By Suyi Ayodele
Muhammadu Buhari contested the 2015 election as Mai Gaskiya (the truthful one). He promised to publish his asset declaration form. He never did for eight years. For eight years, he lived big and clean, wearing designer shoes and wristwatches. He held multi-million-naira wedding ceremonies for his children. He ate and picked his teeth and posted his posh photos for beautiful ladies to drool over. Now he says he is poor. What is the definition of poverty? Or, rather, what are Mai Gaskiya’s definitions for truth and lie?
Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln, was said to have approached her husband and asked: “Does this dress make my backside look big?” Lincoln initially squirmed, shifted on his seat and hesitated before holding his thumb and forefinger slightly apart. Then he answered: “Perhaps a bit.” Mrs. Lincoln’s response was spontaneous. She “spins on her heels and exits in a huff”, the account stated.
What happened between husband and wife in that encounter? Michael Shermer, American science writer and historian, answered this question in an April 2014 paper titled, “What Science Tells us about Why We Lie”. The article was published by the Scientific American. In answering the question, Shermer quoted a fellow American neurologist, Sam Harris, who in his 2013 booky, “Lying”, said that “By lying, we deny our friends access to reality- and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information.”
Shermer projected that Mrs. Lincoln’s question might probably be to elicit compliment from her husband or to test their love and loyalty to each other. But President Lincoln ‘failed’ the test, as Harris stated by telling “little white lies’, which “often lead to big black lies”, warning those involved that: “Very soon, you may find yourself behaving as most people do quite effortlessly: shading the truth, or even lying outright, without thinking about it. The price is too high.”
Lincoln’s ‘little white lie’ to his wife is nothing compared to what a fugitive, Alexi Santana (another false identity) did to the Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, in the fall of 1989. The account, as published by the National Geographic Magazine in its June 2017 edition, as written by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, using the title: “Why We Lie: The Science Behind Our Deceptive Ways”, says it took 18 months for the university to detect the lies.
Santana applied for admission as a self-schooled candidate from Utah, where he claimed to have been a herder. He was admitted to study Philosophy in the prestigious university. The ‘poor’ herder – again a false impression – became the darling of the university community as he scored As in virtually all his courses.
He, however, almost betrayed his true identity when a fellow roommate noticed that Santana’s bed was always neatly made. When confronted, given the poor countryside background profile he supplied to the university, Santana explained that he usually slept on the floor – a very plausible explanation that matched his poor background.
But 18 months later, a woman, who knew Santana years back identified him as Jay Huntsman of Palo Alto High School, California. The university authority got interested and began to investigate Santana. It was found out that at different times in the past, the ‘brilliant’ student, whose real name is James Hogue, had served a prison term in Utah for stealing and had been arrested several times for similar felonies in Aspen, Colorado, where he successfully passed himself off as someone else!
The university had no option but to hand over James Hogue alias Santana to the police. Thus, the end of his ‘academic’ pursuits, and possibly an end to further lies (white or black). The story of Santana is a confirmation that shame is always the lot of a liar. No matter how fast lies travel, the elders say the truth catches up in seconds! Shermer says: “Most of us are not Hitlerian in our lies, but nearly all of us shade the truth just enough to make ourselves or others feel better.” When an elder has penchant for the tall tales, what does he gain? We will answer that presently. But first, we have an appeal to make.
This is a genuine appeal from me to all good-spirited Nigerians. I mean Nigerians of immense goodwill and charity. Someone very dear to us needs help. I am tempted to open a Go-Fund-Me-Account on his behalf. But he is too shy and too ‘honest’ to accept that route. Hence, this Save-Our-Soul (SOS) appeal.
General Muhammadu Buhari is broke. You can read that again. The retired General from Daura, Katsina State, struggles, nowadays, to live comfortably. That shouldn’t be! Here is a man who served this nation meritoriously, rising to the enviable rank of a Major General in the Nigerian Army. He is not a man that should be allowed to live like a common pauper, the very stage he took the citizenry to in his eight years of rudderless leadership!
Besides retiring as a Major General in the Nigerian Army, Buhari was at a time in his career, a Military Head of State. That was between December 31, 1983, and August 27, 1985. For 20 solid months, Buhari had unfettered access to our national treasury. Yet, he did not help himself.
Fortune smiled on him again. During the reign of the expired Head of State, General Sani Abacha, a period when there was no clear-cut difference between the personal purses of our leaders and the treasury, Buhari was appointed to head the ‘richest’ agency of government, the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF). He stole no dime! Great man indeed!
Lest I forget. General Buhari was also once a Minister of Petroleum under the military government of General Olusegun Obasanjo. He maintained a clean record save for the controversial missing $2 billion oil money then. ‘Fortunately’, nobody has been able to trace the money, how it disappeared and who were responsible. The only link between Buhari and the missing money is that the Daura man was the minister of the ministry from which the money developed wings and flew into thin air!
Later in life, and in our recent past, General Buhari again found himself in power. After surmounting the initial hurdles of his inability to raise the N27 million nomination fees imposed by his All Progressives Congress (APC) party for the presidential ticket in 2025, Buhari, through the generosity of his bank in Kaduna, bought the form, contested and won the APC presidential primaries. He went ahead to ‘win’ the FeBuhari (February) 2015 general election, where he defeated the then incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
For eight years (2015-2023), Buhari was president and Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces. As president, our man of high integrity lived within the emoluments of the office he occupied. He supported that with a modest farm in his Daura village where his cows refused to multiply from the initial 150 herds he declared in 2003!
Now Buhari is out of office, power and influence. He has retired to his native land, Daura to tend his cows. Life has taken a new turn for the man who once saw money and had access to money but kept faith with his avowed integrity as a man who covets nothing, steals nothing but lives a simple pastoral lifestyle. Ayi Kwei Armah, the Ghanaian novelist, probably did not project the character of Buhari when he penned his The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born in 1968. The Saints live right here with us in Nigeria! Phew!
It is therefore very saddening that after all his services to the Nigerian nation, General Buhari, former Head of State, former Minister of Petroleum, former Chairman PTF and former two-term civilian president now lives from hand to mouth as he depends on the rent from one of his two houses in Kaduna to sustain himself!
This is pitiable. This is unacceptable. Nigerians cannot afford to see a man of integrity, the very definition of honesty, like Buhari live in penury when common supervisory councillors live in opulence as a result of their ‘good works’ in office. We must rescue Buhari from the jaws of poverty. Poverty here are in twofold, poverty of liquidity and poverty of truth. This is our Macedonian call for our Mai Gaskiya. Buhari must not be allowed to live in poverty.
I didn’t make up the ‘parlous state of Buhari’s fortune. He said so himself. While addressing senior members of his APC in Katsina penultimate week. Buhari told them and the entire nation that all he lives on is the rent from one of the houses he built in Kaduna. Here is how he stated it: “After my eight years as a civil president, I have only three houses; one in Daura and two in Kaduna. I have given one out for renting where I get money for feeding.”
It is very strange in our clime that a man of Buhari’s standing would own just three houses. How come Nigerians had lived all this while with an Angel without knowing? One of the modest houses he claimed is in Daura. The remaining two are in Kaduna. Going by the vicissitudes of life, Buhari said that he had to give up one of the houses in Kaduna to tenants and use the proceeds of the rent to sustain himself.
Where is the house in Kaduna located? He did not disclose. What is its size? We would have to find out by ourselves. How much is the rent? That must be a personal information that is not for public consumption. Again, what is the expenditure of Buhari like after office? We can guess from his ‘modest’ lifestyle! If he lives permanently in Daura, how much does he need to feed, take care of his health and other dependents? These are the issues charitable Nigerians should consider and come to the rescue of Buhari. A man who was once used to the luxury of Aso Rock Villa and other high offices he had occupied in the past should not be allowed to suffer the fate of a landlord who lives on the irregular rents paid by his tenants!
Buhari probably thinks that Nigerians have a short memory. He never reckons with the fact that we know that as a retired Major General in the Nigerian Army, his pension is almost the equivalent of his salary while he was in service with the deduction of some negligible allowances.
The retired General failed to admit, while telling his transition from presidential opulence to rent-to-feed tale, that the Military Pension Board only stopped his pension when he was elected president in 2015 because the law does not allow him to earn salary and pension at the same time. Or is he saying that the Military Pension Board deleted his name from the pension roll? What about the N6.345 billion paid as severance allowance to all political office holders whose tenure ended on May 29, 2023? How much was his share of the money? Or he didn’t get a dime?
Can we also remind General Buhari that by the provisions of the Remuneration of Former Presidents and heads of state (And Other Ancillary Matters) Act, 1991 (no 32) sub-section (i), he is “entitled to be paid the sum of N350,000 per month as up-keep allowance; and (ii), entitled to the perquisites of office specified…?” if he has not been receiving that, can we know how long so that we can ‘beg’ the authorities concerned to do the needful?
Four Russians, Evgeny Nesmeyanov, Yulia Petrova, Nazhavat Abueva, Aliya Ismailova, in January 2019, published an article: “The Theory of Lie: From the Sophists to Socrates.” In the abstract of the piece, they submit that the concept of lie in European culture and social life dwells more “on the preservation of the state, the family, and the implementation of the real practice of human communication…”
Oxford Academy, in an earlier publication in 2010, entitled: “Lying and Deception: Theory and Practice”, says: “a lie is a deliberate false statement that the speaker warrants to be true”. The paper goes further to state that: “…in order to tell a lie, one must make a statement that one warrants to be true…. any lie violates an implicit promise or guarantee that what one says is true. The definition makes sense of the common view that lying involves a breach of trust. To lie, on this view, is to invite others to trust and rely on what one says by warranting its truth, and at the same time to betray that trust by making a false statement that one does not believe to be true”.
I don’t know how many of Buhari’s fans still hold the view that the man can be trusted based on what he says and what we all know to be the true picture. On a personal note, I have a difficulty here because of my upbringing. How do you tell an old man that he is not telling the truth without calling him a liar?
