Nigeria is on autopilot with him. He has no clue. Buhari is
hubris surrounded by hubris and corruption. The only sphere where Buhari
is working is among the shrinking fundamentalist clan of Buharideens but
one has nothing to say to them this late in the day.

I can unpack each of these statements with copious, empirical details and
facts – as I will indeed be doing in several op-eds leading to 2019. These
are arguments and submissions easily available to Sule Lamido to
effectively demolish Buhari. But he is too mentally lazy, too intellectually
shallow, and too sold on proto-Nazi, proto-fascist Fulani racial supremacist
fantasies.

I have entitled this intervention the death of Nigeria for two principal
reasons. First is the fact that this is 2018 but a man with an EFCC rap
sheet as hefty as Lamido’s can still openly run for President. Boys born
when our Senate President, Bukola Saraki, started building his own EFCC
corruption portfolio are now producing spermatozoa and running after girls
in our University campuses. People with active and expansive EFCC
portfolios stroll casually from court appearances to run for office, the
standard morality among the wretched citizens they steal from being, “he
has not yet been found guilty.”
My father and his generation had other ideas about morality and ethics.
“How did you even find yourself in a position or situation where you are
accused of so and so in the first place”? This used to be my father’s
question, the foundation of his morality. Today, we have a generation ready
to die for looters because they are yet to be found guilty. Looters end up
perorating on national TV. Recently, James Ibori weighed in on national
affairs, advising Nigerians to register to vote because that is the only way
they can hold their leaders accountable. And Jesus wept for Nigeria!

That they bear the stain of official indictment is not enough to disqualify
them from aspiring to the solemnity of office according to our regnant
national morality. Once I grumbled on Twitter that James Ibori and Bode
George are constantly being interviewed and normalized by our journalists.
I was reprimanded by furious citizens who reminded me that the two men
have done their time – one was pardoned – and they must now be allowed
to regain their place and space in the scheme of things. Make dem no talk
again? I shook my head and felt pity for this generation.

Second is the fact that a primitive Fulani ethnic supremacist is still openly
canvassing Fulani blood purity as the most important qualification for the
Nigerian Presidency. If you are an adult Nigerian, you know that we are just
lucky that Sule Lamido spoke openly. There are hundreds of thousands
more in the closet where that came from. I should know. I am after all a
northerner, a human pawn in the corrupt game of numbers that these
ethnic supremacists play to have a larger share of the spoils of the center
in our sick unitary system.

I have only one message for Sule Lamido and his Fulani supremacist ilk.
You guys are joking. This is 2018 – an age whose ethos are at variance
with your primitive ethno-feudalist imaginaries of Nigerian nationhood.
Guys like you will always have totally irreverent guys like me to contend
with. There is no shortage of voices like me in the national sphere of
discourse and you can’t do jack about us for we are not beholden to any
Nigerian one percenter. One more bad news for you: we have a national
audience that you also can do nothing about. We are always ready to treat
your fuck up, transfer your stupidity to the intellectual public terrain and
dissect it for the whole world to see.

You have two sons facing corruption charges with you. Continue to
brandish Fulfulde and exclude Buhari from your puritanical Fulani
imaginary. Continue to dream of a Nigerian vassaldom that you will hand
over to your two boys and their generation, where every non-Fulani blood
in Nigeria shall be inferior to them and be their slaves.

May God spare your life and make you live long, very long, long enough to
see that there shall be no such unfair, unjust, unfree, and unequal Nigeria
for your sons to inherit. Those you crudely oppress today in the North and
the rest of the country will never allow your children to have a future in an
unfree Nigeria but you guys are simply too dumb to read the tea leaves.
Yours is now effectively the case of the man who steals the King’s drum.
Where will he beat it? Your only choice is to allow the free, just, and fair
Nigeria that we are fighting for to emerge, where a man shall not be judged
by the purity of his blood and the pursuit of happiness shall not be
guaranteed only for one percenters and their children. Purge yourselves of
your Fulani supremacist bullshit if you want Nigeria to augur well for your
children.
Until you get it, we shall continue to enter the same trouser with you and
your ilk. Pikin wey say im mama no go sleep…

Shior.